–Engage

Bruce Nussbaum, the design evangelist and managing editor at BusinessWeek, asks people on his blog why aren’t designers out there doing more to create social change.

An attempt at such a drastic envisioning was done in a book called “Next Jerusalem”. It is a compliation by Public Policy people, Landscapers, Architects, Urban Planners, Sociologists, etc. Quite an amazing work when you consider both the breadth of roles and the daunting task of the project.

I totally agree with Bruce that designer’s sense of empathy and their proceses of envisioning, validating, and studio critique would go a long way in helping the situation in some ways.

The pessimist in me though feels that there are certain constraints in this design puzzle that are beyond the total skills of designers. There is so much anger on top of self-righteousness that it would be hard for a “design” solution to be any more effective than any other methods previously tried. That’s just me.

I use Digg (Digg is a social news/content site) religiously, but for the life of me I can’t figure out how it works. I love Digg. It generally is an easy way for me to get access to stuff that I wouldn’t normally see. Most of it is “a waste of my time”, but about 25% of it is stuff that I’m glad I have seen, and of that 25% I may actualy read another 25% of those articles. Meaning, I really only read 6 of every 100 items I see, and at that, when i put a number to it, that seems really really high. it is probably less than that.
Of the 25% that “interest me”, maybe I digg 10% of those, meaning I digg about 2/100 items I am interested in.

What is confounding me is why do I hit the “Digg!” button. I mean what does it mean that it is “dugg” anyway? I do know that the more something is “Dugg” the higher up on the front page for that topic it will be meaning more people will see it and then have more of a chance to see it, right?

But why do I “Digg” it? Do I really care if it is on the front page? Do I want to give the original poster some affirmation or appreciation for posting it? Do I care if others read it? Do I just want to give my “me too”?

I’m not sure I understand the underlying motivations that drives me to digg or not to digg something. I’d be interested in other people’s thoughts.

Today my interview with Joshua Porter (AKA Bokardo) came out as part of the UITips Newsletter put out by User Interface Engineers. The topic is RIAs and AJAX.

This interview is a way to give people insights into how I think about designing RIAs and AJAX applications. If they want to learn more they can come to the UI11 conference where I’m co-teaching a workshop with Bill Scott (AJAX Evangelist @ Yahoo) this October 9-12 in Cambridge, MA. If you sign up (and I hope you do), please use discount code MALOUF.

The entire conference is an amazing opportunity to really get a deep dive over 5 days into many different aspects of user experience design.

C|Net ran an interesting strategic planning article and its effect on design choices while looking at Yahoo and Google maps.

The underlying premise of the article is that on one side you have a group that is just building new products in a hurry to just see where they land and then if the core stabilizes they’ll begin to put effort forward to try to integrate those successful products where appropriate–That would be Google.

In the other corner is Yahoo, which focuses on cores as well, but with a more stronger integrated model. They are also stronger at completing the feature picture that users/consumers are used to, and this is made VERY apparent in their Mapping offering compared to Google.

This take is an interesting one because it demonstrates how important an overarching design and business strategy is to the design process. While both styles have value and have certain levels of success, it can be argued that they equally bifurcate the total (very large) marketplace across these lines. Maybe, there are 2 different markets even within these fairly horizontal sets of features and consumer tools. But what is more important is that their success in these areas are probably directly linked to the clarity of their business and design strategies.

Having a clear vision and direction allows you to create a single line of experiences that can be connected for the end-user. The total experience then works as a reinforcement agent guiding users and building brand capital.

Normally I would stop there, but I want to add that Yahoo is looking in my estimate as if it is changing and will have to figure out how to bring people along while they make these changes. Their change is in their design direction in becoming richer, and their business direction in that they are moving everything towards their more socially connected model. It’s an interesting time for Yahoo users.

Google on the other hand is staying Google from soup to nuts. As stated in my previous article pitting the two mapping tools against each other, I do think that Google should worry a little bit, or start pushing the features on their system. The expectations from Expedia Maps (MSN Maps), Yahoo Maps and MapQuest (AOL) are pretty strong and while Google Maps “gets me there quickly” they lack the auxiliary features that users crave when it comes to mapping. This may lead to the inevitable “less is less” reality that creeps up on people.

Ok, I might come off looking a little bad here, but hopefully you all will be forgiving. …

I was walking down the street last week, when I noticed a woman in a very beautiful dress. I started thinking to myself, why is this dress more beautiful (my mind’s perception obviously) than any other dress around me. I mean obviously, the person in it has something to do with it, but a designer can’t really predict that part.

Then I noticed how the dress moves. It just didn’t lay there on this woman. It moved, creased, waved, poofed, stretched, etc. Whether it was because of the wind or because of the woman’s movements, the dress changed shape over (here it comes) time.

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