Victor – Page 40 – Noise Between Stations

Trees and Minor Amounts of Intertwingling

PeterV’s story of automated phone system vs. web (why is the phone system, which forces one to navigate a tree, easier to use?) reminded me of a story from Chris Fahey of Behavior. Chris was designing an interface for a mobile screen, I forget whether it was a PDA or a mobile phone. Of course he was forced to reduce the interface to its fundamental elements. He subsequently would keep designing for a screen that small even when working on websites, pretending he had only that much space and concentrating on the fundamentals of the interface.

I think that’s why the automated phone interface is easier, there’s no auditory ‘room’ to introduce clutter, indirectly leveraging Hick’s Law.

Whereas websites are like our homes: the clutter expands to fill the available space.

Design Patterns for Capturing Knowledge

John Thomas and his colleagues at IBM are working on a design pattern language for Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW). Of it, he emails:

My colleagues and I are working on a different but related topic: a socio-technical pattern language…we don’t expect every software developer to familiarize themselves with a couple decades of CSCW and social science literature before building a system. So, the socio-technical pattern language is meant to encapsulate what “works” in terms of social systems and help the developer build something that makes sense pragmatically and semantically as well as syntactically.

I like that he isn’t selling the pattern language as a design solution. Instead, it’s a documentation solution. Unfortunately design patterns became oversold before they could be used to design anything, and ideas like John’s get me excited about their potential again, if only for documenting knowledge well.

Mozilla

Mozilla reaches 1.0. It looks like it was four years in the making. That says something about the speed of open source development, or the project management, or the scope.

Maybe scope. I like Bill’s description: The OpenSource version of the NetScape Navigator browser. Or, a RichClient development platform.

So far I’ve tried the Windows version and I’m pretty happy. The default theme, or whatever the skin is called, resembles good ol’ Netscape 4. Pages load fast and, my biggest problem with IE/Win, it knows that when I type Google into the URL box that I want to go to www.google.com. The page up and down keys don’t work like I expect (read: like they’re supposed to), but that’s a small price to pay. It’s a good first impression.

Religion and Business

Daniel S. Brenner says, ‘Build a Mosque at Ground Zero, and a church, and a synagogue. An inter-religious center would be a testimony to America’s spiritual power.‘ Then a friend asks, ‘What if the world religions at least got together on the common ground of fair trading? Like co-operative review committees? WTO watchdogs?” In my more cynical moments I think, fat chance, most religions are too focused on the next life to give a shit about this one (IMHO I think churches could do worse than follow the Unitarian example). Ideological association between church and state should make us all nervous, but physical proximity and interaction is an interesting suggestion as it might most effect those that are pious at church on Sunday and driven by greed on Monday.

Stupid Visio Tricks

I usually abhore keyboard shortcuts, since everyone knows mousing is faster. But for zooming and moving in Visio, this rocks…

hold down Shift + Control, then:

– Left click zooms in
– Right click zooms out
– Hold right button to drag page (Adobe-style)

thanks to Brett for the tip.

A-Z Indexes

The good folks at the Montague Institute posted a collection of A-Z Indexes on the web. These can be incredibly useful in the right circumstances. What I’d like to connect to these are both a method for choosing the terms and usability guidelines for when they make sense.

Semantic Studios

hey, I made Peter Morville’s A-list. Though I don’t know why, I haven’t written about information architecture in, like, nine years.

Word, Covering Its Ass

Complexity in Business

What’s the Matter With Sun?: Newt Gingrich was talking about large information-technology companies and what they need to say to their customers. Gingrich said, ‘The line should be, The Answer to Complexity Is ( Your Company’s Name Here ).’

Half-Truths in Business

Memo To: CEOs

There is nothing clever about firing large numbers of people.

In our finance classes, we are teaching a view of the world that says that each of us is obsessively self-interested and intent on maximizing personal gain. Economic Man, we tell our students, has one goal: more. And to get more, each of us is willing to do anything…. In fact, the essence of real leadership and responsible management is the ability to judge the difference between short-term calculable gains and deeply rooted core values.

Imagine a company that puts its shareholders first – only to discover that it has alienated its customers…. Customers recognize the cynicism of a company that only sees them as dollar signs.

We used to say that corporations exist to serve society. After all, that was why they were originally granted charters — and why those charters could be revoked.

In 1999, the number of billionaires (in the U.S.) had increased to 268 — and the number of people living below the poverty line had increased to 34.5 million. A recent UN survey of the world’s wealthiest countries ranked the United States highest both in gross domestic product and in poverty rates….at the height of a decadelong economic boom, one in six American children was officially poor, and 26% of the workforce was subsisting on poverty-level wages. More than 30% of U.S. households have a net worth ( including homes and investments ) of less than $10,000.

Language

Stock Trading Language

When shares of a company plunge on the New York Stock Exchange the trader responsible for that listing must buy into the selling, in their words, she must ‘catch the falling knife.’

Internet R&D

Mr Patent: ‘There’s an endless series of problems, things that the company needs us to solve, and we go and do that.’

I wonder if any Internet companies have dedicated R&D departments for finding solutions to problems (as opposed to developing new products), or if we all keep fixing the same things repeatedly in different situations?

Another quote from that article: ‘But you know what? Universities are slow! They’re collections of individuals doing their own research. I missed working for a big organization with smart colleagues who were all in it together, working toward a single goal. But it took me a few years to figure that out.’

Lockheed Project Management

Fast Company has an interesting article on the management approach at Lockheed Martin that led to winning the U.S. Joint Strike Fighter contract. One important point is the willingness of the Pentagon to prove out the technology during the bidding process: ‘The defense department gave both Boeing and Lockheed $1.1 billion in funding to develop prototypes for the head-to-head fly off, and it set up a fire wall on the amount that each company could spend directly on the JSF.’

Another point is their approach to doing a premortem:

The team’s best hope for staying on schedule is to anticipate problems and fix them before they occur. To do that, managers from Lockheed and its partner companies, Northrop and BAE, undertook an ambitious postmortem: They compiled an exhaustive database of setbacks and lessons learned on virtually all of the world’s modern tactical-aircraft development programs. Then they did a premortem: They plotted their lessons-learned analysis on a graph that runs from 2001 to 2011. The graph enabled them to identify 10 future inflection points — dates when the risk of a setback runs high.

I’ve done postmortem’s to learn the mistakes of a project, and premortems to guess what may go wrong on a new project, but to plot the potential pitfalls over time extends the benefits of this planning process further than the initial meetings.

Community

‘No man is an island’ – Thomas Merton

Merton was a pretty interesting guy. When the time comes to learn more about monks, which we all do eventually, you could do worse then look him up. Given his faith-questioning ways and interest in Eastern philosophy, I’m surprised the Catholic church didn’t kick him out.