31 Aug 2010 2259H

Prototyping with Microsoft Sketchflow

Well, bosses sprung for a copy of Expression Blend on my request — our software runs on Windows, we’re a Microsoft shop, so behooves us to find efficiencies and smooth transitions in the development lifecycle in any way possible — spent a few days last week picking it up and playing around with it. The copy of Dynamic Prototyping with Microsoft Sketchflow that I bought on my Kindle for iPhone was not so much helpful. I largely spent that time watching a bunch of very helpful videos on the Microsoft Design .toolbox and Expression website. It took a few days of wrasslin’ with the software to understand the capabilities and limitations came relatively late in the game, about day four or so.

Quickly evident, Expression is Microsoft’s answer to the Adobe creative suite juggernaut, but specifically for developing the front end layer, known as Windows Presentation Foundation, to the Microsoft .net platform that powers their desktop and the web platforms. The Expression package I got contains web, video, and vector graphics software, as well as the Sketchflow prototyping tool. Clearly the whole package is meant for driving Silverlight experiences across the web (I of course need not explain to the erudite followers of this pitiful blog what Silverlight is) and less so for desktop applications such as we design at Siemens, but still useful to a certain degree. Sketchflow comes with Expression Blend 4 and only in the Ultimate package, which is sad, because it really could be much more, like for instance if it was integrated with Visio. As I am writing this it is becoming more clear to me why Visio is being deprecated in favor of this tool, since Sketchflow generates actual code as well as UI, but I precede myself.

Sketchflow allows you to use a pre-skinned “sketch” style to plunk down user interface elements onto a workspace called the Artboard. After positioning and grouping the elements together in gestalt-y ways, you can create two types of screens with them: navigation and component screens, which can be linked together in various ways to simulate interactivity. The navigation screens are your main screens, such as one might envision using in Silverlight or laying out in Visio, and the components are parts of those screens that are used over and over again or that might have state changes and the like. You can control the different visual states of screens with built-in, pre-scripted behaviors relatively painlessly. It is rather easy to be overwhelmed by the sheer number of properties that a user can assign through the Windows Presentation Foundation to these Windows Forms, but fortunately, it is also easy to ignore the majority of these properties and focus solely on building your forms, navigation schemes, and how transitions and various visual effects might occur.

As I was saying previously, the bonus of working with Expression Blend 4 and Sketchflow, which is embedded in the Expression Blend vector graphics app, is that as you are designing in Sketchflow, you are generating XAML through the application, which allows you to create applications in Windows Presentation Foundation, so, this actually speeds up and eases the development and integration process between the UX and front end development efforts with the backend ones. Another very powerful feature of Sketchflow is that once you have your different states and layouts, it is easy to build the project and package it so it can be deployed to the web for quick remote u-testing or other feedback sessions, as there are built-in feedback tools that allow the reviewers to export their comments and visual guidance as files that can be sent back through email or the web. Also I like that you can keep building different levels of fidelity on the prototype all the way from the initial sketchy style, used to defuse potential misguided attention about the look and feel that sucks needed attention from the interaction and business logic, all the way to very polished software. As usual, it is pretty easy to do some basic things in Microsoft, but when you want to start doing some more, it starts getting more complex and you have to dig deeper into the Microsoft morass.

And that is where I left it, because I’m sure that somewhere, the business decision was made to support the development efforts of people working primarily on the web, which is where money still is being spent, as opposed to those folks who are doing desktop applications work, which is admittedly a minority these days. Sketchflow’s designers do not exactly support the desktop app designer as its very structure fundamentally assumes that most users are designing Silverlight apps to be deployed on the web or as rich media apps, so it’s disappointing at that level. Still, compared to the out-of-box experience of Adobe Flash, Sketchflow does more and more quickly. Palo Alto could take a hint from Sketchflow, except that Flash isn’t really used for developing desktop apps either.

However, as I also said previously, just the fact that there’s this possibility that you can speed along the effort towards tighter integration with backend development by passing them some working code is potentially a good thing if there is not too much rework. I remember, by the way, the days when FrontPage would generate so much bad code that as soon as we could, we abandoned it wholesale for Dreamweaver, and even then we still wrote our own code. But I leave that now to application developers, and I focus on interaction design.

