06 Jan 2009 0839H

Why Steve Jobs is so important

They use a technique called genius design for high profile products at Apple. At Apple, that means it has attracted the attention of Steve Jobs, who pushes the design to the level of his satisfaction, which can also be a bad thing. Now with this year’s keynote disappearing, not to disparage Ives and all the talent out there, but, the question arises, is this a harbinger of things to come? Does the talent pool under Steve have enough to go on in case he disappears? Not to say the Scully or Amelio years were bad — they just weren’t great. If Apple goes back to being a good, not great company, what will happen?

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01 Jan 2009 1640H

‘Lessons which have been paid for so dearly’

The report’s goal, NASA officials said, is to provide a guideline for safety in the design of future spacecraft. In a conference call with reporters on Tuesday, N. Wayne Hale, Jr., a former head of the shuttle program, said, “I call on spacecraft designers from all the other nations of the world, as well as the commercial and personal spacecraft designers here at home, to read this report and apply these lessons which have been paid for so dearly.”

Link

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21 Dec 2008 1647H

Do you matter: how great design will make people love your company

(by Robert Brunner and Stewart Emery with Russ Hall: FT Press, 2008.) Examples are too heavy on the Apple fanboy love, when so many others are available, and there is this sense, despite the hard orange cover with its glossy Helvetica type in a trendy slim, vertical format, that this book is actually a rough first draft, with occasionally contradictory advice, gaping silences when it comes to defining terms, and somewhat testy, repetitive passages, as if the authors are trying to convince themselves of the veracity of their mantras by repeating them over and over again. However, given the difficulty of trying to write a book as a kind of service offerings pitch to C-level execs, while at the same time avoiding giving away the farm, the book is a good conversation starter about the need for executive leadership to create a design-driven organization. I do think the authors are on the right track, even if the evidence presented does not entirely necessarily prove their case. In two or three future editions, perhaps.

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04 Dec 2008 1633H

Initial thoughts on my iPhone

Replaced my aging and increasingly unreliable RazrV3 last week. Loved T-Mobile service in C-town, just couldn’t be beat, but, since we’re now elsewhere, sucked it up and decided to get the iPhone. 

Initial thoughts:

I like it. As an information junkie, I feel I shall never be at a loss again about where to go or what to do. Probably as close as you get to becoming a walking, talking cyborg without having the connection actually in your head.

Wife not liking it so much. Says all she sees is the top of my head now as I’m using the device.

Allows me to do a number of things I used to carry around my laptop for:

• Access email, IM, and web in places where the infosec policy firewalls me

• Access my blogs and the OPML list of blogs I follow on Newsgator

• Access to Cantonese radio for Toronto, Hong Kong and also Chicago local news and weather 

• Photos, music, camera, video — all on one device 

Allows me to do a number of things I couldn’t easily do with my laptop

• GPS allows me to figure out where I am, real-time, on Google maps, either while in car or on foot. Shouldn’t be able to get lost in Chicagoland now. . . or be at a loss for what services are immediately accessible near my location

• Access internet services anywhere I get a signal, so, for instance, I can listen to Commercial Radio 88.1FM in Hong Kong — almost live, on the other side of the world! — in my car on these long commutes

• Google anything, almost anytime and almost everywhere

• Control the AppleTV when I can’t be bothered to use the remote 

• Send and receive cellphone calls & text messages

I like the contextually sensitive keyboard that automatically comes up when you need to do text entry on the web or elsewhere.

Will I be using this to transport documents back and forth from office to home, or using this in the future to do presentations? Hmm. The possibility is there but it is not realized. I would like to be able to run Keynote presentations off the iPhone. . . .

I don’t like that the keyboard targets are relatively small and feel they need to accommodate thicker fingers. And that the affordances for insertion are not immediately clear, but, generally, the learning curve was pretty low, since all the user behaviors are all well established and leveraged heavily. The gestures for multi-touch were new but not hard to remember.

Mail app lacks the spam filtering of the desktop version. Someone says I can route my email elsewhere, which is one less mailbox I have to worry about and also has a really robust spam killing function. 

NetNewsReader is so-so, drops a lot of feeds, but does the job well enough. 

Mobile commerce, here we come? Probably not likely for hard or soft lines, unless you’re in a store like Best Buy or Apple and the wait is ridiculous and you want to fulfill now. I do think the promise of mo-comm is contextual, and specifically, primarily about services, and around immediate gratification: tickets for movies, possibly restaurant bills, bill payments of all sorts, maybe books, travel, parking, maybe groceries even . . . 

Radio drops during busy times, sadly. Less than optimal. 

Battery life isn’t great: maybe like 3-4 hrs active, around 7 for standby? Charges quickly once attached with the USB dongle, but worried about replacing the battery later on. Will need to get a car charger and probably a desktop dock wouldn’t hurt neither.

A BT headset or wired headset is looking more useful by the second but given the short battery life, not sure how useful.

