After last week’s announcement of the Kindle coming to Canada I re-kindled (get it) a purchase decision I had started several years ago when I first saw a Sony e-Reader at CES.

Here are my thoughts after spending 24 hours with the Kindle.

Ordering

Order placed November 23. Order Arrived November 24.

Packaging

At first I was underwhelmed but I really like the “Once Upon a Time” on the side.

Here is an unboxing video….

The Amazon Kindle Arrives at Teehan+Lax from Greg Washington on Vimeo.

After opening the box this is what you see.

That text on the screen is not a sticker. That is the screen! It is incredibly sharp and crisp.

You need to charge it fully by connecting the micro USB to the supplied power connector.

I’m not going to cover a full tour of the UI since these shots exist elsewhere online. But here are my initial thoughts.

• Purchasing content is easy. I bought a book on Amazon.com and it appears on the Kindle within 60 seconds. Buying content from the Kindle is as easy. Great experience!
• Reading is effortless and little to no eye strain. I read for about 2 hours last night and had no problems.
• When you hold the Kindle your fingers naturally rest on two buttons.

  My natural inclination is that pressing on the left button will go back and the right will go forward but that is not the case.

  

  It’s not a big deal but I miss hit it a few times.

• My biggest issue is something that I would never have thought of until I used the Kindle. When you read a book you make note of where you are spatially in the book. You are always aware of if you are 1/3 of the way through or 1/2 or near the end. The tactile feedback of weight in your left or right hand is an important cognitive clue, it also helps your brain position passages and narrative in a physical space. I can go to a book I read a year ago and know roughly where certain passages or parts are. “I know it was in the first half of the book”.
• With the Kindle I was aware that I would need to mark passages I may want to remember. There is a very robust notes and bookmarking feature in the Kindle. You can highlight passages, makes notes or simple bookmarks. The problem is to do this, you need to enter a menu, navigate a 5 way controller and then select the passage. It takes not only 10 or 15 seconds of time but more importantly you consciously need to stop reading and do this action. It is disruptive to the experience.
• The keyboard is ass. The buttons are really tough to type on. Maybe in the future I will type more notes and use it more, for now it’s just in the way.
• The Kindle arrives with your name and Amazon account programmed. This means there is zero setup when you turn it on.
• You get a Kindle.com email address. Sending PDFs to that address will add them to your Kindle.

  I will try to cover more about the Kindle Store, newspaper and magazine reading in another post.

Huge congratulations go out to Teehan+Lax’s own Peter Nitsch and Greg Washington for taking home Best Canadian Developer and Best Canadian Designer at the recent FITC awards. We’re honoured and privileged to work with such a huge collection of talent – these guys included. Here’s the complete list of the ‘09 FITC Award winners.

Ok, so it’s generally our policy not to blog about something that’s already gotten exposure on sites like Digg (let alone made it to the top ten), but for this one I’ll make a quick exception. Google just added an undo send button to its labs suite (or as TechCrunch calls it , a panic button).

This is the kind of “feature” enhancement I love. It’s a natural, yet subtle extension of how I use mail every day, it’s lightweight and unobtrusive, and it’s grounded in an aspect of human experience with email that’s so familiar and fundamental but ignored until now. The word I’d choose to describe this kind of feature is “humane”.

How many times have you sent out an email, just then noticing that you forgot to attach the file you were writing about in the first place? How many times have you forgot to copy someone, or realized you were addressing the wrong Steve, etc., etc. directly after hitting ‘Send’? For me it’s too many times to be a coincidence.

Often when we write emails—especially critical ones where pressure is involved—we get into a very focused, depth-first mode of reasoning. This makes it hard to see mistakes that would otherwise be obvious. My hypothesis is that as soon as we hit send, there’s this cathartic moment where pressure is relieved and we are suddenly able to reason more broadly, or in a breadth-first way. It’s only then that we notice the embarrassing mistakes we are now going to have to write a follow-up email to address. (There’s evidence to suggest this is the case, by the way, and I think it’d make for a great applied research topic.)

I’ve been waiting for a panic button in my mail app for a while now. Apple’s Mail got something like this (there’s a little cancel button next to the outgoing message progress bar in the Mail Activity), but I think it’s more for server-side issues and other technical stuff. I never have time to cancel my outgoing messages—there should be a 5-10 sec buffer between the time I hit send, and the time the message goes out, as in the new Gmail feature.

I’ve noticed a few new services that have replaced the traditional registration form (email/password) with email as an alternative sign-up method.

TripIt, a travel service that creates a single, readable online itinerary from your flight, hotel or rental confirmation is the first site I noticed doing this. To register, a user simply forwards a hotel, flight or rental confirmation email to plans@tripit.com. The site automatically registers you and replies with a confirmation and link to your new itinerary. Brilliant. (Note: TripIt also provides the classic registration form as well).

What’s important about this is that they’re reducing a psychological barrier to entry. Most people using Flickr, Facebook, LinkedIn, Gmail, etc. feel signing up for yet another online service is an annoyance. After a while, another registration form can feel like a burden. Email-based registration avoids this barrier by rolling registration and the way you interact with the service into one action. For example, the same way you use TripIt is the same way you sign up, by forwarding emails to plans@tripit.com.

Of course, form-less registration doesn’t fit for every solution. While flushing out the IA for ImageSpark, our home-brewed creative inspiration tool, we decided upon the classic email/password registration. The reason being that the core interaction with the site isn’t done through email but rather integrated browser and desktop upload tools; For ImageSpark, there was no gain in baking in an email-based registration. (Although we hope this won’t stop people from using it.)

