'I guess it depends on how much one values human life, as against the inconvenience of having to look in the rearview mirror more often.' (via the economist)

Obama loved the new tech during his campaign, but now, in trying to reconcile two radically different operating structures (gvmt & tech) while being shielded from the harsh realities of the dev schedule and product status, he sure got burned.

They broke the page into its component parts and prepared a handful of alternatives for each. For the button, an A/B test of three new word choices—”Learn More,” “Join Us Now,” and “Sign Up Now”—revealed that “Learn More” garnered 18.6 percent more signups per visitor than the default of “Sign Up.” Similarly, a black-and-white photo of the Obama family outperformed the default turquoise image by 13.1 percent. Using both the family image and “Learn More,” signups increased by a thundering 40 percent. (via wired)

vs

O: OK. On the website, I was not informed directly that the website would not be working the way it was supposed to. Had I been informed, I wouldn’t be going out saying “Boy, this is going to be great.” You know, I’m accused of a lot of things, but I don’t think I’m stupid enough to go around saying, this is going to be like shopping on Amazon or Travelocity, a week before the website opens, if I thought that it wasn’t going to work. (via the wp)

In the early days of print, you had to understand the tech to run the organization. (Ben Franklin, the man who made America a media hothouse, called himself Printer.) But in the 19th century, the printing press became domesticated. Printers were no longer senior figures — they became blue-collar workers. And the executive suite no longer interacted with them much, except during contract negotiations.
[...]
Like all organizational models, waterfall is mainly a theory of collaboration. By putting the most serious planning at the beginning, with subsequent work derived from the plan, the waterfall method amounts to a pledge by all parties not to learn anything while doing the actual work. Instead, waterfall insists that the participants will understand best how things should work before accumulating any real-world experience, and that planners will always know more than workers.
Clay Shirky on Healthcare.gov

how to clearly indicate to the world that you've raised more money than you know what to do with (and that your product markup is too high).

design is increasingly an exercise in consensus building (with a few super-votes).
or does it secretly involve doing all the research, running user interviews, thinking hard about it independently, pre-conceiving an optimal proposal and recognizing a few false starts and dead-ends to avoid, and then slowly steering a client to that same conclusion such that it seems like a foregone conclusion, using cycles of user testing, feedback, and refinement to optimize the product? good designers can make you feel smart; great designers can make you forget them entirely?

sans & serif, old & new. les frère frere-j.

the cost of convenience.

jcvd saturday.

got €650K? now you too can become an EU citizen.

a serious plan.
built!

wax paper seems like it has untapped potential.

the dog has a new theme song.

boomerang to fifteen years ago.

scramjet.

President Barrack Obama is one of 1.4 million Americans who take their dogs to work.