Brilliant: A bra for those shirts that are a bit too low cut for the office.

The Natori Lace Cami Bra is offers the benefits of a dickey without the potential embarrassment involved in wearing a detachable turtleneck.

Want one for yourself? They’re available at Garnet Hill.

What is Brizzly?

Brizzly is a web-based Twitter client (with room for expansion) featuring in-line photos, videos, and maps, expanded links, groups, chat-like direct messages, multiple accounts, saved searches, and drafts.

How to get a Brizzly invite:

Leave a comment in this post with your email address and I’ll send one to you. Or, just search Twitter for Brizzly & you’ll see links with invite codes (watch out for spam!).

The Good

• You’ve got tweets: Indicators tell me when I have new @ and Direct Messages (DMs). I don’t have to refresh the screen because Brizzly does that by itself. Once the messsages are viewed the indicator turns off.
  
• Chat-style direct messages: Instead of trying to remember who said what last, direct messages are displayed in a chat-style format. Planning lunch during a conference call has never been easier.
  
• Expanded links: No more worries about whether I’m clicking on a real link or the latest virus/worm!
  
• Image, Video and Map Viewing: On one hand, I don’t have to click through to see an image on Twitpic, a Google map, or a YouTube video. On the other hand, I shudder to imagine what fun spammers would have with the feature. Oh, nudity.
  
• Drafts: Sometimes you have a great idea, announcement or question at 1am. Or you wrote something that’s too long and you just don’t feel like trimming it. Save it to your drafts for a later date:
  
• Handles multiple accounts: I Tweet for myself, my frozen food site (Heat Eat Review), and BayCHI. I appreciate having a single web-based interface for all of them.
  
• Saved Search: One of my favorite features of Tweetie (and now Brizzly) is saved search. The feature is excellent for conference attendees, people missing conferences, and folks who need to search for mispellings of a name.
  

The Bad

• Delete is Broken. Brizzly (like every other Twitter client out there) pretends that the delete function actually functions. It doesn’t work and it drives me crazy.
• How many characters are left? The replies functionality is lovely (reply right from your friend’s tweet!), but the part that tells me how many characters I have left is slightly maddening. What does ‘34 with links’ (as seen below) mean? Sometimes it works, but usually I go over my character limit, have to rewrite the tweet, then need to log in to the Twitter web interface and delete the old, incomplete tweet.
  
• Multiple accounts are separate…but groups are forever. The reason I lump Brizzly into the consumer category is that unlike Hootsuite and Tweetdeck, it can’t show me multiple accounts at one time. However, it does make me share my groups from one account to another. That’s right, no matter how many Twitter accounts I have, I only get 5 Brizzly groups (each with up to 50 people). Hey, it’s free.
• Group limitations: My groups are incomplete because adding folks to groups isn’t integrated into the timeline or user information. To add someone to a group, I first have to open the group, then type in names or I have to open a user’s profile and click the ‘Add to group’ button. I’d like to do this straight from my timeline, and I’d like my timeline to display the groups my users are a part of, that way I can say to myself ‘Hey, why isn’t Kate in my Usability group?’ and fix it right away. I’m interested in seeing how Twitter will implement groups.

The Interesting

• Loads new items on scroll-down: As soon as I scroll into the lowest portion of the page, Brizzly loads the next oldest set of Tweets. This feature’s been around for quite awhile Also, the loading is fast enough that it took me a couple tries to capture this screenshot.
  
• Trends and News: Brizzly lets you define (and submit your definition for) the Trends and News content on the sidebar. The trends come from from Lets Be Trends, an API developed by the folks at ThingLabs.
  

• Image Management: I just want one place to keep my pictures. I like that I can upload them (and view my entire history!) with Brizzly, but I’m tired of using a bunch of different services depending on the Twitter client.
• Adorableness! Yes, the folks who made Brizzly also made Plinky and the sites are barely on this side of twee. I’m not yet tired of the little bear in a bird suit.
• Quiet down folks: I’m attending Interaction ‘10 next year, but I won’t be at SXSW. And while I like the live reporting from great panels, I don’t need the SXSW after-party play-by-plays. Fortunately, I can mute the most talkative conference attendees as needed.

Tell me about it.

• Have you tried Brizzly?
• Are you game for a browser-based Twitter client?
• What features is Brizzly missing?
• Are there any features you’d like to see removed?
• Do you need a Brizzly invite?

I pay a lot of attention to car interiors, but didn’t start photographing them until I got into this Volvo.

The light on the AC switch turns off when the AC is on.

The light on the rec switch (recycled air) turns on when the recycled air option is on.

Sweden is messing with us.

Want more car button fun? Matthew Oliphant posted an amusing car button quiz on Flickr.

The newest ads from Courtyard Marriott show business travelers using large touchscreens to get weather information for the day. Known as the GoBoard, these touchscreens are already installed at over 60 Courtyard by Marriott hotels.

Now here’s the part where I sound like an old fogey: do designers ever think about the folks who have to clean these things? On small touchscreen interfaces this isn’t so much of an issue. Sure, between fingerprints and ear sweat (I know, it is gross – but tell me it doesn’t happen to you), my iPhone gets pretty disgusting. But the phone is relatively easy to clean: I keep it covered with a screen protector and I can just wipe it off with a soft cloth.

Can you imagine how grimy a 51″ touchscreen device would get in a hotel? Would you want to touch that thing? How would you feel about walking up to a surface that showed the traces of every previous visitor?

At what point does a touchscreen device go from fun, enjoyable, and useful to pain in the ass?

