–Engage

Mark Vanderbeeken of Experentia, a former faculty member of the Iverea Interaction Design school, and current avid blogger was interviewed for the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT/ID). Great interview on Experience Design.

There are many great points in the interview to chew on. Mark has experience both in the US and in Europe–he currently resides in Italy. He speaks on the mark about the different social acceptance of socially mediated design and just how experience design has been used within public works projects in Europe. He also speaks on the difference focus of technology in the US (the PC) [I'd add the living room] vs. Europe (the mobile phone).

Mark defines one aspect of experience design diferently than I might. He includes the co-creation process between designer and user as a main defining aspect of experience design. I’m not so sure I would made “process” part of the definition. To me it is the target of thinking of the user as the center of an experience, not necessarily having them as a collaborator in the design process itself. It is also holistic in that it thinks about the total experience the user will have with a system related to a brand’s product, service, system.

In the end though the interview has some great insights, I really recommend that you give it a good read.

Enjoy!

As I mentioned in an earlier posting. I’ll be speaking at UI11 this year.

The Proceedings for UI11 are available for you to order (whether or not you attend the conference). My workshop on Designing RIAs with Bill Scott and my short talk about why RIAs are relevant for IxD are both in the proceedings.

If you CAN go to the conference, I really recommend it. Great folks are speaking like Luke Wroblewski, Gerry McGovern, and Nathan Shedroff. Of course you also get access to the wonderful insights of the UIE team under the principal vision of Jared Spool.

Come to Cambridge! It will be a blast.

But if you can’t at least you now know how to get some value out of the event.

Talk about timing … as Peter Merholz posts this rash in accurrate generalization i was about to post something completely to the contrary. Thanx for the push, Peter.

While I think the examples of Libraries and Museums are clear and precise to what Peter is alluding to:

truly embracing cross-channel and cross-media information architecture

I do think that the enterprise has HUGE examples that make Libraries and Museums pale in comparison.

The Motorola acquisition of Symbol is a great example of just one aspect of where this is all going. The other example is how Endeca is working with companies like Boeing and IBM to turn what was previously facetted search technologies into a revolutionary business analytics tools.

In the case of Boeng which is about warehousing and logistics management we are really looking at the combination of the two in a cross-channel IA program that makes the Library/Museum examples seem oh so small in importance.

But first we have to understand the problem set of any information management arena. What do we do with information:
We create it.
We distribute it.
We track it.
We manage it.
We report on it.
We edit it.
We delete it.
We capture it. (capture is different from creation in that information capture is about turning existing data sources into new information chunks).
We transact on it.
We collaborate on it.
…

But the most important thing we need to do is to UNDERSTAND it. Without understanding then we are no where when it comes to information. Companies that deal with any of the above pieces of information and don’t also in some way bring understanding to that information is not completing its picture.

Libraries and Museums are great examples that fit Peter’s needs because they are responsible by mission of their very institutions to bring meaning to the information that they curate. But on the industrial end, we need are still figuring out how to make meaning and understanding of all the information systems we need to manage.

Both Symbol and Endeca are organizations that are involved in pieces of the necessary total system that allow for information to move across many different channels to lead to better understanding. Hmmm? maybe that is the next M&A deal … Moto to buy Endeca … hmmm?

But while we don’t have the total picture in the enterprise, to say that there isn’t much going on there, seems a drastic generalization. I have worked on systems responsible for bringing information management through multiple channels in the enterprise across different platforms, devices, and contexts of use. Libraries and Museums are fun, but they are far from alone.

Leo Frishberg does a great review of Dan Saffer’s Designing for Interaction on UXMatters.com.

To sum up …

• Dan’s is an important contribution to building the discipline of IxD.
• It is a great read for many different audiences and levels of practice
• It could be more consistent around semantics and other definition issues, but these are distractions for people like me who are semantic-aholics — see upcoming article if you want to join me.

