DAM Technology

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

Brad Feld bemoans people not updating the copyright notices on their websites.

I believe the following graphic should pretty much solve the problem in perpetuity.

Please feel free to use, creative commons licensing applies.

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

An asserted hypothesis:

The more easily you can talk about a user interface, the more easily you can understand how to manipulate it.

Yeah, I generally agree with that and it’s been a fundamental part to how we’ve approached a lot of our interface works in the galleries here at the museum. I think the amount of time someone is going to devote to whatever experience we create is pretty minimal and that having complex interfaces and interactions quickly chew into that engagement time. So, wherever we can make the interface immediately intuitable or simplify the experience so that are no incorrect actions, the better of we are and the quicker someone can get into an experience.

My general rule of thumb has been to create interactions that you can describe in a sentence to someone and take advantage of things they already know how to do. For example, in one of our video experiences, the Select-a-chat, a visitor manipulates a tangible object to select and watch videos. In this instance, we have a metal ‘X’ that they move on a table of pictures of different topics. My sentence to describe the interaction is simply, ‘X’ marks the spot.

Could we do the same thing with a touchscreen and some buttons on-screen? Sure, but it’s not as interesting nor unique, nor does it take advantage of real world objects that already impart some meaning to the user. And, there isn’t any time spent figuring out how yet another person has defined their button/video interface on yet another touchscreen. Bad design abounds in the interface world and we can be a source of slightly less frustration (and at the same time create something a little magical) than that’s what we’re going to aim for.

Big Picture, Software

I had ordered LaCie’s 2big Triple a few weeks ago and it just arrived today. It’s a mini RAID array (1 or 0, meaning that the drives can mirror each other for redundancy or be striped, writing data on both at the same, so it feels extra fast) and I got it with 2 1TB drives.

I’m blown away. It’s hard for me to imagine that disk space has gotten so cheap that I just added 1TB (with redundancy) to my desktop. I’ve always had a bit of a drive fetish, never quite feeling like I’ve had enough, but I think I can pause for a few minutes here, especially when I think back to my first LaCie drive when I paid $700 for 700MB.

In any case, it’s a nice bit of engineering, took just a few seconds to flip a switch to select the RAID style, and then formatted it with Disk Utility. All seamless and transparent. Oh, and it’s got a huge honkin’ blue light on the front which all technical people know — the blue LED is the sure sign of coolness.

Hardware, Medium Picture

The multi-touch tables are done and have been playing with the public in Atlanta for about two months.

We had two late-in-the-game gotchas that were a bitch to solve: - halogen lighting - surface stickiness

We’d done the initial testing and development here at the Denver Art Museum in our offices and gallery space. They have flourescent (and indirect sunlight) and incandescent lighting, respectively. The indirect sunlight was a pain in the butt — it adds a lot of infrared spectrum light (we’re looking at 945nm-ish) that we didn’t expect and adds bright areas to the camera that either become dead spots (because of background differencing) or variable “light shadows” that look like touches. We fiddled with the sensitivity of the general system and tightened up some of the shape detection that takes place to better differentiate touch vs random sunlight and got things to a pretty good point. The gallery incandescents also added a bunch of random light, but as part of the indirect sunlight solution, we got to good spot that as long as the incandescents didn’t shine directly on the table, we were good.

During the install in Atlanta, we learned that Atlanta uses halogen lighting which is as bad as direct sunlight on the table. It’s incredibly bright in our infrared range and throws everything for a loop. In an intense two week period, we became experts on window surface treatments (we couldn’t solve it exclusively through software), learning that you can’t apply stuff to acrylic (which we use for the top surface) because it out-gasses and will eventually bubble up any surface application. Likewise, we couldn’t switch to regular glass because there’s a lot of iron content in normal glass (view it on edge, it looks green. That’s the iron) which totally blocks our edge-lit IR LEDs. We eventually settled on making camera filters from the a couple of the different window surface IR blocking treatments that got us close — we were never able to perfectly solve it because we just ran out of time, but we got about 90-95% of the way there and given more time we could have dialed it in better.

