Soapbox - Friday, July 3, 2009 22:21 - 0 Comments

Daddy Cyberpunk

Owe it to William Gibson…25 years old today.

The UX of CMS - Friday, June 26, 2009 23:32 - 0 Comments
Part of the reason I love WordPress as much as I do is simply that the total user experience of using the admin tools just makes it that much better than most CMS packages. While I still think there are a lot of areas that can use improvement, I have rarely ever used a CMS that made it quite as easy to manage and publish content.

While is why I am extremely proud of the evolution of the CMS that I designed and built for the Wimbledon Live player (see this post).

(more…)
Bradbury and the Internet - Friday, June 26, 2009 23:01 - 0 Comments
Hard to believe but apparently science-fiction writer Ray Bradbury, known for some of his pretty far out predictions of the future, doesn’t think much of the Web. More specifically, he says “It’s meaningless; it’s not real. It’s in the air somewhere” in speaking of our dependence on the Internet. He laments that the Web contributes to depersonalizing relationships. I must be an old codger like the 90-year old author (whose “Fahrenheit 451″ is one of my favorite fictional books of all time)…despite working multiple careers that push to advance technology (on the Internet), I still actually dislike it for exactly that reason. In the same week that Shaq finds out that he’s been traded to Cleveland because of a tweet, I’d say that our ability to get useless information and maintain superficial friendships based on SMS has surpassed our own abilities to want to create nurturing relationships with people around us. More here…
Wimbledon Live – Smooth Stream & Silverlight - Wednesday, June 24, 2009 10:30 - 0 Comments
Most of you know that I’ve been inundated for the last 2 weeks with a crash course project that was launched on Monday. iStreamPlanet built the player and back-end and is managing video assets for NBC Sports’ presentation of the 2009 Wimbledon Championships. The player is built on Silverlight 2.0 and features a fairly large archive of previews, highlights, and interviews from daily matches as well as full match replay on-demand for selected games.

Starting June 27, it will also feature live feeds including up to five simultaneous live feeds (of course the UK being 8 hours ahead of me means some extremely early morning admin). The live feeds (and subsequent VOD archives) will feature at least one Smooth Stream, Microsoft’s new adaptive streaming technology that will bring you hi-definition video at 2950k (it looks really sweet).

The 2009 Wimbledon runs through July 5th.
Wordpress 2.8 - Wednesday, June 10, 2009 0:10 - 0 Comments
I kid you not, I am looking forward to the release of 2.8 than the new iPhone. Pretty nerdy, eh? Just a few more hours…
My day… - Tuesday, June 9, 2009 16:03 - 0 Comments
This just about summarizes it. Not that there wasn’t a lot to do, just nothing very exciting. Yes, sometimes web design can just be dull.
The cow says… - Wednesday, June 3, 2009 6:58 - 0 Comments
MOOOO! So all things must come to an end, or at least get re-directed elsewhere!

The five of you that actually read this blog will notice that the URL is no longer Mobimeet. After a reasonable offer and a little soul searching (about 20 seconds worth) I’ve decided to sell mobimeet.com to a Ukranian mobile phone game developer. Sounds silly because the whole name “mobimeet” really means absolutely nothing for me in terms of anything I actually do … it was just a name I plucked out of thin air … but over the last four+ years it has more or less become my identity so I am now having to spend a bit of time swapping out my registrations and identities to various sites though I won’t bother with all of them.

Which brings me to the Facebook issue. A good number of you found me on Facebook and sent the friend request but I don’t really do anything on Facebook so I haven’t bothered (and won’t bother) to approve anyone. Anyway, students, it would be a violation of the school’s fraternization policies for me to engage on a social network in this manner, as I’ve mentioned before, so don’t be offended by my lack of response (isn’t listening to me rant for 4 hours a class enough?) on Facebook or LinkedIn.

So Mobimeet is officially being transferred. My email address will remain for a short period but please update your records to the appropriate iStreamPlanet or AII or UNLV addresses instead.
Die die die! - Wednesday, May 27, 2009 23:42 - 0 Comments
http://tinyurl.com/pq4nsq

[insert Dr. Evil laugh here]

OK, seriously, nothing against it but to this day I still don’t really see the point and despite incredible efforts and even more incredible simplification, it’s still confusing. So nah nah nah!

