Digital Thoughts @ Wesstyware

This post is part three of a series posts covering my progress on the Zany Video Games Quotes (www.zanyvgquotes.com) project. For the full story about the project so far, check out the other posts in the series or the project page for an overview of the project:

• Project Kickoff

It has been a while since I have posted. A lot has happened since I was in Vancouver for the Winter Olympics, and I thought I would start with the progress that I have made with the ZVGQ project. So, here goes.

SketchFlow Version 0.1 Complete

I know that version 0.1 sounds less than impressive, but keep in mind that once the SketchFlow is “complete” (i.e. version 1.0) we will have a complete skeleton of the new ZVGQ site. In any case, I managed to complete the first iteration of the prototype for the new ZVGQ and went over it with Kev. I have posted it on my site here (requires Silverlight 3), and you are more than welcome to check it out. Right now, the pages are placeholders but the main thing this prototype covers is the way users will navigate through the site.

Once complete, I went met up with Kev to go over the prototype to get a couple of things clearly defined about the project itself:

• Confirmation of the vision for the application.
• The definition of success.
• Basic flow for the site by defining how users will navigate through the application.

Vision and Success?

I realize that you might be wondering about the first two items on the list above, but let me explain. While working with David Alpert, I have had many conversations about vision and the definition of success for software project and the importance of having those pieces properly defined. If your stakeholders agree to a definition of their vision and what they see as “success” for the project, then you always have clear way of making decisions about the project itself. With a clear vision and success defined, developers and project managers are able to make decisions about the direction of the project and how to use available resources properly.

So, how does that relate to the prototype? Well, it doesn’t really. At least not directly.

I have worked with Kev on trying to define both the vision and success for the project through many conversations or “requirements gathering sessions” as some would call them. The problem was that after these conversations, I never felt as though I had a clear understanding of vision and success for the new ZVGQ site. This is mainly due to the fact that, I couldn’t guarantee that the experience that I envision for the site is the same as the one that Kev envisions.

With the prototype, I could show Kev what I was thinking for the site and he could actually play around with it. The SketchFlow also enabled me to explain to Kev my reasons for designing the header as I did. Since my decisions were based on the understanding I had about the vision and success for the project, I was able to confirm that Kev and I were on the same page and shared the same vision for the future of the site, along with the definition for success.

Prototype Feedback

On top of ensuring I had the project vision and definition for success defined, we discussed the navigation for the site. Kev had a few comments about the ensuring that the large navigation buttons were kept the same. What does that mean? It means that the random button that I currently have will be made into one of the hyperlink buttons at the top, and liked having all the letters up at the top rather than in the corner. One thing he did notice was that the “NEW” button that is on the current site with the letters is not in my prototype.

The points that Kev mentioned will be added to the header, and it shouldn’t take longer than about 15 minutes. Then I can move onto page layout, which will help in the next step: database design.

Next Step: The Database

I realize that SketchFlow has nothing to do with database design, but it can definitely help with identifying what needs to be stored in the database. I started work on this not long ago, and kept on having to go back to Kev for details about what he expected to display.

I realized quickly that it was my job to tell Kev what he wanted to display and ask him if there is anything else. This is where SketchFlow comes into play.

If you check out a game on the current site, you will see that the majority of the data is quotes, games, and pictures of the quote in the game. Considering that we can do far more than this, I want to show Kev the data we can display to his visitors, not just talk about it.

Ultimately, the next steps for the SketchFlow and I is to build a page that will display a game and add it to the prototype. The link above shows Final Fantasy 2 for the Super Nintendo, and I plan on recreating that page in the prototype. This will give both of us reference point that we can use to compare the future site with the current one.

Conclusion

At the end of the day, the SketchFlow is going to be a very useful tool for requirements gathering on all fronts. The SketchFlow works because it allows me to show the stakeholders how I have interpreted their vision and demonstrate how I believe my design fits with their definition for success.

