This is an extension to the idea of mutually exlusive options rendered as “Link Sets”, which I wrote about here.  It’s the notion of allowing AND interactions with the set:

This sequence (1 – 4) has the user stipulate a number of AND options
[“View as: this AND that AND other”]

The primary behaviour is the same as the basic link-set, but with the addition, only

With the addition of a +.  Clicking the word has the typical exclusion behaviour (only that item is selected), however choosing the + will add the item to the group of selected items (an AND relationship).  Once added, the + changes to a –, which allows the item to be removed from the selection set.

Here’s me (conviently blurred), courtesy of Dave’s camera phone, sitting before the super great, wickedly smart Kathy Sierra yesterday at Sam and Trent’s place in Welly.

She’s talking about “Suck Thresholds”, Kicking Ass, and Flow glorious FLOW.  For the uninitiated, Kathy’s approach is about designing software so as to create “passionate users” – and a central set of ideas necessary for achieving this can be summed up in the following graph:

Now if you look closely you’ll notice some important distinctions illustrated in this schematic.  Firstly, the user evolves from a green newby, who doesn’t even have ears, into Elvis.  These transitions mark moments in the evolution of skill level – and to be a “Passionate User” you need to be in the Elvis zone of “I Rock”.  The finer point here, is that “Flow” can be achieved throughout this entire evolution by evenly balancing the user’s level of skill with a corresponding level of difficulty.  This will allow them to remain absorbed in the task – challenged, not overwhelmed with difficulty, but also not bored (not too heavy, not too light, just right).  Oh, and “flow” is good because people report their moments in “flow state” as being the happiest moments of their life.

Here’s where Kathy’s lecture turned into a dialogue, as this is the area she wants to have an ongoing discussion around – the area where there are no great answers (or no pat answers at least) – the furtile ground for design.  The conversation here turns to “how” do you design interactions that effectively move users through that middle ground between sucking and rocking?

This is a vexing question of course, and one I want to think about, but first I want to juxtapose Kathy’s model with something similar but different from the Cooper school of thought.  Cooper similarly illustrates the skill-level distinctions over the user-population – but does so like this:

This is explained in the following way: in the beginning everyone is a “beginner” – but beginner’s never stay beginners for very long.  They either give up, or they progress to the level of “Intermediate.”  This is because absolutely no one likes being green with no ears.  Intermediates know what they need to to get the job done fast, or well, “enough” – but that’s where it stops.  Then in the rare occasion, you have an intermediate progress into “Experts” who know everything – and would be at the “I Rock” stage in Kathy’s schematic.  They metomorphesize like butterflys into Elvis.  Experts, however, tend to be (1) thin on the ground proportinate to intermediates, and (2) temporary, in that to remain an expert you need to be constantly pushing yourself with the product – and when you stop, you atrophy back down into an intermediate.

Now this is all highlighted to point to the question “who do we design for” – and the answer from Cooper is “the perpetual intermediate” BUT (and here’s the thing) Elvis is disproporiately important, because what he says has an immensely strong effect on the intermediate users.  If Elvis likes it, then the intermedate guy will keep slogging – and may even become “like” Elvis one day too (this in Kathy’s parlance is a “passionate user”).  But if you don’t cater for Elvis (but do cater perfectly for the intermediates) Elvis is likely to say “oh now, this product sucks” (when what he means is “this product sucks for an expert like me”).

So here we have two models that share very similar values.  Whereas it appears Kathy places emphasis puerly on the expert – in fact I think they both point to the need to focus on the intermedate – and challenge the designer on how to progress users in a smart way up to expert [and for me, smart means not relying on manuals].  How do we do this?  That’s what Kathy wants to know.  Me too…so let the conversation begin.

We all know Moore’s law, right…but what about Mooers Law?  Formulated by Calvin Mooers in 1959, six years before Moores law – the force of nature that has fuelled us to the point where Mooers Law is now highly relevant:

An information retrieval system will tend not to be used whenever it is more painful and troublesome for a customer to have information than for him not to have it.*

There’s now soooo much information.  It’s accessible in ways never dreamed of before (and we’re working on opening up more of it in better, better faster and easier)…but do we always want this?  Mooers says no…less is more.  Never underestimate shadow and self-deception.  It’s an interesting angle to think about when thinking about email searching.

