User Experience

Katie Geminder , MySpace 's SVP of User Experience and Design who was brought on board last summer , is leaving the company at the end of the week. Her departure doesn't come as a big surprise ? Geminder was invited to join the company by recently ousted CEO Owen Van Natta , who had previously worked with her at Amazon and Facebook. While at MySpace Geminder has been reporting to Chief Product Officer Jason Hirschhorn (who was promoted to co-President after Van Natta's firing)

No khakis allowed. That's the rule in the Adams Morgan office of Huge, the Brooklyn-based digital strategy and branding agency that is growing faster in Washington than any of its other seven offices in the United States, the United Kingdom and Brazil. "We want to maintain our culture of creative expression and the agency mind-set of jeans ... not buttoned-up suits and khakis," Managing Director Kate Watts said. "We want to make sure we're maintaining who we are in a city that might be a little less funky ... We're not...

No khakis allowed. That's the rule in the Adams Morgan office of Huge, the Brooklyn-based digital strategy and branding agency that is growing faster in Washington than any of its other seven offices in the United States, the United Kingdom and Brazil. "We want to maintain our culture of creative expression and the agency mind-set of jeans ... not buttoned-up suits and khakis," Managing Director Kate Watts said. "We want to make sure we're maintaining who we are in a city that might be a little less funky ... We're not...

Forget the death of the PC: BlackBerry chief executive Thorsten Heins thinks tablets are on their way out as users shift to doing more through their smartphones. In comments Monday at a Milken Institute conference, Heins said smartphones will become users' main source of computing power in the next five years. People will simply plug whatever display, keyboard or other accessory they need to do their work into a smartphone. For many workers, a smartphone will be the only device they need, he said.

Forget the death of the PC: BlackBerry chief executive Thorsten Heins thinks tablets are on their way out as users shift to doing more through their smartphones. In comments Monday at a Milken Institute conference, Heins said smartphones will become users' main source of computing power in the next five years. People will simply plug whatever display, keyboard or other accessory they need to do their work into a smartphone. For many workers, a smartphone will be the only device they need, he said.

Federal investigators are probing allegations that Carrier IQ software found on about 150 million cellphones tracked user activity and sent the information to cellphone companies without informing consumers, according to government officials. Executives from Carrier IQ traveled to Washington on Tuesday and met with officials at the Federal Trade Commission , which is responsible for protecting consumers and enforcing privacy laws. The executives also met with ...

Yahoo chief executive Marissa Mayer is back to work and with a new chief operating officer in tow. Mayer — who gave birth on Oct. 1 — tweeted that she was back in the office full-time on Monday, but followed up that announcement with a much bigger one for the company. A former Googler, Mayer tapped her former company for talent, naming her former colleague Henrique de Castro as the Web firm's chief operating officer. He will join Yahoo in late January 2013, after finishing his...

GameFly, which fancies itself a Netflix for video games, has developed a mobile version of its site to give customers a better user experience on mobile with features similar to its online counterpart. Using the same URL in their mobile browser, customers can now add titles and make changes to their "GameQ," browse new releases, buy or keep rented games, access cheats, manage points, update account settings and more. Usablenet, which develops properties optimized for mobile out of existing websites,...

We've gotten word of another departure from MySpace in the wake of CEO Owen Van Natta's firing two weeks ago. The latest to leave is Chris Bissell , MySpace's Chief Software Architect, who has been with the company for over four years. Bissell was one of the few remaining members of MySpace's old guard, which has gradually left (or been fired) from the company since the executive shakeup last spring that removed long-time CEO Chris DeWolfe .Bissell was charged with...

Peter Chernin, the COO of News Corp , is speaking at Fortune's conference, and talked about MySpace's effect on News Corp ( NYSE: NWS ). One example he gave: "If we did anything on Hulu it was about user experience...every decision we made was the lens of user experience. And that very much came from managing MySpace...What users were more interested in was aggregation...so we weren't that interested in developing that model on Fox.com. " Category scarcity : "We have to create category...

