Over the past year of living in Toronto, I’ve made some positive changes in my life; one of which was getting a little more… social.

Another, partly due to the conveniences of living in a city, was a conversion into someone a little more… green!

Continue reading It’s Easy Being Green »

Tonight I attended my second Toronto tech event, taking advantage of get-togethers orchestrated by various members of Toronto’s tech community, around various technologies and themes.

The first event I attended was the awesome DemoCamp 17 back in February (at The Toronto Board of Trade, in First Canadian Place), which played host to over 400 people. It really was a great way for me to start to learn about who the players are in Toronto.

Tonight’s event was Toronto Flex Camp 2, at the MaRS Centre (located at University & College), a venue I had been looking forward to checking out.

Continue reading Camping Around Toronto »

The other night I churned through a few TED Talks ( podcast here ) on my Apple TV, and watched some truly inspiring people give some brilliant speeches. My favorite, thus far, is the following by Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuroanatomist who had the opportunity to study her own brain as she suffered a stroke.

If you haven’t already, I encourage you to check out the others. They’re very enlightening, and truly inspiring!

The latest episode of the awesome video podcast Dear Toronto featured what looked like a great event called Cut&Paste, a “digital design tournament”. But the highlight of the vid, for me, was the music, by Bitstream Dream. You can get a bunch of their tracks, for free, here. Out of this collection, my favourite is Whirlwind, which you can listen to here:

Bitstream Dream – Whirlwind

Over on Requirements.net I’ve posted the first in a series of articles about a Facebook application I’m planning to build.

I’ve wanted to do something with Facebook for a while, to learn about how their platform works, and to prepare for a couple more substantial ideas I have for projects that I think could do well on a social network. But first, writing a simple app around a straightforward, fun concept sounded like a good idea to get me started.

Anybody who knows what brownie points are will get the idea: In a nutshell, the app will allow you to give arbitrary points to your friends, set goals around points, and attempt to make points meaningful in some way. That’s pretty much it. (Sorry to disappoint if you were expecting something more extravagant!)

While we were conceptualizing this idea, Kevin (indirectly) suggested that I write about how I’m going to go about defining the app in the first place. Because it’s a very simple application, I thought it might lend itself to being something fun to write about, teaching some basic principles about software requirements and Facebook development along the way.

In the article I start at a high-level, first defining the application and its goals. As things progress, I’ll dig into specifying more detailed requirements. Eventually I’ll get into implementation, though I may move that discussion over to this blog… we’ll see.

Click here to read Part 1!

Just the other day I remembered that my iPod (Shuffle) had a Hold feature. Since there’s no button on the device that initiates this mode (you have to hold down the Play button for 3 seconds), I had completely forgotten that it even existed.

The point is, even though it was a simple thing — and sure, not that exciting — I found it cool that I had (re)discovered a feature of a product I already owned.

Think about movies: Part of the fun of watching a good flick is not knowing what’s going to happen next. And hopefully the plot of a movie is one of its best features!

So, this makes me wonder, can “feature discovery” be designed into a product, such that it provides a rewarding experience for the user without intentionally hiding useful functionality?

How could you add plot twists to your product?

A business associate recently handed me a small cardboard box as a token of appreciation for doing business with them. Of course, the gift wasn’t the box itself — though it was a nice little sturdy box — but rather, what was inside it. After removing said gift from said box, the lonely cube sat on my shelf for a number of weeks. Ultimately, I couldn’t think of a another use for it… so off it went into the recycling bin.

Then it occurred to me: What if the packaging industry was mandated to create all containers for consumer goods, such as plastics and boxes, in a set of standard sizes?

Much easier said than done, I know. But, think about it:

Most packaging only has few additional uses, and it’s up to your brain to figure out what those uses are (this is a barrier to re-use, if you will). So, what do most people do? Throw the container out. Not cool. However, with a limited set of standard sizes, the number of possible other uses for such containers would proliferate, and I’m sure people would gladly share their ideas. Ultimately, this would encourage people to keep containers around for other uses. An ecosystem around exchanging and selling used packaging might then appear. More manufacturers might then accept packaging back for shipping out other products.

Consider this: One day somebody realized that an empty Altoids tin made a great container for a project they were working on, and shared their idea with the world. Now look. On top of this, consider the amount of free publicity Wrigley’s, the manufacturer of Altoids, is getting. (But look at their website: It’s a shame that the company doesn’t appear to take advantage of this.) Anyway, I know I’ll never look at an Altoids tin the same way again.

