• Updated list of online games with good UX design. The folks at goodexperience update this list of games with the primary critieria being fun, easy to learn gameplay.
• How it all ends. A very smart, funny, well produced but low-tech, youtube video about understanding global warming. Interesting primarily for it’s well done wacky / teacher / presenter learning style. This took significantly more time to make than to watch. It’s just flat out good, intelligent communication of an opinion.
• Apophenia. Whenever you meet someone with misplaced faith in some crazy stock market investment strategy, instead of just calling bullshit, you can now tell them they suffer from apophenia.
• Lakota indians threaten to secede from the U.S.. Hard to tell how far this will go as the logistics here are complex no matter what the laws are, but it’s an interesting story so far.

Posted in linkfest | 2 Comments »

The folks over at Edge annually pick an interesting question and let leading scientists and notables offer short essays to answer. It’s fun and truly thought provoking reading (I hate that phrase, but it’s true here so I’ll use it).

This year the question was What are you optimistic about?, but I found the answers to the 2006 question was “What is your dangerous idea?” even more interesting. My favorite answer to that one comes from Geoffrey Miller:

This is the Great Temptation for any technological species — to shape their subjective reality to provide the cues of survival and reproductive success without the substance. Most bright alien species probably go extinct gradually, allocating more time and resources to their pleasures, and less to their children.

You can read his full answer here (scroll down), as well as the full list of answers by other folks, including Howard Gardner, Jaron Lanier, Daniel Dennett, and Freemon Dyson.

Posted in creative thinking | No Comments »

On my first trip to London in 1996, on a whim from a blurb in some guidebook, I checked out Speaker’s corner @ Hyde Park. I just could not believe the blurb: a place where anyone could stand up on a box, preach or rant to their hearts desire, and throngs of people would come to listen, all for free.

Inconceivable!

In NYC, we had a name for public speakers - crazies. We’d ignore them, or as a gang of kids, terrorize them. As adults, who has the time to stop and listen? The notion was absurd, and in my then fully charged American arrogance I figured if such a form of free speech were possible, surely I’d have seen it before in America.

So I went to see for myself - It was true and it blew me away.

1. It’s self-organized. Anyone can stand anywhere and start going.
2. People get interactive. There’s lots of yelling and heckling.
3. It’s mostly peaceful. No one is forced to speak or listen.
4. Some of the speakers are amazing. They own their crowds without microphones, podiums, powerpoint - just them and their voices.

Many speakers were political or religious, but many weren’t. Some were pros who seemed to be regulars at the corner, but many were just working people interested in debate. The experience redefined what a public speaker meant. It’s one thing to speak at a conference or in an office where there are rules of conduct, but entirely another to speak where no one has any obligation to even listen to you.

I can’t say what goes on at the corner is a good way to debate issues, but it sure is an experience and any thinking person can’t observe what goes on there without some kind of opinion.

I’ve been thinking more about speaker’s corner lately for two reasons. First I now make a living as a public speaker, but also because of the rise of informal presenting, from un-conferences, Pecha-Kucha, and 99 second or 60 second university talks.

Surprisingly youtube comes up short on capturing the experience. But here are a few to watch if you’re curious (which you should be):

• Speaker’s corner / mad world. The best video of the bunch. It takes a sad view of the corner, but it does the best job of capturing the variety of speakers, formats and confrontations.
• A debate about oil, no doubt a popular one these days. Watch the first speaker lose control to a better speaker in the crowd.
• Race, drugs and politics. An excellent speaker who has his crowd captivated, heckle-free, for nearly 10 minutes. Wow.

The question I’ll ask you is the same one I ask myself:

• Would you have the guts to speak at speaker’s corner? (I chickened out in ‘96)
• If yes, what would you speak about?

Posted in Teaching/Training, Travel | 2 Comments »

The talk I did at Lunch 2.0 a few weeks ago at the F5 office in downtown Seattle is now online. You can watch the video, or download an mp3/podcast. It’s an interactive Q&A about innovation and invention, ~45 minutes.

