Robert | 2.25.2006 @ 9:29 AM
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The first article in my new series "Designing the Obvious" is being featured on the InformIT.com homepage.

I've done about 20-25 articles for InformIT in the past couple of years or so, but this is a first for me (Kris, however, has had a couple of homepage appearances with his recent AJAX articles). Word on the street is that the series title will also be the subject line of the InformIT Web Design Reference Guide newsletter that goes out tomorrow.

Robert | @ 8:32 AM
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A teenager in Michigan was lucky enough to download the 1-billionth song from the Apple Music Store yesterday, and won a whole bunch of great gear as a result.

The song was Coldplay's "Speed of Sound".

The Internet has made the transfer of information as easy as a few clicks. You can get the latest stock quote for Adobe, directions to Grandma's new house, a photo of Mark Hamill on The Muppet Show, and start a petition to keep your local library open, all in the same browser, all in the same hour. Artists, poets, garage bands, opera singers, comedians, and armchair philosophers all have a voice - a way to reach their audience and connect on personal, social, and political levels. And with this has come the ability to get music anytime you want.

The Internet has indeed captured the ability to deliver music at the "speed of sound". And now, thanks to the Apple Music Store, a teenager in Michigan has become part of a profound moment that captures the very essence of the Internet.

Robert | 2.23.2006 @ 11:12 AM
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According to InformationWeek's article, the U.S. government has granted a broad-reaching patent that encapsulates AJAX, Flash, and anything else that could be construed as a "rich internet application".

Buckle your seat belts, everyone. This could get ugly.

Robert | 2.22.2006 @ 3:59 PM
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Odeo, the site that offers podcasts galore, has a bad homepage. I hadn't noticed this myself, because I've only used the site once. I had to sign up the first time and didn't notice the bad homepage. But a co-worker pointed it and today I had to examine it for myself.

On Odeo's homepage, there are five large, easy-to-spot entry points. They are "Record Audio", "Share with People", "Podcast to the World", "Discover New Audio", and "Sign Up Now".

Most of the people going to the site have been there before and signed up. The logical thing to do on repeat visits is, well, record audio, share with people, podcast to the world, or discover new audio (sound familiar?). Since I want to do one of these things, and I'm not logged in because I haven't been here in a couple of weeks, I click "Discover New Audio", which is one of the five big, beautiful buttons on the homepage. At this point, I'm taken to what is essentially an advertisement for Odeo. It's a page that tells me I can discover new audio if only I were smart enough to use Odeo. Clicking the other buttons on this page shows me similar ads for the other things I could do if I were smart enough to use Odeo. None of these pages goes anywhere. There are no links to leave the page and get started except in the footer, which is not the obvious spot to put such valuable links. There is a way to log in, but if I'm not a registered user, there is no link that points me to the registration form. Not one. They're showing me all the things I could do if I were smart enough to use Odeo, but no way to actually use it.

So, I've decided I'm not smart enough to use Odeo. I can design and build complicated web applications, but I can't use Odeo.

Apparently, if I'm registered, but not logged in, I'm supposed to click the little tiny text link at the bottom of the homepage that says "Or, explore podcasts".

Not exactly what I'd call a commanding statement.

Again, there are five large, easy-to-spot entry points on the homepage. Four go to an ad about a feature, which offers no way to sign up or move on or get started. The fifth gives me a way to sign up.

Hey Odeo: You already convinced me to sign up. Now how's about you give me a giant button that does what it says it does?

A great application does what the user expects it will do. When I click "Discover New Audio", I expect boatloads of new audio to come flying at me at the speed of, um, sound.

Somehow, I'm still determined to use Odeo because the idea is great. But I guess Web 2.0 is going to bring with it yet another thing Web 1.0 didn't have: a whole new set of usability problems.

Robert | 2.12.2006 @ 9:47 AM
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I've started a Squidoo Lens about Kaizen, hopefully making it a bit easier to learn how to work Kaizen into your process. It's not much right now, but I'll add to it as I find more on the subject.

