The thing I like about Apple is that they keep reducing and reducing till they get at the heart of the interaction for the context of use. I use the shuffle when I'm on the go, and I typically don't fiddle with it it much, so for my context of use this sounds great. I will have to goto the Apple store to play with the new shuffle.

Macro-experiences encompasses numerous touch points or to put it another way multiple products or services that make up one experience. Whereas a micro-experience is purely focussed on the experience of a single touchpoint or product of the macro-experience. For example the combination of the iPod and iTunes makes up a macro-experience. Using an iPod to play back music is a micro-experience.

So who is doing it well? Not to dig deep, the obvious macro examples are iTunes/iPod, Nike+ and the iPhone as a platform (app store). At a micro level its hard to beat the iPhone. I was going to digress further, but ultimately I think those who are doing it well find a way to perpetuate a conversation with their customers at a macro level and at the same time offer exceptional micro-experiences.

In one of many side conversations you have at a conference like Interaction 09, I was talking with someone who was very concerned about her sketching skill level and the current sketching push. I assured her that sketching is not about skill, but is about generation. I think it would be very presumptuous for me to say that most designers don't understand this, but I would say that they don't articulate it.

Sketching is about generating ideas. Sketching can happen in many different mediums, using different materials. I heard one designer say over the weekend that he uses words to sketch. And in some aspects sketching is used for telling a story. Primarily I use sketching to explore and generate ideas. Whether it's in my sketchbook or on the white board, my crude drawings convey meaning, especially when combined with words. The best thing is that I can easily erase ideas and start over again without much effort and attachment.

As Buxton mentions in his book, design is about elaboration and reduction of ideas. A designer should explore the possibilities before zeroing in on the solution. I would add that there's a piece missing to this thought, definition, but that is for an other blog post.

The bottom line is a designer needs to be generative, exploring ideas and possible solutions. Sketching is one of many tools to do this. Sketching will always be part of my practice, but if there's need for detail or it's time to communicate my ideas to others I always switch to the digital for clarity. I don't think this is a hindrance, I just have a different objective.

• Lesson 1: Designers should be like ecologists, conscious of the integrated system of invisible consequences.
• Lesson 2: Asking the right questions driven by a set of conceptual frameworks can be more important than domain expertise itself.
• Lesson 3: Process documentation is vital, not just for "nice portfolios" but for recording decisions and rationale, capturing knowledge, and providing visual evidence during project reviews.
• Lesson 4: Design can be a challenge, but influencing non-design stakeholders to implement the desired solution is more difficult.
• Lesson 5: Design leadership has hidden dependencies upon peer designers, support engineers, even sales reps.

• Simple - A simple application not only reduces complexity it creates a meaningful experience.
• Useful - A useful application allows the user to easily accomplish their goals and needs.
• Smart - A smart application anticipates the needs of the users before they realize it.

In times like this there is a tendency to be overtly introspective. And you then have to grasp onto something to look forward into the future. For me I start digging deeper into the bobbie d canon to find something to pick me up. In the movie Masked and Anonymous, dylan rambled, "things fall apart, especially all the neat order of rules and laws, the way we look at the world is the way we really are." And then I remember the eternal optimism my grandmother instilled upon to me and my siblings and cousins with the words she wrote, "With hope anything can happen." It's this optimism that drives my craft and empathetic outlook. In these times, we should look towards the future to envision not how things are but what they can be.

I am excited by my future prospects and opportunities. Especially my acceptance to the Board of IxDA. I can't wait to dig in and help lead this great organization into the future. More on this to come.

• Simplicity over Complexity?
• Subject to Change
• The Uber Header Arrives
• Olympic Medal Map
• The Fold
• From Research to Personas
• I Feel Your Pain

• "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong."
• "The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible."
• "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

These resoundingly ring true.

So an iPhone will have to wait--seriously can't drop the $600.00 + it'll cost me to switch providers and buy the phone. Hopefully the product progresses and in two years it'll be even better. Until then, I'll have to see how the other half lives without a touch screen, but I am excited about the Pearl's gps capabilities and the opera mini browser looks interesting.

I also like the size and shape of the unit. It isn't distracting when attached to the windshield. One comment I do have is that the menu buttons and zoom buttons on the touch screen, while viewing the map could be a bit more transparent or located elsewhere on the interface. They are a bit disruptive. I wonder if they could have a roll-over state of sorts or be hidden.

