realDesign: Design Stories About the Real - world/teams/products/users

OK. My first copy of Make Magazine arrives in the mail. The first non advert thing that I read stops me in my tracks. It is an article titled: Make Like Picasso. And here is the money quote attributed to Pablo Picasso: 

 
 

 "When you make a thing, a thing that is new, it is so complicated making it that it is bound to be ugly. But those that make it after you, they don't have to worry about making it. And they can make it pretty, and so everybody can like it when others make it after you."

This quote seems significant to the work we do, and the way we do that work.  

 

Share your thoughts !

So , I realize that the first thing I should do is go do  a blog search on facebook activity feed and read everything that everyone else has written on this topic. But I want to catalog my impressions of wha activity feed is doing before I go fishing. 

The first thing it is doing, clearly, is that puts all the activities my friends are doing into a bucket and then it shows them to me slowly one at a time. Makes the site sticky. I am riveted to the site because its showing me  the slo-mo-play-by-play for all the sheep throwing etc. Great. 

In addition, it seems to differentiate between push and pull.  Not every activity from some of my friends is shown to me on activity feed. If I go to their profile page, I can see these activities - so they are not hidden from me. However, they dont show up on my activity feed. Why not? One possible explanations is that facebook is somehow calibrating my interactions with my friends and is showing more more of some friends activities than others.  This is an interesting and scary possibility.  Another (more likely) possibility is that I just miss some of the activities it doles out because I am not logged on. Yet another possibility is that it looks at how many friends each person has and ranks the activities of my friends who have many many other friends lower than the actitives of my friends who have just a few other friends. All of these seem plausible from my experience of the site, but the middle option seems most likely. 

Blog Search - here  I come.. 

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Are there standard icons now for blog , wiki, forum , sharing, comments... these web 2.0 concepts ? On a related note , why are there no icons for User Interface Design, Visual Design, Usability Testing, User Research ????

When is it OK to ask someone to be your friend ?  I don't want to put someone else in the position of having to say "I don't -want- to be your friend" .  I have been asked to be a friend of people I have not even emailed - they are "cold calls" for friendship from within the company. I don't know what to do with these. I like to have at least known the person virtually before I befriend them. But there is no way I could have told them this before they asked to be my friend. I am also not looking to abandon my arbitrary criterion for facebook friendship (prior email or real contact).

This makes me wonder about the friend requests I am sending out.  I  look for cues about who wants to be contacted. That person whose profile is private and has no picture - best not to send her a friend request. Oh, look she uploaded a picture, so now I -can- send her a friend request (even though it is a picture of her throwing her hands in front of her face -not- wanting her picture taken). Are we evolving a sophisticated mechanism of communicating the level of contact  we want with our friends ? [parenthetically: Maybe none of this matters, because the annoying people from your high school will be least adept at interpreting your signs anyways...:)]. I also look at the  number of friends that someone has. Some one with three hundred friends is not likely to be upset if one more peripheral acquaintance requsts facebook-friendship. I look at the kinds of friends someone has. For instance, I carefully refrained from asking my high school age nieces and nephews to be my friends - all their 200 other friends are other high school kids. (Turns out they sent me friend requests !) 

While there are mechanisms that allow me to control what people see of my facebook deeds, it involves the creation of dry lists, that may work well enough for objective criterion like a list of freinds who live in boston, but the idea of pulling together lists that carve up my friends along subjective dimensions like tolerance for bad humor seem daunting, tiring and somewhat distasteful. Besides, doing this would remove the element of whimsy from an app like facebook. One of its benefits is that it lets you see things about your friends that you do not at the moment have an avenue to see or share. Perhaps all this list making will take away from that.

I see some intelligence built into how facebook provides it activity feed - but leaving what various people are seeing about me to an algorithm that takes into account my facebook patterns seems scary and Orwellian.

And now for question two. After unintentionally sending sheep or merkats or whatever to your entire friends list, are you now more likely to read the text in a popup dialog? If tested, will facebook users prove to be more likely to read the text in popup dialogs that others?

Somehow, I have accumulated a very large number of emails in my various in-boxes.  This has resulted in an interesting behavior when I work with my Yahoo email client. [which I do like despite the "infinite-tab-problem (tm)].

Here is what happens. Every few days I switch back to the old client, select - all emails on the screen , delete most of them. I do this a few times. [I think I am trying to get to a steady state in terms of inbox size?].  Then I switch back to the 2.0 client.

The 2.0 client really needs a Select All Visible. The "visible" is implied when you are paginating through the pages in a conventional table. However, it gets translated literally , and incorrectly to Select All [rows in the table] in the 2.0 client. May be in 2.0 tables we really need two things, Select All , and Select All Visible (or Select first 10/50/100).

 

 

There exists a tight-coupling between every phase of the internet era and a set of buzz words. The omnipresent and overused buzz word for the web 2.0 era is - "Innovation".  My garden supply site , a respected business journal, and everyone in between wants to tell me about their innovations, how to innovate, who is innovating, why we are not innovating enough and much, much more.

