value in the act

Modeling is similar to planning-most of the value is in the act of modeling, not the model itself.

Scott W. Ambler, Agile Modeling, New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2002, p. 19.Amazon

"Aha!"

EVERY now and then, humanity wakes up, looks at itself in the mirror and realizes that it's been wasting a lot of effort doing things the old way just for the sake of tradition. From the caveman who first put a bunch of rolling logs under something heavy, to the genius who packed four times more orange juice onto a truck by condensing it first, history is filled with "Aha!" moments that propel society forward.

JVC had just such a moment when it looked at how people were using camcorders. "Let us get this straight," the corporate entity said (I'm paraphrasing here). "People buy tapes to put into their camcorders. They fill up a tape, then rewind it and play it into a computer - which takes a whole hour per tape - so that they can edit it and burn a DVD. Or maybe they buy one of those camcorders that record directly onto miniature DVD's, which are very expensive, hold only 20 minutes of video and can't easily be edited on a computer."

The "Aha!" moment came when JVC looked at the iPod. Why, JVC wondered, are we still recording onto tapes and discs, if we can record directly onto a tiny little hard drive like the iPod's? The camcorder could hold hours and hours of video, and you'd never have to buy another tape or specialized blank DVD.

....

But because the transfer-and-edit process is so confusing, the Everio G winds up suited for a very specific audience: people techno-shy enough to want the world's easiest-to-use camcorder, but techno-savvy enough for its awkward video-importing challenge. It may take JVC one more "Aha!" moment to realize and correct that contradiction.

David Pogue, "Aha! Video Straight to a Computer, NYTimes.com, 22 Sep 2005. via Tomalak

managed chaos

Shouldn't there be away to anticipate problems like those posed by bagels and toilets, and cut out all the trial and error? As frustrating as the "rework" is, says Lee [OXO's President], it's part of the design process, a necessary by product of experimentation. "You could design a process to catch everything, but then you're overprocessing," he says. "You kill creativity. You kill productivity. By definition, a culture like ours that drives innovation is managed chaos."

Chuck Salter, "OXO's Favorite Mistakes," Fast Company, Oct 2005, p. 66-67.

let go of safety in mediocrity

Nobody knows what they really want before they get it. Not consumers, not conference goers, not programmers, and certainly not clients. Delivering greatness requires you to let go of the safety in mediocrity where you just do as you’re told. (But sure, it’s also a gamble, so don’t come crying if you’re fired for trying — but do drop a note if it worked out ;))

David H. Hansson, "People don’t know how to ask for what they really want," Signal vs Noise, 37signals.com, 16 Sep 2005

team mind

This is the power of the team mind: to create new and unexpected solutions, options, and interpretations, drawing on the experience of all the team members to generate products that are beyond the capabilities of any of the individuals.

Gary Klein, Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions, MIT Press, 1999, p. 245. (Amazon)

Design Goals for MS Office 12

PressPass: What were the design goals of the new UI?

Larson-Green: We had four major design goals. The number one design goal was to make it easier for people to find and use the product features needed to get the results they wanted. As such, we set about rethinking the UI from the user’s perspective, which is “results-oriented,” rather than from the developer’s perspective, which tends to be “feature-oriented” or “command-oriented” – thereby enabling people to focus on what they want to do rather than on how they do it. We put those results in “galleries,” so for instance, instead of having to learn how to make something shadowed, or what the aspect ratio is or the percent gray, you just say, "Oh, I like that one," and you pick it, you click it and get it in your document. It’s more visual.

The second design principle was to streamline the UI to maximize the user’s workspace. That means having the UI generally be much less intrusive –without popping things up over the top of where you’re trying to work, without toolbars appearing because you inserted a picture, and without task panes coming up automatically. In addition to having the document be the most important thing on the screen, we wanted to make the user experience more predictable, with less guessing and auto features. In general, we wanted too make the UI more user-driven.

