James Allard at Blue C Sushi and I crossed paths 7 months ago, and ever since I’ve only had admiration for his relentless passion to innovate and provide only the best of the best to his customers – a true visionary in more than one way, and a personality…(read more)
I am preparing my session for the event that I will be delivering with Nas. I met August at the Hilton yesterday and I am looking forward to walking through his presentation with him tomorrow morning.
The panel discussion is shaping up to be very interesting indeed (if the emails floating around the panelists are anything to go by).
Che wrote… (I hope he doesn’t mind me sharing his words)…
“Let’s firstly agree that Design != Visual Design. Design is any human-led process for planning the creation of an artifact. Design is a much larger concept than Photoshoppin’.
Here’s a useful UX definition:
User Experience (abbreviated: UX) is the quality of experience a person has when interacting with a specific design. This can range from a specific artifact, such as a cup, toy or website, up to larger, integrated experiences such as a museum or an airport.
Source: www.UXnet.org
I think of what we do at Shift as UX Design – ideally it should activate all of the various facets of experience that Peter Morville identifies in his User Experience Honeycomb diagram:
http://semanticstudios.com/publications/semantics/000029.php
Memorise that diagram. Good user experiences are multi-faceted, and seek to maximize all of those facets, rather than treat them as a zero-sum game: “we had to choose between beautiful and usable”, etc.
Various practitioners tend to focus on specific facets of user experience design:
%u00b7 User research: useful, usable, valuable, desirable
%u00b7 Visual Designer: desirable, credible, valuable
%u00b7 Interaction Designer: usable, desirable, accessible
%u00b7 SEM specialist: findable, accessible
%u00b7 Information Architect: usable, findable, accessible
Put them all together, and you’ll get he best of all outcomes.
In short: Design is the process by which we craft User Experience.
Design vs Art
How can something be simultaneously so boring and so controversial?
My definition for design above would encompass art. But people find it useful to categorise creative output into an artificial polarity between “design” and “art”.
This false dichotomy typically seeks to plumb differences in intention, the relationship between creator and viewer/user, issues of commerciality, or issues of utility.
That’s why the discussion is typically so frustrating. Design and art are not different, yet if you decide to choose a point of difference, you’re spoiled for choice!
My personal take:
%u00b7 design’s focus should be extrinsic (users and clients); consequently its value can be measured against extrinsic factors.
%u00b7 art’s focus should be intrinsic; it’s true value is difficult to measure against clear metrics.
The fact that we assign dollar values to art doesn’t invalidate the second statement; it just demonstrates our perverse ability to assign a dollar value to things as intangible as human life, carbon footprints or beauty.”
We are almost sold out for Thursday’s event but since there will be potentially some no shows there is still some room to register if you get in quick.
Remember also that you can follow along online.
Also if you haven’t already you can sign up for the Expression Newsletter at http://www.expression-newsletter.com.
You have to love that sentence, in an article about IT and its challenges.
The article is titled “The Trouble With Enterprise Software”, by Cynthia Rettig, and – much in the same vein as “Does IT matter?” – it talks about the “failure” of enterprise software (ERP-like software, but not limited to), the complexity of software, the problems with data quality, the mis-alignment of business executives with IT, and the promise of SOA:
The timeline itself for this kind of transformation may just be too long to be realistically sustainable and successful. The dynamic business environments of today, where whole industries and markets can undergo radical changes in a matter of a few years and the horizon for corporate strategies has shrunk from 10 years to three to five, makes it questionable whether companies can actually maintain a focused strategy long enough to align their core business processes with IT.
The article includes very interesting data, and unfortunately it proposes no solutions. Software, in it’s “infinite” flexibility, is a complex beast to tame, and not all (most?) the promises it made materialized.
The average professional coder makes 100 to 150 errors for every 1,000 lines of code
The view that ERP software, by its size and unicity, tries to avoid the difficulties of integrating distinct [fractal-like] modules and applications, is an interesting one. But apparently, if…
75% of ERP implementations were considered failures
… that may not be the way. But Gregor Hohpe reminds us, in Enterprise Integration Patterns, that developing loosely coupled asynchronous systems (today’s fad) implies more complex development and debugging, that basically means we (IT) really have a tough problem.
