90% Of Everything: Links

Tim McCoy advises, when interviewing kids:

• Have an adult introduce you to the child
• Treat kids like regular people (that is, like adults)
• Interact with them at eye level, but don't get too close
• Be specific with your questions
• Avoid technical and professional lingo
• Don't ever take pictures or video without parental permission
• Don't crack jokes or be sarcastic
• Recognize when an interview isn't going well and finish it quickly

Soundex is a phonetic algorithm for indexing names by sound, as pronounced in English. The goal is for homophones to be encoded to the same representation so that they can be matched despite minor differences in spelling.^[1]

According to William Hudson, Soundex was originally patented around 1905, and is geared towards English accents (though today there are many modern variants). Also, it can produce large number of extraneous results if turned on by default in systems with large name indexes.

"We keep comparing ourselves to the notion of chefs. When you walk into a high-end restaurant, you really don't get a whole lot of choice. Usually, the hallmark of a high-end restaurant is the chef's menu. The chef prepared courses of a dinner in advance where he made all the choices. You eat there because you trust the chef's judgment and want his taste. Well, we try to do the same thing." - David Heinemeier Hansson, 37Signals

"[...] although Wave is very promising, it's clear that it still needs some refinement. This is why Google calls it a "preview release". The trouble with innovative new ideas is that not all of them are worth keeping. While developing Gmail, we implemented a lot of features that were either not released, or not released until much later. Some of the most interesting ideas (such as automatic email prioritization) never made it out because we couldn't find simple enough interfaces. Other ideas sounded good, but in practice weren't useful enough to justify the added complexity (such as multiple stars). Other features, such as integrated IM, simply needed more time to get right and were added later. Our approach was somewhat minimal: only include features that had proven to be highly useful, such as the conversation view and search. It's my impression that Wave was released at an earlier stage of development -- they included all of the features, and will likely winnow and refine them as Wave approaches a full launch. The Wave approach can be a little confusing, but it allows for greater public feedback and testing." - Paul Buchheit

Output from 3M visual attention service:

The image above shows that they algorithm does not take into account the direction of baby's face has on a person's gaze. (In reality, we can't help but follow the gaze of faces in photos).

Output from real eye tracking with Humans:

James Breeze comments in a related post: "Completely different!! Of course the child is looking the text and drawing peoples' attention there. Just like happens when someone stops in the street and looks up! This 3M tool [...] seems to be treating the images in exactly the same way [...] What about the emotion displayed, direction of view, context on the page, age of person in image, gender. Not to mention many other factors [...]"

"You don't find out anything until it's used by people." - David Kelley, founder of IDEO.

Check out this potted summary of the discussion on Jonny Holland regarding Jon Kollo's recent article:

Jon Kollo writes: "[...] neither brand nor UX will serve as the driving force behind financial success in the coming decades. “User experience” is just a new name for old thinking, and “User experience practitioners” exhibit the same hubris that has long plagued “brand thinking”: the large name-as-mindshare mentality that a company can own a space, a segment, or even a consumer.

Peter Merholz comments: "Wow. This might be among the most irresponsible articles I’ve read all year. Jon sets up UX as a boogeyman, but at no time does he define user experience, and his take on it runs totally contrary to how I, and all the other UX practitioners I know, practice it. [...]"

Jared M. Spool comments: "Jon has put forward a very distorted notion of user experience. If you look at the companies at the forefront of great experience design, none of them take the approach that they are designing something “for a person to experience” as Jon asserts. Neither Virgin America, Disney, Cirque du Soliel, Apple, nor Starbucks is about designing exact experiences.

Cennydd Bowles tweets: "Do read @jkolko's provocative article: http://is.gd/58TwG I both strongly approve of and vehemently disagree with what he says."

via johnnyholland.org