Fun stuff, no slides, and some good questions. One factual error: I claim Swift had the patent for the light bulb, but it’s Swan.

Posted in Innovation, Myths of Innovation, On Tour | 1 Comment »

#4 on the free review list is SimplyGoogle a utility page, exploding out many of the google options onto a single page. Since there aren’t that many user tasks here, there wasn’t much to work with. The core problem with the page is layout - it’s an endless series of command buttons running down the middle of the page.

The easy remedy is the ever handy radio button: as a rule of thumb, if you can get away with one command button instead of ten, you’re making an improvement. You get tons of real estate back, and it’s easier to scan the list of options.

Before:

After:

Posted in Design, ui review, usability | 4 Comments »

#3 on the free review list is a site for the writer Gina Black. It’s a simple site and does many of the basics well, but the home page makes some fundamental mistakes.

Issue Summary:

• Border pattern distracts from the page. Like ParkingFriend, this isn’t a poster and there’s no need to draw attention to the page. Patterns in the page gutter, unless they are sublte (e.g. grey on white), ask people’s eyes to look at them.
• The picture, and page header, is way too big. Any header item appears on every page, which means it should earn it’s keep. A big photo of Gina takes up almost half of the screen, forcing me to only get about half the page to see whatever it is I clicked on.
• Vertical text is hard to read. There’s a reason newspapers run text left to right - written language is designed for horizontal scanning, not vertical. You can get away with it now and then as it can create interesting visual patterns, but if the site is designed to promote a person I’d keep it simple.

Before, with issues flagged:

After

What else I’d do:

• Find a new picture. I just cropped the existing one to fit, but I’d find a picture that has a natural horizontal composition.

Posted in Design, ui review, usability | 2 Comments »

#5 on the free review list is a site that has a purpose that’s hard to top: Freeing slaves.

This site was tricky to work with. The visuals are strong, but way too strong. And the site is trying way too hard to grab attention that it defeats it’s own purpose. With a cause this good the site doesn’t need to do very much: just explain the situation and then tell the viewer what they should do.

Problems

• Visual overkill. Every element is asking for extra attention. It’s visual a deathmatch, and the viewer is the loser. Compare freetheslaves.net with similiarly themed site, Darfur wall. Will messages this powerful, the cause can speak for itself.
• Confused message. There are so many stories presented, but only one or two are needed. Too many choices. What am I supposed to read first? Second? What is the most important action this organization wants me to take?
• Too much navigation. There are at least 3 layers of navigation for what should be a simple experience.
• Kill the movie. First, if you need a special caption saying “Click here for volume” you’re acknowledging the movie UI is confusing. Get rid of it. We all know what slaves are, and any of the great photos you have are more powerful than video anyway. Also, the site is slow and video ain’t helpin’.

What to do?

It’s hard to work with finished pages, so I made a reverse-wireframe. It helps visualize the elmements and see how they match up with a grid. A clean design respects some kind of visual grid, meaning there are a minimal number of left edges: every left edge should line up with another left edge.

A proper wireframe for the same website, should look something like this. The exercise for the reader, or the designer, is to eliminate elements and make stronger decisions to fit this kind of design. This will force more decisions to be made (e.g. we only have room for 3 things, but had 5. Which 2 should go?) but that’s good.

The other major issue is unnecessary visual flares. These elements make the layout a battlefield, where they’re fighting for attention. By simplifying the design and respecting the wireframe, the layout is cleaner, easier to read, and simpler to understand.

Here’s one before and after example, showing how to clean the visuals.

By sliding the freedom awards into the right column, the element no longer screams “Look at me!”. Instead it’s in its respectful place in the right column. If the freedom awards are really so important, than fit them elsewhere in the grid, but don’t violate your own design by breaking the grid.

