Applied blogging – why the hell should we blog pt 2

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I talked to a friend yesterday about presenting and spreading new ideas among and audience that is interested, but not yet really ready for it. They are not into the topic , they want something new but they are rather sceptic.

“You should not think about something new, something original”, said my friend. “That challenges people too much – and it’s too much work to shape your idea in a clean and neat way, make it bulletproof and let others try do destroy it.” Is that just lazyness and too much recycling? On the other hand: if your idea is good enough to be made bulletproof, if you spend all that work and time on it – then you should try to sell it.

“I think it is way smarter”, said my friend, “to summarize and comment what others did. There are so many ideas around, famous ideas, and professional thinkers – there is enough to build on. And most people did not get it anyway, the more you repeat it and the more examples and relations you build – the higher the chance that they get excited about what you are telling.”

I think that 98 % of blogs do the same. They tell about what others told, they summarize, they report. So here’s another reason for blogging: It’s a legitimate way to recycle the work of others, to use external knowledge to build your own authority. I think you can go even further: Because blogs usually report things that have been there before, they are a good means to also push new ideas: They are written, they are published, they are usually part of an already ongoing discussion – so the ideas should have some authority…

Is it again vanity? I call it strategy… Know the patterns that rule the world and deal with them.

Productplanner.com – an online process design facilitator

Productplanner.com is a great service. Maybe it’s not a fully flavoured design tool yet, but it does provide good support for many basic steps in interaction planning. It allows you to combine the most common steps that every online product has to perform, split into several usecases.

The visualization is nice; it allows you show overviews (that tell you how many steps are in that process) and details. Great add ons would be the possibility to attach documents to the single steps or to add more descriptions.

I plan to use it to prepare some standard processes that I need always and always again – productplanner should allow me to have them with me whereever there is an online connection, and to edit them without anything else then a browser.

A nice benefit besides that could be the public process library: watch and compare processes others have designed.

I’m curious if that service will take off and in which direction it will develop. And I support everything that fosters some process-oriented focus in online design and product development – everythingh else is just plain scribbling.

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User Experience. One of my favorites

User experience is a thing with a whole lot of facets.
Designer Niko Nyman presented some great ideas in his Web2Expo-speech

* You can add good user experience to software and use that to sell it to your customers.
* You can add good user experience in the experience between the user and the screen.
* You can add good user experience in the processes and interactions you design.

The latter is probably the most intensive, but also the must productive way of using good experience, good vibrations. It takes a lot of creativity and a lot of power to shape these interactions, connect them to the user’s offline needs, add that kind of value that allows you to address and solve the most important problems, and to become an important part of the user’s life.

Sounds great.

But I think there is even more: In my eyes, the biggest benefit would come from a chain the keeps all three steps together and allows you to have full control.
* Build software (or have developers) that follow(s) the rules of user experience
* Work with designers, who follow, develop and use the rules and elements of user experience.
* Have these two steps prepared in a way so that
* you can reuse them
* you can draw a line from the software to the output and explain how it helps the experience
* you can draw a line back from the interface to the software and explain how it helps to handle that issue easily
* you can prove that your software and your designs follow consistent ideas – and those ideas are based on common problems in the real world.

I like this idea, because
* I like new thoughts and productive ideas
* ideas should be connected to solutions; at least as a guess – visions are not enough
* that shapes a product, that can be offered, discussed and sold

An important prerequisite is, that you can measure user experience. This is where we need new and reliable criteria. What do people consider as a good experience?
* It may be very simple things – even if they are not good for anything
* it may be something very important – even if it’s very complicated to achieve
* or it may be something in the middle.

That doesn’t answer a lot, but I understand it as a hint: We should probably look for pairs to describe what it’s about. Very simple and very important would be great, very simple and a little important would be as good as very important and not so simple or quite simple and quite important.
That requires some more thoughts.

Interaction Audit – test your page and create an objective diagnosis

Josh Williams from Hot Studio had a great speech at Web2Expo on reshaping ebay.

The two outstanding feature were:
he gave a definition of “feel” in “look & feel”
he introduced a well shaped method called Interaction Audit

The feel is an interaction groove – “It can be click-click-click oder clickp-hover-type or click-scroll-type – it does not matter, as long as you don’t start to turn a telephone in an airplane cockpit.”
The target of controlling feel is not only to attract the user, but also to make him feel comfortable, so that he can reserve bigger parts of his mental bandwidth for the content of a site instead of it’s technology.

