A Googley UX Manifesto

Interestingly Google has exposed what most companies would consider some internal doctrine.  In the corporate section of their site they've posted their "Ten Principles that contribute to a Googley user experience."  Say's Google, "[t]he Google User Experience team aims to create designs that are useful, fast, simple, engaging, innovative, universal, profitable, beautiful, trustworthy, and personable. Achieving a harmonious balance of these ten principles is a constant challenge. A product that gets the balance right is "Googley" -- and will satisfy and delight people all over the world."

It's ambitiously broad for a group's vision statement (and despite being presented as goals, it really is more of a vision statement) and some of the aspects of the ten principles strike me a coming perilously close to contradictory.  Nevertheless, it is an interesting read and a nice testament to user-centric design.

Read the whole manifesto here.

Everyone Poops...Some Just Poop Stuff We All Use

The other day I watched Mike Rowe’s show on The Discovery Channel, Dirty Jobs.  The episode focused on dirty jobs (predictably) with an environmental agenda.  Mike’s theme throughout the episode was that such jobs were proof that the color of environmentalism is not green but rather brown.  I then got to enjoy him come in contact with various forms of filth and feces.  Well, more evidence to support this assertion.  It seems that a company in San Jose has genetically engineered a very small but that eats wheat straw and wood shavings and excretes...petroleum.  It poops gas.  And this gas needs very little in the way of refining before it is ready for the pump and ready for your regular old car...no special modifications required.

Of course just having more petroleum to burn isn’t necessarily a good thing, right?  It seems that the stuff we’ve been burning up to this point has had some less than favorable effects on the environment.  Interestingly, crapoleum these bugs produce is carbon neutral.  

Of course large-scale production of the stuff is a bit beyond the company’s means at the moment and I doubt that the oil industry is going to finance additional research but it is pretty interesting stuff...very sci-fi.  You can read more about it here.

Acrobat.com Unveiled

Adobe recently officially unveiled Acrobat.com, a slick online suite of office apps for the creation, sharing and conversion of documents along with ConnectNow for holding Web conference.  It's a Flash-based app sporting Adobe's characteristically sharp interface aesthetic.  

A pretty face, however, only gets you so far.  This suite has been and will continue to be held up against others in the space like Zoho and Google Docs and even office applications' rex mundi, Microsoft Office.  

Having played around with Acrobat.com briefly, I can definitely see potential but a very long road between where it is now and where it will need to be to draw users away from the alternatives.  The workflow between the applications is shaky and some of the applications seem feature-poor when compared to the competition (I'm looking at you BuzzWord).  Of course, what else would you expect in a beta?  One thing I can declare for certain is that I will be eager to watch Acrobat.com's maturation.  

Light At The Tunnel's End

I've been very remiss about posting recently.  What's that?  You want to hear my excuses? Well okay, if you insist.  Apart from get all of the main comps done for eBay Desktop 1.5 (codename "Wyld Stallyons") and putting together my session presentation for eBay Dev Con 2008,  I took a trip back east with my wife and son to visit the families (remember what Michael Corleone tells Fredo in Godfather II) and we've had a number of guest come out to Denver.  Pretty much every time I thought about blogging, I thought, "Sure I could do that or, I could flop on the couch and vegetate to one of the countless programs beamed into my home for just such a purpose."  In the Rock, Paper, Scissors game of life vegetating trumps blogging.

Well, I'm sitting in a hotel room in Chicago after having delivered my Dev  Con session (it went okay; I could have managed my time better and there were a few other lessons learned) and most all the major design work for eBay Desktop 1.5 in the books, I should be able to get back to this blog more frequently.  In fact, I used the Hyatt Regency's self check-in kiosk when I got to the hotel very very early this morning and it got me thinking.  I'm going to revisit it later today and snap a few pics for an upcoming post.

Now, a nap awaits (did I mention that I got in very very early in the morning?).