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Tim Brown On Current Design Challenges
prostoalex writes "Tim Brown is the CEO of IDEO, design company that is quite famous for its work on designing office chairs, Palm computers, Microsoft mice, Nike shoes, etc. MIT Technology Review interviewed Tim Brown on current challenges in the design world, exciting fields for a designer to be in, current annoyances in the user interface design."
I mean, I like Tim Brown. And Jerry Rice as well. But after the severe ass-kicking that the Bucs delivered in the Super Bowl I fear it *may* be time for the Black & Silver Assholes to rebuild.
The idea that people are going to use their mobile devices to do things like watch movies is just wrong. I think this is as the reason that the Japanese i-Mode has been so successfulâ"its applications are very small.
I'll agree using a cell phone to look at movies and pictures is stupid.
However, i-Mode services took off because anyone can easily make themselves an i-Mode application and have it run. Here, I am limited to very expensive applications and only ones that have been endorsed by my digital cell provider. Meaning that I have never so much as LOOKED at any of those features. I'm not going to spend a quarter to send a instant message. I'd balk at a nickel. I'll just call - I pay a flat fee for voice, to a point. Text uses a FRACTION of that bandwidth.
The phone companies want to be in the applications business, and so long as they control the content, these services are just a bad joke. That's the secret of i-Mode.
..don't panic
Sports? You do realize where you are, correct? Click this and don't ever come back here.
I've often wondered what IDEO was.
I think that the designs implemented could be further enhanced by having the blueprints and patents available to the Open Source developer community. Their dedication and strict attention to detail would allow these corporations to tap into new markets.
We must consider what the impact on the global market that these products will have. Will they be able to reduce the inflation while increasing the gross national product? Only with a strong currency can a country have a voice.
By communication with its neighbors, any country can forge alliances and trade agreements that increase its population's well-being. Their health is one valuable asset when one wants to compete against some of the established powers.
Medical progress in turn will be accelerated by the sharing the knowledge and a strong investement in R&D. Only then can we liberate the world from all the ails and diseases.
So in summary, if the patents are made open source, we can probably find a cure for cancer.
Wearing pants should always be optional.
"Well, one big problem is feature creep. Companies feel pressured to add features, because they want to put a check mark in every check box in the product review magazines"
That seems to be true anywhere these days. Feature creep is at least as bad when it comes to software.
Intellimouse = biggest waste of my money, ever. I've blown through 3 of them, and one of the times, the woman on the phone at M$ had suggested I had a "stolen" mouse, because the Product ID wasn't authentic.
I laughed and told her I don't buy my mice from shady men on the street. Yay @ crappy story.
Well, first off, these guys only designed the original Microsoft "dove bar" mouse, none of the current designs. Other designs include the and of course the Palm V, which is looking a bit tired these days. Interestingly enough they also designed the Handspring Treo and the the Handspring Edge.
Their design philosophy makes sense, but doesn't always lead to good designs. IMHO, the Microsoft Dove Bar mouse was one of the worst designs as it had a lot of usability problems -- the buttons (esp. the big one) were notorious for sticking, and the odd differently sized left and right buttons left much to be desired.
My journal has hot
KDE, Gnome?
The other classic example is digital watches, where the cost of adding extra features is so low, that you end up with all these features through this incredibly low bandwidth interface that nobody can ever remember.
Insert Douglas Adamas joke here.
They're like IKEA, but they don't actually sell the stuff...
Why expect the network to handle this?
The OS should be able to monitor WiFi signal strength, retried packets, etc., and make the decision to switch to the mobile network automatically.
And a periodic retry of the WiFi network isn't going to cost the earth, in processing or in battery life.
oh brave new world, that has such people in it!
I have absolutely no expertise in interface design, and almost as little REAL expertise in hard-core technology, but I am a designer by profession; I'm a Landscape Architect - mostly designing neighborhoods, resorts, and other places where we live out our day to day lives.
