New Media Musings

RIA Screen Layouts

2010-06-21T07:04:00.001-07:00

Check out this SlideShare Presentation:

RIA Screen Layouts

View more presentations from Theresa Neil.

TED Blog: Phillip Zimbardo on the powers of time: The animation

2010-06-13T07:17:00.000-07:00

TED Blog: Phillip Zimbardo on the powers of time: The animation

Just add points? What UX can (and cannot) learn from games

2010-06-03T08:30:00.001-07:00

Check out this SlideShare Presentation:

Just add points? What UX can (and cannot) learn from games

View more presentations from Sebastian Deterding.

Metrics-Driven Design

2010-06-02T07:06:00.001-07:00

Check out this SlideShare Presentation:

Metrics-Driven Design

View more presentations from Joshua Porter.

The Empathic Civilisation

2010-05-25T04:08:00.000-07:00

Now you don't see that very often...

2010-05-25T04:04:00.000-07:00

Search Patterns: The Future of Discovery

2010-05-24T06:36:00.001-07:00

Check out this SlideShare Presentation:

Search Patterns: The Future of Discovery

View more presentations from Peter Morville.

MAYA design - what is information?

2010-05-23T02:58:00.000-07:00

Information from MAYAnMAYA on Vimeo.

Dan Klyn - explaining information architecture

2010-05-23T02:54:00.001-07:00

explaining information architecture from Dan Klyn on Vimeo.

Resmini - Pervasive IA (IA Summit)

2010-05-23T02:40:00.001-07:00

Pervasive IA (IA Summit)

View more presentations from Andrea Resmini.

Jared Spool - Journey To The Center Of Design

2010-05-23T02:36:00.001-07:00

Journey To The Center Of Design

View more webinars from Jared Spool.

Persona Driven Development by Sarah Lawfull

2010-05-18T05:25:00.000-07:00

Persona Driven Development on Prezi

Para fest 2010 changing the experience

2010-05-18T02:51:00.001-07:00

Check out this SlideShare Presentation:

Para fest 2010 changing the experience

View more presentations from Esteban Kolsky.

Fitts' Law Basics

2010-05-12T01:13:00.001-07:00

Check out this SlideShare Presentation:

Fitts' Law Basics

View more presentations from Lucas Rizoli.

Core and Paths: Designing Findability from the Inside and Out

2010-05-07T06:11:00.001-07:00

Check out this SlideShare Presentation:

Core and Paths: Designing Findability from the Inside and Out

View more presentations from aregh.

Case study of agile and UCD working together

2010-05-07T06:10:00.000-07:00

By James Kelway

Large scale websites require groups of specialists to design and develop a product that will be a commercial success. To develop a completely new site requires several teams to collaborate and this can be difficult. Particularly as different teams may be working with different methods.

This case study shows how the ComputerWeekly user experience team integrated with an agile development group. It’s important to note the methods we used do not guarantee getting the job done. People make or break any project. Finding and retaining good people is the most important ingredient for success...

from Boxes and Arrows

Also a pretty good overview of the IA/UX process lifecycle...

Not sure if I blogged this already...

2010-04-16T02:20:00.000-07:00

Rich Internet Application Screen Design

some useful principles:

Make It Direct
Keep It Lightweight
Stay in the Page
Provide Invitations
Use Transitions
React Immediately

http://www.uxmagazine.com/design/rich-internet-application-screen-design

Whitney Hess - Evangelizing Yourself

2010-04-15T08:32:00.000-07:00

Evangelizing Yourself

View more presentations from Whitney Hess.

Whitney Hess - So you wanna be a user experience designer — Step 2: Guiding Principles

2010-04-15T08:27:00.000-07:00

http://whitneyhess.com/blog/2009/11/23/so-you-wanna-be-a-user-experience-designer-step-2-guiding-principles/

includes

20 GUIDING PRINCIPLES FOR EXPERIENCE DESIGN

Whitney Hess - So you wanna be a user experience designer — Step 1: Resources

2010-04-15T08:26:00.000-07:00

http://whitneyhess.com/blog/2009/06/30/so-you-wanna-be-a-user-experience-designer-step-1-resources/

The Ten Commandments Of User Experience

2010-04-14T01:53:00.001-07:00

Check out this SlideShare Presentation:

The Ten Commandments Of User Experience

View more presentations from Nick Finck.

