Informational Geometry

I was only a little surprised to read yesterday during my commute about fake news. About a month ago I saw an advertisement online titled " Bigger Than Snowden " someone actually paid money towards an online ad campaign to purport that electromagnetic weapons are being used by the government to covertly target, monitor, and torture victims. Seriously. The link above goes to  google search results and you can see how this nonsense has been smeared around the internet as if it's true. Which it's not. Did fake news catapult It (I'm not saying It's name) into the White House? NYTimes seems to think so . And you know what, I think so too. As a User Experience designer I know how to pull the same exact tricks that creators of fake news pulled. Any of us web professionals could easily fool a lot of people with fake stories. Then I was a little surprised to read today about a group of college students who already solved the fake news problem in a hackathon. It t...

There's a researcher's goldmine in the comments of news articles. Here's a screen grab of the top comments in the Gavin Newsom story on SFgate.com . It's better than reading the article.

I didn't do much shopping this holiday season but when I did, I did it online. I'm frustrated by how poorly most e-commerce sites are designed especially when I know how good they could be. While I was waiting for YouTube to reject me for being too old, I was working on a project for a shopping dotcom, a search engine aggregator*. I realized something even more annoying about shopping online while on this project. This "web 2.0" company doesn't really do any user centered design at all. They dont do user testing or listening labs or any of that good user research stuff that actually makes a product nice. But they are successful nonetheless, I guess search enginges can constantly be 'tuned' so they work better. Perhaps that's OK, but their site could still be better. It's a cheap ass way to run a web business. Then later I spoke to an Oldnavy.com designer about what it's like to design for that site. Basically any Gap website is designed to ...

I was having dinner last night with a bunch of my girlfriends, during conversation I mentioned something about Facebook. My friend, Cindy said, "I get emails all the time by people wanting to be friends on Facebook. I think it's stupid and I just delete them." "What is Facebook?" another friend asked. "I never do that stuff" declared a third friend tersely. Being an UX person I seized the opportunity for some impromptu user research, I pressed Cindy to explain why she feels so strongly about about hating facebook. "All these things, facebook, youtube, myspace, friendster, are just a waste of time. I just dont care about any of that stuff!" I could tell she was just irritated by all those little invitations, as if they were some form of corporate sponsored email harassment. We all know people like Cindy. I know LOTS of people like her. Another friend (who does a lot of work on the internet) said, "I'm busy, and I hate it that I have ...