How to Design Perfect (Software) Products

Pieter Hintjens – How to Design Perfect (Software) Products:

Trash-Oriented Design: “Eventually, something resembling a working product makes it out of the door. It's creaky and fragile, complex and ugly. The designers curse the engineers for their incompetence and pay more consultants to put lipstick onto the pig, and slowly the product starts to look a little nicer. By this time, the managers have started to try to sell the product and they find, shockingly, that no-one wants it.”

Complexity-Oriented Design: “The team, being engineers and thus loving to build stuff, build stuff. They build and build and build and end up with massive, perfectly designed complexity. The products go to market, and the market scratches its head and asks, "seriously, is this the best you can do?"”

Simplicity-Oriented Design: “We apply one measure of quality to patches, namely "can this be done any simpler while still solving the stated problem?" We can measure complexity in terms of concepts and models that the user has to learn or guess in order to use the patch. The fewer, the better. A perfect patch solves a problem with zero learning required by the user.”

Who cares?

Seth Godin – Who cares?:

“If we define good enough sufficiently low, we'll probably meet our standards. Caring involves raising that bar to the point where the team has to stretch.

[…] Caring, it turns out, is a competitive advantage, and one that takes effort, not money.”

Is 2012 the Year of User Experience in ECM?

An interview by Jane Zupan on the Nuxeo Content Geeks blog – Is 2012 the Year of User Experience in ECM?:

“In the not-too-distant past, user experience (UX) was considered an annoying afterthought for enterprise application development and deployment. User adoption was often disappointing, and the disconnect between business and IT seemed like a deep chasm. In recent years, easy access to technology solutions such as Flickr, Dropbox, Google Docs, and mobile apps that require no reading of manuals or training, has changed the mindset of technology users.”

Jill Hart: “Today, we have multiple generations of people using technology, and users have much more confidence. If they're not able to complete a task, they realize that the problem isn't them, it's the poorly designed system they're trying to use.

[…] Listen to what customers have to say EARLY in the design process. Do some paper prototyping – put together some easy mockups of what your research has indicated that people want.

[…] No matter how I look at content management, in the absence of effectiveness and ease of use, the business value of the system cannot reach its full potential. This applies to any enterprise application.”

Not Piracy

Tim Bray – Not Piracy:

“Anyone who claims that unauthorized transmission of bits is analogous to piracy is at least a liar and is deeply disrespectful of the people who are suffering the effects of theft, kidnapping, and murder right now today in the Indian Ocean. They deserve your contempt, and they have mine.”

ISYS Document Filters

ISYS Document Filters: 

“Support for hundreds of common and legacy file, email, archive and container formats (e.g. Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF, WordPerfect, ZIPs, MSGs).

[…] Converts files into HTML and renders embedded graphics as a JPEG or PNG.”

(Via Enterprise Search.)

Successful DAM evolves to publishing system

IT Enquirer – Successful DAM evolves to publishing system:

“Integration or downright transformation into a publishing system: DAM vendors are hot in today's digitized world.

[…] Typical usages for DAM are for example brand management and photo management. Increasingly DAM is also shifting from pure management system to publishing system.

[…] Digital Asset Management can help them [marketing teams], especially when the DAM system either integrates seamlessly with a CMS or when it comes very close to being a publishing and content management system itself.”

(Via Elvis DAM.)

How Trello is different

Joel Spolsky – How Trello is different:

“The great horizontal killer applications are actually just fancy data structures.

Spreadsheets are not just tools for doing "what-if" analysis. They provide a specific data structure: a table. Most Excel users never enter a formula. […]

Word processors are not just tools for writing books, reports, and letters. They provide a specific data structure: lines of text which automatically wrap and split into pages.

PowerPoint is not just a tool for making boring meetings. It provides a specific data structure: an array of full-screen images.”

The MicroPHP Manifesto

Ed Finkler – The MicroPHP Manifesto:

“I am not a Zend Framework or Symfony or CakePHP developer

[…] I like building small things that work together to solve larger problems

[…] I need to justify every piece of code I add to a project”

(I mostly agree, but I love Rush!)

Small Features

Ben Yoskovitz – Small Features:

“The first instinct is to build a configuration option to let people decide how they want it to work. That's more code, more complexity, more risk and potential points of failure. It also means more UI has to be designed, and once you go down that road it's hard to pull back. Suddenly, every feature needs configuration options.”

(Via Jason Cohen.)

Taxonomies don’t matter anymore

Stijn Debrouwere – Taxonomies don’t matter anymore:

“Automated recommendation engines are mainly useful as cute but non-essential pageview drivers and if your journalists are too lazy to add links.

