Because of a very subtle yet clever feature, Amazon makes the best of both the positive and negative reviews easy to find. And that feature, based on our calculations, is responsible for more than $2,700,000,000 of new revenue for Amazon every year. Not bad for what is essentially a simple question: “Was this review helpful to you?”

When you’re dealing with feedback from hundreds of people you don’t need to address every single issue raised. You’d be mad if you did and have no time for getting the design work done. Rather, what you’re looking for three things:

1. emergent trends
2. unexpected comments
3. obvious pickups

Lack of coherent vision is a common weakness of Agile projects. This stems both from Agile’s modular nature and, to an extent, its inherent power balance. Product owners, for all their strengths, sometimes lack the tactics to appreciate the big picture. Unchecked, this can lead to vague, volatile requirements based on strategic whim, and products faithful to company daydreams, not customer reality. A telltale symptom of this malaise is the ‘horizon effect,’ whereby potential problems are pushed repeatedly from view into future iterations, and the designer is unsure whether the solution works as a holistic whole until it is complete.

Many of the systems that have passed through HCD design phases and usability reviews are superb at the level of the static, individual display, but fail to support the sequential requirements of the underlying tasks and activities. The HCD methods tend to miss this aspect of behavior: Activity-centered methods focus upon it….

Human-Centered Design does guarantee good products. It can lead to clear improvements of bad ones. Moreover, good Human-Centered Design will avoid failures. It will ensure that products do work, that people can use them. But is good design the goal? Many of us wish for great design. Great design, I contend, comes from breaking the rules, by ignoring the generally accepted practices, by pushing forward with a clear concept of the end result, no matter what. This ego-centric, vision-directed design results in both great successes and great failures. If you want great rather than good, this is what you must do.

Somewhat contradictory… neither ACD nor HCD seem adequate enough to produce great design. But a good read nevertheless.

Each little update — each individual bit of social information — is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends’ and family members’ lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting.

Most of the form fields available with HTML are straightforward and easy for people to understand and use. But there is one exception. The select multiple.