So, someone finally rang the bell on that whole “illegal to incentivize voting” thing. Awesome. Stay tuned for thoughts on why you shouldn’t leave all of your thinking to ad agencies–or Why You’re Smarter Than You Think You Are.

In the meantime, you should go hit up Starbucks, Ben & Jerry’s, Krispy Kreme, and whomever else was offering up freebies in your ‘hood and demand your free shit. Srsly.

Just in case you didn’t already know, Starbucks wants you to vote.

So does Krispy Kreme.

Oh, and Ben & Jerry’s.

But it’s not just food getting in on the act. Babeland wants to give you an orgasm if you go and vote. Ok, so they’re not guaranteeing the orgasm, but they are giving you a way to make it easier–with a free sex toy

And Rock The Vote will give you some free music.

If none of those ways of bribing you into your local polling place work, you might be able to find something else on the list thoughtfully compiled by the folks over at slickdeals.net.

As for me, this election felt dirty before…now it just feels gross. If you’re so apathetic about the democratic process that you need free shit to convince you to show up and participate, then should your voice really be heard?

Want to include some yummy AJAX-y interactions and effects in your prototypes? That was a silly question. Of course you do. If you’re of the geeky developer bent, this really isn’t a problem, but what if you’re not? What if you’re more designer than developer? Or more business-y than developer-y? (My command of the English language dazzles you, doesn’t it?)

Anyway, for the non-coder-y types out there, now you too can experiment with rich interactions…and you don’t even have to buy a book, take a class, or bribe your favorite web2.0nerd with an iPhone for lessons.

Check out Protoscript.

I started playing with it this morning, and I think I may be falling in love. Ok, that may have been a little over-the-top with the effusiveness, but if you do any kind of work where the ability to create prototypes with reasonably high-fidelity interactions would be useful, it’s worth your time time to take a peek at Protoscript.

Some of the (nice) tech-y details:

• uses the YUI set of behaviors, events, etc.
• jQuery is used for query selection
• Different selectors can be used as plug-ins, if jQuery ain’t your thing
• Add new behaviors with other libraries like MooTools, Mochikit, Scriptaculous, and Dojo (if you’re a masochist)
• Uses a JSON syntax, so it’s easy to grasp

Some of that probably meant nothing to you, but nevermind that. Just go check it out.

Good design makes my teeth sweat. It doesn’t matter if we’re talking about software or a coat hanger, if it’s done well and with a purpose, I’m bound to be hooked.

So you can just imagine my reaction when I saw this:

There are many pretty things over at boiler design, but this one truly sings. It’s pretty. It’s purposeful. It’s useful!

Also purposeful, but not as useful…
The Flock browser. Since it’s built around the Gecko rendering engine, you can expect the same page renderings as you would see in Firefox, but the browser itself has some special stuff for all of you Web 2.0/social networking site addicts. (I don’t count myself amongst your ranks, but it’s nice to see that someone is looking out for you.)

Access to your favorite services is built right into the browser. Just set up your accounts and you can blog anything at any time, upload media with a click, stream media feeds down… Ok, so you can do those things with Firefox as well, but not without spending many hours sifting through and installing various extensions…with Flock, they’ve done a lot of that work for you already. Oh, and they’ve managed to pretty up the chrome and delivered a pretty polished browser UI to boot.

What’s the easiest interface for a web app you can come up with? Some smartass out there is probably squirming in his seat right now and blurting out, “Oo, oo, a button!”

Sure you can just have a screen with a single button on it to fire off an action, but what would the point of that be? You haven’t allowed your user to specify what they want that button to do, so does it really count as an app? You could have a screen with a few buttons on it that each fire off a different action, but then you have to fuss with labels for the buttons, and think about the ordering and placement of the buttons, and does the user understand what the button labels really say…UX professionals can theorize pretty much anything into the ground.

How about a text entry box and a button? How about letting a user build a web site by means of little more than said text entry box and a button? That’s what they’re doing over at Jottit, and it’s looking pretty good.

“Because we can,” is never an acceptable answer to the “Why a…?” question. And if I won’t accept it from product owners or developers, I’m not going to cop out and use it here for myself.

The blog is here to collect pieces of observation and commentary on design and user experience in general. For things that don’t warrant a full-blown article, or that don’t fall into the categories of tips or tools, they’ll have a home here in the blog.