And to my students (and former students) who’ve put in invites…this should obviously signal why I am not on it. It’s also a violation of school policy to engage in fraternization. And yes, virtual still counts. See you in class instead!

Grads, catch me on LinkedIn instead.
Tweeting and the art of self-invaded privacy - Tuesday, May 12, 2009 6:28 - 3 Comments
Ever since Adam Carolla went off the air earlier this year, morning drive talk has been sparse, boring and pretty lifeless. This morning, however, John Ridley’s quick commentary on KNPR at least gave me a short smile and of course something to rant about.

It’s no secret that social networking as a whole fascinates me, but in a different way than most. To this day, frankly, I still haven’t figured it out. I’ve been in this game long enough to remember SixDegrees and watch the MySpace explosion, see the mess that Second Life and Facebook are becoming and now, there’s Twitter. At least with SixDegrees and MySpace there was an actual theme, and even with Second Life and Facebook I can almost understand why, but Twitter is a conundrum in itself.

Being the professional that he is, I couldn’t say it all any better than he did, so here is Mr. Ridley’s post/comment:

At the risk of sounding like that old guy in Gran Torino telling those “young punks” to “get off my lawn,” it’s gotten to the point that whenever I hear somebody talking about Twitter or twittering or tweeting it just makes my little tummy want to hurl.

I haven’t tweeted once in my life, but I’m sick of hearing about it already. What once may have been the cool way of letting a hundred people know that you’re about to go mow your lawn now has the feel of a used-to-be-fresh means of communicating. So yesterday, like two-way pagers. And AOL.

To be honest, I think tweeting jumped the shark long before ultrahip CNN got into a Twitter match against superdown Ashton Kutcher. Back when politicians started live-tweeting responses to the president’s demi-State of the Union address, Twitter had already taken on all the cool of your mom getting a tattoo.

I imagine, I hope, twitterers are ultimately headed for the social networking retirement home that’s the current residence of Second Life and MySpace.

But my real issue with social networking sites isn’t their faddishness.

It’s the hypocrisy that goes with them.

We claim to be a nation of people who take our privacy very seriously. Just mention the idea of warrantless wiretaps and expect to get hit up with a congressional investigation.

But give somebody an avatar and a URL, and he can’t tweet, post or hyperlink enough personal information about himself to as many people as possible.

Seriously, does valuable broadband space need to be taken up with announcements in that creepy Facebook third-person-ese that “John is enjoying two-for-one margaritas with the rest of the IT Team at T.G.I. Fridays”?

Where is the expectation of privacy anymore? Or, more correctly, where is the expectation that people will keep their private nonsense to themselves so that those of us who still like to communicate personal information with one person at a time don’t have to get caught up in somebody else’s e-mail circles or listen to their one-sided cell phone conversations?

No, I don’t know what’s hipper; to Facebook or to Twitter. I just know for me, personally, discretion never went out of style.

To be sure, Mr. Ridley, like myself, operates a blog which most people view no differently than Twitter might be, but there is a distinct difference. For him, the blog isn’t an outlet for sharing personal details and interacting in a social sense so much as it is a platform for discussing social concerns where technology comes into play, just like this blog is a sounding board for issues that affect areas that I teach.

Of course Mr. Ridley’s post was lambasted almost immediately in the comments. The one that got my gourd was “I say keep your old-fashioned opinions to yourself and off the air.” There is a certain virtue to old fashioned opinions, and just as the person who wrote the comment feels it appropriate to air his discontent over the post, Mr. Ridley certainly has the right to voice it.

[read "Keep Your Tweets To Yourself" here]
Told ya – WordPress Rocks - Wednesday, April 29, 2009 12:24 - 0 Comments
In particular for my IMD335 students who are learning why I harp on learning to use WordPress…good article with massive resources posted on Smashing today! Now, I don’t necessarily recommend that you use WP for your Portfolio Show site but for your own personal portfolio, not a bad idea.

WordPress is often thought of as just a blogging platform. But it’s capable of so much more. Even WordPress’ documentation includes an entire section on using WordPress as a content management system. Because WordPress is such an easy-to-use platform, it makes sense to consider using it as a platform to build just about any kind of website, a portfolio website included.