One challenge we face in the design projects I'm involved with that I'm fairly certain translates to the kind of design Brown talks about is the "lowest common denominator" problem. We can design some public plaza space or neighborhood that is absolutely award-winning, and on the cutting edge of the design world. The problem is, we often have to (at our client's direction) water our design down to something that the average Joe can understand.
The general populace tends to be slow to accept radical changes to familiar things like the way a suburban street or a park feels. They have an expectation that has built up over several years, and things that are different (and often much, much better) seem strange, and are sometimes rejected outright. We fear change. Change is bad. The same is often true for things like community zoning boards (made up of average Joe, average Bill, and average Jane).
Its an interesting problem, and the major challenge for us is to keep our designs current and progressive without succumbing to the temptation to just arbitrarily "dumb down" our work.
anything i tell you will cloud your opinion.
I really wish someone would give these guys a pile of cash to redesign computer GUIs. I can't be the only one that is sick of the slow pace of development of computer interfaces. We really haven't progressed much since the work of Xerox Park.
What we need are some designers - who are not technies or nerds - to sit down and completely redesign the interface from scratch. Forget the "windows" metaphor, forget "icons" and clicking with the mouse - really start from first principals.
If you've ever sat down with someone who hasn't used a computer much and watch them struggle to do the simplest things, you'll understand how bad current GUIs are. The trouble is people that use computers are so used to their bad design that they fail to notice it. For example, when I press the on button, I want it to turn on. Instantly. I don't want to have to wait several minutes for it to "warm up" like the old TVs used to. And when I press the off button, I want it to turn off. Instantly. And if I press the on button again, I want to see the same stuff on the screen as when I last switched it off. And that's just the functionality of the on-off button!
It's 2003 for christsakes. Why am I still using an interface that was designed in the 1970's, when computers had a tiny fraction of the power and functionality they currently have?
I would be interested to see what this guys opinions on apple designs are, and why they are so goddam desirable.
Anyway, its clear to me that the new dynasty is the Falcons... Get used to hearing this "VICK to PRICE for the touchdown!!" as well the old standby "VICK scrambles in for the touchdown!! He is a spectacular player and he has just beat the vikings!!!" LOLOLOL
TR: What kind of people do the best design?
/. or any programming sweatshop :)
BROWN: Well, I can tell you what doesn't workâ"and that is to have a whole bunch of people who are deep in their own technical domain but have no interest in engaging with the others.
Heh, good thing you don't find many of those around
Seriously though, this is dead on. Too often UI design are developed by the same people hacking the low level stuff or the business side of an application. At the end of the project, usually 6 weeks after schedule, they have to release what they used for testing since there is no time to sit and think about usability.
Oh, I can't help quoting you because everything that you said rings true
The Redhat discs come with programs other than just "Redhat" (i.e. KDE, Gnome, Apache, Emacs, Perl, etc. - although I haven't taken a look at the actual content in a while, so one or more of these may be wrong). What does Windows XP come with? IE, minesweeper, wordpad, solitaire, some screensavers. Bah!
Number of CDs to install RedHat 9 = 3 Number of CDs to install WinXP + OfficeXP + IIS + MS Visual Studio + ..... = 15 gazillion.
Your point?
Heh. Same here. Why, just this morning I was making the turn onto Maguire, and I was thinking "what is the natural nickname for people who work at IDEO, anyway?" I don't think they'd appreciate the answer I came up with.
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
IDEOlogues - I'm sure that's what you had in mind, wasn't it?
Or was it IDEOsyncratics?
I have to say though, that Nike's use of sweatshops to produce their merchandise is troubling. Hopefully INDEO as an ethical corporation will take a stand against this shameful labor policy and adopt democratic production methods. A good, book on this written by an objective journalist (not an extremist hippy protester) you can take a look at here.
Keep up the good work!
Good lord, I'm glad you clarified who Tim Brown was, otherwise I would have thought he was an aging wide reciever for the Oakland Raiders.
Double plus good that that name wasn't attached to an article about black holes, then.
