Dearly eParted

We were out for a lunchtime walk when my friend Rob Brueckner asked "Can we change the subject?" as I had been talking about a book I was reading at the time called "Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers." The book takes a gentle literary exploration of death around the world; looking at rituals and customs of several different cultures as well as some new methods for handling human remains.

In western society we quickly get itchy around the topic of death. I believe this is in large part owed to the value we put on life. I won't speculate about how the subject is dealt with in other cultures and refuse to be bated into arguments about whether or not we put a high value on all life, but it's safe to say that our own personal life is typically quite precious to us. I don't mean to belittle other cultures--I simply don't know them well enough to speak on their behalf. The ancient warriors of Sparta, Kamikaze pilots in World War II, and today's suicide bombers in the Middle East all share a sense of nobility in death that is alien to most of the folks I know.

Here in the "modern, western world" we are starting to develop lives that extend into the virtual world. Beyond online shopping carts, bank transactions, correspondence, and job hunting, we have prolific online social lives. I befriended a baker in Melbourne, Australia as we played Monopoly on Pogo the other night. Not that long ago as I prepped for a job interview, I bought my PlayStation Home avatar a suit, tie, and shiny shoes (total cost $1.96 US dollars). The game Second Life takes its name from the notion that we are beginning to lead online lives in step with our corporal lives. When I go into a bank for just about anything these days, the tellers explain to me that I can do just about everything (except deposit rolls of coins) without the aid of a teller these days. Most of my interactions with my banks, my retirement accounts, the unemployment office, and all my friends have become online activities.

So what happens to our online lives when we die? In most cases, they die with us. When my friend Ed Rojek passed away I sent a final email to his old email account for personal closure. I knew no one would read it but I felt such a loss. He had been taken away so young; I needed to send one last message.

There have been several news stories about families trying to get passwords to their departed loved one's email accounts and being refused. I used to be very staunch in my thinking on this topic. Of course they were refused! Email accounts are like diaries...filled with the minutia of our personal lives. Inboxes become our virtual desktops full of receipts from online purchases, usernames, passwords, membership agreements, travel confirmations, letters from significant others--often VERY personal correspondence.

I recall how after an argument, a woman I had a legal agreement with (I feel identifying her more directly would be slanderous) chose to break into my Yahoo! mail. It wasn't hard for her to accomplish--I had set the security question to be "What is Mason's (my younger son's) middle name?" --information she was well aware of. At the time, I had no reason to believe she would attempt anything so malicious as this invasion of privacy. She deleted a lot of sentimentally valuable email as well as wrote and called several old friends. The good news is that most of them called me to laugh about the trash talking she did, and the better news is that I now write cryptic security questions with twisted answers. I myself often have a hard time getting back into an account if I am challenged for this information.

My point is that my basis for thinking about online property was forged in the heart of a serious violation of my privacy. My personal inboxes are currently a mess with very little organization and tons of spam. I don't know why my children would ever want to wade through all that crap, but with some years since suffering an online attack I have healed and find my mind in a more peaceful place. How better to come to a deep understanding of who I am? Gigabytes of people laughing with me about the good and bad times we have shared. Trials, tribulations, tawdry attachments. My boys don't know half of my friends very well...if at all! They have very little idea of how I participated in focus groups, user groups, charity events and even joined a couple of professional guilds. I don't know that they would want to go through that stuff, but I plan to welcome them in.

CNN ran an article the other day about a site designed to tackle this issue. This is an interesting approach. At first, I found the article discouraging, as it had the picture you see at the top of the blog post. I thought the aticle was merely about online venues to pay final respects where everyone can see your thoughtfulness. Where there is one such site, there will be many. The thought of cheapening final words to a friend by equating them to an online birthday card seemed as cold as Phil Collins faxing his wife divorce papers. This just seemed like another way to milk the grieving for more cash.

The good news was the article was in fact about something a little less shallow. It talks about the website Legacy Locker, which offers a means by which users can bequeath access to their accounts to those they leave behind. This informs loved ones which accounts the departed wanted them to access and it takes the fuss out of getting usernames and passwords.

I am personally exploring the site. If for no other reason, I think my kids would get a kick out of some of my passwords. I believe this is a very useful service. Although it's not popular to think about death in this culture, it is an inevitability that is best met well-prepared.

