connecting*the*dots

My buddy sent me these shots from a friend of his. Nash & Nowitzki… I have feeling these two will be throwing ‘em back once again, real soon. The MVP is now only one game away from the summer months and pouring a tall one for his Euro-buddy.

I love that athletes look just as dumb as us after 10 to 15 Budweisers.

UPDATE: More brilliant drunkenness

So it’s Friday night and I find myself cruising around the web after a night out and a tooth brushing away before a night in. In my travels, I landed on JJG’s blog and subsequently stumbled into his Ajax essay on the Adaptive site. I’ve got to admit something; before tonight, I’ve never read one iota about Ajax. The only real conversation I’ve had on the topic was a recent conversation with a client-side developer pal and after reading Jesse’s well defined description of the approach and the benefits. My initial reaction was pretty much, "well, duh!"

I don’t say that to offend Jesse, nor downplay the great client-side work anyone is doing right now, it’s just that I’ve been immersed in online application design for years now and have always tried to communicate these types of solutions to developers. I say "these types of solutions" lightly, as I’m primarily a designer, not a developer, so from my perspective these communication calls have been screaming to be stiched together for a while now. All said, I refuse to rake engineers over the coals. We’re here now.

Jesse spoke to the difficulties of designing online applications due to the technical workarounds which have been historically necessary to successfully support innovative interface behavior. While I agree with the level of difficulty, I disagree with the approach to design, for while practicing interaction design, I don’t model persona scenarios based on technological constraints. As David Fore of Cooper exhorts, the period of scenario modeling should be a period of making magic. That’s how innovation occurs while supporting user needs. I’d much rather engage an engineer in a position to support a brilliant solution than bland, useless features/interface behaviors. So first, come up with the right behaviors, then encourage technology to make it come to life.

Okay, that could come off as a bit pushy, unrealistic and non-tech savvy. One has to understand the constraints of the media when designing for it right? Sure. But not at the cost of potentially handcuffing a more useful experience by limiting possibilities. So how can one design for the user, while considering possibilities of Ajax?

While at Ameritrade, when the opportunity to start the UX Group came my way, I was lucky to be able to convince management to include our relatively small client-side development team in the mix. That brief organizational commitment created a huge opportunity for me to espouse innovation and collaboration across both designers and developers. I didn’t know how long the group structure would last, so I instantly switched up working from the level of context scenarios and began to approach the issue holistically.

We must have used the phrase "push the browser until it pushes back" more times in our weekly staff meetings than "war against terror" has been used in the White House over the past few years. Come hell or highwater, our (paying) client behaviors needed to be supported in our online applications, so in turn, I refused to limit us to any narrow definitions of client-side technology. Thankfully, my CSD guys (and gal) latched onto my mantra with vigor and did the heavy lifting to evolve our conversations into their domain (code), while myself and the IxD’s returned to the iteration of modeling user needs into interface behavior. Did they use the Ajax approach per se? No, but they pretty much pushed the browser until their SOP—which supported the design team’s further pursuit of forward thinking behavioral patterns—is now reflected in some of the latest Ajax app behaviors, such as Gmail. Business as usual of design and development at Ameritrade started to evolve.

Were the solutions as soundly executed across the board as the current Google attempts in leveraging the Ajax approach? I’d have to say no again, as we were performing Ajax-type workarounds on the fly. But the mere fact that the team addressed dynamic interface scenarios on a case-by-case basis, with dynamic executions on the presentation layer, led our marketing group to center their next campaign around the slogan, "Welcome to the 21st Century. Now trade like it." The ripple
effect of the progressive experience design was contained, as it only applied to the authenticated, Apex trading platform, but Barrons seemed to notice it by giving us a 4 star rating (up from 2.5 stars the previous year).

A switch to a complete Ajax approach at Ameritrade today would entail a short period of refactoring, but would make the current authenticated interface move from "singing" to "harmonizing."

As long as the IT politicians and system managers keep their paws out of coding philosophy, Ajax should mark the sweet spot of the golden age of presenting complex scenario relationships as simplified behavioral experience in the browser. Elegance in action. Personally speaking, I just never want to hear "that’s not feasible" again when proposing the design for such a dynamic solution.

