Pleasure and Pain

Measuring the impact of new technology on human experience

Pleasure and Pain: photos by Whitney G. Hess

Entries Tagged as 'Design'

The user experience of a staircase

June 22nd, 2008 · Comments

As I was going over the Triboro Bridge on the way to JFK on Friday, I saw a metal staircase high above the traffic that construction workers use to access the top of the bridge tower. Seeing it from a distance made me appreciate for the first time that a staircase is great design. It’s [...]

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Group Video Chat: A Usability Evaluation

May 23rd, 2008 · Comments

Back in January when I started this whole “getting to know the community” thing, I met a couple guys named @matto and @snook, a.k.a. Matthew Oliphant and Jonathan Snook respectively. Matthew had been following me based on David Armano’s recommendation, and I had followed him back because, well, I basically didn’t know anybody on Twitter. [...]

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Mozilla finally releases Firefox 3.0

May 18th, 2008 · Comments

Mozilla released Firefox 3.0 Release Candidate 1 on Friday, but my software update only just alerted me of it.

The only change from Firefox 3 Beta 5 that I can see at first glance is the link color in the location bar history.
What it used to look like:

What is looks like now:

Yes, yes, I whited out [...]

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Google’s Design Principles

April 28th, 2008 · Comments

I owe you a proper recap of Leah Buley’s earth-shattering presentation at the IA Summit, but because my computer battery had died and I was taking notes on paper, I’ve been lazy about typing it all up.
In any case, one of the things she talked about was the importance of using Design Principles to guide [...]

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Yahoo!’s Shine

March 31st, 2008 · Comments

Everyone in the Twitterverse — @efortiz, @arainert, @jonesabi — is talking about the launch of Shine today so I had to check it out for myself. Shine from Yahoo! is a new website that is meant to be a destination for women between the ages of 25 and 54. On their About Us page, they [...]

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