10 Useful Usability Findings and Guidelines - Smashing Magazine

2010-04-12T03:29:00.000-07:00

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/09/24/10-useful-usability-findings-and-guidelines/

Social CRM with Salesforce Chatter

2010-04-12T03:28:00.001-07:00

2010-04-02T07:34:00.000-07:00

10 Design Quotes, designed, from Freshbump

Prototyping with Todd Zaki Warfel

2010-03-25T06:43:00.000-07:00

Prototyping with Todd Zaki Warfel

View more presentations from UIEpreviews.

The AIPEE pyramid model of the user lifecycle

2010-03-25T04:08:00.000-07:00

[click for larger image]

The 5 Stages of Customer Acquisition for the Social Business (Part 3)

Altimeter Report: The 18 Use Cases of Social CRM, The New Rules of Relationship Management

2010-03-24T03:39:00.000-07:00

Social CRM: The New Rules of Relationship Management

View more documents from Jeremiah Owyang.

2010-03-14T06:28:00.001-07:00

[click image for larger version]

How did I know to add required information when there are no required field indicators?

2010-03-13T07:02:00.001-08:00

Enema kit ad on a recipe page. Yummy!

2010-03-13T07:01:00.001-08:00

Really cool Blizzard 404 page

2010-03-13T06:59:00.001-08:00

Where's the 'yes' option?

2010-03-13T06:54:00.000-08:00

2010-02-18T01:25:00.001-08:00

"An action or choice without context is a step toward failure."

Andy Rutledge

8 ways to kill an idea...

2009-11-25T05:40:00.001-08:00

[click for a larger version]

Is this the future of outsourcing?

2009-09-22T03:24:00.001-07:00

Interesting article about the results of Netflix's prize competition - $1m for the team who can best to improve the video rental and streaming service’s recommendations engine by 10% or more. 40,000 teams entered from 186 countriers.

It occurred to me that maybe this is a model which other companies should adopt. Why spend millions employing a big consultancy company like EDS, PWC, Cap Gemini etc on an ongoing basis - with results which can only be uncertain at the beginning of the engagement and often disappoint the client - why not post a specific technical (and why not design too?) problem and let the wisdom ofc crowds sort it out?

The Hierarchy of Digital Distraction...

2009-09-10T04:41:00.000-07:00

From Any Kind of Actual Work all the way through to Device Failure...

from Information is Beautiful

2009-09-01T02:30:00.001-07:00

“Only second-rate minds are afraid of the obvious.” David Cecil

2009-08-29T07:50:00.001-07:00

“The man who insists on seeing with perfect clearness before he decides, never decides.” Philosopher Henri-Frederic Amiel [As good a description of 'analysis paralysis' as I think you'll find anywhere]

GREAT DESIGNERS STEAL by Jeff Veen - Ep 28

2009-08-27T02:41:00.001-07:00

2009-08-24T16:49:00.000-07:00

from Wired UK, Sep 09 edition

Frugality matters...

2009-08-24T16:42:00.000-07:00

"Deliberate thinking is a wonderful tool when we have the luxury of time, the help of a computer, and a clearly defined task, and the fruits of that type of analysis can set the stage for rapid cognition ... in good decision making, frugality matters ... even the most complicated of relationships and problems ... have an underlying identifiable pattern ... in picking up these sorts of patterns, less is more. Overloading the decision makers with information ... makes picking up that signature harder, not easier. To be a successful decision maker, we have to edit ... Snap judgements can be made in a snap because they are frugal, and if we want to protect our snap judgements, we have to take steps to protect that frugality."
Malcolm Gladwell, Blink, pp141-142 in my edition

Agile and UX Presentation from July 8, 2009 in Los Angeles, CA

2009-07-13T04:58:00.001-07:00

Agile and UX, July 8 - Scrum Club, Los Angeles, CA

View more presentations from Patrick Neeman.

2009-07-04T07:55:00.001-07:00

Wow...

2009-06-16T06:50:00.001-07:00

"it is estimated that a 100-millisecond delay reduces Amazon’s sales by 1 percent"
http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2009/06/the-singularity-is-near.html

2 flashmobs

2009-06-08T02:39:00.001-07:00

Liverpool Street station
http://www.adliterate.com/archives/2009/01/bursting_with_p_3.html

Central Station Antwerp
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UE3CNu_rtY

A useful Facebook widget - whaddyaknow?

2009-04-15T02:11:00.000-07:00

A widget that lets PAYG customers keep track of their spending - now that is useful!

2009-04-03T01:32:00.001-07:00

“If I’d asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.”

Henry Ford

Dilbert Code of Conduct

2009-02-20T08:27:00.000-08:00

[click for larger version]

I was working at BP recently in their Compliance & Ethics Department. Part of the Department's role is to enforce the company's Code of Conduct. The above raised a wry chuckle...

