If you tell it to, Friendster helpfully reminds you when your friends’ birthdays are coming up. This is handy for calling them, writing them, or leaving them happy birthday comments on their wall Friendster profile.
Look at the email itself:
What’s missing? The birthday itself. Instead of building trust with its members by providing them useful information, Friendster, too is nothing but a click whore.
My favourite Canadian bank, PC Financial added a brilliantly designed feature to their ATMs:
No more addition mistakes. Enter checks one at a time, and let the ATM do the math. So smart! Why didn’t anyone think of that before?
Wells Fargo does this now, too — they scan the checks and read the amount in automatically. And they no longer require envelopes.
PC Financial’s relatively low-tech solution is something that can work with all existing ATMs, and doesn’t require new hardware or banking laws.
On the other hand, take a look at the work of a clueless Canada Post graphic designer:
Canada post’s ship-in-a-click, part 2
No wonder Canada Post is so slow at delivering things — all their mice are upside down.
So the idiots at Sprint send Joel Splosky an LG Fusic phone to review, thinking he will promote their service.
Phone companies, as Joel points out, have a history of bad decisions:
And it’s 2006, and I almost can’t believe I’m writing this, because way back in 2000 I wrote almost exactly the same thing about WAP, and how cell phone companies keep failing to insert themselves as toll collectors because they’re so darn clueless about how the Internet works, and about the value of many-to-many networks instead of broadcast networks.
Needless to say, the phone sucks, and Power Vision sucks too. Is Power Vision a 3G service? Why do phone companies have to brand everything in some incomprehensible way? mMode? MEdia Net? Vision? Power Vision? Vcast? Stop, my head hurts.
Now, on to the good part:
the LG Fusic user interface could basically serve as an almost complete textbook for a semester-long course in user interface design, teaching students of usability exactly what NOT to do.
And one more:
A little bit more exploring and I discovered that there’s another entirely separate MP3 player on this device. It’s hard to find. You have to go to Tools, then Memory Card, then to the Music folder, and another MP3 player starts up which you can use to listen to your MP3s. For this player, you don’t have to be on the network, so it works in the subway, but—get this—the minute you close the clamshell, the music stops! I am literally not making this up. There are two bad MP3 players on this device, neither one of which remembers where you’re up to, neither one of which can be used on the subway with the phone folded in my pocket, neither one of which has a fast-forward feature.
TED, the uber-cook, uber-exclusive Technology/Entertainment/Design conference, now has a blog.
looks like logoworks is borrowing rather heavily from others’ work.
Icon magazine covers the 21 most influential designers: everyone from ikea to creative commons.