It is easy to start an online presentation on Google Docs, but do you know how stop it?
Dezember 13th, 2008 Ralf ScharnetzkiPaul Thurrott recently published two interesting articles about user interfaces and the difference between a simple UI and a UI that is easy to use:
“Google’s Web applications are simple—they are—and a certain audience out there really appreciates that.”
http://community.winsupersite.com/blogs/paul/archive/2008/11/24/a-great-google-article-the-difference-between-easy-and-simple-and-why-this-is-a-problem-for-windows-7.aspx
“Today, we take it for granted, and while the details may change, the desktop UIs used by systems as supposedly diverse as Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux are all in fact very similar. But they’re “intuitive” only in the sense that if you’ve used one you should be able to adapt to the others.”
http://www.winsupersite.com/win7/win7_simple.asp
Google Docs as any other Web Office application is mostly easy to use because it is leveraging the user experience we all got used to in the past through interaction with desktop applications. Because Google Docs is web based it adds to the expected set of desktop features (“File-Save as” etc.) rich online sharing and collaboration features.
There are two special features of Google Docs default behavior for “Started Presentations”:
- People will not have to ask you in the future to access the latest version of your presentation and
- you will not even be able to notice that others are accessing your presentation, Google Docs will tell you instead that there are no Viewers for that presentation.
Google Docs online presentation mode is a concrete example where a user interface (in this case of the Google Docs 2008 UI) looks simple but is in reality not always easy to use.
If you would like to know how to stop others from accessing a presentation on Google Docs after you presented then please find all details after the click.
The value of application integration: Gmail Labs integrates Gmail, Calender and Documents
November 9th, 2008 Ralf ScharnetzkiWithout Gmail Labs from Google the Google Mail Beta user interface looks like this:
Gmail Labs was introduced in June 2008. The feature it offered were not seen by everyone as interesting: “Gmail labs is live but also boring”.
But the team behind Gmail Labs released some new features recently.
With those new Gmail Labs features enabled Google Mail looks like this:
The integration of the separated Google applications Calendar and Docs into the Google Mail user interface has proven in our seven days long practical test to be of good value. Gmail Labs is in our view now a great enhancement to Google Mail.
Click below to see:
- Our top 5 recommended Gmail Lab features
- What could be one of the reasons why you can not find or access Google Labs in your Gmail
- For our German readers a simple tip of how to enable those Labs features in Germany (valid in November 2008):Wie kann man Google Mail, Kalender und Text & Tabellen mit Google Labs auch in Deutschland in Google Mail zusammen anzeigen bzw. integrieren?
34 billion German Internet users can teach you something about the web
Oktober 23rd, 2008 Ralf ScharnetzkiUpdate 25.10.2008: See updates in blue text in the body of the post below
A research institute confused million with billion in a news release published last month. Someone called them and they fixed the one-letter error immediately. Case closed, what could be learned out of this? What is the importance of million vs. billion in the light of the current financial market crisis anyway (sorry, bad joke)? After all we are all humans and we are all making mistakes, right?
Good that you are asking. The mission of line-of-reasoning is to help making the world a better place by explaining issues of our today’s information infrastructure.
Based on the small and unimportant error of the institute we will showcase with concrete examples some of the most simple and fundamental issues that continue to plague the web since its beginning:
- broken links: URL´s are pointers and they are great as long as the page that they point to is still existing. But if not …
- copy and paste helps somehow avoiding the issue of broken links but it makes the removal of errors somehow even more difficult
- Google, currently THE web search engine, is not providing you with a good answer related to the most essential information out there on the Web although Google itself has been -so to say- built on the answer to this question: What pages are linking to another page?
Read on for all details, artifacts and explanations.
Posted in Issues explained | No Comments »Free Google search training from Google: How to become a Super Internet Searcher
Oktober 1st, 2008 Ralf ScharnetzkiWhile it is easy enough just to type some keywords into Google`s famous simple search UI this does not necessarily mean that you will find always quickly the most valuable and reliable information that is available out there.
