Chris Hanrath

The New York Times online, uses a bar at the top of the page that allows people log-in to their social platform to follow friends, co-workers and other readers as well as share content and comment on it.

The bar is very subtle, but offers more details in form of a pop-up once the user clicks on the “What’s this” link.

After signing up for the service, another wizard opens and offers to search for other people, import contacts or check suggested users.

The bar stays visible at the top throughout the user’s visit on nytimes.com and offers access to the timespeople page where the user can access newsfeeds, activity history, recommended content and his social network.

[Found via nytimes.com and timespeople.nytimes.com ]

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Yesterday i attended a presentation of Expedia on the University of Michigan Campus. They came to recruit Software designers and Project Managers. I was positively surprised to see how much they focus on usability and user-centered design to improve the user experience of their website. The presenter showed the audience a very interesting and promising take on booking your next vacation using expedia. Instead of using the traditional “day, time, destination” input, she showed us a very interesting wizard that selects vacation packages using other inputs such as an interactive map and vacation activities.

Unfortunately this is only visible to random users visiting Expedia.com who fall into the right category of the bucket test. But you can get an idea of Expedia’s attempts to improve the user experience at labs.expedia.com

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I was calling Verizon 411 the other day, they connected me to the desired phone number and as it has happened before nobody picked up the phone… So i repeated to call 411 to get the number once again. This time i was positively surprised, because as soon as i dialed, i was asked if i want to be reconnected to the last number. Great! This is what i call user experience.

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A sweet new user interface for any kind of search request.

Welcome to a new kind of search bar! Wundrbar is a next generation
search bar that lets you control your personal accounts and launch any
kind of web search. For example, you can manage your online calendar,
start a flight search, update your twitter status, and much more. And
you can do it all from the same search bar.

[ wundrbar.com ]

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As part of my summer internship at Yahoo! i have been involved in the publication of patterns, the blog post “What’s So Social about Sign-in?” references my first contribution.

[Found via yuiblog.com]

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The .net Awards celebrate the best in web design and development. The
14 categories for 2008 range from Design Agency of the Year and Podcast
of the Year through to the Infamy Award – a chance to name and shame
those ruining your web experience.

Vote for your favorites in the following categories:

1. Interactive site of the year
2. Web application of the year
3. Socially powered site of the year
4. Mashup of the year
5. Blog of the year
6. Podcast of the year
7. Vodcast of the year
8. Mobile site of the year
9. Design agency of the year
10. Innovation of the year
11. Web personality of the year
12. Viral campaign of the year
13. Standards champion of the year (go Christian Heilmann)
14. Open source application of the year
15. Best redesign of the year
16. Infamy Award

[Found via thenetawards.com]

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