graffiti in experience

Go on, you know you’ve thought it. What’s the difference between adaptive design and responsive design, read about it, gotten confused, read some more.

The mere fact that the who’s, who’s who of the interwebs (Jeffrey, James, Aaron) have spent as much time qualifying it – means it’s not user friendly.

For those at the bleeding-edge of design, it’s a challenge. For the people who have to convince the bean counters why it’s worth the expense (topic for another day), it’s downright painful.

So I propose we rename it. To eliminate all confusion.

adaptive design is now adaptive thinking.
responsive design is now responsive layouts.

And just so there is no confusion, here’s the lexicon -

adaptive thinking = the exercise of thinking about how users will want/need to engage with the experience (design, content, technology).

responsive layouts = fluid layouts that adjust to screen resolutions, load appropriately sized images, accommodate relevant copy.

progressive enhancement = an approach to how a digital property is built, to allow it to have a minimum, viable, usable feature-set, and then increasingly progressing as the property is rendered to take full advantage of the users consumption device.

design = the exercise or activity that applies adaptive thinking to generate experiences that meet the needs of users (aka user centered design). It’s outputs may include responsive layouts among other things.

mobile = an example of a device that may generate use cases, for which an adaptive thinker will solve.

There. No more confusion. Now go forth and create for the user.

Lets face it, watching videos has always been a lean back in the couch sort of experience. Early forays to web video stuttered and buffered, and most people just said, ‘I’ve got no time for this.’

That’s obviously changed, the youtube generation is keen to find quirky, interesting videos. But they’re still not entirely engaged, often clicking away on anything much over 4 minutes.

But how do you really lean them forward? I think the answer is popcorn. No, not the buttery variety – but the nascent HTML5, Mozilla backed framework.

Using timed points in video to trigger events isn’t new to those who’ve traded the Adobe video currency of Flash. But we all know Flash isn’t semantic, accessible etc. This fixes it.

And boy does it fix it. Addressing any element on the DOM (the loaded page) via cue points in the video, I can feel the advertisers salivating already.

But move past the salaciousness of online advertising, and this could be a really useful tool in shaping the digital experience. Attention spans online are dwindling, and this is a great way to help focus the relevant content as part of the viewing experience. (and the key here is relevancy – since we’re trying to benefit the user after all).

Engaging the user? I’m all for it.

This nifty photoshop api, allows you to upload a PSD file to a content server, connect to it via a api, and direct color, image, layer modifications that are then output to a high availability AWS server, either hosted for you or one of your own.

Brilliant!

Now identified users on your site can see an ultra personalized visual experience. Favorite color is blue, cool, all your (non-brand) accents are now blue. Better still, see the kind of hero images in site imagery that you would respond to.

The possibilities are now endless. It’s an easy way to settle those ‘Well, this image doesn’t resonate with the target audience’ types of discussions. Now everyone can see an image they resonate with, by simply swapping out some demographics.

An even more relevant use case for the educational organization I’m at – getting students to take pictures of themselves at the colleges they aspire to go to. And then embedding those images into part of their college planning experience. Now they can socially share their ‘Hey look, I’m in the quad of college X, and it’s on this site’

A lot of folks are up in arms about the recent blog post about price increases. By Wednesday am, most subscribers had received new rate emails.

Is it the draconian price gouging the socio-sphere is making it out to be? I think not. Before you lynch me, hear me out.

When Netflix introduced streaming, they just turned it on for DVD by mail users. That was the only kind of user they had. 1, 2 or 3 at a time. You got streaming, for free.

Now streaming back then sucked. Limited titles, mostly straight-to-dvd movies.

Then they signed a deal with Starz. And they started adding some old school tv programming. And some not so old school ones too.

Where else can you get Airwolf and ST:TNG and 30 Rock, Glee, Party Down and Ice Road Truckers all at once. Oh and up until now, for free!

So, they want to charge it. Cool. My family is averaging between 2-3 hours a day. That’s a mean of 75 hours a month.

I still have my 3-at-a-time dvd buffet. I’ve traded dvds once a month for the last 3 months.

So it’s fair that they want to charge, and it’s not a bad price to be paying.

If you only stream, still 7.99 /mo. If you only do DVD, its even cheaper at 7.99 (one-at-a-time). You do both, and you get streaming which was a free bonus for many months, for the low price of 6 /mo.

Still don’t like streaming content? Drop streaming. Don’t want to pay Netflix? Sign-up for Amazon Prime. A lot of the same content streamed. 79 /yr.

I think Netflix should have positioned it as – you know this thing we’ve given you for free, well bandwidth cost money. So we’ll charge you. Full price is 7.99 to stream. Got a DVD plan? Great we’ll cut you a deal. Dollar off the 1 dvd plan, 2 off the 2 dvd plan, and 4 off the 3 dvd plan.

