Jason Nunes

In late 1999 early 2000 an experimental television network launched… on the internet. Yeah, yeah, it’s nothing new now but back then it was visionary. Perhaps too visionary, because it sure didn’t last very long. (of course, this could have something to do with the fact that back in 2000 broadband… wait, broad what? What’s broadband??)

ANYWAY, I was digging through my old files, and came across these old screenshots from 21E. Predating all its competitors by a good 6 or 7 years, just imagine if we’d been successful…

I was digging around in some old files, and came across some interface ideas that I put together for metadata logging.

The first was the idea of overlaying touchscreen data logging controls over the top of the content that one is attempting to log.

When I first proposed this, oh, say, 8 years ago or so, there were some technical concerns about overlaying translucent interface elements over the top of full motion video. I don’t think those are concerns any longer. There were also opinions that it would somehow confuse the loggers to have to process both what they were logging, and the activity of logging in the same screen. This always seemed like a silly (OK, stupid) argument to me. And now, with all kinds of new interfaces in automobiles, fighter jets, etc. that overlay controls or information over your view (like this one):
..well, I wonder if maybe the idea should be re-explored.

What do you think? Anyone have any experience with these types of interfaces/controls? Do you think the overlay model would work for logging video?

The other idea we pitched:
Was much more traditional. A combination of keyboard shortcuts, and a contextual mouse menu that, based on what key combinations you held down, would display a different set of data elements.

Interestingly enough, neither of these concepts were adopted by any of our clients back in the day. I still think they were great ideas, that could have really sped up data entry. But, well, the age old, type, tab, type method ended up the winner at the end of the day.

Txt… is there anything you can’t do?

Why Iterate?

I’ve been thinking a lot about this. (and obviously so has the rest of the development community.) Iterative. Agile. Extreme. Scrums. Sprints. You guys all know the score, right?

This is what Wikipedia has to say:

Iterative and Incremental development is a cyclical software development process developed in response to the weaknesses of the waterfall model. It is an essential part of the Rational Unified Process, the Dynamic Systems Development Method, Extreme Programming and generally the agile software development frameworks.

It’s represented by graphics that typically look like this:

This is a much better, more detailed version I stole from Cambridge:

I’ve worked on my share of projects that used some flavor or other of agile development, and I have to say, I prefer it. You get to results (working code) faster. Clients are happier. And because agile requires a sense of ownership by the entire team, agile projects tend to promote better, more fulfilling work environments.

So far my favorite approach to agile is Mike Cohn’s User Stories Applied. I love the concept of a story (requirement) as the beginning of a discussion between the developer and the business owner and the experience designer rather than it being some kind of set-in-stone set of instructions inflicted upon the dev team. Stories let developers be creative. And creative developers often come up with amazing solutions. Traditional requirements treat them more like coding bots. And if they are treated like robots, it’s only a matter of time before they start thinking and acting like them, following those instructions to the letter (if not spirit)…

Sure, iterative development, but iterative design?

SO, all this said, I have yet to experience an agile project with integrated experience design that didn’t feel like some kind of Rube Goldberg contraption held together by gum and bailing wire. Often a waterfall approach to design is tacked on the beginning of agile development. There’s all kinds of reasons for this:

• it’s the nature of agency work (AKA: clients want to see what you’re building before you build it)
• design requires a different kind of thinking (AKA: we designers need to think about the entire experience, understanding all the nuances, before we come up with the optimal design)
• design is a learning process (AKA: the business and user goals are hazily understood at best, and the design process is needed for all the stakeholders to understand them clearly)

All of these arguments have their points… good design thinking requires time to understand, and digest, and process, and create. We have to understand who we are building for, and what their needs and wants are, before we can experiment with the best way to meet them.

AND I’m sure we’ve all worked on projects where design is rushed, wireframes slapped together without any conceptual design work done, so that developers using an iterative process could get coding RIGHT AWAY! We live in an increasingly agile world. One where our clients want to “fail fast” and live in “beta culture” as they iteratively “tack” towards a successful application. One where they can’t afford to wait for 6 months to see something.

So what’s a poor designer to do?