The second unexpected gotcha was that the tables are too damn popular (net, a good problem) and fingerprints quickly build up during use. The museum staff are finding that during heavy use that they need to do a quick clean of the table surface with windex or similar every couple of hours. We eventually found some cleaning solutions online that help reduce fingerprint buildup which has helped a lot, but still requires some periodic low-key intervention to keep things working well. I’m thinking something bold like rain-x is a better solution, but we’ll wait until the tables are local before we really start messing with them.

It’s funny. The technology was hard and yet it’s been some decidedly low-tech issues that have kept things from being as awesome as I would like. That being said, the tables have been incredibly popular and for all reasonable intents, they’ve been a success. We’re already starting to noodle on their future life once the exhibition is finished travelling.

Big Picture, Exhibition, Hardware, Software

So, we got a Kindle. We wanted to try it out, experience the display, see if it felt like the revolution for e-books was at hand, and see if it was something hackable. Heck, maybe it could even be our device for the ultimate reference library of technology related books in the office. (20 O’Reilly books on a little transportable device would be awesome.)

I’m underwhelmed.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s a nice piece of kit, but after a couple of days and reading a bunch of stuff on it, I haven’t picked it up again. I’ve picked up lots of books since then, though.

Not to echo the rest of the detractors out there, but it bugs me that the device is a destination rather than a tool. Anything I ever purchase on the Kindle is going to stay on the Kindle. I can’t send it to another Kindle, I can’t print anything out. If I switch to another user’s account on the Kindle, the books go away (until I log back in as the original account).

And, the customer experience is just weak. It would have been awesome if Amazon had remembered all of the books that I’ve previously ordered with them and offered me a crazy discount to duplicate them onto the Kindle (those that have been Kindle-ized). But, charging me money to subscribe to a blog, and even having to cough up a credit card just to try out a subscription to a magazine or newspaper is annoying. Rather than playing gotcha, hoping I forget to cancel one of the ten or so things I’d like to try out, ask me for the cc at the end of the trial period. As it is, I’m not trying out anything since I know something will slip through the cracks.

The E-ink display is great, but that’s always been a strong point of e-ink’s stuff (random point of interest (mostly to me), my daughter’s first daycare was across the parking lot from E-ink back in Cambridge, MA). The refresh is slow — the whole screen flashes dark and then redraws — which throws a bit of a speedbump into the reading process, although I think you just sort of get used to it.

Oddly, the thing I’ve been most intrigued by is the little lcd silver slider. It’s cool — it’s silver.

The hacking community is just beginning and while Amazon has given a favorable nod to people hacking things up, there’s not a lot there yet. It’s also a shame that if I wanted to put my own content onto the device that’s yet an additional charge. It feels like there’s potential, it’s just not that friendly yet.

(And I especially hate that every time I try to pick up the device I grab one of the next / back page buttons on the side and change the page.)

Exhibition, Hardware, Installation, Medium Picture

It amuses me (not in a ha-ha sort of way, but more of a “hm, that’s annoying” sort of amusing (like getting a root canal amusing)) that when we go through cycles of being “Busy” that communication about stuff that we’re working on drops down to the barest essentials. It’s a crunch mode and everything gets sacrificed in order to meet goals and delivers, but it’s problematic because just when things are at their most intense are probably the times that you need to communicate the most.

Hell, even with this blog you can see the evidence. More posts == life at a rational work level, No posts == my eyes are bleeding from lack of sleep. Assume some sliding scale between those end-points.

In an ideal mode, I’d argue that about 25% of one’s time should probably be spent communicating (arguably less for those doing vs managing (and again, assume a sliding scale in-between)). Having been through this cycle a bajillion times, and being annoyed by it every time, I have to wonder what better strategy there is aside from the obvious answers of do less and get more help.

In any case, we’re getting through the dark phase and I think we’ll be more actively posting when September comes…

Big Picture, Opinion

I came across this blog post earlier today defining some of the words that we frequently use in describing our projects (potential and realized). It made me laugh because it was surprisingly spot-on and showed the gap between our specialized usse vs. the rest of the world.

When an engineer says something is “non-trivial,” it’s the equivalent of an airline pilot calmly telling you that you might encounter “just a bit of turbulence” as he flies you into a cat 5 hurricane.

Big Picture, Opinion