About a month ago when I was talking abut slide simplification, I got a handful of queries about what it was we were up to.

Simply, we’re building a data infrastructure to integrate a number of different business systems. Currently, our ticketing, gift shop, accounting, development, and scheduling systems are tenuously integrated. Over the years, a number of bad habits, internal processes, and highly manual solutions have evolved to work around the inherent limitations of each individual systems. Yeah, we can get stuff to flow one to other, but it’s frequently not pretty and is a huge time and resource suck across a good chunk of the museum.

We have a few things on the upside. First, all of the business systems are MS SQL database driven, so there’s a similar and redundant back-end architecture. Second, while we’ve been doing some institutional reorganization our workload on exhibit development has decreased over the short-term. And, third, and this one is the critical one, we’re the lucky recipients of a generous donation of services from Accenture — a group that’s done stuff like this a few times before on a much larger scale.

A lot of the initial work has been decidedly non-trivial. Even though we’re a medium size company some of the databases (especially Raiser’s Edge for Development (fond-raising, not software)) are surprisingly complex and closed. We’ve also learned that even simple things like database replication can be tricky since tables are temporarily locked and some systems really like to temporarily drop tables which the replication process can prevent.

Ultimately, we’re creating a rich query environment which does an end-run around the limitations of any given system. Data gets pulled from the parent databases into a new environment, entities and relationships across the datasets are normalized, and outputs are available to pretty much anyone. There’s an interesting interface and user experience problem ahead, in which we figure out how to simplify complex SQL queries and reports for the average user, but we’re early in that phase.

At the moment, I’m thinking about developing a query system that has similar functionality as Automator on OS X, except that it’s web-based so it can be part of our SharePoint implementation. I’m surprised at how often we ask our consultants for a solution that’s outside of their usual development scope. The response is that they’ve usually never had clients ask for it, but I think the real problem is that more often than not people conform to a possible solution rather than finding the right solution for the problem at hand — which is really why we’re headed down this whole path in the first place.

A colleague just pinged me about accessibility in our multi-touch tables and how we’d tried to accommodate. Here were my major points:

• The height of the tables are wheelchair accessible and ADA compliant. We realized that someone in a wheelchair might not be able to reach the entire experience from a single vantage point so in the physical installation the experience is accessible from multiple sides. (Side note, this design constraint was a primary factor in driving the projector selection, the size of the table, using mirrors for the projector throw, and the overall form factor.)

• There’s no sound. We just didn’t include any and I wasn’t convinced it was going to substantially add to the experience especially when we have multiple tables installed. We have the added bonus of being an art museum and our patrons generally like quieter experiences in the galleries, unlike a science museum.

• The display is pretty high contrast in design and execution. Things that are touchable are visually bright, everything else visually recedes.

• We also eliminated any modality in the UI which let us also get by with minimal instructions (There are two instructions, one of three words, the other of 6 or 7).

• The magnified area is fairly large, but this was for a few reasons. First, my personal aesthetics (as is most of the UI, anyway. ;) Second, there’s some imprecision in how the table calibrates (we’re undistorting from a fish-eye lens and the camera capture rate isn’t incredibly high) so having a larger active area covers up the imprecision (we’ve introduced enough fudge in the end result that you instantly accept that it feels right). Third, since your fingertip is the point of interaction we designed so you could see around your finger. Fourth, we delay the removal of the magnified area for a few seconds after removing your fingertip so you can remove your finger and still see what you’re looking at. If you put your finger back in about the same location, the magnified area stays visible. (In software, we’re making assumptions that over the refresh period a touch detection within a given distance and velocity of a previous touch is probably the same touch (if a finger is moving quickly, you may not consistently detect it across the full length of travel))

On the whole, with the exception of the height restrictions, I’m finding that when we do pretty good interaction and UI design that it naturally accommodates impaired audiences. I think if you reach a point where you begin to think you need to do something unnatural to reach a broader audience it’s probably a good point to reassess your design anyway to see if you haven’t artifically constrained the experience.

In the last couple of days I was having a side-conversation discussing technologies that were once great but died out for any number of reasons. One that I’ve mentally kept mentally circling back to are the Automats of the northeast, with perhaps the most famous being Horn and Hardart’s Automat.

The concept was simple — a kitchen in the back with people cooking the vittles, enthusiastic and hungry customers from all walks of life in the front, and between the two a curtain of small little enclosures connecting the two worlds. It was a glorious vending machine where you looked for something appealing, dropped the nickels in the slot, and opened up the little glass door to fetch your food. Part of the appeal in the mid-century is that it harkened to a utopian future with chrome everywhere, food that would miraculously appear, and ease of use. I don’t ever recall anyone looking back with anything but fondness for the experience.

