Nick Dominguez

I had the chance to head up to Indialantic this past Wednesday to surf a beautiful little ground swell given to us by hurricane Helene. I don’t get to go surfing as much as I used to and the week day trip was definetly worth it. Some clean long lines anywhere from waist to head high were coming in breaking left and right, depending on which side of the sandbars you were on. It was nice to be in the water with friends and enjoy what’s in my backyard. Here’s hoping that we have a nice cold winter, see you in the water.

“Dale Carnegie’s famous How to Win Friends and Influence People
has a similar take on making a friend. Carnegie suggests that if you
want to make someone your friend, then you should ask them to do
something for you. It sounds counter-intuitive, but the fog is lifted
when you think about it: When someone does something for you they are
vested in your success. They want to see you succeed because they have
a chip in the game.”

Jason Fried

I wouldn’t normally write a post to promote a search engine over another, but after playing around with Ask.com a bit this morning I felt compelled to write something quick.

Ask has apparently launched a pretty large marketing campaign to gain market share against Google and after watching one of their ads last night I decided to check them out and see what they had been up to. My only familiarity with Ask was from their purchase of Bloglines a service that I’ve been using for a few years now. I was surprised to find some nice things about the service. I would have to say the thing I like the most about Ask so far is their “Save” feature for search results. It’s true that Ask isn’t the first to provide this feature, but they really make it easy and simple to use. Unlike Google or Yahoo, you don’t have to create an account to immediately start saving your results, which is nice and their interface is pretty user friendly. Surprisingly Google doesn’t have the ability to immediately save results immediately to personal folders, they have their “Notebook” application which allows you to store results to notebooks, which is nice, but maybe a little cumbersome for the task. Yahoo provides search result saving, but I don’t really use their service so I’m unfamiliar with how it works.

Some other nice features

• Pronounciation audio on dictionary results.
• Great blog search
• Mobile content search
• Great white pages search

I listened to a piece
this morning on NPR by Christopher Noxon, about how common gadgets or
objects in our lives are beginning to look like toys and I instantly
began to think about current design trends on the web.

I think we’ve recently come to define the “web 2.0″ look and feel, we’re cataloging the logos on Flickr and we’ve begun to talk about what makes up the web 2.0 look. If you could say one thing about web 2.0 companies and their applications it is that they are all overwhelmingly “toylike” or “fisher pricey” in look and feel. Big bubbly buttons, big text, bold colors and gradients, all these attributes can be found in the gui and identity design of various new companies.

I think there is an interesting correlation between what is happening in the online and real worlds. I have not yet read “Rejuvenile” by Christopher Noxon, but I think I’m going to make an attempt to sometime this year.

“Depending on the day and the project, it could be any number of
things: interviewing a client, doing field research, brainstorming,
writing documentation, building a prototype, testing the product. It
all depends on what stage the project is at. Unless you are deep in
documentation (creating wireframes, say), it’s unlikely that any day
will be the same. Yes, there still is a lot of EEMP: email, email,
meetings, and presentations. But in-between, there is some exciting
stuff.

Interaction designers get paid to play with ideas—abstract ideas
that can become real—and few jobs can boast that. You can brainstorm
things that don’t exist and then build them. You can shape behavior,
making the world more pleasant and meaningful. You get to sketch ideas
in colored markers on whiteboards and post-it notes. You help people
solve problems. And if you are good enough, you’ll work with companies
whose technology and/or influence is so great, you can make a
significant difference in the world.

But in order to do this, I think there are three essential traits you need: temperament, training, and experience.”

-Adaptive Path’s “So You Want to Be an Interaction Designer 2006″