Robert | 2.11.2006 @ 2:14 PM
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A few weeks ago, I stumbled across the term "Kaizen", while doing research on Poka-yoke (the great idea with the funny name; it means "preventing inadvertent errors"). I immediately became somewhat obsessed with it. And in the middle of my research, I was surprised to see a post on the subject from 37signals. Happily, I'm not the only one who sees the connection between Kaizen and the web. (37signals' Getting Real concepts are more metaphorically related to Kaizen than directly related, but it was interesting to see the post nonetheless.)

Kaizen, directly translated, means "continual change for the better", or in less verbose terms, "continuous improvement". It involves several key components, each of which is aimed at enabling the constant, incremental improvement of the processes used to create a product. Toyota is well known for its practice of Kaizen, which helps the company product high-quality cars that earn them more money and more sales.

Kaizen is part of a larger concept, known as Lean Manufacturing, which also involves Poka-yoke and Kanban, a signaling system used to manage Just In Time production, where goods and such are delivered/prepared when they're needed instead of kept in surplus. All of these principles can be applied to the web, and in fact, this Inc Blot on Just In Time Design discusses the notion of doing design work right when it's needed.

Since discovering Kaizen, it's become core to my approach. Well, actually, it's always been core to my approach, I just didn't know it had a name. It's definitely my kind of solution. It's simple, clean, keeps disruption to a minimum, and involves constant, incremental improvements to whatever process you currently use with the goal of increasing productivity. It's also easy to do and incredibly cheap if done right. Practioners of Kaizen believe that whatever your goal is for the end result of your process (say, a higher-quality car), an improved process will get you there. In companies that practice Kaizen, suggestions are encouraged, and management is open to hearing suggestions and admitting that processes can always be improved. Management not only allows and enables the airing of complaints, but encourages suggestions to improve it. A suggestion box is an important part of the equation. And if one area of a process stagnates for a while without any improvments, a Kaizen Event can be scheduled, during which a singular part of a process is observed and analyzed, and many small improvements are made all at once. (This causes more disruption than typical Kaizen, but is effective nonetheless.)

So how does all this apply to the web? Any way you can make it apply. You can apply Kaizen to the way you write string parsing methods in the programming language of your choice, use it to find a more effective way to create proposals, or improve the way you handle items on your to-do list. Whatever the case, Kaizen is about doing the work of improving things constantly, in little tiny ways that add up to gigantic results. It's the process of improving your process.

Naturally, Kaizen only works to its fullest if you continue to do it, so if you start, keep going. There's always a way to improve a process. Every time you make a small improvement, doors open up for improving the new version. And none of the changes cause any major disruption in your work, so you can keep plugging away at the activity of building sites and software without getting buried in all the improvements you've made.

I'll be talking more about this in the future. For now, I just wanted to open up the discussion.

Robert | 2.03.2006 @ 10:28 AM
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When you first sign up for a personal start page through Google, Microsoft, NetVibes, and others, you are immediately bombarded with data that's already been added to "your" page. There are RSS feeds, weather widgets, link to entertainment news, and many other things. Unfortunately, you didn't ask for any of these things. You thought you were getting a "personal" page, but alas, there's nothing personal about it.

To the contrary, when you sign up for a DashboardHQ account, your first impression will be stellar. Instead of giving you a bunch of stuff you don't want or need, and will likely spend an hour removing from your page, you'll see only a screenshot of a sample DashboardHQ homepage, with the Add Content panel open so you can get started adding your content, your way.

It's your homepage, not ours. So we get out of your way and let you do whatever you want.

Robert | @ 9:51 AM
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DashboardHQ is still under construction, as we have extremely limited time to work on it (ugh!), but the good news is that things are moving along nicely.

Kris finished up some new code last night and fixed quite a few bugs as a result, so adding notes to your Dashboard now works exactly the way you'd expect it to work. The process, from start to finish, goes like this:

1) Click "Add content" to display the Add Content panel.
2) Enter a name for your new content module (or "pod", as we call it internally), and enter whatever text, HTML, or CSS you'd like to add to the pod. (Also, choose the column where you'd like to add the new pod.)
3) Click "Create" to add the new pod to your page.

Simple as that. Once your pod is created, you can edit it any time by simply clicking "Edit" in the top-right corner of the pod. The pod toggles to an input text field so you can edit freely. When you're done, just click "Update" and you're all set.