I have to point you to this ABC.com video coverage of Yahoo! Trip Planner. Too cool. Of all the press we’ve received since releasing Trip Planner, I feel like the ABC piece is the most articulate - without talking about features.
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!
As Gizmodo puts it, a new form of cyber-begging for when you’re too lazy to work. A young and somewhat resourceful man puts up a site asking for help getting a G5. In return for replacing his older G4 Macintosh, he’ll blow it up.
Here’s (below) the first movie he probably made on his new G5.
Some most notable parts are:
Damien the displaced redneck from Wyoming.
There were also the following excellent features:
+ beer cans poked with a drinking hole
+ weiners
+ guns
+ explosives
+ dip
+ a hummer
+ folding lawn chairs
We’re sorry for the inconvenience for some of you who are looking for online distractions today, being the last day before a long weekend for many Europeans, and just another day we should have taken off for the rest of us.
I’m working on the site right now, as it may appear, and implementing a newer, fresher easier-on-the-eyes look for Push Button For.
Hopefully this and all kinks will be worked out before the weekend and new content and programming will resume on Monday (Tuesday for you Europeans).
Have a good weekend.
update: Any PC IE/FireFox users? Would you like to take a screengrab of any funkiness you see going on, and send it to us? A screengrab of the home page as experienced within Safari on OS X can be seen here. Thanks in advance for your help.
Hello, and welcome to Push Button For. This is a collaborative blog by Damien Newman and myself that relates to Interaction Design, and the ways that Interaction Design fits into the business world.
When I look back, this site should have started around 1998, back when I was one of very few bloggers in the world, but due to various factors it never happened. Damien and I have, for many years now, had dialogues (some might call them “arguments” or “debates”) both in person and via email and IM about design, interaction design, and what they have to do with business - and we have long talked about publishing our collective thoughts. Well here we are in 2006 almost ten years after we met, and we sort of have this idea in motion.
Things are still a little rough around the edges, but I can’t think of a better time to start putting thoughts. Call it a beta…
Damien did most of the coding stuff for this site, which runs on WordPress, and we had special help from our good friend, Dagan Packman in the areas of code where we simply suck too badly to do correctly. If you have problems with it, I recommend you contact Damien. Or you can contact me, and I will harass Damien myself.
People have already begun asking about the name. I got the idea when I saw one of the many crosswalk boxes one comes across in any city. It had approximately 8 words, an arrow, and a button - all for a 1-button user interface that can only perform one action. I started thinking to myself, “I wonder how many ways people have come up with to implement this one simple civic UI?” Well, it turns out that people have thought of a lot of ways to do it. See the photo on the bottom of this page.
I’ve started tagging photos of these implementations on Flickr with ‘pushbuttonfor‘ - and if you find a new version I encourage you to upload and tag it as well.
So without further noise, I welcome you to Push Button For.