Is this more boring? Perhaps, but the goal of this site isn’t visual excitement is it? It’s (I assume) to present a serious problem and compel people to donate time or money to the cause. The design has to get out of the way. The above cleanup can be repeated in dozens of places on the homepage alone and will make a big difference.

If any folks at freetheslaves.net are reading and find this useful, I’m happy to do more work for you. Just let me know.

Posted in Design, ui review, usability | No Comments »

CMP Media runs the annual Jolt awards, the closest thing the tech sector has to the Oscars. They just announced this year’s finalists, and Myths of Innovation made the cut for books. O’Reilly’s Beautiful Code is in as well - Congrads!

You can see the full list of nominations here. Winners are announced at the SD West conference, March 2008. Anybody out there going? If I’m lucky enough to win, you can pretend to be me :)

Posted in Myths of Innovation | No Comments »

Linkfest for Friday:

• How to meet Fight club style (The first rule is…)
• The Year in photos, by Reuters
• The Top 15 tech disappointments of 2007
• America’s decrepit food factories (by Michael Pollan)

Posted in linkfest | No Comments »

The work on Making things happen (the book formerly known as the art of project management) is well underway. Months ago, I asked you to vote on what you wanted. There were many excellent suggestions, which I’ve read and am reviewing, but top votes went to a new chapter:

One remaining decision is what the new chapter will be. I’ve heard three good candidates so far.

Possible new chapters:

• How to build/grow a team
• The secrets of morale
• Learning from projects after they ship (or your iteration ends)

They’re all good fits, and I have my opinions, but I want yours. For reference, here is the full outline from the existing book (I’ll give you a dirty look if you ask for a chapter that’s already in there :)

So leave a comment and let me know: does one of the above rock for you? Or is there something else you want to see as Chapter 17?

Thanks!

Posted in Making things happen, art of project management | 14 Comments »

I’m nuts about books. I finish a book a week, and abandon many more. Looking back on the year, picking a favorite, #1 book to recommend is easy - that’s how much I enjoyed this book. It’s Over the edge of the world, by Laurence Bergreen.

The book tells the wild, nearly unbelievably difficult tale of Magellan’s expedition to circumnavigate the world. In short, everything goes wrong. Mutiny, starvation, politics, bad project management, and on it goes. There’s also what has to be one of the greatest idea pitches ever (”Yes, I will go all the way around the world, requiring several routes no one has discovered yet, and you will pay for it”). And it’s all told with the perfect balance of tight, thrilling storytelling and historic detail.

I love books like this for their power to humble: they put all of the challenges and complaints people have today in relief. Nothing any entrepreneur or middle manager faces today even approximates the risks, suffering, and significance of what these historic figures did. Finishing this book I felt inspired by the realities of what Magellan and his crew did, rather than the false, simple tale I’d learned as a kid.

It’s a great gift choice for anyone interested in innovation, how progress happens, how myths compare to realities, project management, people management of all kinds, and well told true adventure tales.

Over the edge of the world: Magellan’s Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe, by Laurence Bergreen.

Posted in Book reviews, Recommended, books | 5 Comments »

Thanks to everyone who sent in articles on geniuses in response to my how to be a genius essay. A few folks mentioned this great two part essay by Joel Achenbach of the Washington post, all about how geniuses have failed.

Here’s one of many choice quotes:

“For centuries, Shakespearean scholars have been stumped by the play. It’s so . . . awful. Mention “Titus Andronicus” to Harold Bloom, English professor at Yale and policeman of the Western canon, and he immediately says, ‘Boy, is that bad. It’s just a bloodbath. There’s not a memorable line in it.’

The Bard, bad? How’s that possible? Isn’t Shakespeare the greatest writer in the history of the English language, pulling away from the pack like Secretariat at the Belmont? How could the same guy write “King Lear” and this crappy thing?

Here’s the best explanation: Geniuses mess up too. This is a phenomenon that permeates the creative world. “

Read the rest of When genius bombs at Achenblog.

Posted in Innovation, creative thinking | 1 Comment »