I’m sure by now many if not all of you have seen or at least heard of Google Wave.  For those who haven’t take a look at this video, at least the first 30 minutes.  They have been working on Google Wave for about 4 years and they have again created something that I think will be game changing for the way communication occurs on the web.  The great thing is how they got started, they took a technology, email, that was dreamed up years ago and had an accepted approach and asked an important question.  What would email be like if it was invented today?  Doing this Google challenged the accepted conventions of sending, forwarding, replying to, and storing messages.  They knew that the current approach worked they new it worked well, but they didn’t let this hold them back.  They challenged themselves to innovate, not just evolve a concept.  What they have come up with is nothing short of impressive and I for one can’t wait to get a chance to use it.

Another innovative design concept is BumpTop.  The team at BumpTop took the computer desktop as we know it and threw it out the window.  They took the approach of modeling how we work in the offline world and brought that to the computer desktop.  Now while there are still some kinks in the design it is a very unique and innovative approach that challenged the accepted norm of the desktop OS whether it be Windows, Mac, or Linux.  They believed that just tweaking the existing design wasn’t enough and took a chance.  Will BumpTop take off like I expect Google Wave to do?  Probably not, but it again shows that what we may all accept as being the norm and the way it should be may not always be the way that is best.

Sure Google has some great resources in terms of people, technology, and money.  However, I would say that this shouldn’t mean that only Google can innovate design.  I would say that we should all be looking for ways to innovate and change the game.  It’s through this approach that we make new strides and develop that wow factor.  Sure their may be failure along the way and things may not always be accepted in the end, but without attempts and failures the world would be a boring place.

So how are you innovating on projects?  What do you do to get team members to set aside the accepted norm and challenge the standard?

Twitter made the decision yesterday to remove any posts from your main timeline if they started with an @username that you weren’t personally following.  Their reasoning was that this removed some of the one-sided conversations that you may not directly be following and this would help clean up your Twitter experience.  Great for Twitter to think this, but they are absolutely wrong in my opinion.  Seeing @ replies from people I follow to people I don’t follow was basically another Twitter search option or “tweet-stalking” if you will.  Through seeing these I was introduced to many of the people that I follow and found many other contacts/friends that I wouldn’t have thought were on Twitter.  By disabling this feature, Twitter basically took that away.  Not only did they take this away, but many other services such as FriendFeed were directly impacted by how messages are shared between the services and what people could/couldn’t see.

As soon as the change was announced Twitter was lit up with #fixreplies from many disgruntled users and FriendFeed came to life with users trying to test out the change and see what and how things were impacted.  All of this happened because, in my opinion, Twitter made a few big mistakes with this change.

1) They took away a once user-configurable option and forced their plans on users.

2) The explanation of the change was covered in about two sentences that did little to explain what the change really meant.

3) They promised that “new features” would be coming to make the following/tweet-stalking of others better in the future, but didn’t have these changes ready when they decided to disable functionality.

4) They apparently collected little to nothing in terms of user opinion about this change based on the chaos that started after they implemented the change.

So what happened once the change was rolled out?  Well #fixreplies quickly became the top “trend” on Twitter and as I described previously users set out to try and determine what the impacts really were.  A couple hours after the change was announced Evan Williams made a post that based on feedback they were considering options for the @ replies.  Nice to see that Twitter used the real-time feedback their service provides, but unfortunate that they did it a little too late and upset a large number of their users.  As I write this, I’m not sure what the next steps will be for the @ replies, but I’m sure it will be interesting.

What do you think?  Did you notice the change?  Does the change impact how you use Twitter?  Do you think that Twitter should have tried to collect the feedback first or do they have a right to “innovate” and adjust as necessary based on feedback?

Again, not that I used ESPN.com on a daily basis, but I had gotten into a mode of knowing where things were on the site.  That piece to the right of the large picture used to hold headlines and top news which made getting a quick glimpse of the day’s stories extremely easy. Now when you get to the site and make your way through the animated advertisements it looks as if someone just simply forgot to build the rest of the page. They have chosen to not even replace the ads with content once they have played through, but to leave them up effectively utilizing the prime once navigated real estate for these ads.

