DAM Technology

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.

Big Picture, Opinion, Software

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.

Big Picture, Opinion

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.)

Big Picture, Opinion

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).

Medium Picture, Opinion, Software

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.

Big Picture, Opinion

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?

Exhibition, Installation, Opinion

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 too 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.

Big Picture, Opinion

Over the last two months we’ve been semi-seriously dabbling in sharepoint as a probable internal communications and collaboration solution (ooh! I love “solutions”!). We’ve seen a couple of implementations where it’s working well - one museum, one venture capital group, one tech company - and I’m consistently impressed although I’ve also noticed an odd consistency to what’s been implemented.

One of the stumbling blocks in the last few weeks has been dealing with the design and style of the eventual site. Having played the role of designer off and on in my life, I care about the eventual look and feel and, on the whole, the couple of default themes available from MS are pretty much the same with minor variations in colors. Even more importantly, I’m big on standards compliant websites and snazzy semantic markup and I’m not going to repeat the usual arguments for separating content from presentation on multiple levels.

Sharepoint is good in that it’s smart about creating pages that are collections of other web elements — an rss feed, a collection of images, just raw text, etc. It ultimately means that you can create simple bits that do simple things and just use them as building blocks. It does a decent job, from a workflow point of view, of doing most of that work inline in a web page rather than totally abstracting it into a CMS backend. So, conceptually, do some design work on the site chrome and then set up good css so that all the little bits inherit nice css should be pretty straightforward, no?

Turns out that answer is no.

Sharepoint Designer, the tool that MS provides to do graphics sucks. The html behind any sharepoint site sucks. In my “redesign sharepoint” browser window, I’ve got about 20 tabs of relevant content for anyone thinking about an out-of-the-box experience. I was particularly encouraged by Cameron Moll’s early enthusiasm for skinning sharepoint only to have my hopes crushed by his 5-month later followup.

This kills me. There’s a great deal I like about Sharepoint (especially after having spent time with the Newsgator folks. Honestly, if you’re thinking about Sharepoint at all, the products that newsgator makes to integrate into Sharepoint is a critical must-have feature (disclosure: they’re friends and they’ve offered some generous support)) but the underlying bits are brutally, brutally bad. Even to the point that I looked again at a bunch of the elegant online solutions for collaboration and such.

Here’s the bottom line for us — we’re going to use Sharepoint, but a little part of me dies on the inside at the same time. I’m settling in for a solution that works pretty well for most people but there’s little joy in using and implementing (on the technical side of things). I suppose the important part for me to remember is that most people like eating the sausage, not making it.

Medium Picture, Opinion, Software

From LinuxWorld:

Google is one of the few large companies that gets one fundamental rule of the Internet: Trying stuff is cheaper than deciding whether to try it.

I think back through the interesting things that we’ve done over the last couple of years and all of the really good stuff started out as a hack. A little bit of being too stupid (or just smart enough) to think that we couldn’t do something that was hard or just seeing what was possible. And hell, you learn far more about the capabilities of something by fiddling with it rather than thinking about it long and hard before you even get your feet wet.

That’s not to say that we start off everything half-assed, but I’d rather iterate on a dozen different things and ideas any day and quickly kill off what doesn’t work rather than have dozens of careful planning meetings trying to make sure that the final thing will be absolutely perfect coming out the door. Hell, if years of designing experiences and interfaces has taught me anything, it’s that people are always going to use things in ways you never imagined.

Try something. Get close to what you think is right. Listen to your users. Change what sucks.

I wonder how large this approach scales…

Big Picture, Opinion

Seen over on Jalopnik, Jaguar is claiming to have launched the first Broadband Magazine targeted towards the iPhone (and iPod Touch although they don’t mention it) at www.jxfphone.com.

It’s interesting to me since I’ve done a prototype museum tour on the iPhone and have been lately playing with converting one of our audio tours to the same format to see how it feels. I mean, PDAs for audio tours are really just the “best-for-now” answer to how to make a kiosk move along with a visitor rather than making the visitor traipse through the galleries to the kiosk.

Here’s the thing that’s started to sink into my head over the last few months of on and off development is that if you’re already in the habit of producing regular content for your website, then going the extra distance to create your own “Broadband Magazine” is only a few extra steps. All you really care about is paying some attention to the formatting and size (yes, I realize that’s a potentially non-trivial effort, but on the scale of getting stuff done in the whole production cycle, that’s the easier nut to crack) the hard part was getting into a regular production cycle in the first place.

Which is actually the part that annoys me — The Jaguar bit, while cool and attention grabbing for this week (or this afternoon) is easily replicated. And, should be replicated by any museum that considers itself halfway serious about the web and trying to reach out to real audiences. Hell, any place that’s actually moved to non-beginner web development and has tried make things reasonably semantic, separating content from formatting is most of the way there. If someone were really smart, it’d just be a little bit of xslt love to create the basic templates and then just pull from your universal content source. (Knowing how the Walker in Minneapolis has done their web stuff, this would be right up their alley)

So, any museums want to be relevant? Here’s a chance. It’s a baby step beyond what you should already be doing. (Of course, if you’re not regularly producing web stuff, your problem is a different order of magnitude.)

Big Picture, Medium Picture, Opinion