I am speaking next Monday at the 2007 ASIS&T Information Architecture Summit in Las Vegas.

My topic will be “Interaction Design Style“. It will be a highly visual romp through a variety of topic having to do with the concept of style and how it fits into the design of interactive systems:

• The definition of style.
• The history and meaning of the concept of “style”, across many disciplines including art, architecture, music, design, writing, and more. Style is not not just fashion!
• How a consciousness of style can and should fit into a user-centered design process.
• How style constrains the design process, through both the anxiety of influence and through the availability of overly easy solutions.
• How style inspires the design process, opening us to new ideas we might never have thought of.
• How style guides the design process through pattern libraries, best practices, and more.

I was inspired in part by Stewart Brand’s 2003 IA keynote speech, in which he dismissed style (and fashion, and art) as an ephemeral, superficial, and ultimately flimsy basis for design strategies, an assertion that rubbed me a little wrong. Lately this has come back to me because style, broadly defined, is not brushed aside at all in so many other worlds of design and development. It’s not a dirty word.

Maybe, I thought, there are in fact major stylistic drivers behind much of what interaction designers and information architects do, in the same way that style drives much of architecture, music, etc. Maybe we shouldn’t reject stylistic influences, but should instead embrace them.

I’m working feverishly to make the most thought-provoking and interesting 45 minutes I can craft. It’s not going to be a research paper nor will it be a case study — it will be something I hope will be at least a little entertaining and educational, but most importantly a little eye-opening and inspiring. There will be lots and lots of pretty pictures!

Monday at 9:30 in the “Mesquite Room”. I hope to see you there!

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You know who you are. You are my friends, colleagues, and clients. You’re really smart about how to use computers and stuff. You’re great people.

But I just can’t stand it when you put dates in your file names. Whether you put dashes between the numbers, use two- or four-digit years, I still can’t stand it.

There are sooo many problems with this technique. Let me count the ways: MORE…

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As a UI developer, I want to be an “early adopter” of as many new technologies and gizmos as possible. Even if they’re clunky, non-helpful, efficiency drain tools, I feel like it’s my obligation to be well-informed about the latest gadgets and websites. So I’m often downloading trial versions, and occasionally checking out a friend’s new gizmo to see what I think of it.

But simply looking at or playing around with a new high-tech product isn’t enough, though. To be a true “early adopter” you have to adopt – you have to integrate the new technology into your life, not just play around with a trial version for a few minutes to see how it feels.

The problem, though, is that so many new technologies turn out, after you’ve tried them out, to really suck, but it sometimes takes more than just a few minutes to figure that out. Sometimes only after using it for a few weeks do you realize that the gizmo actually makes your life more complicated, not less. Sometimes you may not ever realize it at all, and find yourself stuck with a mobile phone or a productivity app that has made you less efficient than you were with the older technology. You might be using such harmful technology right now!

I remember when I used to fantasize that my PDA would replace my paper sketchbook. Ultimately I realized that simply writing stuff down on paper was far better for me. If it ain’t broke, don’t fit it.

Of course there is also the option of not having a particular kind of technology at all. Does having a mobile phone increase productivity? Some would argue that it’s not a necessity at all. Do you really need a whole separate desktop program to tell you the weather outside? If you work on a computer 10 hours a day anyway, does having a web browser on your phone really make your life any easier? Does registering for a new social bookmarking app really help you become a better, happier, more informed person?

Another way of thinking of this is by asking: Can a technology, once adopted, be subsequently eliminated from our lives? I can think of one example where it has happened: I do not, for example, use a wristwatch, and of the few people I know who do wear them, they think of them as jewelry.

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I haven’t posted in a little over a month. I’ve been telling myself that my first new post wouldn’t be a narcissistic navel-gazer about why I haven’t posted — that I would instead just get back to the business of writing posts about real things, starting where I left off as if there were no big missing gap. I figured I would resume by gradually talking about all the stuff that’s happened in the last 4 weeks, one day at a time, starting with something awesome.

But upon reflection I realized that it would be best to just do it all in one post, to just list all the stuff that’s happened in this one month of my life. By writing about a dozen things at once I won’t have to pick which thing should be the first thing I write about, and that’s a big releif for me: The decision regarding my first new post is no small matter. As many procrastinators know, the longer you wait to deliver something, the more you think will be expected of you. It’s a sad, vicious circle: the longer you delay, the more work you think you need to do to compensate for the absence, and thus the longer your delay will be.

