Very cool poster on the Importance of User Experience – ideal for team building, educating or evangelizing usability. The poster illustrates usability metrics illustrating the positive and/or negative impact of user experience execution. You can order the poster for $20 at Experience Dynamics and read about the creation of it here.

How would you like to use your BlackBerry or iPhone to board a plane next time? That may soon become a reality as Continental Airlines has started an electronic boarding pass pilot program. This was something I was just thinking about a few days ago but it looks like Continental Airlines is one step ahead.

Continental is the only carrier in the United States to begin testing the electronic passes, allowing those travelers to pass through security and board the plane without handling a piece of paper. Their boarding pass is an image of an encrypted bar code displayed on the phone’s screen, which can be scanned by gate agents and security personnel.

With the majority of travelers using self-service options already, they would no longer have to print out a pass or use a kiosk at the airport.

Thoughts on Interaction Design by Jon Kolko is now available for free in digital format. I bought the actual book a few months ago after reading the 5 star reviews it received on Amazon and can highly recommend it to anyone interested in Interaction Design.

Today I became a local ambassador for the Los Angeles area for UXnet (User Experience Network).

What is UXnet?
UXnet is a non-profit organization that focuses on connecting people, organizations, resources, and ideas to enable the growth and maturation of User Experience as a practice, a community, and eventually a discipline

What is a Local Ambassador?
A Local Ambassador is a UXnet volunteer who makes connections between people, resources and organizations related to user experience (UX) within a specific geographic locale, in this case, Los Angeles (although I’m going to try and focus on Orange County as well).

Luckily for me, the User Experience/Interaction Design community in Los Angeles is already booming and there are events happening all the time so it should make my job a little bit easier. I’m hoping I’ll be able to help grow and mature not only the User Experience discipline, but also strengthen the Southern California community.

I’ll admit, I enjoy a green tea frappuccino (without whip cream please) at Starbucks from time to time. But in reality, Starbucks is not selling me or you a drink. They are selling an experience. It’s no wonder they recently made headlines when they closed over 7,000 of it’s stores for more than 3 hours so employees could (re)learn how to make coffee.

Starbucks has established itself as a standard of excellence and it is the user experience that gets people to come back and overpay for a cup of coffee: the music playing in the background, item location, colors, process, scents, products and smiling baristas. What’s more, no matter which Starbucks you go to, there is a level of familiarity that makes one feel comfortable. So the next time someone asks how User Experience helps to sell products, just point to Starbucks.