Although I know Tim would prefer not to strictly categorize himself as either “artist” or “designer”, any more than would I, I think it’s clear from our bodies of work that his product could be more easily categorized as “art”, mine as “design”.

During an evening fireside conversation over a glass of a (surprisingly good) Co-Operative highland single-malt, we returned to our favorite topic, and it became apparent that there is little functional difference between his experience with clients, and mine: Both groups have specific ideas about their needs, and make certain impositions regarding the nature of the final product. Both expect to be able to negotiate, influence and approve the final result that they will receive.

Andy Chen has an article over on Design Observer that frets about the art vs. design issue as part of the selection process for a new Head of Department, and I think maybe he’s missing the point.

Since talking with my brother, I’ve started to wonder if we’re all over-analyzing a terrifically simple issue? Art and design together describe a continuum, with (probably theoretical) “pure” forms at either extreme, with “pure art” serving no purpose other than to satisfy it’s creator, and “pure design” serving to meet a defined goal (such as the requirements of or client).

For more or less all practitioners, our work lies somewhere in between, with compromises being made all over the place. The final result is, invariably, some mixture of original intent, process, accident (happy or otherwise), time constraint, and level of interest.

We’re all used to the dated, utilitarian look and feel of Google’s web services, reminiscent, as they are, of GTK or Windows XP styling, but for the most part they remain relatively uncluttered and, more importantly, they’re free. It would be curmudgeonly to look this gift horse too closely in the mouth. However, what is inexcusable is that a similar grim ergonomy has been transplanted to the default visual paradigm of Android, Google’s mobile platform. It, too, is ‘free’ in theory – although it is unlikely that one will be able to obtain an Android phone without parting with a decent wad of greenbacks.

Now, Googlesoft is rubbing salt into our wounds with the hilariously botched launch, this week, of Google Buzz, a truly Microsoft-style theft of someone else’s good idea. The launch, which automatically made public lists of every user’s most frequent Gmail contacts, was a product design misfire of truly epic proportions, and a testament to the reality that Agile methods unbounded by rigorous design guidance can result in decidedly non-optimal results.

While it’s true that the Agile methodology is pretty good at letting engineers stumble towards overall product improvement without the need for significant up-front planning and research, as this week’s fiasco amply demonstrates, such headless wandering comes replete with the occasional disastrous (and costly) embarrassment, never mind the more frequent functional dead-ends.

It turns out that Buzz was only tested internally prior to the launch, and that it was well received, perhaps illustrating just how far the rarefied Google intelligentsia has drifted from it’s chummy ‘Do No Evil’ origins. When one is building products for someone other that oneself, one does actually have to do some original market research to find out what the target market needs. If only the Buzz product design team (assuming that there are designers as well as engineers on the project) had asked a few simple questions, like “what is our target market?”, “is our internal testing group representative of our target demographic?”, the embarrassment, and the consequent brand devaluation, could have been avoided.

It’s not all bad. For a start, I would not have had this rather pleasurable opportunity to compare Google to Microsoft.

What is clear is that, as user expectations evolve, adequate market research, requirements definition and interaction design become ever more critical to digital product success.

Windows Phone 7 is a major clean-up, but it had to be. Apple has rightly poured scorn on Microsoft’s previous design mis-fires and Redmond was heading for redundancy in the mobile space. Design-wise, the Zune player was a step in the right direction, but is an irrelevant product in a market that has already been lost. Mobile is a far deeper space, and one in which the race is still open – certainly for a number 2 or 3 slot.

Albert Shum and his team have done a grand job, and although only time will tell if the platform is usable and effective, it does look spectacular, making use of many of the same motion cues first seen on the iPhone, although with it’s own unique vocabulary of wipes, fades, slides and zooms. Of particular interest is the use of larger-than frame titles and edge-of-screen visual cues hinting at additional content within each of the ‘experience hubs’ that form the heart of the workflow model.

After devouring the presentation materials, interviews, and online demos, I was somewhat disappointed to realize Windows Phone 7 will only be available in the fall. On the other hand, if I’m honest, I’m not thinking of upgrading my iPhone 3G before then anyway – and believe it or not, I am definitely going to take a serious look at Windows Phone 7 before going the default Apple route.

I’m guessing the early announcement is partly to steal some airtime from iPad chatter, partly to respond to Android, and mostly to give their various service offerings time to bulk up on content – the launch announcement talked up the XBOX Live and Zune service integration, but pointedly failed to show even a single concrete example. Add to that the fact that over half the launch demo appeared to be carefully prepared flash animations, not an actual device, and the whole thing felt distinctly hurried.

