I have some exciting news! I have some free time over the next few weeks, and will be taking on freelance work.
I am primarily looking for freelance Interaction Architecture projects, but will consider web design/development work as well.
If you have an opportunity that you need some help on, please feel free to drop me a line: derekkehler@gmail.com
I put together a little bar graph to show the increase in size of Apple’s mobile devices over the last few years. That’s really not the point of this post, but it did get me thinking about other things, and where I think that mobile devices, and stationary devices alike are headed in the next few years.
With the release of the iPad this week, I started thinking about the way mobile devices have evolved over the last decade, and realized that somewhere over the last few years we stopped worrying so much about size, and more about what the device is actually for. The reason I bring this up, is because I remember Apple releasing a new/better/smaller iPod every year, or even twice a year. Now, although size does matter, we have other things to think about, like syncing, storage, and accessibility.
I think we’re approaching an interesting point in time where a separate device is needed for everything we do. Let me rephrase that, I don’t think we need a separate device for everything we do, but that seems to be the way that the need for mobility is playing out. There is a new device for everywhere we are and everything we do: we have a semi-stationary desktop or laptop that is our storage device and main syncing console, a cellphone for when we’re on the go… and now, with the iPad, a browsing/reading device for when we’re lounging around the house.
In my opinion, we’re seriously overlooking the need to store data and synchronize it with each device harmoniously and effortlessly. Now, the obvious answer is to store and sync everything online… essentially doing away with the need for personal physical storage devices, and I do believe that this is slowly coming into view. I guess, I’m just wondering when, and why it hasn’t happened yet.
Here’s my dream: I want all of my devices to sync themselves online at all times (in other words, I don’t want to have to think about it). That includes my music, photos, files and everything else that I could ever want to keep in digital form. I want to be able to purchase and access music from any device, and then listen to it in my car, my phone, and my house without having to worry about which computer it was on, or lugging around an external hard drive.
Is this too much to ask?
What do you think is the next step for computing? Do you agree with me? Disagree?
I dropped my first-gen iPhone the other day, as I was scrambling to answer a call while walking my dog, and sipping an americano. It landed on the sidewalk, and died of a hemorrhage :(
I wanted to purchase a new 3GS iPhone, but it was supposed to cost me 800 bones, so I decided that I would look into other options. It came down to the HTC Magic for $114, or the LG Eve for $85.
I decided to go with the Magic, and have actually been very pleased.
I’ve noticed that it’s quite a bit faster than the iPhone when accessing things over the network, and even just the operating system is substantially faster. Because it’s an Android device, Google Docs and Gmail integration are some of the best features.
There’s a few things that are less sexy, and less “apple”, including the absence of the elastic ending to lists, and touch zoom option… but they’re things that are just “nice-to-haves”, not game-breakers in any way. It’s quite a bit lighter, smaller, and substantially cheaper than the iPhone, and makes for a much sexier pocket bulge.
HTC Magic receives a grade of A-
Today is my first day inside the startup bubble.
Greg Bell and I have decided to start our own company. Our primary focus for the next 3-4 months is a social community called, ScrnShots. ScrnShots is a place for people to upload, tag and share screenshots of inspirational design, usability or anything else of interest.
Everything still seems quite unrealistic at this point, but I’m sure that the long hours will bring a touch of reality with them.
Stay tuned, as I will be updating this blog regularly with interesting tidbits of acquired knowledge and grumblings.
I was at the Seattle Library this last weekend. I’ve been meaning to go for the better part of a year already, but just never got around to it. It was an absolutely amazing sight to see.
The building was designed by Joshua Prince Ramus. Check out this Youtube Video of Prince Ramus explaining his reasoning behind the design.
I have spent the last six weeks at Engine Digital. I’ve done everything from IA to development, and even some design.
Overall, it has been a good experience. Since most of my experience up until six weeks ago, consisted of working with teams of 6 people or less, I would have to say that the biggest lesson learned was communication among a bigger team.
In a group of 5 people, you can get away with verbal communication. But, when you throw an extra ten people into the mix, mistakes are easily made. Documentation becomes KEY. At Engine we use Basecamp for all our project management, todos, milestones, etc. However, even basecamp isn’t detailed enough to keep track of everything, and so for little bugs, fixes, or edits related to a project, we use Mantis.
Also just general communication among your team, is different too. With a small team, you can’t help but be involved in everyone’s projects. With a bigger team, you have to purposely ask people for feedback, make sure everything is going as planned, because time is easily wasted if you’re not aware of what everyone else is doing, and any twists that the project has taken.
Lesson Learned: Communication is good – Communication with Documentation is better
As I’m sure a lot of you know, Firefox 3 Beta is available for download. I’ve been using it for about two months now, and so far, I’ve extremely happy with it.
