(Things worth mentioning that need only a single sentence.)

Annie Leonard tells us The Story of Stuff (about 20 minutes long).

The Adaptive Path crew offers up techniques for sketchboarding (especially interesting for me, as my 6-foot by 5-foot magnetic whiteboard will be showing up next week).

And finally, YouTube offers up an aggregate view of all those lofty promises from the campaign trail.

I know some interaction designers that will really hate this one, but it had to be done.

Redefining User-Centered Design, Part 1 is the first of a three-part article about the flaws of User-Centered Design, the merits of a couple of lesser-known approaches, and how I’ve adapted the whole mess into a process that is effective, efficient, and very repeatable.

Happy holidays, everyone!

At long last, it’s time to start talking about it.

In March 2008, I will proudly and happily be releasing my newest book, Designing the Moment: Web Interface Design Concepts in Action. This time around, instead of talking purely about principles and pointing to web applications that serve as great examples, as I did in Designing the Obvious, I’m aiming the microscope at my own work.

In Designing the Moment, I present over 30 think-out-loud style stories about how I’ve applied web design principles and concepts to real projects, with real clients. In each and every story, I discuss the concepts that helped me make design decisions as I went along, I show each version of the design as it progressed, admit to mistakes, give credit to other people, and generally show how the simple act of continually questioning designs is the key to consistently achieving good results.

The premise behind the title is that it doesn’t matter one tiny bit whether a feature or task flow is considered major, minor, or anything else. What matters is that each moment a user spends trying to understand something in your application and be productive carries with it the potential to either increase his confidence or destroy his trust. It’s not our job as web designers, then, to design screens. It’s to design moments.

In other words, these stories are about applying design principles to create good moments, one step at a time.

If you liked Designing the Obvious, I believe you’ll love Designing the Moment.

It’s available for pre-order right now, and I hope you’ll consider taking some of the little cash you have left over from the holidays to pick up a copy.

Providing the book is released early in enough in March, I’ll be talking about it at SxSW Interactive during a 20-minute solo session by the same name, followed by a book signing. (If it’s not available yet, I may just talk about it anyway, but I may only be able to sign copies of Designing the Obvious. One or both of them will be available at the conference bookstore.)

In the meantime, I need to go finish writing the dern thing. Cheers!

Google, in cooperation with UNICEF and OLPC, launched Our Stories yesterday. And while I think it’s a great idea, it’s also a wonderful example of the fact that web “experiences” often are little more than a reflection of the company that created them.

Our Stories should be an experience rich site. It should offer an engaging environment that compels users to explore and connect emotionally to the storytellers. But it doesn’t offer this at all. Instead, it offers what looks like any other Google design. It’s plain, minimalist, and it’s focused entirely around the information and not the experience.

This approach works well for many Google applications, but these applications are typically utilitarian in nature. They’re designed to enable you to get things done. Our Stories does not have this goal. It’s purpose is not to help you quickly find information, send an email, or create a document. It’s purpose is to connect you to the world around you. But the site’s design doesn’t encourage this connection at all.

Consider the Find a Story page, which should be the heart of the user experience. You choose a collection of stories to view from a cold, ugly dropdown menu, and then you’re shown a very Google-esque list of stories, complete with linked titles, story summaries, and meta information - in this case, a note about where the story was recorded.

Choose a story to view, and you see a simple white page with a video and the story summary.

If Google’s goal here was to create emotional connections, they should definitely have considered something other than the business-as-usual, sterile design work that has become Google’s signature. Granted, some of the site’s pages are geared towards showing people how to conduct interviews for the site, and those pages are probably best left alone, but the main attraction here is an environment of storytelling, not another Google search results system.

They had a good idea in using a Google map as the primary exploration device on the site, but they didn’t follow it through. The map is just sort of thrown onto the page beneath a long block of text, like an afterthought. How ’bout turning Our Stories into a Google Earth feature, flipping Satellite view on by default (so the environment is more real and therefore more compelling), and letting people really dig in and look around the world for stories? (Just one of a hundred things they could have done.)

Web experiences can’t always be simply a reflection of a company’s culture. Sometimes they need for a company to step up and coax it into something that reflects the message behind the experience.

Design is meant to communicate content. With the right design, you can always meet your goals much more effectively. If you want emotional connections, design something that encourages them. If you want people to take action, design to encourage action. Don’t let your usual design style get in the way of doing something great.

So many gift experiences these days involve buying something online and shipping it straight to the recipient, without ever touching it with your own hands or seeing with your own eyes what is being delivered.

So when I got an email this morning from the cool cats at Media Temple advertising a gift card for web hosting, I was pleasantly surprised to see this image:

What a fantastic way to let customers know what will be delivered! Not only do I feel more confident about the recipient’s experience, but because of the “little extra” MT put into the email, I feel much more inclined to make the purchase in the first place.

Once again, smart design results in increased customer loyalty.