So, Windows Phone 7 has an appealing design and interaction model – but that’s not really a differentiator, it’s a catch-up feature. After all, Apple have that already in spades, and everyone else is working on it (Well, OK, Google’s Android appears to be stuck in the eighties, but the rest of the world has moved on). Microsoft are touting a number of key differentiators, including the multitasking model (vs. Apple’s explicitly uni-tasking model) which, while true, nobody cares about. There are also the dynamic Start screen tiles that apps can push to and appear to have API access to. These tiles are far more interesting and a real differentiator, offering some huge potential benefits to end users over iPhone icons. Another differentiator which I think is very important, but which was not mentioned, is the portability of Zune media – unlike iTunes, where bought or rented media is effectively locked into each separate instance, Zune media follows your account, so you can access it from anywhere you can log in. I am perpetually frustrated with iTunes in this respect and would love to have this functionality.

It was very refreshing to hear the phrase “user and design experience is paramount” (or something to that effect) come from Steve Ballmer’s lips at last. If Microsoft can can do the math and see the benefit, then hopefully Avid and Adobe will follow. Fingers crossed!

Watch the Windows Phone 7 demo video here

The draft is going off to the printer today, so we should have hard copies available within a week or so. If you’re not on our mailing list and you’d like us to send you a copy, please use the contact form and drop us a line. You may download the PDF here.

We took a couple of week’s holiday over the new year, and I finally had the time to sit down with John Thackara’s profound, although somewhat disturbing, book “Designing in a Complex World” and give it the attention it deserves (much to the consternation of my 2-year old daughter, Rosie).

Thackara, design guru and consultant extraordinaire, runs the “Doors of Perception” series of conferences (and blog, linked to by this site) amongst a great many other things. His range of experience is incredibly broad, and this is reflected in the book, which explores topics including (but not limited to) manufacturing, architecture and social media, but nevertheless carries with it a couple of predominant themes – that of ‘human-centeredness’, and that of ‘lightness’.

Thackara does not just ask the question about what can we do, or how can we intervene or react, but also the more profound question of what should we do? He tackles the present-day ‘elephant in the corner’ head-on, asking, just because we can, does that mean we should? He describes changes that are taking place around us that are to be nurtured if we wish to create a world based on human fulfillment rather than the headlong pursuit of technology for it’s own sake.

“Lightness” is ultimately a principle that measures the value of human intervention – Thackara maintains that if we can achieve our goals by treading lightly on the world, then we have found appropriate, valuable design solutions. In other words, our interventions should be minimal, rather than extravagant; sustainable, rather than extractive; efficient, rather than profligate. It is only with these approaches that we can grow a people-centered world, where technology exists to serve a sustainable common good.

It’s a remarkable vision, and an optimistic one. However, for myself I tend to conceptualize the world memetically, and therefore, I suspect that the human organism has been at the mercy of the memes that we host for many thousands of years. I think all the technological stuff that Thackara warns us about exists for it’s own ends, and we as an organism are largely unable to influence them. Perhaps these two perspectives are complimentary; after all, people create and copy memes. Thakara’s book is a great meme. I hope it propagates.

And that is precisely the problem: The Economist online portal is about as enjoyable to read as wet dog is welcome in bed, and even worse via a mobile device. Sadly, this is something The Economist has in common with the majority of online news providers, and although I’m motivated by two factors – quality of journalism first, ease of use second – I flatly refuse to patronize online services that I consider to be poorly designed. I continually seek an improved reading experience, and switch immediately when I find something that is easier to use than my current provider (assuming an equivalent quality of material).

BBC’s last redesign around 2004 held me for a while, but is now showing it’s age, and their mobile site is a disaster. I’ve tried Google news, but it’s a mindless aggregator, and the quality of the sources is arbitrary; I do not want to read the latest Intel announcement in the Grundy County Herald.

Reuters were ahead of the game for a while, but their mobile UI hasn’t been updated in over a year, and their news sources are very mainstream and limited.

I’ve found myself forced to use multiple providers, with a confusing array of different interaction models, for the various different kinds of news that I am interested in, which seems ridiculous given the state of today’s syndication technology.

Until now.

In the last couple of months, I’ve found myself returning again and again to Alltop. Alltop is unashamedly a selective aggregator, offering hand-picked syndicated news from a nevertheless eclectic variety of mainstream services and blogs, all organized by category.

Alltop doesn’t have everything I’d like. But it has more than any other single aggregator – it’s the only place where I can read about 3D animation, typography, science news, and international politics in the same place with the same interaction model.

More importantly, it has a more enjoyable UI than many of the sites it links to. For example, I find it much easier to find the BBC articles I care about via Alltop than via the BBC’s own site or mobile site. It’s easier to search, and much simpler to find what I am interested in. I can organize my own customized page with all my favorite news sources and blogs, and Alltop shows new updates, recent posts, most popular posts (where available) all organized respecting each site’s internal categorization.

