Andrew Wirtanen is a usability specialist in Cary, NC More »

Baseball Infographics

Craig Robinson has created a set of amazing baseball infographics over at Flip Flop Fly Ball. One of my favorites is “Home Team Dugouts” (below) which shows the side that MLB teams use as their home dugout. Before seeing this graphic, I thought the home dugout was nearly always on the on the first baseline… but it’s more common than I thought! Some of my other favorites are “2009 Ticket Prices”, “Ballpark Orientation”, “After Jackie”, and “Major League Fields”.

[flipflopflyball via information aesthetics]

The Research-Inspired Design blog

In addition to this site and CodBall, I am now actively writing for Research-Inspired Design, which was launched along with the new HumanCentric website.

Research-Inspired Design is the HumanCentric blog, where all whole company (usability specialists, industrial designers, graphic designers, software engineers, and interaction designers) share our thoughts on user experience. Check it out, and put it in your RSS reader!

http://blog.humancentric.com/

Learning from Amazon.com

Jared Spool (UIE) is always fun to listen to, and his latest work of art, “Revealing Design Treasures from the Amazon” is now on Slideshare. In the presentation, Spool introduces Amazon.com as a unique place on the Internet, where strange things happen, like the reviews for Tuscan Whole Milk, 1 Gallon, 128 fl oz. Some of the main points that stuck with me were: customer reviews are only helpful if you have the customers to drive them, users hate redesigns so roll out designs slowly, and sometimes making one small change to meet user goals can have a large impact on sales (e.g. Amazon’s most helpful favorable and critical reviews).

Personally, I’m a huge fan of Amazon.com and I place orders nearly every month. I’ve loved the tab-free design ever since I first encountered it in 2007.

One of the most recent oddities on Amazon.com is the Three Wolf Moon T-Shirt, which inspired this Pocahontas parody video:

Mr. Penumbra’s Twenty-Four Hour Book Store

This is a delightful must-read fictional short story that is available for free online or $0.80 on the Kindle. It’s about a peculiar book store, Google book scanning, information visualization, and immortality. The author is Current TV’s Robin Sloan.

Hopefully the Kindle platform and/or other quick online publishing solutions will encourage more short stories like this one.

http://robinsloan.com/2009/41/

Tips from Two Tweeps

Boston has a very strong usability community, which every year turns out in great numbers to their own annual “Mini-UPA” conference in the spring. It’s called Usability & User Experience and it actually has grown to compete with the national UPA conference.

A couple of my former peers at Bentley (@jledwell and @kaniasty) created a great presentation on Twitter called “Tips from Two Tweeps: How User Experience Pros Find Value on Twitter.” Apparently, the presentation drew a full room and sparked great conversation. The presentation mentions @uxforward, a user experience link sharing service, which I started back in December ‘08. @jledwell now does a lot of the posting for @uxforward.

[@jledwell's blog: Compete on Usability]