What did I do? I cancelled one cable box (and remote and dvr upcharge) and saved 17 a month. Oh and probably going to drop to 1 dvd. Net savings – 23 dollars.

Use the savings to justify buying another Roku box.

Done and done.

C’mon RIM, get it together with those sound profiles already. The blackberry UI is a marvel in user experience. No unnecessary menus, minimalist options, keyboard HFE (human factors engineering) that’s just top-notch.

Yet they fall short in one of the critical areas of the device. Notifications. Here’s what your users are seeking, for starters -

1. The ability to create time-based profile switching – phone-only mode after 11pm, work-friendly mode at 9am etc. Even better, an optional meeting mode, based on your calendar.
2. Contact exceptions that abide by the overall profile setting – if I set a custom ringtone for a contact, then put my phone in vibrate mode, I want the phone to vibrate even if that contact calls. The custom ring should only apply when the phone is in audible ring modes (loud, phone only etc.)
3. Ability to duplicate existing default profiles as a custom profiles – You may want to copy the phone only mode, but modify it slightly so that a partciular email account issues an audible alert – for those that need to remain on-call, for example, but don’t want sleep interrupted by those marketing emails in other accounts at 3am.
4. Global message type settings that can be set at a custom level as exceptions – I want all my emails to vibrate 3 times, in vibrate mode. I don’t want to have to set that for each email account. If I need an exception, I can set that for any particular account. E.g. a ‘on-call’ account that dings even in phone only mode.

As a non-NYC living commuter, do I get a monthly unlimited or pay-per-ride Subway ticket? That’s a question that perplexed me for a bit, until I decided to solve it once and for all.

This calculator is designed to determine if your commuting patterns would be better served with a NYC transit 30 day unlimited vs. a pay-per-ride option.

It’s based on the premise that you are primarily a commuter, and are not living in the city or doing a lot of non-commuting travel on the NYC subway system.

1. Selecting a specific start/end date allows you to get a accurate comparison, especially for the pay-per-ride option.
2. Regardless of the date in a month selected, this calculator will assume purchase of the full month of the unlimited.
3. The default one-way fare is for the highest price. If you have special circumstances (i.e. child, student or you qualify for a reduced fare, please adjust the fares accordingly.)

Of course there are other specific comparison criteria on the newly redesigned MTA web site.

This was designed for the NYC subway system, but there is no reason it can’t be applied to any other transit system to compare. Just modify the program details in the transit constants fields. I.e. the fixed cost monthly, and the per ride costs. If you are not getting a bulk purchase discount, then simply keep the adjusted pay-per-ride cost the same as the actual cost.

Could a bad meal really get in the way of Google’s plans for world domination?

While Google has taken on an ambitious project to bring high-speed access to the masses, the smudge may be on them for not cleaning up the search results on their brilliant sewer-system based high speed.

In fact a search of google+high+speed+internet revealed this result in 2nd place.

Search Results

Good stuff.

Its that time of year again. No not winter or holidays, I’m talking open enrollment.

It continues to amaze me how awfully cumbersome and complex it is just navigating the health insurnce maze. Let alone going to get care. What with co-payments and co-insurance, deductibles and annual maximums, its a wonder how people know what’s covered. I suppose that’s what healthcare reform is about.

What we need is a plan decoder. Whether its comparing multiple plans at work or freelance gig, or that of a spouse / domestic partner – a single tool that let’s you compare the key factors. And calculate break-even costs, and even do scenario projection.

And it would be great if it would list out the fine print – pre-approvals etc.

As with all of my Why Hasn’t Someone Done This? posts, I do hope someone can prove me wrong and show me that this actually exists somewhere. Or some enterprising person is hacking together a kludge for now.

What started out as a pipe-dream lo so many moons ago is finally a reality. Life and work just have a habit of getting in the way of these things.

In any case, I aim to one-stop-shop manage my socio-sphere, with as much automation across platforms and APIs as can be. I will use open source and free tools where possible to facilitate this, and will look to augment as new technologies emerge.

I am also a tech-geek at heart. If it’s new, I want it. I want to try it. I want to buy it. I want to play with it. I’ve had the luxury of so many great consumer (generally) electronic devices out there, I want to share my findings in hopes that it may help someone, somewhere navigate the maze.

And sometimes its just wishing really cool things existed. Like a standardized way to taxonomize and facet-filter products. E.g., am getting a Kindle, (more on that later) and was looking for a great cover. Something without the hinge (horror stories on cracked devices – ugh), something that was book-like, not a sleeve, and finally something with more than just 4 elastic straps holding it down.

Settled on this one. Not that it doesn’t look like an awesome product. Meets all my requirements. But I spent the better part of Saturday hunting for this. And really only found this.

So I hope to bring light to needs, shine the light on products and people that have met those needs, and just kvetch about anything and everything I deem worthy.

I’ll look forward to hearing about things I didn’t know existed and solutions to problems I have.