Author Archives: Ryan Gossen

The Smart-Grid Needs Great UX

The smart grid presents a huge and growing service design problem that utility companies don’t give evidence of being aware of, nor appear to be set up to solve. More…

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Scaling The Jalopy Sandwich

Your business is ready to scale, but is your product? Things have to change for you to be able to make lots of them, and this change will be different than the organic, evolutionary path that got you this far. Its a lot like a chicken sandwich… More…

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Schelling Games and UX design

Let’s say you arrive in Paris and you have to meet a friend, but you have not agreed on a place and you can’t communicate with them. Where do you go to meet? This problem should not be solvable, you should be doomed to miss your friend, but you find them on the first day. Both of you meet at the base of the Eifel Tower, probably at noon.

Games where participants are given incomplete information and are asked to coordinate with other players are called Schelling Games, after Thomas Schelling, a pioneer of economics and game theory.

User Experience design is a Schelling Game. More…

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My Entropic Toolbox

Old ideas have magnetic properties, and sometimes all you have to do is wave them around to feel them pull at compatible problems. More…

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