* Remarks by Calvin N. Mooers during a panel discussion at the Annual Meeting of the American Documentation Institute, Oct 24, 1959.  Source: Ambient Findability, pg 44, Peter Morville – O’Rielly

Tanya’s next event, this time not for kids:

If you’re anywhere near Waiheke ‘round the 3^rd of June then get your butt along to this.  For the better part of the 3 million years we’ve been human beings, we have sat around camp fires telling stories.  It’s only in the last fleeting seconds of evolutionary time that stories have been relegated to ‘just for kids’….so here’s your chance, and you don’t have to sit in a cave.  Oh no, how about the world renowned Goldwater estate – with a sumptous meal, and lashings of fine wine to boot??  Then “climb into bed with Tanya Batt” for some adult stories…um I mean “Bedtime stories for grownups” (sorry, no smut here, she’s a very classy gal!).

At what point would you admit that the interaction of your inflight entertainment system sucks?

The other week, flying to San Fran on the new AirNZ 777, the lovely old lady sitting next to me asked for help getting a movie going.  Then on the flight back, an elderly gentleman walked down several rows and asked me to help him with the system (what’s that about?? Is that my computer karma catching up with me?)

Both were asking “how do I change the channel” (their mental model) – and wanted to “know how” to do it themselves.  But after spending a minute attempting to convey how the navigation keys related to a cursor moving around the screen, that then needed to have the “select button” pressed at specific intervals – it quickly became apparent that rather than ‘teach a man to fish’ in this case it would be easier and more time efficient to come to their aid two or three times and set the desired movie playing.

This was fanstastically ironic because the first interaction design project of D4 (Dave Fore, my first instructor on the Cooper course), was the in-flight entertainment system for Sony that was outlined in The Inmates are Running the Asylum.  If you ever want to see a beatiful piece of interaction design (with sliding monoclines and all) check this puppy out.

Anyhow, seems Sony must have locked it up pretty well in patents, as AirNZ can’t hold a candle to it.  Funnily enough the air-steward, when I talked with him about it, defended the design.  Perhaps he had the knack for teaching complex navigation idioms to elderly people whilst serving peanuts and cocktails.

Well, I’m flying out to Canada in an hour….let’s see if my computer karma draws more victums of bad design my way.  Hope so, it’s interesting to see how people think when presented with such a problem.  Of course, they all think it’s they’re fault, and they’re being dumb.  The first thing to do is correct them on that fallacy.

Rod just pointed to the new Google calendar release, and comment’s “this is signicant.”  Given that despite an impoverished web-input control for composing messages Gmail is, more me, a signicantly more pleasant and useful experience than Outlook, I wonder: how long will it be before people start diverting their work Calendaring schedules to this – and demanding that their colleagues follow suit?  If Google make it easy to bounce calendaring information from Outlook to this new system this is one more (“significant”) chink in the armor of MS Office.

Interesting comment by D4 (Dave Fore), the VP of consulting at Cooper on the course last week in San Fran.  He was reflecting on how common it was to encounter the “because the law says you can’t do that” variety of excuses for not implementing a design, when what’s really meant is “that’s technically hard.”

In response, D4 says he doesn’t believe any legal argument until 3 lawyers tell him the same thing.

One of the things we were asked to consider last week at Cooper training, was “what’s a good piece of design” and correspondingly, “what a bad design.”

I’ll save my “bad design” example for another post, it’s hilarious…and anyhow, it’s easier to find example of badly designed interactions.  For now, the good are far more rare, and that’s why this was such a delight:

So simple…yet it fundamentally improves the experience of crossing busy roads in a busy city.  By considering the question every pedestrian asks themselves when the cross-sign turns red (“Do I risk it, or do I not”), feeding a single simple piece of information back to the user (remaining time) allows them to make an informed decision about whether to hoof it.  Apparently the accident rate has dropped dramatically since the design has been installed (as you would expect).

I love the simple ones!