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Daniel Russell working at Google for “Google Search Quality & User Happiness” is making us happy with his great training course called “Becoming a Super Internet Searcher”. (download here the 3MB PDF). In this search training course you will learn:
- How to use Internet search and Internet resources for schoolwork and home use
- Develop effective search query formation
- Learn how to organize your search
- What to do when you are stuck
The best thing is that Daniel does not stop here, he is providing also excellent tips of how to evaluate the trustworthiness of the sites that you will find, so that search results can be put into the right context.
The PDF “Becoming a Super Internet Searcher” contains 97 pages of insights and advice and it is interesting for beginners and advanced Internet users: It provides you with the required background knowledge to improve your search. We highly recommend it.
Posted in Interesting Links, Recommended Products | No Comments »The rise of the virtual exchange of pros and cons
September 25th, 2008 Ralf ScharnetzkiIf someone is making a “statement” (positive or negative) about a specific thing this contextual relationship between the “thing”, the “statement” and if it is “pros” or “cons” can be captured and saved. This information can then be later easily used to combine “statements” about specific “things” and create by this dynamically a “virtual exchange of pros and cons”. The value of the virtual exchange of pros and cons is very clear and it is nicely demonstrated on the site opposingviews.com :
We call this a “virtual” exchange of pros and cons because it is not necessarily a given that each pros and cons were provided originally in direct relationship/context to each other. The logic that puts specific “pros” and “cons” left and right together on one page is also not necessarily transparent. This missing or disputable transparency is leaving room for hidden intentions or stupid errors behind each and every page that displays a virtual exchange of pros and cons. Why is this important to be recognized?
The real world effects of information put into the wrong context was just recently clearly demonstrated:
“What made a six-year-old article about a bankruptcy filing by United Airlines reappear on Wall Street traders’ screens on Monday as if it were fresh news, prompting a sell-off that erased $1 billion in the company’s market value in a matter of minutes?”
Source: http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/10/a-stock-killer-fueled-by-algorithm-after-algorithm/
The real world effect of potential errors in the context of a virtual exchange of pros and cons on Amazon would be probably limited.
But would that be also true for possible errors (intended or not) in the virtual exchanges of pros and cons during the ongoing US presidential election campaign (see below Google Labs “In Quotes” as an example)?
How the Aberdeen Group has proven that the Quality of the End-User Experience needs improvement
September 3rd, 2008 Ralf ScharnetzkiSometimes you turn your head around and ask yourself if you are on candid camera. Today this mail titled “Improve the Quality of the End-User Experience” from the Aberdeen Group created such a moment for us:
User experience is one of the core interests of the Line-Of-Reasoning team so we tried to access our “COMPLIMENTARY COPY”. What we got as result of clicking on the provided link was not what we expected:
aberdeen.com provided us with the bad quality end-user experience named “Active Server Pages error ‘ASP 0240′”:
We assume this is not what Aberdeen has to say about End-User experience. Or maybe this is a sophisticated indirect method of showing the need to improve the Quality of the End-User Experience. Whatever, thank you Aberdeen for making us smile.
PS: 5 hours later and the link to the report is fixed. If you are interested in the Aberdeen report try yourself here:
http://aberdeen.com/summary/report/benchmark/4906-RA-application-performance-management.asp
The essence of information based human creativity (and how Robert Scoble´s Techmeme game is related to John Boyd´s military strategy)
August 31st, 2008 Ralf ScharnetzkiOur understanding of the core aspect of information based human creativity that can be for example sometimes (and not often enough) found in
- blogging,
- mails,
- reports/presentations and
- innovative software products and services
is expressed in this slightly modified quote of Colonel John Boyd:
Live the instinctive see-saw of analysis and synthesis across a variety of domains, or across competing/independent channels of information,
in order to spontaneously generate and share new mental images or impressions that match-up with an unfolding world of uncertainty and change.Source: “The Strategic Game of ? and ?”, Slide 58, (words in bold indicate our modifications )
Boyd defined Strategy in this way:
“The Strategic Game is one of Interaction and Isolation. A game in which we must be able to diminish adversary’s ability to communicate or interact with his environment while sustaining or improving ours.”