Disclaimer: If you don't watch football, you won't find this funny and shouldn't waste your mod points. You might not even find it funny if you do watch football because, well, I'm half-awake right now and can't be a good judge of what's funny.
blog |
We can design some public plaza space or neighborhood that is absolutely award-winning, and on the cutting edge of the design world. The problem is, we often have to (at our client's direction) water our design down to something that the average Joe can understand.
What is there to not 'understand' about a public plaza, even for an 'average Joe'? Or, do you just mean that most people dislike your designs?
My favorite example of this is a Nortel ad that was running frequently last year. It had a guy who was going to be speaking at some big meeting, but forget his speech at the office. He used his mobile videophone to have his office assistant read it to him quietly, and he repeated it to the unknowing audience, with the phone sitting hidden on the lectern.
Now, what use is the live video in this case? I can get the same functionality today with my plain-old 2G phone (no video, of course). If you just need to repeat what someone is telling you over the phone, you sure don't need the live video. If this gee-whiz, look-how-cool-the-future-is example, unconstrained by reality, is the best 3G can do, isn't it in a whole heap of trouble?
He talks a lot about usability, which is fine.
Here in the UK we are presently involved in implementing the Disability Discrimination Act, which is about Accessibility. How do you design for this?
IDEOts?
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
Off Topic: :). Does anybody here work in this industry? What kind of experience should I be building if I want to be involved in things like this?
I've been interested in getting into the interface design/industrial design industry from the technical side for a while now. I have a background in Electrical Engineering with both hardware and software desgin experience so I may actually be useful at a company like this
Just went for a browse on the Ideo website, to get a clue who he is. They did the Sega Saturn pad! Big kudos to them, its a thing of beauty. Their steering wheel designs for Logitech are darned comfy too.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
In this article, we have Tim Brown. We had a Bill Romanowski post here. A Ben Coates used to post here frequently.
On the down side, A John Booty used to post here often. John Booty was one of Rich Kotite's defensive backs with the Eagles & Jets.
As an aside, I must really be getting old. When I saw the name "Tim Brown", I thought of the former Eagle, not the Raider.
Actually, 3. Windows XP (1), Office (1), VS.Net (1 DVD).
And gazillion is a word not frequently used in technical terms by grown-ups.
We really haven't progressed much since the work of Xerox Park.
If you are going to try to use a historical reference, at least get it right: it was the Xerox PARC, as in Palo Alto Research Center.
(I know, it's off-topic, but I find it annoying when people try to make references like this to show their old-school-itude. These are the same ones that use "CARRIER LOST" to show their 1337 BBS skillz. Bah.)
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
All the adverts I've seen for 3G devices revolve around gimmics. Ooo look you can watch some video, you can phone your mates and have a laugh showing them things.
Currently 3G is an executive toy and needs a decent application. There are some instances where video calls could be very useful, doctors, police etc. but for the masses there has to be something that makes it worthwhile. Many people are happy with text messaging and instant messaging when online.
> TR: How does technology influence design?...
TR: What's wrong with product design nowadays?
How can we get design to have more of an influence on developing technologies?
Rather than the inverse as they ask it. Of course that's easy to ask, HARD to answer.
Operator, give me the number for 911!
It's actually.... 3. One for each product. (Well, okay. Newest version of VS is more than 1 CD, but you can use just 1 if you don't want to install the MSDN collection)
Background here and demo here.
As an Industrial Designer specializing in User Interface for the integration of the virtual and the physical, the two bigest problems I come up against is first convincing the manufacturer of the value of Interface design, which is getting easier I am happy to say, and secondly convincing them that a product that is a 'Swiss Army Knife' is perhaps not such a great idea. It is much better to have a product which does one thing well rather than a product that does a million things half assed.
We constantly see this in applications and new technology where the engeneers come up with all this facinating stuff and try to cram it into a device hoping customers will overlook the lack of need and only see the prettyness.
As product designers we are at a cross roads where we are only now starting to understand which services and abilities people want grouped together in a single appliance. This is not limited strictly to produts. We are seeing it in services as well. Things like digital television, cell phone service plans as well as in cell phones and PDAs.
