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Wednesday, June 27, 2001
Here's an interesting interview with Adam Bosworth via joel. Bosworth (some ex-MS smartguy) is talking about XML-based distributed web services. One interesting statement about services architectures:
"Often when we look at the real world of how people are building Web services, the conversations are very fluid. You tell several people you want to do something and then they start sending you back messages, and the order in which they come back isn't really predictable-it's too complex-you've got to field them all and keep track of them all and understand why you're getting these messages. So, the third part of what we think is a successful Web services architecture is that it's a conversational and asynchronous model."
It's notable that this is exactly the kind of thing that interaction design/IA has been talking about for a while: that interactions between systems and users (say, Bosworth's example of ordering books from Amazon) are asynchronous and tolerate some messiness, just like conversations. So there's now design principles, business strategies, and system design principles that all revolve around supporting "conversations." Seems like some good common ground.
At Smartprice, they had a custom customer-management application used by all the customer-service folks; it basically dumped all the customer data to the rep on the phone to use. I proposed something that sounds just like what Bosworth is talking about: a UI that would manage the three-way conversation that customers, Smartprice, and telecoms had when setting up or switching services. In those conversations, there are emails, phone calls, web site activities, faxes, all the stuff you need when you're setting up some complex phone service. I tried to design in so that this three-way conversation could be dropped and picked up at any point by any person involved, and could move forward as it needed to. The solution seemed pretty straightforward to me, at least after spending a couple of days sitting there watching and our customer reps handle phone calls. User ethnography to the rescue!
Tuesday, June 12, 2001
So I'm pretty much decided that this summer is a wash, income-wise. Everyone says they're jealous of me having "free time" to do stuff, so I think I'd better do stuff. It seems like a good time to work on some of those nuts-and-bolts things like Adobe InDesign, which the more I use, the more I like as an IA/ UI prototyping tool. Seems like a good time to work more on Flash, too. I really miss using Director, but there won't be any of that in the future (until Flash catches up with it in about three versions and does all the stuff Director can do now). I also have this plan to do a really nice interaction diagram of Evite.com, which is such a nifty, well-designed service that I want to figure out how it's all put together.
Sunday, June 10, 2001
The blog finally gets the heyotwell site makeover.
Tuesday, June 05, 2001
On Friday, Tomalak's Realm posted a notice that it was to be no more and that details would appear Monday. Looks like it will be gone end of this week. Crap! No more end-of-the-Internet signs, please.
I looked at Nathan Shedroff's book "Experience Design" at the bookstore the other day. What a piece of dreck. It's basically the first few pages of any given issue of Wired along with some windy essays about vague topics that basically encompass everything in the world. One review at Amazon compares it to works by "other visionaries" like Buckminster Fuller. Is it really possible to be a "visionary" with one's first book? I see that Shedroff plans three more volumes in the series, can't wait for those...