[…] the way most large organizations actually process information belies that glorious vision and reveals a looking-glass world, where everything is in fact the opposite of what one might expect. Back office systems – including both software applications and the data they process – are a variegated patchwork of systems, […] installed over decades and interconnected by idiosyncratic, Byzantine and poorly documented customized processes. To manage this growing complexity, IT departments have grown substantially: As a percentage of total investment, IT rose from 2.6% to 3.5% between 1970 and 1980. By 1990 IT consumed 9%, and by 1999 a whopping 22% of total investment went to IT. Growth in IT spending has fallen off, but it is nonetheless surprising to hear that today’s IT departments spend 70% to 80% of their budgets just trying to keep existing systems running.
The Red Queen hypothesis, usually applied to Human evolution, states that
For an evolutionary system, continuing development is needed just in order to maintain its fitness relative to the systems it is co-evolving with. (from wikipedia)
I wouldn’t be surprised if these same words also applied to IT and business environments.
The Red Queen in Lewis Carrol’s “Through the Looking-Glass” says:
Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.
There’s some comfort in the following sentence, however:
If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!
According to a post in Kim Cameron’s blog,
You can now use Information Cards at Hotmail and all the other MSN/Windows Live sites.
Just go here to associate an Information Card with your existing account.
It’s the start… of the end of the road, for password-multiplication. Very welcome news, this one.
One tricky aspect of consuming a web service managed by SOA Software is that the credentials used in calling the service must be explicitly identified in the calling code. So, I came up with a solution to securely and efficiently manage many credentials using a single password stored in Enterprise Single Sign On
A web […]
Microsoft BizTalk 2006 R2 RFID is starting to gather momentum on the internet. Anush Kumar from the Microsoft team manages a great blog on the subject. His latest post mentions two other blogs that are a “must subscribe to”:
-Kalyan, also from Microsoft RFID, with sample code and in-depth coverage of the technology in BizTalk, and
-Mick […]
Better late than never, the BizTalk 2006 R2 Developer Edition is now on MSDN Subscriber downloads, currently getting ready to load it onto my new BizTalk 2006 R2 development Virtual Server Image.
Very interested in repeating some of my WCF performance test I did against the B2 release.
David Pallman from Neudesic has been blogging a set of SOA tips that most developers should consider as part of their SOA projects (via Sam Gentile ). Although the posts are titled WCF tips some of the principles are relevant to any Web Services/SOA implementation…(read more)
We occasionally have the need to generate a zero byte file, usually as a trigger file. The File Receive Adapter will “helpfully” delete any zero byte files given to it and write a warning to the event log.
The basic solution is to create a new flat-file schema with a single element node. Set the “Generate Instance Type” to “XML”, generate the instance, ctrl-click in the results to view the XML, and right-click to select “View Source”. Copy the XML as the parameter of a LoadXML method call on an XMLDocument object in an Expression shape. (You’ll probably have to escape the quotation marks for the namespace, although you could also opt to use single quotes or declare the schema without a namespace — neither of which I recommend.) In a subsequent Assign Message shape, you assign this XMLDocument as your message. You’ll also need to create a custom pipeline with a Flat-File Assembler component. Your single node schema is your document body. Now, when you send this message through the port with the custom flat-file assembler pipeline, it will output a zero byte file. This works for the file adapter and a popular third-party set of adapters.
Imagine my surprise, however, when it did not work for the built-in Microsoft FTP adapter! Worse, after the process appeared to “hang” during transmission, if left long enough, the process showed a “Completed” status! We had a delivery notification on the port and got no error. We also had logging configured for the port; no log was written. When I switched to a third-party FTP adapter, the process worked correctly. If I find out why this happened, I’ll post. If you know why, don’t be shy. I’d love to hear it.
A pretty “basic” convoy problem, but I wasn’t sure it would work. Now I am.
A business process spits out a variable number of binary files. We need to transport the batch of files together in a convoy. At the end, we need to send a trigger file. We have no interest in parsing the files and correlating on some value (promoted property). The file names are variable, so we can’t correlate on them. In short, we need to correlate on the receive location — and nothing else.
This article by Stephen W. Thomas discusses a similar scenario (batching orders), but he’s correlating on message type, meaning he’s parsing the message. My scenario uses typeless, passthru messages. Would it still work? Yes. Stephen explains why in a flowchart: if a message can join an existing convoy, it will — even if it could also start a new convoy. By correlating on the receive port, all the messages go to the same orchestration. Once the Listen shape times out, we send the trigger file, and we’re done.