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25 May 2010 0739H

Conducted international remote usability testing the other day

Rather interesting experience. Client was in Cleveland, which is only an hour time difference, but the server was in Bangalore (India!) being run by a colleague between 11:30PM and 1AM their time. Somehow we got Microsoft Live Meeting working and were able to get them to take control of the Bangalore computer, so they could execute tasks. Didn’t get visual feedback but we had a colleague in Cleveland sitting next to the “test subject.” It’s hard to feel amazing at 1AM Indian Standard Time, I suppose, but on the whole pretty darn amazing that the thing worked as well as it did.

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18 May 2010 1948H

Not to brag or nothin’, but. . .

It’s rather late but I was wondering recently what had happened to my former clients, before I went to work in-house e-commerce and then into the dark, murky world of blood plumbing and heart muscle electrical wiring. Well, apparently, back in August of last year, Tim Bay of Shay Digital reported some results from a little work we did together for the online presence of Wilton, America’s number one preferred brand in baking and cake decorating products. He writes on Shay Digital’s blog:

Quite honestly, the results surpassed our expectations - we have seen significant improvements in almost every key metric that we track, including the following:

190 percent increase in the volume of projects and recipes viewed by Wilton consumers
35 percent increase in total number of Web site visits
50 percent growth in returning visitors
20 percent improvement in product views
32 percent increase in the number of new visitors
82 percent growth in the number of searches for local Wilton Method classes
35 percent decrease in search results page abandonment
20 percent increase in estimated Web site driven revenue

These are huge numbers! Like any labor of love, it was a lot of hard work, but working together with Tim, our former client Alison, and our crew at Brulant (now Rosetta), we can now very conclusively say that investments in user experience do pay off!

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25 Mar 2010 2028H

Absolute clarity

Such a thing is very much possible and it is simultaneously a wonderful and terrible thing to behold.

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15 Feb 2010 2133H

Perhaps this is a bit mean to say, but

Look.

If all design is merely form giving, then can you really complain about the people who are working at the tail end of the design process, primarily aestheticians — alright — decorators — who are tasked with the job of making something look good, that is, what Viktor Papanek called “shroud design”, rather than actually working upstream, engineering user needs and requirements into functionality as it is experienced? Because then are they not only doing their job, but the better the form giving, the better the job they are doing.

Now, to the degree that almost anyone equipped with the tools and cognizant of the proper signals of style can mimic good design, and that the average person, viz. your client(s), knows as much about design as can be fooled by even a hapless teenager with a pirated copy of Flash and a dogeared copy of Comm Arts, if that is your value proposition, if that is all it takes for you to be beaten out by someone who can do exactly the same work for a lower price, then I say you should be beaten, and beaten repeatedly, until you find some reason for someone to actually pay you for your work.

And if that person is going to go with someone else solely on the basis of price, you know, a kind of race to the bottom, I say, a) you get what you pay for and b) that’s probably not a client that you would want, anyway.

So there.

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13 Feb 2010 1318H

The Ah Ha moment

just arrived. This morning, doggedly pursuing leads on the internet in my pursuit of my new intellectual project, the history of design in East Asia, I ran across this article by Matthew Turner, a professor at Edinburgh Napier University. In this journal he writes (forgive me for quoting wholesale here):

For some time, now, Occam’s razor has been hovering over this tenuous thread of reasoning and, having entered into Discourse’s hall of mirrors, only an investigation on the scale of a Foucault or a Said would be sufficient. Such an investigation must demonstrate that the history of design has developed into a useful buttress of values central to the First World and, to such an extent, that its retrospective application elsewhere is problematic. Of course, what these central values might be is a question open to much speculation. Supposing that the history of design embodies a number of key beliefs about First World development seems reasonable. These beliefs are in economic growth and technological development, in progress through free competition and consumer choice, in aspirations towards the comforts and sophistications of affluence, in the importance of individuality, creativity, and innovation fused with the benefits of standardization and mass production. If a demonstration that design is less a description of a process and more a representation of an ideology (conveniently depoliticized and positive, filling the vacuum left behind by science, which has lost so much of its innocence since the 1950s) could be made, a fruitless search for essences might be avoided. After all, an essence being distilled from practices as varied as engineering, design, and fashion design has never seemed likely.

