My Yankee husband has always wondered why he doesn’t fit in better at Southern get-togethers. You know, the Sip ‘n See, the Kentucky Derby party, etc. I figured that since he can’t play bocce ball, wasn’t in a fraternity, and doesn’t have a camelhair sportcoat, the deck is pretty much stacked against him. But the other day, he hit on something that might make a difference. Through work, he has a friend who is a well-known former Auburn football player. “I bet if I brought him, I’d be the most popular guy there.” Well, maybe the 2nd most popular.

Through an interesting set of circumstances this fall, we ended up with the Heisman Trophy at our house for a night. I’m talking the real deal here, not a replica. We figured this was a once-in-a-lifetime event and we may as well have a get-together and show the thing off. So, we made up an invitation about a mysterious celebrity, so famous he required a police escort (this was true!), and invited a few select people to come over. It was a hit.

This gave us an idea. Why not have a yearly “Famous Person” party. The person would be a mystery until the guests arrived. Of course, we couldn’t think of any more famous people (or statues) that we knew, so the idea kind of fizzled.

However, I’ve recently become “friends” with a couple of famous people, through FaceBook. Now, if you’re not a cycling fan, you may be somewhat underwhelmed. It all started with one of my teammates, who’s rather well-connected to the US Pro cycling scene. She is friends with Phil Liggett, the Tour de France commentator on Versus. He’s known to describe Lance Armstrong as “dancing on the pedals” or Jan Ullrich as “a steam locomotive.” I sent Phil a friend request, and whaddya know, he accepted. Then, I noticed that Phil is friends with Mario Cipollini. Mario, ah, Mario. He’s an Italian professional cyclist, known for his sprinting abilities, his 12 Tour de France stage wins among his 191 victories, and his, hmm how shall I say it, wild ways. Since I had such good luck with Phil, I sent a friend request to Mario. Voila, we’re friends.

Now of course, I realize we’re not REALLY friends. But I think there’s still something interesting about this phenomenon. We all know the Internet is making it ever-easier for people like you and me to influence media. And with sites like FaceBook, we can come into contact with people we’ve always wanted to meet or to know. Even the famous ones. The barriers are ever-lowering. Facebook isn’t the only place this is happening, either. If you follow someone you respect on Twitter, chances are you can strike up a dialog with them if you really want to. The inaccessible have become more accessible through these technologies.

I may never meet Phil or Mario, but somehow I feel a connection to them. They’re strengthening their importance with their fans by accepting friend requests. Maybe I’ll see if they want to drop by for a little party the next time they’re in town.

We sometimes struggle to communicate why user experience and user interface design is so important in software development. As usual, Adaptive Path says it so well in Subject to Change:

Customers rightfully have little appreciation for the technical workings of a product. Beyond the interface, everything else might as well be magic. Think about a light switch. You flip a switch; a light turns on. How many of us care how it works? Or you put things in the refrigerator, and a day later, when you take them out, they’re cold. Magic. You pick up a handset, press seven or ten digits, and are talking to someone far away. Magic. (page 23)

This is very true, from the perspective of what the customer “thinks” he or she sees. But in reality, the interface is much deeper than this. Don Norman said it well when he expressed this:

Problems arrive at interface, any interface, be it person and machine, person and person, or organizational unit and organizational unit. Any place where two different entities interact is an interface, and this is where confusions arise, where conflicting assumptions are born and nourished, where synchronization difficulties proliferate as queues form and mismatched entities struggle to engage.

The user interface (human to computer in a software application) is of course very important. If this isn’t right, or easy, or intuitive, users will find another way to do what they want. But there are other interfaces that are important too, that can trip users up without them even realizing why. The interface between the presentation layer and the data layer, the interface between your database and someone else’s, the interface between your user’s healthcare data and the secure vault in which it’s stored - all of these should be carefully architected, optimzed, and planned for scalability, connection failure, and overload.

It’s not enough to simply focus on UI design. Underlying systems and interfaces, and those who create them, must think about customer experience as well.

We’ve all been reading the new book by Adaptive Path’s Peter Merholz, Brandon Schauer, David Verba, and Todd Wilkens, called Subject to Change. Adaptive Path is an organization we have long admired, because they have been so successful at evangelizing customer experience and in fact creating a brand around their expertise in that arena.

