While reading About Faces 3 by Alan Cooper, Robert Reimann, and Dave Cronin i began reflecting the information over the startup community.
The processes you get exposed to in the book, though aimed to the Interaction Designer / Information Architect, seem to be very useful to any product design process and seem to be very focusing when it comes to designing products from the ground up, as it is usually done with a startup.
Looking around the web for a one pager / cheat sheet of the books essence i drew a blank. there is a big void when it comes to interaction design.
So i will do my best to get this books essence in the shortest form i can to give the startup community a great guide for product design that requires less than the 600 pages in the book.
This will not replace reading the book if you want to get to the full depth of the interaction design, but it will be handy when you are limited on time and funds and want to get your product focused.
The book bundles together a few processes to create an aspiring for completeness process for creating a product.
When we think of a business about to create a product we let our thought roam in the realms of features/activities and functionality and in the look and feel of the product thinking about our users.
The reality is that we are not doing this in a methodological way and tend to try our luck more then fine tune the product before launch.
Most of us still approach the design of interfaces by asking, “What are the tasks?”.
The books takes us through the following processes

1. Goal-Directed Design
2. Implementation Models and Mental Models
3. Understanding Users
4. Modelling Users
5. Scenarios and Requirements
6. Framework and Refinement

I will try now to skim off the top of each of these and make some sense at the end.
Lets go

Goal-Directed Design
The first principle here is the Goals are not tasks, they are the end goals that the tasks lead to, the motivation for getting tasks done.
The main goal of a user is not to look stupid, keep that as one of the basic principles when you think of all the interaction of the user while using the system.
Most it products tend to:

• Make users feel stupid
• Cause users to make big mistakes
• Slow users down hampering performance
• Prevent fun and/or bore users

but how do we know what are the users goals?
User goals are not like tasks they change slowly, tasks and activities change often and relevant to context.
The way to find what are the goals are to do qualitative research understanding Why a user is performing the activity.

Goals will help later in the process to better understand the users as we model them into personas.
Implementation Model vs. Mental Model, You know how we always cry over software UI that it was “Developed by Developers”? a software like that was developed using the implementation model, thinking over the features from the developers perspective.
Mental model on the other hand is how a user perceive the experience, taking the car acceleration pedal for instance. the user needs to know nothing about the ignition or air intake to understand that pressing harder against the pedal will bring the car to higher speed, this is the mental model of the pedal.
Your users are one of these 3 groups

1. Beginners
2. Intermediate
3. Advanced

The biggest group out of the three is group 2, the intermediates, most beginners turn intermediate quickly and most of them stay like that and never get to the expert group they stay perpetual intermediates.
One thing to remember here is that users don’t use the product in a frequent thus forget how some of the knowledge they accumulated.
Software UI needs to cater to the biggest group while not harming the other group’s usability.
I recommend reading this section in the book (pages 42-48) as it is one of the toughest points you will have to deal with while designing the product.

Now the book goes into understanding the users where qualitative research is to be done to establish Personas and Goals.
The research that is described in the section requires the following:

• Stakeholder interviews
• Subject matter expert (SME) interviews
• User and customer interviews
• User observation/ethnographic field studies
• Literature review
• Product/prototype and competitive audits

When trying to create the initial product in a startup we do not have the means to facilitate such a research and thus will need to create some alternative method in order to acheive partial Personas and Goals.
Some simple solutions will be to look at the competition and find out who of our friends/family/coworkers is using it, observer them and interview them.
If there are no competitors in the space we might be able to get some information from the same people while asking them to imagine the software.

When asking questions about a desired product use the guidance “Imaging that the software is magic” this will get you some ineresting responses.

If we have non of these we can try imagining what are users will be and give them qualities, we can use persona cards like organizational zoo to focus you on the type of persona’s and their associated behavioral attributes.

When approaching the personas definition (hypothesis) ask the following questions

• What different sorts of people might use this product?
• How might their needs and behaviors vary?
• What ranges of behavior and types of environments need to be explored?

When thinking about a persona we need to cover all aspects of the product usage.
Its nice when entering content is smooth and easy to a first grader but when the IT guy needs to create an export of that content and make it available to in the new upgrdaded environment we need to think of him too. He is a persona using the product.
In order to differentiate the Content Editor from an IT administrator we need to specify roles in the system usage. a role is constructed from a given number of tasks needed to be completed successfully with the system

Up to now we have a very flat persona with a Role and some character specifications but we need the persona to get some depth,
The depth of the usage is what we are more interested in as oppose to the theological thought that user might have, though they can indicate user behaviour.