AYCE connectivity is pricey, and roaming internationally can kill you, but, actually, not too bad considering I am now completely wireless and laptopless, all the time. 

Need to figure out how to leverage this platform for my own nefarious purposes. . . . hmm. 

I am reminded about what Tim Andrews said to us back at Viant Quickstart in November of 1999: what you want to do is build the phone into a computer, don’t build the computer into a phone. 

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02 Dec 2008 1153H

From Seattle IxDA

Great talk by Daniel Cook about interaction design and games:

<a href="http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-US&#038;playlist=videoByUuids:uuids:d0cabdcc-97bc-4799-a579-4da3b73f865b&#038;showPlaylist=true&#038;from=shared" target="_new" title="Microsoft Office Labs &#038; Engineering Excellence IxDA Event Part I Daniel Cook">Video: Microsoft Office Labs &#038; Engineering Excellence IxDA Event Part I Daniel Cook</a>

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27 Nov 2008 1617H

Damn you Steve Jobs

Now it is almost December and I am not only married but the owner of an AppleTV and an iPhone from which I am now blogging. All things I didn’t think would happen this year. Life comes at you fast.

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21 Nov 2008 0734H

Big change ahead

When I first started as a designer in this field about 12 years ago, one of the first things I remember wanting to design was the information displays on medical devices. It looks like I will finally get my chance!

After a few grueling months of interviewing and constantly running into jobs being placed on hold, I have accepted a generous offer to join Siemens Medical Solutions as a user experience designer/staff systems engineer in their angiography & x-ray division.

It’s a departure from everything I’ve done so far, but, I think that it’s validation that if you really are a good UX/IX designer, then your skills can be applied to just about any area of interaction. I’m really looking forward to joining this engineering team, applying my skills to understand the needs of everyone interacting with this hardware product,  and being able to build something really great over the long term product lifecycle.

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18 Nov 2008 1350H

Stop reading, start doing

People ask what a good reading list is for our interdiscipline.

But I like to be the contrarian.

I say stop reading.

Take an interaction.

It can be any interaction but preferably human-machine interface.

Take it apart.

Figure out what is the desired path.

Figure out where things can or do go wrong.

Put it back together again.

Take notes.

Figure out how to improve the interaction.

Test it with other humans besides yourself.

Repeat with many many others.

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16 Nov 2008 1155H

Controllers in video games

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12 Nov 2008 0918H

Lumping & splitting among information architects, user experience people, and interactionists

Of all the lousy times to be looking for a new gig, there’s a recession and a marriage banquet and an election and all these things with starting a new life. But I really can’t complain because at least the interviews keep coming, so that signals to me that the market is still fairly strong.

So, recently, I’ve had the privilege of interviewing with the information architecture/user experience practices of a number of different firms, and came away with differing and occasionally overlapping views about what each believed IAs should do, and I think this speaks directly to the lumping and splitting problem that is at the center of controversy among, ironically, IAs, UXers, IxDs, and whoever might consider themselves to be part of this group.

As anyone who has worked with taxonomy knows, there is a famous problem called lumping and splitting when it comes to placing things into categories: those who lump tend to elide differences, and seek out commonalities, which results in less complex, but more unwieldy definitions; those who split tend to emphasize difference, but this results in greater complexity, even as one moves toward precision. Well, this is precisely what is happening within the work that we do. I think Jared Spool recently wrote on an IxDA thread about UCD v. ACD, true, it may not matter too much to the patient what procedure might be done so long as they are cured of their disease, but it is important to us, the practitioners, what is included in what we call whatever it is we do and what is not. For example, we would not want someone who is not an oncologist to be working on cancer. But yet, in IA work, we do something like that, because we have not determined where the splits occur and what those splits are.

For instance, is it likely that those of us who work on synonym rings and authority files and metadata schema like Dublin Core will ever be working on interaction design for a complex, customer-facing  transactional application? I can tell you that after 12 years in corporate America that I have never been asked to work on enterprise information architecture on a corporate intranet, which is a hardcore library and info science practice. I certainly would want someone who is a credentialed MLIS or having equivalent experience working on similar projects on that. Taxonomy for a footwear vertical within an online department store? Maybe less so. Layout of a travel application page, or determining the process flow of a balance transfer system for users within a banking application? Maybe not so much. Maybe we want to have someone who has experience as an interaction designer working on some of these things. Maybe we want to have more than one person touching this to make sure all the pieces are there.

The usability body of knowledge within the UPA is a good start. It’s true that the techniques we use to get to the end result are largely the same, but the kinds of specialities that people are working on are not. Maybe we should be pushing people to identify themselves as what kind of IA/UX/IxD that someone is, and maybe we should be pushing HR and staffing managers to also ID the kinds of skills they’re looking for as well so that there’s a good fit for the client and for the practitioner as well. Who knows, maybe in another five, ten years we’ll start lumping again.

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