As we move forward with the project, the SketchFlow will slowly become more complete and we will have a skeleton of what we will be builiding over the course of the next year.

Catch you on the flip side.

Digital Thoughts Cast Member: David Alpert

My work and growth in software development would be impossible without a strong supporting cast. With that, I want to introduce you to the latest addition to the Digital Thoughts cast: David Alpert.

David Alpert (blog.spinthemoose.com) is a Web Developer and Interaction Designer at Anvil Digital and one of the creators of bundl.it. I have found that David is strong with the Force called user experience development/design, and is considered something of a UX Jedi in my books.

Update

Since writing this post, I have updated the SketchFlow for ZVGQ online. It appears that if you are viewing the SketchFlow in Google Chrome, you might have to clear your cache before it will update. I am not sure if there is a remedy to this problem, but I will do some research and see if anything is out there.

With that, if someone knows something about this issue (or if it was just me), please comment and let me know.

Before I even begin writing this post, I want to clarify that this is not a review of a video game. For the record, I just started playing the game and I’m really enjoying it so far. My intentions with this post is to document a UX issue that could have been caught with some extra UX analysis but an example outside of the regular domain for UX discussion, (which is usually business applications.

Disclaimer

For the record, the content contained within this blog post is based solely on my experience with the Xbox 360 version game and the character import feature. This, in no way, reflects the thoughts or opinions of anyone at BioWare or Electronic Arts.

Plus, the game is fantastic as per all BioWare titles that I have played.

A Quick Introduction

For all those people out there who read my blog and are not video game players, Mass Effect is a series of games from BioWare for the PC and Xbox 360. The first game was released back in 2007 and the second game was released recently on January 26th of this year. One of the interesting features of the Mass Effect games is the ability to make storyline decisions that effect the outcome of the game. For example, when you come across the last “queen” of an alien species, you can choose to whether or not to kill it. This decision ultimately decides whether or not the alien species will become extinct.

With all sorts of different decisions like the example above in the game, it would be a pity to see the consequences of your decisions disappear because they made a sequel to the game. Different game means different save file, right? Not exactly. In the case of Mass Effect, you are able to import your character information from the first game (assuming you finished the game) and continue the story of Mass Effect with all the consequences of the decisions you made in your previous game.

This is an amazing feature and I was really pumped to hear about it. The idea of continuing through to the new instalment of the series with all of the decisions that I made in the game world carried over is a fantastic one. Turns out there was a little more to it.

My User Experience

After playing a bunch of Dragon Age, I was very excited to get into the sequel for Mass Effect, and because of this I pre-ordered my copy from Amazon and patiently waited for launch day.

It arrived for the weekend, and my better half and I prepared for our night playing this amazing game. We loaded up the game, went to the character import tool, and waited to select our save file from the first Mass Effect.

Loading complete. Result: No games found.

Huh. Well, let’s try setting the storage device to make sure it is pointing at the memory card.

Loading complete. Same result.

That is the short of it. Most of our evening was spent reading up on how to make this work. Eventually we came across this article explaining things. Turns out that when you beat the first Mass Effect, a file is created on the Xbox 360 that is not visible through the regular interface where you see your other save files. This is a file that is just not visible by any regular means provided by a game or that operating system.

The Red Ring of Death

In our case, our first Xbox 360 red ringed and needed to be replaced. Considering that we had access to memory cards to move our save files to the new console we figured we were covered. Apparently, that was an incorrect assumption.

Not to be deterred, we went out to find a copy of Mass Effect 1 (as we lent out our copy) and returned home to beat it again, which made the hidden file on our hard drive and life was good.

The UX Fail

I suppose you could say that my case was an special case. I mean, how many players are going to be playing the second Mass Effect game on a different console, have their copy of the first game lent out to a friend, and only realize that they need the game when rental stores are closing?