So playing with the touch screen has led me to realize that my life is incomplete without an iPhone. My jealousy was confirmed when my friend Dan was showing his of at our tree trimming party last week. Actually my jealousy has turned into an obsessive I need to have it rage. Or at the very least some sort of smart phone. I need to see when my Allhell contract is up before proceeding.

I'm looking forward to see how the GPS works on a longer trip. I get to take when I head up to Telluride for a few days of skiing with my friends from the old country (long island)!

But, I would have to say I'm just jealous. Jealous of those who have one and I am most emphatically jealous of those who designed it. I can easily imagine what it was like to design the iPhone: pure giddiness and an ultimate challenge. This device will be the hub of interaction with the digital realm for many people. How cool is that! The iPhone designers in some ways just raised the bar, especially in their attention to detail in the design: read David Malouf's review.

Majority of my work revolves around the web which is beyond fun, but can be at times limiting and rapid. Sometimes I just want to shoot for the stars and work on the ultimate bling and help change the paradigm. As an interaction designer I need to consider the digital world outside the web, something I realized from reading the first 150 pages or so of Moggridge's Designing Interactions. It's high time I think even more about how people are interacting with the digital realm and not just the web. After all, isn't that my purpose as an interaction designer?

Overall, I enjoyed the IA Summit. I did here some grumbling about Vegas from some of the conference attendees. I'd be the first to admit that it's a bit excessive, but isn't that the point. This is the second time I've been to Vegas and I enjoyed it. I had some good food, walked around a bit and watched all of the people. I tried to be diligent and practice some ethnography skills, but I was just taking it all in and spent my time just experiencing the place, though I did take some photos from my phone, some of which can be seen in the flickr stream on the left.

The highlights for me were definitely the dinners. I enjoyed the IXDA dinner on friday, UXNET dinner on saturday, and dinner with some vanguard peeps on sunday (great mexican and mariachi). The Adaptive Path party was fun, especially all of the extra drink tickets that somehow managed to come my way. So for me it was all about the people. Whether I knew them from their work, their blog, their posts on the IXD list, or the first time meeting them, it was good to talk shop.

I enjoyed most of the sessions I went to, though the overall experience paled in comparison to that I had at the Idea Conference. I think this had to do with my overall interest in design and design thinking -- big ideas -- rather than straight practice; I did find Luke W's (Best practices for form design) and Dan Brown's (Communicating design: an astonishingly close look at what makes IA documentation work) presentations useful as reminders of what to and not to do, both of which were very practice focused. In my mind the Idea Conference wasn't about practice per se and a lot of the sessions at the IA Summit were, which is understandable. The Idea Conference was about pushing boundaries and looking at old design problems in new and different ways. Some post-mortem comments I read about the summit expressed some concerns about the lack of representative work, possibly due to NDA and other corporate restrictions. For me, a lot of what I heard was not necessarily new, but was more reinforcing. Also, I'm becoming more and more interested in product development beyond the web. The future lies in enabling IA for the masses and I'm not just talking about tagging. We have seen glances (mashups, tagging, contribution) of enablement in this thing we call Web 2.0. I think enablement will transcend to become the mantra of Web 3.0.

I did find these presentations inspiring:

• Interaction Design Style -- great overview of a design sense and the reflection of one's style. I thought it was absolutely appropriate to focus on fashion, which is why I find myself always compelled to watch Project Runway -- to see the individuals styles, constructive criticism, etc...
• Adaptive Interfaces -- relatively obvious, but a big idea that needed to be brought to light; I wish I could work on projects that had the resources to implement an adaptive interface.
• Backcasting: or how I learned to stop predicting and help my clients -- the most applicable presentation and technique I gained from the conference; I can start using this immeadiately in my work.
• Utilizing ritual in the design of information spaces for the cognitively impaired -- a compelling thought; I'm going to write about this for a paper I'm doing in my cog psych class.

The one thing that the IA Summit go me thinking about, especially after talking about my presentation with other conference attendees, is the Langauge of Behavior. In Interaction Design we talk a lot about conversation, enabling communication between a human and technology, whether it be a gadget, application, website and so forth. This communication ultimately enables back and forth behavior, a conversation; behavior that exists over time. I wonder what the language of this behavior is. Does it has to do with affordance in some way? A door knob, to use the classic Norman example, communicates to a person press or turn just like a button says click or press, inorder to complete an action. There is an underlying meaning to that action open a door or dial a phone. Maybe these are just patterns of behavior, but if we're designing conversations what's the langauge?

