In a nutshell – You know digg? Now tweetmeme collects and counts all the links that are posted to twitter. And the little badge top right of this posting says how often this blog posting has been referred to.  Or you can click the green retweet button to simply create a simple tweet referring to this article. </nutshell>

TweetMeme Button tells how to add such a badge to your pages. For my Roller blog I had to edit the _day template and add the following code to the heading of each blog posting:

<div class="tweetmeme">
  <script type="text/javascript">
    tweetmeme_url = '$url.entry($entry.anchor)';
    tweetmeme_source = 'mprove';
##  tweetmeme_style = 'compact';  
  </script>  
  <script
    type="text/javascript"
    src="http://tweetmeme.com/i/scripts/button.js">
  </script>
</div>

The source parameter is your twitter name that is used for the composed tweet: 'RT @name title link (via @tweetmeme)'. Then the tweetmeme class is used to move the div to the right. It is defined in the stylesheet file:

.tweetmeme {
  float: right;
  margin-bottom: 3px;
  margin-left: 3px;
  }

Happy retweeting.

PS_ already adopted by Think Thin, GullFOSS, Student Views, Reviews Interactive

(photo by patella)

Sun Microsystems is sponsoring a party for students studying in fields related to computer science (informatik), including any computing field, mathematics, life sciences, physical sciences, earth sciences, and just about any field that involves simulation, number crunching, and/or data processing (which is pretty much all of them).

The main reason for the party is to have fun, so tell your friends and come on down.  The only requirement to get in is a student ID.  The other reasons for the party are to promote the International Supercomputing '09 Conference happening that week, to promote Sun Microsystems technologies, and to give students an opportunity to talk directly with Sun employees about whatever.

more info and (free) registration

Here are some more impressions from Sun VDI 3 at JavaOne. <via the singing fat bloke>

This is big – more than 20.000 personal virtual machines are waiting for the attendees of JavaOne and CommunityOne at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.

See also VDI 3 @ JavaOne on Dirk's blog and the background story on the desktop virtualization wiki.

When Peter approached me a few weeks ago to work on the UI design for the next release of Sweet, I had just started on twitter in order to understand what all the fuzz is about. Well, I cannot say I get it, but at least I got some interesting links that I had missed otherwise.

Now Sweet is our internal microblogging service, based on open source laconi.ca. You can try out laconica at indenti.ca or take a look at the before state_

It is not possible to significantly change a project in mid air – but this is exactly what I did by tweaking the CSS and a few images to create a pleasant and inviting design for Sweet. Note the logo (done with creatr.cc), the color scheme, the layout, the text counter, the tabs, the font changes, and the tag cloud in the after image. BTW_ the bird in the tree indicates that a tweet is also visible to the public on twitter.

Paying attention to the 'design details' can even improve the usability of such a project. A professional design increases the perceived quality and therewith the user experience. Since the relaunch we have more users and we even figured out that there was another installation of laconica running inside Sun -- they are now planing the migration to Sweet.

All this took me less than a week. I learned a lot about dirty CSS hacks, and got in touch with 2 nice colleagues at Sun whom I never met in person. Peter was a kind of project lead, and Olof the engineer behind the curtain. And guess what, our main communication tool was... Sweet!

> internal URL: http://do.sfbay.sun.com/sweet/

ok, let's see where to start my little report on the Information Architecture Konferenz – with K and Z – because it was mostly the German IA community coming together for it's annual conference. I must start with the lovely venue, the new Riverside Hotel in Hamburg on top of the river Elbe. That was a perfect location for 200 IA folks attending the 2-day conference last weekend.

Should I write for the web and start with the highlights? Or should I keep my fingers crossed and hope that you continue to read (or at least skip) to the end? Anyway. Mr. IA Institute, Louis Rosenfeld, gave the opening keynote on Web Analytics and User Experience (slides) – a call for data driven people to consider the Why – and a call for designers evaluate the What.

"It's not much use to know what is happening if you don’t know why.
You can’t know why things are happening if you don’t know what is happening."

In the afternoon I was skeptical about the talk "Design und praktischer Einsatz von UI Patterns" (slides). And I was not disappointed. I do not want to understand, why information architects follow just the design patterns approach rather then using the much broader notion of Christopher Alexander, BTW_ a real architect of the 1960s and 70s. [Resources on Patterns]

Claudia Urschbach made us shout "eya" when a pig shows up on her slides. I was not first. I did not get the beer. But I got vivid  impressions from web design work at the BBC in London. They are heading towards the semantic web by generating single web pages for each and every actor or singer and band on the radio or TV and each and every episode of their soap operas, or shows or you-name-it. They expect to get a hyperlinked network where e.g. the website for a cooking show can link to the BBC page of their singing celebrity guest.   (slides)

On Sunday we had two presentations on agile software development and information architecture. Oliver Emmler and Wolf Nödinger gave a very good example by applying agile philosophy on the presentation itself. "What do I want to say? How many time units? Hmm, does not fit in 30 minutes, so let's skip the history of extreme programming and have an interactive part with the audience instead." I liked that. Here are the (slides) of the other talk on agile IA.

Persuasive web design and pervasive information architecture. I am just glad that these come from two different talks. Sebastian Deterding talked about the relation between usability and motivation. Poor usability is less of a problem if you are motivated to accomplish a certain goal. (But this is no excuse for bad design.) On the other hand, a website can persuade a user in the sweet instance when the user's attention is focussed on an issue (eg. her CO2 footprint in dopplr) and an action button is offered (here_ donate to plant some trees).

Pervasive Information Architecture impressed by the presentation style. Andrea Resmini used the zooming UI capabilities of prezi.com for his closing keynote. Give it a try and you can imagine the wow-effect it made on the audience.

