A More Mauvy Shade of Pinky Russet

No i’m not being national security conscious all of a sudden. I’m talking about a new (better?) name for Rich Internet Applications – “Contextual Internet Applications”.  At work we’ve been talking about the benefits (and drawbacks) RIAs bring to the table and my contention is that the primary benefit is a “duh inducing” one – “context”.

Hopefully i’ve explored this line of thinking a little more deeply and more meaningfully with this diagram, a work in progress, offered for comments and discussion …

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A pattern i’ve seen in my work over the last couple of years when engaged in very early “visioning” work is that of first designing the experience for “stakeholder sellability” to get internal buy-in and then worrying about “usability”. Of course its not as black and white as this – its just not in a UX professional’s genes to ignore usability but I do find myself saying “thats good enough for the stakeholder meeting, lets focus on something else right now – we can figure out a better, more usable way later”. Should I feel dirty? 😉

Jesse James Garrett’s “planes” diagram is a great tool for explaining user experiences. I have it on the wall of my cube and I use it all the time when giving informationals to people at Vanguard about UX. Its always bothered me a little though that because of its stacked single dimension it could be interpreted to mean that only the planes adjacent to one another have an influence on the ones around them (strategy influencing scope, scope influencing structure, etc).

I’ve been toying with it for a while, trying to show how the strategy plane (both the user and business aspects of it) acts as a force on all of the other planes and what tools and techniques can be used to explore those forces. So here it is, far from complete – offered up as a conversation starter. Oh, and Jesse – apologies for bastardizing your diagram with my brutal Illustrator skills.

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Talk about serendipity. Two days after I decide to finally start a blog PeterMe invites me to a bloggers meeting with David Weinberger to discuss his new book Everything is Miscellaneous at the Yahoo! Brickhouse in San Francisco (two colleagues and I happened to be out there for three days). It was a fascinating event for me because a) it exposed me to some non-IA (non-UX even) people that I normally don’t get to talk to, b) it was an interesting look at Yahoo!’s new Brickhouse facilities (very open plan, the biggest projection screen I think i’ve ever seen – probably 30’x15′, a “wall of stickies”, etc).

I’ve recently been reading Tony Ballantyne’s new science fiction trilogy – Recursion, Capacity and Divergence and listening to David talk about his view on “order” made me wonder if “order” has a loose parallel with the Schrodinger’s cat theory (essentially that “there is no single outcome unless it is observed”). We could say that “there is no meaningful order to things unless it is observed” – because of course it is the observer and their context that gives meaning to the order.