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3

For lunch, the conference attendees were able to sign up for a group that was going to a specific location. We went to an Italian restaurant that was just caddy-cornered with the library. The conversation was good. I met a few people who work with Amazon, Microsoft, and Oracle. Since I was sitting at the end of the table with the Microsoft guys, we mainly talked about Microsoft. It was interesting to hear how Microsoft is pushing User Experience in a real big way. Lunch lasted longer than the time allotted for all of the groups, so the sessions got pushed back a little bit. I liked the idea of the conference organizers putting together the lunch groups -- it really helped to break the ice.

Right after the afternoon sessions I took a long stroll through the library. If you haven't seen or been to the Seattle Public Library it I a large glass structure with numerous angles shaping the overall form. It is a striking building -- very modern. The space is big and open. It is organized around usage. The main entrance (at least what I think is the main entrance) leads into what is called the living room. A large soaring space that is meant to be a public gathering area, it's essentially an atrium that is open to at least 8 floors above. Interestingly, one of the people I went to lunch with commented that he felt the library lacked warmth -- he preferred the feel of a more traditional library ya know wood. I thought the living room space was an incredible public space. A testament to the mission o the library, large and open -- soaring, potentially representing the possibilities contained within the media (books, etc&) available in the library, maybe it represents the enormousness of the collection itself, or it just could be designed to be just simply a cool space. The best feature of the library is the stacks -- they wind up a central tower. I took the escalator to the top and wound my way down. The use of color to indicate paths through the library was interesting, the escalators were all bright yellow and the signage of the stacks was cool: the Dewey Decimal system was essentially inlaid into the floor.

After exploring the library, I walked down the block to a bar in the W hotel where a whole bunch of the conference attendees met up for drinks. Can we say networking& After some mingling, I wound up going out to dinner with Abe, a phd student at Chapel Hill, Lyn, an interior designer at an architecture firm, Erika, a principal at Mule Design, and a friend of who is local to Seattle. We went to Wild Ginger. The food was great and the conversation was even better. It was really good to talk shop with people from around the country. Lyn brought a different perspective on things  though its all design we still use a slightly different vocabulary. I was pleased to have met Erika, I have always admired the work Mule Design has done, the sites they have designed exude simplicity and elegance, always seem to be on message for their clients. It was also fun to hear the inside San Fran scoop from her and get some good Mule swag, including the Dont be a dick Mena Trott button. This aspect of connecting with people is definitely a highlight of the conference for me. Its been a while since Ive been out of ABQ for a national conference and I was happy to meet and talk with the people I have met  I learned a lot and gleaned a lot of ideas for some of the work Im doing.

One entry is about how we used Deconstructed Wireframes during or redesign of the Clearwired site.

The other entry is about our design and development process map. I created a diagram that explains our design and development process. The diagram is posted within the blog entry.

As with any business now a days we have a blog and I'll be doing a lot more posting over there, especially anything design related. If I have an interesting post, I'll be sure to cross post it here.

Clearwired here I come...

I luv this site. Clean look and easy to use. Go check it out or take a look at my list of wines in my cellar over to the left and down the page a bit. I'll be adding more wines in soon.

Architecture: I love all things architecture. I find many of the design principles discussed in the architecture world are very applicable to designing interactive systems. In essence you are interacting with a space which has a certain flow, if you will indulge. I was turned onto "A Pattern Language" by Christopher Alexander via the Adaptive Path's reading list, I have had for at least a year and I've thumbed through it reading a bit here and there. So it was logical for me to pick up "The Timeless Way of Building" by Alexander. Whereas with"Patterns", I'm content reading it a bit at a time, I'm really looking forward to sitting down and reading "Timeless" -- it's definitely the treatise. I picked up another book about architecture, "Architecture is Elementary", by Winters, which has a tag line of visual thinking through architectural concepts. Quite simply this book (very workbook like) explores design elements in a very visual manner, teaching the reader visual vocabulary. Reading Elementary definitely relates to my desire to bolster my own visual design skills, the 2d space (the screen) and beyond into the 3d realm of physical tangible interactive products.

Design: As I stated I'm trying to bolster my visual design skills, and I luckily came across a neat series of books called Design Briefs published by the Princeton Architectural Press. So I have: "Geometry of Design: Studies in Proportion and Composition", "Grid Systems: Principles of Organizing Type", and Elements of Design: Exercises in Three Dimensional Design". I'm going to pick up the 4th book in the series "Thinking with Type: A Critical Guide for Designers, Writers, Editors, & Students", after reading the others. These books are going to be fun.

