Friday Linkfest
Here are these week’s interesting reads:
- What I learned in four years at amazon. My favorite part is how he says innovation and frugality go hand in hand. My least favorite part is how he doesn’t say what job he had there.
- How designers fail. More about attitude problems among young designers (sense of entitlement) but a good read nonetheless.
- Whatever Happened to ? – Nice list of tech products that dominated for awhile and disappeared. Anyone remember Hayes modems? This list is for you. It’s an inventory of case studies of innovators dilemma.
- 10 Usability Nightmares You Should Be Aware Of | How-To | Smashing Magazine – #9 is the killer that makes me want to hunt web developers down and make them use their own pop-ui 5000 times a day.
- Why advertising is failing on the Internet – This article has some major assumptions that I don’t think pan out, but it’s well written, relatively short and makes it’s points clearly.
4 Comments
Regarding your comment that the blogger talking about Amazon doesn’t mention his position, this is in the second paragraph of his first numbered point:
I worked as a software developer on the Email Platform team.
So he does state his position, just to correct the record.
I get an F for reading comprehension. Thanks for the catch Mark. (How did i miss that?!!#!@)
On Amazon’s Ex-Employee: Awesome, I wish I could speak so highly of any company I’ve quit.
On the Web Usability: If more people had to USE the designs they come up with, a lot of these would probably go away on their own.
On Internet Advertising: Interesting, especially the reaction, but I do think he might have spoken too much from a “savvy” perspective. Intrusive ads may go away, but contextual ads have some use and a lot of people get them confused with content when the two things are threaded transparently. Also, I didn’t see anything where he mentioned advertising as a subliminal brand-building (I’m thirsty and for some reason I want a Coke), but then again he said LESS not COMPLETELY GONE.
Good stuff!
The online advertising article is very interesting. He makes two crucial points.
1) We don’t want/trust ads. After all, they’re designed to persuade us, not to help us make informed decisions.
2) We no longer need ads. Review sites are far more helpful and extensive.
I wrote a reaction piece to it here:
http://www.whyweworry.com/blog/2009/06/29/why-advertising-will-fail-on-the-internet/
Comments are closed.