Author: moleitau

DUX05 (Partial) Notes: day one

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Without warranty, and certainly not a complete record – but here are raw notes from Day One of the DUX 2005 conference:

Dux day one

user steered content

coloursmart app / home depot usa

mr blandings builds his dream home
90% of all paint sales are whites/neutrals

experience model of redecorating/painting process
‘mindsets’ for personas

—-

buying loose diamonds at amazon.com
“i really don’t want to screw this up” = person’s primary thought through this task

cut/colour/clarity/carat-weight = parameters

no way to tell the size/scale

people are scared of getting ripped off, and the system shold be designed to build confidence

(screenshot of really nice ajaxy-slider app)

learn – refine – learn = loop

300% increase in sales.

——–
Avenue A/Razf

developed a social network for the designers internally
rapid turn-around of questions answered by the community via rss feeds of queries being posted.

playing on the inherent curiosity of groups about their particpants.

showcase of your own cool stuff- create identity

——
the paradox of the library
messy libraries vs neat ones…
abe crystal / chapel hill

library as a symbol vs library as working place

messy informally organised personal collections are some times more often used than more organised collections

information ecologies

——

AFTERNOON

——

fred dust / ideo

smart spaces

“it’s not technology unless you’re crawling around on the floor”

started out as a frustrated architect

talk about the difficutly of the word user

design for parlimentary syztem of finland?

empathy as a tool

we need to love our users, not just understand them.

designing for behaviours rather than target markets – psychographics not demographics

storyteller / functionalist / camper

campers are people who NEVER really move in…

design for activities / behaviours and you get more than your target

—-
rhona tannenbaum

obsessed with information + people

new products for the NYT – generated from observation of the readers

using eyetracking to establish how people read
arts and leisure section

worked on alexa for brewster kahle

visualisation of large amounts of data for alexa: the collective intelligence of the internet

working on the open library project, that launched last week

understand how others are reading the text

own project: storymixer

also working with plum.com?

—-

Friday/DUX: BBC English Regions message boards

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Friday/DUX, originally uploaded by blackbeltjones.

At DUX2005 in San Francisco.

As part of the first session on “user-steered content”, The BBC’s Jane Muirison just gave a wonderful, witty little presentation about using tagging in message boards in order for particpants to find conversations that interest them. I think the papers are going to be online.

Good stuff.

Veen Blog Meme

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Veen suggested this: What are the titles of the posts you have in your draft folder of shame?

The things where you’ve just thought of the title, but written nothing to back it up? The momentary points of self-deluded genius that in the cold light of day you thought better of?

From the last five years of rubbish, here’s just the titles of what I still have in draft:

  • 5am London
  • Who’s zooming who?
  • Short, steep and sticky
  • Tracking/emergence
  • Pop will eat itself
  • “There goes the fear”
  • (Rip, Mix,) Burn, Hollywood, Burn
  • Web services and brand
  • Which side are you on?
  • What dogs hear
  • DPH2004
  • The semiotics of CeBIT
  • Geoflow

Together now, these make now sense to me at least, as a list with a certain… resonance.

But individually?

Nah. Still nothing.

BBC News video in RSS!

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BBC News Video in RSS!!

Just found this in the BBC News site’s video player… You can now subscribe to the video via RSS.

A quick bit of copying and pasting from the little orange buttons gives this list of A/V feeds:

Just subscribed to the Sci/Tech feed to check it out, and it works nicely in Bloglines: clicking a headline pops you to an individual pagelet for the video – which is another subtle advance, IMHO.

BBC News Video in RSS!!

One thing they could do is add the duration of the clip to the headline or description so it shows up in your RSS viewer.

Very nice stuff – I imagine this will mean a few interesting ‘mashups’ and alternative interfaces might be showing up on http://backstage.bbc.co.uk in the near future. Look forward to that…

Now, if only they were Quicktimes… or PSP formatted…

Wikipedia: we really haute to know better

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Evidence is building that Nicholas Carr’s argument against peer-production of knowledge by amateurs is dead-on.

Today’s Guardian rounds up a panel of experts to score the wikipedia entries against their deep domain knowledge in their somewhat-pointedly-titled “Can you trust Wikipedia”

It’s broadly good news for the free, open and amateur with scores in the 6’s and 7’s out of 10, with one 5 for the article on ‘encyclopedias’ as judged by an ex-editor of the Encyclopedia Brittanica.

