Category: Work

The decade of user experience (redux)

I originally posted this piece on the Round Two website (the precursor to Flock) in April of last year, and it appears that I now have some corroboration from the Association for Computing Machinery. Of course I never finished the follow up post, but Andreas Pfeiffer seems to have hit the mark.

As a full time user experience architect and user advocate, it is my job to make technology more accessible, usable and more pleasurable to use. I do this work because I enjoy it and find it immensely important and fulfilling.

I know that the cultural artifacts that I produce (in the form of web interfaces) immediately affect the lives of people who touch my work. And if I don’t do my job well, they’re liable to experience frustration, annoyances or other less-than-positive feelings. Since I have utter control over whatever ends up on the screen (or output thru a screen reader), I have a duty and responsibility to make wise and measured choices so that those less-than-positive feelings never arise and instead are countered by feelings of empowerment, amusement and satisfaction.

It has occurred to me more and more over the last few months that my work is not at all unique, but a larger, more pervasive trend towards user-centered design. While there are still immense opportunities for taking improving the design of interfaces (both web and application-based), I believe that we are ushering in a decade of design innovation dedicated to improving user experience.

In my next post, I will discuss the four emerging families of user experience design and what they mean for web, application and workflow design.

I want a Tails topbar

Calvin Yu has done a great job with his Tails extension and I’d like to see something similar in Flock — but much fuller featured. How about a microformat vaccuum cleaner thingamahoogie that sucks up all the mFs it finds, indexes them with Lucene and then spits them back out in a Greasemonkey-created address book or calendar? Eh eh? Any takers?

Flock Spellbound malware issue

Killeroid has reported that the latest release of Flock is being detected as malware on Windows and Linux machines. This appears to be linked the Spellbound JAR file, which is used in our blog editor’s spell checker. We’ve all but determined that it’s a false positive and that there’s nothing to worry about.

The malware signature that Spellbound matches is actually quite generic and applies to many zip files (JAR files are just zip files), which again leads us to the conclusion that this is a false positive.

Anyway, we’ll keep you posted as we get to the root of this. Very strange indeed! 

Flock: having one of those “Genius! Ah ha!” moment

Flock%27s%20Flickr%20Browser%20TopbarSo it’s late, and I’m catching up with my life, but I have to say, something in the latest Flock release really struck as me as like… "Yes! This is what I’ve been talkin’ about baby!"

So, simply enough, I’m over on the great Paul Stamatiou’s blog, replying to a discussion going on about Flock. I’m wanting to point out to Justin Hoffman that Flock isn’t a waste of time, in fact, it’s quite necessary given that browsers haven’t changed a whole lot in 10 years.

To substantiate my claim, I remembered that Bart had showed me a screenshot he took that compared Netscape 1.0 and Firefox 1.0 and that there was barely a difference between them, in terms of the default set of buttons and interface elements. Anyway, finding that shot would lend credence to the notion that competition in this space is desperately needed.

So, where to look? Well, thinking that Bart had blogged about it, I do a Google search for "site:decrem.com netscape". Nothing matching the screenshot is produced… Stymied I wonder where the heck I saw that thing.

Flickr!

Now this time, something different happens. I bust open the Flock Flickr Browser Topbar (a mouthful fer shur) and start typing Bart’s Flickr ID — oo, autocompletion! I tab into the tag box and type netscape, then hit enter. 

Voila, there it is! I grab the link, past it into the comment and I’m done… or am I?

Well, that was 90% of the aha. That I was able to find something very specific using tags on Flickr in literally no time. 

The second part of this is what I’m doing right now: blogging about the experience. Not only was I able to find a specific image very quickly and easily using Flock, I was able to upload the screenshot you see here using the Flock Flickr Uploader — and then drag it into Flock’s blog editor to talk about. Holy genius! I don’t want to toot my own horn too much, but that’s pretty friggin’ sweet.

