Oct 302009
 
HTC Quietly Brilliant

HTC Quietly Brilliant

HTC has a new brand positioning called “Quietly Brilliant”. In fact, HTC seems to be getting the fact that a mobile device is now ubiquitous in everyday life. A few people asked me what I thought when I heard the new branding “Quietly Brilliant”, and going back to my British English roots, I declared out loud, “Brilliant!”. Not so quiet after all.

“Quietly Brilliant” really embodies the philosophy of an ubiquitous lifestyle where a mobile phone just does great and brilliant things while being all natural, behind-the-scenes and “quiet” about it. This very much follows what User Experience (UX) geeks have been trying to achieve all along. Will HTC be able to achieve this ubiquitous stage of Zen? In order to follow through with this new branding, and their “YOU” campaign, they must first look back at what they have achieved, improve their existing ubiquitous technology, and bring it to the next level.

Their existing TouchFlo 3D has brought Windows Mobile phones up one level, emerging as a unique phone above every device. Their new HTC Sense UI for Android phones has given new meaning to how one perceives an Android phone. My recent foray into the HTC Hero has satiated my need for a mobile device that suits my lifestyle, yet discovered that HTC Sense still requires a lot of work. My hope is that HTC follows suit to their new “Quietly Brilliant” branding and develop both the HTC Sense UI and HTC TouchFlo 3D beyond what it is today.

HTC, going forward and strengthening your branding, my humble word of advice: Hire more UX experts and invest your time on making your technology “Just Work”.

Below are the marketing campaign videos for this new “YOU” campaign that will hopefully be a series of campaigns surrounding this new “Quietly Brilliant” brand.

Oct 212009
 

A lot of people have asked pretty much the same questions over and over again whenever I talk about Hackerspace. Well, instead of regurgitating the answers every time, I guess I’ll answer some of the questions that have been raised, and explain what our intentions are and are not.

What is Hackerspace?

Hackerspace, in its fundamental essence, is a place for people who love to explore, experiment, tinker around, create, and innovate to come together, work on their cool ideas, and show it off. It is also a place where various communities can host their events, gather to discuss, and hang out after their events.

Is Hackerspace a physical space?

Yes. It is an actual physical space where members can come and go as they wish.

What is the vision, purpose and goals of Hackerspace?

It is our hope to cultivate a culture of curiosity, creativity, exploring beyond the possibilities, thinking out of the box, and serve the community at large. Our purpose is to provide a conducive environment for the community and individuals to hold their activities, just hang out, or work on certain projects. We want to encourage the possibilities of “Why not?” as oppose to questioning ourselves “Why?”.

What is hacking (or a hacker)?

A hacker, or hacking, is always mistaken for being someone that is involved in cyber crime or breaking cyber security. That’s really one of the paths of curiosity where a person turns bad. Hacking is really about the curiosity of finding out the unknown, making the impossible is possible, and finding ways to deviate from the norm.

How are you going to sustain this Hackerspace?

We’re going for the subscription model where you pay for membership to access the hackerspace. We have a few membership tiers where different membership will allow you access to different benefits.

Why is Hackerspace run under a Private Limited Company?

It is easier to handle the accounting, legal issues, and various other small problems. We have looked into various types of companies and this seems to be the least hassle of all.

What is the philosophy of this company?

“Innovation, creativity and exploration beyond boundaries”.

What is the mission of this company?

“To give hackers a place to go”.

What is the purpose and responsibilities of this company?

Its purpose and responsibility is to serve the community as a legal entity to run of the hackerspace and community events.

What are the rules of Hackerspace?

Keep the place clean.
Honor thy membership tier.

Is Hackerspace an Incubator? What is the difference between Hackerspace and Incubators?

No, it is not an incubator. Hackerspace does not incubate companies or entrepreneurs with business models and ideas. The main difference is hackerspace is a space serving the community to cultivating ideas, as oppose to incubator of companies.

Oct 202009
 

Welcome to our Singapore’s very own Windows 7 Social Party. We have an exciting party in-stalled (har har! Lame pun.) for everyone in Singapore.

We have catered food. We have soft drinks. We have potluck from you. We have party music. We have games. We have Windows 7 Laptops waiting for you to try Windows 7 out. We have a spokesperson from Lenovo with 15 minutes to talk about their Windows 7 “Enhanced Experience”. We have a list of Windows 7 tips. We have lots of Windows 7 propaganda flyers. We have 5 Windows 7 t-shirts to give out! We have 1 Windows 7 Professional, and 1 Windows 7 Ultimate to give out! We might even have more prizes to give out!

So what are you waiting for? RSVP and join us at this awesome party! Remember to bring your name cards!

Venue: Microsoft, NTUC Building, Level 22, One Marina Boulevard
Date & Time: Saturday, October 24, 2pm to 5pm

Oct 192009
 

Hugh Mason did a great job with this video that sums up what Hackerspace really is.

There are dozens of hackerspaces around the world. Hackerspace.sg will be Singapore’s.
Built by and for geeks, nerds, inventors, engineers, and entrepreneurs, hackerspace.sg will be the hacker community’s living room and laboratory.
You can hang out in the evenings. You can work during the day. And we’ll host meetups and movie nights for the local scene.