Whether you’re a photographer, graphic designer, Web designer or any other kind of visual artist, WordPress makes an excellent starting point for developing your online portfolio. And with the wealth of plug-ins and ready-made themes available, you can usually get a perfectly presentable website up and running in a matter of hours.

So get on the bandwagon, listen, learn, try, play and get some stuff done!
Help Elements Advice - Thursday, April 23, 2009 9:04 - 0 Comments
[quoted excerpts from Smashing Magazine, article by Matt Cronin]

Excellent article on a consistently overlooked problem for most web designers – help elements. A help element is anything that provides the user with assistance in completing a task. They come in many shapes, sizes and formats but the primary goal is to be unobtrusive but noticeable and, well, helpful. Most designers/developers look at help elements with trudgery but in many cases it can actually enhance the user experience.

The place we frequently see help elements is in form completion and validation. Why we somehow can’t provide scripts that reduce error rates in the first place is beyond me, but I suppose in a lot of cases you still have to provide visual cues and alerts to help some users out.

In HCI we consider that a standard free-form entry is the most volatile of inputs and sure enough, that’s where you’ll encounter the most errors, but don’t neglect the other visual aspects, including external labels, internal (low contrast, like the one shown below) labels, direct manipulation (such as calendar popups).

The extremes of direct input error handling might be dates and telephone numbers, but here you may need to also consider flow; if within the form you require country, simply provide formats that the user will be more familiar with (such as auto-complete country codes).

From Matt Cronin’s post:

Usability is the Key

With any website design, one strives for usability. Usability is the key factor in the success that a website achieves. Usability is simply about making things easier for your users — and help elements certainly do that. But are your individual help elements themselves usable?

Don’t Confuse the User
Confusing the user contradicts the purpose of the help element, so avoid it. Only put in content that is appropriate to the element. The way you organize content within the help element affects usability. If the element contains a lot of content, use lists and highlight keywords so that the content is easy to scan.

Placement Has a Major Impact
In Web design layout, placement of objects is a top usability consideration. Likewise for help elements, placement affects usability.

Many designers make the mistake of making help elements (i.e. buttons, links, etc.) very small so that they don’t get in the way of the website’s main content. The problem is that they become hard for the user to find. Sure, their small size leaves room for more content, but that won’t help a confused user. Find a balance between subtlety and accessibility.

Also remember that help elements should be optional for the user, not required. Allow the user to choose to get help, instead of immediately showing the element.

Next time you’re designing your site, put some extra consideration into the help elements and see what ideas you can come up with. Send me some examples of your clever solutions via comment.
450,000 and growing - Wednesday, April 22, 2009 13:16 - 0 Comments
[original post at switched.com by Warren Riddle]

To wit I ask – do we really spend waste that much time reading blogs?

As more and more major newspapers fold, in the face of dwindling advertisers and subscribers, bloggers are usurping their roles in record numbers. According to The Wall Street Journal, over 20 million people now blog in the United States. Of those, 1.7 million earn money doing so, while 450,000 primarily earn their livings through the blogged word.

Those statistics indicate that there are now more professional bloggers than there are computer programmers or firefighters. Career bloggers now also rival attorneys in number, which leads us to a question. When bloggers outnumber lawyers, who is going to file all of those libel and slander suits?

The authors, Mark Penn and E. Kinney Zalesne, investigate some intriguing aspects of this journalistic shift. For instance, they ask whether or not bloggers deserve an official union, along with health and unemployment benefits. They also manage to throw in a few condescending and elitist shots at the blogosphere, accusing bloggers of having “limited standards and, for most, no formal training.” It must be humbling to lose readers to the unwashed, untrained, and ethically-challenged masses.

Maybe, the unemployed, professional journalists, with their high standards and firm grasps on ethics and morals, can go back to law school to even out the attorney-blogger numbers. Regardless, our primary concern is with this blogger’s union becoming a reality. We’re ready for our union-mandated break. [From: The Wall Street Journal]

Nonethless, it’s pretty indicative of the way things have gone, the power of the social media and the possibilities of the future. With several regular jobs, I find it tough to make time to even post once a week (obviously) but then again, I don’t get paid for it either. I think it would be pretty damned interesting to know what that would be like. Do pro bloggers whose primary income comes from posting have the same worries about hitting deadlines as traditional journalists? Or does the laissez-faire attitude change that perspective as well?