Firefox 2 was becoming a massive pain in the ass. It would crash on me at least 2 times per day, and it rendered anything with javascript extremely slowly. Needless to say, using Gmail was a “bad user experience”. Since using Firefox 3, It renders javascript better than Firefox2, and I have only had it crash on me 3 times (it’s only happened while I was closing the application).
The only downside to using Firefox 3 Beta has been the fact that I haven’t been able to use most of my Firefox2 extensions that I have come to rely on so heavily (ie. the developer toolbar)
Well… THERE’S A SOLUTION!!!
The boys at Lifehacker posted a blog post called, “Make Your Extensions Work with the Firefox 3 Beta“.
I admit, it’s definitely a bit sketchy, and I wouldn’t recommend it for the average user… but I’m guessing that if you’re using the latest beta version, you’re not a newby anyway, so give it a try.
I did it, and it works perfectly. I am using the developer toolbar right now; I couldn’t use it before the hack.
Try it and let me know how it goes!
Facebook is starting to annoy me. Don’t get me wrong, I love Facebook, and I spend a lot of time on it. When I compare it to other social networking sites, it’s still in first place by miles. However, Facebook applications are getting out of hand.
I’m not saying that I haven’t installed any applications on my Facebook account, and I definitely don’t think that they are ALL annoying. he only Facebook application that I actually use regularly is the twitter plugin. When I twitter, this application automatically updates my Facebook status to whatever I twittered. Simple and brilliant.
Anyway, I have decided to see how many “other requests” I can gather, just for the hell of it.
For those of you who don’t enjoy these “other requests”, check out this video:
How to Block Facebook Applications
By the way… who the hell wastes hours of their life building an application called “Human Pets”???
The last day of CanUX was by far my favorite day. We had presentations from Gene Smith, Derek Featherstone and David Armano; all of which were very interesting.
First Presentation: Gene Smith
Gene Smith is a principal with nForm, one of Canada’s leading user experience consulting firms. He also writes about information architecture, interaction design, community, the web and other such topics.
Gene’s presentation was titled: Tagging. He also recently just finished a book called Tagging avaiable on December 27.
Gene had an interesting approach to his presentation. He started off with some history about how ancient civilizations communicated, up to the invention of the tab that we now have on most of our folders. It was a great intro, because it really set the stage for the rest of what he had to say.
Gene stated the problem, that we’re constantly taking in information, but for most of us it’s hard to keep track of it all (I’m definitely in that demographic). Then he asked the question: “why tags?”
He went on to explain the history of meta data, and how similar it is to tagging. He explained the different applications that tags have, ie. geo-tagging, machine tags, rss feeds and even ’social hum’ (my favorite word of the conference).
He then explained how tagging itself has evolved, from a form of meta data, to a way to search, as well as sticky tags (automated tagging system based on criteria).
I actually learned a lot from his presentation, even if a lot of it was history. I think it gave me a much broader picture of tagging, and it also confirmed to me that tags are here to stay. I think that tagging is still in the infancy stage, and there is much improvement that has yet to be discovered.
Second Presentation: Derek Featherstone
Derek Featherstone’s talk was my favorite of the whole weekend. It was actually quite a surprise for me, because I was not really looking forward to it at all.
Derek owns a Accessibility UX company called Further Ahead.
Derek’s presentation was titled: Accessible UX Design.
He showed us how speech synthesis reads code, and how important things like alt text in images really are. He played us a clip of a speech synthesis reader, reading a page off of amazon. It was absolutely horrid!
His biggest point of his whole presentation was about clean code. If your code is clean, you’re already 80% of the way there. another main point was the importance of the order of your code. The speech synthesis readers read your code in the order that it appears in your code (not on your page).
He touched on what kinds of disabilities require different techniques, and about how knowing your audience is key.
The thing that I found the most interesting, was the use of javascript, and how it can be extremely detrimental if not used correctly. For instance, if you have some ajax-y goodness on your page that only appears when a user clicks a certain spot, that piece of ajax has to be the next thing that a user can TAB to. I don’t think I had ever really thought of that before. I did go back and look at some of my code, and I was doing it right anyway. Nonetheless, it’s something to be aware of!
He also touched on things like:
Overall, what I got out of Derek’s talk was that clean code matters – not only so that you look good when someone views your source code, but also for accessibility.
Third Presentation: David Armano
David is VP, Experience Design for Critical Mass.
The Fuzzy Tail was about being adaptable in the workplace, and in your procedures. He talked about processes (past and present) that worked and didn’t work.
He emphasized putting aside your expertise, and try to learn all over again. He likened it to his relationship with his children. When he’s around them he starts to question the world, just like them. As a result, he’s seen creative changes in himself.
