Archive for the 'Productivity' Category

On Designing software

Posted by meero on November 16, 2005

A friend of mine pointed me out today to the Modo 201 event video for SIGGRAPH’05. While I am still less than a couple of minutes through the video, I was very interested by the way Luxology presented their goals for Modo. I believe it’s the simplest and most efficient set of goals I have seen for a piece of software. Quoted from their slide decks:

“– Cutting edge toolset.

– Advanced software ergonomics.

– Painless pipeline integration.

– Streamline learning path.

“

I believe Software ergonomics in this context is a synonym to usability.

The point that attracts my attention the most is the third one: “Painless pipeline integration”. Great software products should not ask us to change the way we do things; it should observe what we do, decides where its role will fit in our pipeline (hopefully at the bottleneck of our struggles) and how it will make our transition to this new software almost transparent.

Posted in Design, General reviews, Productivity, User Interface | 2 Comments »

On Creativity

Posted by meero on November 12, 2005

In Fall of 2002, I took a very interesting class on creativity support tools with one of my favorite professors: Ben Shneiderman. The course introduced us to several tools that empowers people to be more creative by presenting them with the right medium to find resources (Idea Processors, Thesauri, Brainstorming) , creating maps and collaboration.

I remember Ben’s opening statement was: “I believe with the right tools, we can make more people more creative most of the time!”. I also remember raising my hand, and immediately objecting Ben’s statement stating that I know few people who can never be creative even if they were given the best tools in the world. Ben accepted my objection with his pleasant smile, and told me that it’s my right not to agree. A year later, I went to Ben’s office and told him that I believe his statement was true. I have been using some tools myself that exploited more of my creativity than I ever imagined! FreeMind is one of the tools that I use every day in almost every task, and I am surprised that Microsoft does not include it in their product pipeline yet. Mind Mapping exists in a very modest way in Visio, but it does not come close to other commercial and freeware tools out there (it requires lots of shifting between the mouse and the keyboard, and this is too expensive interaction overhead for me to handle).

Anyways, you may be asking: “What’s the moral of this blog entry?”.. Well, pretty much the bunch of links below to those interested in trying a more creative touch in their daily lives!

User interfaces for creativity support tools (ACM paper)

Workshop on Creativity Support Tools (Free proceedings)

Creativity resources (From the class’ webpage)