links for 2007-03-20

“How­ev­er, mar­ket research, no mat­ter how thor­ough, can nev­er sub­sti­tute for front-end user research, and we need to make the dis­tinc­tion clear to our clients and artic­u­late the val­ue of both.”

“Inter­ac­tion Design grew out of the meet­ing of dig­i­tal and cul­tur­al worlds and the need to make com­put­ers more use­able, it will be inter­est­ing to see what oth­er forms of design will emerge over the com­ing years.”

“At CERN they devel­oped an open sys­tem that passed pow­er to its users as not to pre­clude inno­va­tion. […] we don’t know what will be cre­at­ed next week, next month or next year because we can’t see the ‘Issues’ that need to be resolved […]”

Saf­fer thinks Twit­ter’s bad because it encour­ages anti­so­cial behav­iour and ugly because it does­n’t allow you to deter­mine how much you want to read about your con­tacts. The last is nice­ly imple­ment­ed on Jaiku.

Mer­holz prefers his per­sonas with­out user typol­o­gy because it decreas­es the abil­i­ty of the read­er to have empa­thy for them.