Janine and I co-wrote an article for Smashing Magazine, in which we uncovered and analyzed the deceptively difficult process of buying bedsheets on three popular ecommerce sites. It just might send you walking over to your local department store in real life – out of exasperation! On real feet! Enjoy the article here.

Hey! Congratulations to our good friends (and clients) at AccuWeather on their coverage on Nightline (video here). Couldn’t have happened to a nicer bunch of people. AW really cares about the work they do and the quality of the product they produce in the various channels they serve. It’s not that often that you find a business that is as invested in “accuracy” as AccuWeather and we are proud to be working with them.

I was honored to have been invited to speak at EdUI 2009 down in Virginia a couple of months ago. They asked me to talk about the differences between “applications” and “websites” from the point of view of experience design. For anyone curious, here’s the video:

Nick Gould presents “What’s in a Name? Guidelines for Designing Applications vs. Websites” from EdUI Conference on Vimeo.

Did I mention that we redesigned the New York Post website? No? Ok – blog post on that coming soon. In the meantime, here’s a neat little interview with longtime Catalyst pal Paul Schrynemakers over at SPD.org about it. Enjoy!

More about video on demand to home devices. This time Blockbuster rentals via your Tivo box. All for just $2.99 per rental!

In light of the results of our Roku Video Player study – and the pricing model offered by Netflix – it’s hard to see the Blockbuster offering as competitive (although it does beat the $3.99 per rental through Amazon on Demand or through iTunes). Perhaps for the occasional movie watcher who doesn’t want to pay the monthly Netflix fee…

Interesting goings-on in this space. Will be fun to see how things unfold.