What about Web 2.0 API mash-ups? Expose an interface to a product that was intended to do one thing, and chances are somebody will find some other use for it, and provide free publicity in the process.

Would conforming to some existing standard help your customers? What other uses of your product could you promote? Are people using your product in ways you never conceived in the first place?

I was recently invited to complete a survey for Apple. And OK, yes, I admit, I finished it.

Why? Well, on the one hand I love my iPod. On the other, I was curious as to how one of my favorite companies approaches surveys. And, to be honest, I was expecting some sort of incentive for finishing it… though it turned out there wasn’t.

In any event, it gave me something to write about!

Surveys can be a great tool:

Surveys are cheap. SurveyMonkey doesn’t charge for up to 100 responses, and has affordable pricing if you need more. There really is no need to use your own infrastructure to conduct a survey. Even Apple, who sells web publishing tools, servers, and no doubt has the resources to support it, used a third party provider to conduct the thing. (The real work, of course, is coming up with a good set of questions.)

Surveys provide an opportunity to market your other products or services. Apple’s survey asked if I owned any of their other products. (One day soon Apple, I promise!) Even though you may already know the answer, why not ask your customers if they’ve taken advantage of your professional services, or support options?

Surveys provide you and your customers with insight into other ways of using your products. It may seem trivial, but ask your customers how they use your product. Maybe they’ve forgotten certain features existed!

Surveys show that you care. Sure, surveys can be annoying — especially when completely unsolicited — but if I care enough about a product and want to see the company be successful with it, I am more than willing to go out of my way to answer their questions. What I’d love to see, though, is surveys become more “social”: Why not share the results? I’d love to know how I compare with the average iPod/Apple consumer. What are they using the product for?

Surveys keep your customers coming back. I recall receiving a receipt at a particular restaurant chain that noted a link to an online survey. In itself this isn’t new: Typically you’ll see invitations to surveys that result in a “chance to win” something; not exactly a good incentive. Upon completing this survey, however, the receipt told me I would get a special code, which I could then bring back to the restaurant to receive a not-so-nominal discount on my next meal. How cool is that?

While collecting a human’s feedback is vitally important, in today’s newfangled world technology products can also survey themselves — call this product analytics, if you will.

Video game developer Valve tracks a ton of statistics in their games, including what computer hardware was used, how long people play, and even where people are most likely to die in a given level. (By the way, by sharing hardware statistics Valve did the PC gaming industry a great public service, since they do have many excellent, top-selling games. They didn’t have to do this, but they did, which earns them serious Cool Pointsâ„¢ in my book!) Another, less exciting example is Salesforce.com, who provides you with usage statistics periodically, making you aware of features you may not be using, and tells you how you fare in this regard with the average user.

I think in general, we like to read about ourselves, even if it’s something as seemingly boring as how many times I started an application.

So, if you could do a survey today and send it out to all your customers, what do you think you could learn? What if your product could keep track of how your customers used it?

How could this information be used to improve your product’s user experience?

After several weeks of planning, I am excited to announce the launch of Requirements.net, a joint venture between Blueprint and its partners — which include big players such as HP Software and the Requirements Networking Group.

The goal of the site is to open a discussion on the state of poor software requirements, promote understanding of these problems, and what companies can do to go about addressing these concerns.

From start to finish the site took about two weeks worth of work, once the design was approved. To make this happen, I based the site on a blogging engine I was most comfortable with (WordPress), and was able to carry over a lot of the tricks that I learned while implementing this blog and other web projects.

In the near future, I’ll be writing articles for the site. But beyond that, I believe I have some ideas in mind that I’ll be writing more about here soon, as well. So, needless to say, I’m pretty excited about the possibilities!

Our latest product release was a big one for our company.

While providing an important, fresh set of features, it also visually marked a turning point in the design of our application. Compared to the previous version, the new release had a more modern look-and-feel to it and relied on updated technology, such as a brand new windowing framework.

As a result, it became apparent that we needed somebody to direct the redesign of all of the icons and graphics, as things would have looked very much out of place on top of our shiny new toolbars. That somebody had to identify all 250 icons, work with somebody to refresh what we had, and help to come up with design ideas for the new features we were adding.

As it turned out, that somebody was me.

Continue reading An Iconic Release »