Back a few months ago there was a lot of talk about the new ad layouts that were coming to many sites based on eye tracking studies that were done. It looks like these are now starting to filter out to the public and I’m not sure how well they will be received.  I think many people were “trained” in how they were looking at sites and what they expected therefore giving marketers a new hot-spot to put advertisements.  I must say though that I bet people’s viewing habits for sites like ESPN and others will quickly be changing based on these new layouts.  I wouldn’t be surprised if some of these sites saw significant drops in visitor numbers simply based on the new layout and the inconvenience users will have in getting to the valuable information.  This will definitely be something to watch, not only at ESPN.com but other sites that choose to follow suit.

What do you think? Do you like the new layout? Will your web site viewing and usage habits change based on these new designs?  What do you think results of eye tracking studies will show 3-6 months from now on sites with these new designs?

We hope to engage you in some lively discussions about user experience — what it is, how to do it,  and what it means to us. We’ll share our likes and dislikes about our field. We’ll answer some questions and we’ll ask more. And we hope you’ll share your ideas with us too. In the process, we hope you’ll find comaraderie, be provoked, react, be informed, be inspired and, at times, entertained.  Above all, we hope, together, we can further our field and learn from each other.  And we hope to have some fun here too!

I thought I’d start out by telling you a little about me.  (I guess I should be twittering this if it’s “me, me, me,” right?) I’ve been in the field of UX for more than 20 years.  As the Principal for our UX Practice at Perficient, I’m one of those UXers who possesses the double-edged sword of being very passionate about user-centered design (UCD) and especially about integrating it into larger IT projects.  But outside of work — and sometimes at work — I’m also very passionate about dogs, more specifically big dogs, and even more specifically, dog rescue work. (One of our consultants who’s not particularly fond of dogs told me once that I’m the only person she’s ever met who somehow can work dogs into almost any conversation.  I’ll take that as a compliment, although I’m not sure she meant it that way.) When I tell people I volunteer with Mid-America Rottweiler Rescue, they look at me as if I’m from another planet.  Animal Planet, I guess!  The picture is of Sebastian, one of my “projects,” who is a Bernese Mt. Dog/Rottweiler/Golden Retrieve mix.  Since his huge paws are one of his most endearing features, I figure somehow, at some point, I’ll work a “paws” rating scale into our blog postings. But more on that later.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how others who are not in our field perceive us and the work we do. Recently one of our senior level technical consultants approached me with a new project of his.  His mission was to find out how his business unit could get UX into a project when they can’t engage us  – translated, they can’t “sell” us to their client as part of their project team.  It just so happens at the time I was reading Bill Buxton’s April 29th, 2009 article in Business Week, On Engineering and Design: An Open Letter. (If you haven’t read it yet, it’s a great 2-page article on how “Yes, Virginia, this is, indeed, a legitimate profession.” He goes on to define four layers of design and the progressively larger investment each demands.) I felt like replying with a sentence from the article, “You’re kind of asking for a master’s degree in an email.” 

After some discussion, it turns out my colleague was asking for a list of UX techniques/methods we could train them on so they could use them in our “absence.” After discussing the pros and cons of training a business analyst to do my job vs. letting me help him “sell” us to his client, I went away thinking how in some ways our profession never changes.  My earlier days at IBM came to mind. It was the late ’80s all over again and I was teaching UCD, and before that, UI Design, to developers (because in those days the developers did much of the UI design).  We used to call it “dragging developers kicking and screaming into the 20th century.” In the 20+ years I’ve been in the field we’ve managed to flip-flop the order of our work so we’re now involved way up front instead of at the end of the development cycle, and yet we still find ourselves justifying out existence from time to time.  “We’ve come a long way, baby.”  Or have we?

These are some of the things I’ve been thinking about lately.  How about you?  What’s on your mind?

Thanks for coming to our blog. Hope to see you again soon.