Jeckecko

Muxtape

I made a Muxtape.

Diversions 81

• Bean
  “Bean is a small, easy-to-use word processor (or more precisely, a rich text editor), designed to make writing convenient, efficient and comfortable. Bean is Open Source, fully Cocoa, and is available free of charge! MS Word, OpenOffice, etc. try to be all things to all people. But sometimes you just want the right tool for the job. That is Bean’s niche.”
• VaryWell
  Inserting (whoops!) Interesting Flash interface.
• Letters & Numbers
  Nice design work. Some nice interaction as well.
• Alan Cook
  Really like the simplicity of Alan Cook’s photography portfolio. Eschews conventions in favour of getting the focus on the work itself.
• SeeShell
  SeeShell is an augmented Oyster Card (the RFID-enabled Underground ticket) holder which displays, over time, the journeys a rider has taken. Great stuff. Love the way this blends seamlessly with existing behaviour.
• Viget Inspire
  Not often I get excited about CSS/standards driven design these days. Viget’s Inspire blog is an exception though. The typography and overall look-and-feel is wonderful.
• Moodboard
  Some nice interaction design on this stock photography site (especially the ‘add to moodboard’ feature). Also good attention to detail on the visual design (my fave being the overlapping arrow on the add to moodboard prompt).
• GotoChina
  Just nice.

Here we go again…

Well it’s that time of the year again: SXSWi. Spoken like a veteran but in truth, this will only be my second visit. Just like last year, I’ll be joining all the cool kids at the Hampton Inn Downtown for geek breakfasts and then daily meanders to the convention centre.

As the event gets nearer, I’m filled with equal parts excitement and trepidation. Excitement at the sheer numbers of friends and colleagues that are heading over; A combination of both over the fact that I’m making my speaking debut; And genuine anguish about leaving Sarah and Jemima for a whole week. It’s all very sentimental I know, but I’m getting old so I’m allowed. I’m sure the Shiner Bock will help.

There’s lots going on isn’t there? Wow. Andy’s proposed trip to the Rodeo looks like a laugh. Cindy’s taken the bowling in to a new stratosphere of cool. And then there’s the Great British Booze Up. And if you need to know more, Jeremy’s Adactio Austin can help. Apparently there’s a conference as well.

I’ll see where the tide takes me and look forward to meeting lots of new faces. Twitter seems to be the mode-of-communication-of-choice. I’m on there, so get in touch if you want to chew the fat.

Diversions 201

• An Easy Way to Earn an MLB Salary
  This is interesting. Meta-betting of sorts. I guess it’s only the same as buying a share in a racehorse.
• What Don’t We Know About the Pharmaceutical Industry?
  Four doctors give insights into: “What’s something that most people don’t know, pro or con, about the pharmaceutical business, whether from an R&D, economic, or political perspective?”. Pharmaceutical companies get a bashing don’t they? Citizen regulated even?
• Shelf
  A glance at the potential of the Google Social Graph API, Tom Insam’s Leopard app looks rather cool. Note: If you’re uncomfortable pinging your address book in to the cloud, you might want to check over the prefs.
• Problem Playground
  Playful little Flash site from Honda. Cute.
• Where Game Meets The Web
  Raph Koster tells the game industry they’re doing it all wrong. And then tells them that to fix it, they need to be more like the web. Entertaining stuff (if slightly rhetorical), especially as Koster deals with a lot of familiar subjects but from a new perspective. Is it me, or does Koster sound (and look?) like Richard Dreyfus’ Matt Hooper? P.S. Don’t know if my download was borked, but the audio file seems to have the second half of the talk glued on to the end — it’s actually only an hour.

