So, I am really enjoying this driving/navigation app, called Waze and as I am wont to do with things I like, I'm now thinking about how they could improve the user experience to make it even better.  A couple of things come to mind:

• Quick Reports: Right now, on my iPad, I have to click through several options to report something.  The app should learn my most common reports and offer a "Top 3" menu to give me the ability to very quickly click-to-report those things I most often report.  There are a couple of pros and cons to my suggestion, though.  The primary reason to do this is that it induces me to report more often because it's easier to do so.  But the downside is that while an adaptive menu works great for providing the most sensible default (Sensible defaults are a core requirement of good UX), "adaptive" is another name for "changes without warning".  As any good UX expert will stell you, changes to the UI require the user to think before acting and thinking before acting greatly lessens the likelihood of acting.  An alternative could be setting up a sensible default quick-report menu, but then locking it in as stable and allowing the user to modify after it's created.  Then they are in control.  People crave control until they have it.  Then then just want it to work without input.  For that reason, control is a tricky thing to provide in a good UX.
• Modify the reward Algorithm: The app throws out raid candy periodically to gain points.  Its a good way to induce usage.  You've done a good job with choice architecture there.  We are social animals and making the social aspect salient (do I have more points than others in my region?) means making the app more interesting to use.  Social proof is a powerful tool in the Choice Architect's tool-chest.  That said, I don't know how you determine when road candy shows up, but you should consider tweaking the math so that users get slightly more candy at the beginning and end of a given trip.  We are naturally more inclined to remember beginnings and endings.  Ramping the candy up then (and consequently ramping it down in the middle) means making the reward more memorable and salient to me when I'm not in the app.
• Rankings should show who I'm better than: Right now, you show me my overall rank, which is a number showing me where I sit relative to the top.  As a human being, though, I don't care nearly as much about how many people are over me as how many are under.  I want to know that I've defeated 203,711 poor souls, not that I'm ranked 3078 overall.  So, consider changing the rank from a single number to a fraction (You are ranked 3078 out of 203,711 active users) or maybe as a percentile (You are are ranked higher than 74% of active users).  Something like that is motivating! People want to be motivated.  Competition motivates, but we need to know how we are doing in the competition.

There's more that could be done, but that hits the top 3 that struck me on my holiday vacation drive.  Hope that helps.

Image by Gramophone Maryland via Flickr

I am SO salivating over the Sonos Play:3 player. It is way hot and just what I'm looking for. I'm buying a really cool wreath for our door (the first time we will have a real live wreath!) and I am so tempted to just get the Sonos with it.

• Spotify Now On Sonos (techcrunch.com)
• Sonos' Play:3 All-in-One Speaker Is Their Cheapest Box of Awesome Yet [Gear] (gizmodo.com)
• Bach joins Sonos board (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
• In Conversation With Sonos' John MacFarlane (musicindustryblog.wordpress.com)
• Xbox Head Robbie Bach Snapped Up By Sonos (techcrunch.com)

A pictorial of our trip to the museum today.  More fun than a pail of eels and a lighter!

(download)

Click here to download:

Smithsonian_National_Air_and_S.zip (5.62 MB)

Every once in a while, you find something that does it right, that deviates from what came before in a way that just makes sense and makes you question why it wasn't done sooner.

I love music. I enjoy the variety of artistic expression and the transparency of the spark of creativity that good music gives you into the original artist's state of being. I look for music isn't well packaged, well marketed, or well managed. It's on the unclean edge of music that the best of the art form are form, in my experience.

But before I start to sound like a hipster douchebag, let me be clear: I look for good music because it's fun. That's all. When the talented artist is enjoying what they are doing, I find that I often do as well. I like my music fun.

Radio Soulwax and Aweditorium bring the fun back to exploring music. Both in very different ways, they make music tactile and enjoyable again, like it was when we spent hours in a crappy beachfront record store combing through albums of obscure bands looking to make it big.

Both of these apps are free, fun, and worth exploring. If you like exploring new music by bands you may not have heard of, or playing with the music of bands you have in inventive ways, those way be the apps you are looking for.