Joanna’s website is set up in WordPress so that she can add pages and make changes herself. Image galleries and rotating header images are also easy to modify.

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For this site, I incorporated her existing logo to create a site that conveys peace, simplicity, and healing. Services included original graphic design, coding, and search engine optimization.

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In the case of spaghetti sauce, at least, we cannot always explain what we want. Especially when asked about our preferences, we are more likely to list what is currently known and popular than ask for something that hasn’t yet been done or isn’t widely available (even if that is what we would prefer).

How do you like your spaghetti sauce? Thin, spicy, chunky, traditional …

The point of the talk is variability — one product cannot meet the needs of all users. In the food industry that revelation ultimately led to the 500 kinds of sauce we now face at the supermarket. (See Barry Schwartz’s talk for more on choice overload.)

Gladwell’s talk was a good reminder to me to stray away from open-ended questions when conducting user research. A question like “What kind of features do you want in this system?” is only going to yield a list of features that are already well-established, even bad ones.

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One can imagine the studios are already hard at work for next year!

Continued… see the whole scary story on Mint.com.

The New York Times, in my opinion a leader in data visualization (both interactive and print), offers a nicely designed map that allows you to drill down by state into the details of whether the state is blue, red, or in between.

This state-by-state comparison, however, does little to show the real diversity underlying the single color applied to that state’s terrain. My home state of New Mexico, for example, may be blue-ish in the the above map, but it’s a state composed of very different voting communities (compare Santa Fe or Los Alamos to the rest of the state’s ranching communities and disadvantaged rural towns).

The Christian Science Monitor’s political map breaks out of the state-by-state mold and takes a look at just this sort of diversity. Patchwork Nation presents the nation’s voters in the context of their communities: Monied Burbs, Service Worker Centers, Military Bastions, Tractory Country, etc.

Focusing on the characteristics of each county in a state paints a much more detailed — and more complicated — picture of the American political landscape. Clearly it’s not quite so simple as red, blue, or in-between.

In UI terms, a lightbox draws the user’s attention to a dialog box, error message, or other design element in the middle of the screen by dimming the rest of the screen.

Yes, the lightbox has some benefits. It shows you an Important Message within the context of the page you were just looking at. It doesn’t get blocked by popup killers. And it looks super-cool, especially when used as a slideshow.

But lightboxes are starting to crop up everywhere. In my Yahoo mail (I hope the developer got paid a lot for that), in half the applications I interact with, even in my own website (OK, I put it there, but that was 2 years ago when it was very cool and cutting edge).

Is anyone else starting to suffer from lightbox fatigue?

(I love that she mentions ravelry.com, my favorite web community, as an example of a site built on open-source software!)