My old friends Joe Jonston and Christian Saylor - both of Universal Mind - have been working on an AIR application called AIRFare that is a flight and hotel lookup app using data services from Kayak. Joe has been knee deep into the Experience design of the application and created a couple of videos of his progress:
You can also follow Joe's progress at his blog at www.merhl.com
I've been working on a very cool little application at work over the past few days. It is a mapping application leveraging the Yahoo! AS3 mapping API in Flex 3. We needed an application to be able to view a regional snapshot of our account activity over a given time period. We new the following data:
First had to get the geocodes for all the addresses but found plenty of places to do that. So, here we are with a spreadsheet of almost 5,000 people and couldn't find an easy to use online application to display them.
Enter Flex.
I built the application in Flex 3 using Yahoo!'s api. It was a fairly easy workflow with the Yahoo! classes. Although, I would have liked to have seen the code for the classes from Yahoo! to see how some things were put together that I was extending. The plotting of the points was straightforward but kind of cluttered when you have so many of them in a small area.
Enter filtering.
I created a way to filter by general region of the globe, gender, age, and account value. This helped to narrow down the field of view quite a bit, but there was no way to direct focus on a particular are of the map - no way to see all of the accounts in Chicago for example.
Enter Zones.
At any time you can drop a 'zone' on the map. What the zone does is aggregate the data in a given geographical radius from the center of the zone. This way, you can explore the details of an area and have a summary of what's going on in the area. The zone becomes active after it is dropped and moved or it's size adjusted.
After the completion of the web based app, I decided it would be valuable to create an AIR version. This way, the data could be swapped out for a new data set by simply selecting a new document. I used a tab deliminated text file for the data source but that could easily be swapped out for another format later. I was considering releasing it as a public application at some point and adding customization features like:
I've stumbled upon a very cool publication on web design and development. Its called WebDesigner and its published in England. It has some really great articles on how to execute the latest and greatest in web techniques. Most of the technology how-to's focus on Adobe products - Flash, Flex, Photoshop - but they also cover some Silverlight projects.
They have some great portfolio sections as well, showcasing some great designs across the web. You can check them out online at www.webdesignermag.co.uk I've been able to pick up copies on the newsstand at Barnes & Noble in the computer or art sections.
Well, another phase of my professional career is coming to an end - I resigned from Haworth on Monday. I'm currently working out my required 2 weeks notice and plan to start at my new job in March at Global Forex Trading (www.gftforex.com). I'll be heading up a sort of web R&D practice within the company doing what I like to do best - building cool shit! I'm very excited and plan to share more of my work here for anyone that cares.
Onward and upward!
I was fortunate enough to meet with Apple this past week on a trip to the Bay Area. In my visit I learned of the web application team and specifically the WebKit team within Apple. This is a dedicated team to developing and furthering the progress of the WebKit technology that forms the backbone of Apple's Safari browser, Mail client, and Apple's iPhone and iPod Touch browsers, among others.
One of the unique features of this group is the fact that it is one of the few open source teams within the Apple umbrella. They are working in the code base with developers from around the world driving the next versions of the products and technologies to be included in the WebKit open source project. Any of us can go to webkit.org to contribute to the project, download source code, or play with nightly builds. This is one place where we can actually see a 'product roadmap' for what Apple will be including in their products in the future.
Some of the cool features that we should be able to see in an early phase from the nightly builds are things like:
Joe Johnston (merhl.com), Christian Saylor (Mighty), Grant Carmichael (knoware) and I have been having some great conversations around the concept of Experience Design (XD) lately. Late last year, pretty much during the MAX 2007 conference in Chicago, I latched on to the XD conversation in full force. I hadn't realized it, or labeled it as such, but XD is what I've been doing for a couple of years now... nice to actually have a name for it - I've gotten sick of saying "oh, I do web stuff" when someone asks what I do :) The idea of interaction design or web architect always flies over the non-web person's noodle.
One of the struggles I've been having in wrapping my arms around the discipline, is where does it end? In print, once the piece comes off the press, your done. But in XD, the conversations continue to get more and more lofty. Initially, XD is focused on the user's interaction with the site/application/widget/etc. But this easily begins to transcend this easy to define 'web physical' realm into the oh-so-fuzzy realm of brand, consumer relationships, trust.
The building blocks of XD for the web - in my opinion - are founded on the physical and emotional touchpoints a person has with a web solution. This can manifest itself in the things that a normal rich internet development/design process would undertake:
But lately, I've been struggling on where to put the cap on the conversation. A great blog I follow at Adaptive Path pointed out how experience design is not about brand. In my reflection though, brand is the culmination of experience design. Brand, from the perspective of an organization is inside-out - where the organization is attempting to shape public perception based on it's messaging and externally facing tools. Brand, from the perspective of a consumer is outside-in - where my perception of what a company represents and how it engages its customers is based on the experience you've had with an organizations products and services. These 2 perspectives do not necessarily end at the same point - a cohesive brand - but they do end at the same general point - brand.
This is where I'm stuck. I'm not sure how to tie the loose ends together or if they should be tied at all. The conversation of experience design can be capped at the physical elements of the experience - graphic design, motion design, interface design, etc. Or, it can elevate to the level of the entirety of a brand.
The fact that I bought Apple stock at $19 (and sold it at $50 before the split... DAMMIT!) points to the value I held in Apple back in the day - my 'experience' with Apple products and services formed a personal brand experience with me that was valuable and made me purchase the stock. That experience was rooted all the way down to the icons and sounds in the OS and the little smiley face on start-up. Did the designers at Apple consider my perception and acceptance of this experience at this low level so many years ago? Was it a conscious effort to engage me to that degree or was it just creating something cool for coolness sake?
So my question is, where does an experience designer start and stop?
