Neat user interface on removal company website

We are planning our house removal for a move to a new flat end of this month. While providing information to one of the removal companies we are looking at for a quote, I came across this very easy to use page to specify our flat inventory. I like how simple it is to add and remove items, just by looking at pictures and clicking on + / – . I was expecting at best a richtext form field where I would have to type and describe our furniture. This is so much easier. One of those little big things in Web UI. The website is handymoves.co.uk .

The iPhone has the worst user experience ever …

… for ending phone calls. Seriously, I cannot believe how many times I try to end a phone call by hitting the physical iPhone Home button. It is how I end all other applications on the phone. But not a phone call. Even though each time I realize shortly after hitting the button that it does actually not end the call, sure enough after the following call – unless I consciously remind myself to hit the virtual red button on the screen instead – I will use the physical Home button. It just seems to be deeply ingrained in my subconscious, a) because like I said it is just inconsistent with all other applications on the iPhone and b) presumably many years of mobile phone usage pre-iPhone have left muscle memory that is very difficult to unlearn. Truly annoying. Especially since otherwise the user experience of course is mostly excellent.

Curate Content To Topical Molecules

Robert Scoble in this post shared some interesting thoughts around the ability to easily assemble single content units (tweets, photos, videos, etc) – or atoms – to clusters / packages – or molecules. This is an interesting proposition, both for editors of publishing sites, as well as users in easily creating mash ups on this granular level. It resonates with me as an analogy – much like H2O is more than the sum of its part, and has emergent qualities as a new entity – such topical molecules would probably provide a different perspective than each of its parts seen separately. At a minimum that quality would be convenience and efficiency for others to absorb the information contained in that molecule. I think this is also an apt analogy, because much like molecules cluster to form organelles which form cells which form tissues which form organs, such a simple approach to organizing content is also likely to form something larger (e.g. a site on a given topic) which can feed into something larger (e.g. a network of similar sites, think neural networks) etc., which each dimension of further abstraction potentially leading to new insights (ie. emergent qualities).

Tedeschi Amarone della Valpolicella

This is a fantastic, rich, balanced wine – one of the best wines I have had. A variety of pleasant aromas on the nose (chocolate, black cherries, tobacco, coffee, leather, honey), well balanced tannins and a rich creamy finish. We are having the 2005 vintage, and it seems the perfect age to drink now. Highly recommended.

Japan Matsuri Festival London

We went to the fantastic Japan Matsuri at Spitalfields market today. With a large variety of Japanese food and craft stalls, a rich program of Japanese song, dance, calligraphy etc. performances and probably half of the 50,000 or so strong London Japanese community present it felt much like a real summer festival somewhere in Japan. Including people wearing Yukata and Kimonos (even many Westerners, which I think looked a bit odd). Including a density of people per square meter remniscent of the Tokyo subway during rush hour. Including loooooooong queues for the various food stalls – especially for the Takoyaki booth. Of which there only was one. Y. said that going to a Matsuri without having Takoyaki is no good, and so we patiently waited and sweated for 1.5 hours in a very slowly moving queue, bravely fending off at least a dozen sly attempts of people trying to cut into that queue, until finally we almost euphorically dug into our 8 balls of octopus-filled dumplings.

spitalfield market buildings

Art by Japanese or inspired by Japan

art 2

beginning of takoyaki queue

after about 1 hour

takoyaki busy people

what everyone was waiting for

Did you know ?

Check this out - series of interesting facts (or apparent facts, who knows), but in any case great and inspiring visual presentation of those facts / apparent facts. And part two here. I like the concept of describing our times, our historical moment in time, as exponential times. New mass media technologies have been adopted in ever shorter cycles in the last 100 years, computer processing power of a single low-priced machine in 2049 is estimated to surpass the combined neural processing power of all of humanity etc. This of course is also a statement that is asking to be counter-argued on so many levels, not least of all since it equates processing power with brain functionality, two very different concepts. In any case, entertaining to watch and once again a reminder that if only presentations would use less bullet-pointed text and more creative visuals this world’s meetings would be happier and more effective places …

Defining The Scrum Product Owner

Reading through a draft chapter of a book about Agile Product Management by Roman Pichler, I came across a reference to the blog of Jeff Patton. I have scanned through a couple of his posts and articles, and particularly liked this one about the difficulties (and suggested solutions for those difficulties) a Scrum / Agile product owner typically faces. It is written in an entertaining, yet illuminating style with lots of illustrations. For some reason, I feel somewhat reminded of Scott McClouds brilliant book “Understanding Comics”.

Anyhow, one of the points in Jeff’s essay that particularly resonates with me is that ”Building a common shared understanding of the product within the team is a critical product owner responsibility (…)”.  Communication is key in the Agile process, and continuously talking about user stories and requirements, discussing details as the team goes along and using all modes of communication (verbal, non-verbal, paraverbal) helps to avoid misunderstandings that can easily occur in classic waterfall PRDs with hundreds of pages of requirements. Something, that cannot be read like a compelling story or stimulating essay. And therefore often does not really get read. Which leads to the common misunderstandings, which are so perfectly captured in the famous tree swing comic. But even when using all modes of communication, and doing so often and openly, there is still room for different understandings and visualisations. Mock ups help, but they as well cannot always capture all details. Making sure that the joint understanding of what and why we are building a given feature or product is one of the big obstacles to overcome, in my experience as well.

Presentation Zen – Google Talks

I really quite enjoy watching some of the large series of Google Talks on YouTube when I get a chance. It’s a great idea to expose their employees to a wide range of topics and ideas, and it is an even greater idea to share the videos of those talks with the Internet community. True to the spirit of making the world’s knowledge available to everyone.

Recently I have also been looking at buying a book about better presentations, “Presentation Zen”, and decided to check out its authors talk at Google to educate my purchase decision. Now it is off to Amazon to order the book, and then hopefully take something away for some of future presentations I get to do.

Future of Mobile – World Economic Forum Panel

Fora.tv (which along with ted.com is now my favourite online video destination for brilliant and inspiring talks) hosts this video of a high profile panel that discusses the next digital experience, or in other words the future of mobile. Speakers are Hamid Akhavan (Chief Ex-ecutive Officer of T-Mobile International ), J. Michael Arrington (Techcrunch), Eric K. Clemons (Professor of Operations and Information Management at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.), Chad Hurley (co-founder and CEO of YouTube), Craig Mundie (chief research and strategy officer of Microsoft ), Shantanu Narayen (president and chief executive officer of Adobe), Mark Zuckerberg (founder of Facebook).

Slideshare and Boosting Brainpower

Somehow in clicking through various articles and sites today I ended up on SlideShare, which somehow I managed to not come across so far. It is a platform to upload, share and browse presentations from all sorts of fields.

Really cool, and just the half a dozen or so presentations I checked out left me inspired and with new ideas.

One of the inspirations was a presentation about a book by some neuroscientist on boosting brainpower, and how it translates to the art/zen of making good presentations.

The site for this book – Brain rules – is one of the better sites I have recently come across, and offers a lot of insight from the book in the form of short, informative, funny, well made videos.