cazh1 » Art

How to Draw an Owl

Jim MacLennan — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 03:27:41 +0000

On Documentation

One recent afternoon I found myself in deep conversation with potential consulting partners, holding out for a difficult requirement: “Excellent Documentation”. That’s a tough one to quantify, let alone describe; why hold out for something at once critical and ineffable? Doesn’t every project talk about the importance of providing documentation, yet rarely deliver it? Don’t most people flip past the pages of detailed work process, going right to the keyboard to bang away, expecting tool tips and intuitive UI to guide them through? Aren’t most technical teams passive-aggressive on documentation, procrastinating until the final week, throwing something together that the project manager probably doesn’t have time to read and review?

Click on the picture to check it out in book form ...

Still, I will press on candidate firms that want to code/configure for me, to put their manual where there mouth is, and show samples of the documentation that truly allows me to become self-sufficient. Many will piously claim an ultimate goal; to walk away from the project and customer [me], leaving me fully trained and self-supporting – even though [he cynically observes] they are incented to maximize billable hours. (Yes, I know the real truth; consultants enjoy the “fun stuff” – coding from scratch / developing new. Maintenance, extensions, and bug fixing gets boring.)

Of course, the more thoughtful Business Development folks, having been through similar conceptual wringers, will point out the difficulty of quantifying “acceptable”. But it’s not difficult to visualize; like certain non-fiction books, the really well-written ones where structure and prose come together in a perfectly natural way. “It’s like God wrote that”, I like to say, “it couldn’t have been written any other way.” Sort of like the Potter Stewart Pornography Test – “you know it when you see it”.

On Books

This turned the conversation towards books in general – fiction or non-fiction, read for enjoyment only, without regard to platform (paper or plastic). In fact, this is a terrific interview question I like to spring on folks – What as the last good book you read? It’s interesting how often the technical folks respond with Kernighan and Ritchie or the Gang of Four (no no yes), but I really like to talk to folks who want to review the latest pulpy summer fiction, interesting history, or a real brain bender like Hofstadter or Kurzweil. This is a great way to get into how people really think – listen to someone get animated about arcane topics like how to measure things – really big things, conceptually impossible things. You can hear it in their voice, see it in their body language – and it’s this honesty and energy that you want working for you, on the project or the contract …

Back to the Documentation

… and that’s probably the best way to identify an excellent documentation writer – do they get excited and animated about the craft of good writing. Do they know it when they see it – and can they identify why it works for them?

In the end, I agree that this is my white whale, a recurring windmill against which I tilt. Why do people overcomplicate the pictures and the prose, and create confusion out of something straightforward? Is it lack of complete knowledge about the subject matter – or lack of ability to communicate complexity with simplicity?

No easy answers here, and we’re running out of our scheduled time. To help make my decision, I’ll ask for samples; I find the best way to request representative work is to ask for something that the candidate is “proud of”.

Epilogue

An excellent quote near the end of this conversation; “I don’t read manuals … I clunk, I’m a clunker … I Apple” [emphasis mine]. Fascinating how intuitive usability has made a verb out of a brand name and a design philosophy.

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© Jim MacLennan for cazh1, 2011. | Permalink | One comment |
Post tags: analogies, Apple, communication style, creating understanding, Devil in the White City, Documentation, Hofstadter, Kernighan, Kurzweil, process documentation, Ritchie

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Fragmentation of Social Sharing Environments

Jim MacLennan — Sat, 22 Oct 2011 22:06:47 +0000

Progress requires innovation, success spawns imitation, competition requires differentiation – and after 7+ years of “Web 2.0”, there are multiple sharing environments vying for our attention (and participation).

Content Creation

Blogging has morphed beyond it’s “personal diary” origins; Blogger, WordPress, and the various CMS platforms have moved to become a long-format publishing platforms that continue to evolve. My own experience with this blog (cazh1) and internal blogs at work has shown that “posts” are more essays, articles, documentation on what and how, status reports for projects or trips.

