Getting ready for Admin or Developer 2008? Welcome to Boston! I was out for a walk on Saturday, a nice "crisp" day - i.e. a bit cold - at the Arnold Arboretum, which is within walking distance of my house.
Here's the view of Boston from the top of Peters Hill. That building on the left is the Prudential Center, near where the conference will be held. It's probably about 5 miles as the crow flies. The glass one to the right of it is the Hancock building.
The trees are in bloom, which are spectacular. The first one is a peach tree and the second is a cherry tree.
Hope to see some of you there!
Chris
Chris Reckling | 27 April 2008 06:17:03 PM ET | Home | Comments (0) | Permanent Link
I guess Scott Adams is experimenting with his brand on dilbert.com. In this new world, why not have your audience contribute? :0 It might actually be fun. He's also added ratings to the mix, which is always fun and a good way to know what works or doesn't work.
Chris
Chris Reckling | 22 April 2008 02:04:24 PM ET | Home | Comments (0) | Permanent Link
Today I had to put together a slide to describe what Lotus Notes is for an audience who might not know what it is and probably has no experience with it. How would you do it? Remember, you have one slide to do it (kind of like the elevator pitch version).
I remember having to do this at trade shows back when we used to do those, circa 1999. After a while you figured out what to say in one sentence, but it wasn't easy. Sometimes the person would say something like, "oh, I'm looking for such and such" and you'd want to say - "it does that too!".
I have a version of my slide, but what say you?
Chris Reckling
Chris Reckling | 21 April 2008 09:01:49 PM ET | Home | Comments (11) | Permanent Link
Check out this video with helpful training for using Sametime Unyte.
A Guide to Hosting your Meetings.
Chris Reckling
Chris Reckling | 21 April 2008 08:57:16 PM ET | Home | Comments (0) | Permanent Link
The first "redwiki" was "published" today on developerWorks, part of our Info 2.0 effort. Congratulations to all the authors and project managers for a successful run at a new way to create content. There are a couple of interesting things about this process:
1. The team was completely virtual. Unlike Redbook residencies, where the authors would come on site and work feverishly for 4 weeks or so, everyone could stay home and lead their normal lives. This also meant that more authors could participate. I think the last one that I was in on there were 3 authors on site; this redwiki has 10 involved! Read their bios - the experience that these authors bring to the topic is nothing short of amazing!!
2. The team published a PDF version of the wiki at a certain point in time. That way, you can download and print out the whole thing just like could before with a Redbook. (How many people actually got a real book, anyway?)
3. The content is now available for the community to update and contribute to. Corrections can be made online in an instant. New knowledge can be added as it becomes available.
I hope you join us in making this a success story for Domino, for wikis, and for the community of developers thirsting for information.
Chris Reckling
Program Director, UX MA Design Studio, Lotus Software
Chris Reckling | 8 April 2008 10:12:40 AM ET | Westford, MA | Comments (0) | Permanent Link
Brainstream for the week...
40 years ago today Martin Luther King was assassinated at age 39. Wow! Local angle - The Night James Brown Saved Boston on VH1.
Twitter is a very interesting way to keep up with friends, colleagues, partners, and customers. You really do get to know people. Like what they had for breakfast and stuff - you don't even get that kind of info at Lotusphere!
I've seen the future of television viewing. We're finally caught up on Lost Season 3 DVDs from Christmas and needed to move on to Season 4 - what to do? Download from iTunes at $1.99/episode - easy enough....got the cable to hook to TV - works! Better? Watch for free streaming from abc.com! Got that cable too for the MBP - works great! It turns out that all the media companies are getting in on this and have figured out how to monetize the opportunity instead of ignoring it (see music industry). I'm sure they are even sniffing our ip address and targeting ads based on your location; and if they aren't, they probably should be.
Speaking of TV - just finished up In Treatment, another excellent HBO offering that we watched "on demand", since we could never seem to get it together to watch every night at 9:30 or whenever it was on. Anyway, I hope there is another season! Right up there with Six Feet Under and Sopranos. I also like Deadwood and Carnivale, but those never made it back after relatively short runs.
The RIT Innovation Lab co-ops are doing some great work. We had a review recently and after some churn, they are getting it together and are on track. Hopefully, I can talk more about the individual projects later - I'm not sure what is public and what isn't so I'll err on the safe side. My assumption is that we'll figure out a way to release some of this stuff, esp. for Symphony. We're planning and recruiting for the next round of students already.
Bruins - don't care. Red Sox - still too cold. Celtics - yes! I hope I can get playoff tix.
Logged on to the bleedyellow.com Sametime Advanced installation. Good stuff, Lotus911 - I can definitely see the usefulness of those persistent chats. As Carl said in a tweet, twitter is kind of like a persistent chat that's public. I'm thinking of ways that we can use ST Adv. in our daily work routine, like for project teams or maybe a 'secret managers chatroom' etc.
Speaking of communities, our team (with my pointy-haired encouragement) has started an internal to IBM Lotus UX Community in order to increase our effectiveness as a design team working in multiple locations. We're using Connections, of course, and also have a group blog. First post was on Simplicity. This will be a good test in a number of ways since we're just starting up the process. Everyone is busy, so it'll be one more thing to do. However, I truly believe that the benefits individually and organizationally will be worth it.
I finally gave up and we're going to see an accountant on Monday!
