BASEMENT.ORG
Posted by Richard Ziade on July 31, 2007, 03:45PMCentral Illustration Agency
The CIA looks like a great source of inspiration (or procrastination). No, not that CIA. The Central Illustration Agency.
10 Tips For A Great Photowalk
10 Tips For A Great Photowalk. What's a photowalk you ask? Well, duh! I gotta dust off the Rebel XT and do this more often.
Posted by Richard Ziade on July 27, 2007, 09:36AM26 Reasons What You Think is Right is Wrong
26 Reasons What You Think is Right is Wrong is a nice, succinct list of cognitive biases. Nothing wrong with a little self-auditing now and again.
Posted by Richard Ziade on July 26, 2007, 10:20AMHow To Sketchcast Posted
A How To Sketchcast movie has been posted sketch.basement.org. Check it out if you're interestted in sketchcasting.
Help Prevent Social Tagging Pollution
At the risk of sounding like an elitist, I've stumbled on an oddly perturbing corollary. It goes something like this:
As a social service graduates from the early-adopter/niche population to the general population, its collective content gets markedly worse.
This is best clarified by an example. Del.icio.us has been the favored method of tagging and social bookmarking for geeks for years now. Since Yahoo acquired them and especially of late delicious has become more and more popular. And rightly so. it's a great service.
But with popularity comes...how should I say this...pollution. If delicious is aspiring to become the bookmarking site for the masses, then it's well on its way to pretty much sucking. The less savvy among us will bookmark and tag things that aren't really worth sharing like:
- Entry pages to well-known sites like Forbes.com.
- Junk headlines from MSNBC and gossip sites (have you seen what the most popular searches on Google are? Who is Kim Kardashian?).
- Links to stuff people want to come back to, like the landing page for a big sale on cellulite treatment.
And so on.
I wonder if this highlights an unwritten rule of social media: the more people you add to the mix, the more polluted the pool. It makes sense. In the name of fair use and democracy, we can't rightly shun the masses from using a service as tasty as delicious.
So what do we do? How can we elevate certain assets as "better than most"? Plain-vanilla voting isn't going to work because the same population that is putting up junk is also voting on junk. Maybe we need a class system for people on the Internet. Something akin to a "credit rating."
Then again, one man's junk is another man's treasure. Maybe we just need to somehow allow the populations of certain circles to elevate and support one another. If I start to collect a lot of Nascar links, then when I ask delicious (or Flickr, or Digg) for interesting stuff, it'll provide me with results that better fit my tastes. It's specialization, except organically grown.
The junk that gets in the mix is akin to spam, yet far more subtle. Email spam is inherently impure. Social junk is less about ulterior motives and more about noise (or at least perceived noise). This is partly why certain blogs are so well regarded. They've done the cleansing for you in a sense.
Ok, I'm done with my elitist rant. So umm, who is Kim Kardashain again?
Posted by Richard Ziade on July 24, 2007, 09:18AMLet's Meet By The Whiteboard...
I'd be lying if I said that I didn't enjoy writing stuff for Basement.org. I've been doing this for a few years now and I still get a kick out of it. Nevertheless, some days do come along where I feel like I've got a pretty good idea of what I want to convey but don't want to put the time into writing the post. Eventually I would get to it, but procrastination often prevails. It takes a fair amount of time to write up, revise, edit and tweak a post before publishing it. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on where you stand), I'm not one of those quick-ramble bloggers.
So that got me thinkin'...
Can I somehow recreate the communicative power and immediacy that comes from assembling a few people and gathering around a white board? We take for granted how much we can convey effectively in such a short period of time in that type of setting. It's a different medium that lends itself well to pitching ideas or explaining complex concepts.
In the spirit of "jottin-stuff-down-while-you-talk" I'm kicking off a little experiment: sketchcasting. Sketchcasting is essentially podcasting (there's talking audio) with a whiteboard that you draw on and talk over. The sketches will be hosted on http://sketch.basement.org. Here's the first sketch:
If you're diggin' this new-fangled way of blogging/talking/scribbling, you can help spread the word by digging it on Digg (I'm not entirely clear on Digg's policy towards shameless self-promotion, but what the hey).
I'd love to hear your feedback/thoughts on this. I've got a bunch of topics cued up for sketching. This has also been put out as an Arc90 Lab experiment.
One last point, this is not meant to be, in any way, a replacement for good thoughtful writing. It's just yet another means of communication and publication that works well in some cases.
