Rob Larsen

Designing the Moment: Web Interface Design Concepts in Action I like Hoekman's books. They remind me of really good web writing, in that they're efficiently written, but still full of real examples and strong insights for immediate (and beneficial) takeaway. Personally, I've implemented a couple of his suggestions within days of reading certain chapters and have filed away others for future reference. It's worth mentioning, I'm a relatively good fit with him philosophically, so your mileage may vary on the action items, but no matter what your approach is to web design, both this and Designing the Obvious are worthwhile reads.

" I want to know if it's possible to use my Treo 700p in England.

There's a lot of information about this subject on your site, but it's all defined in phone jargon, not based on the actual device I have. I know that you guys internally think about dual band and quad band and all that crap, but customers think about "my phone." I want to know what MY PHONE can do without learning the specialized taxonomy of cell phones and my phone's place in that taxonomy. You know what phone I have from my account, why can't I get information on topics like this tailored to my phone?"

Seriously, I browsed their site for 20 minutes and I realized I need to instantly become a subject matter expert on cell phones before I could confidently understand whether or not my phone would work in England. There's absolutely no information tailored to me or to my device and there's no way to cross reference the information about bands and all that crap with the actual device I have. At the very minimum, I'd love to see something like this:

• Q: What City/Country Are You Traveling To
• Q: What device do you use?
• A: Your phone can/cannot be used in City/Country. You will be charged $x.xx per minute. Please call XXX-XXX-XXXX to start your plan

What I'd really like to see is a link from my account- "traveling internationally?" Which would lead me to the City/Country question and then right to the answer with a link to activate my plan. They have all the information about me from my account, I should be able to just enter my City/Country and go.

So slow, this year.

Ambient Findability: A fascinating read. One of my favorite parts of it is that he name checks people like William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, a lot. I think he tosses in a Neal Stephenson reference as well. That's pretty cool.

As for the book itself, it's really thought-provoking. As a whole it's great, but page by page it's almost too rich to keep up with. I'm planning on going through and looking through the footnotes for links as I was repeatedly intrigued by quoted articles and never had the time to fully explore them. There's a lot of great practical insight here and a lot of wonderful speculation on the shape of things to come. Well worth it if you make the Internet your job.