I’m sold. Now, perhaps this is a new beast in the world, and we’ll see a divergence between aggregators and news providers? They are, after all, very different kinds of activity. Even so, I’ve a suggestion to the BBC and their ilk: If you want to win, particularly if you ever want to charge for your services in the future, make sure you provide the best reading experience – not just the best journalism. Because we will go where the interaction model is most enjoyable.

The irony is that I think the analysis could well apply to all swirly corporate logos – and there are a lot of them.

In fact, I have done a little research. The inventor of the ‘OOMouse‘, which is apparently the product of having gained access to “the data gathered from more than 600 million actual mouse and keystroke commands enacted by users”, claims to be a game designer. One must assume that he was very good at game design, and made loads of money, for it is hard to see who else would bankroll the development of this monstrosity.

OK, so what’s so wrong with it? Well, if we start with Apple’s appalling one-button minimalist nightmare at one end of the spectrum of mouse-complexity, this mouse is at the other extreme. Apple’s mouse was bad because it significantly sacrificed functionality for aesthetics; unless you are a very occasional user, or arthritic, learning to use a button for each of the two fingers you rest on your mouse is not a challenge.

The OOMouse is awful because it is a solution looking for a problem. It adds more complexity than it’s target customers (apparently everyone who uses OpenOffice) will ever have the time to learn. It’s a fact that around 75% of people that purchase Microsoft or Logitech after-market mice never even install the drivers that enable all the fancy extra buttons to function. It’s quite obvious that very few people will successfully learn to use the plethora of buttons on the OOMouse, and of those that do, even fewer will take advantage of the massive overkill applied to the customization options.

The reality is that a mouse is a device intended to allow a human user great precision in pointing at things on-screen using, for the most part, small wrist movements. Once pointed, we click to select. Therefore, to add functionality in a way that is simplest for the user, one adds context menus of some description, which is a problem that has long been solved in various ways, the most comprehensive of which is perhaps the Autodesk Maya Hotbox, which not only supports deep menu hierarchies, but also recognises gestures to traverse the menu hierarchy rapidly, all the while leveraging the same precision of movement that is used to point on-screen.

There’s so much more wrong with the OOMouse idea that it’s hard to know where to begin. Not least is the decidedly self-referential market research methodology implied by the vendor’s own claims, “After much experimentation, it was determined that 16 buttons divided into two 8-button halves were the maximum number of buttons that could be efficiently used by feel alone. And in the process of design and development, it quickly became apparent that many non-gaming applications would also benefit from having dozens of commands accessible directly from the mouse, especially applications with nested pull-down menus and hotkey combinations”. Exactly who would benefit? The design team? Oops!

All that said, I will have to buy an OOMouse as soon as it launches (if it ever makes it that far) because the product is likely to be discontinued rapidly, and it would make a wonderful addition to my dungeon of misconceived human interface devices. I think I’ll put it right next to my 6DOF mouse.

GRIP Montreal is a local community organization with whom I volunteer. Their mission is drug education and prevention – basically to inform and educate young people in schools, colleges and the bar and rave scene in Quebec to help them make elightened, reasoned decisions regarding drug use.

It’s been a tough year for GRIP, as for all community groups, as discretionary federal funding is cut to the bone, and corporate sponsors tighten their belts, limiting their community support.

SO, this year GRIP has had to focus more on fundraising, at the expense of some of it’s key mission objectives, and so are kicking off Montreal’s 2009 Drug Prevention Week, the GRIP Montreal is putting on a major fundraising event. The goal is to raise $20,000 in order to add an additional full-time field-worker to the permanent team.

The evening’s attractions include stand-up comedy routines from Stéphane Fallu, Dorice Simon and Louis Courchesne, with Véronique Chevrier directing proceedings. Several prize draws during the evening will culminate with a draw for a $500 surprise.

The auction part of the evening features an eclectic selection of premium items, including a week in a rural cottage in Eastern Townships, a day on a sailboat, hockey tickets for the Canadiens, two VIP tickets for the Bal En Blanc 2010, an acoustic guitar, autographed DVD performances of Louis-José Houde and much more to be found in the online catalog on the event website, here http://www.gripmontreal.org/fr/encan/accueil.html (in French only).

Following the auction and prize draws, the evening will change gear into party mode to the vibes of DJ Olivier Saint-Germain and DJ Dominic Dublin (aka Tenzin) and continue until 3am.

I urge you to all to come along and support GRIP on the 14th of November and support this excellent cause.

Thanks.

I have a few invites left, and am prepared to offer them to readers who pop over to the contact form and send me a request with an email address. First come, first served! Oh, and if it seems lonely, try entering “with:public” into the search box, and watch the entire wave world update!! (thanks Kim)