Hello, Office 2010

I just installed Office 2010 and I'm loving it! It looks like Outlook has received the ribbon treatment, which I'm a big fan of. There is some new sizzle in a couple of the other apps as well. If you're a Lynda.com subscriber, you can check out the videos that they have up giving a quick overview of the new features.

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Hammers and Nails: Technology Push Design

"We need to refine our requirements first, before we look at tools." This is a common phrase that I hear. While I sympathize with the sentiment, I think it is frequently wasteful. I suspect that we'd get to the right requirements faster by looking at tools already available in a given problem space. Pushing the concept further, is it foolish to find a cool technology and then look for ways that that technology can apply to current problem spaces? What if you don't even recognize you have a problem space? Without a constant search and openness, we'll miss many serendipitous opportunities. Here is BYU professor Larry Howell discussing this issue. I often enjoy doing something ... that is sometimes controversial. In this approach, rather than starting with a need, you start with a new technology and you search to identify a need that it can fulfill. This second more controversial approach is called "technology push design." You can imagine t...

Making People Feel Stupid: A Cardinal Sin in Design

People will go to great lengths and inconvenience to avoid appearing or feeling stupid. A great example of when design makes a user feel stupid comes from Alan Coopers 1999 book The Inmates are Running the Asylum on page 24. Cooper is talking about the keyless entry system on his car keys. "The large button locks the car and simultaneously arms the alarm. Pressing the button a second time disarms the alarm and unlocks the car. There is also a second smaller button labeled 'Panic.' When you press it, the car emits a quiet warble for a few seconds. If you hold it down longer, the quiet warble is replaced by the full 100-decibel blasting of the car alarm, whooping, tweeting, yowling, and declaring to everyone within a half-mile that some dolt--me--has just done something execrably stupid. What's worse, after the alarm has been triggered, the little plastic device becomes functionally inert, and further pressing of either button does nothing. The only way to stop that ho...

Becoming a SharePoint Convert

SharePoint has always been in my peripheral vision, but never a tool that I actually used. We're in the middle of an investigation project to look at putting up an enterprise instance of it. I watched the Lynda.com intro training for SharePoint 2010 and I have to say that I'm quite impressed with how far SharePoint has come since my first introduction to it. It is sporting the ribbon interface from the Office applications that I've come to like very much. The ability to keep calendars, task lists, and even documents synchronized with Outlook is awesome. I wish it was a little more straightforward to save a document from Microsoft Word or Microsoft Excel in to your SharePoint work space for the first time. Right now, the interface feels a little broken to me. You click the button to browse for a SharePoint location to save, and word does absolutely nothing. You click the button again, and it still does nothing. It turns out that you have to click the SharePoint button, a...

Bradley at Work

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