Have to agree with Jason here on his 2008 Election Maps comparison, The New York Times had the best interactive Election Map last night. It’s not evident in the pic, but you were able to click on the state and zoom into county results, a la John King.

Over 40 million people use Facebook and each of those people spend an average of 3 hours a month on the site*. This includes accessing Facebook from places like student libraries, friend’s houses and workplaces. In implementing a feature like this there’s a lot at stake. If you mistakenly decide to check that harmless little “Remember Me” at your best friend’s house and next week their not so friendly or if someone at a public machine had access to your account imagine what they could do. Destroy your credibility? Steal personal information? Add your Mom as a friend?

Okay, maybe it’s nothing really to worry about, but these are the design decisions that people like me have to make everyday. What is the cost of a good experience? Clearly it’s much more convenient to have a feature that everybody wants but will we want if a million Facebook accounts end up being maliciously accessed? If all that thought has to go into putting a little checkbox on the page imagine what goes into decisions of a much larger scale. In the end the Facebook team had to probably give in on this one (I imagine it was one of the top requests in user feedback) and take a chance.This is just something to think about if you ever assumed these decisions are trivial. 

*BusinessWeek – 09/25/2007 

Vudu’s really nailed the entire product experience here.

1. Availability: For broadband users, you’ll have quick access to over 5000 movies and every (yes every) movie released on DVD moving forward.
2. Quality: Upscaled movies via HDMI and soon 1080p HD movies. (Hold off on that Blu-ray or HD-DVD player.)
3. Pricing: You can rent for $0.99 to $3.99 or buy for no more than $16.99. The set-top box is $399 and there are no subscription fees. Just pay for the content you want.
4. Interaction Design: Slick, intuitive and simple interface and a phallic-shaped 5-button remote that’s supposed to feel great in your hand (no pun intended).

The site really does a great job of explaining Vudu (again another win for this product) so take a look and start hitting up the forums to get this thing north of the border. Just don’t tell Queen Video I sent you.

I am proud to be the Interaction Designer behind the redesign. With some great art direction the final product looks amazing, if I do say so myself! Cheers to Wendy Schaffer as well, my Creative Director here at Blast, for giving me the autonomy to really put my fingerprint on this redesign.

Despite the marketing hype, this is a phone that really gets the interactions right (and the ads are the best I’ve seen in sometime, as Jason at SvN has pointed out).

“Firefox 2′s theme and user interface have been updated to improve usability without altering the familiarity of the browsing experience. For instance, toolbar buttons now glow when you hover over them.”

I’ve never thought to myself “what toolbar button am I hovering over? I wish this browser would give me a visual cue — like, glowing!!” and I doubt many of you have. This isn’t a knock on Firefox at all (I’m using it right now and I use it everyday on both my Mac and PC). Just humorous as even technical savvy marketing-types seem to miss what real usability is about.

- Derek