The last two problems could be chalked up to bad timing. But the Xbox 360 failure happening between the release of Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2? Not only has almost every Xbox 360 owner I know had their console die on them, but I have heard of others that have had the same hardware issues.

Considering that these hardware issues are common play with the Xbox 360, why would you consider adding a feature that is strictly dependent on the hardware? Hence, the UX fail and my reason for writing this post.

In the end this experience was not detrimental to my game. I am playing the game and really enjoying it. Still, when we open up a game only to have the excitement whisked away by features that appear to be broken, it takes away from some of the magic and ultimately makes me question the value in my purchase.

The Point

The point is simple: when you are developing features that live in the unexplored regions of your software genre make sure you spend the time identifying all the possible failure points. It doesn’t mean that you have to support all of them, but you will probably want to try and cover the ones that are likely to come up.

The other point: showing people in Developer Land that user experiences live outside of their business and web applications. The exist in all types of software, even games. And although they can be fantastic games, they can still fail with the user experience in some capacity.

Catch you on the flip side.

Resources

Mass Effect Homepage

BioWare Homepage

Joystiq – Game Informer: Xbox 360 at 54.2 percent failure rate (August 17th, 2009)

Note: I realize that a survey done by a magazine may not be the best source, but the Xbox 360 hardware issues are well known in the gaming community, and this article shows that there are at least more than just myself with the problem.

Friday was an exceptionally busy, but amazing day for me. The reason for this is because Anvil Digital is making me part of more software project, with the expectation that I will play the role of UX developer or expert, or whatever you want to call it.

In any case, that includes two software projects that have the infamous Microsoft Office Ribbon as part of the UI. After reviewing the applications at a high level, the first UX task was easy to identify: make sure the ribbon works like the ribbon should.

If you didn’t already know, Microsoft has made the ribbon available to developers to use with a royalty-free licence. The catch is that you need to make sure the ribbon in your application provides your users with the UX standard that Microsoft has set for the ribbon.

I have been doing research on this all day today and applying my knowledge to our applications. Either way, I thought I would share the resources that I have found to be the most valuable.

Ribbon Vocabulary

Breakdown of the Ribbon

You can find this image on the MSDN too, but I wanted to include it as a quick reference. When you are talking about the ribbon, you should probably know the vocabulary that describes it.

Resources

These resources discussed all the important points from either a UX person’s or a developer’s viewpoint. Considering that I am something of a hybrid (literally as Wessty’s Job Title = UX Developer), I used all of them. Take a look and have all of your ribbon questions answered.

Windows UX Interaction Guidelines: Ribbons – A very in-depth look at the user experience for ribbon controls. Very useful when trying to decide whether your application can make use of the ribbon control.

Ribbon Implementation Tutorial – This is the introduction to a series of posts that describe how to implement the MS Ribbon control in your WPF application.

Office UI Licence and FAQ – The ribbon is free to use, assuming you following their rules. If you are planning on using the ribbon, you should probably review these documents.

Windows Ribbon Framework – Introduced with Windows 7, the WRF is a way for developers to manage a ribbon within their application. The catch: only works on Vista SP2 and above. So, if you are supporting Windows XP like I do, then this might not be your best option.

Introduction to WRF – An introduction to the WRF on MSDN.

Related Resources

Okay, there is only one resource here but it is really interesting if you have the time to watch it. I strongly recommend taking a look at this if you want to know the “why?” behind Microsoft’s decision use the ribbon for Office.

The Story of the Ribbon – A history on how Microsoft created the ribbon UI. A good look into how UX development takes place.

Twitter

There aren’t any links here, but I did use Twitter as a resource. When assessing the value of a particular UX feature, I try and look at it from both sides. The first side, is the “how this makes things better” side, while the other is “how this makes things worse”.

After tweeting about diving into ribbon UX, I received a response that discussed why I shouldn’t be using it. For me, Twitter has acted as a reminder about the other side of the argument as my company already likes using it. It is good to be reminded that people have their reasons for not using it too.