Twitter announced Monday that it was stepping into the photo-sharing business with a new editing tool that allows mobile photographers to enhance, crop and apply filters to their snaps. It's a direct shot against Instagram — formerly a close Twitter partner. The two companies have hit a rough patch since Instagram was purchased by Facebook earlier this year. On Sunday, Instagram pulled the ability to preview photos taken with its software on Twitter. With Twitter's new tool, filtered photo appear on a users' Twitter stream along...

Twitter confirmed Sunday that previews of photos from Instagram no longer appear on the social network. In a company blog post, Twitter said that Instagram has "disabled photo integration with Twitter," though tweeting links to Instagram photos is still possible. Photos from Instagram no longer appear in Twitter user photo galleries. Last week, Instagram stopped supporting Twitter cards — which embed photos into tweets — meaning that tweeted pictures looked strangely cropped and off-center.

Cousin Android is touch from the bottom up. So wouldn't it make sense that ChromeOS would be touchable as well? Google's ChromeOS, which runs mini laptops from Acer, Asus, and Samsung among other partners, may soon follow Windows 8 in making touch a core part of the laptop user experience. According to a report from Taiwan , Google is testing the waters with a small run of touch-compatible Chromebooks, to be released under Google's own Nexus brand. According to the report, Compal will be...

Research in Motion will release its new operating system, BlackBerry 10, on January 30th, the company announced Monday. The company promised that two new smartphones will be announced alongside the platform, signaling the company's eagerness to roll out the new system as quickly as possible. BlackBerry 10, which has faced a couple rounds of delays, is vitally important to the company as it tries to gain traction in the smartphone market against competitors such as Apple and Samsung.

Yahoo chief executive Marissa Mayer is back to work and with a new chief operating officer in tow. Mayer — who gave birth on Oct. 1 — tweeted that she was back in the office full-time on Monday, but followed up that announcement with a much bigger one for the company. A former Googler, Mayer tapped her former company for talent, naming her former colleague Henrique de Castro as the Web firm's chief operating officer. He will join Yahoo in late January 2013, after finishing his...

The entrepreneurs U.S. Hispanics spent more than $1 trillion last year, according to the Pew Hispanic Center. And the U.S. Census Bureau revealed that Latinos are the fastest-growing segment of the population and of the middle class, representing a potent market of customers, clients and patients for retailers, doctors, dentists and other local service providers in communities around the country. It's a market opportunity that serial entrepreneurs Zubair Talib and Azim Tejani couldn't ignore.

Yahoo is transitioning to a new layout for its SearchMonkey results , which can be customized by outside developers as part of Yahoo's Open Strategy. The new design features deep links, which are horizontally aligned under each result's title and the image is now featured on the right-hand side. With the new layout, the SearchMonkey team (whose leader is departing ), believes it can create higher clickthrough rates for app developers. Current SearchMonkey developers and partners will be happy to know that...

It was written that a great Hero would rise from the East. He would be clothed in the sun and his unique user-interface would redefine the user experience for countless fans of social networking and his majesty would reign over all over Android phones forever. That Hero is here, and he's on Sprint.I love the Hero, even in the form that the phone took in Sprint's able hands. While the comparisons to another Sprint phone will be rampant, I'm here to tell you that this isn't the Palm Pre and that this phone is my favorite phone, other...

The entrepreneurs Childhood friends Jonathan Schilit and Micha Weinblatt had always wanted to start to a business together. Weinblatt, already the veteran entrepreneur, wanted to expand beyond his T-shirt company, Crooked Monkey ( profiled in Business Rx in 2010), and Schilit had just graduated from business school. Their new business idea came from Weinblatt's ineptitude at making his bed. He pondered why fitted bed sheets didn't have labels for the long and short sides.

Late-night TV host Jimmy Kimmel conducted a remarkable experiment this past week. He sent cameras out to record people testing the new iPhone 5 , which of course is not available yet. The lab rats were handed last year's model. "Oh, it's way better," one man said, holding the iPhone 4S. "Yeah, it's nice. That's definitely, noticeably better. " Another mark: "It seems a little bit faster. " "Oh my God, it feels a lot lighter," according to a different reviewer. "Just a lot more higher quality.