Our team did some excellent heuristic evaluations recently (not on Notes, another product) that were quite well done and served to rally all the stakeholders around a common set of problems to solve. We used a combination of Neilsen's heuristics and Gutwin, et al, applied to a set of tasks. Good stuff by Eileen, Sandra, and Velda in user research.
Picked up an iPod Touch for my wife. What she really wants is a PDA for her calendar and contacts, plus an iPod music player update. Now, I have to figure out how to have it synch to her Macbook Pro for calendar and contacts and get music from our other Mac desktop where all the music is. Any clues? I'm just going to try doing a manual synch somehow (or just copy to the iPod disk). Hope it works, or I'm in trouble!
That's it for tonight - enjoy the weekend and the week ahead.
Chris
Chris Reckling | 4 April 2008 10:28:32 PM ET | Home | Comments (0) | Permanent Link
I generally don't take on these topics, but this dose of reality is too much for me not to pass on. The article in the Washington Post online, Microsoft is Losing Credibility, Study Says, seems like it's picking on Microsoft, but I guess that gets the headline. Would it be better to say "IBM Beats MS in Brand Power"? Nah...although that point is buried in the article:
"Among its peers in the category of Computers, Peripherals and Computer Software, Microsoft is second to IBM in brand power, with Toshiba a close third, Gregory said. If Microsoft's downward trend continues, Toshiba could pass it in brand power next year, he said."
My point is not to bash MS, but to merely point out that despite the great marketing machine that they have, perceptions of the brand are not necessarily following. Maybe those IBM commercials where they don't show any products are actually working??
Update: I just listened to this blurb on Fox Business News where the CEO discusses the same information. He said that MS was #1 in 1996 but has been declining. Coca-Cola Company is #1 now - Note: this is not Coca-Cola Enterprises that MS made a big deal about switching to their collaboration suite. That is a different company, that handles distribution.
Corebrand (I didn't want to register to get the full report; I'm assuming that IBM ranks higher in general, not only in the Computer Software category! I'm sure one of our enterprising bloggers will let me know.)
Chris Reckling
Program Director, UX MA Design Studio, Lotus Software
Chris Reckling | 31 March 2008 09:02:54 PM ET | Home | Comments (1) | Permanent Link
As reported elsewhere, Sametime Advanced became available today. Congrats to folks on my team who worked on it - Joe (design), Carrie (visual), Michelle (admin), Michelle (usability), Lucille(project mgmt), and Kathryn(manager)! One of the interesting things about the Sametime Design team is that we are very distributed from Westford, New Hampshire, Denver, New York, and Mississippi! So, they really live this whole online collaboration thing everyday. The engineering team is equally spread out, in different places yet!
Joe put together a nice demo, that shows some of the features of ST 8, also pointed out by Adam. Maybe he'll do one for ST Adv. too. (hint, hint)
I'm definitely going to use the chat rooms feature kind of like a Twitter for inside the firewall, with our design community. Should be fun.
I'm pretty sure you can experience ST Advanced on Lotus Greenhouse now.
Chris Reckling
Program Director, UX MA Design Studio, Lotus Software
Chris Reckling | 28 March 2008 10:30:21 PM ET | Home | Comments (2) | Permanent Link
There's a new, old site available that the folks on the IBM Software Group Design Strategy team are starting to put some work into. Here's a place where we will be able to showcase some of our designers, best practices, and product results from across the company.
Another thing you can do is provide us with feedback through surveys posted there or register to be a volunteer for future usability tests and surveys.
There's some good content about design topics on the Design page, too - here's a sampling, to whet your appetite or click directly to these topics from here.
What is user experience design? The foundation Human-Computer Interaction provides for User Experience Design.
What is a user interface? A definition and explanation of the term user interface.
Interacting with computers - UI evolution
Design principles Principles that form the foundation of good design.
User rights The bill of rights for computer users, and changes that must take place in the computer industry.
The three models Models used in designing for ease of use.
Introduction - User - Designer - Implementor
Design @ IBM
Chris Reckling
Program Director, UX MA Design Studio, Lotus Software
Chris Reckling | 26 March 2008 05:33:21 PM ET | Home | Comments (0) | Permanent Link
In my web wanderings this weekend, I found a session at the recent IxDA 08 Conference that I thought was quite interesting. It's the keynote address by Alan Cooper called An Insurgency of Quality.
One of the big ideas is that he compares programmers to pre-industrial craftsman, whose primary concern is the quality of the product they are producing....think "old world craftsmanship". However, most businesses are still in a post-industrial mindset, where the goal is to decrease the cost of production while increasing the amount you can produce...think...assembly line manufacturing - good enough quality at a reasonable price. (Compare a hand-made guitar to a factory-produced one and let me know which you'd rather have.)
If you follow this logic far enough, then you really want to separate out the craft (the coding) from the designing. You want to design first, which tells you what the product will do, followed by design engineering, which tells you how it will do it. These first 2 steps are iterative and collaborative in nature. The last step is about efficiency - that's where you do the "real programming".
Link: An Insurgency of Quality (41min)
Check it out and let me know what you think. I thought it was insightful and somewhat radical.
Chris Reckling
Program Director, UX MA Design Studio, Lotus Software
Chris Reckling | 21 March 2008 09:00:00 AM ET | Westford, MA | Comments (0) | Permanent Link