Alright, that’s it. Time to apply my new found knowledge about the ribbon control.

Catch you on the flip side.

I have been doing a lot of reading on UX design for the couple of weeks and I came across thisat Johnny Holland. I read the title of the article and thought that it sounded like something quite trivial. “Psh. Of course there is value in that.” I thought “Why else would we start software projects if we didn’t know why?”. Still, since I usually enjoy reading Johnny Holland, I figured I would take a quick glance though as usual.

The funny thing is, as I read through the article I started to evaluate my current software projects (i.e. Wesstyware.com) and realized that I have not asked myself “why” in quite some time. I was amazed to find that I really had to thing about “why” when it came to certain software features.

How did I overlook that?

When I looked back at the Wesstyware.com project and thought about the “why” question and the answer I had worked out in my head. What I realized is that I didn’t have one answer, but many. Here are the answers I had come up with:

• To have an online presence where people can find all “official” Wessty/Wesstyware information
• To have a development blog to contribute to the community
• To have a source where people can find information about my software development projects

These answer definitely answer the “why” question for the entire project, but they don’t answer the “why” on the different features I want to have on the site. How is it that I am spend a large portion of my work day gathering requirements and thinking through different features we have in our application, and yet I completely overlooked the feature list for my future website?

I believe that the problem stemmed from the questions I actually answer when doing requirements gathering and feature analysis at work. Working on someone else’s idea and working on your own idea are two different sports. The analysis I do at work answers the “how”, “when”, and “what” with respect to the development of an idea that someone else has decided needs to be included. I don’t have to ask “why” too often as someone has already answered that question and my job is to bring it into the project. Plain and simple.

“Why” Breakdown

Here is the result of my “why” breakdown of the some of the features I had planned on having in the Wesstyware.com.

These are only a few of the features I have reviewed. There are other features that I have put onto the list in the past, but haven’t really fleshed them out and thus excluded them as I decided before even asking “why” that I wouldn’t work on them as they were too much for the first version of the site.

In any case, you can see how this “why” review actually made some difference for my project. It really forced me to evaluate the value of each feature and whether or not I should spend time setting it up. The News Feed feature was something that I have already started working on. Luckily, I haven’t made much progress due to technical difficulties. Now, I can focus on the parts that are important.

In Conclusion

I realize that this post was really about my personal experience with asking the question “why”. The reason I decided to share my experience is because I wanted to give an actual example of the value of asking “why” about software features, even on a project as simple as a personal website.

Another reason for the post comes from the realization that I don’t usually ask the question “why” when working on software. You ask “when” as you want to prioritize some features before others. You ask “how” as you want to implement the features in the best manner possible. You ask “where” as software features need to be included in the software and you are going to want to make sure your new code fits into the software architecture properly. You even ask “what” as you are going to want to know what feature you are going to implement.

But when do you normally ask “why” other than right when the feature is conceived? If you ask it, it isn’t to question the validity of including the feature. More likely, it is to ask why they (they being the stakeholders) decided they wanted to include the feature in the upcoming sprint. I realize that it is still asking “why”, but it isn’t from the same context as I have asked it throughout this post, and that is where I had originally went wrong with my project.

Ultimately this post will probably not change the way you develop software or work on any project. Though hopefully it will keep the seemingly simplest, but most important, question in the back of your mind when you are working on your next project. It might save you a lot of trouble. I know it did for me.

Catch you on the flip side.

References

The Value of Asking Why (by Daniel Szuc) – http://johnnyholland.org/magazine/2009/08/value/

I have been becoming something of the usability expert on my current project at ANVIL which has easily been one of the most interesting and enlightening experiences of my Computer Science career. I have worked on all sorts of projects where I gathered requirements, produced prototypes. and presented the ideas to the project stakeholders who are on staff. On these projects, due to work terms ending or companies collapsing, this is as far as it gets.