[…] We don't come to topic pages for automatically aggregated sort-of-relevant content with no editorial guidance as to what's important and what's not. Sometimes, you just have to do things by hand, in prose.

[…] There is really no way to sidestep curation unless we don't care that we're annoying our users.

[…] Stepping away from mediocrity, for me, means putting power back in the hands of the newsroom. To make that happen, I'll be building prosthetics, not machines.”

Tools vs insight

Seth Godin – Tools vs insight:

“Knowing about a tool is one thing. Having the guts to use it in a way that brings art to the world is another. Perhaps we need to spend less time learning new tools and more time using them.”

Why We Removed the Wiki Markup Editor in Confluence 4.0

Atlassian Confluence team – Why We Removed the Wiki Markup Editor in Confluence 4.0:

“Wiki markup as a storage format hindered our ability to add new features, like merge table cells, that customers had been demanding. This is because Wiki Markup is a very limited subset of XHTML and because any new editor feature had to be built twice...once in the RTE and once in the Wiki Markup Editor. We also had a lot of bugs when toggling between the two edit modes. We knew for some time that we'd need to unify the dual-RTE and Wiki Markup Editors into one simple-yet-capable editing experience and store Confluence content in a more extensible storage format – i.e. XHTML.”

A great way to give thanks…

Seth Godin – A great way to give thanks…:

“For every person reading this there are a thousand people (literally a thousand) in underprivileged nations and situations that would love to have your slot. Don't waste it.”

Asynchronous UIs - the future of web user interfaces

Alex MacCaw – Asynchronous UIs - the future of web user interfaces:

“Move state & view rendering to the client side.

[…] The idea is that you update the client before you send an Ajax request to the server. For example, say a user updated a page name in a CMS. With an asynchronous UI, the name change would be immediately reflected in the application, without any loading or pending messages. The UI is available for further interaction instantly. The Ajax request specifying the name change would then be sent off separately in the background. At no point does the application depend on the Ajax request for further interaction.”

(Via Nat Torkington at O'Reilly Radar.)

W3C Ontology for Media Resources 1.0

W3C Candidate Recommendation Ontology for Media Resources 1.0 (July 2011):

“The intent of this vocabulary is to bridge the different descriptions of media resources, and provide a core set of descriptive properties. This document defines a core set of metadata properties for media resources, along with their mappings to elements from a set of existing metadata formats.”

Mapped metadata standards: CableLabs 1.1, DIG35, Dublin Core, EBUCore, EXIF 2.2, ID3, IPTC NewsML-G2, LOM 2.1, Media RSS, MPEG-7, OGG, QuickTime, DMS-1, TTML, TV-Anytime, TXFeed, XMP, YouTube

Example XML for most standards can be viewed in the testsuite.

(Via Johannes Schmidt.)

Creatasphere DAM Europe Conference Summary

Naresh Sarwan at Digital Asset Management News – Creatasphere DAM Europe Conference Summary:

“The overwhelming sense I get is that vendors especially are too willing to invest in toys and trinkets while at the same time they leave duller and more complex (but ultimately more useful and requested) features like flexible workflow by the wayside or handle it very badly.”

Better Quotes

Tim Bray – Better Quotes:

“If you are publishing text for people to read and you want it to look even halfway professional, you absolutely must use real actual left and right quotation marks: “quotes” not "quotes". Also right-single apostrophe: as in don’t use "don't".”

Don’t Call Yourself A Programmer, And Other Career Advice

Patrick McKenzie – Don't Call Yourself A Programmer, And Other Career Advice:

"The person who has decided to bring on one more engineer is not doing it because they love having a geek around the room, they are doing it because adding the geek allows them to complete a project (or projects) which will add revenue or decrease costs. Producing beautiful software is not a goal. Solving complex technical problems is not a goal. Writing bug-free code is not a goal. Using sexy programming languages is not a goal. Add revenue. Reduce costs. Those are your only goals."

Agile slaves

J.D. Hildebrand quotes Andy Hunt – Agile slaves:

"These weren't productive developers freed from mindless process dogma. They were Agile slaves. The dogma they followed was ours, and they followed it well. […] But they weren't thinking, they weren't reacting, they weren't being agile. When problems came up, they addressed them with all the grace and elegance of a deer caught in the terrifying blaze of alien headlights. They knew how to do Agile; they didn't know how to be agile."

(Via Thorsten Mann.)

Mercury Editor

"Mercury is a full featured HTML5 editor. It was built from the ground up to help your team get the most out of content editing in modern browsers.

To keep Mercury simple, we support all browsers that have implemented the complete W3C contentEditable specification: Firefox 4+, Chrome 10+, Safari 5+"