Loving the highly iPhone friendly mobile version of the NZ Herald. It’s an especially good experience over GPRS.
Not loving the new Delicious design. Way too much visual noise. What used to take a few key clicks (tagging new bookmarks) now takes a few additional clumsy key clicks and mouse clicks.
I’m putting together some hands-on workshops, focused on improving online experiences. I’ve created a new site for this little project - please head over to Skyrize.com for all the details.
The first one is Rapid Prototyping in Flash (no experience with Flash necessary). We’ll also be covering many aspects of interaction design. It’s happening on 31 July from 7-9pm. The workshop is for designers, developers, project managers, biz dev and marketing people.
It should be a lot of fun. Be sure to register early, because registration is limited to 10 people, so everyone has quality hands-on time.
I’ve previously mentioned my antipathy for OSX. It’s been two years since I made a go at switching to a Mac. I can’t say anything major has changed with the Mac since then. What has changed?
But perhaps the biggest factor: my iPhone. The iPhone has really made me lust for more. More luscious details. More speed. More fun.
It’s now been about 5 weeks since getting my hands on Darryl’s old iMac 24″. That’s 3 weeks more than I endured last go round! Many of my previous gripes still linger. Like the inability to maximize app windows. Font rendering. On the 160 dpi iPhone type is stunningly gorgeous. Font rendering on the 72 dpi Mac is a sad imitation, often resulting in butchered illegible type that makes my eyes bleed. I really don’t understand how type purists delude themselves so relentlessly.
Lucky for me, I have a couple Mac die-hards sitting nearby who have been showing me all the secret five fingered key commands, hidden settings and special software that makes working with a Mac tolerable.
So far, the best thing about being on the Mac is…
Overall, I’m happy with the Mac experience. I certainly don’t think it’s flawless. But the speed, the lickable graphics (in spite of the type rendering) and the hardware win me over. I admit that it’s starting to make my eyes hurt whenever I go back to using Windows.
There does seem to be an interesting correlation between the increasing number of iPhones and Macs at Xero. Everyone seems to be switching. Even Grant switched.
With the abject failure of Vista, the mainstream switch-to-Apple tipping point is truly upon us. Jobs is well on his way to resurrecting Apple from the dead, while Microsoft have dug their own grave.
Fifty or a hundred years from now I suspect history will smile broadly on Jobs as a monumental business and cultural icon, while reflecting on Bill Gates as a one-time antagonist in the Steve Jobs story.
Awesome robots courtesy of Verb
Thanks to a few truly dedicated people (I’m looking at you Mike and Tash) Wellington just played host to a geek orgy of supreme quality. First rate speakers, venue, schwag, branding, web site, and perhaps most importantly coffee…mmm…people’s coffee.
I was particularly looking forward to sessions by Cal Henderson (slides galore), Tom Coates (notes and old slides) and Michael Lopp (notes and more notes). Each delivered a superb presentation. I was hoping for a few radical new ideas to completely rock my world, but it was predominantly a refresher course on “the web as platform”. Which was still excellent and inspiring.
Tom Coates’ sneak peek of Fire Eagle was pretty interesting (tho what’s up with the lame name?). Fire Eagle aggregates and broadcasts geo-data, so other apps can retrieve or publish your geolocation at any given moment. The implications of this concept were nicely amplified by Nigel Parker’s 8×5 session on privacy and pervasive online tracking - some kids (his…doh, mine too) have been online since they were in the womb, while other people are implanting RFID tags under their skin, and a few people currently broadcast their geolocation via GPS.
The fireside chat with Sam and Rowan was fun. Rowan roasted Sam with a hilarious video from the nascent days of TradeMe, when Sam was just a young pup. They waxed nostalgic, but also dissected the TradeMe deal starting with how Sam struggled to get investment funding and then buggered off on his OE just when it started to break even. Upon his return the business started taking off. He got serious buyout offers from Yahoo and Telecom, but upped the ante and ultimately landed the Fairfax deal.
My world did get unexpectedly rocked by Amy Hoy. Her session was about coercing people through design and language (excellent notes from her session here). For somebody in advertising, this might have been a basic refresher. However, Amy made it especially relevant and compelling by presenting great offline and online comparisons. For instance, I’ve always wondered why Amazon presents people with an overwhelming and chaotic array of information and options on every page. Where’s the usability and good design in that, right? It’s intentionally that way. For the same reason that malls (and casinos, for that matter) are designed with burrowed interiors: to get you wandering around, somewhat lost. It’s there to keep you busy and distracted, because it’s well known that the more time you spend in a store, the more money you spend.
On the downside, many of the sessions were tediously academic. Too many bullets points. Too much bleating and pontificating on theory. There was a frustrating absence of demos and real world case studies from the trenches. It should be an absolute requirement to show demos, which must include a breakdown of the design/dev/business decisions that lead up to the finished work.
Simon Willison was the only person I saw who did a real world demo with live code, showing Django in action. It was interesting and impressive, but not where my head is at these days. His session on OpenID was excellent and it definitely caught my interest, but it still didn’t leave me with huge confidence in the OpenID standard, as it currently stands.
Another serious downer was the Wifi situation. It was utterly disgraceful and humiliating to watch so many prominent visitors from across the globe unable to get a working internet connection. At a web conference. It’s like having a world conference on electricity and we don’t have enough power to keep the lights on. How bad does it need to get in this city and in this country before internet connectivity becomes an angry-mob-inducing crisis? (as I’m writing this my TelstraClear connection has been down for hours – now’s good, huh?)
