People are fond of saying, “Don’t fix what isn’t broken.” However, in the world of usability, oftentimes people don’t know that some things are inherently broken. Take the measuring cup, for example. If you ask people what’s wrong with it, they’ll give you answers such as, “It’s slippery” or “the handle gets hot easily” — but rarely will they point this out:

It’s actually hard to measure accurately without pouring a bit, bending down to look, pouring some more, bending down again

Enter Oxo. They didn’t reinvent a completely new measuring cup — they simply saw an issue and decided to fix it by improving upon the original design.

Oxo measuring cup

It’s simple, and it solves a real problem — even though most people wouldn’t have noticed that it’s a problem to begin with. That’s what lies at the heart of user experience.

Check out this blog for more information on Oxo’s measuring cup (even includes a video clip of the design process).

Election Day is over, a new president has been chosen, and the country is breathing a sigh of relief. The campaign drama has ended, and a new drama will begin.

Some of the best pictures of the new president-elect can be found at the Big Picture, one of the best sites (in my opinion). Great pictures like the one below find their way to its pages.

What a technology team Obama has, bringing the Obama campaign to the iPhone:

Download Obama ‘08: The Official Application

Obama ‘08 is your official, comprehensive connection to the heart of Barack Obama and Joe Biden’s campaign, giving you the tools you need to make an impact and stay in the know.

Making a difference takes only moments using the Call a Friend feature. Want to do more? Find your local Obama for America HQ or look up local campaign events.

You’ll have instant access to Barack’s positions on important issues, as well as local and national campaign news as it happens. Photos and videos from the campaign trail are all here, too.

Talk about trying to get in touch with the political (technological) mavens and connectors. Obama’s team has demonstrated they move fast, and they move well.

I’ve written previously about mobile texting as a way to engage constituents in the issues organizations care about, and even mobile texting as a new revenue driver. Connection Cafe even profiled the cell phone as the killer app for Election ‘08.

What’s fascinating about the Obama iPhone application is that an organization (Obama’s campaign, in this case) isn’t restricted to just one engagement channel with their constituents, namely texting. Texting, after all, is fairly limited, not terribly empowering, and doesn’t do a whole lot more than tell you people are engaged and interested. Tapping the power of the iPhone on the other hand places an entire application at the fingertips of a mobile user who’s a technological savant, at least savvy enough to purchase an iPhone. Chances are you put such a cool application at the fingertips of such a person and they’re going to use it. Functionality in the Obama iPhone application includes:

• Call Friends: A great volunteering tool that lets you make a difference any time you want by talking to people you already know. Your contacts are prioritized by key battleground states, and you can make calls and organize results all in one place.
• Call Stats: See nationwide Obama ‘08 Call Friends totals and find out how your call totals compare to leading callers.
• Get Involved: Do more. Find and contact your local Obama for America HQ.
• Receive Updates: Receive the latest news and announcements via text messages or email.
• News: Browse complete coverage of national and local campaign news.
• Local Events: Find local events, share by email and get maps and directions.
• Media: Browse videos and photos from the campaign
• Issues: Get clear facts about Barack Obama and Joe Biden’s plan for essential issues facing Americans.

Talk about wow. Maybe non-profits and organizations can start hiring some iPhone developers to do this for them. On top of that, it looks cool.

This just in, the House is limiting constituent email because the huge crush of email (due to the interest generated by the economic bailout legislation) is causing systems to go down. Here’s the error message constituents will get when they send their email to a House member:

“The House of Representatives is currently experiencing an extraordinarily high amount of e-mail traffic. The Write Your Representative function is therefore intermittently available. While we realize communicating to your Members of Congress is critical, we suggest attempting to do so at a later time, when demand is not so high. System engineers are working to resolve this issue and we appreciate your patience.”

What a fascinating scenario. The power of a shifting technology put into the hands of interested citizens is a wonderful thing to watch.

Our team’s split between the two offices in Austin, TX and good ol’ Berkeley, CA. The places couldn’t be more different. Texas and California: ’nuff said. But we’re on the same team and try really hard to behave like one: passing ideas to one another, dropping by one another’s virtual cubes to see what’s up, IM’ing, sharing prototypes and mockups, and everything else under the sun.

With the advent of Web 2.0, the big thing is social networking. It’s also sharing information. And it’s also sharing work not as a finished product, but work that’s in the process of getting there. Our team uses a bunch of tools. Some of them have been helpful, and some not. Some have been adopted with a bit more fervor than others, and thought it’d be good to write them down.