Cell phones are great with a camera built in, perhaps even the ability to take a 5 second video, but there is realy no need for a cell phone which is a video camera, no matter how cool it may be to own one. Video cameras do a much better job of capturing video. In the same way you would not want a video camera which had cell phone capabilities... well perhaps you would, but unless your part of a profitably large enough group of consumers, you probably won't get it.
flinging poop since 1969
I think your wrong.
Does a car need to understand plain spoken words to get us where we want.
Perhaps the interface and marketing need to be redesigned to show computers as something that require a little effort, they are not like a genie in a lamp.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
I don't think ergonomics is holding us back.
I do like the other idea, that a cancer in society is preventing a cure for cancer in our bodies.
That is divine irony.
God spoke to me
Not going to happen. That is like asking Alexander Graham Bell to design a cell-phone. You have to go in with knowledge about the function of a product. If not you either get something that looks great but doesn't do anything, or a single-purpose device. Computers are neither of those.
If you've ever sat down with someone who hasn't used a computer much and watch them struggle to do the simplest things, you'll understand how bad current GUIs are. The trouble is people that use computers are so used to their bad design that they fail to notice it.
I have, and it is frustrating for everyone. But is it the design that is wrong, or the person? My mom didn't know anything much about computers until a year or two ago. She still struggles with the interface. My 8 year old neice picked it up very quickly. Don't blame the interface when the problem might be in the mind of the user. After all, in another generation there won't be anyone alive who remembers when there weren't computers.
For example, when I press the on button, I want it to turn on. Instantly. I don't want to have to wait several minutes for it to "warm up" like the old TVs used to. And when I press the off button, I want it to turn off. Instantly. And if I press the on button again, I want to see the same stuff on the screen as when I last switched it off. And that's just the functionality of the on-off button!
This is functionality, not design. Yeah, this would be a nice thing, but it has nothing to do with the interface design. You have to wait for the hardware behind the curtain to catch up to this idea. So you want a big, embedded computer. We'll probably get there some day, but it has nothing to do with UI design.
It's 2003 for christsakes. Why am I still using an interface that was designed in the 1970's, when computers had a tiny fraction of the power and functionality they currently have?
Umm, because the interface doesn't rely on the power and functionality of the device? So which is it? You want a super-powerful, multi-function computer that is instant-on that everyone intuitively knows how to operate? Gee, anything else? Maybe we could fit them on the head of a pin too. How about infinite storage?
I am all for forward thinking, but let's put a little more emphasis on the thinking part.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
It took "...11 studies by 27 scientists at four universities..." to design --Tah-Dah!-- a chair.
Clap, clap.
I still own a working TrackMan trackball mouse from roughly 1993, and my present most-used mouse is a Logitech MX300. No problems here. I've heard even linux zealots talking about how their "MS Mouse works fine". Nevermind the fact that they're low-resolution, bulky, and prone to having problems with gathering dirt on the pads that actually touch the desk (I'm talking primarily from my experience at my last job, where every mouse was an optical intellimouse explorer except the Logitech I found at the desk of someone who had left the company and put on my own computer). It's a shame they're so common, because they really are poor mice.
I think the biggest problem is that people assume that just because it's optical it must be good.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
Ok, there's no doubt this guy knows what he's talking about, and TiVo's great :), but some of what he says seems to contradict itself.
First he says we want actions on PDAs to be quick:
That tells you a lot about the kinds of interactions that people want to have with mobile devices. They want to be quick. They want to be able to do something thatâ(TM)s just sort of chunked up into small things.
And then:
His belief in simplicity was what got Palm edited down to four buttons, and that was ultimately responsible, I think, for its success. Itâ(TM)s not that you canâ(TM)t do a thousand different things with your Palm Pilotâ"itâ(TM)s just that those thousand different things arenâ(TM)t right at the top level.
Now, I like the Palm, but his description of it makes it sound like it's a multistep process to get anywhere, which isn't quite "quick" to me.
He says e-mail is not displayed in a way that's easily manageable. I agree; my inbox is a mess. However, he says they should be more like blogs "because weâ(TM)re quite good at sequencing." Scuse? Is not e-mail organized by date?
