2007
December Best of 2007 podcast
Welcome again for that holiday tradition, this year, everything pretty much is a reissue of stuff from 1971, so who knows what the music world is all about. Play this on your new ipod/iphone though, I dumped .mp3 for .m4p and put in artwork, and all that jazz. It rolls in at about 50 meg, so consider this a early christmas present. Cheers!
December Browser Wars: part IV a new hope?
I have a 'real' blog post now at Pathfinder, here's a cross post because all these links may finally pay off!
I've been looking around for some data on the life/death cycle of browsers to append to my earlier post. In my early days, there was much drama about the rise and fall of browsers, and the great capabilities these new browsers would bring to the user experience. And when I say drama, I mean it was deadly dull, waiting years for certain 'problem' browsers to die out, or for less savvy computer users to get a new computer and finally update that clunker and get a 'real' browser. This seemed always to be whatever the latest, greatest beta version by the established titan, or sometimes the crafty underdog. When HTML 5.0 gets integrated into a browser, it will be years for that browser to be adopted, and further years for site developers to take advantage of whatever innovations it offers safely. The days of code bifurcation and browser sniffing are not dead by any means, but they are as usual being 'phased out'. If you were writing the script for the hollywood version of "Browser Wars" here's a possible plot outline (If Michael Bey is involved please give me a cut):
- 1996 Exposition - the masses seem to discover the Internet and Netscape makes it all possible thanks to Netscape 3.0. The world rejoices and refuses to dump this browser for at least 10 years (it may still be in use today ?!)
- 1997 Rising action - Internet Explorer 4 introduces a whole new world, special effects, DHTML, proprietary image filters and other goodies that take the world by storm, also, they explicitly link their browser with the operating system, so you can't remove it, and its hell to install a different one (bye bye Netscape). This also starts the nasty reality that windows can only have one instance of IE at a time, so developers rarely have the same browser version as their users, bringing up the popular 'it works on my machine' excuse.
- 2000 - IE 5 for the mac comes out and makes mac users feel cool, superior, and since it diverges from the inexplicable release that was IE 5.0 (for xp?) it becomes the browser of the hip. Cool innovations include somehow integrating ebay bidding someplace.
- 2001 - IE 5.5 for windows/mac and the last gasp of Netscape Navigator (7?) all come out in one big dump. Browsers seem to have become massive piles of auxiliary interfaces (email, auctions, unknown amounts of crap). I suppose writing a browser means you should do something with all those eyeballs to make money? The box model is broken, web standards seem shaky. The future doesn't look too bright, users despair.
- 2003 Climax!- IE 6 comes out to wipe everyone off the map, all those custom hacks for IE have paid off as it destroys all other browsers (mac users need not apply) and the dynasty is secure. It has enough to make web 2.0 happen, but not enough to appease the web standard crowd coming into being. People think about using div's for layout! Since old windows machines all succumb to whatever that horrible virus was, people upgrade their computers and IE 6 gets you about 80% of browser traffic, so microsoft goes off do do something else for about 5 years.
- 2004 The rebels attack! Mac Safari and OS X comes in to challenge the dominant browser, and on a good day, when the wind is right they can get about 1% of browser versions.
- 2005 Denoument - The flaws in the reactor are finally uncovered and the plans to the rebel base are brought to Mozilla which takes on the Windows empire with Firefox. Even average users tired of endless security attacks flee to embrace the upstart. On a good day, mozilla gets a 10% share of the browsing pie. WIndows tries to release service pack 2 to win back their imprisoned users, tempers flare!
- 2006 Ending: The empire strikes back with IE 7, a fully realized, standards compliant docile friendly beast that plays with others and is generally cute and cuddly. However, it breaks all the hacked up IE 6 sp2-only sites and thus people don't accept the peaceful, easygoing IE, and reinstall the evil 6 version, making it the browser we will have to live with for the next 10 years or so.
Or will we?
September Volunteer IT guy?