The funny thing is that I thought the list would be short, but as I started listing them I noticed that, hey, I did accomplish something after all:

• Did a lot of running in the early mornings and on weekends: I’m up to about 19 miles per week.
• Finished building my lovely wife Peggy’s professional web site: tinydiva.com
• Went to Thanksgiving dinner with Peggy’s family in Northern Virginia.
• Went to a close friend’s memorial service and really lost it.
• Visited a couple of good friends whom we haven’t hung out with in a long time — something we really will do more of.
• Marked Behavior’s 5-year anniversary!
• We launched a humongous e-commerce web site that has been essentially my primary project for most of the last year.
• Got closer to launching an amazing new cable TV network web site — should be any day now!
• Did some important new business development, helping to win two major and exciting new clients in Washington, D.C.
• Learned that I’ve been selected to run a panel at an upcoming web conference!
• Read one business book, one sci-fi novel, and two interaction design books.
• Did some long-delayed major household projects.
• Lost my sketchbook (I think).
• Kicked off a major new personal project for this site, but then put it on hold while I did all of the other stuff listed above.

And to top it all off, apparently I am Time Magazine’s Person of the Year!

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I am an extreme multitasker. I usually have at least fifteen windows open on my desktop at any given time, often as many as thirty. I usually have several Firefox windows open at once, too, each with a dozen or more active tabs with pages I either intend to read or need to use as a reference.

Of course, this degree of multitasking is unhealthy. For the most part, each window in front of me represents an unfinished task on my plate, taking up space on my desktop and nibbling away at CPU cycles. Some windows will just sit there for days, untouched and neglected.

At best, these piles of opened windows act as a kind of “to do” list for me, reminding me of my unfinished business. In fact, it’s a pretty safe bet that my goal each day is simply to close all the windows. Usually, however, the clutter just prevents me from finishing any one task by tempting me to revisit and make incremental changes to many other ones.

So whenever an application crashes on me and closes all of its windows or tabs, or even more dramatically when the whole computer crashes, it’s sometimes a blessing in disguise. It is like a splash of cold water to wake me up and force me to take stock of what was really important to get done — and to allow the less important stuff, and the wasteful stuff, to simply fall away and bubble to the top later on when it’s really important, according to a real plan.

I have over the years cultivated many good habits that make normal computer crashes (it’s sad that crashes can be considered “normal”) pretty harmless: I save often, and I save multiple versions of important documents. I even compose my comments for other peoples’ blogs using Outlook (which autosaves email drafts) before finally pasting them in the blog’s comment field. So when my computer crashes, it’s almost never disastrous for me at all. In fact, it’s usually quite nice. I usually gain more than I lose. Does that make me a sicko?

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Spammers are always coming up with new ideas for how to get by spam filters and new ways to fool people into thinking their messages require immediate reading. And these new ideas seem to come in waves, like fashion or style trends. For example, last week (and all in one day) I received about 50 spam emails (a full 20% of the spam I get daily) in the following vein:

Serious letter. You require to read.
Essential letter. You require to read.
Momentous letter. You must to read.
Grand message. You should to read.
Very important letter. You require to read.

And now, over the last 24 hours I’ve received the following spam subjects:

fw: Please do not come to work today
RE: No work tomorrow; Office closed
Fwd: Hey our boss got fired?
Fw: Hey are they starting layoffs yet?
fwd: Offices have been closed permanently

I can’t tell if these are attempting to exploit the recipients’ fear (of losing their jobs) or their laziness (by giving them hope that they can get a day off). But it makes me wonder: Is the public’s faith in the economy and/or their employers so bad that this type of spam is believable?

Has there been any formal marketing or demographic research into the typical “Spam Consumer/Victim”? I’d love to see that stuff — I’ll bet it’s extremely harsh reading.

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Behavior is the featured studio in the latest edition of Design Interact. It’s a nice short-and-sweet introduction to Behavior, showing the diversity of our work and providing a little of the feel of how we work on projects.

The profile includes some mini-interviews with me and my partners about some of the sites we’ve launched in the past year, including The Onion, ResortQuest, Odilon Redon (for the MoMA), Country Crock, and HBO.

As we approach our 5-year anniversary in a few months, and as we grow with more new faces and new clients, it’s nice to see ourselves through another set of eyes and to even feel a little proud of what we’ve accomplished.