I dunno.. I think e-mail might be better integrated with the calendar (sorted by due date, or as a floating item) than with the blog.
I could just be ranting, though...
I know you were joking, but I want my Karma, so I'm going to reiterate your post in a serious tone.
crawl back under your bridge, wanker.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
Linux supports both standby and hibernation modes although it needs some hardware and bios support. It has certainly saved my life during a battery failure a few times.
The problem is with standby/hibernation modes is that apart from a hardware reset, everything stays the same, especially programs with memory leaks.
See my journal, I write things there
The current state of the art system GUIs are a lot worse in that respect, because they are a lot more abstract : the file managers of XP and OSX for example are based on the "browser" concept, that is not spacial at all. It's more efficient for most, but probably more difficult for beginners.
Sorry - just had to do it.
oh brave new world, that has such people in it!
I thought his most interesting comment was about the uses of Instant Messaging and Email. I myself find that a large majority of my email ends up being these long "conversations", which are basically layers upon layers of "original messages:" at the bottom. I'm intrigued by the idea that would could somehow make email more like IM in that the conversation is only stored once, and not every time anyone responds to it.
thank GOD that slashdot isn't a live webcam system...
Why is that? How do you know that I'm not a luscious blonde with big boobs that would make you cream your pants with just one look? That's the beauty of the naked post. It leaves room for the imagination to take over and let the poster be anything you want.
Sexy27-I'm a japanese school girl
JDogg-I'm a rhinocerous (Or at least hung like one)
Sexy27-Oooh!! OK. I run my fingers through your hair.
JDogg-I stomp my feet to signal that you are in my breeding territory
Sexy27-Teehee! I unbutton your shirts and stroek your chest.
JDogg-Rhinocerouses don't wear shirts
Sexy27-Silly! You're not really a rhinocerous. Be serious!
JDogg-There's nothing more serious than a rhino charging your ass!
Ideas Duly Excreted Outwards.
There's something about e-mail that demands a reply, demands a response. But when youâ(TM)re getting thousands of these things, it becomes an impossibility to respond to everything. So weâ(TM)ve got to shift the etiquette, and maybe make e-mail more like publishing: that is, you send something out and you might get one percent response. I think that the paradigm of e-mail as letters, as objects, is inappropriate. I'm waiting for a shift to the timeline, rather than the object, as the organizing principle. If you think about a blog for instance, thatâ(TM)s a timeline. And itâ(TM)s a really good way of organizing huge amounts of information, because weâ(TM)re quite good at sequencing.
I find this entirely true. So much of my day-to-day communication with my friends has changed from email to journal. Rather than mailing each other with "I've been doing X this morning, what have you been up to?", we've moved to making journal entries (and commenting on each other's entries). There's no spam, you don't feel bad about emailing your minutiae around the internet and you can read them from anywhere.
Obviously they don't do everything email does, but there are definitely places where they're very useful.
My Journal
Er, what? Blogs are related to IM?
It's like this guy is just saying words without first discriminating for meaning.
Either that or I'm missing out on something really important here.
Although originally designed for mobile web surfing, WAP is now used a lot by content vendors as delivery mechanism for pictures, ringtones and java games. Even Nokia does it with their Club Nokia WAP site and its insert-coin download stations. The reason is simple. The users pay for the WAP pull, and all the vendor has to pay for is a simple OTA bookmark or something similiar. So WAP is far from dead, and has found its usefulness in areas that it wasn't designed for. Just like what the WWW is.
www.rexguo.com - Technologist + Designer
"But imagine keeping e-mail a bit more like a blog. Then suddenly, youâ(TM)ve got instant messaging qualities and e-mail qualities happening at the same time."