This is genius

2009-02-20T02:43:00.001-08:00

2009-02-09T03:47:00.000-08:00

"Trust me on this. If audiences had an unlimited attention span, I’d be in my second term as President."

Al Gore

2007-12-06T01:46:00.000-08:00

“Designers learn empathy by spending time in the lives and environments of real customers, then simulating the experiences that people will have with new offerings through prototyping.”

Brandon Schauer, Adaptive Path

2007-12-04T07:11:00.001-08:00

Chad Hurley, CEO and co-founder YouTube, from today's Guardian Media section

2007-12-03T13:47:00.000-08:00

"In five years, video broadcasting will be the most ubiquitous and accessible form of communication. The tools for video recording will continue to become smaller and more affordable. Personal media devices will be universal and interconnected. People will have the opportunity to record and share video with a small group of friends or everyone around the world.
Today, eight hours of new video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. This will grow exponentially over the next five years. Our goal is to allow every person on the planet to participate by making the upload process as simple as placing a phone call. This new video content will be available on any screen - in your living room or in your pocket - and will bring together all the diverse media which matters to you, from videos of family and friends to news, music, sports, cooking and more.
In the next five years, users will be at the centre of their video experience, you will have more access to more information, and the world will be a smaller place."

This is something I've often asked myself...

2007-11-28T08:11:00.000-08:00

...and indeed often been asked.

Not sure I entirely agree with this answer, which I would ahve thought depends to a degree on modes: if an application is capable of running in multiple modes, and a user uses the app in both modes, but some options are available in one mode but not the other(s), I would have thought it better to keep all the options there but disable those that can't be used in a particular mode, to keep a consistent UI. Indeed, the greying-out of elements could act as a subliminal reminder to the user of which mode they are in...

"Question: I would like to know if there is a standard for buttons and options that are not enabled for the user to select. Do you show the button or option, and simply 'grey' it out so that the user knows this is not an option, or do you simply not show the button at all depending on the view or mode of the screen? For example in Microsoft Windows, the options that the users cannot select are greyed out, but still visible to the user. However, I am working with an in-house application, that has NO standards, and I am being told by some developers that when we move to the .net framework, that selections will just not display at all if they are not an option for the user to select. As a former user, I may be a bit confused by that.....Help!!

Eric's response: I suppose if your intention is to frustrate your users into getting a software upgrade, the grey out might be good (except that the user won't actually know that an upgrade is needed to un-grey the button).

So in the case where the function must be indicated to not be there, I would prefer to have the button not there at all. But I would like to do it in a more obvious fashion. If there is a state that has a set of buttons that are different, I would prefer to have a clear graphic switch that reveals a different set of buttons. This could be a different window, or a tab within the window. So for example, if you have a CAD system with view-only status, you might have a panel of controls in the view-only state which has only rotation and other viewing buttons. In the editable state the panel is differently labeled and has full editing control buttons. But the user has no ambiguity or confusion.

In general, I am unhappy about the greying-out strategy. The button provides a very clear affordance of selectability. The grey-out is a weak indication that it is not available for some unknown reason."

From the excellent Human Factors International web site

Is web 3.0 a brand relaunch - just like Kylie's new look?

2007-10-22T02:34:00.000-07:00

Anthony Lilley
Monday October 15, 2007
The Guardian

So, finally web 2.0 is dead. Its jargon half-life has expired and the buzzword du jour is being interred and superseded. And by what? Well, you'll never guess. Long live web 3.0. Honestly, give me strength. We'll look back in 20 years and wonder when we decided to hand over the English language to people who can haggle for hours about the difference between versions 2.1 and 2.5 of some software...

http://media.guardian.co.uk/mediaguardian/story/0,,2191061,00.html

2007-09-25T06:44:00.000-07:00

In 2006, the UK online advertising spend grew some 40% to £2bn and even one of the less bullish forecasts for 2007 by GroupM, the forecasting arm of WPP, predicts a 34% increase again this year and 30% growth in online advertising in 2008
...
86% of UK internet connections are now broadband and, by the end of next year, two in three households in the UK will have broadband, according to internet research agency Point Topic
...
The average European spends 14.3 hours online each week, compared with 11.3 hours watching TV
...
...some sites have also attracted deals that look more like marketing and sponsorship than straight advertising. One example is how P&G's Gillette and Paramount show up in the new online drama called Kate Modern debuted by Bebo this summer. "The sponsorships are really subtle and not like advertising on a banner ad," says Joanna Shields, president of Bebo international"
Kate Bulkley, The Guardian (Internet Advertising supplement) 24th September 2007

2007-09-25T02:40:00.000-07:00

"The death of TimesSelect [the attempt by The New York Times to charge for online content] is an affirmation of the new media reality that says the public will seek out our brands less and less and will detour around the front doors we create for them. Instead, they will arrive because of their own need (via search) or peers' recommendations (via links). So we in media must open ourselves to the public in every way possible. Tearing down walls - pay, registration, archive, or just obtuse navigation - is only the start of it. I believe this also means finding more ways for our audience to distribute us: we'll widgetise. And I believe that we must think like Google and see ourselves as platforms on which others build that larger conversation."

