Month: November 2007

  • Make Tools: My IA Konferenz Keynote Slides

    In my keynote talk at the 2007 IA Konferenz in Stuttgart, Germany this month, I argued we need to create fewer artifacts and more tools. We’re already doing this, but it’s easy to get stuck in a make-more-web/mobile-sites rut and that could lead to irrelevance.

    Here’s the slides…

    By coincidence, Joe Lamantia’s The DIY Future: What Happens When Everyone Is a Designer addressed a similar theme through a different lens soon after at the Italian IA Summit. Joe and I are friends and hang out in Brooklyn, but I can’t recall us talking about these presentations. Must be something in the air…

  • When Design Innovation Comes Down to Execution

    Matt, formerly of Nokia, counters the notion that Apple alone has the best touch user interface ideas, but also that it’s not the idea that won that race, but execution…

    In recent months we’ve seen Nokia and Sony Ericsson show demos of their touch UIs. To which the response on many tech blogs has been “It’s a copy of the iPhone”. In fact, even a Nokia executive responded that they had ‘copied with pride’.

    That last remark made me spit with anger – and I almost posted something very intemperate as a result. The work that all the teams within Nokia had put into developing touch UI got discounted, just like that, with a half-thought-through response in a press conference. I wish that huge software engineering outfits like S60 could move fast enough to ‘copy with pride’.

    Sheesh.

    Fact-of-the-matter is if you have roughly the same component pipeline, and you’re designing an interface used on-the-go by (human) fingers, you’re going to end up with a lot of the same UI principles.

    But Apple executed first, and beautifully, and they win. They own it, culturally.

  • Agile with a capital/lowercase A

    It looks like agile software development is having the same growing pains, expressed through semantics, as the design field (or the Design field). It’s the perceived misapplication of language that catches my eye…

    Jason Gorman argued that the meaning of Agile was ambiguous and was being inappropriately applied to a very wide range of approaches like Six Sigma and CMMi. He also argued that “Agile”, “evolutionary”, and “lean” (as in Lean software development) did not mean the same thing in practice, even though they are all lumped under the banner of “Agile” – possibly for marketing purposes. Gorman argued that process-oriented methods, especially methods that incrementally reduce waste and process variation like Six Sigma, have a tendency to limit an organisation’s adaptive capacity (their “slack”), making them less able to respond to discontinuous change – i.e., less agile. He also argues in later posts that “agile”, “lean” and “evolutionary” are strategies that need to be properly understood and appropriately applied to any specific context. That is, there is a time to be “agile”, a time to be “lean” and a time to be “evolutionary”.

    Fascinating, but a nuance that will be completely lost on business clients who are focused on other matters. But just as IDEO shows what they do instead of only talking about it, I think making it all tangible will be a way around the semantic mess. I’d like to see the Agile Alliance produce a “shopping-cart“-like video of an agile project.

  • Interview on the State of Information Architecture

    I’m on my way to the IA Konferenz in Stuttgart this week where I plan to talk about the future of the web design profession by learning from other technology-related professions and projecting out the current trends.

    To preface that, Jan Jursa invited me to answer five questions on his blog, for example this one on collaboration…

    Information Architects can’t simultaneously become experts in their field and in finance and accounting. The reverse is also true: people trained in business can’t also become experts in design. We need to collaborate. And to collaborate we have to know enough to understand each other, and build respect for each other. Therefore, we should become better at explaining what we do to business people — now I think we spend too much time just talking to ourselves.