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The definition of a UX designer's role
UI Designer, UX Designer… pretty much the same, ha? If you are in UI/UX business, I would suggest you get acquainted with a short essay by Peter Merholz before writing UX Designer in your cv.
Totally agreed with Peter in a definition part, I would, never the less, express my concern about the actual role of UX Designer described there.
It looks like UX Designer becomes a “Tzar of Design & Production” that is not only involved but managing every bit of the process directly. Not sure if even Steve was that kind of person.
ACCORDING TO THE ESSAY, THE ROLE OF UX DESIGNER IS THE FOLLOWING:
- User Insights – agreed.
- Ideation and Concept Generation – absolutely.
- Experience strategy and vision – I would say Experience vision and strategy overview.
- Experience planning, Team Facilitation – here comes the tough part. It should be clear, that UX Designer is not a Development Manager, Project Manager, Team Lead & Agile couch all-in-one. Moreover, an attempt by UX Designer to lead Development Team could lead to a bloodily bad end.
- Oversight and coordination – yes, with overseeing dominating over coordination.
IMHO Peter is pretty accurate in the theoretical part, but a UX Designer’s “job description” needs to be defined in a way that would not overlap Project Management and Team Management. As a person with a vision, UX Designer, sure, plays a role of high importance, but it should not lead to micro-management. Good UX Designer would be a team driver, but not the one responsible for everything.
How to make Pocket design even better
Pocket (formally Read It Later) – is a great app for those who use to jump through everyday sources of information to screen out irrelevant, read important and mark others to read it later. With a new UI and iOS integration, it’s a must-have for techie iOS+Mac users. While using Safari plugin for a while I would like to offer some UX improvements there.
- Right after adding a page to a Pocket, make plugin icon change (ex.to red for 1s) to provide a user with app feedback. There’s no fun to click twice to check if it was successfully added.
- When a user clicks icon and Pocket DIV appears from the top, do not hide it until MouseOut.
- When a user clicks Add Tags button – SetFocus on the input field instead of forcing the user to make one more click.
There’s no rocket science in this. I hope an updated ver. of Pocket plugin would make this great app even better.
Skype UI updated. Now it’s bad, definitely.
I’ve been a long-time critic of Skype’s UI/UX. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not because I’m Skype hater, it’s cause I’m an active Skype user. Now with Skype v.6 we have been told about some “UI improvements”. What are these “improvements” about?
- Flattened icons
Don’t much different as it wasn’t an issue - Flattened application icon
A trendy move that doesn't improve usability - Facebook +IM integration
Yeah, Skype wants to know more about you - Chatting in multiple windows
That’s nice to have that feature back - Profile-picture picker doesn’t work
Sorry, no thanks for that - Recent images can’t be seen
The same
It seems like we should be grateful for these updates. But, what if Skype UX designers would be really interested in UI improvements? There is a room for that and, believe it or not, it wouldn’t take much effort to make a real improvement. If you wonder, it’s a long-time UI glitch – “offline” and “invisible” status icons. The problem there is that they look the same, while from a user perspective being offline is quite different than being invisible.
51 stars US Flag
As voters in Puerto Rico have supported a referendum to become a full US state, it may become a pain in the ass not only for the Congress as it would bring a whole bunch of political & economic issues. Consider the election system itself. OK, politicians will do their job. But, what about the Flag? How will it look like with a 51-stars on it? Here is a vision of a new 51-stars US Flag design. Your comments and opinions are welcomed.
Why do Apple fight against Flash
It's been a lot of buzzes why Apple neglects Flash support in its upcoming iPad. Most of them concern just processor eating. While no one view with a different angle.
Flash is a separate code, so it can be used to upload smth. It can be a renewed link and price for the item mentioned or just as simple as a completely new ad. Let's take a look at thousands of "How-to..." e-books. The every article describing best techniques often offers some stuff within a topic: from little low-cost handy-s to high-quality professional equipment.
