Nothing to see here. Move along...
Posted via web from bitpakkit
Friday, May 14, 2010
Not such a great experience after all.
Sunday, May 09, 2010
Saturday, May 08, 2010
The value of nothing
“This is a deeply thought-provoking book about the dramatic changes we must make to save the planet from financial madness” — Naomi Klein. Opening with Oscar Wilde’s observation that “nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing,” Patel shows how our faith in prices as a way of valuing the world is misplaced. He reveals the hidden ecological and social costs of a hamburger (as much as $200), and asks how we came to have markets in the first place. Both the corporate capture of government and our current financial crisis, Patel argues, are a result of our democratically bankrupt political system.
If part one asks how we can rebalance society and limit markets, part two answers by showing how social organizations, in America and around the globe, are finding new ways to describe the world’s worth. If we don’t want the market to price every aspect of our lives, we need to learn how such organizations have discovered democratic ways in which people, and not simply governments, can play a crucial role in deciding how we might share our world and its resources in common.
This short, timely and inspiring book reveals that our current crisis is not simply the result of too much of the wrong kind of economics. While we need to rethink our economic model, Patel argues that the larger failure beneath the food, climate and economic crises is a political one. If economics is about choices, Patel writes, it isn’t often said who gets to make them. The Value of Nothing offers a fresh and accessible way to think about economics and the choices we will all need to make in order to create a sustainable economy and society.
Find The Value of Nothing online at: Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble, Borders, & IndieBound.
Posted via web from bitpakkit
I had no idea Apple had their own version of a pesky client runtime
But it appears I need to rethink everything: http://bit.ly/cCKCSc According to AppleInsider, Apple is using Gianduia, its new a client-side, standards based framework for Rich Internet Apps, to create production quality online apps for its retail users.
We arleady have web apps looking and behaving like desktop apps and the other way around, cross-platform systems relying on Air/Flash (and even Gianduia - will it be cross platform?) to look the same regardless of the underlying platform, and of course there many companies establishing their own experience and brand guidelines to push product families on any platform or technology.
The rigid unification of a computer based on some standards of the operating system, and the adaptation of every control to match the platform is a thing of the past. If this development helps people using digital products is another question - but it's definitely the development that I still see way too often in daily practice (Adobe Browser Lab is proof, no?).The usual suspects deliver many examples of this: Google Apps, iTunes or Facebook do not really match operating system standards at all. The obvious approach is to make a good product, be consistent when it supports an overarching experience, innovate where it makes sense, and try not to break ANY environment.Each case is different. But clearly a client runtime is a great idea even if it seems like the wrong time in our digital evolution to fight over which one. If it was me I think I would choose one that has partners.
Android Smartphone Playing Adobe Flash Video = Awesome from Dave Meeker on Vimeo.
Posted via web from bitpakkit
Friday, May 07, 2010
Thursday, May 06, 2010
A Fourth Value for an Identity Pattern in Three Parts
I was on a thread today regarding the use of screen name or username as a way of identifying a user. Clearly there are patterns, or maybe one pattern with variations, in web application design that revolve around user identity management.
This confusion is compounded by using online services, such as Google, Yahoo!, eBay and other services who have established their identity models based on engineering-centric requirements.
I came across a great post in the Habitat Chronicles that essentially documents the historical belief that lead to conjoining the requirements of engineering (establishing sessions, retrieving database records, etc.) with the users requirements of recognizability and self-expression. But, this approach can actually discourage participation due to the fear of exposing personal data.
Yahoo! where I used to work found that users consistently listed that the fear of spammers farming their e-mail address was the number one reason they gave for abandoning the creation of user created content. This feedback ultimately led to the very expensive and radical re-engineering of the Yahoo identity model.
The author, Randy Farmer, found that a tripartite identity model would describe the needs expressed by most online services and more importantly, would be forward compatible with current identity sharing methods and future proposals.
