As someone who used to mockup magazine articles with completely unrelated, trolling pullquotes back in university, I can actually see why they exist on the web – I read the full text of a lot of articles, but 90% of those, I quickly scroll through before I do so. A lot of my friends won’t even read the whole article, or will start reading from the middle and stop soon after.

Given all that though, I don’t really see why you’d stick with the text-repetition paradigm, when you could just style a sentence or paragraph in a way that calls it out, but keeps it within the flow of the text.

…unless editors assume that people will skip over a pullquote when reading, and thus might miss something important. In which case, well… you’re spending time including text that you expect people not to read…? OK…

Well, it survived being acquired once already, so… we can hope, and dream.

I’ve been hoping we’d see an rdio+ out of pandora since they announced the purchase! Can’t wait, but in the meantime, your skin scratches my itch pretty well!

This is rad. If you could somehow magic up a fullscreen, big artwork player, like rdio had, that would be super rad.

I imagine it would also be a little trickier than what you’ve done so far. Would still be rad, though. I’ve been using spotify with the little album art thumbnail stretched out as far as it will go, but it just isn’t the same.

*Shit, probably deep in the minority in missing this. Just like with wanting a sensible play queue and abolishing 10,000 song collection limits. *

…miss you, rdio :.(

But whereas this kind of user-centered design focuses solely on a user accomplishing their own goals, conversion-centered design is focused towards having the user complete a single business goal.

This can seem like a huge shift, but the goal is essentially the same: getting the user what they need with the least friction possible.

Oh cool, I never realised that user needs and business goals were interchangeable like that. /s

That graph that implied all technology tends toward persuasion and manipulation was pretty damn creepy, too. I really thought that after “helping users take action” the internet was going in a more helpful “trying to understand needs well enough that less user action is required” direction. I feel like these differing viewpoints might be the source of the tension referred to in the headline…

Sweet, thanks! Just grabbed it and modded the URL replacement to point to Rowan’s wikipadia.xyz, and now I’m dreaming!

I’ve been using Firefox’s keyword search to quickly search Wikipedia (and imdb), and this just leveled that up. Keyword search instructions here

Oh, right. Not the only one by a long shot. I scrolled to the end, thought “$5/ user for a slack-connected version of pong? What?”.

For me, at least, it was only your comment that clarified things.

I’m either too old, or my office really isn’t cool enough.

I thought their selections of my top artists/ albums/ tracks was a bit off, given they all included stuff I hadn’t listened to in years.

Checked it against my last.fm scrobbles, and, sure enough, Spotify’s data was completely wrong. Seems pretty weird that a third-party app would be able to understand my listening data better than the application I’m actually using to listen to the music.

I’ve been calling people ‘people’ (in lieu of the word ‘users’) for a few years now. Hasn’t impeded my communication with coworkers at all.

It’s also still a mental battle not to say ‘users,’ but one that think is pretty valuable, since when I think ‘user’ I tend to imagine one of those blank facebook profile silhouettes, whereas when I think ‘people’ I tend to imagine a somewhat more realistic picture of someone who might happen to be using our software (but really they are probably distracted and doing something else).

I doubt everyone has this issue, but I find it a helpful brain hack.

I switched to Spotify recently, just a few weeks before this news (mostly because some smaller labels I like were clearly treating rdio licensing as an afterthought), and one of the features is I miss the most is rdio’s excellent queuing system.

I was ranting just last week to my friends about how completely insane and nonsensical Spotify’s queue/ next tracks system is, and that rdio shows exactly how simple and flexible it could be.

Alas, none of them had even noticed, and they are people that work in IT and UX. Which means Miner was sort of correct in assuming nobody would notice if they hadn’t done it… but not totally correct. I noticed.