One of the most significant takeaways for me from the Cooper interaction design training I participated in last week in San Francisco was the clear distinction Cooper makes between the two roles involved in the design process.  These are:

Now most people, apparently, come to the table with skills on both sides of the fence.  But Cooper has found over the years they have been practicing, that breaking these two roles out across two individual people, who work with each other over the long term, yields better results, faster and more consistently.

This team size of two shakes out as optimal (Cooper have experiemented with different approaches, and this is where they have got to).  This week has been invaluable both learning in the classroom about how this team-dynamic is applied to the Cooper methodology, AND being able to hang out with the elite team of designers at the Cooper design house and talk with them about the nuts and bolts of the everyday business of designing behaviour in this way.

For instance, and this was interesting to me – design teams only ever work on one project at a time.  Only one.  There’s just too much complexity to deal with effectively, if you’re designing something properly, to split your ming across multiple concerns.  That said, there is an extreme pragmatism to Cooper’s teams – and it’s feasible, and in fact highly desirable to design well ahead of implementation time, and in a best case sceanrio, start getting blueprints squared away and on the shelf for future coding (in a sensible, rationale, and predictable manner – which is one of the things a “Form and Behaviour” specification allows you to do.  Without it [an MRD on it’s own for instance], timelines are mostly just guesswork, wild speculation, or optimistic marketing events).

Here’s kind of a staggering metric:

Based on research, corporate users send and receive an average of 133 messages per day and this number is expected to reach 160 messages by 2009. – Radicati Group [Source]

The question I have, is that if that is an average – how much “deep thought” can be going into any of those.  That’s 133 business letters everyday.  Or is it?  I think that this is probably misleading, as we’re seeing email get used a lot like IM.  Tens of emails, with one-line responses, which cumulatively constitute a block of thought.  And as Russell Beattie notes in his recent post “Rethinking Email”, even if the format of email is not technically the most useway to deal with this style of dialogue – it has become a cultural norm – and therefore the opportunity for us is to understand that, and explore ways in wich we can give users better tools to manage this IM-like style of email-communication.

I’ve just discovered a fascinating idea from the famed visual-information theorist Edward R. Tufte, who incidentally taught me the single most useful principle I have had the good fortune to discover: “Smallest Effective Difference” (perhaps I’d better write another post on this some time).  But before I get into this new idea of Tufte’s, here’s a little side background from my context:

Despite the “network effect” upside of desiging apps that run in the browser, there is much that sucks with making detailed interactions dance in the DOM.  So what you can do is go and play with WinForms, and more precisely GDI+, discover the boundless control you have over rendering to screen….but at a painful price.  The “flow” characteristic of UI’s depicted in HTML is lost.  You have to position everything explicitly, and relative placement (especially complex relative placement) is really hard.  But it’s that ‘relative flow’ which turns out to be one of the most powerful characteristics of Web UI’s, and therefore, what’s interesting with WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation, aka. Avalon) is that this flowy goodness is what has been bought over to the WinForms camp with the declarative language XAML.

So this leads into the device Tufte describes in his new book: Sparklines (Intense, Simple, Word-Sized Graphics)

There is a magnificent overview by Tufte of the theory behind these visual devices here.

The rub of course is that creating these Sparklines is not going to be trivial in a web-app, you’d have to have some kind of server-side processor to produce the image, but once you’ve got it, embedding it into the flow of the document would be trivial (that said, here is just such a server-side sparkline creator).

But in a smart-client app, the sparklines could be both generated client-side (using the clients CPU, not the server’s) and potentially much more dynamic and manipulatable.  But it’s going to be a bitch to implement from a flow perspective…until that is, we start working with XAML.

This is an exciting idea, and I can really some some exciting uses for it given making it so will be a fiarly triveal job with WPF.

Here is a nugget of pure gold.  Anyone involved in making a hi-tech product, please watch this frank conversation with the 4-star general of interaction design (Alan Cooper) in a conversation with Scoble and a few other Microsofters at a recent Patterns and Practices Summit.

