More or Less

For another tangent that I've always had interest in...designing user experiences. This is a great post on the dangers of complexity in your application designs. The thing to beware of, don't mistake simple design with brain dead design. I see this happening more and more, especially with internet apps and the crutch of "we can release it ad-hoc as new features are completed."

Consider the moaning that gets posted in Facebook status messages when they make seemingly random UX changes. Even the slightest, most subtle change is noticed with resounding hew and cry. Of course Facebook can regress and it's a free service anyway. So all those Facebook users out there feeling like guinea pigs might as well get used to it.

But the lesson for your enterprise-minded and software-for-sale developers there are some good lessons in this article.

Truly exceptional experiences are crafted when complexity is removed whilst the level of power and control is maintained.

Not an easy challenge and requires, dare I say it, planning. But sometimes the best planning isn't enough. You need to assess design all along the development process. Not always easiest on the developers but the best way to ensure adoption and user's preference for your product.

Digital peeping

A timely article from the Atlantic Wire on government and corporate surveillance of social media. The later half of the article addresses how the Government and our outdated Electronic Communications Privacy Act, circa 1986, opens doors to government entities who want to look at e-mail content, and how service providers comply most of the time:

In the second half of 2010 alone, the government sent 4,601 such requests to Google, who complied 94 percent of the time. 

 Your Social Media Will be Monitored

Ethics people!

Apple employees may have trouble keeping corporate secrets in their pockets, but the folks who find obviously confidential stuff seem to face a moral dilemma figuring out what to do with the things they find. A recent Gizmodo post, "Man Get Hard Drive Full of Secret Apple Documents", details how one Apple Store inadvertently gave a customer the store's back-up hard drive rather than a broken hard disk that the store replaced for the customer. Ok, ok, simple or complicated mix-up that can be blamed on "amateur hour" or "lack of adult supervision" at Apple, but the fact that the customer turns around and tries to sell the hard disk to the press is just plain stupid. Really, where are your scruples? Or at very least your sense of avoiding arrest? Semi-Bravo to Cult of Mac for telling the customer the right path, but only after publishing screen shots. Who knows if the right thing was done.

Not Again?!

Cnet reports that Apple loses another unreleased iPhone. Really? Dunno, something just ain't right.

Social Business #Fail?

Some very sober points on how Social Business could possibly avoid the fate of Knowledge Management.

The thing that struck me while reading this post is the fact that we seem to be backing into developing tools that really meet the requirements of their users. As my colleague Larry tweeted regarding this article:
  

"natural collab experience" = support my work-dont just push "social"

Although culture and change management in the enterprise play a factor in the success of collaboration within an organization, I'm also struck by the way social software is being developed in both the enterprise software and consumer spaces. As Ms. Buczek points out, collaboration in business goes beyond the firewall, and those who "get it" are turning to consumer tools to get things done. But while the consumer developers are trying to attract enterprise and figure out the "new e-mail" (which looks a lot like e-mail from 1990), enterprise software vendors are busy trying the reconstitute social media in their own style with a 1990's development model.

And so it goes, the primary ingredients that Ms. Buczek enumerates,

1. Integrated interfaces
2. Cross-organizational interaction
3. Streamlined identity
4. Device agnostic tools

fall by the wayside to serve the bipartisan consumer versus enterprise approach to software development and delivery. As Ms Buczek notes, there are lots of places we can start.