Summer is almost here, and in Chicago that means an endless series of excessively loud concerts and festivals. These events are so loud, in fact, that you can hear them thirty or forty floors off the ground. And who funds these wonderful events? Judging by the signage and advertising, it seems like corporate sponsors make […]

Against my better judgement, I went to Sears on Saturday to pick up a few random things that Amazon doesn’t carry. The store looked like a cheap flea market, with products stacked up all over the place, but that’s not what I’m writing about today. Instead, I want to talk about the excessive number of […]

When you’re shopping in a local store, it’s easy to find the unit price of virtually any item. Most stores print it right on the price tag, e.g. “$0.02 per square foot”. But when you’re shopping online, unit costs are much harder to locate. Sure, dedicated grocers like Peapod have this info, but other sites […]

Just as I was walking out the door of a museum on Saturday, a huge group of school children walked in. There had to be 50-60 of them, plus the inept chaperones. Since when do schools have field trips on the weekend? That mystery aside, I was very glad that I went to the museum […]

While passing through one of the Orange Line stations in downtown Chicago, I saw a billboard promoting the state of Montana. More specifically, the ad featured a striking mountain shot, a few words of text, and a web address. The last item caught my eye, with the URL visitmt.com. The web address is short, which […]

It’s common practice to show a confirmation message once a customer completes a task. But what about when they abandon the task? Normally, no separate message is needed: if nothing changed, there’s little to report. But I think there’s one important exception: starting and then cancelling a high-stakes task. What do I mean by high-stakes? […]

So I’m watching last week’s episode of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, and I get to a scene that looks like an obvious product placement. A character drives up in his shiny Mercedes, and the camera frames the front of the car right around the logo. However, the logo is gone: the familiar three-pointed star […]

Through pure luck, I recently discovered that one of our competitors is operating more than one website for essentially the same product of theirs. The positioning of the two websites is slightly different, but the product is the same. In fact, they even use a very similar name for the second “company”, which is little […]