But the ultimate highlight of the conference was Peter Boersma's invited talk on user experience deliverables. He extended the common view of user stories, wireframes, mood boards!, usability reports etc. by pitch presentations, product launch activities, and management documents like strategy papers, risk and planning documents, and requirements engineering.  You might wonder why this is the highlight! Well, it was quiz time. An incredible show regarding the various deliverables of user experience. Definitely worth my trip from Hamburg to Hamburg ;-)  

> collection of presentations online

Each and every of my endeavors starts with an index page. A title, a logo, some ideas, related info, more stuff added over time, a log, and sooner than later the thing becomes a substantial project. This approach worked out fine for me for almost 1 1/2 decades now. First in the GoLive team in the late 1990s, where we developed a WYSIWYG web editor. Then the intranet for StarOffice' user experience team. And today I am still using GoLive to create and write on web pages for my projects.

All this is along the lines of the original vision of Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau to create a read/write web. Some time has passed, and their vision never came true. At least not in a way that could be called elegant or straight forward. Instead we see a cyber-landscape of wikis, blogs, microblogs and other social software that empower "users" to "generate content." Wrong perspective _BTW.

For the VDI project I've changed my habits a little. I set up a blog internal to Sun and start with a blog entry, a tag, some ideas, related info, more stuff added over time, and sooner than later the thing becomes a substantial project. The advantages are the same as in the early web zero-dot-nine days. I do not have to spend extra effort in communication, while colleagues can see what is happening and can provide feedback.

Here is a screenshot of my internal blog at Sun:

Tags are assigned to all entries, and the resulting tag cloud provides quick navigation for the blog. Concept diagrams, design sketches, and even photos from whiteboard scribblings are stored and shared on the blog. Other content like wiki pages are linked, as well as classical intranet pages for stuff that does not easily fit here.

I am not blogging. I say it again, I am not blogging. I just use the internal blog as a low key content management system; and that approach has proven to be useful for me and the team I work with.

>> VDI UX Story: Part 1: Concept Workshops | Part 2: User Research || To be continued...

Some time ago I've created a planet of all design, usability and accessibility blogs at Sun. That makes it easy to check and subscribe what's going on in this area. Now it was a snap to add Oracle's Usable Apps and Luke Kowalski's Blog as well.

Sun & Oracle User Experience Design

enjoy
Matthias

Some time ago I attended the User Research Friday in San Francisco. For short, research is a very important early step of user experience design work. You need to know and understand the world of the users. Otherwise don't expect to design and develop a system that is of any use to them. Usability might be good, but it does not matter if it's not useful at all... [Well, I do not dive deeper into this discussion, otherwise I have to become philosophic.]

For Sun VDI 3 we conducted a few customer meetings that turned out to be very important to gain an understanding of the context of desktop virtualization. Note that this are not focus groups, or scripted Q&A sessions. They are open informal discussions on the current situations on site. I remember the system administrators of a scientific research lab with several visiting PhD students a year. Each of them needed a PC...  Another one was admin at an online store selling lots of toys in the Christmas season. Their call center is staffed with many 'agents'. During change of shifts it is really the critical point to keep queues short on the phone lines.

All this leads to certain questions on our side, e.g. How is a user assigned to a virtual machine? Does it belong to her personally? Or is it reused when the next employee logs in? How long does it take to recycle a virtual machine? What are the general pool policies?  etc.
In order to come up with reasonable answers it is important that you listen to your users. But do not simply build what they say. They are experts in their domain. You are the system designer and have to create a system that fits the context(s), solves a problem, and is easy (enough) to use. Hence - the goal is to build what the user needs.

>> VDI UX Story: Part 1: Concept Workshops || Part 3: Power of the Web

About a year ago I joined the Desktop Virtualization team at Sun as an User Experience Architect. I knew Sun already from my previous job on OpenOffice.org/StarOffice, and also a few of my new team mates which gave me a kick-start. But the area of desktop virtualization was completely new to me. So you can read this as an experiment how to dive into a new domain with just some user experience methods and team collaboration tools in your back pocket.

One of the tools is the concept workshop. It is a meeting that takes at least half a day and that can also be conducted over several days. It involves all engineers of a specific area, and as far as the user interface or general concepts are concerned also my participation. The dynamics is hard to explain, but we start with a topic and distributed expectations and knowledge and end with a common understanding of what we want to accomplish and how to get there. A moderated pace and lots of space on multiple whiteboards are important aspects for successful workshops. As shared knowledge is very transient in nature, we capture the results by taking photos of the whiteboards and transforming the important aspects into diagrams, concept maps, or white papers. They are stored on the team wiki or in internal blogs, so that everybody can refer to the results and add the latest twists.

Here is one of my favorites examples to give you an idea. It covers the cluster install process of Sun VDI 3 on at least 3 servers. And because it did not fit on one whiteboard the image below is a stitched version.

The outcome of the initial workshop in May 2008 was an object model for Sun VDI (users, user groups, token cards, pools, desktops, desktop providers, ...), actions on those objects (create, add, assign, login, ...) and task flows or scenarios (sequences of actions to accomplish certain goals). Together with some estimations on the expected number of objects in the system this was the raw material to start designing the user interface.

Another benefit of concept workshops should also be mentioned. Especially during the early stage of a project, workshops help to define a project language for the team. Furthermore, different mental wave lengths are adjusted and the people are enabled to work together -- even remotely. This matters in an international team such as the VDI team with engineers from Ireland, Spain, Mexico, France, and Germany at two main sites. The extended team also includes people from India, the US, and Canada.

>> VDI UX Story: Part 2: User Research | Part 3: Power of the Web