His physical appearance, and the force of his delivery reminds me of some kind of military leader – but there is also a calm, bitingly intelligent quality to what he’s saying.  He’s not scratching at the surface problems of software creation – he’s going deep down (below “conventional widson) to the heart of the issue – and he does so with some serious cred.  Not just a designer, he’s a hard core programmer in his own right – and in fact the essential design of today’s Visual Studio can be traced back to his original conceptions of an IDE.

I’m fortunate enough to be heading up to San Fransicso in a couple of weeks to study at his design house.  I am so looking forward to getting up there and meeting the guys that are pioneering this field!

Nic’s just made some interesting comments on an new article by Joel ("On Software")  about usability, where Joel’s central tenet is:

“Something is usable if it behaves exactly as expected”

The example Joel holds up is the difference between Mac and Windows – where of course “we all know” (or are told by the black-turtle-neck brigade) that the Mac is far easier to use than Windows.  But Joel paints an accurate illustration of a PC user getting frustrated with the Mac because little things (window resizing etc) are all slightly different, and the user therefore incorrectly concludes that the Mac is a hard and clunky thing to use.

Well the point is dead on.  And what I think is useful to highlight here is that both systems had to be “learnt.”  There’s nothing intrinsically intuitive about either of them (in the sense that evolution did not genetically prepare us to know how to use a mouse or resize a window).  But as with any good idiom, we pick it up quick, and we don’t easily forget it.  Joel’s point though, is that if that idiom changes ever so slightly – we get ruffled real quick.

But this a diagnosis of the problem, and not a prescription for how you might solve this most vexing problem – making something “behave exactly as expected”.  The article is part of a series of essays by Joel, in which he promises to answer this question…and whilst I’m eager to see what he says, I can point to some answers that come from the field of interaction-design.

Namely the notion of the mental-model, the implementation-model, and the represented model.

Our mental model is our “cognitive shorthand” for how something works.  It’s the way we think it works.  And with complex systems like software, the way we think it works is almost never the way it actually works (that’s the implementation model).  Electricity doesn’t run like water throught the cord to our toaster – but if you think that way, that’s good enough to solve the problem of getting your toaster working.  There’s no advantage (in fact there’s only dis-advantage from a usability standpoint) in forcing the user to understand the true oscillating nature the electric current before they can get the toaster toasting.

And here’s the thing…in order to use it, most software forces the user to understand the way it does things by mapping it’s implmentation model straight onto the interface.  The weird, strange, prickly, arcane, processes that are convenient and optimized and natural for a machine are dished straight up to the end-user.  But your grandma wouldn’t expect to have to save the letter she’d just penned to C:\...\MyDocuments\MyLetter.doc, and then if she scribbled a PS on the bottom, to re-save it so as not to lose the changes….but then again, nor would you until you’d been told you had to.

We learn these things, and bend our mental models to the way the computer works – and forget we ever thought differently.  But if we want to make something that gives the “illusion” of being intuitive…we discover the way people actually think about something – then we design something that maps closely to that way of thinking (we construct an abstraction called the represented model).  And the user will encounter it…and they will have to learn it…BUT, if it maps closely enough to their world-view (it behaves as they expect it), they’ll learn it quickly, they won’t forget it…and if you’re really lucky…they’ll think they always knew how to do it – and run around telling their friends that your software is “intuitive” (not true, but who’s gonna complain?)

In conclusion, this in and of itself doesn’t explain how to make something “behave as expected”, but I’ve found it to be a useful model to get you thinking in a way that can allow you to include the user’s thought patterns in a way that relates intelligently to the software creation process.

What’s even cooler about this is that Rod grew up using Macs. His first computer experience as a boy was an Apple II, and it sent him on a trajectory to the heart of the software game, a trajectory that would ultimately put him in a position to play Segway Polo with Woz himself. 

“A butterfly flaps its wings in New York…” :)

There’s a feature of the iPod whereby if you pull out the headphone jack while listening, the device automatically pauses.  Whilst this at first appeared to be a cute flourish to the design, I’m finding that is has become an [un-internded perhaps] primary interaction. 

If I’m walking around with the iPod in my pocket, and quickly need to pause to talk with someone or deal with something in the environment, the simplist and most rapid way to do this is simply to “pull the plug”.