Jeff Jarvis, The Guardian (Media section), 24th September 2007

2007-09-21T01:35:00.000-07:00

This is an interesting slideshow:

Learning IxD from Everyday Objects

2007-09-17T07:07:00.001-07:00

“A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”
psychologist Hebert Simon

2007-08-12T21:01:00.000-07:00

"Amateurs built the ark; professionals built the Titanic."

2007-07-17T01:47:00.000-07:00

This is very interesting, from Jared Spool on the UIEtips mailing list (also available at

http://www.uie.com/articles/facebook_mini_feed/ ):

--------------

--> Feature Article: Learning from the Facebook Mini-Feed Disaster

By Jared M. Spool

Imagine this scenario: Your team works hard on a new feature --
something that you think will bring your design to a completely new
level. Launch day arrives and you wait with anticipation to hear the
rave reviews of the millions of existing users.

However, instead of kudos, you immediately hear complaints. The
users are upset. They are so upset that they band together and start
a petition to have you remove the new feature. The petition itself
gains attention as the list of names grows and, suddenly, major
newspapers are reporting how users are complaining about this feature
you thought was so great. All of this happens in just a few days.

This is exactly the scenario that Facebook, the social networking
site, found itself in a few months ago. They created a grand
feature: the mini feed. The feature is neat: instead of requiring
users to visit the pages of all their friends, the feed reports on
changes immediately. It's an immediate way to keep track of what's up
with your friends.

Unfortunately, this cool feature wasn't well received at all. Upon
its initial rollout, users suddenly found their familiar home page
replaced with a listing of random people doing random things. Many
people initially assumed their own actions were now transmitted to
people they didn't know.

As is common on Facebook, several users started groups to protest
the new feature. Ironically, it was the mini feed itself that
announced that friends were signing up for the protest groups. As
more people joined the groups, an increasing number of users became
aware of the protests. Within 24 hours, one protest group had grown
to 750,000 members.

The Facebook team was caught by surprise by the sudden, massive
backlash to their design. They posted a blog entry that said, "Calm
down, breathe. We hear you." Unfortunately, their reaction added
flames to the fire, making the protesters only angrier about the
sudden changes to the site.

Bloggers picked up the story, and then the mainstream media started
reporting it. Within days, the New York Times and the Wall Street
Journal both had prominently placed stories talking about how
hundreds of thousands of Facebook users were revolting against the
new features.

What can we learn from what happened? What did the Facebook team do
to upset everyone so radically? What could they have done to prevent
the backlash? By reconstructing the sequence of events, we can try to
understand what happens when things like this go wrong and learn how
we could avoid similar results with our own designs.

> The Shock of Sudden Change

In the old days, users could control when their software changed. An
upgrade was suddenly available, but the acquisition and installation
of that upgrade was under their control. (Or under the control of a
local representative, such as a company system administrator.)
However, in the world of web-delivered content, the content provider
now controls when the change occurs. Incremental changes to a design
are now commonplace, with small changes happening frequently and
often without warning.

The developers of Facebook have changed the Facebook design dozens
of times in the past. Nobody got terribly upset. Nobody formed
protest groups. Why should this time be any different?

Unbeknownst to the development team, they had walked into a
minefield. With one new feature, they had changed a fundamental
element of the site: what it means to be a friend. In addition, they
hadn't carefully explained the implications of the change, causing
users to extrapolate incorrectly the design's behaviors. It was these
two things that formed a 'perfect storm' condition, making the system
ripe for the problems to follow.

> Keep Your Friends Close and Everyone Else Closer

From its inception, a core feature of Facebook was adding friends.
When you add a friend, Facebook recognizes your relationship. When
you 'friend' another user, you have access to their photos, status
messages, and other capabilities of the system, and they have access
to yours. The power of Facebook is in the friend network each user
sets up -- the more friends they have, the more powerful their
network.

This increasing power led many users to freely add people as
friends, even if they weren't friends in the offline world. They'd
meet someone at a party or bump into them at Starbucks, discover they
were both Facebook users and agree to add each other into their
network.