That is the exact reason I use a threaded view in Evolution. WhatÂs more, I canÂt do without the virutal folders wich allow me to filter what I see on a daily basis. The times when I saw my "real" inbox are definetly over. Many other mailclients (Sylpheed for example) provide a similar approach to organizing mails. The way most people use their mailclients IÂm not surprised they canÂt handle the traffic anymore. But: the features are there, people just have to start using it.
cu,
Lispy
as a designer, i find your analysis on target. nobody wants to pay for thinking about the problem, it's requirements (both client and user), and the path to a finished solution (planning the process). ideo is fortunate enough to be able to dictate to a point, but smaller offices have to sell every line item. additionally, too many designers think of themselves as artists as opposed to engineers, something more than a few historic figures have thought of themselves as. engineers have to consider the entire picture. creativity is part of the process, not the whole process. That said, many managers and customers have no clue about what is an effective design or design process. when i hear somebody bitching about "design," i attribute about 50% too cluueless designers, and 50% to clueless customers and end users.
David Gerlernter also has some ideas about changing the UI based on timelines and visual representation.
As far as your wish about things staying open between powerdown and booting again - I'm not sure whether or not Apple's new user switching persists during shut down, but I think it may (have to go back and read up).
Finally, if you're looking for way-new interfaces, nooface blogs new and upcoming UI projects.
"Well, I can tell you what doesn't workâ"and that is to have a whole bunch of people who are deep in their own technical domain but have no interest in engaging with the others. Then you end up with this "siloing" effect, but itâ(TM)s the joins between different disciplines where all the difficult stuff happens."
very simply, take your pile of cash, organize some osf foundation seminars on user interfac design, both experimental, and practical, and educate those closest to the technology. bottom up! not, top down. for everything that parc produced, much of it was never accepted or produced. open source needs a more interdisciplinary approach to interface design. somebody commented on a thread in the osx discussion, that apple has been great about incorporating open source technology with great user interface thinking (ymmv). they asked, why gnome or others could not do that. this is the reason why.
From the article:
Weâ(TM)re quite good at remembering when things happen./i>
I would argue rather strongly that in fact that is utterly wrong. In the short term we might be, but over time we loose more and more track of when exactly something happened, even order at times!!
And like someone else pointed out, email is already sorted by date. That doesn't make it any easier to find stuff older than a week. Then I have to sort by sender and start looking backward.
I think the final solution might be something that sorts information by contextual relevance. But How that works I am not sure (something beyond a regex search, anyway).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Sureâ"it's the whole horseless carriage scenario. Early cars looked like carriages, early TVs looked like radios. Every time somebody brings you something thatâ(TM)s new, it looks like the old thing. Itâ(TM)s only the second or third generation before it finally starts to look like the new thing.
This is a great point. Why do cell phones look like regular phones? They don't have to. Look at the handspring Treo- it tries to look like a PDA and a cell phone at the same time, and it winds up looking pretty clumsy. My contrast, the new Tungsten W just looks like a PDA, even though it's also a phone. This is a bit smarter of a design, because there is no need for it to look like a phone in order for it to have the function of one. The down side being, you can't just put it up to your ear, like the Treo.
I'm predicting that this is the way that more devices will go. When Bluetooth becomes more of a player, we will just slap on a mini headset to make a call and use a PDA to make the call... and that PDA will LOOK like a PDA and not a phone, because what's the point in having it look like a phone? With a little luck, the idea of a headset will change, too.
On the whole this was more sensible than what I've come to expect from "design", but this guy needs to listen to himself and go talk with the technologists a bit more. For example, we've already got that automagical thingy to switch between WiFi, and cell data: it's called routing, dude. Plug all your media in at once, assign sensible link costs to each, and the routing engine will figure out that WiFi is the best route to everywhere when it's in range and fall back to cell when WiFi stops working because you left the building.
Oh, and some physicists, too. I'm a bit alarmed at this talk of accelerating a curve, since a curve has no position and thus makes no sense w.r.t. acceleration. (Hint: what's the second derivative of a null sentence?) I suppose he means something about society's progress along a path, but then I can pick statistical nits since "society" is not a dimensionless object. Better invite a mathematician as well.
I'm a RedHat fan, and not a fan of WMP, but at least XP comes with a usable video player. I've heard more people complain about (the lack of) video on a Linux desktop than almost any other issue.
That office chair has 30 approved and 6 pending patents. It's a chair for *#@!'s sake. I can't even think of why an office chair would have more than thirty different parts.