In the meantime, inasmuch as I would love to be able to post on a daily basis here as Jen does on her blog, I guess I don’t really have much of a point in doing it except to keep exalting the virtues of good web design, better user experiences, and DRM. I must be kookoo.
WMM Returns – Awesome - Tuesday, April 21, 2009 12:53 - 0 Comments
Probably one of the best ever free apps that Microsoft was kind enough to include in pretty much every semi-current version of Windows was Windows Movie Maker. Now someone with a much bigger brain and an even bigger heart has published a Portable WMM that can run off a USB flash drive on any Windows XP, Vista or 7 box. AND he went that extra mile and included some new transitions and effects! Way to go dude!
Testing the User Experience - Tuesday, April 7, 2009 22:51 - 0 Comments
Wednesday I begin a new round teaching IMD335 (User Centered Design II – Testing). I’ve taught this class every year for the last three and for the most part it’s always been the same.

With the huge move towards user experience in the last 12 months or so, I’ve decided to change the class up a bit this time around. First, a new textbook – Measuring the User Experience by noted guru and researcher Tom Tullis. I think it might just be what we need to introduce more experience and less testing. Second, we’ll focus more on task accomplishment and user satisfaction in the past by using some pre-defined testing, sprinkled with a lot of web-based issues as opposed to general interface issues, and wrap that up nicely in a site building exercise designed to take what we’ve learned and applying it to a development.

I’m also continuing my support of WordPress by introducing it as the tool of choice for both blogging as well as general site development.

For those of you in the class, get ready for a hopefully fun, definitely challenging, and mostly a good learning experience with lots of information that I hope you take and reflect on every now and then. I have the benefit of 15 years of experience in the business – some good, some bad, a lot of great designs and experiences and a lot of bad ones too. It would be unfair to say that I hope you can live these experiences within the 3 short months of the course (or 6 if you count IMD345) but I certainly hope you can take from what I have learned and use it to your advantages.

That being said, I hope you all take a bit of time to check out some of the upcoming work that my team at iStream has been working on. Right now the prominent projects we have in the still include:
- A redesign of the iStreamPlanet corporate web site
- A launch of the iStreamPlanet Sales Portal
- The official release of iStream Director, a digital asset management system
- AT&T Blueroom Masters Golf Silverlight application with Move Networks technology
- Three interactive Silverlight applications to replace some existing Flash interfaces for a major broadcast network
- New Silverlight interfaces featuring Smooth Streaming
- A Flash video player featuring slow motion techniques for Ballpark Preps
- PlayReady digital rights management
And plenty more to come…
Give the User an Experience - Wednesday, March 25, 2009 13:42 - 0 Comments

Probably one of the best stated defenses I’ve read for UX comes courtesy of this post in Smashing Magazine. In talking about the brand loyalty of Apple users…

How do you make your customers trust you this much? The answer is to give the user an “Experience.” It is not enough simply to make a website usable. The experience you create for the customer has to make them not realize that they are “using” it. It’s a tough concept to grasp, and the recipe changes from website to website, but the right combination of usability, creative design, writing, psychology and metrics and a strong brand will create an experience through which your customers learn to trust you.

How true. This week I’ve been tossed back and forth between clients and bosses struggling with all the wants and demands and needs and the bottom line came down to making sure everyone realized that it has nothing to do with personal preference and like and dislikes, it’s about experience, and more than that it has to be tangible, palpable and reach the emotion of a human in a way that makes it memorable, or at the very least engaging.
Mix09 - Thursday, March 19, 2009 22:47 - 0 Comments
I was furious that I missed the first day of seminars at Mix yesterday but was ecstatic when I finally slipped in this afternoon and was standing behind (and subsequently got to meet) Bill Buxton (HCI guru and Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research) and then got to see some of Johnny Lee’s seminar. Not a big deal I guess but it’s always kind of cool to see and meet the people that shape your industry.
Silverlight 3 Debuts - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 13:59 - 0 Comments
The hot topic at Mix was the beta release of Silverlight 3. Tons of new features including 3D and animation effects, hardware acceleration support, multi-touch, outside-the-browser capabilities, and native support for h.264 and 720p HD amongst other things. In addition, its been retooled with cross-application support between Blend and Word to enhance rapid development, new controls, SEO enhancement, deep linking and more.

