Surowiecki on feature creep:
The fact that buyers want bells and whistles but users want something clear and simple creates a peculiar problem for companies. A product that doesn’t have enough features may fail to catch our eye in the store. [...] But a product with too many features is likely to annoy consumers and generate bad word of mouth, as BMW’s original iDrive system did.
I love Nathan Sawaya’s lego sculptures. Make sure you go through the gallery, and check out Nathan’s site for many more. When I was a kid, I wanted to build lego’s for a living — here’s someone who’s actually pulling it off!
The flow/state blog recently had a good series of posts on improving the new user experience on websites: hurdles at the entrance to a site, easing visitors in with anonymous accounts and slickest trial-to-signup yet. Well worth reading!
Andreas Gursky creates beautiful large-scale photographs. The supermarket shot above happens to be most expensive photo in history, at $3.3 million. Phew!
Driving a manual on the steep hills of San Francisco, I find Uros Pavasovic’s Fiat Scratch particularly appealing:
The Fiat Scratch comes pre-equipped with scratches and quirky lights that vaguely resemble freckles. The aim is to make drivers less protective of their cars and more able to lighten up and behave with tolerance on the road.
A concept design for a competition, the Fiat Scratch comes with a “scratch-happy” bumper that is explicitly designed to be more beautiful as it gets dented and nicked. You can find Uros’ competition entry at the Michelin site.
Two related concepts:
The first picture in this set of photographs by Eugene de Salignac is absolutely stunning.
As some of you may have guessed, posting has been light because I was busy launching offline functionality for Google Reader. Go try it out and let me know what you think!
