Archives for August 2005
It’s Difficult – So Let’s Leave the User Out of It.
For too long, login, registration and online point of sale processes have been designed either by IT business analysts who see users as UML symbols, or worse by developers who don’t want to think about users at all. More often than not, information architects get frozen out. I’ve worked on loads of sites that had ecommerce or registration processes that for some reason were deemed out of our scope for us. So we deliver a great experience up until the point the customer actually wants to engage with the site, whereupon it’s all “enter your 15 digit user name with no spaces or diacritical marks.”
SphereXP
I bumped into SphereXP yesterday, which is one of the experiments in desktop management that’s been going on for a while (well, ever since Xerox PARC I suppose). Here it is running on my machine.
Golfers
My BoingBoing feed had a story today about the Foxhills Golf Tournament’s sponsors. Being the letter-writing nutter I am, I thought I’d send in my views:
Life is What Happens…
There is a (possibly apocriphal – I’ve not checked it) John Lennon quotation: “Life is what happens when you’re making plans for other things” which is rather apt for me recently. For instance, I noticed that I’ve been blogging for more than a year now and that the anniversary (July 11th) completely passed me by. Not that this is in itself a wonderfully interesting event, but I did imagine I would be marking the date with a fantastic post on world peace, the copyfight, or at least something on site maps. But no. Instead I’m worrying about my pension.
Head-Smacker
Once in a while you get “one of those moments” on a project. This time, it was courtesy of the off-shore developers we’re working with. I’ve inherited the acceptance phase from the first iteration of an application that was specced up before I got on the project (I’m picking it up on the second iteration).
The requirements for iteration one are pretty simple, so I found it odd that while some aspects of the application were fine (the layout, menus etc.) others were just utterly wrong. It was almost as if they’d not even read the specs there were given.
Moat Construction Problem
WHY do I do it? Perhaps I’m being governed by the GIFT, but for no apparent reason this evening I posted the following to uk.d-i-y. Readers may recall my equally inexplicable posting on uk.legal a few months ago that produced a very witty set of responses far funnier than my original post. This is one is equally weak, but I hope it’ll both fish in some suckers and spark some funny replies. Lets see if it works…