Analysis: Here’s why this is so good.  Firstly it’s a gross “manual affordance,” which has the added avantage of a cord leading my fingers right to it.  It also has zero cognitive friction.  There is only one resulting action – the track is paused.  There is no multi-mode aspect to this…I can’t pull it one way to pause, and another to resume etc. 

Pulling the Plug = Stop (period).

[As a side note, one of the most beautiful things I find about the iPod’s physical design is that you can actually reach into your pocket, and be able to navigate the basic functions of the player simply by feel.  The orientation of the wheel can be derived from the relationship of center “nodule” to the device-base/play-button…but in the context of this discussion, to pause this way is to incur higher cognitive friction.  The pause button must (1) be found on the wheel, and then (2) it has multiple states, it will either play or pause based on how many times you press it (the toggle behaviour of the button changes it’s action based on the current state of the device)]

Finally, the argument might be that to resume you have to put the plug back in, and then hit play.  A two handed operation. 

This is true, but it doesn’t matter because my goal was to “attend to something in the environment rapidly whilst not losing my place in the track.”  Achieving that effortlessly is (I have found) more important that quickly resuming the track. 

And so it’s interesting for me to find, that this fancy design flourish has been elevated to a primary and natural interaction.  I wonder if the designers intended this.

It’s not only the visual renderings of fractal geometry that I find fascinatingly beautiful – but it’s the way Gleick framed the concept here.  Self-similarity-at-all-levels.’  When I first discovered that – it totally entranced me.  I got the pattern of similarity at different scales, I could not help but see it all around me, and I don’t just mean visually – in relationships, in processes, in all the varied machinations of this world – there it is, the same stuff happening – big and small – “as above, so below”.  That’s all nice and good…but the visuals are pretty too, so here’s one piece of fractal-kiwiana that I happened upon, and found particularly amusing:

On this visual theme, I’m kicking myself I didn’t do this on the shirt we put together for Rod last week (but, we did make it real fast – we’ll spend more time getting the high-volume release to the general public version right :)….in a sense this kind of thing is a visual dipiction of a recursive function:

public void DrawRod(Graphics g, Rectangle bounds)

{

       this.DrawPicture(g, picRodHoldingPhone, bounds);

       bounds = this.GetPhoneScreenBounds(bounds);

       this.DrawRod(g, bounds);

}

Wisdom from Apple: Here’s to the Crazy Ones.

I think this came out of the Think Different campaign that Steve Job’s ran early on in his second coming.  The link to apple is no longer live – but it certainly sounds like early Apple culture and ideology.  More similar rhetoric here in a speech Job’s gave as a commencement address at Standford.  This is stuff that I find particularly inspiring when I think about my own creative motivations.  I must find a copy of Andy Hertzfeld’s book Revolution in the Valley to read….

We’re refining our product development process at AfterMail presently (the ‘how’ of going from a cloud of good ideas to a workable construction blue-print).  I can’t talk too much about the details just now, but in broad terms, the goal is to get everyone’s input included, in a manner, and at the moment it can have the most effect.  This leads to the question, who is “everyone”, and are there some more useful ways to group and associate their general concerns and agendas.  There are, and I’ve been drawing on the triumvirate “Capable : Viable : Desirable” and their depiction by Larry Keeley (which I discovered via Cooper):

It’s another “three legged stall” analogy – and it’s a good one :).  You see the balancing of what we are capable of doing (what is technically possible), with what can be sold (commercially viable, market factors), but it’s the third side that balances the stall – the one I think you see less often in the marketplace – and one that defines a stand-out company.  By taking the two concerns (viability and capability), and crafting them into a form that is desirable for the end user – you end up with the competitive advantage of fierce customer loyalty.

That’s the ideal, or at least one of the conceptual models backing our process…the specifics of how we refine the “process” is the interesting “process” we’re going through now.

