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

72-Hour Survival Kit

The Haiti Earthquake and this article on Make got me thinking again about emergency survival kits. Thankfully, I don’t have to worry much about earthquakes and hurricanes in Raleigh. But we do have the threat of tornadoes, and there was a touchdown in 1988 not far from where I live. It turns out that 72 [...]

Experience Is The Product

Peter Merholz (Adaptive Path) posted on his blog this week that his slidecast “Experience Is The Product” hit 400,000 views. Peter gave the talk at dConstruct 2007 in Brighton, UK. The presentation argues for focusing on the experience rather than technology and features. It’s a great talk that uses examples of good user experience design [...]

Waving Goodbye to 2009

Year-end video recaps are special because they make you realize just how long the year was. Whirled Interactive took a stab at it with this great video made with the help of Google Wave:
What are my memories from 2009? Well, off the top of my head:

Getting snowed in and working from home while watching the [...]

Magic Highway USA

What did we think the highways of the future would look like? Here’s a video from a 1958 episode of Disneyland TV. Surprisingly the first couple minutes are focused on human factors and safety concerns. For example, the video shows much larger, dynamic, and higher contrast highway signs. The rest of the video enters Jetsons [...]

Video: The Decade in Seven Minutes

Transitioning online from printed journalism isn’t easy. Most companies saw this coming 30 years ago, so recent newspaper circulation trends weren’t exactly a surprise. Some companies have figured out how to survive in the age of digital journalism. One that I really enjoy is Time Video (see my previous post on Ze Frank’s video series [...]