Over the next few days and weeks, we’ll post quotes from the book that are particularly interesting or particularly good at articulating concepts we also practice and evangelize. One of the reasons I like this book is that is concisely explains ideas I sometimes struggle to communicate to clients, business partners, and even my friends and family.

Today’s Quote:

Aiming to be better at an activity that everyone else has already mastered isn’t a strategy. Strategy is about tradeoffs — purposefully choosing tactics different that those used by your competition. Strategy means saying no to some activities so you can excel at others. And the result of these strategic tradeoffs is products and services that are clearly distinguished in customers’ minds, with meaningful differences that can’t easily be replicated by others. (page 18)

This sentiment echoes our philosophy of user-centered software development. To us, it isn’t enough to just create software. Anyone can do that in today’s market. The differentiator, which gives our clients a competitive advantage, is that we help them truly understand their customers’ abilities, needs, and desires, and build software products to support those things.

I just spent the past 45 minutes listening to my husband as he grew more and more frustrated with offshore tech support from our cable provider. Who likes offshore tech support - raise your hand? I thought so. Everyone is doing it these days, so the cost-savings advantage it brings has essentially been eliminated. Customers hate it, so why does anyone use it? Apple Computer doesn’t, and that was the initial reason I bought a Mac laptop that was significantly more expensive than a comparable PC. I didn’t care about the price tag anymore. After sending my PC back to the manufacturer 4 times, and spending countless hours on the phone with offshore tech support, I made the conscious decision to go with good customer service over price savings.

Apple has chosen not to play the parity game, but to focus on good design and good support. They certainly got my business.

When I first signed up for a Facebook account, I stumbled upon a capability to import blog rss feeds as Facebook notes. Log in to your Facebook account, click Notes, and then notice ‘Import a blog’.

Now, when I first did this, I used the following URL for our PointClear blog:

http://www.pointclearsolutions.com/blog/?feed=rss2

The problem with this, I later discovered, is that we have multiple Authors (Lee Farabaugh is the most prolific of all of us), and this URL is the feed for _all_ blog posts. The worse part is that when Facebook shows these entries, it doesn’t pick up meta-data from the feed like author. So, it appeared that notes actually written by other folks like Lee were my own. (Sorry for the virtual plagiarism, Lee).

Anyway, obviously, the solution is to use a URL that filters by author. Here is the format, which took me a little while to find:

http://www.pointclearsolutions.com/blog/?feed=rss2&author=3

By trial and error, I figured out that Author_id=3 is me, Author_id=2 is Blaine, Author_id=4 is Donnie, Author_id=5 is Lee, etc. There probably is a parameter that allow you to specify author first name or the such, but I was too lazy to look at the source code. Anyway, it works!

I finally did it. I traded my truck-based SUV that carried 4 bikes (and smelled like it carried as many or more racers of said bikes) for a luxury crossover with leather seats, navigation, and a rear back-up camera. I love it. I would live in it if it had a kitchen and a bathroom. It’s just that awesome in its 0 to 60 in 6 second, 300 horsepower loveliness.

One specific feature that I love is the Intelligent Key. All I have to do is have the fob on my person (or in my purse) and I can open the doors, start the car with the push of a button, and lock the doors when I get out. It even knows if the key is inside or outside the car, and won’t let me lock it inside. But for all its whiz-bang technology, the Intelligent Key is, well, still just a key.

It makes me think of a concept I first heard about from my professor in graduate school, Janet Murray. When a new technology comes along, there is a period of time before the paradigm shift occurs, where the new technology is still applied in old ways. Think about the first Internet web sites. They may have had hyperlinks but they still closely resembled the printed page. Only later did the true interaction and communication possibilities become evident and even mainstream.

That’s where the Intelligent Key is today in my opinion. If it’s smart enough to know when the key is inside or out, or when I (with the key) come close, why can’t it automatically unlock the doors when I near, and lock them when I walk away? Why can’t the same key that opens my car open my garage, my front door, and my locker at the gym? Why can’t we replace the analog notion of a metal key inserted in a slot with mechanical tumblers, into the digital notion of a code that belongs to me and travels with me everywhere I go? Maybe one day our “keys” will really be a public/private encryption key that we can code into all the locks in our lives. Only then will the paradigm have truly shifted and the keyring become obsolete.

