Might social personalities not help in designing for engagement? I’ve long held that when it comes to designing for social interactions (site, app, game…), personality types are more useful than personas. Personas can be good communication vehicles for capturing and anchoring on user/customer interests, and they help to ground a…

UX design communities are filled with articles about UX. Why? Popping back into UX here for the first time in a long while, I’m struck by how the UX design community here still features a lot of articles addressing the question of What is UX, How to do UX, Why…

Rocketman Elon Musk zoomed onto stage at the recent All In conference a few days ago for an hour long interview. He was asked about his deal to acquire twitter. While I’m not so interested in the business machinations of his takeover offer, his thoughts on the spam bot issue…

Social Interaction Design (SxD) and information design Stock market action for the past weeks has been ferocious—bordering on catastrophic. At times catastrophically ferocious, times ferociously catastrophic. Uncertainty abounds, and analysts are searching for a bottom reliable enough to call a bottom — reliable enough to buy stocks at. The sell…

Perhaps because I am cancer, astrologically speaking, I am accustomed to zig and zag. One of my parental units remarked of me, when I was young, that I had a tendency to get to my destination by means of detours. That, if I encountered an obstacle, I tended to clamber…

Reading China’s Zero Covid Policy through with a bit of help from Foucault Any China watcher of late has had the head-scratching experience of following news out of Shanghai, where a strict-but-short two-phase lockdown of the city’s 25 million residents has mutated into a sometimes cruel and unusual, Kafkaesque trial…

The dilemmas and risks facing an impossible policy choice The zero covid policy of the Chinese central government has created dilemmas of its own. These policy dilemmas in turn generate risks. …

Covid as climate change dress rehearsal? From the very beginning of the Covid outbreak I thought perhaps it might serve us (all) as a dry run for climate change. A chance to test the systems. See how well we responded. Practice a bit of hardship, toughen up, and build some…

Are Chinese beginning to protest on social media? Watching western socials of the past week for news on the Covid outbreak in Shanghai, which is unfortunately one of the limited ways of getting information out of China, there have been increasing signs that Chinese are both more inclined to speak…