From the "Design and ERGOnomical" Dept.
Just wanted to spread the word about a few things that I have been reading of late. The first is a good article in Business 2.0 by Robert Partks entitled ""Great-Looking Product (Too Bad Nobody Wants It)--Why good design is not always good business". Interesting read whereby he lists three rules (citing real-world examples) that companies often make when designing and bringing a product to market.
They are as follows:
Example: The CueCat
The second article is about the passing of the encryption program PrettyGoodPrivacy (PGP). In a telling analysis of the demise of the PGP encryption unit, Gartner analysts Vic Wheatman, John Pescatore and Joyce Graff hit the bullseye on why PGP failed:
Gartner believes the failure of commercial PGP likely resulted from Network Associates' [the parent company of PGP] past organizational problems.....most importantly, Network Associates' failure to make PGP easier for enterprises to use and manage.
Ideally, all Internet messages, be it email, VoiceIP, or instant Messaging, should be encrypted--especially in the workplace. However, in most cases, email encryption is often too cumbersome (via the use of Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) solutions offered by such companies as PGP, Verisign, or Thawte) for most people to user efficiently. By that, I mean Easy to use, fast, and hard to screw up. There is also the risk that the receiving party may not be able to decode the message--but that's another story that I'm not too clear about. Here's a telling quote, "The entire process--assigning, distributing and managing keys and finding compatible software for both ends of the exchange."
Finally the last article I read is on a really cool technology that aims to make reality more palatable. It's called Augmented Reality, and the best way that I can describe it is to imagine a contextual overlay ontop of everything we see, hear, taste, touch, and smell.
I would love for this kind of stuff to be available, but it's obvious that careful design is needed for this to work. Not only is there a huge Information Overload threat, but the computer would have to be context sensitve. Whether a computer can successfully determine the type of information that I want to see, and whether or not it knows when I want to see extra information....wow.
Cheers,
Tai
Posted by taitoh at March 20, 2002 01:11 AM