From Ars Technica:

Hearing that Windows 8 would use HTML5 and JavaScript for its new immersive applications was, therefore, more than a little disturbing to Windows developers. Such a switch means discarding two decades of knowledge and expertise of Windows development-and countless hours spent learning Microsoft’s latest-and-greatest technology-and perhaps just as importantly, it means discarding rich, capable frameworks and the powerful, enormously popular Visual Studio development environment, in favor of a far more primitive, rudimentary system with substantially inferior tools.

Despite developer complaints, this is the right thing to do. Technology changes, and Microsoft has to make this shift with everyone else. It’s better for the user, better for the business, and better for everyone involved in the long run.

From Business Insider:

From a business and technical perspective, this makes sense. Windows 8 will run on a bunch of different hardware — traditional  Intel x86 chips, new Intel systems-on-a-chip, and at least four different flavors of ARM. Programming separately for each of these platforms is complicated — it would require developers to recompile their code for each platform, and perhaps rewrite portions that don’t work.

HTML5 and Javascript are Web standards, and they’re built to be cross-platform.

…

That not only makes their past experience less useful, but also opens development to an army of Web-focused developers who have never been particularly interested in Microsoft. Suddenly all these young hotshot Web jockeys will be able to write competitive Windows programs? That’s a lot to bear for the guy who spent a decade perfecting C#.

It could mean truly cross-platform applications (i.e. get rid of Flex). It’ll take a while to build tools that will catchup to Visual Studio.  But in the meantime, more developers will be able to develop for the platform, and it’ll bring more (and possibly more usable) applications to Windows.

That’s a bad thing?

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So I was futzing (read: making it look worse) with my blog today, and I noticed that the four share buttons are all different widths (heights are the same).

You know what would be nice? If those companies got together to agree on a common size.

The design teams are all within miles of each other — get in a car, and hash it out. I’ll referee. Hell, I’ll supply the booze. We can all meet at Tony Nik’s and do it over a few Macallan’s.

It’s just annoying to have to design around something that’s inconsistent, and the pissing matches of which size is best are just stupid.

This would take like, 5 minutes of my time in Photoshop?

Ryan Sarver, what do you think?

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Funny. Really funny.

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Classic. Guess the site.

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Great post and great app:

Creating a great user experience transcends direct interaction with a product and extends to interaction with the brand. How a brand positions itself, its aesthetic, and how it interacts with its customers will have a significant impact on a user's experience. The path to great UX is  iterative. It adapts and improves in small but deliberate steps.

Path, a mobile photo sharing service backed by Kleiner Perkins takes a different angle on social. Path is, "the simple and private way to share life with close friends & family." In a culture where the internet has everyone playing the part of voyeur, Path seeks to create "personal networks"-a decidedly different approach than other players in the space.

Read on…

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How I do unfriend?

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There was a great article by Jeff Bullas about eBook sales going through the roof:

The American Publishers have just  announced that compared to the previous February, sales of eBooks have more than tripled with more eBooks selling in February than the whole first quarter of last year, added to this is the iPad App for the Kindle, making it easy to read an eBook even on Apple's iPad.

Newspapers are being replaced by smart phones and hard cover books are being supplanted by digital hardware that enables reading in a digital medium that challenges long held traditions and book publishing models.

This reminded me of the decisions I made when I moved to San Francisco about a year and a half ago. I tend to move around a lot (one of the “benefits” of being in technology). Each move, I figure out what I don’t need.

During my last move, all the CDs went. I gave them away because they weren’t worth selling.

They looked cool, but did I really need them?

With my next move, most of my books will go.

I was recently in a Barnes and Noble and thought, “In ten years, this store isn’t going to be here.” It’s happening to Borders and many other booksellers now. It already happened to Tower Records.

The future of book publishing is dramatically changing. That industry is going through a period of creative destruction like the music industry did, and it’s a good thing.  It’s doing so at a rate that’s probably making Gutenberg spinning in his grave. It took 570 years to perfect the printing press, and now digital booksellers like Amazon and Barnes and Noble are actively trying to kill it. These companies know if it’s not them, it’s going to be someone else.

Alex Williams said, “Never underestimate the aesthetic of books in a house. Picture frames can be replaced by digital, books can’t.” I absolutely agree. There’s a place for books and art. You will never be able to replace having a few good books in the bookshelf and an amazing Picasso drawing.

Books like “iPhone Development for Dummies” shouldn’t be in anything other than digital form. It’s not art. It’s commerce and should be delivered in a way that impacts the environment at the least.

