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photo credit: Jeremy Levine Design

It’s important to have a common vision and shared values in a company like Pathfinder. We often talk internally about what we value.

A frequent topic is valuing things that are designed as opposed to merely built. The obvious example is the iPad vs. the Android tablets emerging now. A more concrete, less virtual, example is a house. You may have experienced one where the whole and its parts were purposely designed, as evident in the durable choice of materials, comfortable spatial dimensions, a sensible floor plan, appealing surface treatments and manicured surroundings. Both the inside and outside are made beautifully with a timeless style. Then you notice the thoughtful features like large windows situated on the south and west sides to help utilize the sun’s heat in winter, or trees and overhang roofs to help keep the internal climate cool from the summer sun, or air circulating effectively such that the fireplace actually warms the house as opposed to being a static ornament. What makes these desired outcomes remarkable is the architect’s attention to detail and thinking through how each part of the house will be utilized.

At Pathfinder, we recognize, appreciate and strive for good design. We incorporate it into every app we make. Because of this, our apps aren’t just a flat list of features that our clients pay us to implement, but are fully viable products, designed like a house we would enjoy living in and cherishing its sense of craft, from the inside out and vice versa.

The value of wireframing even with incomplete information

The task of wireframing in application development, as I’ve come to know it, should begin after user research has been performed, and a complete set of requirements gathered.  But what happens when, for whatever reason, you just don’t have access to user research, or a full set of requirements?  What if all you have are some rather unspecific, vague notions of what the user should and should not be able to do?  Is wireframing at this juncture useful?  I say yes.  With incomplete or even almost non existent information about target users and or requirements, wireframes can still be a valuable tool in the interface designers toolkit.

The key to a wireframe’s usefulness is that it is a visual document.  Presumably it will be presented to one or more product stakeholders, and they will have the opportunity to review it and comment.  Having something visual to respond to is one of the easiest ways to generate ideas, and identify incomplete specifications.  A good assumption is that if a product’s requirements are incomplete, someone at the wireframe review will notice the gap by responding in the context of the visual presentation.  “Where is the Cancel button?  Oh…not in the requirements?  Well it’s obvious that on this screen the user will need to be able to cancel, so we have to add that as a requirement.”

In this way, a wireframe can be an ever evolving document, which begins by starting the requirements conversation.  Of course ultimately, just prior to feature development, the wireframe should have all of the necessary specifics so that the developers can use it as a guide (along with the relevant user stories).

Q: What is the NewNet?

a) The increasing prevalence user-generated information on the Internet
b) Push-web triumphs over pull-web
c.) Social media
d) An attempt to sell subscriptions to Om Malik’s new “research” service

Answer: d. GigaOm Pro: Fresh Internet buzzwords, unsullied by the taint of the latest crash. Can I have my Web 2.0 back, please?

I’ve just come across Yahoo’s new home page, which features a clean streamlined look, the ability to add your favorite pages as links right on the homepage, and most interestingly, a module that gives you access to (a subset of) your Facebook account. This module, which appears when you hover your mouse over the Facebook link on the let hand side of the page, will–after sign in–open up your facebook friend feed right there on the Yahoo home page.
Apparently Facebook has been giving third party websites the ability to connect to their users via Facebook for 8 months now (through a set of API’s collectively called Facebook Connect). But the Yahoo home page is the most high profile example yet. This is certainly the first time I’ve come across it.

The benefits of Facebook connect Facebook is obvious. It’ll gather more information about its users, and become more ubiquitous within the wider web, as users remain connected to its platform even while not actually on the facebook.com.

Change has come to America, and so, too has it come to whitehouse.gov, the official website of the President of the United States.

One minute into the 44th Presidency, the website sports a radically new look (I’d love to hear how that was handled), and all the neccesary updates as a new administration moves in have already been made.   But the changes promise to be much more than cosmetic.  According to a statement on the White House Blog, Macon Phillips, the Director of New Media for the White House, “Millions of Americans have powered President Obama’s journey to the White House, many taking advantage of the internet to play a role in shaping our country’s future. WhiteHouse.gov is just the beginning of the new administration’s efforts to expand and deepen this online engagement.”

Efforts will be made so that whitehouse.gov “puts citizens first” through three main priorities.  Again, from the same statement:

“Communication — Americans are eager for information about the state of the economy, national security and a host of other issues. This site will feature timely and in-depth content meant to keep everyone up-to-date and educated. Check out the briefing room, keep tabs on the blog (RSS feed) and take a moment to sign up for e-mail updates from the President and his administration so you can be sure to know about major announcements and decisions.