As a publisher, you sell your paper book once and that's all the revenue you can get from it. Don't forget that you need to share it with Apple. While being able to embed flash ads in an e-book the publisher can possibly sell its banner places more than once, creating an e-book ad market. Sounds good, yeah? But not for Apple. From Apple's business model perspective Flash is not just a piece of code merely impossible to control, but a Trojan horse that steals ad share.
It's quite sure that it isn't just about Flash ads - an HTML / JS /... based ads are the same issues whatsoever. That's why I'm looking forward to getting my hands on iPad books and magazines to find if it will have a static "non-updateable" ads within.
iTunes 9 with a Home Sharing bug
These days Apple came with some new stuff. First of all, we all were happy to see Steve "vertical". Jobs has a liver transplant and he shoots a pipe that he's doing well.
Apple announced some new product updates: new iPods and new v.9 iTunes. Although it wasn't extreme new in core, new iTunes has some great improvements.
According to Apple's long-term play to became an Amazon within a multimedia market, the new iTunes provide customers with an iTunes LP (iTunes Extra) containing not only music, but a bunch of multimedia content (pictures, video add-ons, lyrics) that finally makes buying that pieces of aluminum, covered with plastic coming with paper inserts worthless. In its way, Apple is one of those who is real "green" and that's great.
Another iTunes improvement announced is a Home sharing, that allows sharing your iTunes stuff to up to 5 PCs (or, sure, Macs). Generally, it isn't something very special - previous iTunes versions allowed to share and play remotely iTunes content among PCs that are connected. The basic improvement is, actually, is the ability to copy that content, see and use playlists from another computer.
Unfortunately, here we came to a blot on a landscape - it's buggy. While trying to connect my two major PCs I've found Home Sharing disappearing just after turning it "on". Spending some time manipulating with different account settings the only result I've got is that now I work fine on a Tablet, but fail on a Desktop. Sure it should work properly, but in case iTunes Home Sharing has a bug, I wish it would fail in the opposite way. Well, Google search came with a bunch of posts claiming the same. Hope Apple will come with an iTunes bugfix ASAP.
There is some other stuff that should be noticed. The latest keynote became available at apple.com with a significant delay - all those who wanted to see it have already found it published by 3-rd party sites. Sure, it wasn't HD, it was ripped into pieces but it's all in the timing. Coming back to apple.com yesterday I finally found keynote announcement and tapped to play its HD version. Unfortunately, I've got the only sound with an on-screen QuickTime logo. Funny thing is that it is a brand new QuickTime that comes with iTunes 9.
It seems like Apple came with a buggy stuff. Just a tiny off topic - try to click "MacBook Pro 17'" at Apple's home page. Hope I'm the only person to get "Page Not Found". That's OK, I will go through it, sure, too. The only hope it will not become a rule for Apple, the company that I do sincerely like for its UI's and design, to be buggy in every aspect.
Contextual advertising in impending hyperinflation
It isn't a revelation that we will face the deepening financial crisis just in the near future. How would it affect contextual advertising?
No matter how strong your will to avoid all these "depression talks" and let it fix itself, it is clear that this does not happen. One of the most probable scenarios for the next two years of global financial crisis is hyperinflation. The rapid depreciation of the money will have a significant impact on the segment of contextual advertising.
Let's imagine that AdWords will use post-paid invoicing. In this case, the money Google get is no longer appropriate to the cost of services previously provided. Given that payments to publishers are to be made even later, this could be more or less all right, however, advertisers will try to delay the payment of bills, and Google's internal costs will rise steadily. At some point, Google will require replenishment of the deposit for the use of AdWords service.
The described situation makes use of contextual advertising (eg, AdWords-AdSense) unprofitable for an advertiser and, moreover, for a publisher. Large sites have a potential to solve it easily - they can sell their banner space to advertisers directly. Small sites will be in real trouble - hyperinflation will eat up the revenue of contextual advertising aggressively. Google will not be happy about losing its advertisers and publishers, too.
