Week 5

Blueprints for the Web: Organization for the Masses

Here are the 2 points that stood out for me.

1. "...bit time consuming, but it's invaluable insight and will save you twice the time redoing your site later." - Enough can't be said about proper planning and organization on the front end.
   
2. "...determine who will be using your organization scheme first and do a card sort only with those folks." - subtle way of saying know your audience.
   

Another thing I thought was interesting was the different ways suggested to identify and handle oddball categories with feedback and ranking systems and how in many social network driven sites today the whole labeling of the taxonomy is left to the user or community with an individual tagging system. (43things.com)

Hierarchy And Contrast: The Basis of Good Design

Not sure what to say about this, it was an article that could be titled Graphic Design 001. The points they made about contrast and hierarchy were true and useful. It just felt like they needed a little more, no a lot more, depth of explanation. Like handing someone some knives, showing them a fish and expecting some sushi.

Week 4

Gestalt Theory and HCI

The relationship between positive and negative space is at the core of all visual design. The Gestalt ideas of similarity, proximity, and continuity, are, in my opinion, the foundation for the HCI design principles. HCI is concerned about a users ability to perform tasks easily, and get results they expect. So the designer applies their knowledge of these basic Gestalt design principles to organize the elements in a visual hierarchy to hopefully guide the user to the different tasks available and what can be expected in the following steps. HCI with Gestalt not only has the power to make tasks easy, but can actually create a path or guide that directs the user to certain elements, while pushing others into the background. That is why there is so much thought put into e-commerce web sites and the relationships around the buy button.

Cluetrain Manifesto

As I was reading this I tried to remember my internet experience in 1999. While I do agree with many of his views on corporations, and the attitudes they have, and I agree that many still have a problem.

However the idea of Joe Sixpack joining the conversation and corporations not I think is very short sighted. Also that everyone in the group of unwashed masses out there is starved for a creative outlet and the laziness we see is a result of corporations is seems very idealistic.

CEOs, CIOs, VPs, Marketing directors and all the other people running corporations are people as well. They will join the conversation and today many have. One thing about corporations is that they have lots of money and power to figure things out, even if it takes a little longer.

His point about leveraging an intranet to tap into the knowledge of the worker bees is good. My director where I work now has been trying this, it works ok.

Overall, fun to read and very good points that are still relevant in today's digital environment. In 1999 while the adoption curve had come down considerably it is even further down now.

I remember when...

For me the “I remember” idea has the best potential to be molded in to something everyone in the project can have a piece of and claim as their own. As I said in my post below, I see the greatest potential not only in aesthetics and richness of the design, but in the content itself. Some people will like interviewing people for stories, others might want to research interesting facts and history about places or things.

Some links:

Not that we are going to go for 10 years, but the potential for richness in the content is very compelling.
http://www.storycorps.net/
http://www.nyc-plus.com/nycp8/storycorpspreserves.html

Very simple site - http://www.myurbandig.com/

Some photos to get you feeling nostalgic
http://www.bighappyfunhouse.com/
http://phototaken.my-expressions.com/slides.html

Not really examples of sites but this is to show potential if someone wanted to take a story or a topic this far.
http://www.gen.com/trailer/usb/usb_trailer.html
http://www.gen.com/trailer/atg/atg_trailer.html

I’ve included this just for the front page photos. Where can I get a sweater like that - http://www.remembertheaba.com/

Project goals, roles, and other fun

Before I go into my goals I want to play the role of cheerleader.

We have a great opportunity to design, plan, build and complete a project with no corporate political bureaucracy to wade through, no accounting hoops to jump through, and no half-baked marketing plan to mislead us. Yes, I understand there are still some constraints and obstacles to work around, but I’m not going to be a kill joy and go into those. I just want everyone to be excited at the prospect of getting to make something big, hopefully fun, and having their creativity freed from the man.

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I’ve been creating web content from a graphic design perspective going on 8 years and I’ve been a member of creative and design teams varying in sizes from 2 to 20. There are many reasons teams have succeed or failed that I’ve participated in, but the main factor in the effectiveness of the team has always been one thing, clear expectations. The team needs to communicate expectations with each other and with Kathy very clearly. Fulfilled expectations bring happiness; unclear expectations bring frustration and confusion which leads to failure and finger pointing.