A service like Posterous however, which uses email to create and update a blog, is built on avoiding forms at all costs. It makes sense than that your first email registers you and initiates your first blog post, all in one.

I’m pretty sure we’ll see form-less registration grow into a design pattern as new services emerge. And I’m looking forward to using it, so long as the situation is right.

Limited access to television, icy temperatures, and no amount of distance, held anyone back from watching Tuesday’s inauguration of the 44th president, Barack Obama. Several sites proudly played host to the most web-friendly presidential inauguration to date, spiking internet traffic levels to 54% above normal.

CNN streamed the live ceremony alongside an impressive Facebook tool, which let users update their status, and toggle between viewing live status updates of their own friends, or the general public (consisting purely of Obamania). You could call it a success, an average of 4,000 users updated their status every minute, and CNN reported over 1.5 million status updates through their portal alone.

Meanwhile, not one minute was wasted updating the White House website, literally. By 12:01, the site was Obamafied, and the blog page already flourishing with updates and recaps.

At the Obama-friendly T+L, we were lucky enough to get a mid-morning break to pile into the boardroom and watch history unfold. It was especially exciting for us that the ceremony that captivated millions of people around the world had a much higher priority online, compared to in the past.

We even had some friends from the Globe and Mail join us for a story.

Just released LinkedIn Applications... so good to link my Slideshare and our Blog right into LinkedIn. This should have happened months ago. I would like to connect my Twitter to it…

I am reasserting my Valentine’s Day post that RIM should buy LinkedIn.

Our friend, Peter Rivera at AOL, nails it in this post about getting the details right.

Check out this site for the Dutch Air Force. It’s not in English and therefore you’ll have to click around to really experience the site, but if you have the time to mess around, I suggest you check it out. Everything from the 3D transitions, the video integration, the photography… really well executed.

Credits
Concept and Project Lead by ARA
Design and Flash by Momkai
3D, Flex and Flash by IND

Source [cpluv]

For several years we’ve said that a company’s CEO has the greatest impact on customer experience. We’ve said that when a CEO is the most demanding customer of their own product, it shows.

It’s a recurring theme we’ve seen from people like Bruce Temkin at Forrester.

I don’t think many senior level executives have any idea what it’s like to become a customer of their company. They’ve become out of touch the experience as it exists today and rely on internal and external analysis to understand the experience their providing. Analyzing the experience is a great step to take in bettering whatever it is you do but it doesn’t replace experiencing it first hand.

More senior level executives need to take the initiative and become a new customer of their company every year. By doing so they’ll have a much better sense of the type of experience they’re providing their customers. In time they’ll also be able to see the impact their decisions are having.

The US presidential campaign is widely seen as one of the most interesting if not important contests in a long time (and—full disclosure—I have to admit that I’ve been taken in by all of the hype myself). But as an interaction designer, and just as someone who’s interested in how people engage with, influence, and are influenced by technology, I’m even more interested in what’s going on in the political arena south of the border. Here are some things we’re talking about at work:

Campaign websites

Now I wasn’t paying close attention back in 2004, but a quick trip to archive.org shows just how far campaign websites have come in the last four years. A PEJ study showed progress in key areas like fundraising (e.g. real time drives), dialogue (blogs and social networking) and rich media across the board.

At the office, we liked Democratic contender Barack Obama’s site the most. The highly polished aesthetic, while a little too rich for some, is nevertheless upbeat and fresh, and the underlying IA makes for a very compelling experience. For example, content from the blog, articles and video section can appear in multiple views (states, issues, people, etc.) Because of this bottom-up IA, the site can be used as a very nimble and responsive communications tool. Tactical content and utility for getting out the vote make the site a good practical resource for grass roots activists to organize themselves locally.

Barack’s site isn’t the only one leveraging new technologies to promote local support. Huckabee’s site is still up and features a simple but effective Google Maps widget that allows users to drill down to find details on meetups in their area. Clinton’s site, like others, features tools like this one that automatically distributes call lists to supporters who can help get her message out in Pennsylvania.

Social networking

Some candidates have launched presences on both Myspace and Facebook social networks, but the Obama campaign has really invested in this area, enlisting one of the creators of Facebook, Chris Hughes, to help create my.barackobama.com.

I signed up to get a sense of what MyBo was like and found it to be highly focused and flexible at the same time. For example, while some elements on your dashboard place you in the context of local opportunities for involvement, others allow for personal expression through blogging and user-generated fundraising campaigns. In this month’s Rolling Stone, Tim Dickinson talks about the great lengths to which Obama’s campaign has gone to translate online enthusiasm into real-life, boots on the ground effort and organization to move the electorate and GOTV (they’ve apparently learned a lot from the mistaken assumptions Howard Dean’s campaign made about their net roots advantage back in 2004).

Coverage websites

Finally, we’ve been really impressed by how online coverage of the campaign has really progressed. CNN, which really lives and dies by meta events like these, launched their Election Center 2008 site, which is packed with data and analysis. It’s the ultimate tool for the political junkie—in fact, CNN personalities will often encourage viewers to log on to EC2008 simultaneously during major campaign events like primaries or debates to track along with their correspondents and feed into the process live. The highly usable, well-considered and fresh-looking design provide easy access to a very rich pool of data.