Will Oller .com

Empathy is the most important thing.
Real.com is a bad example - it doesn’t work very well
Links don’t look like links and vice versa
Site is driven by conflicting corporate needs rather than user needs
Half wants to distribute the free player and half wants to bury it in favor of the pay version

cosumersearch.com
No planned user experience, requres lots of motivation to drill down.
Unacceptable user experience
Can’t tell external ads from internal, cant tell adds from navigation

Good education
Hard to come by holistic education - not much out there for user experience
Excel vs Business
bobulate.com

Web people are not in charge of the web experience
If your web site resembles your org chart, you fail.

Who speaks for web design?
The public doesn’t understand the web (opinions come from places that don’t understand user experience)

When you have contests, it perpetuates the same kinds of work.
Judges make judges out of similar work (intentionally or otherwise)

Journalists have a hard time talking about ideas; they concentrate on money or other tangibles.

A bunch of new templates for Blogger: minima is the most popular. That design is iconic and an example of “landmark web design”, seems custom-designed no matter what the content is.

Guitar Solo
Design is not a heroic or impressive thing; the design is to represent your brand, not make the users jaws drop. Good design is invisible! People don’t get burned out on it.

Empathetic design gets away from Agile vs User-centered. Put the work in front of real users and redesign until it works.