The 3 measurement vectors are Frequency, Desire and Motivation.
Frequency represents the users frequency in usage of the feature.
Desire represent the will to do tha action.
Motivation is the reason behind the action, this could potentially be nowhere near the actions result.

So now you know more about the persona and its goals for some of the usage of the system.

From here the book will go into the methods of research which is valuble in the standard company improving product scanario, but has less relation to a startup before the first alfa, you can purchase the book by then with some funding on the table.

image curtesy of Design and Technology student

Software vendors to the enterprise spectrum of companies seem huge and daunting, and they are, unfortunately for them it means they are too big to wish to notice smaller tasks or out of the core product expansions.
The way product vendors work is in high scale mode filtering the noise to get the important stuff, and they are correct about working this way, there are too many people involved in projects to be able to notice every single complaint and request.
But this filtering also opens the market to the smaller players,
Imaging a little kid eating a cracker, the main bites go in but there are lots of crums left over. our Enterprise software vendor is probably more efficiant but there are still opportunities.
The opportunities can be vast and have many shapes and forms but they are there.
Some of the opportunities i am expose to are in the partnership and expertise areas.

1. Complete solutions.
2. Supplement software.
3. Bridging Gaps between solutions.
4. Supplementary products and solutions.

These have been the gaps always you are probably saying.
You are right, but these days the vendors had to cut most of their people to keep afloat at the recession.
Usually the first to go are the people interacting with clients since no clients paid their salary they became a liability.
The clients had their own issues and have released their people, thus in greater need for solutions or services.
The outcome from these actions is an increase in these gaps and many opportunities are not addressed due to the understaffing .

But you don’t want to be another “Partner” or a service provider do you?
If you do then go and do that and stop wasting your time, you need to make the most of now since partners always stuff up and get the boot.
If you don, you need to identify the opportunity in creating supplementary products or services.
There are 4 scenarios to these gaps.

1. The vendor is missing completely the market needs and is there only because he was there or he is the safest bet (no one got fires for buying IBM).
2. The vendors product is ok but there are a lot of features and twaking to do to get it working.
3. The vendor product is great but there are some features and integration points missing.
4. The vendor product is perfect. there is side business to be made.

The Vendor is missing the market needs completely, this one is simple, make a product that is better in the market vertical you found the problem in and make it hard for other partners to penetrate.
The vendors product is OK, look at how you can create installation processes, visual configuration aids, addons and plugins that make the product complete, try to start within a vertical.
The vendors product is great or perfect leaves you less to deal with the product and more to enhance it, create enhancements or complimentary products like tracking and recommendations.

There are a few more unexplored solutions like hosting of major Enterprise products and reselling them as a hosted service, WCM market will be a good starting point.

In my mind there are so many points where you can become a player in the Enterprise market and be successful because you are small and very hungry.
The barriers of entry have been dropped due to the wish to lower the cost of external resources and current project, this is the best time to act.

The new Apple iPad was titled the new way to produce content.
But that seemed a bit far fetch considering the configuration and hardware spec, no camera for instance.
Everyone quickly realized that this tool is for consuming content, lots of types of rich media will be the biggest segment.
Yes it has the potential of a book reader but lets face it, LED display is not good for book reading its good for movie watching.
looking at all the information around i think we missed the big picture.
Apple business path is missing in most of the talks and the focus is on the purchasers and what will you be able to do with iPad or the ways it will be delivered.
Apple in my opinion is looking for the new iPhone trick.
if you are not aware of the iPhone trick i will elaborate a bit, when the iPhone came out Apple bundled it with a store, the application store, this step was based on the success of the iTunes store when the iPod ruled the world.
The business move was to diminish the telephones company to a mere pipe supplying Apples content to the Apple hardware, the traditional way was that the phone company sold you the content and not the phone manufacturer. Apple turn the table and AT&T were pissed, they now lost a big margin and have to upgrade the hardware to support the traffic, but they got loads of money for that data traffic.