Sadly, the last automat disappeared in 1991, a victim of economies and the fast food industry.

The idea’s come back to life in the last few years, though, in the East Village in NYC as the Bamn! Automat. Oddly, there are no pics of the experience on the website, although plenty abound on Google.

The experience again speaks to the future with a darkened environment, funky colored lights, and food peeking out like jewelry on display.

So, that’s a lot of setup to get to the part that I found pretty interesting. In both instances, there was a need to explain to customers how the experience was going to work. What I was struck by was how Horn and Hardart, 50 years ago, were offering an experience and how Bamn! seems to be offering just an interaction. Compare the images below:

Horn and Hardart show the whole experience — little glass doors, polished chrome surfaces, the promise of food — as part of the instructions. Alongside that, they show an overall view of the whole space. As a postcard, I can imagine getting this and wanting to head there for lunch the next time I was in the big city.

In contrast, on Bamn!’s website (where does the apostrophe go when there’s an exclamation mark in the name?) there’s the following graphic:

It focuses entirely on the interaction of what to do. In the pink and white world of an iPod commercial, use a vending machine and stand there and stuff your face. There’s no charm. There’s no excitement. It looks no different than anything I’ve done before. There’s no promise of a better future. I don’t know, in the last frame, with the instruction “enjoy” he might just be sniffing his finger for all I can tell.

It’s disappointing. Believe me, I’m one for simplifying instructions as much as possible and making a message clear and concise, but it becomes critically important to remember that sometimes the experience itself is just as important as the activity. Any instruction — any kind of description — should be taking a whole picture view and convey as much as possible. In this instance, the experience is an incredibly important part of the message, not just the activity itself.

Jakob Nielson’s Alertbox has a post of the Year’s 10 Best Application UIs.

It does, however, seem like seem weak user experience not to include any actual images of said interfaces or explain what made them so great. In fact, about 70% of the post highlights other good UI techniques and observation from the past year.

So, the lesson here?

• Actually show what you’re talking about. It makes you more convincing.

(To be fair, there’s a $98 report available but I’m pretty confident you could still give away some free samples of the product without damaging sales.)

I was talking about some of the work that IDEO’s (they’re a design consultancy) done in the past with a friend and while browsing their site ran across a really, really nice PDF creation tool. Especially interesting since it was a topic I was pondering a few months ago as we were starting to scope out a similar tool for a website of teacher resources.

IDEO To Go has a few navigation methods that wield a lot of power — At a glance you can see the full scope of what’s possibly available for the PDF. You can start to populate the PDF with elements either by selecting from the choices along the left-side or by individually clicking the project pictures. True, the pictures don’t have a lot of meaning before you click on them, so there’s some minor room for possible improvement there but I’m guessing that space limitations are the defining limiter in this display. As elements are selected through the choices, they highlight in the picture field and each of the individual pictures can be added or subtracted from the final result through the checkbox and the top of the project blurb on the right.

It was fast, incredibly easy, and actually customized. As I made choices, I could see the impact of that decision. So, a few good lessons here:

• Let people see the full range of available choices (in museums, we’ve found that people are often frustrated with a digital experience when they can’t figure out how to access a feature that someone else is using.
• Give progressive feedback (instead of making choices and then seeing any result).
• Have controls that let you make a few broad decisions, but then make granularity available to the power user (if PDF creation has actual power users, I suppose).

It’s interesting to me to note the increasing regularity with which I’m in a meeting (mostly museum-related, and not just my museum so I can throw stones) and someone suggests that we need to spend some cycles figuring out how to take advantage of youtube, facebook, flickr, etc…

Guys, you’re totally missing the point — and this happens all the time with technology in general. Those platforms are just tools to help you solve other problems. Have the problem first, not the solution. More importantly, say stuff like “we want to make our visitors part of the experience” or “how can we capture stories that our visitors could share with others.” You need a more fundamental motivation of involving people in the first place and then you can start to figure out which social media services might be applicable.

Start by sharing. Respond by listening. It all gets a lot easier after that.

I was at LACMA recently, viscerally enjoying the massive works of Richard Serra. Incredible presence and have made me mentally refer to our own Serra work at the Denver Art Museum as “excerpt” since it feels like just a shaving off of some larger work. I’d love to show you some pictures but as my trusty digital camera emerged from my pocket, security guards were quick to approach and inform me that photography’s not allowed.