I’ve recently begin experimenting with a new (for me) type of blogging – I’ll call it short-format, and it hearkens back to the old-school, diarist model. This is a place to put short notes, observations, maybe sketches / photos for an Artist / Designer, code snips for a Engineer / Developer, or experimental prose for an Author / Poet. The format is exemplified by tumblr, a fast-growing platform that hosts some amazing content and is giving the old stalwarts some competition.

Click for the original ...

Content Sharing

But what about the Usual Suspects – Facebook and Google+? I don’t see these platforms as content creation engines as much as they are content sharing engines; ubiquitous Share This! links, the +1’s and Like buttons that give “social media” their differentiating characteristic; networks of contacts that are of a like mind, in your Circles or Smart Lists, add value and context to the original content.

I see Flickr and YouTube as hybrids. Flickr is driven by people adding pictures; you can see / browse / search, and it has a personal, sharing-my-photo-album quality. YouTube, in the other hand, is more like a new video broadcast network; lately, it seems like the number of personal videos is dwarfed by ad campaigns, political messages, and music / entertainment videos.

Antics with Semantics

Yes, I understand that you can Follow other tumblrs. Facebook pages and Google+ circles are creating content as profound and banal as the bloggers. And I’m glossing over professional networks like LinkedIn, which can be oversimplified as an electronic form of career networking. All of this has great value, is very relevant to the conversation – but all have subtle nuances, different use cases where they drive value.

Where does Twitter fit in? The best description to date seems to be micro-blogging; the 140-character limit forces a style and controls depth of meaning – Twitter is more of a broadcast medium, a virtual bulletin board or cocktail party, best understood by watching trending topics when events are breaking. Content is created, and RT’s and hash tags give weight to an ideas current mindshare.

An Excuse for Experimentation

Clearly, there is no one best answer when trying to figure out how social networks can drive a business. There are many platforms and technologies, all of which are evolving to deliver different messages and produce different results. There is no one best solution – and the only way to be able to glibly comment on how this might impact your business is by diving in, learning what these things can and cannot deliver. Or find someone who had done it, who is still doing it.

Just don’t go by what you read in airline magazines or see on TV – sound bites won’t cut it.

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© Jim MacLennan for cazh1, 2011. | Permalink | No comment |
Post tags: Blog, Blogger, business value, Facebook, Google, Google Plus, LinkedIn, networking, Social Media, Social Networks, Tumblr, Twitter, Web 2.0, WordPress, YouTube

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Google+ is Active, not Passive, Social Networking

Jim MacLennan — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 19:22:21 +0000

This past week saw the introduction of Google+, the search behemoth’s entry into the social networking fray. A slew of posts, articles, opinion pieces, etc. were sure to flow – and as I settled down with some time and a backlog of links to review, here are my initial thoughts on the service.

Do I need yet another social networking platform? Not really, I’ve got my personal (Facebook) and professional (LinkedIn) networks somewhat segregated, and I am falling a bit behind in regular tweets and blog entries – the value waxes and wanes over time. Still, I’ve been impressed with Google’s overall track record on innovative tools for the “personal cloud” (i.e. how can I run my own life / my start-up / my virtual business sans infrastructure?)

Ahem … Google Wave notwithstanding … but everyone gets a mulligan every once in a while, yes?
In the various reviews / blogs, many call out that Google+ will replace / obviate the need for Google Buzz. Funny, I barely registered that one … a finnegan?

First impression: the basic interface / layout seems unimpressive, just another “skin” over the basic LinkedIn / Facebook layout. The UI tricks in Circles (drag and drop into groups) is cute, and it’s the little “usability” things that get a fair chunk of the universe to salivate … but I’m looking for something insightful …

Sparks just looks like Yet Another take on aggregated, automated search. I can follow news topics in Google News or companies on LinkedIn, subscribe to Google Alerts in eMail or RSS feeds in my feed reader; Sparks is just the Google+ version of an in situ enabler for watching the world go by

Hangouts actually looks promising – a video chat room that allows groups to speak and see each other. The first-time install process was a typical, classy example of well designed, tech savvy, user-empathetic instructions that eludes corporate IT.

