Rainypixels

Anybody home?

Nishant — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 21:08:13 +0000

Gosh, it seems so long since I wrote something. It’s not that I don’t have anything to write about; on the contrary, I think the issue is that I have way too much to write about. March was a busy month with MIX, SxSW and the final installation of Artists in Residence, a training program I run for top design agencies. April has been filled with travel - met customers in Singapore, and then took a much-needed vacation with my wife. It was a - w - e - s - o - m - e. We flew to Malaysia and made our way through a few places we’d been meaning to visit - Kuala Lumpur (of course), Taman Negara (it’s the oldest rainforest in the world), and Genting (this was a totally random decision; Genting is the Vegas of Malaysia). An overwhelming number of things have been going on, and I’m sort of in a transition period right now (and jetlagged). Can’t share much yet, but it’s all good, I promise.

On a side note - I’m a bit irate with this blog design. The primary forcing function behind it was to validate that Expression Web works well with Wordpress. It was a learning exercise, and something that I also took on to get back into standards-based development. And, it definitely worked out with that purpose in mind. But, as a production design, I’m not really happy with it. I think I may take a few days to revamp the site completely.

MIX08 Interviews

Nishant — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 20:02:56 +0000

MIXOnline, for those of you who don’t know, is the online community for the MIX conference. It’s really what keeps the conversation going all year round. You can candid interviews with UX professionals, designers, program managers, etc. on the site conducted by Joshua Allen or moi.

Somehow this year I got roped in to doing short video interviews with luminary speakers and keynotes at MIX this year. I interviewed some really, really cool folks and got a chance to have a pretty laid-back conversation with them. Some of these guys have dream jobs (Sean Dee, the guy behind Hard Rock International, for instance - he hangs out with Clapton).

If you’re looking for something to watch over lunch at your desk, here ya go:

Search for these folks on the internet. They represent some great brands, companies and philosophies, from UX and rock music to the Olympics and fast cars (that chicks dig).

UX & McNamara’s Fallacy

Nishant — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 01:29:38 +0000

What I find compelling about the article is that it very eloquently describes something that I’ve always thought but was never able to put into words. The process of software development, as it largely exists today, is severely prone to being affected by McNamara’s Fallacy. Design (and I mean end-to-end experience design that encapsulates everything from flow to UI) is still perceived as this organic thing that is measured in terms of how your product makes users feel; it’s really about measuring emotion and perception change over a long-period of time. Donald Norman does a fantastic job of alluding to this in the first chapter of his book, Emotional Design: Why We Love (Or Hate) Everyday Things.

Yes, there are ways to de-risk your product development process by conducting usability studies, focus groups, A/B tests, and so on. But I feel like we often go about those activities with some degree of astigmatism because we haven’t yet been able to successfully quantify the true value of design due to our inability to measure it accurately. Companies like Apple and Target have definitely put design on the map, but there still remains this void in measuring it. We can’t just run a set of unit tests against the software we’re building to detect the design bugs. And till that happens we’re going to continue to see software that, for a lack of a better word, sucks.

If you happen to be dropping by MIX08 this year, I’ll be running a panel called What’s the Secret Formula? with panelists from Microsoft Office Ribbon, Microsoft Surface, Firefox and Adaptive Path. And, you bet your fanny I’m going to be pressing these guys to give me an answer to the question, “How do you design software that looks good, feels right and just works?” I have a hunch that all of them are going to tell me that you can’t do it if McNamara’s on the design team.

It’s Raining Pixels!

Nishant — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 21:03:28 +0000

I caved.

I’ve been trying to get a blog up for a few months now but always got side-tracked by work. I used to blog a few years ago at spoonerism.org, and that blog started gathering dust once I started working at Amazon. When I finally got around to revamping it, I found out that my host, Xtreme-host, had dropped off the planet. Lost everything: all the data, all my files, and even my portfolio. I figured that was a sign to get a new domain, a new host and a new look. So here it is. Rainypixels. Why rainy? Well, I live in Redmond, WA and we get some rain up here.

This design is currently in beta and you should expect it to evolve a great deal over the next couple of months. For instance, you can’t explore the content using mechanisms like tag clouds, chronological archives, etc. That’s “by design” for now. It makes no sense to provide that sort of functionality when there isn’t enough content to organize. Also, the visual design and IA are far from done. The focus right now is content, and the look and feel optimize for that.

Speaking of content, what should you expect to see on Rainypixels? Well, it is my personal blog, so I’ll likely end up writing about stuff that has to do with my life, my hobbies, my cats, and my lovely wife. Turns out that one of my favorite hobbies, design, shares a lot in common with my job. So, it’s likely that I’ll write a whole lot about design, technology and my employer.

If any of that sounds like it may interest you, point your rss reader at rainypixels.com, grab the feed and stay tuned. Thanks for visiting!