Continuing to come up with ideas that make Steve Jobs and friends "shit their pants" ...
(Score:-1, Wrong)
So, after he's done, and your email no longer works as email, you'll be able to use something called imail (internet mail), which will be what we used to call email.
This is just change for the sake of change.
Maybe we should point him to dictionary.com so he can make up his mind what design is?Their web page might be titled "Master of Design" but I think they left out the letters "b, a, t, o, and r"
Yeah, I know somebody's going to mod this as a flame or a troll, but this guy's supposed to be influencing design, and he comes across as Faith Popcorn.
"Heh, good thing you don't find many of those around /. or any programming sweatshop :)
Seriously though, this is dead on. Too often UI design are developed by the same people hacking the low level stuff or the business side of an application. "
OK Mr Insightful. Now why is that the way it is? Answer: because the boss is a cheap SOB who doesn't want to hire someone who can do UI design. I'm certain the hackers would like it if someone took that load off of their shoulders, so they could get back to what they love doing, and not have to listen to smart-aleck comments about how ill-suited they are to the task.
correct - that is the preferred version here in Palo Alto.... ;)
'This writing business. Pencils and what-not. Over-rated if you ask me. Silly stuff. Nothing in it' - Eeyore
My digital watch is actually quite simple. It only shows hexegrams, judgements of king wen, and any time past 6:31 PM is a Suffusion Of Yellow.
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
"Masturbator" would still be spelled incorrectly.
Troll. :)
:-)
technology does not differentiate PCs these days. OMG, don't tell that to a Mac user. Or people running Linux. Or *BSD. Or AIX. Or those with multihead displays. Or touch screens. Or voice recognition. Or high-speed connections. Mind you, if he thinks technology doesn't differentiate PCs, maybe I can sell him an old 286 at today's prices
Let me repeat what he said: "Technology does not differentiate PCs THESE days." So the fact that NO pcs that are sold new come with a 286 cpu makes your point moot. Your comment about Mac users is completely wrong too. If anything, Mac users prove his point precisely. I'd say a good number of Mac users by Macs out of the "sexy" quality of their machines versus the technology architecture of their machines.
On this point he was basically saying that you could by a PC with an intel chip, amd chip that are of similar speeds and it would not matter much to you. The same can be said of equal powered graphics cards by nvidia, ati etc etc. There is little differentiation amongst PCs when it comes to technology.
design is a funnel-shaped thing design is a holistic way of thinking Maybe we should point him to dictionary.com so he can make up his mind what design is?
He was saying that the design process was funnel-shaped. He pointed out the Palm as an example where it's capable to doing a thousand things but the physical interface to the user comes down to four main buttons.
He referred to design as being holistic in reference to intersecting disciplines that are requirements of design (in his example he said that a software engineer would have to have some interested in the hardware because those two disciplines would interact in a product). That makes complete sense.
I recommend you read the article closer next time.
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." - Martin Luther King, Jr.
Ideo may design a lot of things well, but they have made some mistakes.
They designed the US version of Sega's Saturn controller, which many gamers considered inferior to the Japanese version. The US verison had the same features as the Japanese version but a clunkier layout and more internal parts. Sega eventually dropped the US version and sold the Japanese version everywhere. Plus, Saturn was one of few consoles to put more than four buttons under the right thumb, but that was probably Sega's decision, not Ideo's.
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Saying that hardware doesn't differentiate PCs today is bullshit. Some video cards sell for more than a low-end pc, and are used for specific purposes (video editing, gaming, etc). Others come w. different storage options (raid-5 for example) suited to their purposes. Then there's the whole intel vs mac thing. And pdas. And tablets. And laptops/palmtops. These are all personal computers, but the hardware is significantly different. They don't resemble the average user's conception of a "personal computer", but that's what they are - computers that are designed to be personal.
- Saying that the design process is "funnel-shaped" is obfuscation, not clarification. It's also incorrect. The design process is more properly represented by a loop - design, cut/code, test, evaluate - repeat ad nausium. That's why it's called the design cycle.