Check out this screencast of a project collaboration by Microsoft and the NY Times showing off some of the features in Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). Just like I mentioned in my previous piece on Microsoft Max WPF is going to radically change the way we can deliver network connected, distributed applications (AKA RIAs).

MS Max is a project by the folks at Microsoft to show off some of the new features in the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) currently available in .NET 3.0 beta. This thing is worth checkin’ out, especially if you have any interest in Rich Internet Applications.

The Photo application depicted above is one of many view types you get of your photos. They are playful and practical. You can set up your presentation of photos so that when those who you choose to share with come to your collection (which always remain resident on YOUR computer through MS Max’s peer-to-peer system) they see it how you want. I really like this “Mantle” view that frames different images into 3-D angled views and groups them.

The above screen is of the just release Blog Feed Reader. I really like where they are going, but want a lot more. What you see above shows you a very different and more engaging display style. I for one was reluctant to do RSS-like feeds b/c I didn’t want people loosing my designs, but with a reader template like this that is so dynamic, I have very little complaints about the content presentation. Most of my complaints are about content management. Everything is an individual feed. There are no groupings, taggings, categories, folders, collections of any kind. There is also no way to import or export an OPML file.

More important to the actual feature set is what concepts are being demonstrated within the application:

• New Photo Layouts
• Pencil Annotations for images
• Peer-to-peer sharing
• Resizing capabilities
• Animation for transitions
• New News dynamic layout

These up the ante on the “Rich” in RIAs.

Enterprise Web 2.0 is a good blog for those interested in the business2business side of Web 2.0. How will these trends in technology and processes and relationships work their way from the masses to the enterprise.

In a recent article entitled, The Coming RIA Wars the author, Dion Hinchcliffe, explores the success of AJAX and what competition seems to be brewing. The article is a good survey of backend or development platforms that engage most RIAs and make them scale, and what limitations they have.

Being the semantic freak that I am, I do take some offense to the lack of clarity portrayed by these articles. Confusing AJAX for something grander than what it really is, and further confusing backend development platforms as analagous to what AJAX or for that matter Flash is or does.

Dion speaks about Flex 2 and OpenLaszlo as if they are competitors to AJAX, which is really off, because they are as capable of serving up AJAX GUI as they are Flash GUI. Comparing Flash to AJAX makes sense, but not Flex to AJAX. Now, comparing Flex to OpenLaszlo does make sense as they are doing similar things for the backend and for developers.

Now, he does bring up XAML or more generally the Windows Presentation Foundation (Everywhere) that Microsoft is launching early next year. And he speaks about XUL. Both of these definitely compete with AJAX.

Regardless, with these clarifications the article is definitely worth a good read.

SD Times reported a BZ Research study that was done this past july.

Why are development managers interested in AJAX, and in related RIA and so-called “Web 2.0” technologies? The responses varied, but many cited the improved user interface experience due to AJAX’s elimination of postbacks.

Nearly three out of four software development managers say that they’re using or planning to use AJAX-based rich Internet application technologies.

Further …

Why are development managers interested in AJAX, and in related RIA and so-called “Web 2.0” technologies? The responses varied, but many cited the improved user interface experience due to AJAX’s elimination of postbacks.

Post backs are those annoying white periods between page refreshes that are required without AJAX if you want to get new information or do server side logic calls.

But Why AJAX over other technologies? To me the key is in the wealth of different server-based deployment options, most of which require little to no switch in your programmers core skills from what they are already doing. Java, .NET, Flex/ActionScript, Ruby, even PHP and ColdFusion can all be used in conjunction with AJAX.

While I do think that animated widgets are easier to build and manage in Flash due to its use of vector graphics and embedded fonts, the open nature of AJAX is really hard to beat.

I learned about this through AJAXIAN–one of my favorite AJAX blogs.

Absolutely NOTHING bug pure entertainment. If you ever made a Flash movie, this is for you!

uiGarden is a great UX Blog that translates the articles from English to Chinese and visa versa creating a nexus of these two communities.

The article I recently published was inspired by a thread on a similar topic on the IxDA list. Take a look at “The Place for Standards in Interaction Design (Ix) and UI Design (UID)”.