Embrace the Madness..

And make the process our own.

Can design be iterative too? Desiree Sy and the folks at Autodesk have been thinking about this, and pioneering it in their own process. Here’s a brilliant diagram that outlines their approach:

In a nutshell, the philosophy is that dev and design work in parallel tracks, with dev coding the current build, and design thinking about the next sprint–testing the previous sprint, doing further discovery, and designing.

Can we apply some of the great stuff they’ve learned to the agency world? And how would it be different for us agency folks?

Sooo, because this blog entry is getting waaay too long, I’m going to slap up some diagrams for what I’ve been thinking:

Start it off with a vision sprint…

Lead into a design/development sprint…

I’ll go into more detail later, but it would be great to hear from others out there. Is anyone else thinking about this stuff? Had any great successes/miserable failures to learn from?

Small Media XL recently participated in the Obama in 30 seconds campaign from Moveon.org. Here is our entry:

Watch it, and then head over to the site to voice your opinion and vote!

OK, so I’m misspeller… I admit it. Don’t like it about myself. I’ve always relied too heavily on spell check… but if we didn’t misspell we couldn’t come up with fun little ideas like this one, right?

Introducing the Tounge… the chaise that tastes you.

A beautiful piece of public interactive art for sure:
(From Shape and Color)

Through a matrix of perforations, sunshine gets converted through the dome into lines of poetry underneath. For the text, Song chose classical Korean poems called “Sijos” and translated them into English. It takes about 8 hours to see the entire poem, with each line visible for about an hour. The design actually shifts poems based on the season (how they managed to get it to do that with only one set of holes in the top, I have no idea…). During the summer the poem focuses on a theme of “new life”, during the winter it turns to “reflection and the passing of time”. The time-lapse video showing the the delicacy of the words moving through the shadow of the dome is a must see.

But I have to say, I’m in love with the all the conceptual stuff that Jiyeon Song put into this piece. The project site is chock full of beautiful diagrams showing all the thinking that went into the project:

Sometimes the directions for how to do something can be just as beautiful as the actual thing itself… well, to design geeks anyway

Crazy debates going on (and on and on and on…) about if (how and when) video will destroy Flickr…

YIKES! Really? We’ve got this much free time on our hands? Really?

Why don’t you guys all go take some photos, or… shoot some video… or… I don’t know, watch some cool stop motion videos taken with still cameras (on Flickr of course):

Forwarded by a friend.

This is fascinating–using a video game to generate research data. What a brilliant idea! Research like this can be such drudgery, (and, speaking as someone whose written my share of test protocols, not just for the people answering the questions.) So why not have fun while doing it? It’s a simple little game, but, heck, it’s as valid a time waster as any of a number of facebook apps. (speaking of, seems like for this to really take off, it should be made into a facebook application… what do you think, guys?)

ANYWAY, check out the original blog entry from Ironic Sans:

Video Store Clerk Game: A Crowd Wisdom Experiment

On-line movie recommendation systems (such as those at Amazon, Netflix, etc) are pretty good at guessing what movies you might like based on your movie history. Improvements to these systems are constantly being made, using ever more sophisticated algorithms. But how good are they compared to the wisdom of actual people? That’s what my friends Jay and Andy are trying to figure out. And they need your help.

Jay and Andy have created a game called Video Store Clerk in which you play a video store clerk. You are told how a real customer has rated previous movie rentals, and then you are shown another movie title that the person also rented. Can you guess how the customer rated that movie?

They are collecting all the user-generated data and comparing it to the real customers’ ratings. A computer has already played the game with millions of customers, and we know how well it did. The question is whether or not the wisdom of crowds can beat the computer. To gather enough data for an accurate comparison, they need a lot of people to play. So please, pass the link around. Digg it. Blog it. They tell me their server can handle the load.

The experiment’s findings will ultimately go toward building a better movie recommendation system. Hopefully you’ll find the game fun to play, too. And if you have any ideas about improving the game, you can leave a comment here or use the contact link on their site.

Link: Video Store Clerk

Incredible music visualizations. Learn how they’re done.

Or just watch and enjoy…