Posted by Richard Ziade on July 20, 2007, 09:32AMGoogle News Debuts A New Image View (Sorta)
The freaks at Google News have put out (in a rather stealthy manner) a really cool news photo browsing view. If you hit the regular Google News destination, along the left side nav you'll see "Image Version." Clicking on it will get something like this:
Mind you, that link seems to come and go. They seem to be toying with the new feature. You can get there directly (at least as of this post) by adding a "imv=1" URL parameter to your link (here's a direct link). It's pretty slick and works against news searches as well as the main categories.
I still very much enjoy Google News. It's a great way to dig around for perspectives from lesser-known news sources.
The Open Source Web Design Toolbox: 100 Tools, Resources, and Template Sources
You really can't go wrong with free. For all the cheap bastards out there: The Open Source Web Design Toolbox: 100 Tools, Resources, and Template Sources.
Posted by Richard Ziade on July 18, 2007, 10:36AMFlash Bumptop
Anyone remember that slick interface prototype Bumptop? It was this groovy interface where artifacts behaved like physical objects. You could stack them, fan them out. Really cool concept stuff.
Well Doug McCune, Flash/Flex developer, is in the midst of actually implementing it in Flex. It's part Papervision. Part Actionscript Physics Engine. Very frickin' cool. Here's a video of what he's got working so far:
Posted by Richard Ziade on July 16, 2007, 09:41AMThe Bloomberg Makeover
Three well-regarded design forms, IDEO, thehappycorp and Ziba Design, took a crack at redesigning the formidable (and famously overwhelming) Bloomberg terminal interface. The results are pretty diverse and interesting. From the looks of them though, none match the sheer volume of data that a single Bloomberg screen can muster.
The Wealthiest Americans Ever
Excellent NY Times Infographic : The Wealthiest Americans Ever.
Posted by Richard Ziade on July 13, 2007, 09:35AMSimple Ways To Help Your Design Suck Less
Good practical advice (more pragmatic than inspirational, but still).
Posted by Richard Ziade on July 11, 2007, 02:37PMFamous Scenes Done In Lego
Perfectly timed with today's earlier post, someone has been kind (and kooky) enough to put together famous scenes in Lego. Odd and cool.
Legos vs. Action Figures
When I was a little kid, you could easily group my toys into two distinct categories: Legos and everything else. "Everything else" including things like action figures, your occasional gun, fighter planes (I really liked planes) and a Transformer here and there. But the life span of those toys was very limited. I'd play with them, act out some imaginary storyline, and then eventually get tired of creating a world around this toy in my hand. Yeh, I'd seen Star Wars five times already so I was definitely into the characters, but how many action scenes am I supposed to re-enact? I was playing out a soap opera. And seven year-old boys aren't really into soap operas.
Legos were a whole other story. Yeh, the box they came in suggested what to assemble (fire truck or fighter plane or whatever) but I never paid much attention to that. I had my own ideas. Almost immediately, I wanted to build something - from nothing. And that single Lego piece really is nothing. It is, both figuratively and literally, a building block. At first glance, it's far less impressive than an intricately detailed action figure. Yet by having so little going on, the burden shifted to me to create something meaningful out of it. With all due respect to Han Solo, someone else already had their fun building that world. I'm just getting their leftovers.
So there's an odd irony here. Tools (and these really are "tools" that are used to achieve another end) that appear more constraining ("What am i supposed to do with this?") in fact better position us to do something creative and amazing.
In the 1970's, Steve Wozniak holed himself up in his living room with a set of chips, some circuit boards and a handful of technical manuals. With those constraints in place (due to lack of money and access to more expensive and elaborate equipment), he was left with little more than a collection of electronic parts, his own tenacity and some wild ambition.
The result? Some of the earliest innovations in personal computing came out of that living room. The constraints Wozniak was confronted with fueled his determination, and in a sense, forced him to focus on a narrower set of possibilities. Wozniak is legend today and the Apple II (the direct descendent of his work) was an enormous success.
What if Wozniak had been hired by IBM to head up their R&D group? He probably would have had all kinds of hardware, software and people at his disposal. Would he have made the same headway in the same amount of time? I highly doubt it.
Technology moves fast. Really fast. It seems as though as soon as you've mastered a scripting language or some graphics tool, the next version comes out with a whole new set of features. I personally love that its in constant motion, but it can feel overwhelming at times. I get a little bit excited and a little bit depressed all at once when I read about yet another tool or function or library that I should know about but don't. Yet at the same time, I feel like shutting down all those channels, picking a smaller set of tools (i.e. constraining myself) and going from there.
