There are no problems, just opportunities to design a better solution
Who's Joe?
I'm an Experience Designer who leads companies in developing their product strategies through a research driven process commonly known as User Centered Design.
Is the phenomena known as “Social Software” ready to be decoupled, or opened up? I’ll go on record saying “No”. Why? Well, for one, because everyone else is saying yes, and I like to be different, but more importantly, because “The Theory” leads me to believe that.
I could be wrong, and that’s OK. I may even be trying to apply the wrong theory to this particular phenomena. I want to inspire thought and conversation here.
One reason I may be wrong, is that software is much better understood then it was just a few years ago, and is behaving much more like modeling-clay in the concept car studio, (thanks in part to better software management and thinkers like Joel Spolsky and others) so a software capability may be able to decouple parts of the value chain while leaving other parts available for optimization.
Echoing what I’ve been preaching for years now around my day-job, firms that are seen as customer advocates will reap rewards in measurable increased wallet share. This takes “soft” business cases built around “blue dollars” and adds real substance to them.
Hey Hugh, it’s me, Lawrence. I gotta talk to you about this new open standard that’s going to revolutionize the way we drink: It’s called the Dixie Cup.
It’s really great. What we’ve done is wax coated a plain old paper cup, and now it’ll hold more types of beverages… it’s almost universal! I mean, from Grapefruit Juice to a Gin and Tonic, this thing holds up. It’s going to change the way companies think about distributing and consuming fluid.
Right out of the gate we have agreements from Rubbermaid, PG and Acme Co to modernize their fluid distributions to be transitionally contained by this exciting open standard, and Saul’s working on a logo as we speak.
We also see an expanding market for dispenser apparatus; think about it: every house in America with a Dixie Cup dispenser in the kitchen. You could show up at a party with Dixie Cups and KNOW they’ll fit in the hosts dispenser apparatus.
Oh yeah, we turned the cone shape into a flat bottom to increase lateral stability thereby extending its intra-usage utility. Ted’s doing some R&D around optimal radius to metacentric height ratio to maximize stability.
It was when I was doing a freelance gig, producing the online version of the 1996 Bank of America Annual Report (kindda ironic, as that’s where I work now), and after showing my client the usual four tiers and types of pages the site would comprise, and getting them approved, and going into production to grind out a couple hundred pages just to have the client (yep, that was you, Cliff ) say:
“Blue… could we change all those table headers from grey to blue?” Continue reading »
It never ceases to amaze me, that the best experience we seem to come up with for feeding a computer, after multi-touch this-and-that and semantic wonderment, and peer2peer, socially syndicated gobble-d-gook, are text fields, radio buttons, check boxes and menus.
My Dad used to say that he had an unparalleled skill at creating errors on “those Web forms” which he didn’t even realize were called forms. Continue reading »
My professional objective is to come up with the most amzing experiences imaginable.
Imaginable.
Think about that word for a minute.
Imaginable.
Not experiences we know how to build… Not even experiences we know.
Just great experiences which will make people say “that was amazing! I want to do it again, and I’m going to tell everyone I talk to about it.”
And I don’t worry about who’s getting the credit; whose “incentive compensation metric” is getting boosted, ’cause that kind of thinking leads to the siloed brain-rot that drives disintegrated experiences that customers hate.
The most amazing experiences: that’ what I’m going to work on.
Listening to conversations between designers and developers is an endless source of amusement. Contributors and visionaries from both camps will always have expectations and frame questions from the view of their own professional specialty.
It gets even better, when a programmer and a designer discuss working Agile methodologies, and gets even better when they have varying appreciations of what exactly agility is. Continue reading »
So I decided that a new website is in order. Why? Well, the current most recent version of my site was made in 2003, and a lot’s changed since then.
First off, I’m not in the business of providing custom solutions anymore: that site really showed the range of services I had been providing my clients for over a decade and was intended to bring in new clients. As I’m currently employed I’m not really looking for clients, and my focus has narrowed from being a full service integrator to living up at the “Fuzzy Front End” of the development practice, where I start at the strategic planning point and pretty much back off once concepts have been approved.
From the smoking cauldrons in Arlington comes an effort to track every electronic, and some not so electronic, bit of data surrounding a persons life. The electronic data mesh this conceives would be capable of making incredible connections between information, the needs for which are being questioned by government and private agencies alike… Wired News: A Spy Machine of DARPA’s Dreams
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Riiiiing… Rrrinnngggg.
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