My Waiheke buddy, and doco-maker/film editor extraordinaire, Scott Ewing just pinged me a heads up about a documentary he made in 2004 that is now being aired on TV ONE this Sunday.  I haven’t seen this one - but I have seen other pieces of Scott’s work - and he has a talent for making one see the world through different perspectives.  Important stuff given the kinds of subjects he’s interested in.  Here is the press release for his documentary coming up on Sunday:

On the path of deepening my understanding “tagging,” and its design implications, I’ve been spending a bit of time looking around at the modern theory (which abounds) along with some practical examples.  I found this interesting - the notion of inferring system/functional context from user’s tags - and then providing additional functionality to the content being tagged.  The example is on del.icio.us, where if you tag anything ending with a media type (eg. *.mp3) it will understand this, and add the appropriate enclosures to the link page’s RSS feed to make it a podcast.

I’m packing up and bidding the talented, dynamic and vibrant community of Waiheke farewell.  Why?  Well I’m a heading south for adventures in far away lands…the magnificent city of Wellington to be precise.

I’m honoured to be joining the wickedly-smart people at AfterMail, and extremely excited to be working on the next generation of email technologies….that is to say ”email intelligence”.  This is going to be a great big adventure – cool city, cool technology, cool people.  Doesn’t get better than that.

A fabulous reading by Paul Graham of his essay “What Business Can Learn from Open Source” at this years OSCON (Open Source Conference).  Get it here at IT Conversations.  I really enjoy Graham’s writing and perspective on things…he spends a lot of time polishing his pros, and it really makes reading his ideas all the more pleasurable (even when you don’t necessarily agree ;).

From Cory Doctorow’s habits of highly effective geeks:

JWZ: Every program expands until it can read mail.

Danny's Corralary: Every program that can read mail ends up

getting used for everything else.

Email sure is like an overwheliming ocean of glue – holding much of the “social” digital world together.

I just whacked up a Community Server instance to my web-server last night in what I’m hoping will be an interesting and useful “live” experiement for allowing a “geograhic community” to speak its voice.  Geographic as opposed to a “value community” (being the more typical for the internet - we talk with groups who share our values, but we don’t necessarily live on the same patch of dirt).

It’s here: www.capow.info and here’s the story.  Basically the island community as been engaged for the last 3 years in a nasty scrap of David and Goliath proportions.  Or, to mix my metaphors, perhaps it’s more like the “evil empire” coming to Waiheke, and the “rebel alliance” had to get its shit together and fight off empending doom – in this case doom = a massively innappropratie development at the island’s gateway that would have had dire effects on the island’s economy and ecosystems.  The community united, and fought a very expensive legal battle, and effectively won in the sense the developers backed out, and the Auckland City council stepped in an purchased the strategic land (a more accurate summary of the story, sans references to Star Wars, can be found at the Wikipedia entry on Waiheke).

And here’s where the community server kicks in.  This is moving from the “negative” scrap (what should not happen) to the “positive” – what should be developed.  The RMA (Resource Management Act) pretty much calls for this to happen – so it’s not just a nicety – it’s the law!

And it is in this area where there is an unprecedented opportunity for a smart, talanted and vibrant community to determine what would be best for it – to actually contribute, rather than the usual and depressing process of putting a few ideas forward, and then having the “outside experts” go away and design whatever the hell they want.  As the home page says:

While the ultimate decision lies with the elected officials, the extent of community authorship depends on the people, and how they, how we, choose to exercise leadership in articulating a clear, precise vision and plan which can be converted into instructions, tenders and consents.

The extent to which this Community Server has an effect will be, for me at least, very interesting.  I certainly feel empowered in that I live in a time where I can spend a few hours plugging in a piece of open-source, and immeditaly see dialogue and collaboration within the community begin.  Viva la resistance! :)

[PS: Thanks to Tim for timely advice at critical junctures of the install process.  You saved me good time and potential headaches dude!]

[PPS: Community server skinning IS a bitch.  If you’re wanting to do it, it ain’t as easy as it could or should be.]

I was in Wikipedia the other day, and I noticed there was only a stub entry for Waiheke Island.  So I alerted a friend of mine on the island, an historian and the social entrepreneur genius behind the Renaissance Aotearoa Foundation, and low and behold - within an hour or two it was updated with the real and current story of this groovy little island.  This was the closest personal experiences I’ve had with the power of Wiki’s, and the instant gratification to be had.  Read about Waiheke here.

