Chris Hanrath

Windows 7 now visualizes progress right in the system tray even when the window is minimized. I like it!

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After logging in to Netflix today, i experienced a recently added feature to improve movie recommendations. These ratings are asking users to make statements about their taste for movies based on mood characteristics such as: “romantic, goofy, sentimental, dark, controversial, steamy, mind-bending, violent…”

These taste preference can be categorized into “never, sometimes and often” and are supported by six example movies to understand what netflix considers to be classified under the mood. These can be changed later on.

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Mozilla just put up a new website that let’s users discover more add-ons for Firefox. It’s an interesting way of helping users to identify extensions that are of interest to them by relating the suggestions to persona-style categories like these:

• Finder and Seeker: “I want to make finding information on the Web simpler and more relevant to me.”
• Rock Star: “Music and the Web go together like rock stars and leather — I love to listen while I surf, work, email or research online.”
• News Junkie: “I want to know what’s happening in the world as it happens. And the weather helps me plan my week — temperature, please!“

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I joined the SoCHI student group for Human-Computer Interaction just before the summer and since i came back from my internship this summer at Yahoo! we have had quite a few events this semester. One of the ideas we had was to facilitate Design Jams that would encourage students to get together to apply their skills to real life problems. We held two Design Jams sponsored by Mozilla to brainstorm and prototype ideas and designs for the browser of the future inspired by their Concept Series. We bloged about the fantastic results on our website and today we were featured on the Mozilla Labs Blog.

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Tom Allen from Yahoo! Membership posted an article on the Yahoo! Developer Blog about the “OpenID: One Key, Many Doors” usability study that was conducted to uncover usability issues associated with enabling OpenID on 3rd party sites and using it for subsequent logins.

[ Found via 25hoursaday.com ]

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On October 7th Katie and I went to Chicago to attend the IDEA conference for two days. It was a great opportunity to meet and network with professionals from the User Experience domain. Most speakers were very interesting, thought provoking and inspired some great ideas for possible projects. I was very impressed by the talks of Dave Gray from XPLANE and Aradhana Goel from IDEO.

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