So close all those unnecessary programs. Uninstall all that extraneous stuff. Unsubscribe from all those feeds that you're not really that interested in anyway. Also, and I know this one is tough: stop upgrading. Stick with what you have and make better use of it. Faster and bigger isn't always better. In fact, it's a deceptive crutch that can hinder us in many ways.
Hmmm...I wonder if there are any Pentium II's out there for sale...
Posted by Richard Ziade on July 5, 2007, 06:31PMThe Mobile Internet For The Rest Of Us
We've all seen how beautifully the iPhone renders web pages. It really is something. But there really are two major problems with the iPhone:
- It's still too frickin' small to surf the Web on until you zoom into to a readable level. Unless you really enjoy straining your eyes, you'll find yourself reading "Printer Friendly" pages on it. The human eyes are the new printer.
- I don't own one...and neither do 99.9% of you.
Number two is really a deal-breaker here. While I doubt I'll ever find myself spending hours a day reading on my phone, I do enjoy the occasional read in bed or while waiting somewhere...and alas, I don't own an iPhone.
The kids at Arc90, in their infinite altruism, have put together a killer tool for browsing news on the Internet. It's called Rio and it's a dead simple way to read some of the most popular news sources on just about any Internet-enabled mobile phone. We've tested it on a slew of mobile phones including Blackberrys, Treos, Razrs and Windows Mobile devices, and yeh it looks pretty awesome on that iPhone thingy.
Just point your sub-par mobile phone to http://rio.arc90.com and bam a lean, mean mobile surfing machine is at your disposal. You can do one of two things here. You can either enter a news source or topic in the search box (like "lacrosse news" or "recipes") and you'll get the most popular news content for that search, all scrubbed and cleansed for your mobile reading pleasure. Alternatively, you can pick from the list of 50 or so popular news sources on the default Rio page. Once you find an article you fancy, simply click through it and it'll also be stripped down for mobile consumption.
Rio is the product of a wonderful mixture of RSS (RSS is a great way to deliver content to smaller devices - it's already stripped out the web junk), Live.com's excellent feed search (pretty much nothing out there like it) and Google's excellent little mobile web view. Rio is inspired David Winer's River of News style of news reading.
Awesome work by the Arc90 team on this one. I no longer need to pretend friends are SMS'ing me. You can learn all about Rio by visiting the Arc90 labs page.
Adobe's Opportunity
A few days ago, I outlined the different ways design can be infused into a product development process and asserted that the iPhone is the most drastic example of aligning your entire business around a sound design. Furthering the theme, Business Week has an interesting article that makes a similar assertion: CEOs Must Be Designers, Not Just Hire Them. Think Steve Jobs And iPhone.
I'm still scratching my head in amazement wondering how technology behemoths like Nokia and Samsung could let Apple, a mobile phone non-player, step into their space and in a single moment, instantly put them two years behind.
What were the management meetings like in Nokia, Motorola and Samsung last week?
Of course, this isn't just about design. It's about alignment around design. The only way to realistically make this kind of leap is to put out a reference design that seems relatively impossible...and then go figure out how you're gonna pull it off.
Diving slightly deeper, the iPhone is an incredible example of software and hardware synergy. The software team wasn't working against some pre-defined API. When that hardware got delivered to them it was custom-tailored to exactly what the design demanded. I firmly believe that this is why the product feels so revolutionary by today's standards. This is also why Macbooks and Macs feel so much more "together" than Windows-powered PC's and laptops. Apple has to work against three or four reference designs. Microsoft has to accomodate tens of thousands of distinct pieces of hardware and millions of combinations.
So how can the other guys catch up or even surpass what Apple has pulled off? Well, it's clear they need to not rely on pre-packaged tools or components that are far from revolutionary and then just piece them together. Software from vendor X and hardware component from vendor Y is not going to win in this game. Instead, they need to do what Apple did...unless someone can come up with a wickedly powerful software and hardware platform that people can build on. Something that can compete with the power and fluidity of the iPhone experience.
Enter Adobe
The big guys need help. They need a platform that can enable the next generation of mobile devices deliver a far richer experience than available today. They need a platform that can leverage the work that's already been done and knowledge that is already invested. The platform also needs to be really lightweight without compromising power. The big guys need Flash.
Adobe's strategy around Flash, Flex and AIR isn't just about widgets on your desktop (at least I hope it isn't). It's about finally decoupling from the browser and breaking out to just about anywhere. A single platform that delivers a rich user experience across platforms and devices. By abstracting away dealing with the hardware, a massive population of designers and developers can be leveraged.
