–Engage

The alternative title for this piece could be, “The Dangers of On-Demand Software Services.”

The premise for this article is that due to the properties of the technology and business models of On-Demand Software Services (ODSS), there is a great risk that ODSS corporations sacrifice quality.

More below, but first some background
On-Demand Software Services (ODSS), formerly known as Application Service Providers (ASPs) is a software product that does not require any installation on the customer’s machines. SaleForce.com has become the recent poster child for ODSS trying to capture the lucrative and competitive Customer Relationship Management (CRM) market from the much more expensive enterprise solutions of Oracle, SAP and of course Siebel. They have been successful because they help small to mid-sized companies get the same level of software capabilities but without the heavy overhead that comes with an installed enterprise solution like the ones mentioned above.

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The included PDF documented is a scan of the article that I published in ““, a journal published by ACM’s SIGCHI.

Enjoy!

Aesthetics and Interaction Design

This is is a part of a presentation that Robert Reimann (Bose Corporation) and myself gave at the IDSA 2005 National Conference on Aug 27, 2005.

A History of Interaction Design (IxD).

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Ever feel like you live in an alternate universe? Everything you read on and offline tells you, we are living in a beautiful age of technological innovation and true belief in design … Then you walk into your office’s conference room, and it’s like walking into the Matrix.

So like Neo, you spend your days “taking out your neighbors garbage” (classic Smith voice), but at night well, you write blog entries, and scour the blogsphere for signs of hope as you just wait for someone to pluck you from the machine and drop you into the land of BDTU, where Businesses use Design and Technology in a symbiotic ballet to achieve User bliss.

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As usual my buddy Luke does all the hard work, so I can use his stuff for further commentary. Thanx!

This time he both did prep work before the Web 2.0 panel by BayCHI and then did a great summation report.

There are some themes that help peple to define Web 2.0 and what still remains unanswered is my favorite question, “now what”? This is especially interesting from the IxD perspective. So I have a few questions to help spur the conversation along.

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Chris Gee, has a blog that he also uses to podcast called The Prepared Mind. His third episode was a podcast interview of me.

Also, of interest in the blog, is an interview-podcast of GK VanPatter, who co-leads the NextD organization.

Today, Wired.com published an article entitled, You Say You Want a Web Revolution. The article makes what I would call a brash statement touting the revolutionary properties of AJAX. AJAX–the term coined by February essay”>Jesse James Garrett in his February essay– is a technique for creating richer (read more dynamic) browser-native presentations by requesting XML from a server, to then be used to dynamically change a screen’s layout, information, style, etc., without the need to refresh the entire screen. The claim is that this functionality brings desktop application behaviors to the web-browser. The article then says that like the early Netscape 4 paradigm which also touted “the new platform” for applications, that Microsoft should be scared by this technology, which they themselves helped to create, as it is a threat to their uni-platform approach to desktop applications.

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I will be presenting with Robert Reimann (more about Robert below) the Interaction Design Track seminar at the IDSA 2005 National Conference: reAction.

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