Nokia tried and failed the iPhone trick with the Nokia Store, it never soared to the heights of the App Store, my quick guess is that they were not strict about the production of software and the location of its sales to their store like Apple did and that doomed the store as useless.

iPad is looking like the second try of Apple over the Networks, after the failure of the Apple TV Steve jobs probably wondered how to get his way in controlling another retail channel.
iTunes is a great platform to support the purcahse/rental of movies but it never had the hardware counterpart to elevate it up to the level of a network.
There were always movies/tv shows to be purchased out of the iTunes store but this has never been a big segment of the store.
last year apple sold around 3 billion songs compared with the mere 5 million videos.

iPad will change this, its the best video mobile device, big 9.7 inches LED backlit display, 10 hours of watching video and 16-64GB of storage.
The video interface is great.
The price is reasonable.
What else can you wish for?

You probably could but this is not the place… talk to Steve and while you at it remind him the MacBook Pro update.

Lets hope that the networks wont find out that most of their grays anatomy/desperate housewifes fans got the iPad and are buying the show from the iTunes Store now and loving it.

A few things to make this a true success will be to introduce subscriptions to the iTunes store like you have in your local cable company. this will be the nail in the coffin for both the networks and the Tivos out there.

This second take on the networks makes AT&T smile ( scream is more like it ), Steve Jobs promise for more traffic then they can dream of is just around the corner.

I have to also correct my standing over the iPad, i though this is another MacBook Air flop but i think its not going to be that.
As for the flash support, enough was said but my 2c on the subject are that its not relevant for a media tablet and that the performance/heat that will be produced by supporting flash will render te iPad useless. taking into an affect the business plan i just thought of i think it makes sense not to support flash as it is not going to support the business.

There is another option for the video distribution and that is YouTube with a premium flavor, it could happen though apple are too centric to let it happen.

I have joined the crowd and bashed the iPad on my twitter, i guess i had to let off the steam for the silence in the MacBook Pro front.
I was waiting for a new release to get me one but i guess i will get it later if at all.
Back to the iPad.
The iPad is funny, at first look it resembles a big iPod touch with some 3G voodoo.
Its a bit fragile looking were my initial thoughts, this will be only tested through time but i am sure to get, if they ever manufacture, the incase rubber back ontop the carrying case.
Just incase it decides to jump out of my hands.

The ipad in my opinion has great opportunity for a few people.
Its simple enough to get my grandma on a computer and use facebook.
Its robust enough to enable a friend roaming the country to control his server farm through logMeIn.
its good enough to entertain my boy for hours.
its screen is god enough to read an ebook or the news, not for hours though.

In summery it seems that iPad is good enough to do most of the tasks, in a good price point.
The pricing at first seems to be aiming at the kindle, but i think it is not. its priced to hit the netbook and atom machines.

I do fail to see people watching videos with iPad on the train in rush hour. the ips is great for sharing with friends but not with your cellmates on the train, nor that the size helps to stand holding it in one hand while been pushed.
But home/park/coffee/flight/sitting in the office that is where it will rule.

The other market which will be the greatest is the iPod users looking at shelling 150$ more to get the bigger screened iPod.

Multitasking is a big issue and my guess is that it will deter youngsters from moving away fro iphone as it only disconnects them from their friends.
So its not going to be a y-gen success in my opinion.
Some thing about not having multitasking makes me ponder about the HP slate, how will it affect the market amongst the y-gens and tech savvy people.

Will i get one? i dont think so, i got the kindle iPhone app to read books and i use it allot, my needs are for a much stronger processing warehouse that will be capable running my experiments.

Steve will you give me the i7 MBP please? as much as i like the iPad i have no use for it at the moment.
Please….

Looking at the news it seems that all parts of the Australian society are crying against this proposal to make Australia the first modern country in the world who stepped back from democracy.
The proposal has been so tightly coupled to child abuse that when earlier tonight an article from computer world citing Child protection group Save the children claiming this effort is futile and money is better off some where it will make a difference blew the whole argument out of the window.

One of the best arguments is one that technology people raise allot

The filter could lull parents into a false sense of security, thinking that it is working, but we know hackers are always ahead of those filtering technologies

but coming from a non tech sector makes you believe that other people are aware of this Australian mockery and the joke we have become as a nation.

It saddens me to see that the news reports are short and futile in engaging the members of the parliament in explaining why this is even supported, if it is at all.

If you are interested in a more simpelton explenation of the initiative look here at whirlpool

Ways you can act immidiattly
Rob Manson has his old HTML page updated, you can twit and send an email to the minister.

