Thomas Edison quotes courtesy of 37 Signals:

Thomas Edison quotes:

I didn’t fail ten thousand times. I successfully eliminated, ten thousand times, materials and combinations which wouldn’t work.

I never perfected an invention that I did not think about in terms of the service it might give others.

I am more of a sponge than an inventor. I absorb ideas from every source. My principal business is giving commercial value to the brilliant but misdirected ideas of others.

Time is really the only capital that any human being has, and the one thing that he can’t afford to lose.

I find out what the world needs. Then I go ahead and try to invent it.

I have more respect for the fellow with a single idea who gets there than for the fellow with a thousand ideas who does nothing.

Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.

My latest issue of User Experience just arrived and, how timely!, it’s about Usability and Healthcare. The articles can be accessed online, although full text requires membership in the Usability Professionals Association.

Virtual Hosting just released their list of the Top 100 User-Centered Blogs. Lots of old favorites here and some new ones. I wish there was enough time in the day to read them all!

Some of the ones I’ve been following for several years now are:
Signal vs. Noise
456 Berea Street
Adaptive Path
A List Apart (also an excellent resource for CSS tips and tricks)
Zeldman
Meyer Web
Andy Budd
Duoh (also an excellent resource for Photoshop and Illustrator techniques)
Mike Industries
Good Experience (I’m dying to go to a GEL conference)
GUUUI
D. Keith Robinson
Design By Fire
Louis Rosenfeld
Alertbox
Laws of Simplicity

They left out one of my favorites, maybe because he’s more design focused, but it’s definitely worth mentioning Jason Santa Maria. He’s very talented and just a nice guy who will answer email questions about his camera from yours truly.

A great find in the list is Software As She’s Developed, an Ajax and Usability blog by Michael Mahemoff, author of Ajax Design Patterns (our bible for Ajax projects).

Whatever you might think of Donald Trump (and his hairstyle), he has a pretty good idea of what it takes to be successful.

I heard him this morning on the Today Show. We got a good laugh over his assumptions about Rose O’Donnell but listened closely when he espoused that knowledge and passion are integral to building a successful business. (He also said you should hire smart people but don’t trust them. Not sure I agree with that!).

He said that you have to “know your subject.” Of course I found the user experience angle to this. To really be successful it’s not just enough to know your product and the market. You have to know the people who use it, who like it, who hate it, who use the competitor’s version instead. Without this knowledge, you can’t say that you truly “know your subject.”

He also said that you have to be willing to work hard for what you want, and if you don’t love it, you won’t go that extra mile. I am lucky that I found what I love early in life. Chasing users to get insight into what they think, want, feel, and do isn’t a 9 to 5 job. Sometimes you have to hang out in a place over the weekend to see them in action, and sometimes it takes early mornings and late nights. But it’s worth it if you truly love to learn what makes people tick.

At our most recent Birmingham UX Group meeting, the topic was UX Week 2007. Shannon and I both attended, so we each picked 3 presentations to “re-present” to the group. It was clear pretty early that all of the presentations we chose had a common theme: designer not as genius, but as faciliator.

What does this actually mean? Jess McMullin summed it up quite nicely:

“I believe we have reached the point in our practice where the barriers to increasing influence are not about better methods for working with users, but for working with business.”

It seems as though the tide has shifted from the paradigm where the designer sits in a room, feverishly scribbling, trying to understand the whole business in the course of a one or two hour meeting, and then produce a product that revolutionizes said business from those scribblings. While this seems utterly ridiculous and so 1990, we all have to admit we’ve done this in the not too distant past.

This doesn’t make sense on a lot of levels. It’s time consuming (you can’t understand someone else’s business in an hour) and it leaves a lot of room for error. Participatory design with business stakeholders is a much better option, because it supplements the designer’s skillset with inside knowledge he or she can never hope to gain. It also creates buy-in from the very people who get final say in what stays or goes.

The tide has also shifted from the idea that usability is all about the end user. It’s also about solving the right problems, which originate with the business.