Ahem … looking for examples of why folks don’t like corporate IT? Or, suggestions for skill sets and training required in modern IT?

However – to be a real enterprise tool, it desperately needs the ability to screen-share. The majority of my collaborative, video-enabled meetings-at-a-distance typically revolve around a presentation or spreadsheet that we are reviewing.

Active vs Passive: I found that I was looking for ways to incorporate feeds from Twitter and this blog … but I noted what MC Siegler called out in his writeup. Content doesn’t make it into Google+ unless I specifically put it in there; if/when I build up an active, complex nesting of Circles, that editorial tweak has the potential to jack up the overall relevance score, and make Google+ an impactful tool for workgroups in a professional setting. Combine that with the readily-available face-to-face Hangout interaction – it’s a social networking platform that leans a bit more to Active, not Passive, connections. Marshall Kirkpatrick has some very insightful notes on this idea, expanding on the notion that communication needs contextual integrity (a reasonable expectation of the proper level of privacy in this context – or, freedom from worrying about who’s listening in).

At this point, however, it’s very tough to get real interactions going – I need to get folks that I know – and would actively participate – to join Google+. I got my invite through a Lifehacker forum last week, and the person that kindly sent me an invite hasn’t even completed their profile yet.

Social Networking for the Enterprise: The really interesting notes come from folks like Dennis Howlett and R. “Ray” Wang, longtime commenters on the enterprise IT scene. Howlett’s writeup on Google+ in the Enterprise is a bit breathless, but I suspect this comes from years of wading through the so-called Enterprise 2.0 offerings from other quarters; he also notes the contextual power of Circles (when done right). Wang writes about the Google+ and the consumerization of IT – where I (above) call out the usability, he is stressing his five pillars of Consumer Tech and how Google’s approach lines up so nicely with what the consumer market has been trained to expect.

But don’t take my word for it – check out these writeups, my link list for the topic (hey, I even tagged and shared ‘em via Google Reader … and the

Whitson Gordon at Lifehacker gives a quick tour here – best place to go for the mildly curious
MC Siegler at TechCrunch captures his thoughts, including the seed of the Active vs. Passive idea
Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb on the intricacies of Circles – and an XKCD comic
A threat to Facebook? David Cohen at All Facebook weighs in with his alternaview
Sarah Perez at ReadWriteWeb writes on her “stress test” of Circles – and shares the findings of Florian Rohrweck on possible future offerings for Google+

At this time, Google+ is still invite only – last weekend, there was quite a rush of wannabe early adopters, so I am not in a position to give out invites – but if you are interested, let me know, and I will send out invites as soon as I am enabled!

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© Jim MacLennan for cazh1, 2011. | Permalink | No comment |
Post tags: collaboration environments, Dennis Howlett, effective design, Facebook, Google, Google Plus, Lifehacker, LinkedIn, personal cloud, R. "Ray" Wang, social networking, Wave, Web 2.0, YouTube

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A Nice Knock-Down Argument

Jim MacLennan — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 02:47:50 +0000

Sales and the Gantt

“Why exactly does he want to meet again?”

I could sense the exasperation in Karl’s voice, faintly; the sales manager wasn’t about to slip out of his professional demeanor over some perceived technical triviality. But for the fact that the request was coming from his newly-hired PMI maven, he probably would have found a convenient excuse to skip the invite.

“I just don’t understand why we need this meeting … the projects are moving forward, we are meeting regulary, the team is communicating status – what am I missing?”

Karl had called me in to his office to help decipher these requests, and I was searching for the analogy that would let me get to my next meeting. “Ah”, I explained, “you are using the terms ‘project’, ‘tasks’, and ‘communicating’ … somewhat colloquially”. The familiar roll of the eyes – I am talking in high concepts, pausing as I speak, trying to compose precise prose on the fly – never a good idea. Karl is checking his vibrating iPhone and wondering if he can make his own next meeting – but we both know there is a nugget of truth here, just have to find the right words.