Given all of this, I found it hard to resist buying and reading Scott Berkun's latest book "the myths of innovation". From reading his first book , The Art of Project Management, I expected this book to be pragmatic, realistic, entertaining and informative. I was not disappointed.

Myths of innovation is a book about the everyday work of designers and the way this work is perceived.  However, The Art  Project Management is about the effective management of the environment within which we, the designers, work.  While I learned a lot of new facts reading The Art, I found a lot of supporting evidence (if you will) for existing beliefs when I read The Myths. In addition to reaching for this book when I want  to use a quote or anecdote to make a point, I can also see my self using this book to analyze the innovation trajectory of projects that I am affiliated with.

The book is organized into ten chapters, each chapter focusing on debunking one myth. I have taken the liberty to translate the list into design parlance:

• Myth 1: Good Design is the Result of a Single Moment of Inspiration or Epiphany
• Myth 2: Winning Designs are Immediately Obvious
  
• Myth3: There is One Single Method to Get to Good Design
  
• Myth 4: People Love New Designs
• Myth 5: The Designer Works Alone
• Myth 6: Good Design Ideas are Hard to Find
• Myth 7: Your Boss Knows more about Design than You Do.
  (probably not, but he can create an environment where it is safe for you to innovate)
  
• Myth 8: Problem Statements Do Not  Matter (they do, phrasing the problem correctly can give you half the solution)
  
• Myth 9:  The Best Design Always Wins
  (no, the design that is optimum for a given situation and time - wins)
• Myth 10: New Designs are Always Good

 

Read the book ! 
And if you need further inducement, here is my  favorite quote from the book:
"An idea is not an innovation till it reaches people"

 

 You can read an edited and improved version at the xDesign Group Blog: design@sun

 

 

 

 

When I order books from India,  I really look forward to  receiving the parcel, packed in brown paper, with a  handwritten address and with about a million Gandhi stamps on it. Above Average actually did not arrive in such a parcel. I saw the book advertised when I was looking at one of the US sites where they sell books imported from India (Prabaas , Indiaclub) and pre-ordered it.

Despite the fact that it arrived in a regular old fed-ex packet, it was a wonderful read. :)  

There have been other books about the IIT experience. And like most  other reviewers, I like this one better. It is written by someone who reads, and  can write  well. Almost everything that needs to be said about the book, seems to have been said already, however there are two points I want to mention only because they possess the virtue of  whimsy.

• The hero of the book, in grad school in the US is utterly delighted that his girl friend back home now has access to email. However, what actually happens is that he writes these long detailed letters (as one is wont to sitting in the grad school cube or lab, waiting for inspiration to strike, late at night), and after several days receives a one liner in  response. I remember writing something long and soulful, to be told after a few days that the movie The Titanic sucked, or  to see yet another copy of some joke, a pointer to some web page , or worse yet a singing e-card. If I had been in grad school a few years earlier, my buddies in India would not have had email when I was in grad school (thus, I suspect, reducing meandering and thoughtful emails from me). If I had joined grad school later, my peers would have had much free-er access to emails - (and this, I suspect would have lead a more even handed email exchange). The inability to re-connect with email , because the other party has access to the technology but not at their leisure - is, I suspect one of the  experience that defines me temporally. 
  

• The other self referential point of whimsy I wanted to mention?
  My bus routes in Delhi - 620 , 615 - feature in the book!! If only some one would write a book with DTC route 603 - my bliss would be complete.

 
Above Average also has a nice website. and i wonder if Amitabha Bagchi is still tracking blogs that feature the name of the book  :) 

Did you know that your intra net portal has stages of maturity? It does! Based on a multitude of primary and secondary sources of research Avenue A | Razorfish  has published a model for how a corporate intranet matures.  Some of these will likely be familiar to you

• Stage 1: Homegrown set of  HTML pages that allow for easy sharing of information, often at the departmental or group level.
  
• Stage 2: The intranet portal in this stage has evolved into a company wide entity and uses technologies like ERP to enable self service of HR and Finance systems
• Stage 3: While they include the information sharing and self service aspects of the first two stages, these third stage portals highlight collaboration tools. Companies with a large proportion of knowledge workers are most likley to invest in collaboration or stage three intranets
• Stage 4: These intranets meet the needs of all users by deftly aggregating and prioritizing information based on the role, group, location etc. of the employee
• Stage 5: These portals improve on the enterprise portals in stage 4 by including highly visual and graphical display formats that update in real time and allow for creation of dashboards
• Stage 6: This final stage of intranet portal sites includes application that actually allow for employees to get their work done from applications embedded in the portal page. This stage is called the Consolidated Workplace.
  

If you found this article interesting, you may be interested in
 the information at: http://www.nngroup.com/reports/intranet/

Happy Reading.  

I love stationery. If  Stacey and Clinton ever appear at my door step and give me a credit card loaded with $5000.00 , I would try to ditch them at the earliest, and duck into the nearby Staples or Office Depot and splurge on notebooks , pencils , pens , sharpeners and the like. It goes without saying that "back-to-school" is turning into my favorite  season ....

