user experience

Facebook's recent push to make money could backfire, warns an analyst who believes a user backlash may depress its shares to $16 over the next year.

BTIG analyst Richard Greenfield lowered his firm's target price for Facebook today, citing concern over Facebook's "aggressive" increase of monetization efforts, particularly mobile ads, according to his report. Facebook's stock opened at $20.40 a share this morning.

Since going public in May, Facebook has faced increasing pressure from investors to demonstrate that it can keep revenue and profits growing quickly. The social network has increased advertising efforts, … Read more

The idea of convergence, of one device replacing several, has long been a popular theme in forecasting high-tech gadgetry. It's also something that doesn't happen as often as predicted.

Some of the reasons relate to design and technology. It's hard to make a multitool as elegant for each individual function as specialist devices are. A form factor that's optimized around, say, being a phone demands serious technical compromises when it comes to a totally different function, such as taking a picture. And rapidly evolving technology means some functions in a device are inevitably behind the technology … Read more

For its Xperia X10 smartphones, Sony Ericsson designed a new user interface from scratch. Called the User Experience Platform (or UXP), it sits on top of the Android OS for the Xperia X10, X10 Mini, and X10 Mini Pro.

Last week, Nicole Lee and I took an in-depth tour of UXP with George Arriola, Sony Ericsson's head of human interface design, at the company's lab in San Francisco. On the whole, we liked what we saw. UXP is clean, easy to use, and attractive, and we like that it lets the basic Android framework shine through.

For the … Read more

Technology can improve the customer experience. This usually translates into more money for the company doing the improving.

So-called self-service retail is a great example of this. For most purposes, I'm much happier using Expedia and similar services online than I was going to a travel agent's office in the old days. The recommendation engine, customer reviews, streamlined ordering system, and sheer scale of Amazon.com present for many things a vast improvement over traditional brick-and-mortar shopping.

This isn't always the case, of course. I find it stupefying that Lowes and Home Depot are the two chains … Read more

Facebook's Groups feature seemed to have long since taken a backseat to the "fan pages" that the social network has encouraged companies and brands to create. But they're far from obsolete.

In a Monday blog post called "Giving Groups a Stronger Voice," Facebook has announced a number of ways it has improved Groups, to better match the rest of the site and more closely tie to members' activity feeds.

"Group activities, which previously only appeared in the group, will now be delivered to your news feed," the post by Facebook engineer Knot … Read more

Guess what? Facebook is tweaking its home page design yet again--something that invariably seems to tick off members at first before they realize they actually don't mind that much. The company seems to have been previewing the new look to advertisers, one of whom forwarded the details along to industry blog Mashable.

It doesn't look too different. The biggest change is that Facebook's home page news feed will now be divided up into "top news" and a more real-time "recent activity" view.

The explanation:

"Facebook is simplifying the user experience on … Read more

ToDoList provides a set of easy-to-use tools for monitoring several tasks and due dates. The program's efficient layout is designed to keep users informed of progress and upcoming deadlines on everything from simple tasks to major projects.

The program is a little intimidating to start off with, since it's really not much more than a blank screen with a lot of strange-looking command icons. Fortunately, the Help file's tutorial quickly gets you on track. Populating the list took only a few minutes. You can make notes, set due dates, mark your progress, and color-code everything. Completed lists … Read more

My last post about "reverse switching" from an iPhone back to a BlackBerry generated a lot of great comments that I believe warrant a short follow-up (much shorter than the original post, I promise). I can't address all the comments, but here are a few thoughts.

For the record, in my post, I'm describing 3.1 software on an iPhone 3G.

Yes, the 3GS actually speed some things up, such as the camera; however, in my view, the iPhone's speed issue is not one of CPU horsepower, but because of its fundamental interface architecture. As I say in the article, the paned, step-by-step interface is "easy," but it puts a limit on how fast it can be used, simply because of the number of steps it requires to perform a task. Apple can speed the CPU all it wants, and it will only make a marginal difference to the key usability index of time on task (the amount of time it takes to start and complete an activity).

(As an aside, on the topic of doing great user interface with a low performance device, here's an old post I wrote about the UI design of the Palm. Palm beat the experience provided by Windows Mobile phones of the day, even though its CPU, memory, and screen were far inferior.)

As some point out, there are things that can be done with a jailbroken phone that address specific issues. However, I'm using a work-issued phone, so I'm not going to jailbreak a phone that doesn't belong to me. Besides, jailbreaking is something that only a tiny percentage of users will risk doing, or even know about. You may say I'm a BlackBerry power user (I don't really think I am; there are people who know way more about it than I do), but things like knowing one's way around the menu are way less geeky than jailbreaking.… Read more

I have blogged about how the frequent WebOS updates, proliferation of homebrew apps, and general spirit of communal play and discovery over at Pre Central have kept things fun, but there's something else that has started to take shape that is almost more compelling than all of that put together.

Have you seen the latest Pre TV advertisement from Palm?

Early on, the look and feel of Palm's Pre ads seemed to be playing on the natural, organic inspiration for the Pre'… Read more