“Your PM is looking for detailed tasks and dependencies, right? Like a recipe for building a road, constructing a house – a repeatable set of instructions, honed over time, that produce a predictable result. That model doesn’t fit this project; it’s assumes full knowledge of the path to the end … but that doesn’t really apply with a consumer-facing project like this …”. A glimmer of recognition …

When I make a word do a lot of work like that, I always pay it extra

“It’s like asking you for a detailed task plan when you are negotiating the big contract – there is a general path, for sure, but your team always has to find the way to close by navigating the relationships and complexities. Could you write down the steps for a trainee to follow? Of course not – and that’s how your team runs its projects. Not right or wrong – just different.”

And then the lights came on. “Thank You!”, said Karl, “that’s what I needed to hear, simply put, I understand now. I can deal with this meeting now, I’m good .. gotta go ..”

Engineering, Excel, and Expectations

“Why is my machine freezing up? Don’t you know anything about IT?”

I must admit, the 3D-spinning rendition of the button assembly was the kind of flashy technology that people like to stuff a CV/portfolio with – but who am I kidding? I can hack file formats and automate PDF renditions, but debugging drawing layers and block interference in a 2M, 15-page technical drawing?

“Look, we install this stuff, but we can’t run it for you. I put Excel on the desktops of everyone in Finance, but I don’t write their spreadsheets for them.”

Deadline tension has a way of stressing the plasticity of common sense, and Mike’s expectations were a little out of true here. He actually laughed at that one – but the machine was still poking along, so he returned to the Task Manager and his Google searches, a tad less grumpy.

Executives and the Blank Slate

“There has to be an easier way”, said Sandra, the impatient executive.

Unfortunately there wasn’t; like most mature ERP implementations, earlier software didn’t quite cover the requirements list, and a bit of customization gets added here, here, and here. And, as entropy reliably applies to business process and code repositories, that stuff gets complicated after 10 years – hence our suggestion to reimplement the base ERP for this latest strategic acquisition.

“Why can’t you just tweak it?”

I’ve come to despise that word – co-opted from the hardware hacker’s lexicon, it has become a common term used by the non-technical to minimize and rationalize a patch, exception, and/or other workaround to deliver results with the minimum amount of near term effort. And, since IT is woefully unable to glibly quantity TCO, the tweaks persist.

But not in this case; since we had the opportunity [acquisition budget / slush fund] to reimplement [... if I knew then what I know now ...], the suggested approach was to create a new instance, model the business in a clean system, then “convert” the existing data into the new instance. Manageable, simple, some time involved – completely understood. However, our “tough customer” wanted to understand why we would do it that way, as opposed to “fixing” the application in place.

“You can start with a clean sheet of paper, or you can keep erasing over the old one”.

What a reaction – silent stare, then “Wow, that’s perfect – concise, complete – I get it!”. The mood lightened noticeably; Sandra couldn’t believe I had come up with that one one my own.

The Vendor Rep Brings Me Down to Earth

My own Blackberry buzzes, snapping me out of a self-satisfied smile. And my drinking partner for the evening snaps me back to reality, out of the reverie these old war stories had brought on.

“Yes, Jim, that’s how we are taught to close the sale. Make the solution relevant to the decision maker, using examples and analogies from their own experience – makes it easier to get over the objections”.

“Gee thanks”, I griped, “thought I had stumbled upon a secret recipe there.”

But then our conversation turned to the creative application of styles and approaches from one discipline to another; mash-ups in the change management world, as we passed the time until the rush hour subsides.

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Post tags: abstraction, analogies, BlackBerry, business conversation, business savvy, CEO, creating understanding, elevator speech, euphemisms, Gantt, imagination, Project Management, project manager, short stories

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The Hegemony of Large Numbers – Ignoring Common Sense

Jim MacLennan — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 02:32:28 +0000

Ok, maybe I’m stretching the meaning there, but that’s a cool sounding title, and what I see as an interesting phenomenon. People get excited about Large Numbers, and think they have meaning and importance simply because they are Large Numbers.

The Law of Large Numbers ...

Big Errors

For example – years ago, when an application manager was whirling around the office in a minor uproar, worrying that that someone accidentally keyed in a $1B line item on an invoice.

That’s $1,000,000,000,000 – for the Unit Price.