One of the nicest finds this year is the stop signal sharpener.  It has a small button on the top, which you press down before you start sharpening. When the pencil is sharp and the point touches the end of the blade, the button pops up to let you know. And you are saved from over sharpening and thus breaking the lead etc..  Kids using the sharpener now have a cue that tells them when to stop. :). 

During my online journey to discover more about this sharpener I found a blog devoted to pencils etc. ! Maped,  the company that manufactures these sharpeners is  in France and has a nice web2.0 , flash filled website, complete with a carousel widget and pop-up bubble.  Gizmodo actually has  some entries on sharpeners (and yes , I will be sending them a tip about this one).

 I watched the amazing Pan's Laybrinth recently. A movie about a portal. Well, one that was created to transport a princess to the underworld. So my liking the film probably had more to do with the fact that the film was brilliantly made, than with the portal connection. :)

I wandered over to the Pan's Laybrinth website (webby award winner !) and while there, found that there were pages from the directors notebook. Apparently, he is in the habit of  putting his thoughts into a journal, and then years later in the midst of a project he will remember something he sketched that would be perfect for what he was currently creating. Take a look at this snapshot of the journal. Talk about content rich. Maybe I am a Luddite, but I just don't see someone being able to do this using, say a blackberry.

 

Now if they had  a FlyTop  pen (or the more grownup version by Logitech) and the paper that goes with it - they would have best of both worlds. The flexibility of paper, and with a one gesture upload all the goodness of Digitality (tm). I stumbled into this product about a year ago, and am surprised that it has not yet taken the world by storm. (...all it needs is a wireless chip..)

 

Maybe sometime in the future, the notepad portlet, will also connect to my physical notebook. Maybe I will be able to throw some of my portal pages on to the wall or white board, and some to my real desktop (surface of four legged table). I could place my digital pen notebook on top of the notepad portlet area, to upload the pages I have written. Maybe I am more of a Futurist than a Luddite.

Every once in a while someone will ask me what I do at Sun.  There is one elevator pitch that seems to work well with most people - including audiences at a conference and my high-tech-savvy-octogenarian-next-door-neighbors. And here is what I say : "My work involves making computers easy to use".

Getting into the next level of details can be tricky. Even if (especially if ?) I am talking to people who work in software.  This  OK-Cancel comic comes close to several conversations I have had in the past dozen years. ("So you don't implement the UI , and you dont provide the graphics ... so what exactly is it that you do again ???")

 

 

 

 

 

(Anyone remember that scene in Office Space? )

One of the great things about working with the Portal Server team was that they knew what services the User Experience person on the team could provide. Sure there have been times when they would have liked more true to life prototypes, or for the UI implementation to belong with the UI design group - but this is a higher and more informed level of discussion than "just give me the hex codes and images". Given that most of my team mates "get it" , I find myself even more unprepared for the casual job description conversation.

So the past two years that I have worked on the Portal Server I have :

• created user requirements based on data from customers
• created user interface flow and design specifications
• created story-boards that described how the UI would be used 
• worked with the implementation team to ensure that we cross all hurdles without sacrificing the user experience 
• conducted user tests
• reviewed user interfaces to see if the comply with Sun Standards and best practices
• talked to customers and customer facing folks to ensure that we were working on the right track
• worked with graphics on the visual aspect of the UI

Understandably its not easy to condense all of these into a pithy answer. Even within the  User Experience community, there is often debate about the same person designing and testing the user interface. So, I have simply resigned myself to an awkward conversation following my ease of use elevator pitch. Alternately, once I have delivered the pitch I look into the sky and say "look , a purple people eater" and dart away.

The ambiguity about what user experience folks do seems to happily co-exist with some irrational exuberance about what they can do for the bottom line. I leave you with a more recent OK-Cancel comic . :)  

 

The past two iterations of work on the  Portal Server Admin Console have been an interesting journey in design work.

We started by teasing the Portal Server Console out of the Identity Server Admin Console. Endless meetings with white boards filled with diagrams of everything that needed to be presented to the user in the console, and how they should be grouped.  At the end of all this we had a spanking new console with a navigation scheme that had a good amount of "scent". What is scent you say? It is a concept that Jared Spool uses, and that I happen to like. The idea is that a well designed website should let users know that they are on the right track. The 7.0 console had the ability to lead you to the places that you wanted to go. It also has the ability to allow you to find your way back there with ease. Denim was my friend those days.

The next iteration of work was adding the Visual Display Design Tool -  A Direct Manipulation Interface that lets the Administrator interact directly with what they are working on - a Portal Page. This advances the UI further along the continuum of task awareness (note: i did not say task based, task centric etc.. I should blog sometime about my reasons for avoiding those terms...). One of the unique tools I used  in this round of work was comics. I used them to tell stories of how the UI wuold be used, and to create story boards. I have often felt that conventional storyboards, are really just the boards. But add a talking head to it, fill in the comic blurb with information of the users intent or reaction : and you have a stand alone presentation that conveys what you need to, even if you are not there to walk people thuogh it. People seem to enjoy reading these storyboards. It was a lot of fun to do, and was a lot more effective in ensuring a shared understanding of the work!