Diversions 111

• The Long Now Foundation
  Every now and then, you discover something ridiculously good and wonder how you’ve not managed to find it before. This is one of those things (thanks Sophie). I’ve only listened to two of the podcasts so far, but both were first-class. Firstly, the ridiculously talented Steven Johnson talks about long zoom thinking and references some of his exquisitely crafted books. Secondly, Will Wright and Brian Eno collaborate — or should I say chat — about generative systems, and the eagerly awaited Spore.
• Fluid
  I’m always intrigued by apps that break the traditional browser model. Actually, I’m not sure ‘intrigue’ is the right word. It’s part trepidation, part excitement and then a sense that this is probably a sign of things to come.
• Link to a specific point on Google Video
  This is old, but still useful. Love the way, it’s handled in the URL.
• Feltron Eight
  Another year, another brilliant piece of design from Feltron.
• There’s only one Barack Obama
  Who would have guessed it? Barack Obama is a hammer! This is the last time I link to The Sun (honest).

Pure phase

The common theme for my weekend seems to have been phase transitions.

Firstly I got hooked on this dynamic traffic simulation. I wasted an inordinate amount of time trying to discover tipping points for traffic jams.

I blame Mat Webb’s Interconnected, which also led me here. And in particular here. The theme was set.

Next up, I spent the afternoon in East London watching West Ham take on Manchester City in the FA Cup. It ended up being a pretty drab affair, largely because it lacked any creative players (or at least creative play). With no player willing or able to inject anything extraordinary, the match became disappointingly stale and predictable. What I and thirty three thousand other spectators really needed was something to subvert the unimaginative patterns the game had fallen in to. Someone or something that could move it towards a critical point. This proved to be wishful thinking on my part and the game ended as it began: nil nil.

To give all this pretentious nonsense some context, I should probably mention that I’m currently reading Philip Ball’s Critical Mass. I’ve just got to the part in which Ball explains that phase transitions can be considered generic phenomena:

“It is surprising enough that two different fluids, such as carbon dioxide or methane, which have quite different critical temperatures, should approach their critical points at the same relative (that is, percentage) terms. It is baffling that two wholly different kinds of system – a fluid and a magnet – also display this universality. What this suggests is that phase transitions are generic phenomena: they happen in the same way for a wide range of apparently different systems.

So why not traffic and football? In fact, Ball ends up drawing one such parallel:

“Every traffic jam involves a different set of vehicles and circumstances, but there are features that are common to them all.”

I read this on Sunday night and so brought an end to my weekend of (seeing) phase transitions (where there were none).

Diversions 109

• Dynamic traffic simulation
  Love this (from Interconnected). I’m no programmer, but I see this as a useful model for expressing the concepts/benefits of OOP. In fact, when I was studying for my MA, I tried to build something like this in Director (I didn’t get anywhere). Think I wanted to experiment with intelligent traffic lights.
• Paper CD case
  Horrible looking tool for creating foldable paper CD cases. That said, I quite like the whole idea of online nonsense being used to create offline ephemera. In fact, in a different skin (less app, more experience), I could actually see this site being a cute little social space.
• Schematic
  Like the spatial thing going on with this interface. Same genes as Relevare and Sofake (two old favourites) which don’t seem to be alive as I post this.

Diversions 7

Happy New Year people. I begrudgingly stayed in this evening (it’s Friday). Here’s the guff I looked at:

• Star Wars and UX
  Okay, I freely admit to being lured in by the Star Wars thing but there’s some great material here. I’d really like to see Stephen Anderson talk sometime. In case you’re wondering, the Star Wars thing is used to draw parallels with entrepreneurship. P.S. Did you know that George Lucas only decided to kill off Obi Wan during filming!
• Elmwood
  Yes, this is fancy-schmancy Flash. And may be a little pompous. But it has got nice-ish URLs. And nice content. And big pictures. Oh and I quote like the idea of language workshops.
• The Small Stakes
  Lovely illustration. Great bands.
• Fixed-price contracts don’t work
  Well put. Certainly something close to my heart at the moment.

