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echovar Posts

Design Thinking: Zeldman to Buxton to Gillmor

Published January 16, 2008 by cgerrish

This thread of thought bounced from Zeldman to Buxton to Gillmor.

Jeffrey Zeldman wrote a post about how Apple should hire itself out to fix the awful state of user interface in a number of devices. My immediate reaction was that there’s no reason that good UI should be unique to Apple. Jobs and Ive just start at a different point than most manufacturers. The question really comes down to where the power lies with regard to design thinking in an organization, and at what level design decisions are made (or not made). At Apple the answer is very clear.

This lead me to a lecture by Bill Buxton at Stanford’s HCI program. I wasn’t able to attend in person, but a video of Buxton’s lecture is available through iTunes University. Buxton’s lecture provides the link between industrial design and software interface design– the interface is now part of the form factor. Buxton has been hired to change the design culture of Microsoft. That’s a tall order, but I give them credit for bringing Buxton on board. His ideas about understanding the transitions between states, and the journey from sketching to prototype are very important.

Steve Gillmor chronicles the transition of software applications from the hard drive to the cache / cloud. His latest prediction is that Silverlight will become the rich internet application runtime of choice for the new MacBook Air and the iPhone. Clearly it won’t be Flash or Java. The Ajax apps are already there, but more richness is always better. If Microsoft plays it right, they could find a path into their next incarnation. MS Office may be dead, but Ray Ozzie’s Live Office is yet to be born.

The reason that no phone or computer manufacturer can compete with Apple is they don’t understand what design thinking is or why it’s important to their organization. Phones are designed by a set of pipes, the telecommunications network makes the design decisions. Computer and software interface design is still dominated by the hardware, it’s designed back to front. Until the value of design is understood, and the hardware stops designing the software, Apple will have no competition. It’s all about the ratio of features to features used. Apple leads the field by a mile.

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Air: The Difference between Broadcast and Servers

Published January 15, 2008 by cgerrish

We can connect to servers wirelessly, and that’s a kind of air. But when we broadcast over the air, it’s entirely different. When broadcasting content over the air, you don’t care how many receivers are taking in the signal. When listening with a web server, the number of requests for content matter a lot.  A good example is what happened to Twitter or many of the blogs during Steve Jobs’s MacWorld keynote. Twitter went down, and many of the blogs covering the event were slow or unreachable. It’s the finite and the infinite, a fundamental difference in the way communications channels scale.

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The Album Cover for a Digital Music Container

Published January 12, 2008 by cgerrish

Bob Dylan’s Highway 61

Trent Reznor tried something similar to RadioHead, and didn’t like the results. In an interview with CNET he suggested an ISP tax that would allow all music to be downloaded for free. I suppose this would be like the tax that citizens of the UK pay to support the BBC. The tricky part about the kind of tax that Reznor suggests is distributing the monies collected. Who gets paid and how much? Distributed based on number of downloads? By what measure?

The music industry has done something like this before with CD-R discs. If you want to, you can buy CD-R Music discs on which to burn your music. They cost a little more, and the extra bit goes to the music industry to make up for lost revenue. But the fact is, a business needs to succeed in the marketplace. The music business needs to find a model that works with the new set of music containers and accompanying artifacts. Seth Godin points the way in his post entitled: Music Lessons.

They’re stuck on the idea of selling particular kinds physical of containers for music. It’s not just the music that people like to buy, it’s the stories and ephemera around the music. The one thing I miss about vinyl is the beautifully designed large record covers and the album notes. The digital container loses all meaningful context, there’s an opportunity there.

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Lyrics by Hesse: The cool rain seeps into the flowers

Published January 11, 2008 by cgerrish

The video above is of Renee Fleming singing September, one of Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs. Last night I saw Deborah Voigt perform the songs. Some of the most beautiful and haunting music ever written. I have five different recordings of this piece of music; each performer brings something new to it. Jesse Norman’s recording introduced me to the songs. If you’re listening to the Four Last Songs, be sure to turn up the volume.

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