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The goals or areas I want to focus on during the project:

There is probably one word for what I want to focus on, but I can’t think of it so I’m going to use many. The following job titles all have aspects of things I want to learn; Product Manager, Creative Director, Producer, Information Architect, Usability Engineer, even some aspects of Account Management. Basically, I’m trying to figure out a way to say I want to get better at managing resources, the creative process, and site assets, as well as expand my design skills with a better understanding of usability factors. I would also like to learn backend programming, but I suspect this isn’t the right class for that.

One role that is best left to someone else is copyediting/proofreading. I’m not good at this nor have a real desire to become good. Video or sound editing however, while not a strength of mine, is something I would like to learn more from the experts among us. Many of you expressed an interest in learning some common software applications. I’ll be happy to share what I know and some tricks I’ve learned. Please don’t hesitate to ask.

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All the projects have good potential. The one I gravitate most towards is Brian’s “I remember idea”. I think this not only has a lot of legs to go far in our class, but can potentially continue to grow through time. The content itself can be very rich in nature or just simple text, very flexible depending on time, resources and subject matter. I like the idea of focusing on one topic like Seattle, but I also think there are many other topics to consider as well, like favorite food Mom cooked, or childhood toys, TV shows, lots of back in the good old days stuff. And I don’t mean to sound like it has to be all really old, kid have great memories that are old to them as well. I think this is a great thing to brain storm about.

new year new class

My goal for this class's blog posts are to be short and to the point. Not only because I don't want to spend a lot time writing, I don't want to make you read it either. We all have more interesting things to do.

moment of clarity #1
Notes on Design Practice: Stories and Prototypes as Catalysts for Communication - I have sat in many exploratory design meetings as a graphic designer, but I have never experienced story sharing as described in the article. It is a very intriguing idea and would be fun to try with the right project. Like any method for design there is no one size fits all.

moment of clarity #2
The Publishing Team - Having worked primarily in a in-house agency or freelance environment in my career it was interesting to see where the marketing exec was put in the org chart. From personal experience the 'markcoms' rarely understand their role.

As for application to goals this quarter, I'm still a little vague as to where this class is going to apply to goals of my own.

Some links that might be of interest.

Random things of relevance in my opinion.

Microsoft employee commenting about Google - could it be any more relevant to Tuesday's class?
Scobleizer

You music buffs might already know about this, for the rest of you, this is a very cool community for music lovers.
www.last.fm/

Keeping with control of content and customization
Personalized web page similar to myYahoo.com, built with a relatively new language called Ajax. I vaguely understand how it works. However, play around with this and you'll see it has some great potential. Completely confused? Go to the tiny about link at the bottom of the page.
www.netvibes.com/ - I've played around with my page some - the best thing I discoverd is it makes a good starting RSS reader if you don't have very many feeds to keep track of.

I needed to add one more since there was talk about photo copyright and flickr and this is amazing to me.
blog.veer.com

True to the end

Winston's take on holography was interesting. This might be because I can actually remember some of the hype about it when I was younger. Holography was going to revolutionize they way we see everything, movies, pictures, books. Well we all know that hasn’t happened. In the examples we’ve read thus far, the supervening social necessity can be looked at from 2 angles; necessity is created because the technology or invention is cheap to produce and therefore buy, and the new invention is finally easy to use for the unwashed masses. Did anyone else think Winston’s tone in this last chapter was a little more fun? At least not so hyper scientifically dull?

Am I being ignored?

I’ll touch on a couple of things in the Ecologizing Mobile Media article by sharing my experience with cell phones.

With my move to Seattle, my wife and I have decided to forgo the traditional home phone and just expand my wife’s cell phone plan and get two phones. The price is roughly the same.

The decision to only have a cell phone is a good example of #4, new technology making war against the old, #5, new technology changes everything and #9 social biases. As was discussed in class with regard to VoIP, I am giving up some advantages doing this. The example though is that I choose one form over the other and my money followed. Just in my experience I think giving up the home phone is not uncommon with many people.

This brings me to the title of this post. Last week my mom tried to call my wife. The first time, my wife was standing in a crowded licensing office for our car and didn’t feel it was a good time to talk, sent her to voicemail. The second time my wife had no coverage and the third time the phone battery was dead, both calls went straight to voicemail. I need to mention my mom hates leaving voicemail and the missed call log doesn’t work if the phone is dead. Now my mom, being a little over sensitive mother–in-law, thought she was being ignored because she knows my wife always has her phone.

When everyone that calls you on a regular base knows you only have a cell phone, the expectation of a return response is different than home phones because they think you are always ‘home’. And if you don’t answer, through the magic of caller-id you will surely call back the instant you can. Mobile technology is creating a weird immediacy expectation in society similar to email.