Soon, many users were competing on the number of friends in their
networks. People had hundreds of friends, many of whom they didn't
really know. Because it was easy to ignore people you didn't know
well -- you never visited their pages -- the cost of having a huge
friend network was minimal, while the reward -- claiming large
popularity -- was great.

The introduction of the mini feed changed these costs and rewards.
All of a sudden, anything a friend did was presented in the feed.
Users with large networks saw listings from people whose names they
didn't recognize. Their feeds were full of "news" about people they
didn't care about.

Users saw this as superfluous information, cluttering up what used
to be a perfectly well organized home page. This was the first
problem that started the backlash.

All of a sudden, it mattered who was in your network. Having dozens
of people who you could previously quickly forget about now took up
your attention. However, that wasn't all.

> An Invasion of Privacy

Given incomplete information, people sometimes jump to incorrect
conclusions. This is exactly what happened when users found dozens
of folks in their feed, many of whom they didn't recognize.

Many users assumed the feed was informing them of random users of
the site. Given that assumption, they jumped to the next obvious
thought: their own activity on the site was being broadcast to random
other users. With these two assumptions in hand, many users decided
the feed was an invasion in privacy.

Of course, these assumptions weren't true. The feed only reported
activity of people in the user's network. In fact, there wasn't any
new information being presented in the feed. The only difference
was, before the feed, you had to visit each friend's own page to
discover the information now being summarized in your feed. No
invasion of privacy was occurring -- just an increase in the
visibility of already available information.

The designers assumed most users only added people into their
network who were truly friends and people they'd recognize. It
surprised them to discover people had added dozens of mild
acquaintances and didn't recognize everyone they'd added.

Users in the protest groups immediately demanded options to control
the privacy of the system. Interestingly, the privacy settings
already existed in Facebook's core functionality. However, the
default settings were to share all information. To make things more
challenging, the privacy settings weren't easy to find.

> Preventing the Perfect Storm

What could the Facebook Team have done differently? Was there
anything they could do to prevent the sequence of events that forced
them into damage-control mode after the national coverage in the
mainstream press?

Of course, it's easy to play Monday-morning quarterback and
second-guess the decisions made by others. However, we do know some
things that likely would have worked better.

First, while the team had an existing deep relationship with their
users, it seems clear they weren't aware of how these users were
using the system, particularly when it came to building out their
friend network.

Spending more time watching how people added friends into the
network would probably have helped. Friends are a core element of the
Facebook experience. The more the team knows about how users build up
their network, the more they'll embed that knowledge into their
designs.

Second, a staged rollout of the new functionality would likely have
helped gauge the users' initial reactions. The site has millions of
users, yet a rollout to a few hundred, and the appropriate feedback
collection mechanisms, could have easily predicted users would have
misconceptions with privacy functions.

Third, it's clear, when dealing with social dynamics, users need a
sense of control over how the system disseminates any personal
information. While there is always a tension between keeping an
interface simple and allowing for control over functionality, social
systems seem to demand more on the control side. The defaults can
still tend to be open, but users need easily accessible methods to
restrict the visibility of content they want to remain private.

Finally, designing for embraceable change, in addition to designing
the functionality itself, would likely have helped with the adoption
of the new functionality. Through an iterative rollout process, the
team could have learned the information users needed to correctly
understand the mini feed and its implications.

Just designing new features isn't enough. We need to design the
process by which users will learn to adopt those features. One
strategy is to use an opt-in preview, where the site offers the new
functionality as a sneak peak, allowing users to start using it on
their own schedule. (Currently, Yahoo! Finance is using this
approach for their new chart capabilities.)

Another strategy is to make sure the users are clear on the
implications behind the change. Had the Facebook team explained at
the outset how the people in the feed were only established friends,
that personal information was not broadcast beyond the existing
friend network, and how it was easy to change the privacy settings,
much of the brouhaha could have been avoided. Clear messaging or a
guided tour of the new feature is a way to communicate these
concepts.

> Epilogue: All is Well that Ends Well, Right?

In the months since the mini feed was introduced, the users' initial
reactions have since gone the other way. The mini feed is now a
critical part of the site's functionality, allowing users an easy
way to keep tabs on their network.

One could say the initial ruckus was just an over-reaction from
users resistant to change and, now that they have become accustomed
to the power of the new features, they are happy for the new
capabilities. In the long run, the controversy wasn't really an
issue.

However, I'm betting the Facebook team would prefer to never have to
live through that period again. And I'd be willing to bet most other
development teams would prefer to avoid massive petitions and
nationwide mainstream press coverage in the same way. Nobody wants a
backlash. So, while things have worked out well for the Facebook
team, learning from what they went through is important for all of us
involved in designing excellent user experiences.