He diagrams this most efficiently as:
Randy Farmer's Tripartite Identity Pattern postulates that the three components of user identity are: the account identifier, the login identifier, and the public identifier.
Read more about each of the elements and some interesting feedback on the pattern here.
Another interesting pattern in this regard is the use of a claims-based identity model. This revolves around the idea of claims i.e. a piece of information about an individual that is in doubt and must therefore be proved. Using an identity model based around claims allows individual identities to hold many disparate roles which can relate to different organisations as part of a wider ID metasystem. The way in which these claims are asserted and proven can be handled by a variety of technical solutions and services.
...to be continued.
This confusion is compounded by using online services, such as Google, Yahoo!, eBay and other services who have established their identity models based on engineering-centric requirements.
I came across a great post in the Habitat Chronicles that essentially documents the historical belief that lead to conjoining the requirements of engineering (establishing sessions, retrieving database records, etc.) with the users requirements of recognizability and self-expression. But, this approach can actually discourage participation due to the fear of exposing personal data.
Yahoo! where I used to work found that users consistently listed that the fear of spammers farming their e-mail address was the number one reason they gave for abandoning the creation of user created content. This feedback ultimately led to the very expensive and radical re-engineering of the Yahoo identity model.
The author, Randy Farmer, found that a tripartite identity model would describe the needs expressed by most online services and more importantly, would be forward compatible with current identity sharing methods and future proposals.
He diagrams this most efficiently as:
Randy Farmer's Tripartite Identity Pattern postulates that the three components of user identity are: the account identifier, the login identifier, and the public identifier.
Read more about each of the elements and some interesting feedback on the pattern here.
Another interesting pattern in this regard is the use of a claims-based identity model. This revolves around the idea of claims i.e. a piece of information about an individual that is in doubt and must therefore be proved. Using an identity model based around claims allows individual identities to hold many disparate roles which can relate to different organisations as part of a wider ID metasystem. The way in which these claims are asserted and proven can be handled by a variety of technical solutions and services.
Microsoft's (where I also used to work) ASP.NET team documented the Geneva Framework as used for building claims-based applications and services for ASP.NET applications. Features include:
- Security Token Services (STS)
- Federated authentication from ASP.NET applications
- Object Model that facilitates claims-based authorization form ASP.NET applications
The above definition was taken from the below URL, this webpage also gives a more in-depth look at what is a claims based system is and how the Geneva framework fits in.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/dd278426.aspx
Microsoft's Passport service which I worked on for a few years at Microsoft is a good example how this can work to provide identity services between applications.
Who Cares? Where is this going?
Federated and open identity systems ultimately lend themselves to a new identity pattern that I have yet to see documented, but I actually think I see it in use quite frequently, mostly when I comment on blogs. Frequently the comment I post is able to retrieve information such as username or real name and an avatar without ever exposing personally identifiable information that could be used for rude behavior such as spamming or harassing someone. However, what strikes me as the untapped potential in this emerging pattern is the concept of 'ownership' of my contributions as it relates to the persistence and distribution of that identity.
Activity as a function of Identity
If there were a fourth element to the tripartate identity that was activity this would complete the social pattern. I could consume or represent that identity in the context of contribution, content or context as appropriate and as subscribed to by the user who owns the activity and identity.
This would enable a double-click on an identity that could perform interesting new social functions:
- Aggregate user output in the context of an experience essentially allowing me to view contributions of an individual expressed as an identity
- Assimilate interest and behavior and express this as a contextual metaphor (e.g. a score, a weighting, etc)
...to be continued.
Another UI Patterns Collection
OH: Platform-agnostic user and customer advocate seeks patterns to make sense of web apps.
UI Patterns is a self-proclaimed growing collection of User Interface Patterns that someone has started collecting from web sites (and a few applications). This anonymous developer has begun collecting under the following subheads.
Fat Footers - is an emerging design trend ultimately a pattern?
Forms - one could argue that Login is a pattern and just one example of a form.
Headers - is header a pattern?