As always, there were sessions I was frustrated I couldn’t attend. I heard from many people that Mike Lopp’s session on design management was fascinating. Sadly, it’s also one of the few that will not be made available online. Damnit! Apparently, he described how Apple creates 10 different pixel perfect prototypes for each new piece of functionality in their software! I can’t say I buy into that approach. I know how much time it takes to finesse every little gradient, drop shadow and icon. I appreciate how important those details are in the final product, but when you’re exploring new ideas you tend to lose the plot when you focus on fine tuned pixel pushing. Worst of all, you get way too precious with your design, since you’ve invested so much time and energy.
Nothing could have capped things off more perfectly than the happy coincidence of Phoenix Foundation playing in Frank Kitts park. It was a beautiful night, the buzz of the crowd was blissful and the band rocked hard. It was purely intoxicating.
To finish things off here’s a short, but brilliant clip from the show…
My beloved K750 has crapped out on me. It’s not beloved anymore.
To replace it, I almost bought the N95. Then I played around with it. It has a killer feature set, but it’s extremely expensive and it has the absolute worst hardware and software design. It’s pitiful. For half the price I got the iPhone. Thank god for that.
The iPhone is almost certainly, as my friend Wayne put it, the best 1.0 product ever. I’m really dying to know how they pulled it off. How did they manage to design such a refined user experience in a 1.0 - without news of the phone’s details leaking?
I say that even though my version of the iPhone lacks the ability to make or receive phone calls, text messages, or email/web on-the-go via GPRS!! I can NOT wait until they work out the crack.
It looks like Apple already has that in the works.
What I miss from my K750?
The iPhone is definitely giving me Apple love. I’m still not quite compelled to switch to a Mac. I’d really just love to use my iPhone as my primary OS. If I could connect my iPhone via wifi to a big screen and keyboard then BAM…I’ve got my pocket computer that has most my data in the cloud and acts as a Web OS client device.
This navigation system paints a virtual line over the road which appears on your car’s windscreen. It’s like living inside a Google Map! All the other nav systems seem to force you to think and can easily be misread. This seems so obvious, natural and unobtrusive.
(via del.icio.us/garrettdimon)
Hong Kong 3D pixel-art interactive map. Be sure to spend time exploring it and using the tools!
This SlideShare presentation by Peter Merholz of Adaptive Path is mandatory viewing for anyone interested in product design and marketing strategy.
My take aways:
I’ve been a bit remiss for not posting on this sooner (and not posting in a while). I’m so proud of how well Dave and Tim have accomplished getting their startups off the ground. Both their startups recently received some serious global exposure and both were met with outstanding reviews, which they well deserved.
Dave launched Ponoko at the TechCrunch 40 event with big buzz and fantastic reviews like this from Michael Arrington “Ponoko is a cool way for designers to create new physical products and sell them. Users collaborate on design and prototyping all the way through to production.” It was also hilarious that Dave emailed me afterwards and said that the first person who approached him was a VC who started off asking “Do you happen to know an American interaction designer…Philip Fierlinger?”
I was really lucky to have the opportunity to work with Dave for a short while. When we were just forming Xero, Dave consulted for us and worked along side us in the 404 apartment. I got to hear Dave’s early concepts for what would become Ponoko. From the outset I loved it and I was quite impressed that he was so unphased to take on, what seemed to me, such a daunting project. It’s definitely not your usual web startup. And that’s one important reason why it’s such a great idea.
Tim is a born entrepreneur who has a never ending reserve of passion and ideas. He presented his product PlanHQ at DEMO, which also got an excellent review from Msr. Arrington.
Tim is really active in the NZ web and business community. A little while ago he did a fantastic presentation on getting your startup funded:
The entire set of videos is well worth watching. It’s refreshingly frank and well informed, with great insights and tips, based on priceless experience.
Go New Zealand! Go Wellington. Let’s just not mention the rugby.
It’s been my mission with Xero to make the user experience a bit like a game. Money essentially is a game. It represents your score, your points and your power in the game of life. Yet, for most people managing money is a painful chore that is dreaded and avoided.
The latest update to Xero includes new functionality and design ideas that really begin to exhibit what I see as a game play experience. For instance, we’ve designed the bank reconciliation so that it’s fun to use, it’s an experience you actually enjoy and look forward to.
With the bank rec in Xero your job is to match transactions coming in from the bank with transactions you have recorded in Xero. Often Xero can predict the match for you, so with one click you can easily clear a row. You get a big green tick and away it fades, bringing up the next line - the next little piece of the puzzle - to be matched. It’s a bit like clearing rows in Tetris (as seen in the short video above).
Our new ‘fast code’ design lets you do it even quicker, by letting you create an instant match, on-the-fly. After that, Xero learns how you code your transactions so that the next time it already has the details filled in for you. Pretty soon all you do is: click, click, click down the page and you’ve cleared away a whole bunch of rows, knocking them off in rapid fire.
It gives you a real rush of instant gratification.
When you come across a transaction that reconciles to multiple items you go into “find and match” mode, tracking down the transactions that add up to the one bank statement line. It’s another type of simple puzzle that gives you an immediate sense of satisfaction when you find the exact match.
With Xero, we’re now getting into a phase of the product design and development where we can really start to optimise the work flow across the system to make the experience smarter, faster and genuinely fun.
I love seeing it all come together. It’s even better to see how much customers are loving it.
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