Off the Top: Personal Entries
Showing posts: 136-150 of 376 total posts
Designing with a Solution is the Problem
I finally put my finger on it. There has been growing frustration within me with where I work and as well with some of the leaders in the web design community of late. The problem and the solution has been known to me, but scattered in pieces and I did not pull all the pieces together until today. Why today? Well, it took a little doing, but I finally got my hands on this month's issue of Fast Company - June 2005, which I had been subscribed to until the May issue. It took a little bit of time to track down the issue as it was to the point in the month when the next months issues are getting put out. But, having that issue in hand (having read some on-line) I stumbled across my tipping point in the Be Cooler by Design column. I did not make it past the fouth paragraph when it hit.
It Begins with a Canyon
The paragraph has a header, "Show Them the Canyon" and discusses a designer at Ford, Giuseppe Delena, who would say, "Don't tell me you need a bridge, show me the canyon!" This was aimed at marketing people who would ask for specific design solutions, but not explain the problem.
That is my tipping point. Having to start with somebody's solution to design problems (most often solutions to the wrong problem). Not having the problems put forward, but an answer. An answer without anybody showing their work to how their arrived at the solution. For nearly four years I have been working, for the most part, with the end results of the work of others who started with a solution and worked that as a starting point, while never considering the problem (or in nearly all cases the multitude of problems they needed to solve). They did not understand the problems nor do they understand or know the standards and requirements that their end result must meet. Lastly they do not understand the medium in which they are working. In short it is a string of considerable messes that our team deals with continually. The sad complication is this is taxpayer money being spent (often quite nice sums) for end products that require incredible fixing to meet minimum standards and be usable on the web.
It is not my direct customer, who is in the same boat I am in as we support him (and he is one of the very few that really get what they are doing), but the "customer service" management and the management signing off on these projects that have become the problem. With the web, the business customer is not always right, the user is, as without the user their is no business customer. In our situation, by-and-large, the web being built is using what works for print and for multi-media, neither of which are solutions for text on the web. The business customer requires solutions for the wrong medium, which (as those who have sat through usability test find out) the tan text on brown background and all of the animated bits make using the information as is it is intended, nearly impossible.
Designers Must Explain Design Better
In part the design world is to blame as we have done a very poor job of educating the rest of the world as to what we do. We solve problems. We have spent an inordinate amount of time on learning everything we can about our medium, how people think, how people interact with our medium, how people interact with their devices (desktop, laptop, PDA, mobile, etc.) as they are all different, how to organize and structure for people interacting with what we design, how to build for people to give them freedom to choose the solution that is best for them, how to build for ease of use by people, and how to build for people to easily reuse what we provide (the list goes on). Yes, it is not a short list and I do not know a good designer who will truly claim they are done learning all of these aspects. We know what works best with everything we do know for the problems before us and we test everything we do and we iterate through our designs while always striving to make things better. Every designer I know loves to show how they got to their solution and document it for others to do, as their joy in designing is not repeating, but problem solving and innovating to better solutions. As designers we are always trying to learn what others do, so the good designers share in as much detail so others may learn what to follow and what to modify for even better solutions down the road.
In my current situation the lack of time to document and show our work is a major problem. The lack of documentation (or deliverables) is part of where the problem lies with the problems up the food chain (not that there are skilled designers or people that would understand up the food chain). If we had the time to show our work we could hand it to those at the beginning of the process so we could get better products with fewer problems when we receive them (although it is a very rare occasion that any of what we have produced for these purposes is ever followed). Many of the places up the food chain have sold a bridge with out ever seeing the canyon it is just a cookie cutter. It is rare when we get to solve the problems, either at the beginning or the end, we just get to fix it so it will just pass the minimum requirements, which are horribly low.