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You can’t compensate for incompetance with prayer, luck, stubbornness, or waiting until your presidency is over, either. Demotivational poster from despair.com.

I read an article recently that pointed out that when members of Congress voted in 2003 to authorize Bush to invade Iraq, they were voting not just for war with Iraq, but specifically for the Bush Administration to manage and wage that war.

Most liberal hawks are willing to admit only that they made a mistake in trusting the president and his team to administer the invasion and occupation competently. … The New Republic’s Leon Wieseltier added, “I think that it is impossible, even for someone who supported the war, or especially for someone who did, not to feel very bitter about the way it has been conducted and the way it has been explained.”

Now, more than three years after “Mission Accomplished”, the Administration has proven itself to almost everyone regardless of party that they are incompetant at war management. In fact, they’ve not shown competance at much of anything big or important (except, of course, elections).

After the prescription-drug plan rollout stumble, the Katrina rescue fiasco, the lost trail for Osama bin Laden, and of course the actual Iraq War itself, this incompetance is now especially clear. But even back in 2003 it should already have been apparent to most observers (especially to liberal hawks) that the Bush Administration just wasn’t likely to do the job well.

This phenomenon struck me as something that web consultants deal with all the time. When we design web sites, we design them to be used by the end users and by our clients. If our clients use offshore programming teams to manage their IT services, if their web maintenance staff is lean and mean or even non-existent, if key content stakeholders lack basic computer skills, if they are stronger in one technology versus another — then it is our obligation as consultants to cater our recommendations to their particular strengths and their weaknesses. We cannot recommend an ambitous solution requiring a team of top-notch experts if the client simply doesn’t have the team to support it.

Just an observation… And, dear clients, please forgive the unfortunate parallel with the Bush Administration! You are far more competant at just about everything.

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TV snow, soon to join the record-needle scratch and the dial tone in technology oblivion.

It’s well-known that the entertainment industry has its own distinct and secret language. Variety magazine’s slanguage is infamous, in which “mitting” is applause, a “skein” is a TV series, an “oater” is a western, and, most confusing of all for a veteran Internet developer like me, the major TV networks are called “webs.”

I was in a meeting last week with some hard-core video people. No, they weren’t pornographers, rather they were video technology people who live and breathe video tech in all its myriad forms: broadcast, satellite feeds, microwaves, video tape, DVD, high-def, cable, streaming over the Internet, you name it.

They had their own jargon as well, beyond Varietyese. There were the countless technology acronyms and obscure formats, but there was also a hefty dose of outright code words for everyday familiar terms. They used the word “linear” to mean plain old “cable TV”, for example.

Most confusing of all was they way they used the term “broadband” whenever they were listing all of the different channels by which video can be delivered (as in “We can provide you with a feed via linear, [list of incomprehensible acronyms], broadband, you name it.”)

What did that mean? Is there some kind of broadband delivery channel that is distinct from dial-up channels?
MORE…

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It’s not bragging (in fact, it’s probably a little embarassing) for me to say that I am an expert user of Microsoft Word. I can do just about anything I want with it, and I understand most of Word’s idiosyncracies and tricks. Still, the UI has always seemed to get in my way. For example, there are a ton of buttons I never use — so for kicks I decided to see just how many.

Here’s the epicenter of MS Word’s toolbar, as it appears when you first install it:

Even at a glance I see a bunch of buttons that are complete mysteries to me. Remember, I am a self-professed Word expert. And I honestly have no idea what these buttons (in purple below) are used for. I’ve never used any of them.

I do know what these buttons (in red below) are supposed to do, but I’ve never used any of them. They’re almost all features I that can invoke either through keyboard shortcuts (for the tasks I do a thousand times a day) or through menus (for those I do twice a day or less).

These buttons (in green below) are the only buttons I ever use. I use the second row of formatting options all the time because they are convenient and absolutely appropriate as buttons. (I have no excuse for using the Save button when ctrl-S is faster, I suppose, but I guess I like the illusion of security of pressing a visible button.)

The funny thing is that I know that there are millions of Word users who use these buttons all the time (and who have never used keyboard shortcuts). And there are millions of Word users who use the pull-down menus for every single cut-n-paste task they ever do (something I find painful to observe).

And, of course, there are those people who don’t use Microsoft Word at all.

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