Input Feedback - very useful and not widely enough adopted. Is it a sub-pattern of form or input dialogue?
Input Prompt - see above.
Pagination - sub pattern of navigation or an expression of the navigation pattern?
Search Filter - there's a good discussion going on IXDA about best practices in preserving filter selections. There are variations on this one for sure.
Search Suggestions - I think this is 'auto-complete'
Select All - interesting.
Tabs - I have also tagged tabular organization as a pattern in the paper I am working on.
This is interesting. My rough plan is to collect the collections here while writing the paper on patterns of interaction I am working on with some colleagues.
This is interesting. My rough plan is to collect the collections here while writing the paper on patterns of interaction I am working on with some colleagues.
The control panel
If you want to be in control, you might need a panel. I have been thinking a lot about control panels in UX/UI terms and the real-life and historic examples of this are an inspiration sometimes.
Posted via web from bitpakkit
This video commerce thing...better than in-store?
Summit says yes...
In the replay presentation below, Summit Sports talks about how they doubled online revenues after incorporating enlarged images, alternate views and zooming capabilities (from Adobe Scene 7) and then actually captured more than 1,400 product review videos in just three days, basically giving them a total of 3,000+ videos to help explain and sell its gear and equipment.
You have to register to watch it, but Dennis Kopitz, Director of Web Development for Summit Sports Inc. makes a good case for going this route saying that it is actually better than the in-store experience.
Posted via web from bitpakkit
Wednesday, May 05, 2010
Tuesday, May 04, 2010
Customer Process Management
(Disclaimer: Since I heard so much about CPM being dead as a pricing model I would like to reclaim the acronym for something useful)
There are no shortage of business process management professionals, businesses, problems, platforms, analysts, books, theories, architectures and general products and services. People have spent years building up massive practices and businesses and used this BPM terminology in order to help move us from the archaic world of database and legacy-centric thinking that has built monolithic applications and waterfall-en methodologies around core business processes. We managed the unmanageable by wrapping management capabilities around the processes and exposing this management layer to the various users who ultimately owned or had to interact with those processes.
We wrapped our lingo franca up with some analytics, intelligence, integration points and made sure that we could deliver this in some useful fashion. We integrated to service buses and SOA back ends, consumed REST and SOAP endpoints, dressed it up in Flash and AJAX and pushed these processes out to users and yes, even customers.
And so at some point, we actually blindly entered a space where we had customers managing their view of business processes. We had dressed up these business processes with some kind of front end and exposed appropriate elements and touchpoints of those business processes out to customers. We had customers managing processes. But the business owned the process right? They owned the outcome right? It ultimately benefited the business right?
Now we have added Social BPM - the latest shiny object in the information workplace - social collaboration around the business and associated business processes that require new levels of collaboration. That collaboration also apparently, from time to time, may involve customers.
Don't customers (don't we) have our own processes? Actually we also have the ability to manage our processes too. But, unfortunately noone is exposing any Customer Process Management endpoints for us to consume, use, interact with or ultimately use to do the things we want to do.
I want all vendors to please submit their products and services to my 'vendor selection process' - please compare your prices, service levels, warranties, etc in a standard way so that I can consume these into my selection process.
Once I have completed my vendor selection process, please supply the product or service at appropriate intervals for the agreed upon price. Submit any variations in service level, quality, timeliness, friendliness, or things I may not have thought of to my vendor evaluation process.
When I love you and what you do and refer you to a friend, please accept my consumption of the 'mimic me and don't fail' service together with my 'these guys are good' service to ensure a constant fidelity with your new service endpoint based on expectations set in my instance.
Is it just a subtlety, or is there a notion where we as consumers could own our processes, could force endpoints to be met in terms of an SLA and commitment as a condition of doing business? I think we are in control of the money that gets spent and it seems to me that all too often we let inconsistent service, poor pricing practices, overt marketing attempts for upsell and cross-sell to ultimately impact our perceptions of quality but we carry on disheartened but stalwart in our willingness to compromise and let business fail at our expense. What choice do we really have? We have self selected into a business process and are now inserting coins in the slot to keep the monkey dancing.