For the record, I owned a cell phone in the past, but can honestly say I can live without one. Admittedly though, I am slowly becoming an addict of the convenience it brings. Does anyone else ever get the feeling that sometimes technology is rope being handed to us in order to hang ourselves?

Mediamorph This!

Did everyone have a crazy weekend with the papers, homework and life like I did?

My first overall impression of this article is that it was a Reader’s Digest version of Winston. That is not necessarily a bad thing. It did seem a little rushed though at the end. Again not a bad thing considering my schedule, it just seemed to have more details in the beginning than the end.

Now to the question of the effects of computing power on communication, there were a couple of things I that came to me as I was reading this. The first is about adoption of the new technologies discussed.

• Telephone: it could extend communication without delays or added complexity and that this significantly contributed the rapid adoption.
• Radio: adoption really grew after not only after content was there, but when easy to use receivers were widely available as well.
• Color TV: its adoption was slow because of two things, the new sets were expensive and difficult to tune.
• Internet: it had been around for sometime and was growing in use, but it wasn't until the creation of Mosaic and the World Wide Web that the popularity became widespread.

One factor that is common in the adoption of all of these technologies on a mass scale is the ease of use of the technology. There are other factors at work as well, but I think that every new technology, invention, service that people get exposed to, the initial thing they think is, "It this easy and is the benefit of use going to be worth effort it requires to learn?" I think VoIP is at stage right now where adoption is certainly there, but on a rapid, mass scale it still needs a device or something to shorten the learning or effort curve. Basically something that is as easy as a good old telephone.

The other thing I found interesting was all the new ways of mass communication technology coevolved together, each one benefiting to some extent from the other, and then diverged finding their niche in the human communication system. Which brings me to computers and how that is ever increasing easy to converge these different mediums (radio, TV, internet, telephone) into one, this isn't a giant revelation by any stretch, it the major theme of this program, it just makes me pause and think.

Pretend each media channel were its own separate small ecosystem, each with its own little money making animals coexisting with each other. Now, pull one these animals from an ecosystem and place it into another. The dominate little animals in that ecosystem are going to fight and squash the lone new comer. Pretend now you're God and just created a whole new type of ecosystem, one that all animals from the other ecosystems can survive in and it is also really big, room for everybody. Now place one animal from each of the small systems in the new environment so there is no dominant 'species'. That is the power of computers on media, taking a bunch of money making animals and throwing them together. The will either figure out a way to coexist or kill each other trying to be the alpha male. It's sweet.

Anyone seen the movie Pillow Talk?

As the title suggests, I won’t be getting very deep here. As I was reading about the phone I thought of that silly Doris Day movie and wondered if phone networks were conceived of sooner could have been a mass entertainment supervening necessity as strong as the business one? I bring this up because the author mentions the ‘Lovers Telegraph’ fad. I think people were the same then as they are now, and would have liked to talk on the phone. There might have even been a need for a speaker phone so the whole family could sit in the parlor and chat with Aunt Betty. The success of the record for entertainment demonstrates that there was a consumer market out there with discretionary spending.

I really enjoyed the “Informing Ourselves to Death” and had to wonder what kind of reception he received in a room full of computer scientists after he finished. Remembering where computers were in 1990 the speed seems quite prophetic. I love this part

“…brilliant young men and women, believing this, create ingenious things for the computer to do, hoping that in this way, we will become wiser and more decent and more noble. And who can blame them? By becoming masters of this wondrous technology, they will acquire prestige and power and some will even become famous.”

Does this make anyone else think of the dot com bubble and subsequent burst?

Chapter 1: The Telegraph.

I was a little worried about enjoying this book after reading the introduction, but chapter one about the telegraph was much better. It also made me understand why I slogging through that introduction was necessary.

Two things that hit me from reading about the invention of the telegraph:

1. I never knew why the U.S. had a privately developed telecommunication system, while countries in Europe have a public developed system. I don’t know if one is better worse that the other. Maybe that could be someone’s research.
2. The other thing I thought was interesting goes along with the area I want to research, design and usability. A major factor in the Morse system ‘winning’ over the others was the simplicity of his code. He drew on printer’s experience with type-fonts to help design a code that was easy to learn and use.
   

Just a side comment about the book and I’m going to sound juvenile here, but I wish there were more pictures of the devices the author is describing.

Beta version 0.1

Since nothing is every released as a complete product anymore, I will follow this trend and start by saying this blog is still in beta and may contain some errors.