Customer's Site Redesign Exposes the Sad Truth about Corporate Inertia
Dustin Curtis is a UI designer. He was fed up with how hard it was to book travel on American Airlines' AA.com Web site. So last May, instead of complaining, he sent them a better UI design. That led to an interesting interaction with a member of the team involved in the design of the AA.com Web site. Dustin refers to his correspondent

National Semiconductor’s New WEBENCH® Visualizer Raises the Bar
I've always admired Phil Gibson's work and have often pointed to many of his accomplishments as best practices. This week, he did it again! On November 9, 2009, he unveiled the most sophisticated, yet simple to use Web dashboard that I have ever seen to help customers make buying decisions. By turning a virtual knob to optimize for power efficiency, small footprint, and/or cost of a total bill of materials, design engineers can instantly generate and evaluate the most appropriate options among billions of power supply circuit designs. By turning the dial, or selecting different parameters or filters, engineers can visually navigate a bubble diagram depicting the choices that me

National Semiconductor’s New WEBENCH® Visualizer Raises the Bar
I've always admired Phil Gibson's work and have often pointed to many of his accomplishments as best practices. This week, he did it again! On November 9, 2009, he unveiled the most sophisticated, yet simple to use Web dashboard that I have ever seen to help customers make buying decisions. By turning a virtual knob to optimize for power efficiency, small footprint, and/or cost of a total bill of materials, design engineers can instantly generate a

Google Android vs. Apple iPhone: Whose App Ecosystem Will Win?
  The recent buzz about the Verizon/Motorola/Google (An)Droid vs. Apple/AT&T/et al iPhone has revolved around two customer-critical issues and one supplier-critical one (can you guess which is which?):• Which device+network combo meets customers' usability requirements?• Which brand evokes the most loyalty?• Which ecosystem will attract the most apps?As pundits review and early adopters swarm, I've been noticing a few patterns in the dia

Local Motors: Reinventing the Car Industry from the Outside In
One of the most inspiring "stories" at the Business Innovation Factory's fifth annual summit, BIF-5, in Providence, Rhode Island was told by Jay Rogers, the founder of an innovative new American car company, Local Motors (www.local-motors.com). Jay is an ex-marine whose grandfather instilled in him a passion for cars. His grandfather owned, among other companies, Indian Motorcycles. Jay grew up in a car-mad family. His experience fighting in Iraq convinced him that the U.S. needed to shed its dependence on foreign oil. So he has invented a new kind of car company.