himalia.net | community blogs

Please, update your feed to point to http://feeds.feedburner.com/leovernazza.

I also categorized all my old posts and added a "Labels" menu on the right pane.

I would like to put it as a tag cloud but I will need to fight against Blogger or move to another publisher.

(It's not so easy when you are publishing via FTP from Blogger as I am... probably I should change something there)

Labels: Blog Update

# posted by leovernazza : 9/27/2007 02:01:00 AM  0 comments links to this post

Probably, you have read the Marc Andreessen' post about the three kinds of platforms, and the interesting answer from Joshua Allen. If you don't, I recommend both.

First, I don't believe Marc Andreessen is using his argument to advertise Ning. It makes no sense, he doesn't need it. From my point of view, he has an obviously strong conviction about where the platforms should go, and that is the reason why he founded it.

He proposes basically two things: something can be called a platform if you can program it; and that you can classify all the platforms in three levels depending on where the code runs (remote code that uses an API to communicate with the platform, a plugin attached to the platform, an application inside of the platform).

Then, Joshua responded that his analysis has some problems because the data is the platform, not the software. That is clearly part of the vision of Tim Berners-Lee for the semantic web.

But, my question is: is data enough?

I don't think so. I think we need a Marc Andreessen' style platform to make the Joshua's data accessible in a massive and new way for everyone, something very close to the Strategy Letter IV that Joel wrote a few days ago. With that conviction I founded Himalia two years ago, to give the developers something they can program to give their users much more data available, in an easy and interoperable way. This is a very long way, but I am convinced that it is where we should go, because we have the technology to do that.

(*) I added this post to my software redefinition series, What Is A X?. We need to rethink many of the definition of the main concept of our still young industry.

Labels: Himalia, Platform, Software redefinition series, Technology

# posted by leovernazza : 9/20/2007 03:49:00 PM  0 comments links to this post

I get very frustrated using the LAN entertainment system because of a stupid failure in the design of its Navigation Model. I want to share it with you, because little things like this are the ones that make the difference between great and bad experiences. In this case, the difference between entertainment and a post with bad-publicity for the company ;)

Interaction with the entertainment system.

I was just looking for some music to help me overtake the 11-hours flight from Los Angeles to Santiago, so I turned on the individual entertainment system I had in front of me. It presented a friendly menu where I selected Audio and then Library. Then it showed an index of categories, and the albums by category at the right pane. As the display wasn't too big (around 10'') the right pane just presented 6 albums, and you had to use the page controls to explore each category in depth. I selected a Massive Attack album that was in the 13th (of 24) page, so, I had to pass 12 pages...

Suggestion #1: The average category had 10 pages and the only way of exploring them was just with a next/previous page control. A scrollbar was best suited for that case (a user that knows where is going can move faster); other solution could be to add a page index (like the one in the Google result page).

But I couldn't listen to the music because after my choice I received a "This selection is currently unavailable. Try again later" error message. 

Rule #1: Be proactive; don't wait for the selection to show the "unavailable" message. If you can, remove (or disable) the unavailable elements before the user have to try them.

After such an imprecise error message I couldn't realize what the problem was, but anyway I was ready to try with another album. But for my surprise, after the message I had to start from scratch again because I was redirected to the Home screen!!! Why? Is this a kind of penalty for trying to listen to Massive Attack? Well... ok, I made the whole process again and selected the Jack Johnson's album In Between Dreams... but I had the same problem again. So, I desisted and continued with the book.

Rule #2: Never redirect your user to the home page unless there is no other choice. Try to conserve the context always.

It this case, the obvious decision is redirecting the user back to the album selection screen remembering the category and the page (that is, doing a good BACK). I didn't count the clicks I needed to get frustrated but they were surely around 30. In this case, 15 clicks in average each time you want to pick a song added to a intriguingly high response time... seems a little expensive for an application with a so bounded functionality.

Navigation Modes. Above is the suggested, below the current.

From my point of view, the problem that derived the current design of the system is obvious: it is a clear case of a stupidly-use-case-driven-application. I can see the analyst writing the Play Album Use Case: "...if I can't play the album, show error. Then, end".

Rule #3: Think always in the step after the end of a use case, both in success and failure scenarios.

Actually, this rule is the opportunistic link pattern put in other words. For instance, after you complete the buy process in Amazon, they provide you similar items to continue buying. The opposite is to present a "Thank you for buying in Amazon message" where the only choice for the user is to close the browser, that is what the entertainment system does.

There are many examples out there of stupidly-use-case-driven-applications, one that always surprised me during my university days was the Beadleship's site where you had to log into the system twice if you wanted to inscribe for two courses... the use case should be something like: the user select Inscriptions from the menu, then enters his user and password, then select the course, end.

Labels: airplane, Travel, Usability, Usability cookie

# posted by leovernazza : 9/09/2007 10:56:00 AM  1 comments links to this post