So if you haven’t yet, or if you’re still on Flock 0.4.10, definitely take a peek at the latest release. It’s still got a ways to go, but man, just these simple improvements to the Flickr and blogging integration are huge productivity boosters. (Now if only I could get that whitespace issue resolved I’d be blogging from Flock all day!)

A modest release; an update on the camps

Been sitting on a number of posts that I don’t know I’ll ever get out, but I need to spread these few things.

Flock 0.5.11.7+First, modest Flock update in the wild (0.5.11). Jesse’s got the details on this updated developer preview. Go get it and tell me what you think!

Andrew Fèrriere -- the host of Wine CampSpent yesterday and some of today scoping out the venue for Wine Camp with Miss Rogue (that’s Andrew Fèrriere over there — the proprietor of the Wine Camp venue: Fèrriere Vineyards). Had some revelations about how the event should happen — and started planning the thing in earnest using Backpack. Will have details later this week.

In other news, Mashup Camp is tomorrow, the first-ever trademarked decendent of Bar Camp! Oh, and not only is there a signup list for The Son of Mashup Camp already, but the “Bar Camp of Mashup Camp” — Mucho Camp — will be taking place at the birthplace of the original Bar Camp — at SocialText‘s offices. So if you didn’t make it onto the Mashup Camp list, definitely show your inclination and then drop by Mucho Camp.

What else? Well, Boxes and Arrows has a great article about the formation of Bar Camp. A great read.

Then we’ve got Bar Camp LA and Bar Camp Dehli coming up March 4-5.

Bar Camp Austin needs posters (yes, Whurley, I’ll do them!) I expect those of you heading to SXSW to make the pilgrimage to this stellar event (trust me, nothing can prepare you for what’s in store…)!

And finally, Enric needs help planning and promoting his Indie Film Camp.

Qumana 3.0 Beta out; state of the blogtoolosphere

Qumana LogoQumana has released the 3.0 beta of their blog editor, touting the following features:

  • a “blog manager” that locally stores your drafts and published posts
  • support for trackbacks and pinging
  • improved editor with valid XHTML, plus ability to view and edit code
  • a way to refresh the editor (‘New Post’) – to clear away published material and start a new post instantly
  • improved image dialogue, including preview and auto upload trigger from Drag & Drop

Looking through their Tour, there’s some remarkable similarities in their workflows to how we’ve solved similar issues in Flock (adding a blog, tagging). This suggests to me that there is some consolidation and consensus emerging in client-side blogging apps. MarsEdit 1.1 similarly added tags late last year and some other niceties.

Some things are still pretty unique to each editor… like Qumana’s Adgenta program or the DropPad feature that enables drag and drop blogging from the desktop (Ecto has something like this as well). Ecto also features email integration with the Mac Address Book to notify your friends of updated posts.

But so besides pimping Qumana’s release (hey, more choice is a good thing!), I also wanted to point out that we’re starting to see at the least the beginnings of some standard features in blogging apps, including a kludge for consistently adding tags to posts. As I use the excellent Ultimate Tag Warrior to tag my posts (when composing via the web interface), I’m hoping that tags will soon become something represented in the standard blogging APIs (I know Matt‘s already done some work on this that we’ll be taking advantage of soon). Once that happens, tools like Flock, Performancing, Ecto, MarsEdit, Qumana and so on will be able to offer native tag support and not just append that extra data to the body of the posts.

Flock seeking interaction designer…!

So I have a funny thing to post… Flock is looking for an interaction designer — which is similar to the role I’ve played so far except that it will be far more… erhm… focused! Yes yes, we’re looking for someone who can really execute on pushing pixels into place, on coming up with real world, grounded solutions, and someone who can design user flows, soup to nuts and really get inside someone else’s thoughtspace to understand the problem opportunities that Flock can solve.

Check the description for details; the first test is whether you can figure out whom to contact about the job (hint: serious applicants won’t apply in my comments!).