In this sense a specific type of Blogging can be easily understood as an instance of the war for attention. Herbert Simon identified already in 1971 attention as the scarce resource of the information age:
“…in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it”
Source: Simon, H. A. (1971), “Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World” from here
One of the blogger’s who participated intensively and with success in this war for attention is Robert Scoble. He called this activity himself recently the “Techmeme Game”:
“See, if you want to earn links and attention in this world you’ve got to be first, or at least among the first articles to go out. I’ve seen this time and time again. I call it the Techmeme game.”
Source:http://scobleizer.com/2008/07/30/cuil-why-im-trying-to-get-off-of-the-pr-bandwagon/
In the picture Boyd`s well known OODA Loop is applied to Scoble´s Techmeme game:
Competitive advantage comes from quickness over the entire “loop,” not only the single direction O–>O–>D–>A sequence. Those who publish quicker and know how to get the attention of the Internet (via sites like Techmeme and other methods) can interrupt the OODA loop of their Blogging competitors and win the bigger share of attention.
It is your choice if you would like to be like the old Scoble or to focus less on competition and your ego and more on generating, contributing and sharing new mental images or impressions that match-up with an unfolding world of uncertainty and change. But whatever your choice is we would recommend strongly to study John Boyd’s work. It will enable you to make a more informed decision:
- Great collection of Colonel John Boyd’s work:
http://dnipogo.org/strategy-and-force-employment/boyd-and-military-strategy/ - Access Frans P.B. Osingas thesis about the strategic theory of John Boyd as pdf: http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/5555.html
- Video (also) touching on Boyd´s ideas:
http://spookyaction.blogspot.com/2008/06/whats-going-on-in-there.html
Usability of free software tends to suck and how Mozilla Labs wants to address it
August 6th, 2008 Ralf ScharnetzkiMatthew Paul Thomas is listing In this follow up post to the 2002 article “Why Free Software usability tends to suck” lots of reasons “Why Free Software has poor usability”.
Item number three on his list is :
“Design suggestions often aren’t invited or welcomed.”
Exactly this point seems to be addressed in Mozilla Labs recent call (August 2008) for participation:
“Today we’re calling on industry, higher education and people from around the world to get involved and share their ideas and expertise as we collectively explore and design future directions for the Web.
You don’t have to be a software engineer to get involved, and you don’t have to program. Everyone is welcome to participate. We’re particularly interested in engaging with designers who have not typically been involved with open source projects. And we’re biasing towards broad participation, not finished implementations.”
We really hope that Mozilla Labs call for participation will lead to great results (maybe we will even come up with our own idea and proposal).
But we find on Matthew Paul’s list of “Why Free Software has poor usability” also two items that highlight some of the challenges for Mozilla Labs “Call to participation”:
”
6) To many cooks
…
12) Design is high-bandwidth, the Net is low-bandwidth.
When developers are in the same room, they can discuss interaction design using whiteboards, paper prototypes, spoken words, and gestures. But on the Internet, these often aren’t available, making discussions much slower and prone to misunderstandings.”
Let us not worry too much. Mozilla Labs call for participation is also your chance to influence the future of the web.
That should be worth some free of charge creativity efforts, don´t you think so?
Enter text similar as you roll in Super Monkey Ball: How typing on iPhone 2.0 could be faster and much more fun!
Juli 26th, 2008 Ralf ScharnetzkiWhile the virtual keyboard on Apples iPhone gets the job done it is still not really fun.
Why not to be a little more creative and use iPhones special hardware to make typing faster and more fun? Movies and all details after the click.
TED 2008: A great source of inspiration and big ideas
Juni 30th, 2008 Ralf ScharnetzkiThinking about ideas and creating our line of reasoning is our passion. We recommended already earlier as a great source of inspiration the annual conference TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) and their videos of some of the most fascinating thinkers of the present.
To get a first idea of the ideas shown at the 2008 conference we recommend the 3 minutes long TED2008 BIGVIZ movie created by Autodesk (ideas span around questions like: “How Can we Create?”, “How Can We Change The World?”, “Is Beauty Truth?”).
We are pretty sure that after seeing the movie you will download the 200 page PDF featuring the idea-maps of the TED 2008 main-stage presenters.
Source of picture: the AutodeskBIGVIZ pdf
In the best case reading this will re-establish your motivation to develop your own ideas further, spread them and make a difference. Go for it!
Posted in Interesting Links | No Comments »