Americans as a culture want a big house full of things. Things require  manufacturing, natural resources and shipping.  Companies like Walmart have spent billions to perfect distribution. They have 147 distribution centers in the United States. Millions of jobs to move around boxes.

What if you were to take everything that should be digital out of the equation? How many billions do you save? Do they really need stores as big? Do we really need big homes? I live in an 800 square foot apartment (with less things), do I need all this space?

This flies in the face of improving the environment and living less complex lives.  We have to gear our economy so we aren’t creating jobs that involve moving physical boxes from Bentonville to Chicago.

When you think about what it takes to produce a book and ship it, there’s a tremendous amount of waste. The same goes for newspapers, magazines and a lot of things that could be of a digital nature. Storing it once in digital form on a server is much cheaper and better for the environment.

The same goes for the cloud. As technology improves, there’s no reason to have the same file on six different computers or for having hard drives that could hold millions of books. Humanity going through profound changes, as it culturally and technologically progress.

Digitally, I have more reach with my small blog and Twitter feed than the original copies of the Gutenberg Bible. More content is being created in less space. More opportunities are being created to go directly to the reader than ever before. It’s a profound shift that most writers are missing, but those that understand it are making millions.

These are amazing times, enjoy them while you can.

What are the physical  possessions you could do without? What could be digital?

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Short, but great, read:

Apple has managed to achieve what I never achieved: using the power of their products to persuade people to queue to buy them. For me, I had to queue to receive food at the end of World War II. That's quite a change.

They understand that design is not simply an adjective to place in front of a product's name to somehow artificially enhance its value. Ever fewer people appear to understand that design is a serious profession; and for our future welfare we need more companies to take that profession seriously.

Another post here covers this (experience before features). Distinctive product design makes people invisible to the commodity of features. No one asks how many megapixels the iPhone camera has, but they do ask that of  Android  phones. That’s a design #fail.

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People will read great content if it’s written on butcher paper (much to the dismay of visual designers and user experience professionals everywhere) but that takes talent and practice. And great  content is great content, no matter its length.

I know that some of this seems repetitive because Twitter’s been around for a while, but sometimes it’s good to get back to the basics.  Just because it’s only 140 characters doesn’t mean it has to be boring; some of the best content ever has been clever, clear and concise.

One of the truths of about writing copy is that the shorter it is, the harder it is. That’s one of the reasons Twitter is so compelling — great, short copy is hard to find, and there’s so much of it there.

Be  140 Characters 110 Characters or Less

Just because you have 140 characters doesn’t mean you should use them.

Services like Klout  look for retweets to gauge influence, and the best way to get that is write content that’s short enough so the retweeter can keep your @username in the message.

For example, “RT @usabilitycounts ” is what my handle looks like in a retweet when someone passes along content.  That’s 20 characters.  For the lazy twitters out there, I have to write tweets of no more than 110 or 115 characters that allow for easy retweeting.  TweetDeck is a great tool for this. It’ll give me a character count as I type. When I get to 30 or less, it’s getting long.

The last thing people want to do is edit a retweet. That’s an extra 20 seconds, and if it already takes less than a second to capture their attention, they might just forget the retweet altogether or delete your username, which is worse.

Retweets should be a frictionless, one click like an impulse buy, except it’s free.

Be Relevant

There’s nothing better than useful, relevant content.

I don’t have time to look for it and RSS Feeds take too much time (sorry @davewiner). Twitter users are the news ticker because they collectively curate content that helps the masses filter what they want to read.

One of Monday’s useful tweets was shared by @rsarver:  Twitter and Facebook share  statistics.  I wouldn’t have seen it otherwise. Ryan Sarver’s opinion matters because he’s on the Twitter API Team. Every once in a while he’s going to send something across that I find very interesting.

There’s another 280,000 users that feel the same.

Be Clever

Twitter is for business and pleasure. It’s OK to be clever.

Just recently, I started a thread called the  #uxdrinkinggame.

It consists of silly and/or fun situations that happen in my every day work (My favorite: “#uxdrinkinggame #ux if a client says they can get a better design off of @99designs, do a drink”). I saw interest from the feed in the form of retweets and comments.

Silly, but when you’re staring at the same wireframe for hours, it’s good to take a break.

I love following user experience folks that are both informative and funny (@semanticwill comes to mind, even when he talks about testing his hair cuts).

I have  a list of people I follow that’s separate of the general feed (the best 50 or so), and each one of them says something funny at least once a day.

