I have kept politics off the table during my 3+ years of running this blog. I just think it’s a private thing, and not germaine to the topics I cover here. Suffice it to say I’m a something like a rabidly capitalistic social-liberal-fiscal-conservative-with-a-libertarian-streak. Or a Second Amendment-supporting Democrat (befitting my Texas residency) who believes in states’ rights and a limited Federal government. (In other words, there really is *no* real party for me in the US…but that’s another story and another blog…)

But today I thought I’d point to a really top-notch user experience, and in the process reveal that I am a contributor to the Obama-Biden campaign. After reading about how Sarah Palin’s RNC convention speech raised 1M for the Replicans and 10M for the Democrats, I was reminded that I wanted to contribute. Rather than browse to barackobama.com, I decided to go to www.mybarackobama.com, the social networking site run by the campaign.

I was impressed with how easy it was to not only contribute (it darn well better be), but to quickly and easily increase your level of commitment to the cause. Obviously there’s been some research behind this. They hooked me with the drop-dead simple way to register, and the ease with which they asked me to contribute time, money, or my personal network. They also offered registrants the ability to harness network effects by setting up a personal donations page, where you can ping your friends for donations in your name. Check out my page at http://my.barackobama.com/page/outreach/view/main/pjsherman. The page took no time to set up. My only nit with the site? Why oh why did they make the username/login fields the same color as the background?!? Amateurish mistake, that.

Now I’m sure that the McCain campaign has made it easy to contribute as well, but from my forays onto the McCain site I don’t see the same social networking aspect. And I have to say, I don’t like having a video start up automatically when I visit a site. It’d my choice whether I’d like to watch video content, thank you very much.

This article has been making the rounds today. Thought I’d do my part to keep the meme alive. OK, this isn’t really a meme. But it’s an interesting little compilation of UI concepts. Of course the author cites Adaptive Path’s Mozilla Labs effort called Aurora.

My last article for UXmatters also touched on the topic of this article.  I was focusing on 3D virtual spaces and navigation. Still, I would suggest reading that article of mine if you’re interested in uncommon user interfaces.

10 Futuristic User Interfaces  ::  Monday Inspiration  ::  Smashing Magazine

While setting up my newest install of Flock (the Mozilla-based social web browser), I ran across a blog posting that brought it all back home for me. A guy named Darren Barefoot wrote about the trouble his stepmother had posting pictures to Flickr.

His stepmother had some family pics she wanted to post and share with friends and family. No one could see the pictures. Turns out his stepmom had quite naturally selected “Visible to friends and family” when uploading the pics. Of course, none of the friends and family had been tagged as such in her account.

What a great example of the gulf between design and user intent and mental model.

A Parable About User Experience

Blogged with Flock

Or general availability as we called it in the telecom software world.

Again, go get yourself a copy. It’s the most enjoyable, highly functional web browser out there.

Flock is no longer in pre-release, it’s 1.0bn-ware now.

You really ought to try Flock. It’s that good. Remember that feeling you had when you first loaded Netscape Navigator 1.x? Or Firefox? You’ll get that feeling, a little bit of it anyway, if you give Flock a shot. It’s really usable and very enjoyable.

This is a few weeks old, but I did want to point to this article. It reviews a number of “web tops”, or web-based desktops. Calling them web OS’s is a bit grandiose, but if you accept for the moment the idea that to many people, the desktop *is* the OS, then you can get by this bit of semantic overreach.

What still consistently amazes me is that so many offerings simply recreate the tired old desktop/file/folder (and now “widget”) design. Some do it better than others, but it seems like everyone is stuck in this metaphor. What happened to 3D spaces where you could organize your “stuff” in nooks and crannies? What about more integrated views of people’s frequently used data?

Web As Desktop: 20 Web operating systems reviewed - Lifehacker

Blogged with Flock

Google Maps recently added the moon and Mars to its mapping service.

If you go to the moon version and zoom down to the highest magnification, it displays…swiss cheese. How great is that?

I am not making this up.

Damn you, Google! You make it so hard to dislike you.

http://moon.google.com/

Flickr Has The Hiccups…

Similar to my earlier screengrab off of Overstock.com, here’s another error message that makes me feel like I’m dealing with humans, not robots.Thanks to Dan Szuc for pointing this one out.