This simple UX gaffe could be worth double digit percentage decrease in revenue for Orbitz over the course of a year. For a company that made over $700 MM, that could easily be over 9 figures.

Not sure about the $100 MM, it could be right or wrong. (Makes for good linkbait, though. I’m linking to it, right?)

What I do know is good web UX implementation is about doing stuff the hard way, or sometimes just the right way, so your users don’t have to. Orbitz crashes and burns here.

I love Clear and here’s why:

1. There’s no skeuomorphic bullshit
2. It’s fast
3. It’s fun to use
4. It’s cheap ($0.99 in iTunes)

I linked to Shawn Blanc’s excellent and in-depth review of Clear yesterday, because it was a good review. However, after having used the app for 24 hours, I have to say more.

The most striking aspect of Clear (and one of my favorites) is that there is no skeuomorphism–the interface doesn’t waste my time pretending to be something it’s not. There’s no soft corinthian leather or talking paper clips. (WTF does a Paperclip have to do with a computer!?) I’m 100% for design metaphors when they serve a purpose, but if something is to be used, ornamentation for its own sake drives me nuts. It’s distracting and a waste of time and computing resources. There’s not trace of that in Clear. Every pixel has purpose.

Clear also definitely has that magic for me where I want to use it because of the ways it looks and responds to my interaction. Being productive is already a high-friction process for me. (The passively consumable media options available to me on a day-today basis are an embarrassment of riches.) So, when it comes to productivity software, it has to be something I want to use. Clear nails it.

It feels like vandalism. This is what hackers do. So why are companies defacing their own sites? Is it really so hard to understand that the browser on a tablet device is in all important respects the equal of the browser on a laptop, and, depending on the machine, in many cases superior?

No, it’s not that hard to understand, but only if you’ve used one of these devices for any amount of time.

The Samsung Galaxy Note isn’t for everyone, and I can’t recommend it as the main mobile phone for most people. But as a stylus-driven small tablet, it might be just what some users are looking for.

If it looks like a niche device and it quacks like a niche device, then it probably is. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it’s not going to pull anyone out of line at an Apple store.

(via The Brooks Review)

For me, a good list app needs to be both fast and available. Clear is both of those while also managing to be unique and quite unconventional.

Shawn Blanc gives an excellent in-depth review of a great app.

Where does the floppy go?

Female Passengers Say They Were Targeted for TSA Body Scanners:

“[The TSA agent] says to me, ‘Do you play tennis?’ And I said, ‘Why?’‘You just have such a cute figure,’” Ellen Terrell recalled to CBS News in Dallas.

Terrell said the female agent appeared to be acting on a request from male agents who were in a separate room viewing the scans and who apparently asked the agent to send Terrell back through the scanner twice because the scan was blurry.

After the third scan, Terrell said the agent seemed frustrated with her co-workers in the screening room. “She’s talking into her microphone and she says, ‘Guys, it is not blurry, I’m letting her go,’” Terrell said.

This is one of several testimonials in the article.

Even more damning is this was a behavioral pattern found among 500 complaints lodged against the TSA. The complaints were collected and reviewed in a CBS investigation. Shameful.

It’s an open secret that the TSA is security theater. Ineffective at best, dangerous at worst, and enormously expensive on both ends of that spectrum. This is all not to mention that they’re protecting us from something that, statistically speaking, never actually happens. (Yes, when it happens, it’s horrifying. There are far more dangerous things in this world that actually are quite common, like heart disease or car accidents. These are much less emotional/polarizing though, and cannot be brought to market politically with much success. But I digress.)

To me the most interesting part of this TSA farce is from a user experience and marketing perspective. The TSA allows airports to opt out of federal screening and hire private firms to do the job instead. I wonder if/when it will become a competitive advantage for airports to ditch the perverted thugs running TSA security?

Here’s a list of US airports with private security (via Wikipedia):

• San Francisco International Airport
  (One of the top 30 in the world, by traffic.)
• Kansas City International Airport
• Greater Rochester International Airport
• Tupelo Regional Airport
• Key West International Airport
• Charles M. Schulz – Sonoma County Airport
• Jackson Hole Airport

If you’re flying, and have a choice between one of these airports and a TSA airport, remember to vote with your dollars.

UPDATE:

DanielBMarkham commenting at Hackernews:

Sadly, up until today TSA is not allowing airports to opt out of the system, even though the law was specifically set up to allow them to do so. The new FAA bill — which also calls for the FAA to set rules for thousands of law enforcement drones to monitor civilians sometime in the next decade or so — changes this. (random Google link:http://www.securitydirectornews.com/?p=article&id=sd2012…) A bunch have already applied — and been turned down.

Hopefully this will change.

Even if an airport uses private security, under the current system they are regulated so closely by the TSA that the experience is a wash from the traveller’s perspective. And under the new system it looks like no one is getting approval to bypass the TSA anyway. I’ll say it again: shameful.

After just days with a Galaxy Note, my forearms have never been so toned, and my apartment’s never been so bare. Is it a tablet? Is it a phone? It’s everything.

This parody is delicious.

Music mega-star Whitney Houston died on Saturday at the age of 48. And when a high-profile artist passes away, fans often look to re-experience their music, which causesdigital and physical sales soar. Most recently, Michael Jackson’s catalog considerably jumped on the charts after his death.

But instead of reverence in the wake of Houston’s passing, Sony chose to raise the price of one of her most popular hits collections. The Ultimate Collection album in the U.K. jumped in price by more than 60 percent from £4.99 to £7.99 within 30 minutes of Houston’s death, according to Digital Spy.

Record labels continue to do what they do best in the internet age — insert themselves unnecessarily between the artist and the patron.

TNW: I know one of the major complaints about TweetBot has been its “heavyness” in terms of design and animation. It also seems to bug some designers and developers to no end that it doesn’t use ‘standard’ transitions and animations. Was that also conscious? To make it feel and work differently? Or was it just a function of trying to fit in all of the things that you wanted it to do?

PH: So I hate the term heavy, just bugs me to no end because its a nonsense term to me. But yeah it was conscious a way to make it look and feel like our other apps. I think we actually do use pretty standard animations and transitions in 1.x. We’ve actually done a lot more crazy transitions in our other apps than in Tweetbot. In Tweetbot 2.0 Mark made some of the colors a little more subtle which hopefully will do away with that “heavy” feeling. But it’s just never going to be the standard white cells with black text that a lot of iOS apps use. We want it to have personality.

Tapbots might be the epitome of an iPhone software company that makes stuff that I want to use just for the sake of using it. Their interfaces are rich, complex, and worth every second it takes to learn them.