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.
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.
