Pleasure and Pain

Measuring the impact of new technology on human experience

Pleasure and Pain: photos by Whitney G. Hess

Entries Tagged as 'User Experience'

TweetDeck stream of consciousness

July 14th, 2008 · Comments

Preamble
In my opinion, Twitter is a powerful vehicle for synchronous communication (Asychronous = e-mail; Synchronous = AIM). It’s happening in real-time, and while it’s often called a micro-blogging platform, I think that’s a misnomer. It’s quite different than a blog — a centralized stream of content curated by one or many people. By contrast, Twitter [...]

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My Beef with the NYC Taxicab Touchscreens

July 7th, 2008 · Comments

If you’ve ridden in a NYC taxicab in the past 6 months, you’ve likely noticed the touchscreen TV in the back seat. At first I thought this was a great innovation — GPS-powered maps to show the distance between me and my destination, real-time local news, restaurant reviews and events listings.
Then I tried using one.
As [...]

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Plurk You

June 20th, 2008 · Comments

I’ve been wanting to write about Plurk for a while. Everyone seemed to be so enamored with it when it first launched, but maybe that was because Twitter was experiencing serious downtime and people were pissed off — not because it was anything actually worth being excited about.
The first time I logged on, I had [...]

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Bluefly don’t bother me

June 13th, 2008 · Comments

It’s been hot in NYC lately. Very hot. So it’s time to buy some more dresses. But being the busy woman that I am, I don’t have a ton of time to go shopping. I decided to check out a few websites to see if anything caught my eye. I’ve never shopped at Bluefly.com, but [...]

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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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