What could be the solution?
Either Google will develop its own or cooperate with an existing web instant payment system (smth. like PayPal) that will enable publishers to withdraw their earnings when they are needed, or the popularity of the AdSense publisher may drop dramatically.
There's one born every minute, so, it is likely that while Google will slow the car to change direction, a new player in the contextual advertising market will come. If it will offer webmasters the opportunity to withdraw the funds earned or alternatively will pay out on a daily basis through PayPal - it potentially could grab out a substantial market share of contextual advertising.
The time will show.
Stupid User Interfaces
Most of the stuff we use in our everyday life have some kind of interface to manipulate. Some are actually, handy and we do what we need don't even thinking about.
The other... Seems that I'll start collecting those funny things. The picture below is just an example of stupid user interface I've made a shot yesterday. I don't know what the guys were thinking about, BTW it cost me all I knew not to plug it out to see what would happen.
Next time I would probably do.
Life that affects web, web that affects life
Just within one week after the Iranian social network wave named "Facebook revolution", when the web caused a dramatic impact and quick succession of events in real life, we observe an opposite influence. The death of a pop star Michael Jackson affected the web and caused a slowdown through of innumerous users' activity.
Google, as a world leading search provider, indicated a "volcano" growth of searches containing "Michael Jackson" with its peak just in 2 hours after the news become public. The fair quantity of looking similar searches even caused an anti-spam security system to block that kind of searches, being suspected of fraud or automatic searches.
Among Google top-10 trends of June 25, 2009, four relate to Michael Jackson:
michael jackson died
michael jackson dead 2009
christian eyenga
jeff goldblum dead
la times
jeff goldblum
michael jackson heart attack
cardiac arrest
what did danielle do to dina
farrah death
Google wasn't the only site, affected, - according to BBC "traffic to the site at the time of Jackson's death was 72% higher than normal". The burst of activity in social networks lead to Twitter servers crash after 66,500 post updates related to Michael Jackson just within first 2-3 hours.
Internet giants like MSN, Yahoo, AOL, famous news-provider sites found themselves under attack of an incredible number of users hunger for new facts, pressing their browser's "reload" button.
Iran = "Facebook revolution"?
I share the opinion that Barack Obama was elected by the Internet. At the very moment, we can see development in Iran, that in the future may be called "Internet revolution", "Facebook revolution" or "Social networks revolution".
Cellphone captured amateur videos posted on Facebook and Youtube migrate to CNN and others air.
"We are getting new Iranian videos over the Internet constantly", "... the Iranian opposition leader left a message at his Facebook site telling he 'is ready for martyrdom' and calling for a national strike if he would be arrested"...
Hundreds of posts and videos on Twitter, Facebook and other kinds of social network sites, avalanche growing count of comments; thousands of people in different cities protesting, sharing their videos and pictures over the Internet;
Google added Farsi to its Translate service,
Facebook added Farsi version of the service and opened a special Iran site...
For the last 4 days of Iranian protests (according to Alexa rank) Facebook reached its historical traffic maximum. We have faced the evidence of Internet and social networks role in modern world. Iraq war was translated by TV, now - revolutions are made by the Internet.
Will the protests in Iran lead to the regime change or it will end up as a minority turmoil, but what is clear, is that Internet became one of the most (or even most) influential social media. I'm looking forward to reading researchers like "The role of Internet in Iran's 2009 revolution".
P.S. I'm not an expert in Iran's political life and not sure that Mousavi would be much more different (it's Iranian people choice), but, according to the pictures I see - it's more than just protests against voting fraud.
06/22/2009 add-on
In its evening report CNN talked about the role of Internet in Irans turmoil, naming it in different kind of "Facebook revolution", "Twitter revolution" or in general - "social networking revolution", quoting H.Clinton's "I wouldn't know a twitter from a tweeter, but apparently it is very important".