Jeff Blankenburg has a new video series that he's starting to do called JUXtapose which stands for Jeff on User Experience. That's a clever twist on words there.

What Jeff doesn't mention is that he "grew up" in the technical end of a marketing firm implementing the whims and ideas of the designers. Through that experience, Jeff learned a lot about user experience and design. He was the designer of the original CodeMash site and gear head logo. That's why in his video he said that he was "familiar" with the gear head.

In his first video, he builds a Silverlight 1.0 gear head with spinning gears. I like it for a number of reasons. It clearly demonstrates the power of declarative vector graphics and timelines in XAML. I've done the stupid demo that everyone does for Expression Blend and Silverlight where you take text, put it on a timeline with a gradient and have it spin about the screen a little. As Chris Bernard put it - that's Silverlight Blink meaning that it's the thing that everyone is going to do because it's simple but it's annoying as all get out to the user. However, that was random movement around the screen. To actually make it do something deliberate like Jeff did has been well outside of my depth.

In his second video, Jeff tracked down the CTO as well as the Dev Tools Product Manager, Visual Design Manager of Component One and interviewed them about the controls that they are creating for Silverlight 1.1. That set of controls, called Sapphire, went Alpha yesterday which happened to be the day that he posted the video. It's a well done video with lots of good information. I liked the their attitude where they see Silverlight as a way to reuse their desktop development knowledge, toolset and more for web development. This is the direction that Microsoft is taking things - extending our current base's (mostly desktop developers) experience and abilities to the space known as RIA. Adobe has been in the RIA space for a while and with AIR, they are trying to extend their base's (mostly web developers) experience and abilities to the desktop. This is a subtle but hugely important distinction that Component One understands and is excited about.

On a side note - it was interesting to hear that Component One, as a control vendor, is an agile shop developing in an iterative fashion.

JUXtapose - Jeff on User Experience

Tuesday, November 06, 2007 1:09:29 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [0] 

One of the key messages that I've been talking about with a lot of my customers recently is a continuum of experience.

It starts on the left with Web and it's absolute ubiquity through HTML and CSS. This works on any device with a browser from a phone to any desktop and even a lot of computer based applications (such as search engines or spam email harvesting engines). The tradeoff is that the user experience is less than optimal. Billy Hollis calls it the Cobol of the web referring back to the old time green screens. Whether we like it or not, HTML not only has it's place now, it's going to continue to have it's place long into the future. Unfortunately, one of the reasons that many applications go this direction is not because they need ubiquitous reach but rather because it's easier on the IT department to deploy it. This makes things hard on the user. Oops. Things can get better with AJAX. At this point, you are sacrificing some reach for functionality as you are giving up phones, PDAs and older browsers. Often that's an easy decision to make.

On the right hand side of the continuum is Platform Optimized. This is really giving up broad reach for absolute functionality. As an example, the Halo 3 team knew which video card was in the target machine so they could tailor the experience for the edges of what's possible on that hardware. That's a good position to be in when you can be because it means that you can create the absolute best possible experience available. However, it would be hard to take that same experience and put it on any laptop. Short of knowing what hardware you are targeting, look at the platform that you are targeting. If you know that your users are using Vista or XP with the Service Pack 2, you can target WPF, WCF and so on because you know that it's on the box. Backing up from there, if you can target .NET on the box, great.

Somewhere between the Web and Platform Optimized is the Supplemented Web with Silverlight and Flash/Flex. This is an exciting frontier to be in right now bridging the gap. It's not full ubiquity but it's more reach than platform optimized and it has a far superior user experience than HTML and CSS.

Microsoft and Adobe are working from opposite angles here. Adobe, with Air, is trying to take this supplemented web development paradigm to desktop. It's an interesting idea to be able to bring HTML, Flex/Flash, embedding PDFs and so on to the desktop. Microsoft, on the other hand, is trying to take desktop application development paradigm to the web with Silverlight.

I think that there's room for every type of experience along the continuum but you really need to evaluate your skill set and what type of experience you want to target when starting an application. Today actually, I had a customer meeting where we talked about a blended approach where we build a simple ASP.NET application for their ubiquitous touch and then target a click-once deployable application for those clients that are able to leverage it. This would be a great move on their part as it would give the best possible UX for the greatest possible audience.

Friday, November 02, 2007 2:01:23 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [0] 

SRT Solutions hosted a "User Interface Smackdown" yesterday. While the "Smackdown" part of the name was a little off what happened, it was a great event with some great discussions. James Ward (a Flex Evangelist from Adobe), Drew Robbins (Developer Evangelist for Microsoft), Chris Bernard (User Experience Evangelist from Microsoft), Dianne Marsh (SRT Solutions), Bill Wagner (SRT Solutions), Mark Ramm (Contributor to Turbo Gears and author of the best book out on the subject), myself and a number of other technologists and business owners totaling 34 in all got together and discussed a lot of different options on the user interface and creating the best user experience possible. The event was in an Open Spaces format which means that none of us lead the conference but all of us contributed, none of us knew what the topics were going to be when we started but all of us got to vote on them and suggest new topics and none of us knew what the outcome of the event would be but we all helped shape it. I don't think that the Open Spaces format is the right fit for every event, but it is a great format for learning and promoting discussion. I learned a lot more about GWT, Flex, Turbo Gears, Ruby on Rails and more. I also learned more about what people are thinking in the areas of design, Rich Internet Applications, Smart Clients and more. We talked about everything from WPF to WPF/e to the Web Services Software Factory to Click One Deployment to an amazing number of other topics. It's really hard to capture all that we talked about yesterday.

It was not a smackdown at all - it was a coming together of minds, technologies and disiplines that I think everyone who attended was able to take something positive away from. I really enjoyed the event and hope that we will have more like in the local area.

Link to User Interface Smackdown 2007 | SRT Solutions

Thursday, April 05, 2007 12:23:41 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [2]