Oh man, how I hate it when people use the word ‘intuitive’ when describing user interface design elements…
Well, I dunno, maybe it’s not so much the word as the fact that people often seem to use it to wallpaper over big lumps of imprecise thinking and unexpressed assumptions. I guess in that sense, it’s useful as a conversation-stopper, which is a necessary tool when you’ve got too many people talking at once in a big meeting. Which reminds me of how I hate big meetings…
Can I get a “hells yeah!” for the inventor of clumping cat litter?
I wonder to what other human (or feline) endeavors clumpitation can be applied?
I’ve been thinking about packaging lately… not sure why, exactly, but I think it’s a side-effect of my move, where I’m dealing with a lot of boxes and also buying new things for the new place that come in, well, packaging.
I just bought some cookies, and when I got ’em home I realized they have the super-cheap plastic packaging that you can’t reseal. The cookies are pretty good, but I’d go with another brand just to get a resealable package, because when I eat cookies, I eat a few, put ’em away for a day, eat a few more, etc. They’re around for a week or more, and I want them to have a chance of staying fresh.
This is either public documentation of the fact that I coined this usage, or a call to prove that it’s already been coined :-). But, according to a quick search of the web with Google, which, as I understand it, contains all phrases that anyone’s ever said, and hence all phrases that have ever been coined, nobody’s said this before. It kinda surprises me.
Anyway, what I’m trying to convey with ‘mixin brand’ is that kind of brand that doesn’t encompass the whole product or service, but only some characteristics of it. For example, you don’t buy a Microban keyboard, you buy a Fellowes keyboard with Microban microbial protection. You don’t buy Thinsulate mittens, you buy L-Bow mittens with Thinsulate insulation. If you’re the sort of person who buys mittens, ya know.
I often think that I’ve coined something and immediately find thousands of uses of it on the web, so it’s sorta cool that this one is at least not quite as obviously already out there…
This all came from pondering a mixin brand that I think would have some sales potential, if done right. Maybe I’ll blog about it at some point, but right now it’s just a baby in my brain.