Another design principle was driven by the desire to make it easier for people to discover the capabilities that achieve a desired result. To accomplish this, we contextualized the new UI by taking all the things that were not about authoring documents and moving them out of the authoring space, and contextualizing all the things about authoring documents into tasks to create documents. In PowerPoint today, all the commands are available to you at all times at the same level. While there are advantages to that, when you have a couple of thousand commands, you have too many things on the screen at once, and the user experience is not really directed to what you’re trying to get done. By making it context-driven, only the more relevant features are visible, which also makes it easier for the user to understand what the product’s capabilities are.

A final design principle focused on designing for the full document life cycle. We’re starting to add more of these processes in Office that aren’t just about authoring documents, which are features supporting collaboration and work flow and document management processes for your corporation. Currently, there isn’t a good place in the UI to put that kind of functionality, so we are creating a place to put it.

"Q&A: Microsoft Showcases New User Interface for Office “12” Core Applications," Microsoft.com, 13 Sep 2005.

41 minute video showing the new office UI.

easier on the eyes

The previews of Windows and Office focused on their use of graphics to give consumers more ways to manage information on the computer screen.

That's a growing issue as software applications become more complex. For instance, the first version of Word had 100 commands. The 2003 version has more than 1,500 commands and 35 tool bars.

"We need to make it easier for people to visualize information that comes from different directions," Gates said.

The Office redesign is meant to make it easier on the eyes, with the myriad of menu boxes fading in and out of view depending on what tools are being used.

Microsoft designers developed the system by tracking -- with permission -- every keystroke of some Office users, Charles Fitzgerald, general manager of Microsoft's Platform Strategy Group, said in an interview.

Alex Veiga, "Microsoft: Office 12 to anticipate needs," BusinessWeek.com, 13 Sep 2005.

as convenient as the pencil

In looking back at Kodak's long road to the digital age, Sasson doesn't believe his employer ultimately was late to the game.

"As much as other people may have introduced cameras earlier, I submit those cameras probably were not very easy to use — or very good by image-quality standards," he said. "The mission is the same as George Eastman's: Take this very important art and turn it into something 'as convenient as the pencil.'"

Ben Dobbin, "Digital camera turns 30 — sort of," MSNBC.com, 9 Sep 2005

nano

It's amazing that the Nano even made it to the stage. The story of the Nano started nine months ago, when Jobs and his team took a look at the iPod Mini and decided they could make it better. On the face of it, that wouldn't appear to be a fantastically smart decision. The iPod Mini was and still is the best-selling MP3 player in the world, and Apple had introduced it only 11 months earlier. Jobs was proposing to fix something that decidedly was not broken. "Not very many companies are bold enough to shoot their best-selling product at the peak of its popularity," Gartner analyst Van Baker says. "That's what Apple just did." And it did that while staring right down the barrels of the holiday retail season.

It was a gutsy play, and it came from the gut: unlike almost any other high-tech company, Apple refuses to run its decisions by focus groups. But Jobs is a hardened gambler, and he doesn't scare easily. This is the guy who coolly poured millions of his own dollars into an unknown and direly unprofitable company called Pixar before anybody had even made a full-length computer-animated movie. "The more we started to talk about what this could be," Jobs says, "it wasn't long before I said, 'You know, what if we just bet our future on this? Is that possible?' And everybody immediately looked pretty scared. Including me."

"What's really been great for us is the iPod has been a chance to apply Apple's incredibly innovative engineering in an area where we don't have a 5%-operating-system-market-share glass ceiling," Jobs says. "And look at what's happened. That same innovation, that same engineering, that same talent applied where we don't run up against the fact that Microsoft got this monopoly, and boom! We have 75% market share."

Lev Grossman, "Stevie's Little Wonder," Time.com, 11 Sep. 2005

Experience design

Experience design, or “design for experience”is a name for enlarging scope to consider patterns of life, goals, activity, context, repeated use, learning, sharing, emotion, and more…while applying The Design Process.

Marc Rettig and Aradhana Goel, "Designing for Experience: Frameworks and Project Stories," Presentation given at Adaptive Path's User Experience Week 2005 in Washington, D.C. (via Putting People First)