Information Architecture/Interaction Design: In the last year there has been a few big releases: "Ambient Findability" and "Designing Interfaces" (I'm looking forward to reading "Designing for Interaction" by Dan "www.odannyboy.com" Saffer) in the interaction design/information architecture world. I have them and I going to read them -- I've actually read the first few chapters of Ambient Findability, its good. I was lucky to find a couple of other books dealing with mostly HCI (interaction design -- with some information architecture if you're being picky) stuff at a really good local book store, Page One. The books are: "Designing Interactive Systems: People, Activities, Contexts, Technologies", "Where the Action Is: The Foundations of Embodied Interaction", and"Thoughtful Interaction Design: A Design Perspective on Information Technology". I've been pouring through, Designing Interactive Systems, which is a text book with the purpose of teaching Interaction Design. I think its a great overview (and review) of information I had learned elsewhere. Also I'm revisiting "The Humane Interface" by Raskin, after letting sit on the book shelf for way to long.

Seminal: I go crazy over anything Ideo, I got the cards, I have "Thoughtless Acts", and the "The Art of Innovation", and believe they have all been consumed! So now its time for "The Ten Faces of Innovation", which will be my next read! I also found and bought "The Computer and the Brain" by Neumann. This book was intially published in 1958 (I'm reading the second edition published in 2000) and is about the analogies between computing machines and the living brain. Should be interesting.

Ruby on Rails: I need to finish reading "Agile Web Development with Rails", before my june trip to the first ever Ruby on Rails Conference. I have read (and worked through) the first section of the book, I just need to read the second section.

Okay, maybe the list is too ambitious. I do have a few plane rides for some upcoming trips and I am not taking any psych classes this summer (will be starting up again this fall with cognitive psych), so maybe I have time. We'll see, if not I love books (having them around, something to pick up and feel some weight, and to thumb through), plus I told myself I can't buy another until I finish reading these...

Alina, my wife, took the test and then got frustrated with the interface and after a few epitaphs and declaring "THIS IS STUPID", she closed the window. I thought the interfeace was cool, sliders and all, up to the point where they had you plot yourself on an XY chart. Even though I have seen these used in this contex before (not quite as an form element, but as a means to plot personality traits), I still had to think about how to answer the question; "what does this mean if I move the dot here". Alina, after answering a few of these, just decided it was too much work. Maybe they should have kept using the sliders.

I still have to implement the auto-pings and permalinks.

Museums on the Web was recently held in Albuquerque. I wrote up a recap for the Ideum blog.

I've made some progress with my little blog engine. A simple backend has been built -- I just need to make this page dynamic. I've been taking a look at Ray Camden's Blog CFC for some ideas: comment spam, search engine friendly permalink urls, pings, and rss feeds. So I might wind up using some of the CFC's functionality or maybe all of it -- it remains to be seen.

I think these widgets are popular because the content is compelling, if not stunning. I am currently finishing up Donald Norman's book, Emotional Design: Why We Love or Hate Everyday Things, and the widgets represent the ultimate in visceral design. I wonder if the images displayed in the widgets evoke a response at a more personal level, or what Norman calls the reflective level. For me, I think its the visceral appeal that draws me in. The sun just looks too cool!

Another cool project we completed a few weeks back, was the creation of our first Yahoo Widget. You can find out more about the widget we built on the Ideum Blog and look for the post I wrote on the Ideum Blog describing how we built the widget. Widgets are pretty neat.

I still have to work on the engine of this blog, so hopefully I'll get to it soon...

Maybe I'll get real or maybe I won't. I definitely won't be using Ruby on Rails, not because I'm opposed to it -- it's really the coolest thing since sliced bread -- but because I don't have the time to switch to another a host that supports it and I'm only half way through the book! So, I'll stick to what I know, Coldfusion, it get's the job done!

While I'm building my little blog application, I'm going to explore integrating some AJAX into the mix. I'm planning on using Rico for my JavaScript engine. I have successfully created an Ajaxyfied web page on my own; the data passed back and forth was encapsulated in JavaScript Objects. But, I'm looking for a simpler solution and as always I ran into a snag. Today when I was integrating Rico into my Fusebox 4.1 Framework I ran into a 500 error from the server. What could it be? I'm not sure. So I'll be pulling out what ever is left of my hair tomorrow trying to figure this out, which get's me to my point of this post:

As I develop my little blog application I'm going to track my progress on this blog. I'll purge my thoughts, frustrations, and triumphs. I will also rationalize my critical design decisions -- I'll try. So here I begin, my own little space on the greater web community... And remember: "All blogging is global!"