Understand and Explain the Problem First
This frustration has also flowed over to the web design community of late as there is excitement in the web community again. The excitement is not bad, actually it is great. But some of the new solutions are being framed as new wonder solutions without framing the problem they are solving. In the world of design (as it is with many other things) it is a realm where the answer to most every question is, "it depends". What is the solution? It all depends on many factors in the problem. Teaching how to understand problems and to walk through the decision process to get to the solution (or more correctly, one of many possible right solutions) is what raises the profession.
What has been happening of late in the web design/development community is looking at solutions that may be terrific implementations for a certain problem in a set environment, but proclaiming what is new is "the new way". For those that are not good designers or even designers at all, this approach reaches a problem point very quickly. It was not long after XMLHTTPRequest was coined AJAX that customers, and those I advise from farther away, started asking for their solutions to be AJAX. There are right places for AJAX, as it is just one of many solutions for problems where it may be one of the solutions. It is quite similar to aura around Flash as a solution, but AJAX has its benefits and detractors when compared to Flash.
Where the problem around the AJAX solution got tough was when AJAX was tied to a whole new exitement around the web. It was at this point the AJAX solution was being demanded from customers. I was hearing if from many corners, this great solution touted, was for customers the only way they would accept their final products. AJAX had quickly become the cure-all in customer's eyes, much like Flash had years before.
Our Responsibility
What we have to realize as designers, is people do listen and people want to believe there is one simple solution for all of their web problems, all of the information problems, etc. We know there is not a simple solution as of yet. In fact the digital information world is far more complex than it ever was, as Europe and Asia will attest, with the influx of mobile handheld use. (Europe and Asia have things a little better than the U.S. right now, as they have much less of a population that believes build for desktop (including laptop) solutions is the one way all design is heading.) Europe and Asia understand the world is far more complex and information far more useful when it can be used in context on a mobile device. The expanding of the devices and the realm of possibile solutions with their benefits and detractors across the many variables we monitor componded the problems we are solving. Simplicity is many designer's goal, but getting there is ever harder today and we must embrace the complexity (thank you Mike for turning that light on for me) and work through it. We also need to communicate the complexity to our customers so everybody understands it is not as simple as it seems.
It is this complexity of convergence around devices is also compounded by the flood of information people are experiencing, which is what has me loving the work I get to do around the Personal InfoCloud (and the Model of Attraction and folksonomy that are intertwined with it). This work is satisfying as it is not only defining the problems and working through possible solutions, but more importantly laying out frameworks to design and build solutions that others can use. There are increasingly people (who may become customers) that are coming and asking the right questions from the right perspective around the Personal InfoCloud, which may be another reason I really like working on it (we all love people asking smart questions). People are asking how to cross their canyon while describing the canyon and many times showing me the canyon they would like a solution designed for.
I think we all know what the next step is. It will not be happening tomorrow, but every day that passes makes the frustration that much worse. Knowing there is one point around which much of my frustration revolves may help me deal with it better.
Focussing on Personal InfoCloud More
Things have been too quiet over at my Personal InfoCloud site lately. It is not for lack of things to write about, but more of the too much going on syndrome. A few things are happening that made me realize that is one of the more important things I need to be doing for now. It will also help me focus on the WebVisions presentation. In the last six months there have been a lot of very positive things transpiring around the Personal InfoCloud work I have been doing, which has greatly helped more my ideas around it move forward.
Aside from my having more serious allergy problems this Spring than I have had in many years, trying to stay on top of all that is going on outside of work lately has been nuts. I am not at a point where I could give up my day-time job to get 10 hours of productive time back to move all of the other things forward far more quickly. Currently I am balancing four different camps, not including family and sleep for this "free time" and nearly all of these things drawing my attention revolve around the Personal InfoCloud.
Musical Baton
Livia passed me the Musical Baton. I have a somewhat broad collection of music that narrowing is extremely tough. I may answer this very differently in a week, month, or year. But, as of today...
Total volume of music on my computer
I have 6003 songs taking up 31.5 GB on my hard drive. This encompasses around 700 artists (give or take odd variants that become multipliers).