Oct 132009
 

Well, it’s here! DigressCast Episode 5 is our first episode with alcohol involved. We went to Brewerks and had a few drinks, chatted a little, and this is what came out of it. This isn’t the complete night’s recording, but it’ll do for now. I’ll post Episode 5.5 soon as a continuation to this episode. In the mean time, listen to this first half.

DigressCast Episode 5: The Virgin Night, and a Special for Auntie

Oct 122009
 

A few days ago, Microsoft Research released a news article, “Exploding Software-Engineering Myths“, debunking several software engineering myths and discovered/confirmed a few beliefs using actual empirical data.

The biggest problem for several researchers and software engineers were  a lot of their hypothesis and conjectures are based on anecdotal and personal experience. These were seen to be true throughout several projects, but none were able to confirm or deny these without empirical data… Until now. This research was done by Nachi Nagappan, a senior researcher at Microsoft Research Redmond with the Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement Research Group (ESM). Working with Microsoft and their various (enormously huge number of) development teams, Nagappan was able to confirm several beliefs and even debunk and correct some of these hypothesis.

Some of the discoveries are shocking. Here’s a brief summary of the article:

Code coverage != software quality
You should spend more time testing complex code and more used code rather than having a high code coverage.

TDD does takes more time to release, but reduces post release maintenance cost
TDD actually produces better quality code, but takes 15% to 35% longer to complete. However, it reduces the cost after release significantly. (Realizing quality improvement through test driven development: results and experiences of four industrial teams)

More assertions and code verifications means fewer bugs
The density of assertions/contracts actually have a negative correlation to code defects. However, forcing the use of assertions will not work; building a culture will. This is a good thing because Code Contracts will be released in .NET Framework 4.0. (Assessing the Relationship between Software Assertions and Code Quality: An Empirical Investigation)

Organizational metrics can predict software failure-proneness
The software system developed will usually resemble the organization building the system (Conway’s Law). This is really startling for me to find out various factors that organizational faces will actually affect the software’s quality and failure rate. It means that there is a direct correlation between organizational structure and the quality of software. The Influence of Organizational Structure on Software Quality: An Empirical Case Study

Distance does not matter
Most believe that distributed-development model has negative impact to software quality. But surprisingly enough, the impact is statistical negligible. In fact, organizational cohesiveness plays a more important role than distance or geographical location. (Does distributed development affect software quality? An empirical case study of Windows Vista)

Oct 092009
 

Here’s a great listing of books on Usability. Here are some books I highly recommend from the list:

Universal Principles of Design: 100 Ways to Enhance Usability, Influence Perception, Increase Appeal, Make Better Design Decisions, and Teach Through Design, by William Lidwell, Kritina Holden, and Jill Butler (buy in the U.S. or buy in the U.K.)
As the title says: a description of a hundred basic principles of usability and design. Few of these will be new to you, but it’s good to have them collected in one place with simple description and a few illustrative examples of each principle. Serves as a nice checklist to read through as you are thinking about the usability of a design problem. For example, one technique is “highlighting”: the book gives the guideline to highlight no more than 10% of the information and lists five common ways to highlight (bold, different typeface, color, inverting, and blinking). Reading this short description may give rise to the following questions about your design: Did we highlight something that users should be directed to give special attention? Did we highlight too much? Did we use the best highlighting technique for the context, or should we use one of the others?

The Design of Everyday Things, by Don Norman (buy in the U.S. or buy in the U.K.)
This book is the best introduction to the importance of usability in design: much of the value comes from the fact that it is not about computers but about all kinds of other things that we suffer from every day (even nerds can identify with the examples in this book, though they usually claim that “well, typing mumble-foo-META-F4 is not that hard to remember” when confronted with an example of bad user interface design). This is the paperback edition. The hardcover edition was entitled The Psychology of Everyday Things, leading to the often-cited acronym POET. The two editions are the same despite the different titles.

Emotional Design: Why We Love (Or Hate) Everyday Things, by Donald A. Norman (buy in the U.S. or buy in the U.K.)
Don Norman presents his theory of the three levels at which people engage with designs: visceral, behavioral, and reflective. Many traditional appearance designers have focused on the visceral level, usability has traditionally been strongest at the behavioral level, and many marketing experts have focused on the branding aspects of reflective design (while ignoring other angels of how people think about their personal history of using products). Norman brings it all together in a unified theory of design. The book is the most useful for readers who are designing physical objects where the visceral level has more dimensions to work with and where users also get more time to engage the reflective level. Web design is more dominated by the behavioral level, but the other two certainly matter as well.

Usability Engineering, by Jakob Nielsen (revised paperback edition). Buy from Amazon USA or buy from Amazon U.K.
Basic textbook that covers the entire usability engineering lifecycle from early product conceptualization through design and evaluation to field installation and follow-up studies. This book focuses on the practical methods that can be applied at each step with a particular emphasis on “discount usability engineering” methods that can be used despite the most severe deadlines and budget restraints. The full table of contents is online

Oct 082009
 

Kyle Sollenberger sums up 10 User Interface Design Fundamentals, and most of them can be used on almost any design you do other than UI. But here’s a 1 liner I can sum up everything you need to have. (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder). Yes. Just be overly obsessive in every little detail.

  1. Know your user
  2. Pay attention to patterns
  3. Stay consistent
  4. Use visual hierarchy
  5. Provide feedback
  6. Be forgiving
  7. Empower your user
  8. Speak their language
  9. Keep it simple
  10. Keep moving forward

There you have it. 10 fundamentals of User Interface Design.