I want to thank Christina Li of uiGarden for asking me to convert the original IxDA discussion list post into this article.

David Armano of Digitas gives a great 4-point program for how to become a more compassionate designer. Budget not required.

Since I don’t think I’ve ever pointed to David’s blog before, I want to take this opp to tell everyone how great this blog is–Logic+Emotion. It covers aspects of Brand, Marketing and Experience Design relevant to all of us trying to create engaging experiences that meet market, brand, business and, heck! even user needs.

I particularly like how David uses illustrations to capture many of his points. I hope he is thinking of a book fo all of his visualizations. I think their great!

Flickr’s Map is a pretty nice idea. I know that Frappr.com mapped people and a photo of themselves, but this by Flickr is much more robust.

Mapping your Photos
To map your photos is pretty easy. Go to the “Organize” drop down and then choose “organize your photos”. On the organize screen, then select on the top menu the “Map” tab. (You can also choose the “Location” menu on the “Batch Organize” tab. Then find the photos you want to map and drag and drop them onto the map.

The drag and drop interaction is quite nice and it is even pretty easy to add photos to the same regional area where you might have already added others.

Exploring on the map
Use the “Explore” dropdown menu and then chose “Photos on a map”. Then they are presented with the photos of everyone on Flickr who did mapping. When you look at the map in the top left corner there is a list of pages and it gives you the total amount of images that are possibly viewable within the Flickr universe. It also animates when you load a zoom level to tell you to wait for a bit while the push-pins are coming up.

What I find so interesting to this is that a map with zooming capabilities is already 3 dimensional, but when you add paging to the mix you are adding yet a 4th dimension to the puzzle.

Then selecting the push-pins and scrolling through that spots images is yet 5th or possibly 6th dimension.

The later piece of selecting a push-pin and then scrolling the images seems to work for me. The paging a zoomed exposed area of the map feels REALLY odd to me. There are just so many pictures. In this case just mere 10′s of thousands, but at higher zoom points they are in the millions. With the “20+” signifier that you have a lot of pages to go through, it is not clear that the paging is JUST for push-pins at the current exposed area for the current zoom level? Does zoom level actually make a difference? i.e. would the # of images available for me to look through be different for X zoom level on page 3 vs. Y zoom level on page 3? Because there are SOOO many pictures it is very unclear as to the behaviors that I should expect. My last issue is that as you Page forward or backwards the same animation telling you to wait doesn’t kick in and it takes quite a long time to have an effect so you give up before anything happens.

In spirit I love the idea. I think that some of the publishers I’ve been dealing with like Schmaps and NowPublic will have an even easier time to find specific pictures for their systems.

I’m not too certain how I’ll use it yet. It might be nice for a company like Schmaps to integrate with this feature if there is an API for it and then give people access to the viewer for a host of images about their guides or if people are creating itineraries, or if World66.com with its wiki-style guidebook hooked into this, it might really start to become useful.

Eric Mattson was gracious enough to interview me for his Marketing Monger podcast series. In it I talk about RIAs, User Experience, Interaction Design, and others of my usual topics.

A special thanx to Jared Spool of User Interface Engineers (UIE) for the intro.

Listen to the podcast

Teh folks at Experientia pointed out Sr. Tim Berners-Lee call for calm around Web 2.0.

In general, I’m definitely a pragmatist, and “calm” is definitely a good thing, but I do have to say that it is exciting to well finally have something to get excited about.

In my estimation, while there were things going on in the past that were about connecting people like email and IM, I think we are experiencing new ideas that don’t just connect people, but use people’s connections in passive and active ways that are indeed different. It is not just about connecting, but doing it in a very subversive and grassroots way that is exciting.

What is further exciting, is that there is growth going on, and while I understand the fear of another bubble, I’d rather go through another 5 years of prosperity than continue the previous 5 years of boredom we had before.

So calm and rationality is nice, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t something new if just slightly askew from before going on.