In the interaction audit (which aims to check and harmonize the feel), they started with
* defining some example workflows: what do users do, what tasks do they perform on the way.
* that led to a task-activities matrix to find out similar activities in different tasks.
* Detailed descriptions of both were collected in a database
* The number and the number of variations in the interactions are now a criteria o quality (links, tabs, forms, mouseovers etc. – 16 different types of reactions/behaviours after you click on a link, 5 different types of forms ertc.)
* in addition to interaction inconsistencies, also task inconsistencies were analysed
* object inconsistencies as well.

This was a base that could be used to define targets, go through the enterprise universe and clean up.

What makes this so great?

It’s all about structuring – shaping and describing a problem is maybe not solving it, but it’s a good start to avoid it in the future.
There is no common taxonomy or reusable usecase for that – it’s up to us to create the best practices and to find innovative ways and solutions.
As long as you don’t forget your goals, there are never to many details – all those small pieces (if kept in a clear structure) will help you understand new problems that will keep arising every day.

Early adopters – that’s not us

Some ten to fifteen years ago when tech- and ebusiness-journalism evolved also in Austria we were frantically writing about new eras, great technologies and killer applications.
Well, the beginning was more moderated; the main topics were curiosity, content and communication.
As business pressure started to rise and advertising customers wanted to sell something (I still believe that they did not know what they wanted to sell, but they tried anyway), we also had to sell something in our stories.
In 1997 Bertelsmann started a digital tv project – we hyped interactive tv, ecommerce merged with soap operas and a revolution on the living room sofas. Nothing happened; just some boring technical tests. In 1999, the 3G-umts-licenses were auctioned in Europe. Telco companies paid tremendous money, we wrote stories on location based services, mobile tv, mobile commerce, mobile dating services and video conferencing. Nothing at all happened. In 2000, Telekom Austria and ORF closed a deal that did not mean anything – just some vague cooperation. And againg, nothing at all happened.
We were doing some more stories, were heavy users of some pilot applications (I especially enjoyed the mobile public toilet finder for London and Paris) and then got bored and went to something new.

Yesterday my wife who does not care at all about technology, told me that she will buy a new n-Generation 3G mobile phone, because she wants to use the gps navigation tool, use the phone as a mobile video camera and because she wants to use the mobile shopping guide features: “It doesnt matter in which city I am, it can always tell me the address of the next drugstore and show me a way with some satellite-pictures.”

I had not spent a thought on these services for years. I’m a heavy user of mobile email, sometimes I’m quickly browsing the mobile web for exchange rates, travel schedules or footballl results, but I don’t spend any money in the mobile world.
I’ve just been making up my story. And it seems to be up to others to live it. – No problem; Im always finding new stories. We just should not forget that what seems like looking back may be a great outlook in the future: Ok, we invented the stuff, we’ve been there, done that. But others live it. And they tell us, if it works, if what we’ve made up makes sense.

And it’s been a while since she has been asking for the ip-based tv-service of Telekom Austria, which finally had come out in 2006 (without much ORF-participation). Fortunately, it still does not work outside of big cities.

Design

I tried to present some designs for the new intranet in a project I’m currently working on to the boss of the communication department. I just wanted to get some feedback on colours, use of logos, the general look and feel and maybe some discussion on the top level menu.
Not even the first sentence was finished as we were in the middle of a discussion on content details, wether to put tables of content on the top or on the bottom of a page, on how to remodel the voluminous pieces of content that made up large parts of the intranet and on about which new interaction schemes should be designed and how that would influence the organisation.
As regarding the look and feel, she just made an ugly face at the beginning, but at the end of our discussion she said something like “Well, the longer, I look at it, the better I like it, somehow.”

We think we’re focused clear and precise when we go into a presentation. “I want to discuss our new designs with you, just to give you an overall impression of what it could feel like.” – But even artifical terms like design allow such a wide variety of understanding.
Two me, we need two things to cope with that:
1) More definitions, which means more artificial terms. Concerning design, that could be Information Design, Interaction Design, Identity Design, Graphic Design
2) Nobodx will listen while we are trying to explain that stuff. we should have explanations ready and we should be prepared to discuss it with everybody, but it is even more important that we are prepared to understnd who is talking to us about what, to categorie the inputs todeal with everything at it’s time, but to stay focused enough to get now the decisions we want now.
This could be something like agile presentation mode.