Well, come on, that number is so ludicrously high, the error condition sticks out like a sore thumb. A single order like that is 1000 times our annual sales, for goodness sake – no one would let an error like that get all the way through to the month-end closing documents, or the daily sales report, or the AR reports. And no one would believe it if they saw it there.

So just calm down and reverse the error – maybe add a little data entry validation to prevent another such “catastrophic event”. (Note – this was in the days of the S/36 and the AS/400 – the user tabbed out of the data entry field, didn’t use field exit).

We should be more afraid of the small data errors – what if you mistakenly introduced a 10% error by transposing a few numbers – what happens then? Cranky customers, lots of backing out, and a difficult needle in the haystack to find.

Big Benefits

Projects these days need lots of business justification to prioritize above the many others vying for attention. But a benefits statement that claims $100M in costs aren’t getting allocated correctly? Where’s the real benefit here? Not $100M, but making the overall profitability of the products or customers in question more accurate. Not a lot of quantifiable benefit there – but $100,000,0000 looks so impressive.

Or maybe the classic “sales force automation” justifier. If I can make my sales reps just 1% more productive, and annual sales are $100M, then surely we can justify spending $1,000,000 on the Fancy Software System. The big numers make for compelling math – but will you get the sales force to commit to the incremental revenue? A difficult task, typically.

Common Sense Helps

Everyone is busy, everyone working hard and trying to make things happen – and unplanned interruptions or competition for scarce resources (including time!) can lead to interesting reactions to such Large Numbers. Unfortunately, most folks also do not have enough time to pause and reflect on the reality that those numbers are trying to express. Realistic? Rarely.

Just count to 10 … slowly …
(that’s not too large of a number …)

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Post tags: benefit, business savvy, errors

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Vintage Technology

Jim MacLennan — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 03:29:03 +0000

Here’s one of those videos making the rounds via eMail. I found this in my inbox at work, from an observant friend who apparently likes the same web sites I do (although I had originally this as a great example of minimalist site design).

It’s interesting to note how the magical becomes the mundane. I did find it interesting that certain “timeless” concepts (a deck of cards? a marbles game?) have more resonance than these artifacts of a bygone age.

Yet we are still surprised when new technology comes along, with the younger generation and their newfangled ideas supplanting our familiar, tried and true tools that we use every day. Not many music fans want to go back to 8-tracks – so why do we resist the next version upgrade, the next user interface paradigm?

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Post tags: generational diversity, Technology, video, YouTube

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Learning About Data Visualization

Jim MacLennan — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 01:08:31 +0000

Even though there is an art to visualization design, it stands to reason that this is a skill that can be taught / learned. I remember going to campus visits with my daughter, and hearing about a textbook considered to be a timeless classic – teaching students how to draw. What a concept – I guess I had always imagined an innate, magic ability (that I, of course, never had).

Then again, musicians start learning to read and write music and play chords, and engineers learn physics, materials, and how to manipulate CAD environments – so why not training on data visualizations?

Thankfully, there is a ready supply of introductory material and examples on the web, with links to more advanced stuff. Let’s start with some design concepts (we’ll do specific tools and techniques later …) Note, of course, that this is just a small selection of interesting stuff I’ve read over the past few months.

Fundamentals First

If you like your training in small bites, Mathias Shapiro uses the Pecha Kucha technique to lay out the basic principles. It’s a nice ice breaker – the fast-paced style glosses over things a bit (and mispels a word or two), but you get the general concepts.

Over on Flowing Data, Nathan Yau has a pretty nice write up on getting to know and understand the fundamentals of graphical perception. It’s a summary of a 1984 article from the Journal of the American Statistical Association; if Nathan’s points (as it were) on how people decode visual clues pique your interest, try diving into the entire article.

Finally – on Understanding Graphics, Connie Malamed has a nice article on 5 myths of visual communication – instructing / learning by concentrating on what not to do. Seeing things “in reverse” can be an effective learning strategy – the opposite of “I’ll know it when I see it“….