1. What a brilliant example of social marketing. Check out how Mozilla is generating buzz for Firefox 3 by asking folks to help them set a world record for number of downloads in one day:

http://www.spreadfirefox.com/en-US/worldrecord

2. From Jakob Nielsen’s blog, here is a very interesting post with the title OK-Cancel or Cancel-OK?.

We actually had this debate while working for a client (the Cancel-OK camp won):

After reading Nielsen’s blog entry, I actually think the OK-Cancel approach was appropriate after all, as most of the users for this web application would be on Windows and therefore used to the Microsoft UI paradigm.

3. Finally, here is a wonderful little classic film that I found on a physics blog, the classic ‘Powers of 10′. Wow, I’m back in the 10th grade working the projector for our Chemistry class (and irritated that no one else thinks the film is cool). _shiver_

My friend Ike on Twitter just now pointed out a blog entry about the new rollerball design of the Dyson vacuum cleaner, and the fact that a PR person from Dyson commented on the entry. It reminded me that upon seeing the commercial the other night, I let out a huge gasp (akin to the gasp precipitated by the MacBook Air commercial). “Oh, I want one of those!” I said. My husband replied, “But you don’t vacuum.” Good point, but I still want one.

Just so you don’t think my house is terminally filthy, I do have the luxury of paying someone to clean it (the result of some fuzzy logic on my part about how it saves us money). Anyway, the house is spotless and he doesn’t argue! But before I had this luxury, I toted my canister vacuum up and down stairs, tripped over it, knocked it over, and generally cursed at it, even though it did a great job and I do appreciate its engineering. (It’s an Electrolux, same as Mom had).

The point of the blog post, and why I gasped upon seeing the Dyson, is this:

Another great example is the TV spot for the new Dyson Ball vacuum where James Dyson demonstrates the “steering” problem with conventional vacuum cleaners due to their being on four wheels that are only able to roll forwards and backwards and then showing his solution, putting the vacuum cleaner on a ball so it can pivot on a dime.

…

As for the Dyson example, they’re taking the entire experience of using their vacuums very seriously - always looking for ways to improve and rethink them and then actually doing something with what they learn. How is it working for them? They’ve been cleaning house on the competition for some time now. (Bad pun intended.)

Good design wins because it takes user experience into account and acts on real research into user habits, preferences, and desires.

If my husband ever figures out that my logic isn’t quite so spot-on, I’m buying a Dyson. Although, that will cost more than the cleaning service.

As my friend Rebecca said when she saw I was on FaceBook, “welcome to the black hole of the internet.” Well, I guess it’s true. However, it’s pretty cool to connect to college, high school, and even elementary school friends you haven’t talked to in years. It’s also fun to see what they look like now, what their husbands/wives and babies look like, and what they’re up to.

I’ve been reading an interesting book given to me by another friend who’s on FaceBook too (and suggests I “super-poke” people…strange, last time I actually poked someone it didn’t go over so well). It’s called Surfing the Himalayas, and the Buddhist monk Master Fwap’s description of enlightment is oddly like the new world of the internet since joining FaceBook, Twitter, and several other cosmic bodies of cyberspace:

“‘Before you became enlightened,’ Master Fwap continued patiently, ‘the world appears to be three-dimensional, dull and boring. But in reality, the world is not three-dimensional, and if you are at all aware, it is anything but boring.

‘Life is composed of millions of dimensions. To an awakened mind, life and even the most repetitive tasks in daily living can never be dull and boring at all, because infinity exists in all things.’”

I have to admit that life seems to have a new dimension, because people I either never knew before, or haven’t seen in years, are now in the forefront of my mind. I’m also meeting new people and hearing about things around town that I might have never known. So far, it’s ok to be sucked into the black hole of the internet.

Because of our work with CapMed, Microsoft has chosen PointClear as a HealthVault Consultant (at the time of this writing, there are only four in the world, including us).

You can see the directory on Microsoft’s site here:

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/healthvault/cc136753.aspx

How can we help you use Microsoft HealthVault to expand your business and build your brand with consumers?

Having been a teenager in the late 70’s and early 80’s in Alabama, Lynyrd Skynyrd was (still is) a staple in my music collection. I still have to resist the urge to yell Freebird at the end of any concert (even classical) and don’t tell anyone, but I still stand and put my hand over my heart when Sweet Home Alabama is played.

Imagine my surprise when a friend of mine sent me this version of Sweet Home Alabama. Enjoy

Peace

Keith