Stopgaps and alternatives to the touchscreen exist:

• Fingerprint-resistant coating: The market is still waiting for a truly fingerprint-resistant coating that doesn’t interfere with the interface. The minute I see one I’ll spray it on every hard surface in my house. Provided the product doesn’t destroy the Earth.
• Gestural interfaces: The folks at Kicker Studio developed an alternative way to interact with the screen, but it gives control to a single user rather than the multiple users envisioned by Courtyard Marriott.
  
• Sanitary covers. Much like the Hygolet toilet seat covers at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, Courtyard Marriott’s touchscreen could feature a sanitary coating that refreshes for each user.
  
• GoBoard Attendant: In the same vein as a bathroom attendant, the GoBoard attendant would set up shop near the device, either cleaning the screen after each use or offering customers a squirt of Purell.

Now try not to think too much about airport kiosks.

Walker gliders are $20 a pair. A bag of tennis balls will set you back slightly less than a buck a ball if you buy them on Amazon.

You could try meeting in the middle and pay $32.00 (yikes) for tennis balls designed for use with walkers. Or you could buy walker attachments that hold tennis balls.

But none of those options seems so right as the cheapest, most common, most accessible solution.

Makeshifting wins here. Where else does it survive?

Sort of.

This photo of a USA Today was taken on Thursday, September 24, 2009 – but the newspaper is dated Monday, September 21, 2009. Thanks to that date I know better than to buy this paper. The date isn’t there to tell me what day it is (though I admit that I’ve used a newspaper to figure out the date), it is there to tell me what day that document was published.

But for some reason, folks working on the web decided that showing today’s date (rather than the publication date) was the ideal way to indicate fresh content:

Displaying the day’s date on a website doesn’t guarantee the content is fresh. All it means is that you’ve got a bit of PHP or Javascript whiling away the time.

Are your users going to your site to see what day it is? No. Unless you’ve developed a dashboard (see iGoogle and My Yahoo) they’re going to your site to get the freshest information, whether its about User Experience Design or Hollywood gossip. If your front page isn’t updated on a daily basis, consider including the content’s publication date (or time) next to the headline:

What are some other ways designers can accurately display the publication date for content? Does it mean putting the date next to every article on a page or just stopping the over-reliance on javascript date snippets?

The northernmost end of the train tells cyclists how many bike cars are available. While I stood taking this picture, a guy with a bike stopped and asked me if I knew how many bike cars were on the train. I said “Two” and gestured toward the sign.

His eyes lit briefly, then he shook his head and said “I’ve never noticed those.”

Turns out a tomato is Italian food. The canned tomatoes of all varieties, from whole to petite diced, were shelved alongside pre-made pasta sauces.

At first I felt sort of silly. “Of course!” I thought, tomatoes are a natural pairing for the pastas in that aisle. But later on I realized that my first inclination had been correct. I’d looked for tomatoes by a categorization that considered the product’s definition, not its use. Why? Because no other non-prepared fruit or vegetable in the store was categorized by use.

The same things happens when websites are designed around categories that limit interpretation.

How to fix this in both supermarkets and websites?

Make categories that follow a common convention. On Safeway.com this means grouping all items that fall into a form factor:

Use card sorting tools. Feeling too familiar with your products? Do a card sort to group items. One major issue to watch out for: keyword bias. Jakob Nielsen has a lengthy (but useful) Alertbox on doing so.

Observe people. Look at what people are buying and how they buy it. Baking items are included together because they’re all used together, and that grouping can prompt a shopper to pick up another item (like chocolate chips) when really he just needed more flour.

Gather data. Then use it. On the Internet we have have an easy time gathering data, but often spend very little time putting that data to use. Take a look at your on-site search queries; they’re a huge clue into what people can’t find on your website. At a physical store it means that your employees report what questions customers asked. Sure, it can be a time consuming effort, but the rewards are likely enormous. Three years later, Avinash Kaushik’s advice on on-site search analysis still holds true. Two days after I posted this, A List Apart published Avinash Kaushik’s most recent advice on on-site search analytics.

Do the best with what you have. On the Internet, the Safeway folks can include as many items as they want in the canned foods section. In a supermarket there are physical limitations to the number of items you can include on an aisle. Thus, if you’re dealing with an usual or makeshifted category structure, give people help. Aisle signs are a good start.

“I don’t mind fantasies, but shouldn’t it be a female one?”

I started working in the ad industry a year and a half ago. Since then I’ve paid a lot more attention to the commercials, especially ones that seem slightly off. This one from Bounce struck me as a little wrong the first time I saw it. The second time I watched the ad (while viewing Project Runway online at Lifetime) I realized what was wrong: the ad showed a t-shirt being ironed and folded.

Who irons t-shirts, then folds them?

Maybe there’s an alternate reality out there I know nothing about. But more likely the ad wasn’t checked by someone to say ‘Okay, do these chores actually make sense?’.

That’s the beauty of working in an interdisciplinary team; you always have someone with a different point of view, someone who knows that ironing a button-down shirt would be a much more realistic choice. Ads don’t have to tell the truth to be believable. Does anyone really think there are currently 4 people stuck in an elevator, a la the Sprint ads? Probably not. But do the Sprint ads make some sense? Yes, because they speak to real things in our lives, like working on the final-final-final-revised-final copy of a document.

I spent last weekend in the Sierras, lounging on boulders set in the Stanislaus River and cooking on this remarkably complicated stove.

The far right buttons are ‘off’ and turning on the stove simply requires the touch of another button…if that button works. While scrambling eggs, it is nice to melt the butter quickly then turn down the heat for cooking the eggs (really great scrambled egga can easily take upwards of ten minutes), but with this old stove includes non-working buttons. Which means that those 10 minute eggs actually take 20 when you realize they’ve stopped cooking.

(The dial is for the oven.)