Sign up for the GetUp campaign and register

Educate the peope around you who are not tech savvy

Help @Lozz to create his education campaign.

Contact your representatives , you want to know who they are? go to geo2gov.com.au and find out who they are (Thanks to Adam).

Yesterday the Australian government announced it will go ahead with its plans to mandate the Australian ISP’s to censure the internet based on a black list.
The green light was given after a small scale a “live” field pilot has been done with a few ISP’s, most of them small, on a very small segment of the list (1000 sites) and with marginally leagal techniques including DNS poisoning.
The Report of the modest pilot looks like it was designed to pass.
The issues that came up from the report pretty quickly are

• Who is controlling the black list?
• How is the blocking going to be done?
• How much slower will our slow internet go
• What is the carbon footprint of an effort like this

I agree with the idea of protection against the dangers that lurk on the internet and the need to protect our children from these but have a bit of a problem with the implementation.
This implementation is insufficient in the best scenario and is missing the point of protecting our children.
This tool is not selective and blocks things in a generalised manor rather than enabling the public to select whether they want or don���t want this to be present.
Why do people without kids need to be filtered?
Will you block facebook if a child rapist use it to seduce kids? will you block digg if some sort of illegal content raises to the top (as it did with the DVD encryption code)?
What is the benefit of a blockage if it is not going to stop me from getting my content elsewhere? or through different networks like Tor?

But beyond the technicalities the mere introduction of an idea like this in a modern country is quite disturbing and feels not right. The width of the blockage and the nature of it are not yet heard of in a modern society and have been noticed by Google as problematic also

Some limits, like child pornography, are obvious. No Australian wants that to be available ��� and we agree. Google, like many other Internet companies, has a global, all-product ban against child sexual abuse material and we filter out this content from our search results. But moving to a mandatory ISP filtering regime with a scope that goes well beyond such material is heavy handed and can raise genuine questions about restrictions on access to information.

Also noted is the EFA technical approach to the success of the filtering

There are a few things that need to be done to make this filtering a true solution but i think the biggest one is to give the people the ability to choose.
Sen. Conroy needs to change his tome and give the option to citizens and residents who wish to filter their network to do so for free through the ISP. and no grants for the ISP’s to enable extra content filtering while charging clients (as described in the FAQ)

The Government will also establish a grants program to encourage and assist ISPs to offer additional filtering services on a commercial basis for those families that wish to have a wider range of material filtered

There also should be an open list of blocked sites that will be available freely through the government sites.
There should be a process where you can specify wrong doings/additions in the list and mandate them to be corrected/added.
This will be a dignify the solution make it a good solution for the people by the people and not an undemocratic secret service Stalinized solution.

But i have a gut feel this is all a sham to get the games rating slipped through the radar. the new scheme for the games is bizarre and does not match, with the film and tv rating, in turn lets kids over 15 to see a movie that they cant play the game of it later since its too gory/violent/sexy/etc.
Time will tell if i am on the right track or not.

Working on the Omm Writer, is it that productive? it seems to disable all of the interface and allow you to look only at the written word.
At first i did not believe how this could influence my work.
But this trial got me to believe that my work can improve!
Seen the words hand from the emptiness on a screen lets you concentrate on the words.
The twitch sound while you type makes you want to type faster. and the ability to remove words with no punishments using the backspace really makes the process, well, joyfull.
I am experiancing sensation of happiness and joy. some thing not related to writing usually.
The interface is easy to use and simple.
Saving the file as text gives it vast availability.
May be i should try writing code here.

string yuval=”happy”;

This is a thought. why not make our development environment like this… why not actually?
why?

So our bosses wont be chasing us with questions over our actions on the screen? no they will learn to understand and will be avid users after they try it.
Happy did i mention? in a calm way…

Try OmmWriter, its free.
p.s. Dont change the typing sound to No. 2. just because yuva.equals(“happy”) = false.

First and fore most i want to thank the organizers and the participants for an inspiring and motivating day.
I have arrived late to the event and only was through the second half of the day but got very good presenters and some interesting people who have put their heart and information out for the others to comment and help out.
The day was great and i dont want to restate the info already typed here, and if you were in the Startup BarCamp you are welcomed to put your notes up the wki page.
What i want to reffer to was my suggestion to the next Startup BarCamp.
The question asked was what do you want to have in the next Startup BarCamp, a predefined agenda or in the tradition of BarCamps a fluid on the spot agenda.
My suggestion was to make it a semi fluid agenda holding spots for subjects and letting presenters present in a fluid manner inside the time slots i.e.