The last CD I bought
It turns out that I picked up a stack of CDs today, which included: Kem Album II, Midival Punditz Midival Times, Dave Matthews Band Stand Up, Bruce Springsteen Devils & Dust, among a handful of backfill disks.
Song playing right now
Blue Nile The Days of Our Lives
Five songs I listen to a lot, or that mean a lot to me
- Dizzy Gilespie Man from Monterey
- T.J. Baden Sureal
- Youssou N'Dour Shaking the Tree
- Lyle Lovett Can't Resist It (live)
- Peter Gabriel Solsbury Hill
Five people to whom I'm passing the baton
Super Spam Build-up
Super spam build-up. Thursday night I did my weekly pull of my stored "junk" e-mail, which was more like 10 days of build-up. I had found some legitimate bounced e-mail during my past round when I scanned through the mess, so I was saving up until I had a little time to visually parse through the pile. This time I had 31,000 items in the junk mail bin. I did not even look in the output bin this time, I just did a straight push to delete and dumped the trash.
If you sent something that you did not get a response on that you believe should get a response lets try this again. Send it. I have around 15 e-mails I have been working on longer responses to, but am going to be sending, "I got it" responses then put it in my longer response queue.
Oddities on an Odd Day
There were three things from today's White House and Capitol evacuations that were a little more than bothersome.
First it was reported that a couple weeks ago there were evacuations, but the cause of the radar blips were clouds. It sounds like the system is not quite ready for prime time and our lives depend on it.
Second, the only way those of us not working in the Capitol nor White House knew something was up was people calling them or they caught something in the media. The city government of Washington, DC was not informed until after the all clear was sounded. After September 11, 2001 this Government seems to have learn little and changed their planning very little and they prove they lack competence at every turn.
Lastly, our President was out in the country-side on a bike ride. Oh, it was the middle of the day on a Wednesday and the President of the United States is out with an old school chum for a bike ride? You have got to be out of your mind. Not only did people elect this guy, he is getting paid for leading not bike riding and playing hooky, and he is allowed to keep his job?
Alive and Busy
This has been a busy week already and it is only Tuesday night. Getting chunks of time to focus on promised writing has been tough the past few weeks, but I am in the clean-up stage of that finally. I am quite behind on e-mail and have about 300 rebolded to get back to and 15 with flags and reminders causing pop-ups every so often. I am finding the quick responses are harder to come by these days as I am often reshuffling schedules, but with out one central calendar to plan from and guide my time (security at work and the lack of syncing with Yahoo's calendar from my Mac and work calendar dropping entries as well as not flowing into anyother usable format easily).
I try to knock out quick messages to e-mail from my mobile, but my commute time for doing this was switched to driving the past few weeks. I am back to the train, which is helping, but the Snapper mail on Treo 600 is not a great management tool (a larger screen and multi-tasking/threading OS is really needed).
If you have not heard back from me, you will by mid-day Friday as I will try to get everything knocked out on my flight out West. I usually get great amounts of work done on plane flights and train trips as I get focus, which is very difficult at home.
Hang in there I am getting there, really.
Happy Mother's Day
Happy Mother's Day to all it applies to. It is a day in a coffeehouse writing for me, but will be joining back up with the some of the mothers in my life in a bit.
One oddity with these gift card holidays is their sexist bent of the cards themselves. The greeting card industry is largely focussed on females (as it is quickly apparent if you have ever gone in search of bereavement cards). The cards for this particular event focus on the mothering, house care, and cooking roles. In our house many of these tasks are shared, outsourced, or done by dad. Cards like "dad" will be trying to cook and burning everything just get me in the wrong frame of mind. We are not living in the 1950s any longer, must we still rely on these greeting card holidays to try and push us back into a past we are better off leaving in the past?
I celebrate the mothers of the world, but loathe the backwards sentiment of the fabricated lifestyle. Moms rock in all that makes them great and strong and it is this that should be help up and cherished. Thanks moms!
