Challis Hodge’s UXblog

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Now is the Time to Spend
Here’s how you can use technology to do more with what you already have.

In the last few years big, expensive projects such as CRM, e-commerce and ERP were the order of the day. Today, IT executives are looking at budget cuts! A recent study from Stamford, Conn.-based Meta Group projects that total technology spending will decrease by 2 percent in 2002, compared with an 8 percent increase in 2001. So here are five technology investments that can save money with what you already have.

1. Be a bandwidth miser.
2. Manage your desktop smarter
3. Pinch pennies with network policies
4. Get stingy with your storage
5. Scrooge it up with your ISPs

Sometimes the Obvious Can Be So Eloquent
Tim Salam wrote on the CHI-WEB ACM SIGCHI mailing list:

“I got tired of explaining to clients and others that I can perform usability work…oh, and I’m an information architect primarily…oh, but when I combine the two like I did on a huge project last year, I was more like an interaction designer…blah blah blah.

Now it’s like this:

ME: “I’m an experience designer.”
THEM: “Oh. What is that?”
ME: “Well, I help develop web-based applications by ensuring the product is well organized, scalable and easy to use. It’s called experience design because these aspects figure heavily into the user’s experience of a product.”
THEM: “Oh I see…that’s interesting.”"

As software and Internet have evolved, proliferated, converged and migrated toward ubiquity, so too has the need for expertise to weave technology into life and work has evolved and grown to meet demand.

Following is a suggested model describing a continuum of roles necessary to solve design problems at the intersection of people and interactive technologies.

The combination of these roles in practice is often described as Experience Design. The result of their combined effort is likewise referred to as the User Experience.

Information Design
Concerned with the categorization and structure of information

Interface Design
Concerned with creating controls to make use of structured information

Interaction Design
Concerned with human interaction with controls over time

Immersion Design
Concerned with human interaction in context of use

Hijacking the Brain Circuits With a Nickel Slot Machine
Recent findings challenge the notion that people always make conscious choices about what they want and how to obtain it. In fact neuroscientists say much of what happens in the brain goes on outside of conscious awareness.

Neuroscientists have uncovered a common thread between compulsive gambling, attendance at sporting events, vulnerability to telephone scams and exuberant investing in the stock market based on rewards.

“Such behaviors, they say, rely on brain circuits that evolved to help animals assess rewards important to their survival, like food and sex.”

Apparently those same circuits are used by the human brain to assess a variety of social rewards from investment income to surprise home runs at the bottom of the ninth. They also found that the brain systems that detect and evaluate such rewards generally operate outside of conscious awareness.

“In navigating the world and deciding what is rewarding, humans are closer to zombies than sentient beings much of the time.”

Manipulative Sales Techniques?

“Dear Amazon.com Customer,
In case you weren’t aware, we wanted to let you know that any items that have been in the “To Buy Now” section of your Shopping Cart for 90 days will soon be cleared and put back on our virtual shelves. (We round up idle carts occasionally to keep our e-aisles neat and tidy.) But don’t worry–you still have time to check out any items you’d like from your cart:”

ThinkCycle: Collaborative Open Source Design
I’ve just discovered ThinkCycle, an academic non-profit initiative, developed and operated by a group of doctoral students at the MIT Media Lab. The concept is really exciting. Actually making use of the database and captured knowledge could pose an interesting challenge as it grows and evolves. There are future plans for a Temporal Design Journal that would create an historical graphic representation of contributions, design rational, peer commentary, alternative paths and more.

As described by the team:
“The Internet allows us to link millions of people worldwide and solve computationally intensive problems by using thousands of computers (e.g., distributed.net or SETI@home). Could one develop an analogous method of using the creative thinkcycles of people everywhere to work on global design challenges? ThinkCycle is an academic, non-profit initiative engaged in supporting distributed collaboration towards design challenges among underserved communities and the environment. ThinkCycle seeks to create a culture of open-source design innovation, with ongoing collaboration among individuals, communities and organizations around the world.”

See the following paper for more information:
ThinkCycle: Sharing Distributed Design Knowledge for Open Collaborative Design
by Nitin Sawhney, Saul Griffith, Yael Maguire and Timothy Prestero� : MIT Media Laboratory and MIT Ocean Engineering

Abstract: In this paper, we propose an Open Collaborative Design approach for distributed engineering design. ThinkCycle is a student-led MIT initiative to create a culture of collaborative design innovation among distributed communities in critical problem domains. As part of the initiative we have developed a means for distributed participants to capture ongoing challenges, evolving design solutions, rationale, peer reviews and intellectual contributions within a searchable and cross-referenced online platform.

Al Gore Invented the Internet and British Telecom Invented the Hyperlink
British Telecom has taken its case to U.S. federal court claiming that it developed and holds a patent for the hyperlink technology now used to surf the Web. BT’s patent was filed in the United States in 1976 and granted in 1989. BT claims it forgot about the patent until last summer, when it was unearthed in what the company said was a routine update of its 15,000 global patents in the summer of 2000. Ooooops!