2007-07-11T11:40:00.000-07:00

Smirnoff goes mobile to back Signature campaign
by Darren Davidson Brand Republic 09-Jul-07, 17:00

LONDON - Diageo is launching a dedicated mobile site for its Smirnoff vodka brand, backing a new global campaign for the drink.

The new service, created by AKQA, will launch in the UK and then roll out globally, market by market. The site can be viewed at
http://mobile.smirnoff.com.

The mobile platform, which launches this week, is part of a wider global campaign called 'Signature', which broke through JWT last week.

The £1.5m 'Signature' campaign launched last week in the UK following a soft launch in Ireland earlier this year. It includes a TV and cinema ad.
The mobile platform offers users a Nightlife Guide, where consumers can choose from a broad selection of UK pubs and bars based on what they might be in the mood for.

'Pocket Bartender' provides users with a collection of signature Smirnoff cocktails, as well as the opportunity to view the new TV ad via their phone.
The mobile platform will be promoted by a digital advertising campaign which will run across key mobile portals and lifestyle sites such as Vodafone Live!, Orange, 3 and FHM.com.

Michelle Klein, global digital marketing director at Smirnoff, said: "We are very excited by the initiative. The mobile platform presents consumers with an unexpected and original way to engage with the Smirnoff brand.

"It offers a really effective service for people to use when they are out and looking for a great bar to visit or even just at home with friends and trying to find a delicious cocktail recipe."

2007-07-11T03:06:00.000-07:00

The Psychology of Social Computing: What Best Explains the Success of Facebook?

http://www.socialcomputingmagazine.com/viewcolumn.cfm?colid=458

amazing Facebook stats

2007-07-11T03:00:00.000-07:00

Pretty incredible facebook stats:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/500hats/sets/72157594550002847/

camera phones eh? God love 'em... ;-)

2007-07-09T08:16:00.001-07:00

Analyzing the Facebook Platform, three weeks in

2007-07-05T07:50:00.001-07:00

Fascinating article by Marc Andreessen about Facebook opening its APIs...

http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/06/analyzing_the_f.html

IT Support (Dr Seuss style)

2007-07-05T07:23:00.000-07:00

If a packet hits a pocket on a socket on a port,
and the bus is interrupted as a very last resort,
and the address of the memory makes your floppy disk abort,
then the socket packet pocket has an error to report.

If your cursor finds a menu item followed by a dash,
and the double-clicking icon puts your window in the trash,
and your data is corrupted 'cause the index doesn't hash,
then your situation's hopeless and your system's gonna crash!

If the label on the cable on the table at your house,
says the network is connected to the button on your mouse,
but your packets want to tunnel on another protocol,
that's repeatedly rejected by the printer down the hall,
and your screen is all distorted by the side effects of gauss,
so your icons in the window are as wavy as a souse,
then you may as well reboot and go out with a bang,
'cause as sure as I'm a poet, the sucker's gonna hang!

When the copy of your floppy's getting sloppy on the disk,
And the microcode instructions cause unnecessary risc,
Then you have to flash your memory and you'll want to RAM your ROM
Quickly turn off the computer and be sure to tell your mom!

Top ten MMOs

2007-07-05T01:57:00.000-07:00

Not all RPGs...

http://gigaom.com/2007/06/13/top-ten-most-popular-mmos/

Ten Ways to Kill Good Design

2007-07-04T09:03:00.000-07:00

--> Feature Article: Ten Ways to Kill Good Design
    By Kim Goodwin

It's a given that most of you reading this article believe design
is the right tool for translating market needs into tangible product
specifications. Unfortunately, the best designs and the best
intentions won't always lead you to success, because the problem
goes beyond your product and beyond your design or development
process. Building better, more innovative, and more profitable
products requires organizational change on a deep and difficult
level.

When design pilot projects fail, it endangers everyone's willingness
to adopt design methods. Over the course of doing hundreds of design
projects and teaching our methods to more than a thousand people,
we've seen that several reasons for failure keep showing up. A
discussion of these reasons follows, along with some solutions to
consider. Let's start with the easiest ones and work our way up.

> 1. Poor choice of pilot project

When you first bring design into an organization, you generally have
to convince others of its efficacy. The best way to do this is
usually to pick a pilot project and demonstrate how design helped it
succeed. However, if you pick the wrong project and can't demonstrate
success, you will certainly lose credibility and may also lose any
further chance of persuading people.

