“Malcolm Gladwell’s two humongous best sellers, “The Tipping Point” and “Blink,” share a shake-and-bake recipe that helps explain their popularity. Both popularize scientific, sociological and psychological theories in a fashion that makes for lively water-cooler chatter about Big Intriguing Concepts: “The Tipping Point” promotes the notion that ideas and fads spread in much the same way as infectious diseases do, while “Blink” theorizes that gut instincts and snap judgments can be every bit as good as decisions made more methodically. Both books are filled with colorful anecdotes and case studies that read like entertaining little stories. Both use PowerPoint-type catchphrases (like the “stickiness factor” and “the Rule of 150”) to plant concepts in the reader’s mind. And both project a sort of self-help chirpiness, which implies that they are giving the reader useful new insights into the workings of everyday life.

“Outliers,” Mr. Gladwell’s latest book, employs this same recipe, but does so in such a clumsy manner that it italicizes the weaknesses of his methodology. The book, which purports to explain the real reason some people — like Bill Gates and the Beatles — are successful, is peppy, brightly written and provocative in a buzzy sort of way. It is also glib, poorly reasoned and thoroughly unconvincing.”

Doesn’t sound that convincing.  Plus Jame told me the concept behind this book over dinner last night.  The concept was simple and easy to grasp, and I didn’t feel like I need a full book of examples to understand it.

I guess I will wait for my other favorite writer Steven Johnson’s the “Invention of Air” then.

Technorati Tags: malcolm, gladwell, outliers, steven, johnson, invention, of, air, book, new, york, times, review

However, the times when it gets it right, it is insanely convenient.  I only tried it for looking up directions, because I have long dreamt of voice search on the GMap iPhone app.  This is a great way to combat the difficulty in typing on the iPhone.

The design is extremely elegant and user friendly as always.  See for yourself:

Expand map on the spot.

Click on map to launch GMap in iPhone.

Can also click on Get Directions and launch GMap on iPhone.

Technorati Tags: mobile, google, app, voice, search, iphone

On Friday night we happened to have rented a Zipcar and the post office is on our way. I decided it will be the perfect opportunity to drop off the shoes. I went on Zappos and try to log on but couldn’t. My browser usually have my username and password cookied and it was weird when the password didn’t auto-fill after I entered my email. I keep getting the same error message that the user id and password combination does not exist or something like that. I must have tried a thousand combinations and none worked. I tried retrieving it from the lost password twice but it didn’t send me anything.

I became really frustrated when I couldn’t log onto Zappos to get the return label in time for our Zipcar. The Live Chat has too long a wait so I left a message. I also decided to complain on Twitter, hoping they will find me so I don’t have to sit down and call them (multitasking has always been my thing so I hate phone calls).

No response yet the next AM. However, a response finally came in from someone at Zappos through Twitter at around 6pm (they had followed me on Twitter after Zappos was mentioned in my feed). It turns out to be Zappos CEO (I know because I watched him on the Web 2.0 Summit podcasts)! He was really nice and patience. He asked me to call customer rep but I told him the wait was too long. He ended up just helping me himself. In fact, after they found my tweet, Tony emailed me, a customer rep emailed me my password, and a customer rep called me. After a bit of troubleshooting with Tony, it turns out that I had entered the wrong email address (the browser auto-fill completed the wrong address).

I do think there is potentially an underlying usability issue with the error messages. If they have told me that the email address does not exist, it would have been solved without all this. They also haven’t tell me why I didn’t receive the lost password email twice(if a wrong email address is entered, it should return an error message).  But this post is about Zappos’ great customer service. There you go, another satisfaction post on the blogosphere.

Zappos’ CEO at Web 2.0 Summit this year (good jokes throughout):

technorati tags: zappos, customer, service, tony, hsieh, rep

According to the website, Protonotes are

“notes that you add to your prototype that allow project team members to discuss system functionality, design, and requirements directly on the prototype. You can think of it like a discussion board/wiki in direct context of your prototype.“

It is an extremely useful tool to have if you ever do HTML prototyping.  Having did that for a project and went to presentations of others who have, it seems that although everyone has a different method of annotating, it is still one of the most complicated part of the process.  I know someone here at Razorfish embedded it in their code with the help of a PLD.  My old project uses the combination of code and Wiki, which I think is more robust.

However, I think Protonotes makes this process a lot easier by allowing us to drag and drop it to wherever it is suppose to go.  It also makes collaboration a lot simpler, since even a novice can easily figure out where to place the note.

It even prints properly!  The sandbox from Protonotes website doesn’t print properly but try this one (found from Adaptive Path’s post).

I know this is probably an early prototype, but features that I would like to see in future iterations are:

• Ability to group notes by layer and show/hide layers - this is mostly for hiding expired notes but doesn’t want to remove them entirely
• Ability to choose color for notes - this is for when there are multiple reviewers or for developers to post questions on the interface
• Automatic time-stamp

But very cool so far!

technorati tags: protonotes, annotation, html, prototype, wireframes,

The beginning of the interview is definitely worth the watch.  The love triangle alone is probably the most entertaining news in my GReader lately.  If you are remotely interested in this topic, I suggest you hear it from Jerry first hand.  There might be a little desperation in his tone, but he took on some tough questions.  It is funny too at times.

Here is a post on their new platform.

Technorati Tags: jerry, yang, web2.0, summit, san, francisco

If you are planning to purchase this phone, my advise to you is to forget about it.  This phone is an absolute waste of money.  It was working well for a couple days.  After about 2 weeks, it had stopped to function properly.  

People said they have trouble hearing me or my voice is weirdly distorted.  The driver crashes daily:

It doesn’t matter whether you are using the phone or not, it just crashes several times a day.  The input volume goes up and down while you are on a call.  I even have to keep increasing the input volume while talking just so the person on the other side can hear me.

About a couple days ago, I received this message and the phone had completely shut off on me:
 

I tried restarting my computer but it didn’t work.  I tried reinstalling this damn thing but it didn’t work.  Completely dead.

Don’t waste your money.

Technorati Tags: ipevo, skype, phone

Strangely, after I hit Submit Error Report, all the tabs stayed and including the iLike tab.

Anyway, I really like the user experience of the browser.  On the other hand, it lags ALL the time on my machine which is really annoying.

Technorati Tags: google, chrome, browser, crashed, crash

Check out their website.  I don’t know if I should be laughing at how geeky this is, or their tagline: “Your kids will love ‘em!”

Sure this will come into handy when I brainwash my kid someday to become an ID.

There is a new article on UX Matters that speaks directly about this issue.  The article, Winning Considerations for Interactive Content, mentioned a couple things we as Interaction Designers should consider before proposing too much interactivity for reading content.  The article listed out some great points such as the ability to link to content disappears when they are on layers that doesn’t have a unique URL.  In addition, printing is another problem which we tend to forget.

Anyway, very thought provoking.

Technorati Tags: winning, considerations, for, interactive, content