The Chicago Reader has picked up the story on the podcast and the site I put together for the Monastery of the Holy Cross. I am happy to be mentioned, although "the volunteer IT guy" seems a bit nondescript. Everyone should subscribe, it's a great podcast, I'm happy to help get more people to recognize the great stuff going on at the Monastery.
September Gestures
If animation is now expected in the UxD, is it also becoming more accepted to include gesture or haptic input to computers? I know this idea has been around as long as computers themselves, and has only been resurrected thanks to Jeff Han and 'patented the hell out of' by Steve Jobs. I can attest that nothing quite beats the thrill of swinging the tennis racket in the Wii, it beats button punching any day. Add to that two finger scrolling two finger tapping and gestures being built into the trackpads and iphones, we may have ourselves another PhD topic . The question being, do people learn faster through gestural contact because it needs no explaination? Is pushing a button inherently unnatural and more cognitively difficult (outside of your one button mouse)? Perhaps the animation/haptic elements now being more prevalent in web pages solves an inherent need for less clicking. It reminds me of my Thinkpad trackpad with the 9 buttons I could never figure out what they did.
I can attest the fact that I have the corner of my screen set up for Os X "expose" mode. When I move the mouse to that corner, all the windows are exposed. This I do practially every minute. I also have it triggered to the button on my mouse. I observe that I never push the button and always do the gesture. Unscientifically, is the gesture more 'learnable' than the button press? Secondly, whenever anyone else uses my computer, they trigger this mode which elicits surprise and shock more often than not.
I find it fascinating how long it takes for ideas how people interact with computers to become viable, then expected. That leaves the only thing left is 'speaking' to your computer ala Star Trek to trump them all.
September Wither thou cover flow?
I believe its a good trend that animation techniques are becoming more accepted and expected in the user experience (don't call it DHTML). For example, the sliding show/hide or accordian menu is rapidly replacing the older 'twisty' style hierarchical menu. Coming up with a range of 'accepted' experience-enhancing animations would be a good project for someone who needs a Ph.D. topic. My observation concerns of my favorite programs, Cover Flow, which allows you to see all your Itunes albums as 'art' much like thumbing through stacks of records. Amazingly, Apple bought the program and incorporated it into everything, including the new OS - Leopard. Its a great feature, and significant since it finally utilizes a usable horizontal scroll, something no one had ever figured out what to do with. Kudos. My disappointment comes from a tiny detail of the original program, that the user's perspective was slightly above the stack, also, when you 'mousedover' the pictures, they would highlight and move forward slightly. I know its a small detail, but see the screenshots, I think it 'sells' the experience much more than the flat perspective of the Apple implementation.
JulyInformation Architecture vs User eXperience Design
Content is king. I don't create or in any way influence content. I try to understand the content, how to organize it, define it, style it, store it, deliver it and enable creators to distribute their content to select or general audiences for their (and their companies) benefit. Then I study, strategize and measure how to help content consumers find, contribute to, classify or interact in some meaningful way to that content. With this thought out of the way, it may help in describing how the IA/UXD discipline differs from a designer, coder, system admin, or any of the other disciplines with the web world. To be subtle, UXD is a bit different in that it comes mainly after the IA portion and has to do with refining individual experiences within pages, refining design elements, adding consistency, ect. Everyone should bake in some good user experience elements into their product (easy to scan, easy to read, flexible in appearance), and that can be reinforced through good IA work. Also, when users become involved, the IA should validate that the framework is appropriate, and has allowed enough room to fix things from user feedback without recoding or redesigning. That makes the role essential from a business perspective, it truly saves them time and money and keeps them on goal to deliver quality content.
June More sites about buildings and food
I am an Information Architect living in Oak Park, Illinois and this site concerns both me and my work and philosophy - function (as in form follows). The subject of this site is not necessarily what is happening to me today, but where I've been, and things that seem important in retrospect. I had difficulty writing a blog, because it takes place in the now, I'm as interested in the past, what I did think, so I'm doing a reverse blog or preblog. And there's some distractions, such as lots of music and art I need a place to put along with experiences in the interweb. My hope is to make connections between the topics of today and some of the things I've been doing my whole career.