Choose a relatively small project with a clearly measurable outcome.
For example, if a particular part of your application causes 30% of
your tech support calls, fix that part and track the decrease in
calls. It's also a good idea to choose a type and size of project
your company has done several times before, so you can show the
savings in development time and cost. Also, avoid ill-conceived
projects -- if it's a product or function no one will ever use,
there's only so much design can do to help.

> 2. Not having one consistent project owner

Every design project needs a business decision-maker associated with
it -- someone who can make trade-off choices between desirable design
directions and difficult implementation issues, and will shepherd
the product from concept to completion. In many cases, this is a
product manager. Companies that try to do this by committee, with no
single person responsible for the project's outcome, seldom succeed.
Everyone thinks everyone else is responsible, so the process
proceeds very slowly, if at all. Changing project ownership part way
through the process is also an enormous risk, particularly if the
new project owner has not been involved until now; you will need to
revisit every project decision, and may end up throwing out quite a
few and starting over. This will ad to a perceived project failure,
and will devalue the design process in everyone's eyes.

So, senior managers should choose a single project owner and be sure
that the person is someone you're not planning to reassign in a couple
of months.

> 3. Incomplete design or insufficient design communication

The best design in the world won't get built if it's incomplete or
undocumented. When clients ask us to design to the framework level
(major navigation and interactions) but not provide the detail, they
are much less likely to succeed than our clients who ask for bitmaps
and widgets. This is generally because the people who have to fill
in the rest are not interaction designers, and don't have the
appropriate skills and context to fill things in. Likewise, your
documentation must be very complete, because if anything is open to
interpretation, trust me, it will be interpreted. It might seem
obvious to a designer that my bank's ATM shouldn't offer me the
ability to withdraw from a money market account if I don't have one,
but it apparently wasn't obvious to the people who built the ATM
software.

This kind of problem is relatively easy to fix; be sure to assign
designers for the duration of the project, and make sure there's
someone on the team responsible for providing detailed
documentation.

> 4. Not getting buy-in from top executives

Every time we interview stakeholders on a project, we ask whether
there are any executives higher up the chain of command who need to
approve the project's direction. One of our worst nightmares is being
told that no one else will influence the project, then having an
executive we've never met suddenly object to our direction. On one of
our projects a few years ago, we were told that a senior executive
didn't need to be part of the process. Sure enough, two days before
the end of a multi-month project, he didn't like the design because
he hadn't gone down the path with us. Several months of formal
usability testing finally convinced him, but the opportunity cost to
our client was tremendous.

Interviewing top executives at the start and involving them at each
decision point will help you avoid this.

> 5. The wrong people doing design

If you wanted to persuade people that martial arts were an effective
means of self-defense, would you hire me, or Jackie Chan? (Believe
me, you'd want Jackie Chan.) Design won't take root in your company
unless people see it done by experts. The vast majority of companies
I've seen try to bring design in-house by telling some programmers
that they're now designers, or by having the product manager do some
design in his spare time.

Although the need for designers varies during the project life
cycle, design is a full-time job as well as a profession that
requires many years of practice. Good interaction designers are hard
to find, but they do existóhire them!

> 6. Not committing resources to design

Even with the right pilot project and the right people doing the
design work, if the management team doesn't provide support in other
ways, it's much harder to succeed. We often see companies that won't
give designers access to users, or that won't allow enough time to
understand the problem, solve it to the level of detail required,
and document it in a reasonable way. Unfortunately, until they've
seen its value demonstrated, many people view design as a cost,
rather than a savings (and more importantly, a strategic advantage).

Think about mini-projects you can use to demonstrate value, even
with little or no budget. Use those small successes to ask for
resources on a modest pilot project with an obvious opportunity for
gain.

> 7. Failure to separate innovation from renovation

If you have one product manager and one development team, it makes
sense for them to be responsible for the visionary new release 3.0
as well as the 2.x maintenance releases, right? Wrong. When that
version 2.x deadline looms, no one has time or attention to spare for
what the next major release should be, so the future product always
gets shortchanged.

Instead, carve off a small team to focus solely on designing 3.0 in
parallel with the implementation of maintenance releases. This might
mean you throw away a little more of that 2.x code when you build
3.0, but it will save calendar time and increase what you can
accomplish for the big upgrade.

> 8. The inmates are running the asylum

You knew this had to be in the list somewhere, right? It's here
toward the end of the list because it's a big problem that takes a
long time to solve. When we say the inmates are running the asylum,
it means the programmers are making business decisions that should be
made by executives. In most cases it's not intentional, and the
majority of people are unaware of the extent to which it happens.
However, every time a programmer says "That's not technically
feasible," he's just made a business decision that's invisible to
most people, since "not technically feasible" really means "not in
the tiny amount of time or with the constraints I know you're going
to give me."

