A quick reminder that we’re meeting on a different night to accommodate Valentines Day: Monday, February 7, at the Wilde Roast Café, from 6:00p–8:00p.

Our theme for the meeting is The Emperor’s New Clothes: Challenging Received Best Practices, Tools, and Standards. There are experts in all fields who promote a methodology or tool or best practice. Sometimes they are spot on and provide amazing insight and ease or enhance our work; other times they’re a red herring, wrong, or misleading and add unnecessarily to our workload.

Do you know any experts who got it wrong? Have you used tools which made your job harder, not easier? Were you forced to do something one way because “that’s how it’s done” when if only “they” had listened to you the project would have finished early and under budget? Well, now’s your chance to share your own expertise and insights. Come challenge the experts and conventional wisdom!

If you’d like to try on some of the Emperor’s fashions for yourself, he’s been know to shop at these fine stores:

Jared Spool, Understanding the Kano Model – A Tool for Sophisticated Designers:

http://www.uie.com/articles/kano_model

Is this tool meant to be used prescriptively or descriptively? Does it provide meaningful or useful data? Do you use it?

Jakob Nielsen, Change vs. Stability in Web Usability Guidelines:

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/guidelines-change.html

Perhaps we can see now that some people were correct from the beginning…or eventually! Are there pros to being the first, even though it bucks tradition or standards or trends?

Please feel free to share any books, articles, or musings where you’ve personally pointed out that the emperor had no clothes!

Regards,
The UX Meetup Organizers

Ok, it’s a minor point, not a revolution, but can we start calling it “ecommerce” now? Even as I type this, I’m being told by the spellcheck it’s E-commerce, but why bother with the hyphen? And capital “E”? Please. I’m going to ignore that and hope things change. 

Do you still say Web site? How about website from now on? Is that still a debate, on how to spell it? Do we need to capitalize “Internet”? Does that really make sense anymore? 

Any other words come to mind for you? 

I’m familar with most of the pros/ cons of PNG and have utilized them for their benefits in gradients and tackled the whole IE transparency issue. The question is, would you bother with PNG?

http://www.engadget.com/2007/07/31/switched-on-apples-brash-flash-clash-rehash/

I find my mac loyalty waning as they become a bigger player in the world of consumer electronics. Has anyone noticed that Best Buy is now an Apple Authorized Reseller? I’m sure that has something to do with CompUSA closing half it’s stores, but I digress.

I was excited when I heard about the iPhone and although it’s way outside my budget and not really a necessity, I’d been thinking that an iPhone was in my future somewhere. Now that this Flash support issue has been a present for over a month and there’s some possibility it may not get resolved anytime soon, as a flash developer I’m thinking this may not be the phone for me.

Now I’d still tell you any day of the week that Apple is on so many levels, a better company then Adobe. Don’t even get me started about Microsoft. That said, I’ve got to start to consider what (from a Flash Developer’s perspective) is the best mobile device competing with the iPhone? Any thoughts?

This often seems to happen for me when looking at print design again. I often wonder if we will ever get print designers on board. Last week Daniel Eatock gave a talk.

It was fresh for a change. Daniel Eatock is not necessarily a interactive designer. And i’ll say the first 6 minutes feel a bit staged to appear cutting edge, but the more I listened I appreciated the moto. Essentially a focus on fun and function, a reaction to the abundance of slick, overly produced work out there.

A few projects stripped away the excess of interactive design. His site is a good example.

In the end he recited a list of “no’s”. Amongst them “no flash”. As usual there were muffled murmurs. “no flash?” people whispered under their breath. Apparently the last hour didn’t stick… I can only hope that we as designers can remember that there is more than just aesthetics to design. I have to say thanks to Daniel. We need to be reminded once and a while that design is more than a visceral reaction. That concept and interaction can carry the weight of a message just as much as color and form.

In my decade of experience, a website isn’t real to clients until they see some pictures, sketches, something, anything. With this in mind, my goal is to provide initial wireframes (black and white skeletons of the website) earlier rather than later. Something that represents current thinking, grounds the conversation, and provides a malleable vision. Without a visual artifact conversations quickly fly into the ether, and you quickly spend cycles speculating what do build when you should be building. I talked about this need on my other blog.

The most productive meetings are where the visual artifact or prototype is revised in real time, rather than capturing changes in notes. This gives clients something to digest immediately that represents current thinking. No waiting, and no “homework”. There’s a point where the project team runs out of information – even with a prototype. When you reach that point, stop revising and get more information or move to the next stage of development. Again, don’t spin cycles speculating – while wireframes are cheap, changing and changing back and back again is demoralizing.

Ben’s reminder that “The interface is the product” needs to be taken to heart by information architects and interaction designers as well. Wireframes and flows are not a web application – they’re a communication tool, a conversation starter. To me, using them as anything more is mistaking a tree for the forest.

A client this morning referred to me as “Santa” – because they tell me all their wishes for their app and I return with a nicely packaged interface. Fits perfect – the metaphor, not the suit.

It truly is still a work in progress, but the new features they’ve rolled out over the last few weeks are pretty cool. They’ve now got all the RSS and probably a few other features you’d hoped to see them develop. I won’t go into detail here, but I wanted to remind everyone to go check back on their progress.

You might even find a good show to see tonight or a scope out a fun place to drink way too much beer next weekend.

If you are looking for me, I can be found here.

“That’s what the economics of abundance is really about….Having customers who stay with you because they want to, not because they have to.” – Shane Richmond

(Thanks to Hugh MacLeod for the pointer)

Too often it’s obvious that a website acts like it’s the only website in the world; convoluted registration process, not linking to other websites, forcing full-screen browsers, generally being annoying. But there are options are abundant – with more in development everyday.

The economics of abundance has huge implications for our work as designers.

Something to ponder as you fade into a tryptophan coma this week: what are the principals of designing for abundance?

 I promise not to make posts that were this far off topic often, but this was really interesting to me and I think others might be interested as well.

My Cousin and her many of her friends over at eightandfive.com got together last weekend and did a Blind Taste Test of Cheap Beers available in the Twin Cities Area.

 http://eightandfive.com/2006/11/20/what-is-the-best-cheep-beer/

Some of the results were very predictable, but others were somewhat unexpected.

 

I’ve always liked the fact that they let you listen to every show they’ve ever made for free as long as you streamed it off the web. The only problem was you had to use Real Player, which we all know is on it’s way down the tubes.

Luckily, I assume that partially due to an influx of popularity, leading to a forthcoming television show, leading to a better budget for the website, They’ve upgraded to a Flash Based MP3 player. Now you can actually jump the playhead to the part of the show you want to hear, and your stream is MUCH more reliable.

Also, They’ve started Podcasting all their New Shows, which we can assume will boost the sales of their old shows on Audible…

It’s just great to see that people are gradually getting this whole internet thing.
ROI for Podcasting hasn’t really proven it’s self, but I’d bet This American Life is making some money giving their product away for free.

It’s the Number One Audio Podcast on the iTunes Music Store, and it’s the Number Two Podcast Overall.