Remember Belushi’s reaction to the insipid acuistic guitar love song in Animal House? Exactly.

I want a satellite radio product that meets *my* needs.

I want true convergence, not the usual business of multiple brands, releasing redundant products, creating sustainable profitability and not sustainable satisfaction.

It’s 2005 people; we deserve sustainable product offerings that meet our needs in any environmental scenario.

So what does the current portable, streaming, satellite landscape look like? Forgive the brand choices, but it seems to look something along the lines of…

Aside from the obvious competitive redundancies of the middle products, the feature overlap of any two products is pretty interesting to note:

• Portability (car, home, walking, etc.)
• Song ratings
• Random play
• Library of music to draw upon (satellite, jukebox, server, etc.)

When I see these overlapping product attributes, I also see opportunities for elegant simplicity, for product convergence, and most importantly, for happy consumers. I start to see…

Yahoo! Music plays audio files off a server, leveraging personalization settings, such as ratings of songs, artists, albums, genres, etc. What’s stopping them from striking up a deal with a Sirius or XM to create a completely personalized satellite/internet station?

A biz-dev deal here, a little bit of industrial and interface design changes there, a chunk of engineering and voila!; the physical satellite products could have input devices for rating these same music attributes. So the next time you’re on the beach, in your car, etc., you’re now continuously participating in updating your station to reflect your current passions and interests. Tie these setting into an Amazon or iTunes shopping experience and the collaborative filtering possibilities are endless.

Speaking of Apple, what about the iPod?

MP3 players bring the “tangible” nature of accessing a personal library of ripped and downloaded music. Bring this into the conversation and you now have a device that not only syncs personalization between devices via server/satellite communication, but also allows a consumer to archive a library of music/content for consumption in a more linear fashion (i.e. playing entire albums, setting up playlists, dj-ing, etc.).

Of course that also could be managed via satellite — providing the user a search and play capability — but that’s a bit more tricky regarding music rights and costs. It would also cannibalize owning CD’s and downloading music, although Napster and Rhapsody are already heading down the monthly cost for leasing music.

Once Sirius and XM start a partnership, splitting redundancies in content and sharing technology at a cost (like satellites), maybe, just maybe, we could see a sexy product, with beauty found on levels deeper than it’s original vision…

And yes, I too would rather have Apple lead the industrial design of this fantasy product than myself, but for visualization purposes (and because I’m long on Sirius, remember) I think my rendering will suffice for this conversation.

I smell a Dire Straits song in the works.

I can’t tell you how much I love playing Spades.

52 cards, split up between four players in teams of two. Your partner is your pahtnah; you know his tendencies, he knows yours. If you’re really tuned in during the bidding process and through the first two books, counting count cards and deductive reasoning takes over without much effort. After some practice, especially with the same partner, you can look forward to setting your opponents with amazing regularity.

Spades is about sharing that moment of victory with your pahtnah; it’s a game for bravado and talking smack. It’s Love & Hate on Radio Rahim’s knuckles. It has a pulse of its own.

Poker is so different.

1. No matter what game of poker you’re playing, you’re on your own.
2. Only cards dealt face up and player movement will give you a hint in counting cards.
3. You have to play your hand, the cards on the table, more than one deck at a time and the tendencies of your opponents. Patterns have to be established from the way your opposition reacts to various situations, but unless you play with the same people for an extended period of time even that strategy doesn’t help too much, as tendencies based on a stereotype aren’t too reliable.

Poker forces you to execute at a precise moment in time based on a plethora of variables; a majority of which are unknown.

A player folding twice in a row, with face cards in the second hand just to throw the table is a perfectly, rational strategy. Being conservative with three aces to raise the stakes, after raising on a bluff to gain a stake of the pot is SOP. Playing a straight game 85% of the time–in the midst of the madness — creates even more of a competitive advantage.

Poker is cold and calculating; poker is schizophrenic.

A poker player doesn’t strive for that moment of Quan; he plays to take all the chips for himself.

So which of these two games would you guess to be more popular in institutionalized environments, such as a federal prison? Which would you guess is more popular with Wall Street types on a Wednesday night after raking in $10k of commisions on speculative stock trades?

Let the gamble of our non-sustainable future continue.