Micro-trip to the Bay Area
I have an incredibly short trip to the Bay Area beginning tomorrow. I will be on the ground there less than 24 hours and nearly all of it will be either sleeping, prepping, in meetings or transit to and from the airport. I was hoping for a trip of three days at least, but that will come. Should you see me, say hi and I may have time for a quick coffee or something.
Blower Blows
Our air conditioning/heater blower went out yesterday evening. Today we had a new one put in (we have spent two-thirds the cost of a whole new unit in two years in repairs). It just kicked on and, man does the new blower blow. This could make for a more comfortable summer, or at least it is one option.
Breeding not Easy
I loathe allergies. For some reason my allergies started in full drive a little early this year (only by a week or two). This past week, starting last weekend, the annoyance began its progression. Yes, I take things for them (I have done shots too, but the lost time out of one's schedule is greater than the week or two of misery, at least for now), but the effectiveness diminishes each year.
The two things that get to me are lack of good sleep and the cloudy mind. This really is not the time for this as I have a ton of things to get out the door that require focus of a clear mind (focus is a little difficult at the moment, but more on that at another time).
Crunch Time, as Usual
We are quite busy with articles, summaries, presentations, and e-mail these days. We have ideas and projects that need to get out of our heads on in to some functional space. Again we are looking for about 6 more hours in each day, that would do it. The other option would be to rearrange things we already have to put better focus on the stuff that will help the people who get it design and build for those that don't get it and shouldn't need to get it. What are we talking about time spent on the wrong things and working to spend time on the right things. What are the right things? We will tell you once we have time to knock some of them out.
Cryptic? It will not be once we have the key to set all of this free.
The Touch of Pope John Paul II
It is with sadness that I pause at the passing of Pope John Paul II. I am not Roman Catholic, but the Pope did have an impact on how I view the world. Actually he gave me a look into a world I would have never seen.
In 1987 the Pope was making his trip to the U.S. and traveling across the states, stopping in many places. One of the places he was stopping was San Francisco. I was in my last semester at St. Mary's College and had been contacted over the summer to see if I had an interest in helping the San Francisco Diocese Catholic Communications work locally on the Pope visit. Since I was a communication major, I though this would be a great experience.
There were preliminary meetings over Summer, but most of the work started a few days before the Pope was to arrive in the U.S. I was going to be helping in a communication center that was going to be tracking the Pope by satellite feed, providing tape to local media, as well as subject experts explaining the Pope's points. As Pope arrived in the U.S. our satellite center was busy, I was spending most waking hours outside class at the center flipping tapes, running cameras of the expert press conferences. It was a lot of fun seeing behind the scenes and getting good hands on experience.
As the Pope was nearing San Francisco on his trip our communication center was getting moved to another place as the space was needed for other purposes on the day of his visit. The night before his arrival we moved all the equipment to an annex of the Cathedral. I had class early the day of his arrival, but was back in San Francisco to help out the last minute changes.
When I got to the Cathedral one of the technicians who had been a lead was needed back at the NBC affiliate. This left an extra spot for a person inside the Cathedral and I was asked if I wanted to go in as I had put in a lot of hours. The event was a religious only event between the Pope and Roman Catholic ordained priests, brothers, nuns, sisters, bishops, and cardinals. It was them, security, and a few press. I had to go fill out some paperwork for security and go help with some final preparations inside for the network cameras. Then it was back outside for the bomb searches.
We were finally let back in and went to our spots before the religious were let in the Cathedral. I was up on top one of the kiosks in the back with one of the camera crews and had a perfect view of the whole Cathederal, including a look down on the Pope's entry way. Things were orderly as everybody in their vestments came in and took their seat. We watched as the Pope landed in San Francisco and drove to the San Francisco Mission, where he held the boy with AIDS, which changed the view of many in the whole of the Church with that one action. He then was on his way to the Cathedral along a route that had more security than any other event prior.
