Ellen Beldner

The system is what the user makes of it -- the system is what the user brings to it. That's the essence of social sites, compared to crowdsourced sites. Crowdsourcing fails and usually sucks, unless you have a community of people who actually know what they're talking about. So while everyone in the industry has been hyping social for several years now, it's not because authoritative, editorialized, expert content is actually going to die or go away. It's because we're just now getting the technology that ALSO affords other people the ability to create and partcipate. In other words, I'm...

UPDATE: I have found where the nerds have discussed such things: StackOverflow which I --- Which is why at work I'm taking on the (currently not-unmanageable) job of responding to customer support requests. However, I'm finding that gmail (we use google apps) is not really a good interface for doing this quickly. I want to be able to do things like bulk respond to a set of emails with the same message... Gmail has the canned responses plugin, but that doesn't cut it -- it's too slow to use. So I just hooked Thunderbird into our support queue, and now...

Recalling CMU intro HCI course whose capstone project was UI improvements for the PalmOS.... Here's the question on Quora, but haven't yet gotten much of a response: http://www.quora.com/q/What_are_the_best_fresh_up_to_date_academic_type_resources_for_mobile_UI_UX_design...

Jon Kolko, who I met at CMU, just published his book Thoughts on Interaction Design. I'm a guest author and wrote a chapter called "Getting Design Done". The book's website is http://www.thoughtsoninteraction.com/....

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/25/business/yourmoney/25Proto.html?_r=1&oref=slogin Summary: Let advanced users hack on your products. They will come up with innovations that you didn't think of. This stands up nicely to an economic interpretation too: If someone is willing to take the time to hack around and build something that wasn't part of the spec, that means that they're willing to spend capital to have that functionality. Which means it's some sort of market opportunity. Enterprise software can often be maddening like this: companies sell their software for $200k + and they want to be gatekeepers and prevent customers from getting into the code -- they...

The other day we launched the Google Base Store Connector. The progression to the final version was pretty neat. When I started working on the project there was a functional demo that had already been built, wizard-style. I came up with a few user scenarios that led to functions like storing account information so users can easily update their items in one click. That is, if someone has an Ebay store and they want to get listed on Google, it'll be better for them if they can store account information so all they have to do is periodically click something...

The fact that a lot of organizations cram unreasonable, un-vetted features into the spec and call it a "spec" is not a problem with specs. It is an organizational problem. Blaming the existence of specs for problems caused by bad management is not fair to the spec.

Sitting down with my architect this weekend to make decisions about kitchen cabinets, countertops, sink, and how the stairs will work. The kitchen will be monolithic charcoal gray (or maybe white) so it doesn't compete too much with the brick & timber in my loft. Work will start ASAP. I can't wait to start cooking again. My 14 boxes of kitchen and dinnerware are starting to annoy me, and I want to have dinner parties again....

Pironimo.net is a twiki installation that I deployed, customized, and maintain for a small community of friends (around 30 people). It began on another server in September 2002. Since then I've done about three major UI revs and one software upgrade....

At work we have a bunch of Toto washlets. One day I was explaining to some friends about the wall-attached remote control. One of them, in annoyed puzzlement, asked why on earth would you need a remote-controlled bidet control? This sketch is an exploration of different solutions based on my task analysis....