Be Sensational

Twitter is the modern equivalent of a tabloid newspaper cover.

You have less than a second to catch the reader’s attention before they’re catching the next tweet,  similar  to a  newsstand  in a subway station.

Which gets more traffic: “Man Murdered in a Bar” or “Headless Body in Topless Bar?”

Clever and thought provoking headlines get the user to click. Remember A/B testing? Tweets should be descriptive and interesting,  so readers know what they are clicking on and that it’ll be a good read.

Not every tweet is going to be a winner, but every once in a while, you’ll write the right headline that will get over 100 retweets.  The best way to get there is to learn from other sources.  I would look to the New York Post or New York Daily News for ideas, because they are the class of the business.

Be Tagged

People also follow search terms.

When I started reweeting the #uxdrinkinggame with the #ux tag, I instantly saw an increase in traffic.

Don’t forget to use tags that will have a large enough audience for retweets, but small enough where your tweet is broadcasting by an attentive audience. (Justin Bieber’s tag is probably not going to get a lot of traffic.)

Occasionally if you use a tag that’s related to a search term, you’ll get a bot retweeting — Sunday one of my posts about Radio Shack got picked up and replied by two separate bots.

Be Conversational

Tweeting shouldn’t be a one-way conversation.

The best users I follow include something that’s about their personal lives (sometimes good, sometimes bad). They reveal information about themselves that shows they are real people versus auto-follow bots.

What’s better is if you reply to them, they reply back.

Twitter channels should be treated as a true feedback loop. View comments as a positive way to interact with your audience. It’s a public forum, after all.

You don’t even need a lot of followers to generate conversation.  Alan Cooper is a good example, because he has a higher measured influence than fellow user experience expert Jared Spool, even with only one-fifth the followers.

That’s because Cooper has more retweets than Spool, even with 20 percent of the following.

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Good post:

I can think of multiple instances when people have come to me and asked how is it that I've managed to do what I've done.

…

People like to ask if I've gone to school for these things. The answer is a giant NO. There was no school involved. I simply did these things because I wanted to do them and I had an  irrational, unsupported-by-anything  belief (which I really can take no credit for) that I can do those things! It's that simple. I believed that I could, that they were mine to claim and I did them.

We all know those people who think they can and those people who simply think they can't. Some jump forward with zero preparation, make mistakes, learn, adjust, while others take classes, read books, read and research endlessly, feeling overwhelmed by the necessity to be "ready" and to build up slowly before starting on a task.

Here's some simple proof. When Wanelo first launched, the design was just plain bad. There's no other way of putting. It was utterly horrible. And, in retrospect, I really didn't care about how bad it was. I wanted to design it. I  thought I could design it well. I liked the problem I set out to solve. And I decided that I loved designing enough to figure it out (i.e. make mistakes, learn and fix them). So I did it. But the reality is that I was not good at it and I had no idea what I was doing.

The more we know, the more we don’t know, but are willing to learn. Right?

Read on…

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This is a great post:

I only have two rules for doing UX design. My first rule is:  be lazy.

Through years of practice I have become quite adept at following this rule. But why is being lazy a good attribute for doing UX design? Because it prevents one from doing stupid, cute, things. Sure, some of those stupid/cute things might be brilliant, but most of them would diminish the UX of the product or perhaps take a lot of your development time for no real improvement to the final result. Just like in evolution, there are lots of mutations but only a very few of them will actually be useful.

I have also found that being lazy is a sort of filter for adding new features to the UX of a product. When I think of something new to add or enhance, I usually just make a note of it and then forget about it. If a few people who are testing the product suggest the same feature, then maybe it was actually a good idea. Once I have reinforcement for the idea, I’m motivated to push through my laziness to implement the new feature.

My second rule is:  copy good UX whenever you see it.

This one is a no-brainer. Everyone does it, but I suspect that most people feel a little cheap in doing so. I say embrace your inner copycat. If you see a product that has great UX, then copy that stuff and tweak it a bit to make it yours. Every first-person shooter game is a knockoff of the original, Wolfenstein 3D. I’m so glad that no one at Bungie thought that they would be called copycats for creating Halo.

Read on…

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An excerpt:

We've proven for years that you can ship a product without a designer. Many companies have done that, and while it doesn't make for a great result, it does ship. However, it's much harder to ship a software product without a coder, if not near impossible.

That's why, right now, there are dozens of startups looking to pay big bucks to find the coding super designer. The demand is high and those designers who have proven, practiced coding skills can demand a higher salary than those who don't.