This definitely is a decent way to start developing a project. If you really wanted to, you could continue to drive the project this way, but I’m betting that most would believe that course to be unwise. The difference with the project I have at ANVIL is how the team has reached the milestone where we are actually getting real feedback from an actual user.

What do you mean actual user?

What I mean is someone is using our software that isn’t on the same payroll as the rest of the team. That isn’t to say that we didn’t get honest feedback from our fellow co-workers. The thing is, since we are all on the same team it would make sense to overlook some of the minor nuances of the software to make things easier on us.

With an actual user, you are going to get the honest truth whether they tell you directly or not. For example, let’s sayif the user runs your software, plays with it for 10 minutes, closes it and never looks at it again. Presuming that you have selected a user that is part of your targeted audience for your software, you know that your application does not really interest them. This means you know one of the following:

1. Your software does not meet the expectations of the user.
2. Your software is too difficult for the user to use.

These might seem vague, but it is definitely a start. Obviously this isn’t the reaction you were looking for, but you can now discuss the problems and work with the user to make your software what they actually want. It is for this reason that the actual user should be put into the mix of your software development process as soon as it feasible in your project.

My Own Epic Failure

Going back to the title, we have the words “epic failure”. I figured I would include those words

A while back I posted about the Mozilla Labs Design Challenge for Summer 2009 and how I had been working on a submission with a very good friend of mine, who I will refer to as The Designer in my blog. Over the weekend, we managed to complete our submission and now that we have received official word from Mozilla that our submission has been accepted I am here to tell you about it.

We call our idea “Corner Petals” for two reasons:

1. We store open pages in the corners of the viewport
2. When viewing what pages are stored in each corner, the corner blooms into a bunch of “flower petals” that display the different tabs to the user.

You can find our submission and all other 115 concepts that were submitted here at the showcase. You can find it under “Corner Petals”, as you may have guessed. I have also included a link to the wireframes we submitted, along with the video we produced in this post.

Check it out and leave some comments as feedback is always appreciated.

Catch you on the flip side.

On June 6, 2009 at 10:00am Pacific Daylight Time , the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympic Games started phase 2 of their ticket sales. If you would like to know more about the ticketing process for Vancouver 2010, check it out here. For the rest of you here is a quick explanation: each ticketing phase represents a set of tickets that go on sale to the public. Phase 1 was done by an online lottery. In phase 2, the tickets were available through the website and the Vancouver 2010 Ticketing Center and through ticket booths in Vancouver in real time. Although I already have some tickets for the games, I decided that I would attempt to get some Team Canada hockey tickets.

The login to the ticketing section of the site was locked down until phase 2 officially started. When it opened, this is the screen that was displayed to me:

Your average person who is desperately trying to get tickets because they missed out on phase 1 might be exceptionally frustrated by this screen. Me, being a UX person (and already having a handful of tickets for some for the events), didn’t mind the experience of sitting around waiting and thus here I am writing about the experience.

The idea of a virtual waiting room is something that makes sense for high demand online events. If you are hosting a public webcast, but you know that your servers will only handle 10 000 users, setup a waiting room and put them in a queue. People can still browse around the web and continue to go about their business while waiting to enter your event.

That might sound like a lame user experience, but think of the alternative: the user attempts to enter, get denied, and have to continually refresh their browser until they get in, or until they give up. I don’t understand how that can even be considered a viable user experience for any web event. For the event host, all of the people that are “over capacity” are constantly hitting your server whenever they hit the refresh button. It doesn’t matter if they aren’t getting into the event, they are bombarding you with requests that your server needs to process, which slows down everything. On the other hand, the user has to sit at their machine hitting refresh, meaning they can’t do anything else but that with their computer.