I do my best work when I’m not supposed to.  What’s up with that??!  I mean, it’s Saturday, the sun is shining, by all accounts I should be out playing with my friends - out there in the sun - but instead - I get a fire in my belly and I start getting excited about ideas…ideas that flow more freely into my head because I don’t “need” to have them.  It’s when I intend to do “nothing,” that I find I really get going.  When the cup is empty, the muse sneaks in.  It’s weird, but there I have it…. I’m at my best when I’m not supposed to be (I think the trick is understanding that, and managing it for greatest effect).  I’d love to hear other’s comments on their strange encounters with that funniest of things - the life of ideation.

Last night, courtesy of Nigel Parker, I got a whirlwind overview of the entire PDC - condensed into an hour-long preso at the AK DNUG.  And whirlwind tour it was…there’s a lot of stuff coming down the pike.  Of major interest to me was the “presentation foundation” technologies (formerly code-named Avalon, and including things like XAML and Sparkle.

And very impressive it is… here are a few of my initial reactions:

A “Mac-envy” sign of Relief

Firstly it was a strange kind of relief - a sort of “great, looks like Window’s is dishing up a comparable set of expressive tools that Apple has been showering on it’s developers since the OSX redesign”.  I haven’t studied either side hard enough to say whether this is a leap-frog or merely a catch-up, but I’d imagine given that the MS engineers have had several years now to pick OSX to bits that they have gained a lot of advantage from seeing where the Mac presentation platform can be improved.  The same way .NET was a jump ahead of Java/J2EE - easier when you’ve got something to improve on as opposed to breaking entirely new ground.  Anyhow, from a personal consumer stand-point, it gives me enthusiasm about owning a PC again - as opposed to current Mac envy and shadow-denial  [I thought an iPod would do it, but it’s just not enough :)].

It’ll work on XP / 2003

Praise the lord!  We can actually start thinking about using this stuff.  With history as our guide, the safe estimate is that Vista won’t be a widely adopted platform for at least 3 years after release.  But there will be framework redistributables that can be installed in the same way as the .NET framework redistributable (at time of release) - and the presentation foundation XAML el al will become available to us on the platforms that are around today (same goes for the Communication/Indigo and Data foundations apparently).

Flashy Things Give Some People Epileptic Fits

Given the ease of creating fancy, moving, singing and dancing UI elements courtesy of XAML (and the host of editors coming along, with Sparkle leading that charge) get ready for a torrent of shocking interaction which is very nicely lit, with beautiful drop-shadows, and delicately reflecting their surrounding widgets (which are also dancing).  This can’t not happen.  With a tool this powerful - that is this easy to use - and the shear power of “color and movement” when selling an app into management - this will be the “ransom notes from early PC graphic design” all over again.  The solution to interaction problems isn’t having a button fly in from the left - just as the solution to a badly written movie scene isn’t a fancy sliding-transition.  Although the ability to do this is useful for executing and heightening a “well written” scene.

We’ve now got enough headroom to do what’s needed…easily

And to follow on from the mac-envy relief point above - the main reason to be happy with all of this is that it’s like we’ve gone from driving a rusty old Skoda, where we are revving the guts out of it just to hit the speed limit, to driving a Porche, where we are hitting the speed limit in second, and where not in our power-zone until 300 KM/h.

This is the right place to be.  Where we can do fabulous stuff, concentrate on what’s important from a design and interaction standpoint, and not be constantly freaking out about how technically we’re going to pull this graphical miracle off in code.  We’ve got plenty of headroom - and there is no need to push the revs into the red - just to achieve something average.

I should be getting more excited about this I guess - but for me it just seems like the inevitable, sensible thing - that “finally” is coming our way (umm, a year from now that is) - and we can start thinking about how we can use this cool new creative head-room to do things that are “desirable” for end-users to use - not just “flashy” (although hell - let’s make it a little flashy too eh?).

