Usability week ending January 9th

Friday, 7th January, 8:15 AM
The new Mac App Store shows human centered DRM -- your identity as key to generous rights: http://j.mp/geoDEN #drm

Thursday, 6th January, 6:30 PM
Everyone is a designer. Design is a fundamental part of everything. Keep this in mind throughout your project: http://j.mp/i1ivbf #ddd

Thursday, 6th January, 9:12 AM
Software Updates, System Update 10.6.6, Restart, New App Store icon in Dock, Twitter, Free ... Twitter icon in dock, Tweet!

Wednesday, 5th January, 11:18 AM
@kiwi_app i'll buy when you can. cheers.

Wednesday, 5th January, 10:41 AM
@kiwi_app where or how do you set your bit.ly api key to use with j.mp/bit.ly?

Wednesday, 5th January, 7:05 AM
Progressive signup -- as the user uses our product, we gently prod them to give us more info: http://j.mp/dENcnI #ux #ia

Tuesday, 4th January, 4:17 PM
The anatomy of a perfect landing page: http://j.mp/fIheah #ia #webdesign #ux

Monday, 3rd January, 5:21 PM
Essential and desirable skills you should look for in your UX designer: http://j.mp/dV4YKc #ia #ux

via twitter.com/terretta

This is how to do consumer-friendly DRM

These books are DRM protected, but people are buying them.  As a consumer with money to spend, you have several devices, but instead of fragmenting your ebook collection, you're free to use the device you prefer.  So far so good.

Aside from the devices, people want to be able to loan or share ebooks they way they can hardbacks.  Amazon is addressing that use case too:

Later this year, we will be introducing lending for Kindle, a new feature that lets you loan your Kindle books to other Kindle device or Kindle app users. Each book can be lent once for a loan period of 14-days and the lender cannot read the book during the loan period. 

Kindle is approaching frictionlessness.  If your product's DRM doesn't take away hundreds of years of comfortable use cases, but in fact adds something to the value proposition ("fit all my books in my pocket"), consumers are more than happy to adopt it.

Hollywood, paying attention?

Why the Apple iPad has no Java or Flash

Apple iPad is the first complete, general purpose, computer DRM platform and all people complain about is plugins. Music DRM went away because it was stupid. Idiot users pirate everything not bolted down and you end up with Bluray, Xbox, Playstation, Kindle, iPhone and now the Apple iPad. There has never been more DRM and people think they are winning. No, because Internet piracy and hardware piracy has given birth to yet another locked down platform. Because companies need to make money and do what is required.

The iPad exists because you wanted it. Blame yourself if you don't like it. Personally, I might buy one for my mom. Because it's probably a great piece of web surfing, picture browsing, hardware. And OMG do I need one of those.

via labs.teppefall.com

At first that read like a rant, but Jan ended up wanting one for his mom.

We've been saying this for a decade: if you make music and video easy enough, users will pay for it. Pirating is hard, but pirating is because users want to consume media on their terms: when they want, and on the device they want.

Users' sense of ownership was formed by physical things. Buy a book, share a book, get the book back. Copy a CD you play on the stereo to a cassette you pop in the car. Excessive restriction fosters circumvention so people can use the media they consider theirs. Follow iTunes' lead to work with users. Let them share in the home, and have 5 copies on 5 devices. Maybe even give them a way to loan or share with a few friends. The iPad itself is sharable, like a comic book or an LP.

Make life easy enough, and users don't actually care about the DRM. They just want to watch and listen their way.