That is what makes the web such a lot of fun, the connections, and was decidedly the quite clever point of HTML - the hyperlink. Now it links masses of data, the ways we can digg / facebook / flickr or link-ourselves-in our information to each other. Basically the 'web' part of the web. I remember this not being quite so clear back in 2001, when E-commerce and porn seemed the only popular value propositions on the web. Things are changing for the better, daily, and its time I put pen to paper to point it out.
Prototyping for fun and profitJuly
I've helped introduce a new process using this Caretta prototyping tool, taking visualizing from the first rough draft sketches, right down to the developer writing requirements and the people working on each step in between. An enormous savings of time and focus, more later once we get some solid specs from this run through, looks like we'll save millions, which is why change is good.
June The vision thing
I transitioned into the vision team here at Mercer Human Resources Consulting. Since most of the work I was doing when I started here came way, way after the solution was developed, it was a bit more fitting that I get in early. Working with Tony Pauley, Brett Dutton, Steven Cheung and Natalie Brannan, we're making headway into this massive actuarial valuation tool. The dominant paradigm seems to be a cross between visual studio and turbo tax. I'm resorting back to creating HTML models (this time making them look like a windows app) just to get the idea across.
Photoshop/Visio just won't do anymore. To get business to buy- in to a concept they need to see the 'finished product' and I'm happy to deliver it (well fake it). Its surprising how time consuming and wasteful development can be without proper prototyping and feedback from users. As Tony said happily - my one week of prototyping saved 5 months of development. Not to say that users shouldn't be happier as well, but I'm constantly moving farther and farther away from end user experience which is kind of sad but see back to 2000 when I was on the frontline. Got to do a little 'portal' thing which was nice to be back in the web for a moment.
MayHerman Miller and watching TV
Another fun project I did with my neighbors at central coast - Kevin, Maggie and Chris for the good folk at Herman Miller. This was a challenge to architect a way to get across what the product was, and was the first time I embraced video as the main content. Feeling old. They were thrilled, and although my orientation by value alone pitch kind of fell flat, I think it came out as I had hoped. The video really saves it, but the follow through is lacking for the intended users. I can see why 'related video' on Youtube was such a revelation, who wants to go back to some nav/search paradigm when you're in front of the tube?
AprilWe digg Martha!
Centralcoast got to pitch some ideas to Martha Stewart Omnimedia, and wanted me to come up with some ideas of what kind of cool web stuff they could do for their new furniture line. What better than to rip off Digg and present a social network site for home improvement junkies? Oddly, even though this is a rip, I think the idea is sound, there is much more value in expanding social networks to un served people. If Yahoo would get their act together and brand for the 'rest of us' rather than bow to the geek power of Google. Also, the voting thing is going to be huge, just look at American Idol to see why this will be a popular interaction model for awhile.
JanuaryPersonas, style guides, actuaries, standards, oh, my!
Started at Mercer this week, this project has been in progress for about a year or so, and they need someone to help come up with some standards, write a style guide, and clean up some of the user experience. Also to let the team (50 and counting) know what an Information Architect does. I got the opportunity to hire a prototyper to build C# models of the major parts of the navigation system. I feel that you cannot adequately express user experience in Visio diagrams. I have one of my hundreds of sketches, this is what I think 'wireframing' should be. Sketches. The problem is that business does not want to see sketches, for that matter, they don't want wireframes, they want the finished product. Then they'll say whether or not to build it.
Since this directly mimics my experience at Aspen last year, I was prepared. I wasn't prepared for .NET - it seems slow, ugly, very hard to change. Where were the lessons learned about abstracting presentation from content from behavior? Wasn't this the reason for the CSS-AJAX phenom? What about standards? Anyway, I do the best I can, chapter and verse of the style guide should tell them exactly how the thing should work, if they would only read it...
Download a chapter (PDF) for a taste of one of the 20-odd chapter style guide.