PBS' Robert Cringely shares this sentiment in a write-up from a week ago:
Flash is well understood, and the development environment is highly evolved and therefore efficient. There are many experienced Flash designers, so the pool of available talent is potentially much larger. GUI design can be done by people who don't require intimately specialized knowledge of the underlying hardware. GUI elements would be portable across device models and even device categories. Think how the right-facing triangle of the "Play" button started on tape recorders, moved to VCRs, and is now on CD players, DVD players, DVRs, iPods, and any hardware or software that records or plays back content.
GUIs would evolve much more quickly and cost less to create. There could be standard interface libraries for all types of uses, and the similar GUIs would lower the learning curve for users. Talented interface designers would be in demand. User interfaces would be potentially upgradeable. More interesting, GUIs could be user-specific: the same cell phone might have a "Grandma interface" for one user, but a very different GUI for teens. And there's no reason why that should stop with cell phones.
So there does appear to be hope for the "other guys." It'll be fun to see how aggressively Adobe goes after the mobile platform market. Flash Lite is pretty good, but the Holy Grail is Flash 8 or 9 running on something really small and powerful. They're probably still going to need to partner with (or buy) someone on the hardware end. Hell, if Apple can have that kind of influence, why not Adobe?
Adobe is just now reaching the desktop beachhead with AIR and Flex. There's still a lot of headway to make there. But the desktop/mobile dichotomy is officially dead thanks to Apple. Those widgets and mini-apps that look so nice on your desktop would fit beautifully on a little screen in your pocket. Imagine visiting a web page and having the options "Drop On Your Desktop" and "Drop On Your Mobile" available. One code base, many destinations.
As for me personally, I've come to terms with the fact that just communicating with Sprint seems to renew my contract. So I just gawk at the iPhone from afar and just keep...ahem..."surfing" on my Treo.
Posted by Richard Ziade on July 2, 2007, 10:31AMDesign Leads The Way
It is a sexy little thing. The iPhone that is. It's finally out after arguably the greatest viral marketing blitz in the history of everything. Apple seems to understand human nature - a key ingredient that preceded the Web and blogging. I'm convinced there's a part of P.T. Barnum in Steve Jobs. They understand suspense, drama and some really basic things about what triggers the inner child in us.
But this post isn't about the marketing of the iPhone. It's about the iPhone being the single most drastic example of infusing design into the development of a product.
I've often yammered on about how great design can really make the difference for your product; how marking off some time for some good, solid design sessions can really elevate your product beyond the ordinary. A really successful design can almost feel like something completely new if done right.
If we roughly break it down, there are three ways to fold design into your product development process:
- Build the thing first, then design around it. This is bad. Really bad. The development group has gone ahead and picked off the key "function points" around some business requirements list. Here, design is an afterthought. Warning signs are phrases like "it's nearly done, now let's give it to the design team to make it look nicer." Design is an afterthought.
- Have some brainstorming design sessions. This approach isn't half bad. You'll often see a "representative" from development sitting in on these sessions. Here, design is sort of mushed into the development process. "Negotiations" often take place with the development team pointing out impossibilities or near impossibilities ("there's no way that's making into this timeframe."). This approach is fairly common nowadays. The value of design has finally gained some headway so you'll often have your CIO (or some equivalent) saying "hmm, we should probably have an interface designer in the mix."
- Design leads the way. This is rare. Really rare. Here, development - the construction company - doesn't make a single move until the design is created, tested, validated, and ideally, refined again. Only once presented to the development group can they give their assessment. You know you're in a design-driven shop when development is on its heels, excited to figure out the puzzles that will make this design come alive. The power dynamic is shifted compared to #2 above. The designers and product managers will make the hard call of what can or can't make it in.
Apple is in a very rare place today. They are very large, very powerful (in terms of purchasing power) company that happens to adhere to #3. Not only are they entirely design-driven, but the design will not only influence the development team down the hall, but the hardware manufacturer across the globe and one of the largest mobile phone carriers in the world. Apple believes in design as the lever, and they've now reached that place where that lever can affect a lot. The result is the iPhone, the outcome of a massive alignment of hardware, software and design. That's why it looks like an impossible device by today's standards.
The thing that other companies have struggled with in trying to catch up to Apple is their inability to dismantle the engineering-driven mindset within their organizations. Microsoft and Dell have felt the pain of somehow always feeling a step behind. Nokia and LG are now about to.
So it's yet another lesson learned from Apple. If you head a product group, put a few hours aside and take your design team out to lunch. If you're really interested in making an impact, give them the reigns and do what you can to get everyone else out of their way. The less encumbered they are, the better your product will be.