20 May 2007 2349H

Updates

Been pretty depressed lately, the kind of depression where you just want to lie in bed and not do anything, but, occasionally you have a good conversation with someone on a plane, like I did this evening with a remarkable young lady who comes up from Kansas City to ride horses in Gilberts, near Elgin, quite far for someone so young to do regularly, and your faith in future generations is restored.

Frankly, I love this place, this city on the plains. The people here are the nicest people evar. I just am shocked and amazed by how nice people have been here, and that’s coming from a fellow midwesterner.

I have been distracted primarily by trying to get my claws into this thing called WebSphere Commerce and am now beginning to understand the rudiments of it as it works out of the box. In the process of inventorying the process flows and ways things are done out of box, I am learning the gaps and weaknesses in the way it was designed and thereby, create value for ourselves in an engagement.

Thanks to an invite from Tim, this afternoon I installed Joost on the PC and it is a remarkable experience but only for its potential to be great. In a sense, it is a proof of concept piece designed to get buy in. We’ll look, as usual, at the usability of the interface in a future post.

I got About Face 3 by Cooper et al., and Design of Sites Second Ed, along with a slew of other UX Books, including Designing Interactions. Haven’t had time to get away to read them but, a Zen riddle in one of the profiles caught my imagination: how do you fit a mountain into a teacup? Most people will try to make the mountain smaller. But the user experience designer will ask, why do you want to fit the mountain into the teacup in the first place? And from there everything else follows.

Plus Heroes season finale is on tomorrow, and with it, all TV watching for the rest of the year until Galactica and Heroes are off hiatus.

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2 responses to "Updates"

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21 May 2007 0737H

K writes:

Every once in a while, it pays to talk the young. :-)

21 May 2007 1940H

tim writes:

I’m glad you’re enjoying Joost. Hope you feel better soon.

And now it's your turn.

Fire your weapon, soldier. Just be careful of friendly fire. NAME & EMAIL required.

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