But how much of an extra salary?

What about the non-startup portion of the hiring world? Right now, the established organizations find it easier to have larger teams with separate developers and designers.

Yet, that doesn't make the designer that can code any less valuable to them. A team with two coding designers is more flexible and capable than a team with one non-coding designer and a non-designing developer. The flexible team can produce well-designed results better and faster.

I had a conversation with a recruiter about this regarding a position they were hiring for. It was a fairly large organization that was looking for someone who could do user experience, design layouts, illustrate icons, and code.

The mythical unicorn.

The pay was good, but not even close to what that person could make freelance, nor much more what most of the people with two to three of those skills are making. I told the recruiter that.

There’s nothing that’s come across my desk that would pay enough to force me use both skills. I can do visual design. I can do HTML. But I enough User Experience the most. The technical and visual skills help me understand the constraints, but I don’t go much further than that.

If a recruiter calls me about that mythical unicorn position, and isn’t paying at least a 25 percent premium over market rate, they don’t understand what they need.

What hiring managers really need is a diversity of skills:

Coding and designing are collections of skills. What we've learned is teams with a better distribution of skills, not segmented by roles, produce better results. Having a team filled with individuals who can both code and design will be more effective in the long run than a team where the skills are divided up.

Maybe we should be asking developers if they get user experience and visual design.

In today’s environment, you can get by with good but not great developers early on. You can’t get by on poor design, and that’s why user experience skills are more valuable now.

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That LinkedIn Honeymoon: it might be your professional network, but how long will that last?

Several start-ups are banking that the future of career networking is actually on Facebook Inc.

LinkedIn has established itself as a source for candidate information, recruiters say. The company made its debut on the NYSE on May 19.

These start-ups point to Facebook’s much broader user base: With 500 million users, Facebook is five times larger than LinkedIn.

But changing users’ mindsets might be a challenge. Some Facebook users are loathe to mix their personal and professional networks, fearing some private information might damage their work reputation.

Younger people are more apt to use Facebook than LinkedIn. And does everyone need a LinkedIn profile?

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It’s easy to criticize the user experience of an application or website, because we’re all end users.

But sometimes we use it once, while many have to use it day after day as a part of their job. We talk about how we like using some sites, but there’s always the “I wish it was this way.”

We are our own worst enemies.

We constantly pick at sites and snipe on Twitter how certain missing features are UX 101, but we don’t offer constructive feedback. We don’t understand that some decisions are based on conscious business decisions. Worst of all, we don’t get that company culture, most of all, plays a part in the final product.

Not every company is Apple where design is king. Trade offs are made all the time, sometimes without any input from the user experience stakeholders.  All good user experience designers make decisions regarding what they can live with and what they can’t.

What do you forget when you comment?

The User Experience Designer Is the Wrong Fit

All user experience designers aren’t created equal.

For most of my career, I’ve been involved in large projects. One site redesign over 300,000 pieces of content. The current application I work on has hundreds of screens, many with complex interactions.

Because of my past experience, I could tell you a lot about content management, Internet Postage and consumer level escrow transactions.

But please, please don’t ask me to design a microsite.

I tried once. After two weeks, my client and I mutually agreed it wasn’t a fit.

There’s a reason why job descriptions read: “Must have 3 years of mobile experience.” There’s all these nuances and details that come only when you work on projects. If you go from one type of site or application to another, you’re going to make mistakes. And in the end, users suffer.

I’ve made conscious decisions now to tell recruiters up front that I’m not a fit but will refer someone that’s a better candidate. Not everyone does that.  Many User Experience and Visual Designers are “out of position,” because they are working at companies or on projects that aren’t in their sweet spot. Other User Experience Designers have to come in behind them to clean up the mess.

Often, this cleanup lasts longer than the initial development because of migrating legacy user experience issues and redesigning the technical implementation with users in mind.

Technical Debt Affects User Experience

There’s a lot of truth in Joel Spolsky’s statement: “All applications suck until version 3.” It takes a lot of time to learn the users, build the features and fix all the crap that you broke in the first place.

All of the startups where I have worked functioned on the “just good enough” philosophy of development. Some places where I worked, tasks that should have been automated were done by hand, because the system didn’t support it.

I worked at one startup where we were up against the wall.

One month before launch, and nowhere near complete.

They had to launch.

On time.

No questions asked.

The development team was in a meeting room late at night trying to figure out all the features that absolutely had to be done. There was a bunch of arguing, a bunch of negotiating, and then someone brought up something completely unthinkable.