WWW: 16 years in the public domain today

I remember it like it was yesterday. I was at my friend Brad McLean's house in East Syracuse, NY and he had this new program running. He called it "Mosaic" and the logo caught my eye because it animated as he "downloaded" content off what he was calling the "web."

Each page he loaded was not coming off his local computer, but off a "web server." This server wasn't even one of the other computers in his house; it wasn't even in New York State! It was delivering "HTML pages" that "referenced" images and could display them "inline." Sure today this all sounds commonplace but back then he might as well have been speaking Greek and telling me ancient Aztec secrets. What is this thing? Who can put pages up? EVERYONE can put pages up???

I worked at a State University and had been using Gopher for a while by that time but this was radical--it was graphical...each page could have its own design. To the fault of most of the developers putting pages up back then (myself included) each page *DID* have its own unique design. Consistency from page to page was a sign of laziness and we had so many ideas to try out. I will even confess to having used the "BLINK" tag in a few applications, and I won't even try to tell you it was tasteful. We all have our crosses to carry.

In March of 2009, the WWW turned 20 years old. On April 30, 1993 CERN put the web in the public domain. Any form of publicly available interconnected content prior to that was proprietary. You might find Apple or Microsoft for instance, utilizing the network for their own systems, but beyond that, there was no centralized connection for virtually everything. Today, with the exception of content we intentionally hide offline or behind firewalls, virtually any piece of content can link to any other piece of content. Now this seems as normal as microwaving a cup of tea, but back then this was seriously radical thinking. The naysayers were adamant that this was exposing vital content to hackers. Using the Internet as a primary means of acquiring data was dismissed by skeptics as a fad (why bother with slow downloads when you can get data off a diskette instantly?). I have since had many jobs developing web content and applications for this venue, and as far as I can tell it's here to stay.

Those of us surfing the web today, reading this blog for instance, may find browsers unrecognizable in ten years. I made my first VRML page back in 1997. It was my dream office, with a spiral staircase up to a loft for reading and drawing, and it had a T-Rex skull (that skull took A LOT of work) mounted on a plaque over my "hand-carved" oak desk. Under the desk's surface, I had an "escape" button which I hooked up to a random link generator that Yahoo provided. Anyone who knows me well knows that button under my desk was a jolly, candy-like button. As mentioned in previous posts, I have watched a semi-literate six year old flying through operating systems. I myself have wandered around in the PlayStation Home virtual world; this required no technical savvy whatsoever. I even purchased shiny shoes and a business suit for my virtual avatar in preparation for a job interview that I conducted IRL. While no one knew I had purchased the suit, somehow seeing my avatar standing there, all dudded up gave me confidence--we looked good!

I can only guess that the browser of the future will be as revolutionary an advent as Mosaic was over Gopher. People will have to be networked constantly. In the book Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson refers to such folks as "Gargoyles" --although his vision of a Gargoyle was weighted down with a lot of heavy gear. I imagine not too far into the future we will find today's cell phones as cumbersome as we today find "the brick" (the Motorola DynaTAC 8000X). We won't "connect" anymore--if anything we'll have to work to DISconnect. The ideas of synchronous and asynchronous communication will blur. The boundaries between public information and personal knowledge and our access to both will become indistinguishable and instantaneous.

All that said, I still remember with great fondness the first browser I ever saw and how blown away I was by the idea of it. World Wide Web, I embrace you! CERN, thank you from the bottom of my heart for putting it in the public domain 16 years ago. What will you do next?

The triumph of the agnostic

I was recently put through my paces in a three-on-one interview. Among the interviewers was a VP of Product. After a whirlwind demonstration of requirements gathering, I assembled a crude design concept for a product we had just come up with (muffins with "kick"). The challenge was then to come up with a front-end model that would put the website into the history books for its revolutionary design. How would I achieve this?

Tall order, eh? It's funny because I didn't think I would be able to answer the question but I ended up arriving at a decent response. Please forgive my writer's embellishment here, but what I am about to describe (using hyperbole, analogy and movie references) did happen, and my mind did kind of work this way, but I wasn't channeling Neo when I found what I believe to be the right answer.

I was thrown into "bullet time." For those unfamiliar, this is a hyper meditative state that Keanu Reeves's character Neo goes into when the bullets start flying in The Matrix. Time slows down, and the bullets seem to be moving in ultra slow motion. As I watched these "bullets" coming toward me, I immediately understood this was a training simulation and in the balance of my performance a job was hanging on the line.