Imagine, with me, for a minute a world inverted and built in our favour, where those who want our money, loyalty and commitment ultimately meet us on our terms.
OK, back to work...and go ahead, keep CPM for whatever you were using it for already.
Posted via web from bitpakkit
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
Tubby Toast
OTTAWA - Two random thoughts collided on the internet today causing a devastating urge to write down the following nonsense.
I have been reading this very insightful paper called "Attuning Notification to User Goals and Attention Costs" by D. Scott McCrickard and C.M. Chewar which is all about trade-offs we need to make in notification systems in order to support user access to additional information from sources secondary to their primary activity. In parallel I have been looking into indexing and mapping strategies that best resemble classification schemes, such that a developer could actually surface best practices to the UX layer as a catch-all for 'everything that is possible". Somewhere in between these two extremes for navigation and interruption is the actual paper I am working on with a few colleagues around defining all of these patterns of interaction in an attempt to create better dialogue, more utility in taxonomy and agility in the way we address interaction layers.
While on the trail of classification I came across a brilliant new post from Donna Spencer called Classification Schemes (and when to use them) http://bit.ly/cOWowu and within that she talks about best practices for classification inclusive of good old-fashioned Alphabetical indices and some great insight in terms of the opportunity to educate and inform users even within this seemingly mundane approach to experience. As any good author would, she cites a few examples and her example of a best practice in this regard is the BBC "A Whole Lot More" function which is essentially an alphabetical listing of all their sites aptly located at http://www.bbc.co.uk/a-z/. BBC provides the alphabet linked across the top nav element of that page and uses the remaining real estate to showcase Categories and enables horizontal scrolling of that category.
And here comes the collision...
On that categorical horizontal scroller I was drawn immediately to the lower right of the page (I assume I must have already adequately inspected the top left) wherein I was greeted by the familiar (I have children) waving form of the purple Teletubby, Tinky Winky. Tinky Winky, unlike the other characters featured more demurely, even sombre and moody, in their category boxes was smiling, animated, welcoming and engaging and I realized he was hogging my attention on the page. For those familiar with the Teletubby cartoon, you will know that they do things that little children like to do, such as rolling on the ground, laughing, running about, and watching real children on the televisions embedded in their stomachs. Their stomachs accept one form of substance, a waffle-like form that ejects vigorously from their readily available toaster called Tubby Toast.
And that's when it struck me. Henceforth, overexuberant notification systems that dominate attention span in an unbalanced way will always be referred to as Tubby Toast. That's it.
Thank you, Interwebz, for this unique form of conspired inspiration and the ability to share it. Hopefully you were notified of this article's existence in a usual, predictable and friendly fashion that gave you latitude to continue with your original task.
If you were looking for information on actual Tubby Toast, you can learn how to make your own here: http://www.pbs.org/parents/birthdayparties/teletubbies/food_toast.html but bear in mind you will be hard pressed to use that for any form of digital notification system.
Posted via web from bitpakkit
Monday, April 26, 2010
Y?
Who spends more time on Facebook than they do with their family?
Who has played more than 5,000 hours of games and sent more than 250,000 emails?
Wei Liu is a designer, studying interaction design in Amsterdam, and is looking for people to share experiences and ideas that relevant to his research. If you would like to share your thoughts with Wei, please input/discuss your thoughts on http://generationyinteractions.blogspot.com/ where there is already some interesting things posted. He is especially looking for your input for the following questions:
a) What are the characteristics/classifications of 'Generation Y'?
b) What are the relevant trends/opportunities in interaction design?
c) How to map these characteristics into the development of 'Generation Y' interface?
That's Y.