Would such an investigation yield any positive result? Yes, for it would open a perspective on an immense, unexplored storehouse of knowledge about the developing world in the modern era. While enlarging the understanding of world design, valuable material for other disciplines would be provided and a much needed boost would be given to the growing confidence of designers working outside the First World.

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12 Feb 2010 1948H

Let’s just call design what it is

From my private study, from all the reading I have done and the observations I have made, I think it is now safe to declare design what I really think it is. Design as we know it today really is a western way of looking, thinking, and shaping, that flows from many very long aesthetic traditions in the west, guided by schools of thought most recently in what we call Modernism. In contrast what we call Asian design is not actually Asian at all. Asian design is actually the work of Asian people who have learned to look, think and shape in this way, much like learning how to cook French food. In the same way that there arrived this history of really good Asian cooks who are supreme French or Italian chefs, so too are there a lot of really good Asian designers who design in the western mode. The problem is that somehow in the design profession and in academia that the origins of the discipline have been masked, so that its biases, preferences, and proclivities are declared as universal when in fact they are not. There are historical conditions that shaped this, such as Japan’s reaction to foreign invasion through the various initiatives launched in the Meiji era, then how that affected Korea after Japan learned its imperialist lessons too well from the west, and the less well known but tumultuous responses to foreign incursions and the various indignities suffered by China in the late Qing period, and perhaps likewise we could look at Vietnam and Thailand as to how they reacted to colonialism by the French and on and on and on. Well, that’s my work right there.

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08 Feb 2010 2330H

World’s most helpful dialog

Thank you Borland for your extremely helpful dialog from your very reliable product, CaliberRM. And here’s our winning dialog, which I am now seeing on a regular basis:

caliberdialog

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28 Jan 2010 0022H

Another year, another Apple event

Or was it? I’ve been saying this in various places, but, I think we saw a game changer of an event today. Technologically nothing has changed. But because it addresses emerging markets and unmet user needs, the iPad will change computing as we know it, really make it part of our contemporary everyday experience, almost akin to radio and television no longer being special, but ubiquitous. We all knew, deep inside, that the netbook was really only a band-aid to people’s real needs, which really don’t require the computing power of a laptop, and yet need something more heavyweight than a cellphone or Blackberry. At the same time, they couldn’t build something that would take share away from their phone or laptop business.

We all saw how e-Readers took off this Holiday season and that it may just a matter of time, really, before book discounters could potentially go the way of the big box video rentals, like Blockbuster or Hollywood, and music stores like Tower Records and HMV. Amazon is better insulated against this because they’ve diversified their risk, but you can see it in the big boxes like Best Buy: everything is bits. Hard media is passe. Publishing rights and deals are the new currency in such an economy. I would not be surprised to see not only big time houses do well, but small independent publishing should flourish through the new Apple online bookstore, as podcasting did under iTMS. Amazon has never been able to leverage this as Apple could and hopefully will. Now Apple owns the world’s largest music, movies, and bookstore chain. I get the sense that Amazon’s happy to just sell through Apple, so long as they mind their own business. But there will be a day when Amazon will want more from their partnership, and that will be the end of that.

I have seen some snippy comments about the technology not being so special, in fact, not new technology at all, but those same people said the same things about the Nintendo Wii when it was announced. Again I would say no one is looking at emerging markets, no one is looking at the vast untapped needs out there, no one is looking at how regular, everyday people use computers, now and for the foreseeable future. But this is what divides the design thinkers from those who don’t. The best way to predict the future is to create it, and that’s what Jobs demonstrated today. Again.

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27 Jan 2010 1307H

Wait. Wasn’t that Magic Shelf?

Magic shelf?!

Magic shelf?!

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