• 37signal’s Basecamp is just plain cool. Messaging, commenting, and tracking conversations so we don’t have to search through email. Posting images, screenshots, and mockups. We don’t use it as a project management tool, although I think the recent feature of adding files and comments to the to-do’s was brilliant. But we really like the fact that our conversations, ideas, comments, screens, and everything in between has a historical record online.
• Skitch is self-described “fast and fun image sharing!” It’s what we use for our virtual whiteboarding and sketching so different product stakeholders and team members can be in the conversation together, commenting on different screens they might see, having the designer revise on the fly, and then posting inline on the fly. It’s cool, it’s free, and the easy drag click and one-button upload takes care of so many in-between steps that it’s a plain joy to use. It’s Mac-only too, but not a problem. I think I was sold after reading (and watching) tap tap tap’s design session.
• We recently started using Yammer. We’re into daily status reports so we know what we’re working on and stuff like that, but it’s tough to capture a day’s events (the previous or the current day) in a single bullet point email. Yammer is enterprise Twitter, and it’s a little like peeking over into someone’s cubicle. You can just as easily walk by if you’re not interested (but at least you know they’re there), or you can see what they’re working on and say, “Hey, that’s cool. I want in on what you’re doing.”
• Fast prototyping’s done with Balsamiq’s Mockups. It’s better than OmniGraffle, InDesign, Photoshop, Visio, Illustrator and a whole bunch of other things I’ve tried. Don’t get me wrong. I think those other programs are awesome. And when it comes to working on the visual design of a screen and doing a hi-fidelity pretty pictures UI, I still wouldn’t trade anything for Photoshop (I’m really psyched about CS4). But in that step after requirements, after whiteboard sketching, and in trying to quickly communicate what the Product Manager and I have in our mind’s eye to other stakeholders and developers, Mockups is a great tool. There’s knocks against it that it doesn’t give room for innovation and creativity because you’re using a palette of already made UI elements. On the other hand, understanding where a new interaction can be introduced comes when the designer is trying to figure things out at a UI elements level, past the level of abstraction and theory.

There’s more, of course. But at the risk of overloading and overwriting, this was a foray into some of the new technology we’re playing with, trying out, and have incorporated into our workflow as a design team.

You can watch the Force.com keynote presentation online.  Pretty good stuff.

Abe and I went to Salesforce.com’s Tour de Force in Santa Clara yesterday.  It was an extravagant affair.  Nice Hyatt Regency accommodations and conference rooms, refreshments throughout the day, deli lunch, and plenty of tech folks filling out the rooms and halls.  We walked away with a couple “cook books”, a free Force.com shirt, and hoping we won the iPhone contest.

Really interesting and compelling stuff.  Benioff gave the keynote (which was 2 hours), and preached the platform-as-a-service model.  Why spend money, time, and stress on infrastructure?  All that overhead investment causes good products to take an extra couple years to get out of the gate.  Anyway, I had already drunk the kool-aid a while ago, so he was preaching to the choir as far as I was concerned.

He gave his version of web history: Web 1.0 gave users access to things they wanted.  Think eBay, Amazon, and other retailers.  Web 2.0 gave users the ability to publish their own content.  And Web 3.0, he suggested, gives users the ability to develop their own products, leaving all that infrastructure investment to the folks who’ve already done the hard work.  Hence: Force.com.

Got some more thoughts about Force.com and VisualForce in particular, seeing as how we’re a design team after all.  More on that later.

Talk about an ideal web 2.0 mashup for our clients and the constituents they serve: OpenCongress.  From their About page:

OpenCongress brings together official government information with news and blog coverage to give you the real story behind what’s happening in Congress.

The site aggregates bill information, senators and representatives, vote tracking history, and what’s happening in the news and blogosphere.  In essence, it aggregates all the info made available from government sources and pairs that up wiht relevant news and blogs.  They aggregate using GovTrack.us, Google News, Google Blog Search, and Technorati.  Very nice site, rich in functionality, easy UI and organization to get the information that interests you and all related information easily.  Plus, you can customize and save off your searches, or pull an RSS feed based on your own defined criteria.

As a civic-minded constituent and voter, OpenCongress is an invaluable resource.  Looking to the needs of the non-profit organizations we serve: imagine crafting an RSS feed for a particular issue or legislator, and importing that into a webpage.  All an org needs to do is write their own position on the issue, link this to a campaign (e.g. take action, write a letter, or donate now), and then populate the rest of the page via RSS import with good content that’s already been aggregated from OpenCongress.  Why do extra work when other great applications do it for you?

The Pew Internet & American Life Project recently wrote on the 2008 Election:

A record-breaking 46% of Americans have used the internet, email or cell phone text messaging to get news about the campaign, share their views and mobilize others. And Barack Obama’s backers have an edge in the online political environment.

Furthermore, three online activities have become especially prominent as the presidential primary campaigns have progressed: First, 35% of Americans say they have watched online political videos–a figure that nearly triples the reading the Pew Internet Project got in the 2004 race.

Second, 10% say they have used social networking sites such as Facebook or MySpace to gather information or become involved. This is particularly popular with younger voters: Two-thirds of internet users under the age of 30 have a social networking profile, and half of these use social networking sites to get or share information about politics or the campaigns.

Third, 6% of Americans have made political contributions online, compared with 2% who did that during the entire 2004 campaign.

One thing that keeps making me think, “that’s neato,” is how the internet continues to grow as a vehicle for people to get their message out, to mobilize fellow advocates, and inform people hungry for information.

Virgin Mobile’s 20,000+ respondents texted in via mobile phone to participate in an election issues poll.  Interesting to note that 72% of their respondents were under the age of 34.

Pretty hot slice of the election population, which both parties are going to need come November.  And, perhaps more importantly, suggest to our non-profit sector that creating advocacy campaigns which incorporate mobile phone text messaging might be another way of interfacing with an increasingly tech-savvy Gen-Y demographic.  Think Twitter for info updates, the previous post about mobile giving, or any number of participatory engagements (e.g. polling, messaging, telling friends).