Transparency — President Obama has committed to making his administration the most open and transparent in history, and WhiteHouse.gov will play a major role in delivering on that promise. The President’s executive orders and proclamations will be published for everyone to review, and that’s just the beginning of our efforts to provide a window for all Americans into the business of the government. You can also learn about some of the senior leadership in the new administration and about the President’s policy priorities.

Participation — President Obama started his career as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago, where he saw firsthand what people can do when they come together for a common cause. Citizen participation will be a priority for the Administration, and the internet will play an important role in that. One significant addition to WhiteHouse.gov reflects a campaign promise from the President: we will publish all non-emergency legislation to the website for five days, and allow the public to review and comment before the President signs it.”
Read the full statement

I may have visited whitehouse.gov three or four times in my life, but I’ll be back quite a bit after reading this, excited and hopeful about the ways that the new administration will use technology to connect to the people.

Google is at it again. Entire industries have sprung up around their search engine, adwords/adsense universe, and now they are set to do the same thing with healthcare data.

One of the major barriers to entry for companies offering services around processing healthcare data has been access to data. Who has the data? Typically the insurance companies. At least they have it in the kind of quantities that makes doing serious data analysis worthwhile. Managed care organizations are in second place, but from there you get to piddling amounts quickly. As you move from the heavily consolidated payer end of the industry to the heavily fragmented provider end, the comprehensive data view of the patient is balkanized to the point of uselessness.

This data problem even effects the valuation of companies. I’ve seen healthcare analytics companies that provide services to hospitals and clinics valued at less than $10 million, while another company that provides the exact same services to insurance firms is valued at ten times that price. Here, as in all things, follow the money.

I spent a lot of time at Web 2.0 Expo session-hopping – and a lot more time hanging in the speaker’s lounge fine-tuning my own talk. That’s the curse of going on the last day. You can’t fully enjoy the rest of the conference. That said, I had pretty strong reactions to some of the keynotes. The big platform announcements from Microsoft (Live Mesh) and Yahoo (SearchMonkey plus), were OK, but I was most struck by author Jonathan Zittrain and Mozilla exec Mitchell Baker.

Of each particular thing ask: What is it in itself, what is its nature?

– Marcus Aurelius

We get asked quite often to convert Web 1.0 applications into Web 2.0 applications. We do it so often that we’ve developed tools, written frameworks, published articles and whitepapers and given conference talks on the topic.

So far, there are and remain three different approaches:

1. The Christmas Tree Approach – decorate an application with lots of Ajax widgets.
2. The Reboot – reengineer your application from scratch.
3. The Resurfacing – leverage the MVC nature of your application by turning your controllers into web services, your views from HTML into XML or JSON, and deploying a single page JavaScript client to access your new backend.

Which one to chose? That depends on what kind of application you have. Is it a Web 2.0 application masquerading as a Web 1.0 application, or is it really a rather dull Web 1.0 application that you need to tart up with a few widgets?

I launched this blog just a little over two years ago, on March 21st, 2006. Appropriately enough, my first post was about User Experience (UXD) and Ajax. The blog has come a long way since then — we’ve added another full-time blogger (Brain Dillard), published nearly 700 articles of original Ajax and Agile related content, and covered the major new innovations in Ajax and Web 2.0 — but in many ways Ajax technology is still struggling with the same issues that I wrote about back then:

As it stands, Ajax is still in its infancy (or in its wild west phase — pick your metaphor), and Bill’s simple three part “patterns” are emblematic of this.

OK, onwards in our effort to convert Web 1.0 apps to Web 2.0. Today we’ll focus on some of the differences between Web 1.0 and 2.0 from the user experience perspective. When we think about our web interface, we usually think about the links, forms and controls we’ve put in place. But the reality is that often things go wrong with our app — sometimes network problems, system problems or application errors — and we get errors like 404 or 503, or a “page did not load.” How does the user respond to these issues?

Usually they make use of the Stop, Reload, Back and Forward buttons. Most times application developers see the use of these browser buttons as a problem, to be mitigated (“Please don’t submit this form twice…”; “Don’t use the back button or your order will be submitted twice…”). If you think about it a little more carefully, you’ll find that these buttons form a vital safety net for web applications, without which users would be crying in frustration at the “Unable to connect…” pages and spinning cursors that have brought your app to a halt.