It's a designer's job to mediate this conversation. Changing the
process on paper is relatively easy, but changing the attitudes and
behaviors behind the process takes more time and effort. One way to
help things along is to make sure that design doesn't report in to
engineering, but instead reports to a cross-silo manager who can
balance marketing and engineering perspectives. Ultimately,
responsibility for fixing this problem lies with senior managers,
who have to ask, "What would it take to make it technically
feasible?"

> 9. Unrealistic expectations

I can't even count how many times someone has called me up to say
"We need to design or drastically redesign the product that
generates 100% of our revenue, and we want to ship it in two
months." For some reason, Fast Company or some other part of the Web
boom hype created this perception that you can design, build, and
launch a successful product faster than you can get a new driver's
license. While this may have been true for a couple of people who
got lucky, it's simply not true in most cases.

We seldom encounter this myth in companies that build physical
products, because they're much better acquainted with the reality
that spending up-front time ultimately results in more efficient
manufacturing and more profitable products.

Unfortunately, many companies assume their problems come with the
territory, just like traffic noise comes with living in a big city.
Have you ever noticed, though, how much more annoying the traffic
noise is when someone points out that it's there? You can do the
same thing: bring the points of pain to the attention of the
management team, identify the cause, and propose design as your
solution. It may take a while to have an impact, but be persistent,
tie the problems to dollars, and you'll eventually get through.

> 10. Unhealthy corporate culture

For design to work in an organization, that organization has to be
basically functional. By this, I mean there needs to be open
communication at all levels of the organization, clear delineation
of responsibility and authority, competent staff, and trust tween
managers and their teams. Some degree of risk-taking must be
acceptable; otherwise, no one will be willing to stand up and say,
"I believe we need to do this." In healthy companies, certain kinds
of mistakes are OK, as long as people learn from them Senior
managers challenge their teams to do better, but never ask the
impossible, and they give their teams clearly stated problems to
solve, instead of specifying solutions.

If your company lacks these qualities, work on fixing these major
issues first before you try to implement design. Again, you'll
succeed in getting management's attention if you tie these problems
to dollars: talk in terms of lost productivity, employee turnover,
and project delays. A good human resources manager will be your ally
in this.

> One step at a time

When you're trying to bring design into an organization, it's
important to realize that you're not just changing a process -- you're
attempting to change the company's culture and dearly held beliefs.
It's entirely possible to change any company, but it will take a
clear goal for where you want to be, a plan for getting there,
executive sponsorship, and excellent communication about the
benefits of change. Change on this scale isn't easy, but isn't that
true of just about everything that's worth doing? Find allies within
your organization, look to designers outside your organization for
moral support, and don't forget to celebrate your successes, because
you will have some. Every time I get discouraged about the state of
the industry, I remind myself that five years ago, no one knew what
interaction design was except those of us who did it. Today,
marketers, developers, and executives call me up asking for
interaction design. We must be doing something right, after all.


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Kim's article is also available on our web site at:
http://tinyurl.com/2478sp

Kim's article was originally published on the Cooper site at
http://tinyurl.com/29sjzu

2007-07-02T07:34:00.000-07:00

"Chris de Wolfe: Looking at the bigger picture

MySpace is already the world's largest website. Now, with its expansion into television, it's gunning for YouTube. And, it might just help save the planet, too. The site's co-founder Chris DeWolfe tells Ian Burrell about the long-term revolution..."

http://news.independent.co.uk/media/article2725889.ece

2007-06-19T07:56:00.001-07:00

Pioneering a User Experience (UX) Process

2007-06-19T07:37:00.000-07:00

Guerrilla HCI: Using Discount Usability Engineering to Penetrate the Intimidation Barrier

2006-12-14T04:50:00.001-08:00

“Your existing cooking-pots may allow you to cook all the meals you have always cooked, but if one day you want to cook dim sum, then you may need to get a proper steamer system.”
Edward de Bono, Parallel Thinking

2006-12-08T06:50:00.001-08:00

"Essentially, customers come to the web to do one of two things: save time or spend time. What we present to them and how we present it has to fit what they're trying t do, which is why research and analytics is so important to the site - not just the design, but also the content we display and how to display it." Andy Hyatt, digital partner at Dialogue DLKW, talking about a site they built for the Halifax, quoted in Revolution November 2006

2006-12-08T06:46:00.000-08:00

Thought it was about time I created an online resource for quotes, links, images etc etc that I come across in the whacky world of London new media...