Believing I would not arrive at a sufficient solution, I deferred the question and described a revolutionary front end model that had made the history books a few years ago. ESPN had completely redone their website and was the first commercial entity to launch a completely tableless wrapper (the structural HTML for the page contained no HTML "Table" tags). Those who know me well understand I am not an avid sports fan, so for ESPN to get me spending the amount of time I did on their website was pretty impressive. "Look ma, no tables!" I was familiar with the concept but at the time this was gutsy--there were still legacy browsers out that would choke on this model.

In my deferral, I described the situation above, and in telling the story I realized what the next revolutionary step would be. If ESPN had launched a site that worked well across all modern browsers and used only "box" containers to deliver the content, then the next evolutionary step would be to transcend the browsers altogether. Whether I am coming at the site with my PS3, my iPhone*, my Kindle*, webTV, an old-fashioned WML phone, or a conventional web browser, the content and functionality would be platform-agnostic. This was my triumph--understanding in bullet time that the next evolutionary step in web construction will be sites that agnostically deliver their payload to ANY platform.

I can't say whether I passed the training simulation (I'll let you know) but I can say I was at once intellectually exhausted and thoroughly exhillerated. My modus operandi is typically to ice up in test conditions. I might get an A+ on the practical, but I typically just squeak by on the final exam. Time will tell if my prognostication was correct. We shall see.

*No, I don't have an iPhone or a Kindle, but will happily accept donations or perform extended field testing on one or both if anyone is interested. :)

Better interface through gaming

I was just having a great conversation with a gentleman named Yoav Shapira from Hubspot.com. I should briefly digress and mention that I am in love with what Hubspot does (Internet Marketing) and you should check them out if you are at all interested in online marketing. Yoav asked me what was going on and I told him about my weekend.

My brother had come to visit me and we had (among all sorts of other trouble) turned on my Playstation 3. I realize that this is by no means a new game system. There isn't anything revolutionary about any of my insight here, but it is funny how we are what we do. As my story to Yoav unfolded I explained that my brother is into racing games but his current state of technology is the Playstation 2 (a totally competent gaming platform). He was taken with the accelerometer in the PS3 controller and how this enabled him to engage games in 3D. He was also taken with the fact that the system has its own operating system and even connects wirelessly to the Internet and has a big hard disk with onboard games and music.

As I relayed to Yoav, my brother tried a racing game (Toys Home to be specific). As he turned the controller like a steering wheel, the car responded in turn. He was driving with no warm-ups. The user interface was direct and exact. He quickly picked up that L2 and R2 were the brake and accelerator--amazing! The game designers had created a UI that a "virgin" could drop into and perform accurately in.

My story for Yoav then turned to earlier in the same weekend. I should mention that this was my first experience with the Wii, but it won't be my last. A six year old challenged me to Wii Boxing and I agreed. This is a smart kid, and he was sounding out several of the words onscreen but I should point out he was six and flying through windows and the operating system like a champion. What I am saying is that without reading comprehension as a tool for operation, this six year old was navigating menus and using a sophisticated graphical interface. My hat is off and my head is bowed to the folks who developed the UI for the Wii. It is natural, logical, intuitive and usable by folks who haven't even mastered literacy. I should also mention I got my clock cleaned in the boxing ring.

Anyway, the point of this story is that I was watching my brother and Kevin (the six year old) carefully as they engaged these systems. They took to radial menus, modal dialogs, and VR (virtual reality) UI concepts amazingly well and it makes me tip my hat to the folks that developed the interfaces for these systems and the games we played.

I realize this also indicates I need to get back to work--I am sitting here doing focus groups with friends as they play games because I have no better place to exercise my career discipline at the moment. I am analyzing a child who is beating me brutally in the boxing ring instead of fighting back--how funny is that?

If you are a UI/UX designer, you may have already played with a PS3 or a Wii, but I recommend you take a step back and watch others as they play. Watch how swiftly cursor movement becomes second nature. Watch how often the user's eyes leave the screen to look at the controller. Watch the decision-making process. There are a lot of lessons to be learned there--oh, and you might learn a new gaming trick or two while you are "studying." :)