However, I do take minor exception to some elements of myth 3 and 4 – there can be value in animation. Case in point – I was always enthralled by the miracle of the sewing machine – could never imagine how that actually worked – until I saw this nifty little animation (from World Of Technology, via FFFFOUND!)

Click for the original ...

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© Jim MacLennan for cazh1, 2010. | Permalink | 2 comments |
Post tags: abstraction, Art, CAD, data, data visualization, Design, graphical perception, information, pecha kucha

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Art and Science of Data Visualization (Part 2)

Jim MacLennan — Sun, 14 Nov 2010 19:03:30 +0000

Just a little more theory and background on Data Visualization, to eat up the rest of your weekend. Unlike the McCandless video, this video will take some time investment – but well worth it, if you want to charge your batteries on this topic.

(via Flowing Data) From earlier this year, Martin Wattenberg gives a talk on data and visualization. Some interesting points:

Data visualizations work well with large data sets
Interesting insight comes from borrowing ideas from different knowledge areas
Visualizations and analysis can help text “data sets” just as much as numerical data sets

Plus, a really interesting injection of artistic sense and sensibility into the “science” of data analysis – breaking WIRED magazine covers into component colors wheels, and seeing editorial patterns following patterns. Wattenberg’s summation on this particular visualization technique:

… an interesting phenomenon – the idea that you can visualize color.

I know what he means, it just sounds like he’s struggling for words to express a concept that is simple to understand visually; sort of a mini-proof of the “picture tells a thousand words” idea that is the fundamental reason why well-done data visualizations are amazingly effective.

Presentation fans, take note: Wattenberg also provides multiple examples of effectively reinforcing a discussion point by doing really interesting visualizations with openly available tools on the internet. Makes me question my “firmly held belief” that presenting live software to a large group is a a recipe for disaster. This is one of my personal takeaways from the video – live interaction helps the audience better understand the insights that they can get when working with the data. A least it’s better than a room full of bobbleheads when the “drilldown” buzzword pops up.

By the way – the MITWorld site has a huge collection of deep-dive videos; more on data visualization and empirical analysis, of course, but on a wider range of topics as well.

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Post tags: data visualization, effective presentations, Martin Wattenberg, MIT

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Art and Science of Data Visualization

Jim MacLennan — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 03:02:45 +0000

“Data Visualization” has been an extremely active and popular topic for a few years – we can use Google’s Timeline search feature to see the growth in interest since 1980:

Google Timeline results for

That local high in July of this year was due in no small part to David McCandless’ Information is Beautiful talk at TED this past summer. It appeared in my RSS stream here, here, and here, so I got the hint, spent 18 minutes watching it, and got suitably jazzed on the power and potential of visualizations.

McCandless uses a variety of visualization techniques to generate insight into a wide range of topics ..

Mountains out of Molehills – what are we afraid of? Funny stuff, but hidden patterns that jump out at you with just a little extra context.
Facebook break-ups – at 6:15, the roller-coaster graph of predictable relationship demise, recently Slashdotted
Military Budgets – a digression into the knack we all have of misunderstanding / misrepresenting that facts via statistics. Did you know that Myanmar is the world’s biggest war machine (as a percent of GDP)?

An important section comes when McCandless talks about the start of his work in design of data visualizations. Note that he’s not had any formal training – it was just sort of dormant within – and is very probably there within all of us, practically forced on us with the information overload of the web-enabled era. The bulk of your sensory input is visual, and the majority of our perception is happening unconsciously.

… the eye is exquisitely sensitive to patterns and variations … [it's] the Language of the Eye. And if you combine the Language of the Eye with the Language of the Mind – which is about words and numbers and concepts – you start speaking two languages simultaneously, each enhancing the other …

I do agree with his point that an effective visualization is self-evident, and appreciated by many – but I do not think it’s easy for the average Data Consumer to see themselves as a Data Artist, one who can conjure the magic on command. I have noticed that most of the data visualizations catching the public’s eye are not the ones you can easily generate with Excel (data navigation and manipulation tool for the masses). McCandless’ “balloon race” interactive diagram of health supplements is sublimely useful, easy to understand – and beyond the tool- and skill-sets of most of us.