• 10:00am-11:00pm Investor Relations
• 10:00am-11:00pm Idea growing
• 12:00pm-1:00pm Lunch
• 1:00pm-3:00pm How we did it
• etc.

This will give the people a more coherent way of knowing what to attend and when to wake up.
But i am now thinking that bar camp with all the intensity and fluidity needs to stay fully fluid.
The best example was the Pitch Your Idea session that took more time then most of the presos and was helpful to every one in the room.
So what is your take on this?
[poll id="2"]

Imagine you are a CEO of a medium company, or you might even be one, and you have chosen your Enterprise 2.0 platform, implemented it and trained every employee in the company to use it.

So you have your Wikies and Forums set up.

All of your groups have access and manage their content in the sysem.

You see usage growing in the company.

“All is good”, you think to yourself, i can tell the board we have succeeded and that benefits will be seen in the immediate future.

But nothing happens.
You start to question the reasons, but all you see is a good usage rate and lots of content.
What is wrong?

From my experiance in the last few months i have a few reasons.
First and foremost is that the initial flame is gone, your employees are not eager to play since the interest in the content has fallen and the content that was there is not as updated any more.
The second is that this is a business that has ranks not an open source project where you have respect, not everything is documented.
But these are all obvious things we all know about, whats your new pain-point Yuval?
I was just exposed to a problem in the way the content is managed, i have a client where he has 2 IT departments under different titles. they both use the same software for their Enterprise 2.0 solutions but they are separated by a security border and thus oblivious to the content of the other group.
They have no way of using the content that the other group have written even if it is most relevant.
Both of the groups use our software and use the same infrastructure, so they encounter the same problems and could use each other solutions.
But they have no exposure to that so they need to go and ask people, that have done the same 6-12 months ago, if they have seen this or that behavior.
Guess what, no one can remember so they either search the wiki for you or say they didn’t encounter it.

This is a major hidden problem especially with things that are cross deparmental.
But when is it safe to share and when is it not? i guess we are missing some sort of a rule of thumb here.
My guess is that more then 80% of the information is safe, very safe to go across departments to the whole company.
But who makes the decision? who is the person in charge?
The contributor is not capable of making the decision himself some times and needs to consult, who governs this?
I have seen a few debates going sour, and was introduced to this article onhow blogs solve the inter departmental communication gap but that is a singular solution to a problem in multiple communication channels.

Let the discussion begin!
P.S. if we get a good solution i am going to push it to the client as a pilot.

Its been a great weekend in OpenAustralia Hackfest, first let me thank the organizers who have done an amazing job, Matthew Landauer, Alan Noble, Pamela Fox, Henare Degan and Tim Ansell who organized the event. And a special thanks to our amazing sponsorers Google who gave us the space, the food and the great prizes.
A big get well out to Rob Manson, getting sick in the first day and missing out. Hope he gets better soon.
There were some great hacking done on goverment data and some nice things that have not matured to applications during the weekend.

There is one thing, that keeps blinking at the back of my mind.

Is the crowd we are serving the data ready?
Will they be able to use the interface we give them?

It seems there is a gap, a big gap, between the technology world and the political realm. there is always a gap, i was not aware of how deep it is. Reading License to Drive in the Digital Economy exposed me to a troubling figure, a quater of the people in this land are social web illiterate,

“27% of those surveyed aged 14 and over were not currently participating online. These statistics give some indication that about a quarter of those surveyed would struggle to become active participants in the digital economy.”

This poses a big question about utilization of the Government 2. and the usefulness of these tools.
It seems that the information gathered from these types of applications will be biased towards the more capable social layers, thus creating a worse situation to the social segments not represented.
What shell we do?

How can you enable all the crowd to be part of this participation age?
This is a big questions that got some mentioning

My take is that we need to child proof our applications and match them to a crowd of a non technical and non social aware type.
As we develop our systems we should be able to get the information to the users in the most easy to follow and simple to understand thus making it available to all users of the web.
Keep your interfaces accessible, make them conform to WCAG 2.0, if you are not a front end developer DON’T develop the front end.

There was a cry from Tim Ansell, during free hacking sessions and later in the lightning sessions, to find any one who can prettify his interface.

Do the same, there are allot of people that are very capable and would love to do so.

May the web be with you.