via the Austinist web site:
According to one research analyst, Round Rock computer maker Dell Inc. failed in its initial attempt to bring a prototype smartphone to the consumer market after being rejected by wireless carriers for being—get this—too “Dell-like” in appearance.
Once again, if you don’t take design seriously (be it interface, industrial, visual, etc) your business will be at a serious disadvantage.
How many times have you worked on a long-term project and the design rationale gets questioned by various stakeholders at late stages of the design and development process?
This has happened to me many times, and most of the time I am madly scrambling back to emails and meeting notes trying to find who approved something and why. Most of the time this search ends in futility, thus sparking a new design debate on something that had already been finalized.
My question is: how do you guys capture design rationale, and how specific is it? (for example, saying that “Ken X in Marketing approved this approach on Jan 7, 2003 at the status meeting”.
Comments?
This is pretty amazing. Using the browser’s drawing capability, Typeface.js (a javascript library) will render any font you choose.. no need for the end-user to have the font installed on their system! Being able to select, copy and paste Optima is pretty neat!
via webappers.com
Some interesting ideas in this video.. augmented reality, instant language translation, thin displays, multi-touch and more. I hope in the near term they fix Vista, but for a longer-term goal this is pretty neat.
The guys over at 280 North (who built the awesome web app 280 Slides) are working on an app very similar to Apple’s Interface Builder, but for web-based applications.
It is VERY impressive work, and I highly recommend watching the video. I am still on the fence about Objective-J, though. It’s just so different from all the other languages! But because its similar to Objective-C, which is used for iPhone apps, it might have a chance of catching on.
I guess no one at Microsoft has read the great book “The paradox of choice” by Barry Schwartz. It appears they plan to offer 3 versions of Windows for those new tiny netbook computers that are getting more popular.
Here is a video where Barry talks about why less is more, and that faced with too many options people avoid making any choice at all.
Just insane. Please, companies, make things simple for us. We have enough to worry about already!
Opespot, a former 2 Sides client, just secured 4.2 million in funding. Way to go!
Something I am very interested in is how people perform in an environment where there is the perception of progress versus the perception of little-to-no progress.
When I used to work on motion pictures, our unit of measure was a “shot”. For visual effects, this was usually about 2-10 seconds of screen time; once production was underway (3D models made, textures made, etc) we would get a shot done in about 3-5 days and it was very satisfying (and was usually followed by a team happy hour). After 6 months, we would final the film and it would hit the theaters. This was extremely satisfying and to celebrate we would have a HUGE wrap party at the end of visual effects work.
In contrast, I have worked on software projects for 3-6 months with no appreciable sign of progress, no celebrations, no ceremony. It’s not as if people are’nt working; they are working, but the perception of progress is just not there. The final release of software cannot be the only measure of progress; other occasions need to be marked and celebrated. Perhaps the “unit of measure” can be a feature, the end of a sprint or a design deliverable. I think the important thing is that the duration is relatively small (no more than a month), has is a clear end date, and that the occasion is marked somehow.
Since most people who work at large software companies are there for years, not marking and celebrating occasions can make work appear to be a dreary gulag where the view never changes and nothing seems to happen. I think over years it wears people down and takes away that vital energy that makes them innovative and creative.
Instead of performing tests on subjects and then writing long reports in which the results are completely obvious to anyone who watched the tests, meetup.com has the coders/designers watch users every day and incorporate changes daily.
This is so rocking… and so obvious.