With the virtual waiting room everyone wins. People virtually arrive at your event, if there is no room, they are sent to the waiting room. The waiting room doesn’t have to be a page with a nothing more than a message. You could give them proper feedback on where they are in the queue, you can prepare them for the event by displaying resources related to the evening. You can even give them access to your online store and give them a discount for being patient. There are countless things you can do with the virtual waiting room and keep your users on your site, even though they are unable to see your event right away. Even if they just want to wait until they are in the event, the user does not have to sit there refreshing their browser window. They can open up other tabs in their browser, or write a blog post about how they think the virtual waiting room is an underused and underappreciated UX tool. Now THAT is a user experience.

Well, I have been in the virtual waiting room for the past hour and I am about to give up and assume that all Team Canada hockey tickets have been secured by other people. Although I am disappointed that I was unable to get tickets, at least I was able to share my thoughts on user experience about the virtual waiting room while sitting in line attempting to get tickets.

Catch you on the flip side.

QUICK UPDATE:

I did manage to get into the site a while after completing the post here. Although I liked the use of the waiting, I must say that the site needed some work on the UX side of things. Still, I managed to get a couple of Team Canada hockey games, so I’m content enough.

As everyone who listens to the Internet knows by now that Microsoft has launched Bing, their new answer on how to search the Internet without having to use Google. Now, I could sit here and discuss the new features of how Bing is better/worse than Google, but I think there is enough out there already. So, as opposed to writing another article about the same thing that everyone is discussing, I have decided to talk about something different: site design.

A Quick Canadian Note

Something you should probably note is that I am Canadian and that means I am using the Canadian version of Bing. All the features that people are writing about, such as the shopping helper and the travel helper, are not yet available to me. Keep that in mind when you say to yourself, “Wessty, you should use Bing because of all its new features”.

Internet Search: A Quick Review

I think it is fair to say that for the past many years Google has dominated the search engine market. According to Market Shareby Net Applications, as of June 1, 2009 Google owns 81.5% of the market. That is a pretty significant piece of the pie if you think about it. Even without the statistics how many companies have their company name become a unique verb to describe the service they provide? I am sure we have all heard ourselves or someone say, “Just google it” or “I will google that when I get home”. Whether you love it or hate it, the world loves Google. Plain and simple.

Microsoft has taken a kick at the search market prior to Bing, that being Live Search. Going back to the statistics provided by Market Share, Microsoft Live Search was rated fourth overall. Although that sounds pretty impressive, the unfortunate fact is that everyone below first place has to split the 19% of the search market that Google doesn’t own. In the case of Live Search, it only represents about 2.5% of the market. Although a victory to some degree, my thoughts are that Microsoft had higher expectations than that. At least I would hope so.

The Brilliance of Bing

When I heard that Microsoft was taking a second shot at Internet search with Bing, I started to think about what could anyone, including Microsoft, possibly bring to the table that would make them stand out. Search is search, plain and simple. Google’s search engine, although mysterious, works exceptionally well. Even if Microsoft comes up with their own mysterious, but amazing, search engine of their own what would make me change from Google to Bing? I mean, if I want to move over to another search engine, there will be the learning curve that I will have to overcome. Regardless of how easy it is to use, why would I bother investing my time in learning something that is going to give me the same results as the search engine I already know?

And there in lies the brilliance of Bing: there is no learning curve. Bing.com is simply the next version of Google.com. If you can use Google, then you can use Bing. Check out these screenshots:

View Full Album

You cannot deny the similarity between the screenshots. The layout of the sponsored link sections, the header, the details of the results. Bing just added the left bar that contains extra information that is useful to your search, like your previous searches, related searches, and so on. One of the great uses of the left bar is with image searches. When you select an image from the results, you are linked to the page containing the image BUT the rest of the image results appear in the left bar, allowing to you continue to browse through them without clicking the back button.

The Microsoft Advantage

The other advantage Microsoft has with the release of Bing over Google is the fact that Microsoft can make changes to their Google-esque to add new features without upsetting their entire user base as there really isn’t a user base yet.