Diversions 6

• Google My Location
  Old news obviously. But great news. Lots of interesting (which led to this) follow-ups.
• Interaction 08.
  Hmmmm, this looks rather good.
• Edenbee is coming
  Shameless nod to a project we’ve been working on. Super excited about this one.
• WebKit now has rudimentary support for specifying transforms through CSS
  This could make things interesting.
• Mob rules
  Wonderful presentation from Mark Pesce at this years Web Directions South. Highly recommended.

• The Experience Stack
  The podcast of Matt Webb’s marvellous dConstruct talk is now live. (or here via iTunes).

Safe

I’ve been wrangling with something for a while. I was hoping the wrangling would end and I’d reach a logical conclusion to this all. And then blog about it. But that’s not happening so I’m resorting to a splurge. Maybe the conclusion will come later?

Some context: One of the principal reasons, I work at Clearleft is because we get to work with leading-edge companies and ideas. I like this; It challenges me and most of the time, gives me an opportunity to deliver work that I’m proud of. But one of the criticisms I’ve recently faced is that my work has been too ‘safe’. What do I mean by safe? Well obviously that’s open to interpretation, but you’d be forgiven for interpreting this as a compliment as opposed to a criticism. Afterall, safety offers protection and reduced exposure to risk, which from a business perspective, is something most of us would welcome.

But in this particular case safe wasn’t being used as a compliment. It was in fact, a term of disapproval and would be more accurately read as conservative or even unenterprising.

No, I’m not about to launch in to a rant about a client. In fact, I think the client’s criticisms were — on many levels — fair. The reason I mention this is because I see this type of criticism increasingly directed towards traditional approaches to user-centered design and this post is my attempt to try and understand why.

Allow me to generalise: As an Information Architect, my toolbox contains a host of tried and tested methods, many of which focus on the derivation of users’ goals. It can be hard work, but I know as long as I use the tools appropriately, they provide me with the ability to extract the basis of a solid proposition: a set of goals which if met, can form the essence of a successful product or service.

The problem is that goals exist in several forms and while I can rely on traditional IA tools to derive what Cooper termed End Goals, the Super-Best-Friend’s web (that’s Web2.0 to marketeers) has created an ever-increasing demand for their less tangible, more subjective counterparts: Experience and Life Goals (I’ve blogged about these previously). Within this space, a proposition has the potential to move beyond the realm of safe, even defensive design and in to the domain of delightful, meaningful experience.

Stephen P. Anderson captures this tension superbly, describing the jump from task-driven to meaningful experiences as crossing the UX chasm:

“With rich interactions, the Social Web, and other recent web application advancements, we are reaching the point where it’s finally appropriate to discuss things like ‘joy of use’ and ‘pleasure’ in interface design. This is also the point at which we must stop designing only to support tasks and begin designing to support experiences…I dub this difficult transition the UX grand Canyon. This is the chasm between designing to support tasks (with a focus on products and features) and designing to support experiences (focusing on people, their activities, and the context of those activities).”

Stephen P. Anderson, Getting from Tasks to Experiences: What’s Next in Interface Design

Substitute tasks for End Goals in the previous quote and hopefully you can see where I’m going. In case not, I’ve ruthlessly stolen Anderson’s pyramid diagram and then scrawled on it to demonstrate what I mean.

The base of our pyramid is built on the solid foundations of functionality, reliability and usability. All coveted attributes, that can typically be met via the fulfilment of user’s End Goals (and should in no way should be ignored). But in order to create experiences that lift users towards the peak of the pyramid, we must also pay attention to their Life and Experience Goals as well.

In hindsight, the project I alluded to earlier probably focused too heavily on End Goals and left little room for anything more ‘meaningful’. Budget and time was certainly a factor (isn’t it always?), but I also believe this was symptomatic of the persona-driven approach I adopted. This resulted in a thorough collection of End Goals which in my opinion was both necessary and worthwhile, but not enough.

The question is how? In my opinion, there’s huge scope for innovation in this space. Lots of smart people are interested in doing the same and it’s certainly something I’m focusing my 20% time on at the moment. It’s also something I’m intending to blog about as I explore different approaches. But for now it just feels good to get this stuff down.