Tom Hume

Little Springs Design on "yes/no, ok/cancel": "n the mobile space, I frequently see the button label problem with error messages and query messages. In many of these cases, “Retry” and “Cancel” make good labels (almost always better than either yes/no or ok/cancel). What’s most important is giving the user a clue about the action in the button label itself."

This is a personal bugbear at the moment: why, when an application is telling me it can't do what I want it to, do I have to admit to it that that's "OK"?

Is this really much of an improvement than the "abort, retry, fail" choice which MSDOS gave us?

Going to SXSW? If you get a chance, go see Chris Letcher play :)

• IMG_0062.JPG on Flickr - Photo Sharing!
  (tags: 3gsm slogan competition)

• Motorola Z8: Clever, bendy slider phone - Crave at CNET.co.uk
  (tags: motorola handset industrial design ui)
• Play Uncross the Lines Online at 2DPlay for Free
  (tags: puzzle game play lines elastic)
• Lifeblog: Tyranny of the desktop metaphor?
  "But, thinking on what folks want to do on the move and how, I keep wondering if the whole Pointer-Icon-Windows metaphor is no longer relevant, especially for mobile, small-screen, one-handed devices."
  (tags: mobile ui design)
• 3GSM diary: Vodafone and Google from Guardian Unlimited: Technology
  One of his colleagues, who was on safari in Kenya and wearing a Google T-shirt, was accosted by a local shop owner who said he was a massive fan of the company's news service. Mr Nishar's co-worker pointed out that he could now get the service on a mobile
  (tags: mobile google vodafone africa kenya)
• 3GSM - AmiGO
  (tags: symbian amigo flash series60)
• HugeURL - for better bragging rights
  (tags: huge url amusing)

• Netimperative - Yahoo rolls out mobile display ads
  (tags: yahoo mobile ad)

I'm not going to 3GSM this year - we're just too busy (more on that soon, I hope!), so Mr Falletti is representing Future Platforms in Barcelona in 2007. But to try and bask in some of the reflected glory of 3GSM, I'd like to offer a competition.

Last year I came across some really appalling slogans from companies exhibiting. This year, I'll offer a bottle of bubbly to whoever sends me the worst slogan of 2007, as a photo. Judging will be done by me and whoever's nearest me when I run through the entries.

"Never underestimate the power of intent" was my Worst Slogan 2006, for it's pomposity and lack of any discernible meaning. Can you find better this year?

• Another definition of “Second Life” « Scobleizer - Tech Geek Blogger
  "My favorite quote of LIFT came as I was interviewing Sister Judith Zoebelein, who manages the Vatican’s Web site. I asked her “do you think we’ll soon go to church in Second Life?” and she answered: “You mean after death?”"
  (tags: lift vatican scoble interview nun)

Something was bothering me towards the end of 2006. I'd started receiving an awful lot of email which looked the same. It was something like this, with varying terms and percentages:

Hello dude

I don't care why your ramrod is so small, but 70% of women do.
They are pretty sure that bigger sausage will make their desire
stronger. You have the chance to change your life.

Now, I'm a sensitive guy and I respond poorly to criticism, so found this quite bothersome. From the tone of the email (sent to me by an altruistic stranger who I can only thank for bringing this to my attention) clearly a number of women have been talking about me behind my back and coming to what I feel were some unfair conclusions. I wanted to know more about what was going on here, so I started saving my spam in an attempt to determine some sort of pattern.

Two months and a 5-line Perl script later, a disturbing picture emerges. This graph plots the percentage of women who think I have a small ramrod, thing, prick, schlong or Johnson against the date emails were received alerting me to the fact:

What can I conclude from this?

1. There was a lot of what I gather is referred to in intelligence circles as "chatter" around my genitalia at the start of December. It was clearly a hot topic of discussion for women worldwide, and opinion swung back and forth wildly for about a week.
2. Something happened at 4:21 on Christmas day: women stopped talking about my old chap. Subliminal messages beamed to them worldwide during the Queens Speech? Distraction thanks to a Bond film? Too many mince pies?
3. Things were looking much better for me by the next time the issue was raised, on 12th January at 11:27am. During the intervening fortnight, 14% of women worldwide had decided that I met minimal physical standards for them. Ladies: I salute you.
4. 14% of women worldwide is 462 million women. Clearly, my powers of the communication with the opposite sex totally ROCK!
5. And on that note, my glass is half full: even at my lowest ebb, 10% of women worldwide still thought I was good enough for them. I platonically ruffle the hair of the 330m women who've stuck by me through thick and thin: thanks girls!

• Mountain Goat Software - Selecting the Right Iteration Length for Your Software Development Process - Agile Development Training and Consulting
  "I find two-week iterations to be ideal. The overhead for planning and testing is much more manageable when amortized across two weeks. The first week of a two-week iteration may feel different from the second week, but the difference is not as dramatic a
  (tags: agile iterations software dev)
• Coding Horror: Dysfunctional Specifications
  "You have to strike some kind of balance between a one-page vision statement and an obsessively detailed five volume masterwork of a functional spec. "
  (tags: spec software dev functional documentation)
• A Set of Unit Testing Rules
  "Generally, unit tests are supposed to be small, they test a method or the interaction of a couple of methods. When you pull the database, sockets, or file system access into your unit tests, they aren’t really about those methods any more; they are abo
  (tags: agile dev software tests unittest)

It's the day after LIFT finished, and I'm sitting in a Starbucks in Geneva, catching up with some work stuff and generally reflecting.

The conference has been fantastic. I think it's been the best conference I've ever attended; normally when I go to things like this, they're much more commercially biased: less thought-provoking and more sales pitch-y. With LIFT, there were 6 talks which I thought were absolutely excellent, and another 4 which were good. Normally I find 1 or 2 which enthuse me, so LIFT's strike rate is very high.

In particular I have to point to Jan-Christoph Zoels (who I was fortunate enough to get to chat to on the way to the Fondue), Adam Greenfield (who it was great to meet), Jan Chipchase and Fabien Girardin. If you get the chance to see any of these guys speak, I urge you to do so.

Other thoughts on the event? It was very metaphor-heavy; perhaps it's a consequence of the type of event I normally go to, or my lack of any formal design background, but I find it difficult to think in the softer terms that metaphor demands. Ben Cerveny's talk is still making my head spin (though I don't think this is an unusual reaction, judging from conversations with others): I'm not sure if I "get it" yet.

I also found there was a fair amount of the bleeding obvious and jargon in some of the talks I found less rewarding. I'm developing an aversion to the word "innovation" right now. It seems to be bandied around like the word "interactive" has been in the last 5-10 years: as something which is a priori A Good Thing, and is used to sprinkle magic pixie dust on otherwise bland ideas.

And I have to say that some of the talks - particularly the open stage ones and the panel discussions - got a bit salesy (though admittedly, some of the products being sold looked quite interesting); this generated ire on the backchannel and detracted from the exploratory feel of the event a little, I felt. That said, unless you're paying speakers to talk, I'm not sure how you avoid this. I know that if I was up there I'd be talking about some of the worthy stuff FP have been doing recently, but with one eye on how the company was being presented.

And on the subject of the backchannel... it was the first time I'd used one of these successfully during a conference, and a good and bad experience. It was interesting to chat to folks about what was being said whilst it was being said, but between IRC, blogging, and twitter, it was all definitely a distraction. Not necessarily an addiction (hey, I could stop any time!) mind...

But I don't want to end on a negative note. It was a fantastic event and I'm already looking forward to going again next year. Is there more stuff like this out there, anyone?