Shannon discussed a method for involving business stakeholders in design. It actually sounds like a lot of fun. It involves teams of people using kits filled with all kinds of objects, shapes, stickers, and other creative goodies to make models of better processes, better experiences, and better tools. Check out maketools.com for more information.

At Alabama Code Camp we talked about a few great resources for design and development of Ajax apps. Here they are:

Ajax Design Patterns by Michael Mahemoff:
Buy it
Check out the patterns online
Read his blog

Ajax in Action by Dave Crane and Eric Pascarello:
Buy it

I just got back from the AL Code Camp where Keith, Lee and I spoke about our experiences creating Capmed’s Online Personal Healthcare Record application, which is a part of the new Microsoft Health Platform. The audience had some great questions for us, and our hope is that we saved them both aggrivation and debugging time on their future Ajax apps.

In our presentation, we mentioned several tools we use to monitor memory leaks, logging javascript applications, and client-side xsl transformations. Our notes (along with urls to download the tools) can be found here. I mentioned our strategy to solve the “IE freeze bug” previously on this blog, and our presentation slides and video can be found here.

Thanks again to Jeremy Chance and Todd Miranda for putting on such a great Code Camp! We had a great time and look forward to future events.

Someone once said that ideas are cheap, that successful entrepreneurs are able to execute on ideas; they know their idea will evolve once the rubber meets the road. Consider listening to the entrepreneur podcasts on ClearCast and you will hear a common thread among our hometown serial entrepreneurs.

Now, for the first time ever, You have the opportunity to take your idea and have the brightest in Birmingham take it from idea to product in a time span of two weekends. Only if you can defend your idea and convince the panel that your idea should be chosen.

Check it out at Birmingham Startup

While this is clearly part of the marketing effort Microsoft launched yesterday with the advent of HealthVault, Bill Gates has an interesting op-ed piece in today’s Wall Street Journal (may require subscription). He makes some interesting points, the general tone of which I agree. First, he addesses the data silos that exist in the various part of our massive healthcare system and the problem of data liquidity:

At the heart of the problem is the fragmented nature of the way health information is created and collected. Few industries are as information-dependent and data-rich as health care. Every visit to a doctor, every test, measurement, and procedure generates more information. But every clinic, hospital department, and doctor’s office has its own systems for storing it. Today, most of those systems don’t talk to each other.

This is a topic near and hear to us here at PointClear, and was of particular interest to folks at the Health 2.0 conference.

The problem is, how does one maintain security and privacy once the walls of the silos start breaking down? Microsoft may do a great job securing the HealthVault platform, but what about all the third-party vendors and partners who write applications that use HealthVault? If health information sloshes back and forth between these third parties, and some of the third parties have insufficient security which can potentially lead to data breaches, then how secure is HealthVault in practice?

That makes this comment by Mr. Gates a little frightening:

No one company can — or should — hope to provide the single solution to make all of this possible. That’s why Microsoft is working with a wide range of software and hardware companies, as well as with physicians, hospitals, government organizations, patient advocacy groups and consumers to ensure that, together, we can address critical issues like privacy, security and integration with existing applications.

The ‘wide range’ of companies Microsoft intend to work with would seem to have a negative impact on ‘issues like privacy, security’.

One of our clients, CapMed, is getting a lot of great press associated with the launch of the Microsoft HealthVault.

Here is a snippet from today’s press release:

Microsoft said CapMed, which already markets personal health record tools, will create an application for HealthVault, as will Kryptic Corp., whose program will help doctors send and receive information from HealthVault without having to switch from technology they already use.

Helping CapMed develop these personal health record tools has been the focus and passion of most our team over the past year or so, and we are all extremely excited to see it getting launched to the real world–as part of the new Microsoft Health solution, no less. Congratulations, CapMed! Woohoo!

See HealthVault here.

See news on these new tools for Microsoft here.

See the press release here.

See the CapMed icePHR solution that we helped build here.

See the Microsoft HealthVault Developer Center here.

See blog entry on the Health Care Blog here.

See blog entry on DiabetesMine here.

More blogs on this launch (sorry, this is a massive PR effort on Microsoft’s part and it’s fascinating to see it unfold) here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.