“When we launch, we don’t have to bill the customers for at least a month. That would buy us some time,” a developer said.

So they launched the product without billing. Absolutely amazing. Later on, we had to pay the technical debt because the billing system they did write was written by developers that had been working 14 hour days for months. But that was a business decision that at the time seemed worth it.

Why? We shipped on time.

Many startups begin without a user experience designer, and that affects every decision that is made. That forces the incoming user experience expert to be a janitor — something that’s not really seen until the redesign is complete.

Culture Puts User Experience at the Back of the Bus

There’s a famous tale of a web designer that called out American Airlines for how bad their site was. He redesigned their home page, doing a great job creating a very clean design. Easy to do, right?

He got a response from a user experience designer that worked there, a very talented one at that (and one that eventually got fired). The designer listed all the divisions that were stakeholders on the site and explained the interactions that lie outside of user experience but made it in the final product. He mentioned that one group might have control of the pages, user experience designers get overriden by executives and, in the end, the visual designers might have final say, affecting the shipped product.

The group running AA.com consists of at least 200 people spread out amongst many different groups, including, for example, QA, product planning, business analysis, code development, site operations, project planning and user experience. We have a lot of people touching the siteand a lot more with their own vested interests in how the site presents its content and functionality.

I’ve been in many places where user experience is back of the bus to the direct  opposite  of what they sell. Some places, creative runs the shop. It really just depends.

A culture has to value user experience and product management to let it lead. The best organizations I have seen have been collaborative, but in the end, product and user experience had the final call. If that isn’t the case, then it’s a culture issue.

Resources Are Constrained

I was at a meetup a few months ago, and a few people I met worked at a company that recently IPO’ed. We were talking about the size of teams. In their company, they had 60 visual and interaction designers. Most of the places where I have worked, I was on a team of one. Sometimes, I’ve been lucky enough to have a visual designer.

That’s a pretty big gap.

When you’re working with smaller teams, you make a lot of decisions that you would never make if you had unlimited resources. You know that drag and drop WSYISYG editor you’d like to drop in? Can’t do it, but we can create something on a smaller scale. The site-wide redesign? Don’t have the resources, but we could do it on a rolling basis. Rewrite every email that gets sent out? Sure, but we’ll have to do it over two months.

All of the situations above I’ve gone through. Multiple times.

Not everyone works at really large companies with unlimited resources.

Nor do we work at startups trying to solve very specific business cases. One project I worked on, there wasn’t a product manager for a single screen.  The majority of us work at companies were there’s job security for three years, because you’ll be redesigning the application one section at a time.

Because of this, we all make decisions on which battles to fight. Often, it’s the difference between shipping and not shipping a product. Not shipping leaves one year gaps in your resume.  You ask yourself the following: Is digging in worth that one year gap? Do you want to own the decision that could negatively affect the profitability of the company?

Do you want to put your job on the line because you want something cooler?

Business Goals Trump User Experience Goals

If I was working at some software services, the last thing I would do is improve the user experience too much.

There are a lot of services companies that sell great software. But what they really sell is services to install, maintain and extend the software. It’s going to be easy enough so sales engineers, most of them making much, much more than user experience designers, can show how customizable it is, but hard enough so anyone without experience can customize it.

Because at the end of the day, the business value of user experience hits the bottom line.

Great user experiences for consumer products not only sell the product, they prevent customer support and save money. The reason Mint.com had to be so easy to use is because customer support representatives cost money, and that’s something you can’t charge for with their business model. What you can charge for is solution architects, because there’s a perceived need.

I worked for a consulting company, and we did a lot of customizations. We played this game all the time, and none of it was about User Experience. It was about the bottom line. We billed by the hour, and the easier the package was, the less we could bill.

Any software consultant can tell you the best thing about open source is the lack of real support.

To really learn what matters for the product, talk to everyone else in the company and ask where they fit in the bottom line. You’ll realize that your wireframes are a very small part of the big picture.

You Aren’t the Target Market

There are a few things I don’t like about 37signals.

I wish it had auto-numbering.

The lack of categories annoys me.

I wish the permissions system was better.

However, say want you want to say, they’re doing something cool over there. They’ve invented the perfect lifestyle company. They have a solid team. They’re making a virtual team work across multiple time zones, using their own products to manage product development. They are contributing to a very profitable SAAS product that has an enthusiastic community behind them. Their process works.

Who am I to criticize?

I’m a power user of project management tools.