As the Pope neared the Cathedral everybody was getting excited. There was getting to be a lot of commotion from the truly devoted, many of whom had never seen any Pope in person. As the Pope was a block away it was near bedlam in the Cathedral. The nuns, priests, brothers and sisters were up on the pews stomping their feet. It was like a rock concert. Not any rock concert, but a huge rock concert, like Elvis would have been, only bigger. I was on the headset that had media, security, and police on it. The police added more forces inside the Cathedral before the Pope would come in. They had metal barricades up and there were many police pushing back at the barricades, it was a scene I never would have imagined and one very few would ever see. Here was a man who represented to nearly every person in the Cathedral the embodiment of their connection to their God. For many it was a once in a life time event for these people who had given up everything and taken vows of poverty for their God.
As the Pope entered the Cathedral things really let loose. The barricades nearly came over as the Pope walked in and shook as many hands as he could. He put his hands deep into the crowds beyond the barricade that were thrust with the weight of thousands of pounds of the adoring. As the Pope walked down the main aisle he stepped into the pews to shake many many hands. He knew the sacrifices of these people as he was one of them. He made many feel like he was one with them.
After many minutes he finally was seated on the alter and a few minutes later order was largely restored. The meeting was one that presented the U.S. Church views to the Pope, female ordination and other relatively contentious subjects were broached. As the Pope gave his blessing I was asked if I wanted to go down near the exit to hang out to get a closer look. After the blessing I went down to an empty spot near the door with another who was helping. The exit was quite boisterous as well. As the Pope neared I was pushed toward the barricade, but as those around me urged, I put my hand out. As the Pope went by he shook my hand (it was very different from a politician handshake as it was more caring). As I turned around there were three or four nuns standing, a little shocked, and they asked timidly if I shook the Pope's hand. I said I had and the asked with which hand and I said my right, "the Pope it was right", I remembered saying. They asked if they could touch that hand. Two of them became faint, but they did not go down, as they touched my hand. They were so excited to touch the hand that touched the Pope. I was stunned and deeply saddened by this, as I was not expecting this response, but I felt very badly that I shook the hand when it should have been one of these nuns, who had given so much.
Since that time I have been in utter awe of the man who was Pope John Paul II, he did far more for the Church and making it come to life for many. Peace.
The Cost of Being Sick
Well, I was supposed to be on a plane for a fun weekend away with family, but they have gone I am home sick. I was really not feeling well yesterday at work, but tried to be a trooper through it (largely because I have burned through my vacation/sick time by going to conferences and speaking). Today I stayed home as I was not better and if I was going to travel this evening I needed to rest and get better. Getting better did not happen. I tried changing the flight to catch part of the weekend with my family, but the costs were astronomical to change the flight and just 100 dollars to cancel the flight. Looked at other route and airlines, but everything was booked of 10 hours of travel for a 2.5 hour flight. On top of this I would be not getting paid for anytime away. The financial cost was going through the roof to spend some time and relax (I have not done that in a while and do not see it happening until August).
The bright side is I am home and can work on those special projects, following up (still) on contacts from SXSW and the IA Summit, and cleaning the office. I guess I need some sleep and get better.
Outside of the 3rd World, Yahoo Buys Flickr
Once again we are back into living in the third world. It is the first day of Spring and we got a lightning storm and out goes the power. We have this to look forward to until Fall. Well, unless we move.
Once the power came on it was errand time, then time shout congratulations to Flickr and Yahoo!. The news was officially announced, that Yahoo! bought Flickr. The Flickr team is staying intact and in Vancouver. Flickr is one of the kick-ass products on the Web right now and with Yahoo! support it could stay at the forefront.
Mail Bagged
Tomorrow night should be my night to start catching up on e-mail. I have been getting more than a fair amount in the last 10 days, but I have not been able to send back out from the various hotels. It seems that POP mail and ISAPI mail do not like going out (ISAPI did not work inbound in Montreal either). I have gone through and parsed most of the e-mail into buckets to start handling.
I have not forgotten about you. Really. I have shot back some short e-mails from my mobile, but for many of you I have a little more to say.