- Saying that design is holistic because people doing design must be multi-disciplinary is bafflegab. Sure, you've got to be concerned w. the whole, but if the individual parts don't work due to bad design, you're screwed. In that case, the whole is less than the sum of the parts. Same with the question of software and human factors. Most coders are very much aware of design considerations, and are continually cursing the marketing dept. for asking for more features that actually take away from useability. Ditto software vs. hardware. Just look at the flame wars started here over hardware (this isn't primarily a hardware site).
My original point was that the article was stupid. As an example, wanting to make email into a spam-style service (publish it and get back maybe 1% response) was the dumbest thing I've heard in a week (not including anything from SCO, of course).This was somebody trying to "do the visionary thing", and failing it, pure and simple.
I understand hibernation to be as you say, off - no CPU, no RAM, no hard disk. The only "on" thing is the couple of watts required to keep a PCI motherboard plugged in. What I want hibernation for is to have FAX/answering machine on all the time and only use a couple of standby watts to do this. Of course the thing has to unhibernate before enough rings go by that the caller gives up.
I have never been successful getting hibernate to work. I am currently using an ASUS TUSL-2C and what I had before that was one or other VIA offering (Intel PCI boards both of them). It is always something stupid, like the thing unhibernates and the mouse freezes up (that is on the ASUS, on the VIA I don't even get that far).
Are there lists of hardware that people know about where they got hibernate to work? I am not even sure if I can get recent desktop Dells to hibernate.
Anyway, the point of this is that it is not design, not UI whatever, it is that the features that are announced (like ACPI hibernate) just don't work. People need to wring the bugs out of the technology before talking about fancy interface stuff they want. Or rather I would like to see a lot more bugs getting the technology to work rather than ignoring that and coming out with more Windows versions.
My best example of a technology challenge is getting graphics files, and especially Windows metafiles to interoperate (with just about anything else), but that's a whole other story.
In Italy, ads from 3 (only active UMTS provider so far) are even sillier and include three girls on the beach that show an attrctive guy one of them, who is undressing in a cabin.
Actually, private erotic shows (come to me, LOOK what i've got for you!) can be a reasonable application for video phone calls, with a wider user base than medical and police applications.
Dude - Xine+Mplayer - I watch movies on Linux all the time. Then, of course, I use Debian, not Redhat. :)
Perspective, perspective, perspective.
1) Of course hardware differentiates PCs if you look at it from the perspective of specific professional use (audio mixers, large storage servers, etc). But, if I may repeat what I said before, I believe that what he means is that to the normal consumers out there there's not much distinction between a PC using an Intel 2 Ghz or an AMD 1700 or even a G4 1.X (i'm not much of a mac user). The same can be said for PDAs and/or mp3 players. But why is it that there is so much buzz about the iPod or why do different PDAs or different cell phones get different levels of attention? Many of them are similar hardware-wise.
2) I agree that there exist such a thing as a design cycle. But now you're just bringing an issue down to word-play. When he said that the design process was "funnel-shaped" I don't think he was excluding the fact that the process was also a design cycle. He referenced the design of the palm (as I stated in my last response) as an example of how they wanted to support a thousand different options but the design got "funneled" to 4 different buttons. So when he says that the design process is a "funnel" I believe he is saying that in supporting human-friendly interfaces we need to simply. We need to take all the options we want to support and "funnel" into a way that easily usable by humans, that makes more sense, and support the core features of a product. I see nothing wrong with that idea.
3) I don't think he was speaking against the contributions of individuals to a project versus the whole. Sure, I will admit, that coders are aware of design when it comes to CODE design. In his example he used hardware and software because the hardware would have to be able the support the software without overkill. THis makes perfect sense and, in this sort of situation, the programmer is not necessarily aware of the hardware restrictions. I'm not sure if this is the best example but to say that the design process for the type of products they put out is a multidisciplinary one is right on target in my eyes. Sure there was some fluff to it but I won't use that as a reason to deny the partial truths he spoke of.
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." - Martin Luther King, Jr.