Could the harnessing of “collective intelligence” not just be the wishful thinking of venerable west-coast technohippies, but something that could help humankind out of the beginnings of what may turn out to be it’s most difficult century, a.k.a. The Grim Meathook Future?

Maybe, maybe…

Until – we get to a 0 out of 10.

It’s from Alexandra Shulman, editor of Vogue:

“Broadly speaking, it’s inaccurate and unclear. It talks about haute couture and then lists a large number of ready-to-wear designers. As a very, very broad-sweep description there are a few correct facts included, but every value judgment it makes is wrong.”

We’re so HOSED!!!

Snakes on a phone

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The new version of Python for s60 is available, and looks to have a metric shed-load of interesting new capabilities:

The new version includes support for the following new features:

* 2D Graphics, Images, and Full-screen applications
* Camera and Screenshot API
* Contacts and Calendar API
* Sound recording and playback
* Access to System info, such as IMEI number, disk space, free memory, etc.
* Rich text display (fonts, colors, styles)
* Support for Scalable UI
* Expanded key events
* Telephone dialing
* ZIP module

Version 1.2 continues to include features from the 1.0 release, such as:

* Networking support for GPRS and Bluetooth
* On-device and remote Python console
* Support for native GUI widgets
* SMS sending
* Application build tool for packaging stand-alone application installers
* Compatible with all Series 60 1st and 2nd Edition devices

Aside from being able to make nice UIs with it – now that you can make stand-alone application installers, hopefully we’ll see a lot more innovation on s60 using this.

Inaugural Mobile Monday London: November 7th…

moleitau

UPDATE
———-
If you have arrived here by searching for MoMoLondon, let me be completely clear, this is not the site of MoMoLondon!

If you are planning on going to Mobile Monday London,

  1. please do go and join the group/mailing list at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/momolondon/
  2. Visit and bookmark the nascent official site: www.mobilemonday.org.uk

  3. Make sure you PRE-REGISTER on the mailing list

———-

I’ve just been on a conference call with the group that are starting up the London ‘branch’ of the Mobile Monday events. If you’re not familiar with them, then they have been running ideas, debate and networking events about mobile technology, business and culture around the world for a few years.

The first London Mobile Monday (or, MomoLondon) will take place on the 7th November at Vodafone’s offices on the Strand in central London from 6pm. N.B. YOU WILL NEED TO PRE-REGISTER FOR SECURITY REASONS! Visit the MoMoLondon Yahoo Group for details.

The theme was tentatively set as “Connecting the physical and digital world” – with topics such as location-based services, optical code reading and some others to be agreed.

One of the messages that came out loud and clear from those participating on the planning call was that it should be idea-rich and powerpoint-light.

Yay!

Also, it was stressed that what interested most people was to move forward the thinking as a whole at the intersection of business, technology and user-experience.

One other idea that was strongly supported was trying to get academic and industry research in the mix – so that we finally can move on from the “Joe arrives in a new city and wants to find his nearest pizza” use cases…

Personally, I’d like to see the definition of the mobile discussion stretch outside of just cellular – to personal media players, connected game decks (anyone from Sony London Studio still reading??) and ubiquitous computing.

From a very selfish viewpoint, I’d like a monthly event about mobile tech, design, business and culture that I looked forward to, so, I’ve tried to mail a few folk I know who work on designing user-experience for mobile to get them roped in, and hopefully posting here, cast the net a little wider and get more user-research and design folk involved.

Here are the details of the group if you’d like to join:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/momolondon/

The main driving purpose is of course to get together those in working on mobile digital stuff to talk, drink, swap ideas and have a laugh. Please do pass this on to people you work with if they would be interested, and hopefully see you soon at one of the MoMoLondons…

Hume channels Huizinga

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Carlo Longino on Gizmodo posts an article with a title very close to my heart, The Casual Games Revolution. It features extensive quotage from Tom Hume of Future Platforms, including this ludic beauty:

“The other thing to consider is that play is a very natural thing for any mammal,” Hume says. “We all play, where it’s hopscotch, bingo, scratchcards or CounterStrike. My cats are casual gamers.”

Which has left me feline like a game of something…

Sorry.