Posted via web from bitpakkit
Thursday, April 22, 2010
Adobe Cloud Computing - LiveCycle ES Cloud instances
Original post on: http://technoracle.blogspot.com/2009/01/adobe-cloud-computing-livecycle-es.html
In case you missed the news on January 12, Adobe is now offering Adobe LiveCycle ES Developer Express. This is Adobe's first (but not last) major foray into the world of enterprise cloud computing. The LC ES Developer Express software is a full version of Adobe LiveCycle ES that is hosted in the Amazon Web Services cloud computing environment and provides a virtual, self-contained development environment where enterprise developers can prototype, develop, and test LiveCycle applications
Feature set?
Once you get an instance up and running, it appears to be virtually running on localhost:8080. There is a small download called LiveCycle Developer Express (shown below), which then allows you to log in to the instance running in the cloud.
Once you log in, select the instance:
and hit "Connect". Once you connect, you will be able to log in by accessing the admin panel via a browser. The URL is http://localhost:8080/adminui/secured/admin.faces. Note below that I am now logged in as Admin while running it in the cloud from my Mac. What does this mean? LC ES on the Mac!!!
From here you can browse all running services on the instance:
or manage endpoints:
The service, available to all members of the Adobe Enterprise Developer Program, allows developers to bullet-proof their applications without having to invest in a development environment or test lab. I will be unveiling more on a future episode of Duane's World when we get into SOA and ESB cloud architecture.
In case you missed the news on January 12, Adobe is now offering Adobe LiveCycle ES Developer Express. This is Adobe's first (but not last) major foray into the world of enterprise cloud computing. The LC ES Developer Express software is a full version of Adobe LiveCycle ES that is hosted in the Amazon Web Services cloud computing environment and provides a virtual, self-contained development environment where enterprise developers can prototype, develop, and test LiveCycle applications
Feature set?
- Provides pre-installed, pre-configured virtual instances of LiveCycle ES.
- Reduce time required to download, install, and boot new server instances.
- Develop LC ES applications in a fraction of the time.
- Virtual instances can be used to build proof-of-concepts
The base installation provides the following LiveCycle ES server applications pre-installed:
- LiveCycle Forms ES
- LiveCycle Reader Extensions ES
- LiveCycle Rights Management ES
- LiveCycle Barcoded Forms ES
- LiveCycle Digital Certificate ES
- LiveCycle Output ES
- LiveCycle Process Management ES
- LiveCycle Content Services ES
- LiveCycle PDF Generator ES
Once you get an instance up and running, it appears to be virtually running on localhost:8080. There is a small download called LiveCycle Developer Express (shown below), which then allows you to log in to the instance running in the cloud.
Once you log in, select the instance:
and hit "Connect". Once you connect, you will be able to log in by accessing the admin panel via a browser. The URL is http://localhost:8080/adminui/secured/admin.faces. Note below that I am now logged in as Admin while running it in the cloud from my Mac. What does this mean? LC ES on the Mac!!!
From here you can browse all running services on the instance:
or manage endpoints:
The service, available to all members of the Adobe Enterprise Developer Program, allows developers to bullet-proof their applications without having to invest in a development environment or test lab. I will be unveiling more on a future episode of Duane's World when we get into SOA and ESB cloud architecture.
UPDATE: There is now a full video tutorial posted on how to work with the cloud offering here: http://technoracle.blogspot.com/2010/04/using-livecycle-es2-on-cloud.html
- Author: Duane "Chaos" Nickull (pictured) is an Adobe employee and lifelong musician, cynic, traveler, athlete, author and first class antagonist.
Sunday, April 18, 2010
Saturday, April 17, 2010
Friday, April 16, 2010
iPhone still tops for mobile ads
Recent TechCrunch post with stats from Millenial Media indicates continued "leadership" for MacOS devices in terms of mobile ad delivery. iPhone was seconded only by other Mac devices, but it was interesting to see RIM in the overall #2 spot, which seems to prove that they have broken into the consumer/end-user space quite aggressively.
Posted via web from bitpakkit
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