Yeah, yeah, I work at an art museum and I understand the issues of copyright and wanting to own image rights to works of art. But, that night, it seemed a little more stupid than usual. Honestly, my small image of oxidized (rust to you non-art types) metal is probably indistinguishable from my many other pictures of the distressed and weathered world. It’s not like Serra emblazes a Louis Vitton-like logo across all metal surfaces and my photographic subterfuge would be revealed.

But to the real point here, where’s the fine line between exact duplication (which is the thing to be feared and why DRM really exists (and this situation is really just analog DRM)) and something changed enough from the original that it’s all okay. And, if we can’t really find this line, then do we need to think it’s there in the first place? Especially in a creative commons world, what holds us back?

Here’s my thought experiment while I was in the shower in the following morning: So, given that a digital image is bad, what if I’m a lousy photographer and my pictures are blurry? Is that still close enough to the original to violate policy? Is it the potential of the perfect image that makes the device the bad thing? What if I had a randomly distorting lens that always shot things imperfectly — some axes through the images are 10-20% stretched or something — does that get me in the clear? What if my camera is more of a camera obscura and I trace the resulting image. Is that bad? (This is different than most museum’s non-sketching policies where they just don’t want pens or other color laden devices in galleries that could deface the actual works.) What if I never display my original perfect image but instead use it in a collage?

Is it the fear that my picture taking is somehow stealing the soul of the original painting? I don’t see at what rational point I actually cross any sort of threshold that’s meaningful.

Better yet, what if I take a picture of another Serra, in a public setting, crop it just so, but claim that’s it the Serra from LACMA… Have I crossed any boundary?

Right? At what point is all of this just silly? What’s the real harm in letting people take away memories of their experiences when they really grooved on some piece of art?

One of the things that I spend a lot of time concentrating on is how to simplify things. There’s an adage that I picked up somewhere along the way about focus — “Focus isn’t saying yes to the right things, it’s saying no to everything else.” I think that’s pretty much spot on and mirrors how I approach a lot of our work.

Here’s a relevant example. We received an incredibly generous donation from a business consulting firm primarily in the form of in-kind services. Before I disparage them here, let me be clear in saying that I hold the group in pretty high regard and my experience with them both personally and professionally has been nothing but positive. We’re working on a big data project with them and they bring an incredibly amount of resource and skill to our little problems that we’d never deal with otherwise.

In a nutshell, our big data problem is that we have a bunch of business systems that live in silos. We’re creating a middle layer that knows how to talk to the data stores and can do some manipulation of that data and spit out new stuff that we can’t do now. A common problem, a reasonable solution.

So, how do we communicate that to people? Here was the consulting firm’s take:

I look at that sort of image with horror. A good indicator that you’re to visually complex is that you need pullquotes or tooltips to explain what you’re doing. It’s all good information, but only a mother would care for that little beast.

So, I simplified a great deal and then turned it into a before and after story to better demonstrate the actual change that’s going to take place.

I’m not totally happy with it and think I probably could have done a bit better, but as a communication tool, it’s worked out pretty well. I’ve changed a handful of things — gotten rid of about a thousand words (listen to me, not read the slide), made the second slide mirror the first to show progression, provided higher contrast in complimentary colors, and show only the essential bits of what’s happening. Oversimplified in spots? Perhaps, but for most people with no familiarity of what the hell’s going on, it’s probably about right.

Over the last two weeks, I’ve started six different posts about stuff I’ve seen or been thinking about. They all languish in their half-written state. I’m self-censoring too much — I need to stay convinced that my moments of insight are still interesting and thoughtful six hours later. So, I’ll call myself out publicly here. A post, by wednesday, on either digital signage or image copyright in museums.

Shame me publicly if it doesn’t happen.

The multi-touch tables are back in Denver after a successful run in Atlanta. (There’s a summative evaluation of them that I’ll turn into a separate post which speaks to the user experience (a success!) as opposed to the hardware (they worked!))

Turns out that the problem with bespoke solutions (and believe me, these are bespoke, although easily reproducible) is that they’re very finicky in setup. Little things like the metal frames that hold the mirrors were each produced individually so each mirror and the projector angles all need to be tweaked and fine-tuned. The electrical setup has been different in each venue, the lighting is different, the museum schedule is different, whine, whine, whine. There’s also that unholy terror of realizing that I’ll get to see them every day and invariably nitpick at whatever’s not absolutely perfect.

So, yeah, a time-suck, but golly, they’re still cool. And, every time I touch one I have that “holy crap, it works” moment. Which, honestly, is kind of fun.