I first encountered Silverlight 2 years ago when it was first released at NAB as version 1 (the Javascript version). Quickly iStream assimilated into the Silverlight army and helped push several products into the forefront with Silverlight 2 over the last year+ including several prominent public jobs and some to be released shortly. Now, just 23 short months later, SL3 promises some great stuff.

For all those that say Flash still kicks SL in the ass, maybe true, but with a 10 year head-start I would’ve thought they’d still be leaps and bounds ahead. The fact that SL is quickly catching up and becoming a prominent player especially in the business forefront says something about its acceptance and viability. Don’t take me wrong, I too still develop plenty of Flash apps and here at iStream we take strides to develop interfaces concurrently on both platforms but the sheer speed at which SL has come to adolescence speaks volumes about what it may bring in the near future.
The Web Turns 20 - Friday, March 13, 2009 8:00 - 0 Comments
3 months after I graduated from Cornell, much bigger minds were hard at work. 20 years ago today, Tim Berners-Lee submitted his first proposal to CERN for the creation of what eventually would become the World Wide Web. Originally designed as a means of countering data loss at CERN. At the time, the average longevity of a researcher was just 2 years which meant that there was a high turnover which led to loss of knowledge, “…the technical details of past projects are sometimes lost forever, or only recovered after a detective investigation in an emergency. Often, the information has been recorded, it just cannot be found.”

In the resulting manifesto, entitled “Information Management: A Proposal“, Berners-Lee suggests the we “should work toward a universal linked information system.” Every student of web design should read it and understand the origins of the industry. It is an amazing path that the Web has taken in its course to ubiquity and utility but it all started, like most great inventions, as just an idea in someone’s head.
What a great time in technology - Friday, March 6, 2009 12:11 - 0 Comments
This is for my students, the UCD students in particular…

At this very minute I am sitting in a waiting room while my car is being serviced. I am IM’ing with my staff about projects, Twittering, surfing for some t-shirts on eBay while downloading YouTube vids for playback later, and typing this blog entry … all from my phone. And it isn’t because I have some phenomenal mobile device (G1 from T-Mobile)…it’s the norm nowadays. This is maybe the first time I’ve ever really tried to multitask on the little device but the fact that it can all happen is just amazing for someone like myself who started in tech back even before cellphones were a common device.

Yes, there is a lot to learn and it can be daunting, but with new technology and services comes more jobs and more exciting things to get into. Embrace this future…despite the economy, eventually things will turn around.

Now if my Android would learn to make my coffee right, we’d be all set.
9 Hot Tips to Increase Site Conversions - Wednesday, March 4, 2009 7:38 - 0 Comments
[by Gary Klingsheim for SitePro News]

“Site conversion” is a very dry and unexciting way of saying “how to get more profíts from the same amount of website traffic.” Isn’t that a more upbeat way of expressing it? Who doesn’t want to get more profíts from the same number of visitors?

Increasing your conversion rate is a straightforward, even dramatic way of positively impacting your bottom line. It really cannot be emphasized too much that any improvement at all in your conversion rate means additional revenue that is total profít.

Remember this fact when you are told that the way to “make more money” is to invest in more traffic-generating schemes (and dreams, at times). Before you start spending more money to generate additional traffic, you need to do as much as you can with the traffic you are already getting. If you keep the horse ahead of the cart in your planning, you will have an efficient, stable, measurable conversion rate from which you can extrapolate x amount of additional profit from y amount of new-traffic generation. (more…)
The World According to Microsoft, circa 2019 - Sunday, March 1, 2009 23:33 - 0 Comments
If Microsoft ever seizes control of the government (seeing as how it can still run a profit and the US government can’t, maybe it wouldn’t be a bad thing … except they might ask for that 2 cent overpayment on your social security check back) maybe this is what we can expect? Minority Microsoft Report-style?

A longer version can also be found here.