David Hockney has always been such an innovator. Now, at 73 years of age, he come up with a crazy iPhone/iPad exhibition.
Remember, this was the guy who came up with the idea of overlapping images to create a larger image. We all know lenses never fit enough of what we want to show, he just didn’t put up with it and found a way to fix that. Very clever artist.
I knew about this after paying attention to what was going on on CES this year. Lots of tablets where announced, from the JooJoo to that HP running Windows 7. You’ll find reviews on them here, here and here.
Funny thing is most of those were announced before the iPad. Yet the iPad got all the attention because Apple knows it’s Marketing better than those other guys put together. Masters of Spin they are they’re probably making everyone believe they invented this tablet idea.
I’m looking forward to seeing what happens with all these and how do they evolve. Android or Chrome Os sounds like a nice thing to run on one of these. Apple’s iPad is almost impenetrable. You even have to Sync it with iTunes (!?). That’ all very nice since to find their market, some hardware company will build something with HDMI, camera and all the toys for the same price or less running Android… and for that I might wait in line at some underdog store.
Great speakers today.
Stephen P. Anderson and Matthew Milan did great presentations. Erin Malone and Christian Crumlish showed up with this amazing Social Patterns Card Game. It’s quite difficult to play, but it’s worth it.
Stephen Anderson is the reason I attended, basically. “Wow, the guy who writes those nice articles in A List Apart is going to be there? This must be good”.
Anyway, he gave a nice presentation about how the way you approach the user can make a huge difference in the collaboration you’ll get from them. Things like the profile completeness gauge from Linkedin or the music games of iLike. They use techniques from the Gaming industry to make it a fun thing for you to fill out information which otherwise would be a daunting process. Instead of forcing you to do it, they kind of challenge you. The idea is to seduce your curiosity and drag you into playing trivia games or making you fill up information to raise your status which will then yield a reward.
It’s a hell of a lot better than presenting the user with the typical 5 or 7 pages of input fields an insurance company would t request a quote, only to take you into a final page that would say something like “We’ll let you know”.
Matthew Milan gave the most engaging presentation of all. I don’t know how he compares in terms of content but he’s definetely a kick ass presenter. It was all about innovation, which is a great topic. He used parkour as a metaphour of innovation. He was talking about using obstacles as portals to new stuff, innovative stuff. Not to flow on the path already designed for us but find a new one where there seems to be none.
He then tried to explain how to train our minds to innovate. The more you practice the better you get and according to his theory, to innovate, you need to be resoponsive in critical situations. You should be so well trained that you don’t have to think in those situations. You should just be able to fix the problem by scanning your environment and finding a solution quickly.
Critical thing for this, according to him, was not panicking in this critical situations. He compared this to the way pilots get trained to deal with this kind of dangerous situations. They can’t panic, otherwise you can’t think clearly. To find a solutions you must remain calm or know how to cope with fear.
Tomorrow I’ll post more on the card game.
Today was the first day of the IDEA conference (there was a workshop yesterday, on the 14th, but that was like an add-on or a plug-in… not a bonus because you had to pay for it).
From the program, the speakers I liked the most were Christing Wodtke and Leisa Reichelt. Everyone else had interesting information too, it’s just those two where closer to what I do.
Christina Wodtke started making analogies between Web Design / Development and Architecture which I thought was very interesting. The reason I loved this is because 5 years ago, when I lived in London (UK) I was going to Architecture Exhibitions to try and find inspiration for Web Design. I was trying to link Web with Architecture (and I’m not talking about Information Architecture). She did a better job than me, obviously.
She also said that we should go back to layout. Our designs are too boring and we need more movement. Of course, she’s not talking about crazy designer site out there but more about user interfaces for web applications. And it’s true, we’re all making square modular design boxes. Maybe we round the corners, but it’s still too square. She has a point. Standards are cool and I know that repetition makes it easy for the user but if we don’t break with the standard we don’t innovate, and that is the worst that can happen to the web or technology for that matter.
Leisa Reichelt spoke about her adventures in the Open Source world. She tried to take on the job of fixing Drupal’s massive User Experience issues, but this one wasn’t a success story. It’s a real world story and that’s what I liked about it. She hit a lot of walls when it came to re-thinking the whole experience of this CMS app. They tried to go to the root of the problem, but the problem was no one got it. Everyone tends to build from a top-level place. Designing before even thinking how to structure and make things functional.
But it happens to all of us. We get asked to make something pretty but no one gets it that when we walk into a project the problem is not generally as easy as just giving the interface a new look. I also have to deal with the problem of BA’s and Bosses creating 24,000 features for an app, which of course will never be used by 94.5% of the users and it will make their experience super annoying.