Nevertheless – the inspiration, the examples, and tools are out there, and I am convinced that there are more Data Artists among us – they just don’t know it yet. I’m starting a series of posts today – I’ve been following many blogs and writing about this topic for some time – but it’s been a few months, and I’ve got a big backlog of topics to cover.

So check out the McCandless video; be prepared to get psyched, and then carve out some time to join me in this review. Data is the new soil, as McCandless points out – and just like good writing, those who can effectively help other visualize data and have their own insights will harvest some interesting insights, for themselves and their employers.

(… and learn how the Eyjafjallajokull volcano was carbon-neutral!)

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© Jim MacLennan for cazh1, 2010. | Permalink | One comment |
Post tags: Art, cognitive science, communicating complexity, data visualization, David McCandless, Design, Facebook, Google, hidden patterns, information overload, Inspiration, multi-media information sharing, Presentations, Science, TED, video, visual, visualization, visualization techniques

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Designing for Devices

Jim MacLennan — Sun, 10 Oct 2010 19:53:41 +0000

My last entry on design for a bit – just some thoughts on the added complexity when designing applications for multiple client devices.

Fast Changing Device Landscape

Click for the original ...

The “last mile” of user/computer interaction has seen a number of exciting innovations over the past year or so. Phones are getting physically smaller, yet have bulked up their connectedness and capabilities – and the shrinking screen, now touch-sensitive, has blown up into the ubiquitous iPad and a host of next-gen touchscreens. Yes, I know the iPad came before the iPhone – but vendors have been attempting tablet computers for years. I think the “always-on phone” and society’s fascination with social networking and connectedness made it natural for the change in focus – the world isn’t just at your fingertips, it’s in your pocket and with you at all times.

But after texting and pictures, there were many desk-hating, operations-focused Real Business Users with ideas and needs for a number of Relevant Business Applications that are poised to benefit from a connected, free-roaming UI. Historically, the clipboard metaphor and handwriting recognition has had mixed success, but the gesture-control meme seems to be making the latest waves – even threatening the future of the mouse as the preferred non-keyboard data entry/control device. Robert Kosara’s writeup on the Magic Trackpad is an insightful summary on the current state of Supply and Demand for this important new client device.

Impact on Application Design

With new devices come new and different input and output possibilities – and limitations. Earlier this summer, Mobiletuts+ featured a discussion with two applications designers, detailing how they work within the limitations of the target devices, while taking advantage of the unique UI elements that are available. A key question to ask – Which Device are you Designing for? The answer sets your possibilities and your limitations, while designing the most effective UI for the task at hand.

At about the same time, Derek Powazek wrote up his experiences while designing for the iPad. His flash of insight was the realization that the “design language” of these devices is still evolving; when combined with the rapid pace of innovation, it can be a bit maddening when investing time and thought into aspects of presentation and interaction that may get replaced next week with the “next big thing”. Suzanne Ginsburg wrote of her experiences adding Android UI skills to her repertoire (and features to her designs); she grudgingly takes on the incremental work that multiple UIs demand, but makes the call for some standards to develop.

Is there a shortcut to multi-device development?

New technology from SAP / Sybase promises an abstraction layer that separates the presentation logic from your application. A classic approach – just focus on the application “content”, and the SAP Unwired Platform takes care of the final rendering on the device – any device, even as things change going forward. What’s not to like?

The Application Architect sees a relationship similar to CSS and HTML; the presentation details are separated from the content
The Corporate IT Developer likes the idea of writing the application once, and eliminating the need for a rewrite for each new client.

However …

The Interface Designer dislikes the idea of developing with boxing gloves on – unable to precisely control the unique aspects of any one client device’s native UI by genericizing concepts across all.
The Target Marketer knows they could be losing buzz-share with the device-centric mavens that want apps optimized for their favorite platform

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© Jim MacLennan for cazh1, 2010. | Permalink | No comment |
Post tags: Android, Application Development, BlackBerry, client devices, computer interaction, Design, interfaces, iPad, presentation layer, SAP, Sybase, UI, user interface design

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