You may not think that it is a big deal, but I’m sure we have all heard of the issues that Facebook has been dealing with over their UI changes. At eBay, they have an entire usability department that is dedicated to studying how they can make changes to their UI to make it more efficient while not upsetting their user base. These changes aren’t dramatic ones, but more like things you may not even consider to be important like resizing or repositioning a button. These small changes effect millions of people instantly. If they are not exceptionally careful with their changes, then they can upset millions of users instantly.

Going back to Google and Bing, if Google were to make drastic UI changes to utilize the left side of the page, then users may not like it, or feel that it was implemented incorrectly and thus change their default search engine.

My Point

Here it is: Bing is a great search engine not just because of all the features everyone is talking about right now, but because of its similarity to the world’s most popular search engine. I think the real brilliance in Bing is that Microsoft took what worked and made it better. Sure, some are going to look at this and say that Microsoft cheated or something like that. The reality is that Microsoft took did the smart thing: they chose not to reinvent the wheel, but to make it better.

Although I am a huge supporter of innovation, developers should remember that it isn’t the only way. When you are working on a project, make sure you know what is out there, what works, and what needs to be fixed up. That knowledge might be what makes your application the next Google….or Bing.

Catch you on the flip side.

Just over a week ago I came across an article that lead me to learn about the Mozilla Summer 2009 Design Challengewhich I found rather interesting. According to the contest site, it is quite common for people to have 20+ browser tabs open. When I first read that, I could barely believe it, but then I thought about my web browsing habits along with the habits of others that I know.

The truth is that although tabs did it for everyone in the past, now people are beginning to grow beyond them and need a solution. Sure, there are plugins to organize your tabs, or stack them, but that really isn’t solving the problem. It comes down to the amount of clicks you need to get to a different tab. So how do we overcome tabs in the browser window of tomorrow?

Well, I do have an answer. As we’ve heard of the Biologist here and here, her other half is a designer and another great friend of mine. He and I went out for some beverages and discussed some possible ideas to submit into the contest. As soon as we submit our idea, you can be assured that I will be adding a post about it.

Until then, I suggest anyone out there try and find a solution to the problem. Not because this is exceptionally important for the future of the Internet, but more because it is an interesting problem to think about. This problem really forces you to think outside the box of what you are accustomed to, and because of that you need to explore possibilities that may seem far fetched. The thing is, that is the point. Innovation doesn’t come from doing what everyone else does. It comes by throwing out ideas that appear to make no sense, or seem really quite crazy. Without innovation, technology becomes stagnant. Sometimes you need to shake things up a bit just to see what happens.

Catch you on the flip side.

The other night, the Biologist dropped me an email with a link to a video. She figured that since I have been listening to Nine Inch Nails (thanks to her musical influence) and have an interest in user interfaces and such that I might find the video interesting. Although I was skeptical to listen to a musician talk about their own application, I figured it wouldn’t hurt.

People underestimate the amount of creativity that goes into UI and UX work. I mean, there are literally countless ways to present data to a user in your application. This video shows a great example of how innovation and creativity can give you a completely different look on how to present a web application. The Nine Inch Nails web site is actually quite the site. Browsing through it, I didn’t think it felt like your regular promotional site for a band. The NIN site feels like a real application where its users drive the content. The NIN iPhone application manages to replicate and that experience in a whole new way, and expand upon it as well.

They have created a mini-version of their site on the iPhone that is driven by the data provided by their web site. On top of that, they have utilized the fact that the application will be on mobile devices and used that to provide exceptionally interesting features. To be more specific, I found the use of GPS coordinates added a whole new level to the experience of their web community as opposed to what you get when you just hit the site.

I have embedded the video below, so I strongly suggest you check it out. I realize that you all might not be NIN fans like myself and the Biologist, but the application may just give you some ideas of your own for a mobile version of your web application.

Catch you on the flip side.