I haven’t posted in a long while. Home ownership has caught up with me. New fridge. New kitchen floor. New front steps. New patio. New retaining wall. Whew. I’m not sure why we just didn’t get a condo in the first place (oh yea…still waiting for someone to build condos designed for families).

On the plus side, home repair is always an excuse to get some new tools from Menards. As usual, I needed a utility knife and couldn’t find one of the dozen or so I’ve purchased in the past so went to get a new one. I came across this knife. It’s amazing. Well, ‘amazing’ for a utility knife. See that yellow button? Blade dull? Push the button, yank the blade. See the black lever on the bottom? Squeeze it and a new blade magically appears!

Since college, my utility knife experience has mainly consisted of those metal things that you have to unscrew and then the guts fall out and you fumble to put it back together with the new blade and screw it back on, so you get pissed, and don’t change the blade as often as you should, and then the dull blade messes up your work, and then you get even more pissed… This knife solves all of that.

Nice to see someone paying attention to the little things we all hate but never get around to fixing ourselves.

Alltrade 150003 Auto-Loading Squeeze Utility Knife  @ Amazon

If you’ve spent any time near the DDR, or seen Good Bye, Lenin, you’ll know the odd, cheap, kitschy feel that’s both comforting and some how very, very wrong.

We’ve been looking for the best way to get our two kids around as a family on our bikes. We have a bike trailer. And that works. OK. But really hard to get two kids squeezed in and then the kid is still way back there getting mud kicked in his face the whole time.

We could get a bike seat for him, but I never trusted those things since my brother and I had some ‘iffy’ experiences with those as kids.

And…that’s about it. Not many other options. In Europe, however, they’re decades ahead of us when it comes to getting around on bikes.

A Danish company, Winther, has come up with he ultimate kid transporter. The Kangaroo:

Their website also features a variety of other clever kid transporters. Another favorite of mine is the ‘Mini Ben Hur’.

According to an article in Reuters, a Dutch scientist found that half of all product returns are because customers can’t figure out how to use them. The study also revealed some other interesting information, such as the fact that consumers in the US will struggle for around 20 minutes before giving up on a product. The study also found that most of the problems occured at the beginning of the design process in product definition.

Maybe it’s time to start charging more for our services!

In his most recent post, Scott talks about his experience with a workshop at the eTech conference called “Creating Passionate Users,” given by Kathy Sierra. This workshop, he says, is very hard to summarize. But some of the salient points he picks out have broadened my perspective of user experience.

For example, Sierra talked about the idea that “users want to kick ass” at something. They want to feel like they are continually learning and gaining expertise. This is (part of) what creates passionate users.

This reminds me of the conversation I had with Karl Fast last Saturday at the IA/UX Meetup. He was talking about how his research right now is around how the actual interactions people have with systems can affect their cognition and learning of the knowledge domain. To me, designing a user experience that ellicits passion seems like a *very* effective way of improving the stickiness of learning. When people are excited about things, they think about them and keep them fresh in their memory.

I’m not sure what actual bearing this will have on the kind of work that I typically do, but this will definitely be floating around my mind for quite a while. I imagine that it may inspire an added BANG! factor somewhere down the line for some otherwise uninspiring campaign site… We’ll see!

(I nearly forgot to mention… “Creating Passionate Users” will be a book sometime in 2006… look for it!)

The latest “why didn’t I think of that” product idea is the Powersquid, a power bar/surge protector:

And, at $50 a pop, you know they’re making a nice profit as well.

Also worth mentioning: The 360 degree rotating electrical outlet.

(first post, great site! btw)

Just wanted to bring this to the attention of all the designers out there… from the ISDA chapter.

Don E. Harley Associates presents:

Al Franken is coming home to Minnesota. Looks like Norm might have an opponent in ’08.

Arianna Huffington appears to be forming a blog posse.

PacifierOnline is a new modern children’s store in Minneapolis. Nicely priced kids furniture alongside overpriced kids clothing.

Smoking Marijuana may be less damaging than email overload.

The Living Green Expo is this weekend.

Some more additions to my list of ‘color picker’ tools: Steel Dolphin’s Color Scheme, Well Styled Color Scheme, Behr’s Paint Color Chooser, IDEO’s 5k color visualizer, Infohound’s Color Schemer, ColorSchemer.com.

The Typophile Forums will be shut down for a week for their long overdue upgrade to a new forum system. Re-launching 05/05/05.

Here’s a few simply great products I’ve discovered over these past winter months….

Venta Humidifier

The Venta Airwasher is a good humidifier. And, in the world of humidifiers ‘good’ is great. If you live in MN, you know you need one of these things to avoid your skin turning into a cracked, dry, itchy landscape. The typical offerings are the evaporative ones that require constant filter changing or the heat ones that require a constant scraping of the mineral deposits off the element. Either way, they’re a pain, and we typically would just buy a new one each year rather than attempt at rehabbing the one from the previous season.

The Venta system is different. It’s a simple box with a fan at the top. Inside is a large, plastic, rotating drum. You add a few drops of their additive to the water, fill it up and turn it on. Every two weeks you dump out the old water and put in some news. At the end of the season, give it a quick hosing and you’re set for next year. No filters. No crusty deposits. The only drawback is that it ain’t cheap (we paid $300), but, it’s as low-maintenance as you can get and has a 10-year warranty. Humidifier season is over, so perhaps you can find a deal.

The Clip-n-seal

The clip-n-seal system consists of two pieces of plastic. A rod and a clip that goes over the rod. It does one thing and it does it amazingly well…it seals bags. Chip bags, freezer bags, cereal bags, diaper bags, anything. We bought a few dozen and I’m still finding uses for them. My 3-year old also finds them to be a great toy.

Posterhanger

I haven’t actually used the Posterhanger yet, as I’ve just discovered it. However, it’s another one of those so-simple-it-has-to-be-good products. We actually purchased some nice art posters on our last vacation to portland. At $20 a pop, they are nice, but not *that* nice in terms of value. Unfortunately, the options for hanging a poster are few. You can get the cheap Target or Ikea frame (which never does the poster any justice), you can tape it up (really, only an option if you live in a dorm), or you can find a really nice large frame (nice, but hardly worth it for a $20 poster). In the end, I ended up building my own frame, but had I discovered this earlier, this would have been the solution.