We know from many years of usability testing with financial services and insurance companies that getting customers or members to “go paperless” can represent real cost savings – not to mention the environmental impact of all that paper and printing. So, upon logging into my Citi credit card account, I was not surprised to [...]

The NYTimes has added a customization option to the homepage story “feed” box. It’s just one of a series of experimental new offerings that the Times has been rolling out. This one is surprising: I understood the “Most Popular” box to be one of the higher traffic driving elements on the site; odd [...]

Tony the Tiger. The Pillsbury Doughboy. Sonny for Coco Puffs. Trix the Rabbit. I might not remember what I did for Halloween last year, but I will always remember these product characters because they are imbedded into my subconscious. Is this just a coincidence? Am I a product of too much TV watching? Perhaps. But, it could also be that these characters were created in such a genius was as to stick in our minds – in a positive way. Who doesn’t like the Pillsbury Doughboy?

A recent article in the New York Times talked about how important video sites like YouTube were to upcoming elections. Apparently, Senator George Allen, a republican presidential hopeful was videotaped calling the videographer, a man of Indian-American descent, a “macaca� (a term I’ve never heard but apparently is an offensive racial slur). The tape became a hit on YouTube and then made the rounds on TV and newspapers. The article goes on to debate whether video sites like YouTube and Google Video will have positive or negative effects on future campaigns. After reading the article I went to YouTube to view it. But by now it was long buried in YouTube’s thousands of videos that are uploaded to the site every day.

Noting, with interest, the integration of the online and offline newsrooms at the NY Times