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

Bonobos CEO: Don’t use Twitter for marketing

Bonobos CEO Andy Dunn is someone who gets it. He understands that the value of Twitter for businesses is not to reach out to new customers, but it’s more about listening to your current customers. As Dunn says, the signal-to-noise ratio on Twitter is very low, and Twitter is more of a tool to open [...]

Illustrating reCAPTCHA Phrases

The reCAPTCHA Project takes words from books that computers can’t read (via OCR) but humans (hopefully) can. For more info, see my overview of reCAPTCHA back in 2007. Well, this weekend, the folks at Something Awful and Buzzfeed are having some fun with the random phrases that are generated… here’s my contribution to the party:

Original [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Explaining Twitter

It’s safe to say that Twitter is now accepted as another means of communication. It fits right in with email, blogs, and social networks. The service has also gotten a lot of attention recently with news networks and celebrities (e.g. Shaq, Britney Spears–look at WeFollow.com for more). Anyway, here is a funny clip from SuperNews, [...]