Here’s a new video search engine that claims to index and discover video content in an entirely different way to the likes of Google and Yahoo.  Further details about how it works here on Cringley’s weekly column (which is pretty interesting.  It’s a different paradigm to the way normal search-engine spiders crawl static content). 

The Truveo engine does seem to work pretty well - certainly pulls back a good selection of “The Daily Show” clips….my new discovery of the last couple-a weeks - it’s hilarious, if not a little scary.

Last night was one of the year’s bigger fundraisers on the island - the annual Neptune’s Ball.  My great friend and celebrated frock-o-holic Tanya Batt, of course could not let an opportunity to dress up (and over the top) pass her by, and painstakingly threw this little nautical number together over the course of some weeks in her frocked-out “design studio”:

Needless to say, an impromptu photo-shoot on the beach was in order, before she was whisked off in all her splendid glory to the ball.  Kind of amazing she managed such a glow as the sun set, but turns out that light attracts the sea-crabs, and the lucky one that found its way into her hair was allowed to accompany her to the dance.

Hmmm, whilst I’m pulling piccys of Tanya out - here’s a couple more from on file showcasing her brilliant little creative company “Imagined-Worlds”:

This post is really about fudge.  But I’ve got to introduce another idea first…

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about a new kind of paradigm which is emerging - based on systems that are light-on-their feet with unstructured data. 

I’ve been talking with some smart people that have been predicting this future trend - Rod has blogged about it - most recently here - pointing to Dave5’s fascinating sample he devised that turns the thin veneer of structure (RSS) over the tangled mass of unstructured data (blog content) into a database-like experience.  A virtual DB that you can throw a SQL query at. [Interestingly Dave5 said he was inspired by a discussion by Adam Bosworth (of Google) about loose-data structure and the future of databases which is a really good listen - well worth it]

Anyways - to explain this “structure vs. unstructured” concept a little:  The idea is that there is an exploding mass of data in the world - and most of this data has very little structure to it.  And, the bulk of informational value is now finds itself in this unstructured form (email for example.  Gartner research estimates that 70% of corporate knowledge flows through email).  So, if that value is “locked up” because of its unstructured nature - if the value is inaccessible - then that’s a big problem we should be interested in.  Therefore there is massive opportunity in the area of developing tools that are really smart at unlocking this value in nimble, innovative and adaptive ways.

Some examples?  An obvious example might be Google.  The web is very unstructured - but Google is a really valuable tool because they derive a structure [page ranks] that really helps people pluck out what they want from the vast sprawling unstructured mess of the web.

For those following AfterMail you’ll see the fit here too.  AfterMail are super smart guys making real-world, concrete tools right now at the pioneering edge of this phenomenon.  In what other areas this will go is anybody’s guess - but it sure is exciting.

This idea is in contrast to the traditional route of building ever more structured and expensive database apps to model the ever more complex problems and processes of the business.  The prediction is that this approach will ultimately hit the wall in terms of RIO when faced with the accelerating rate of change in the marketplace, coupled with competition from businesses that are employing these smarter apps that take unstructured data as the norm - and as a result can adapt quickly, on-the-fly, to changes in the competitive/data landscape.

That the background idea - and in thinking about that this morning - here’s what I realised.

I was reading Cooper’s thirteen characteristics of considerate (or polite) software.  The last one has always fascinated me:

Fudgeability

Considerate Software Knows when to bend the rules.

This is an extract of Cooper’s explanation to give you an idea of what this means:

Although an automated order entry system can handle millions more orders than a human clerk can, the human clerk has the ability to work the system in a way most automated systems ignore.  There is almost never a way to jigger the functioning to give or take slight advantages in an automated system…the characteristic of manual systems that let humans perform actions out of sequence or before prerequisites are satisfied is called fudgeability.  It is one of the first casualties when systems are computerised, and its absence is a key contributor to the inhumanity of digital systems.

About Face 2.0

And the point is - rather than tacking “fudgeability” on top of a system to make it more useful (which is itself a complex undertaking) - these new “unstructured apps” are essentially fudgeability-optimized from the ground up.  Because of this, in whatever form they turn out - they have the potential to be extremely considerate (and hence desirable to use) systems indeed.  Yumm….sweet like fudge.