It is no secret that Yahoos are involved with regularly occurring Hack Days. When I first started at the company, I participated in a Y! Travel Hack Day - yes, we designers (and all team members) are just as involved in designing the hacks as the engineers that code them. The hack that came from my first Hack Day endeavor was a Yahoo! Widget (a.k.a. Konfabulator widget) for FareChase.
My team of three spent about three hours designing it, four or five hours coding it, and that was that… we thought. Not bad for a day’s work.
The hack was passed around to various people in the company, and it quickly snowballed into a request for a real, living breathing widget. So after six months of politicking, red tape, tweaking, and backend engineering, Yahoo! released the FareChase widget Version 1.0.1a without much fanfare on July 8. We have had a couple thousand downloads at this point, and would love your feedback!
What does it do? The Widget finds the lowest air prices from dozens of travel sites for you and brings them right to your desktop. Hey, we are a lazy bunch, and prefer things to come to us - and now you can benefit from our laziness as well!
Today, Yahoo! Travel brought Trip Planner out of beta. There has been a ton of press coverage today, which is quite exciting. To see folks write about my work in Forbes, and in many national and international newspapers, online news outlets, and in the blogosphere (the most important outlet!) simply stokes my fire.
Some people would say that Y! has bet the farm on social media, and I say that it is an exciting place to be right now. Greg Sterling ponders today, “in many ways it’s the most impressive expression to date of Yahoo!’s social media strategy. Yahoo! Answers has received a great deal of attention recently (there’s an Answers integration with Travel) but the new Trip Planner is more fully realized as a product.” I think Greg hits the nail on the head, and there is only more smart, focused integration of Yahoo properties (in Travel and elsewhere) on the way. If the press and PR folks are missing some points, I would have to say that Trip Planner is focused on SIMPLICITY, and very concise, progressive disclosure of functionality. It doesn’t overwhelm, but hopefully it is helpful in all the right places. We also took great pains toward personalizing the experience based on other actions you have taken within Yahoo Travel and elsewhere - but that’s a hard topic and concept for the PR engine to spin, so you’ll have to read it here. 
While much of the trip creation process of Trip Planner existed when I started at Yahoo back in December, I led the design for many of the new features in Trip Planner, including the ability to explore geo-coded trips across the world. Rather than go into detail describing all of the features and new-skool Yahoo! coolness, I’ll just point you to the Trip Planner home page; go plan a trip!
To the Trip Planner team, I’m proud of the work we’ve done, and can’t wait to get started on Trip Planner 2.0. The Trip Planner engineers are amazing, and thanks to my fellow designers for all of the great feedback, idea generation, and help in bringing focus to the product (and the sweet visual design). There is so much to do still, and I look forward to seeing where we can take it.
Update: Be sure to check out Ivanka Trump’s Trip Plan to Dubai!
It’s no secret: I am a bicycling nut. And of late, my tastes have turned very much toward the classic, bird-like lugged steel frames of a time gone by. I guess my techno-centric work life pushes me toward a personal life of dirt, twine, shellac, and other things that can not be had from the confines of a digital device.
There is a fellow named Chris Kulczycki, who via his Velo Orange blog, has begun to build a classic cyclo-touring business by interacting directly with his customers, and potential customers. The recent post that really struck me as interesting - and ballsy - was this one. Chris asks an open-ended question which has sparked a fervent rash of comments, requests, and of course, doubt. He asks with confidence, “Now don’t get excited, but what if Velo Orange had frames made?” He then lists a few core piece of his frame idea, and finishes his post with, “What else would you want to see on this imaginary frame?”
This is the most concrete example I’ve seen of watching a person build a business, and more importantly, getting explicit and public feedback from his *potential* customers to influence his product design decisions - all via his blog (and probably email).
Are there other interesting examples of this type of thing out there?
Oh, and I have to point you to the Velo Orange store to see the beautiful collection of hand-made bicycling goods that Chris is designing.
In my continuing search for ways in which people have implemented the One Button Interface, I ask that you post photos of your crosswalk buttons, or send them to us (see Masthead for how to get in touch), and we will!
In my design and thinking around online communities, I am constantly entrenched and talking to other designers about abuse risk and mitigation. Any product or service which presents opportunity for public reward also opens itself to a number of pitfalls, including gaming the system, abusing the system, abusing other people that use the system, and so on.
Some recent examples I can think of are:
The Flickr Flashr
A guy was going around Flickr introducing himself to women on Flickr, telling them how much he enjoyed their photos, and that they should also come check out his photos. When the unsuspecting women would arrive at his photostream, BLAMMO: they got flashed!
The Yahoo Answers gamer
I was talking to Randy Farmer about Yahoo Answers, and he mentioned something about a guy from Nova Scotia who, early on with Answers, gamed the system so that he would by far be the person with the highest score on the leader board. I believe he did something like write a little app that would troll questions, scrape them for keywords, conduct an internet search looking for said keywords, and provide answers that were maybe close enough to being right so that he would get even more points. I can’t remember the exact scenario, but it was something ridiculous like that. And what was his motivation? Nothing other than being acknowledged in a high-traffic public space on the web.
Anyway, the list goes on and on. The more involved I become with online communities, and more importantly designing online communities, the more I think about mitigating the risk of lowlifes abusing things. Which finally brings me around to the point of this post:
An Italian Interaction Designer has designed what she calls Electric Cinderella. As Gizmag points out:
The Electric Cinderella shoes idea began as part of Simona Brusa Pasque’s thesis at the Interaction Design Institute in 2002 and was inspired by a beautiful woman who Simona interviewed for her thesis who wanted to be able to “intimidate her intimidators.” She wanted to be empowered without losing her femininity, to have the freedom to be sexy without fear. The shoes certainly achieve that, offering 100,000 volts of high fashion stun gun power which can be activated by a control on the matching necklace.
Now maybe it’s just me, but doesn’t this sound like a recipe for disaster? How does a designer 1) justify creating such a product beyond it being a joke and 2) mitigate the risk of someone abusing (or maybe killing) the recipient of the product’s intended use? Or are Italian men that aggressive?
I guess on the one hand designing that sort of product is much more exciting - especially the usability testing part of the process… On the other hand, I don’t believe I would want to put myself into a situation where the fruits of my labor could also land me in a courtroom, which, we all know is where everything that is any fun ends up these days. Oh, and be sure to check out the photos, which bare an uncanny resemblance to something from the Austin Powers series.