I’m always going to ask for more features.

I’m not their target audience.

They have filled a very specific need that serves millions of users well, and they are making money on it. I could make suggestions all day long, but they have a good handle on their target market. They get their users. They understand the personas. They will be king of the hill until someone makes something better.

The same goes for any product. I look at products on which I’ve worked, and I always see features we can improve. But then the users (remember, “user” experience? Not “what you want” experience.) rave about the product, and it’s profitable. Or almost so.

It works for them, and the users are happy even if it’s not perfect.

Who am I to criticize?

The End Game

There’s no such such thing as an ideal situation.

It’s easy for someone like 37signals to talk about how a product can be improved, and it’s another thing to actually do it when you’re not driving the bus. Not all companies have the luxuries a small startup does, with a clean codebase and clear objective.

The real world isn’t some startup where people will run through walls to launch a product, or some college product. The developer you work with wants to work realistic hours, and that means making realistic choices. We all want to see our family and friends; a satisfying work/life balance might mean shipping a feature in the next sprint.

If you have feedback, here’s a better approach: reach out to someone personally and give your feedback.

More often than not, you’ll get an honest response. Taking this approach is a very professional way that, hopefully,  can be easily achieved by using LinkedIn or Twitter, and both make it easy to find that person who’s designing the product. I’ve done so several times (I have to dig up that email to Quora), and I’ve enjoy the conversation immensely. Having that conversation publicly through Twitter is something that is bound to come up with people evaluate you for other positions. Social Media is forever.

Doing so privately also doesn’t get the designer fired for talking frankly about the issues they encounter.

It takes a certain amount of maturity and mutual respect for the designer to have that conversation. We are all after the same end goal: great user experiences.

But that’s easy to forget, isn’t it?

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Ah, the irony. Then again, does he really need LinkedIn? Do we all need it?

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How much did it cost to print out your portfolio?

I know how much it cost for mine: $521. It took three hours to print at Kinko’s, and I generally carry it around in a suitcase on wheels.

I’ve been lucky — most of the places I have worked at treated wireframes and persona documents as deliverables. I also have a print design background, which most UX types don’t have. I also have also worked with Fortune 500 companies, so it’s going to look impressive even before opening the pages.

Even then, when I present my portfolio really, really impresses people. How do I know? I’ve been told several times that what I have is some of the best materials they have ever seen.

By interviewers. By recruiters. By co-workers.

Word gets around too. I’ve interviewed a lot of UX types, and been interviewed.

Sooner or later, the right people take notice, and they’ll remember your work. They won’t remember the average work, but they do remember really bad and really good work.

People move places, especially in the UX community. Even in San Francisco, it’s a small town. Once you break in, people know who you are.

Does your portfolio impress people? It should. You should be able to explain in detail what parts of the UX process you used on a particular project. We never go through the whole process — we adapt to what’s needed for the project.

Explain what you did to make the process more efficient.

Explain your thinking.

And most of it, do what you need to do so you don’t have to explain: make it look good.

This is a really good post about portfolios over at Better UX Portfolios:

I do still think that it is important to show well presented, detailed, annotated wireframes in a portfolio. Employers need to know that you can do these, and can think through the detail that a developer and designer will need.

But, no employer worth their salt will just want to see a bunch of wireframes. You should share aspects of your process.

All those things you list in your cv (collaborative workshops, sketching, personas, sitemaps, process flows, user journeys, prototypes). Where are they?

1. Prove that you have done these stock UCD activities that you can learn from the many books that exist
2. Demonstrate how you have adapted the technique to suit your style or the problems you were faced
3. Show how they helped a project, or even better how the activity failed for whatever reason

Read on…

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Sounds about right:

Android phones must adhere to a "compatibility" standard determined by Google. In an e-mail on Aug. 6, 2010, Dan Morrill, a manager in the Android group, noted in passing that it was obvious to the phone makers that "we are using compatibility as a club to make them do things we want."

…and you would think open would mean being able to plug in other technologies. Not so:

In an e-mail dated June 2, 2010, Tim Vangoethem, a Motorola executive, wrote to Skyhook executives that Google had informed Motorola that Skyhook's location service on the planned smartphone "renders the device no longer Android Compatible."

Google can do whatever it wants — they open the OS. But they shouldn’t be standing behind the “Don’t do evil” philosophy if they’re only as open as Microsoft is. I’m sure there are a lot of companies and government agencies that are concerned about the amount of control Google is now exerting over the market.

And I think that’s rightfully so.

Read on…

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