David had the quote of the conference: “People will use the tools that you build the way they want, not the way you intended it.”
Overall I thought David’s presentation was quite interesting. Maybe not extremely useful in real life, but quite interesting.
First Presentation: Lou Rosenfeld
Lou Rosenfeld has quite an impressive list of accomplishments. Of those accomplishments, Information Architecture for the World Wide Web is probably the most well known. Lou’s presentation was about his newest endeavour: a company called Rosenfeld Media. Rosenfeld Media is a publishing house dedicated to developing short, practical, and useful books on user experience design.
Lou talked about trying to come up with innovative designs for ancient products: namely, books. He talked about how he used UX techniques in developing his publishing company, as well as testing his books on users, and how that contributed to the design.
He introduced a social application that is currently in beta, called UX Zeitgeist: it’s a tool for rating UX books, and voting on what kinds of UX books are needed.
He also threw out a few ideas and fielded a few questions about how he’s trying to be innovative with distributing his books in PDF format. I found this subject quite interesting, since I am currently brainstorming of new ways to promote and distribute my music. I really wish that he had gone into a little more detail on this subject.
Overall, I thought that the talk was quite well put together, but a little bit unsubstantial. I didn’t really think that his business ideas were very innovative, but maybe if he had gone into more detail about his business model and how he was planning on distributing and marketing his products, I would have found it more useful.
Second Presentation: Brad Nemer
Brad Nemer is a product portfolio manager for Motorola’s 3G efforts in Asia. He’s also got an MBA and a Masters of Design.
Brad led a workshop on constraints, and how they affect what we do.
For this workshop we broke into groups. Each group was given a sport, and were named manager of one of the teams in that league. We were given a list of new rules (different from the current game rules), and were asked to discuss how these constraints would affect the game. We discussed things like: equipment, fans, fitness/skill level, etc.
After that, he proclaimed each group as commissioners of the whole league, and presented us with a few more constraints. We were asked to come up with creative ways in which we could multiply the current profits of the league.
Overall, I thought that the talk had a lot of potential, but in the end, it didn’t really go anywhere. I would have liked to spend a little less time discussing things in our groups, and a little more time listening to some of Brad’s theories on how to overcome constraints.
Third Presentation: The Banff Leadership Arts Ensemble
The Banff Leadership Arts Ensemble performed a play for us. This wasn’t your average theatre format, though. The play was based on a book that I can’t remember the name of, but was, none-the-less, amazing.
The format of this theatre was what really intrigued me most. Since I’m not a theatre buff, I don’t know what this form of theatre is called, but I’m going to call it “Fly-on-the-wall Theater”.
Scene 1 started with everyone in the same room. We were all in a board room, along with all the actors, almost like a normal play, but almost as if we were part of the play. Scene 2 is where everything got interesting.
When the board meeting (scene 1) was over, we, the audience, had the option to follow whichever character we found the most interesting. As the character left the room they entered conversation with another character (scene 2). At that point, we, the audience had the choice to follow this new character, or continue with the character that we had originally found interesting. This continued for 8 scenes. At the end of the play, all the characters ended up in the same room. At this point we, the audience, were allowed to discuss amongst ourselves, and try to figure out the rest of the story, according to how each of us witnessed it.
The story was about corporate life in an organization. There were a lot of politics and personal issues. The interesting part was how the personal issues affected the politics, and vice versa.
The moral of the story was: there’s always more to a story than what you can see.
Fourth Presentation: Jess McMullin
Jess McMullin is one of the owners of nForm, a UX consultancy firm in Edmonton, Alberta. He also co-founded the Information Architecture Institute and is the founder of the CanUX conference.
Jess’ presentation was called The Business Side of UX. It discussed ways to increase our influence on clients and co-workers.
A few things that I got out of his presentation were:
I enjoyed Jess’ talk quite a bit. I thought that he could have gone a little bit further with some of his ideas, but I definitely took a few things away.
An interesting point to mention, is that Jess was also a very nice guy, and extremely approachable. I subscribe to his blog, and I would strongly recommend others to do the same.
Unlimited Microsoft Bar Tab
The second evening of CanUX was extremely interesting also. at around 10:00 we headed down to the pub. David Crow, who calls himself an instigator and an entrepreneur, but is also a UX advisor/evangelist for Microsoft, had an open bar tab for everyone at the conference.
I ended up having a great conversation with David about some of his past ventures, and experiences with start up companies. He had some great suggestions about career direction, and improvement. He is an amazing source of information. and I would consider his blog a must read to anyone who is at all interested in the Canadian UX community.
I’ll be posting Part III of CanUX 2007 tomorrow.