Stock price be damned! Today there was a mass evacuation of my building at Yahoo! in Santa Clara. Apparently someone brought in their personal DELL laptop and had yet to heed their battery recall instructions. Here are the charred remains. The fire was on the 8th floor, and the acrid stench of burned plastic could be smelled eight floors down!
I have yet to find out who the person was; I would like to get a recount of how the events that led up to this transpired. If I get an update, I will let you know.
Update: The machine belongs to a Yahoo! Research Intern. It was his first week on the job, from what I’ve uncovered. He was simply sitting there at his desk, writing code when his machine started smoking, and then flaming. Welcome to Yahoo, grasshopper.
There’s a certain feeling I get when an idea really gels; you know what I’m talking about. Iteration after iteration, hours, weeks, even months of energy put into the smallest interaction victory - all so that your users will be delighted by their experience. And when they do experience that delight, it rocks!
Well, for concepts and prototypes, I’ve begun using the Rock cursor as inspiration to acheive greatness. I’m in this to create products that rock, and thought it would be a nice Friday afternoon gesture to share this icon with the wonderful the Push Button For readers.
I wish I could claim that I created the icon, but I didn’t; I only tweaked it and made it better. In fact I have no idea who originally thought of the idea. But damn if it doesn’t look good when I’m presenting an idea that is air tight! Take it, use it, and my friends, let’s spread the rock!
I’m not certain that it has been published anywhere else, but I find it to be hilarious. Hint: West of the Golden Gate Bridge.
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.