Mojo second week summary

Another hectic week with my travel schedule and two refreshing lectures alongside. Christian Heilmann from Mozilla presented his lecture, giving me a page full of web links' resources to be bookmarked in my Delicious account. The emphasis on openness of web, using standardized open models to develop apps to achieve bigger reach was the highlight of Chris's lecture. He quoted few rich web apps' examples which run on browsers instead of being traditional local apps. Few features of Google plus website, Angry Birds game which runs on browsers, rich communication platform such as Facebook instead of traditional emails have evidently proven the abilities of web browsers. This tends to make the web an "information superhighway". This evolution makes different app developers to consider the web-browser way and evade all OS dependent issues and headaches they often encounter with native apps.

I liked the discussions related to HTML5 in the lecture. Some of the resources and repositories mentioned by Chris are quite helpful indeed for me to start developing my project using HTML5 and CSS3. Today's browsers’ which support HTML5 are also equipped with very powerful features such as detecting users' location, advanced graphic accelerators, etc which empowers the app developers further by many folds. These ideas have definitely influenced me strongly to consider HTML5 and take advantage of these powerful set of features for my project.

The next lecture from John Resig, the creator of Jquery further lured me to consider Jquery in my next app. I have always been a YUI guy so far and have used Jquery in my previous apps for very small purposes. John mentioned many points related to building community while creating an open standard or open source library, and also the importance of the support the creator of the software needs to give to his users. I have always wondered how few open source software creators always answer to my questions whether I post my problem in Stackoverflow, or Quora or IRC or other mailing lists. I could see that John meant that the creator of the open source software needs to be a watchdog and should keep helping people who bring up their issues in many different websites or communication medias. He also mentioned to “Treat every user as a potential future contributor”, which I feel is imperative to make the software reach widely and to make the users happy and eventually spread it or contribute to it by themselves. Sometimes, the lazy me could come out of myself, and I would definitely have to make sure that I follow up with my users diligently despite of all my reasons. In the past I have been part of software development which failed as a catch 22 situation case, primarily because of not having a strong community around it. This time, to remind myself these points consistently, lemme grab some post-its.

Mojo first week summary

My take away this week from Aza Raskin's lecture, primarily, was the importance of Prototyping. It reminded me the days when I used to create experience prototypes while studying interaction design in my school. The start of the lecture with the quote "To design is to inspire participation" gave few funny comical examples such as a student demonstrating his Dad's tits and asking his friends to "feel free" to touch them. During my school, there were instances where I had to stand behind my early stage design of my audio based product installation and make weird sounds by myself, to fake as if the product was making those sounds. This not only forced me to refine my design with more relevant auditive messages to the user, but also helped me to change the model of the interaction triggers of my product.

Another important point I could grasp from Aza Raskin's lecture was the importance of quick iterations and also improvements in every iterations. He gave some examples of a wooden block being a prototype for wii controller. At first sight one might think that a piece of wood wouldn't suffice as a prototype for a wii controller. However, to understand quickly, how someone would hold a wii controller, how would they rotate it, how would they interact with its face, etc, a wooden block could clearly give an idea at the initial stage of the product. So, to sum up, I can start with a piece of wood, and in the next step to understand more, I can stick color papers all around and try to fake it more close to the wii controller, and eventually create the right wii controller.

It was interesting to learn about "Tabcandy", something which I wasn't familiar with. Another approach I had seen sometime back was something called "TabViz"(http://vimeo.com/5257754) was created during one of the design contests hosted by Mozilla. I’d love to see what solves my problem of navigation with my 50 tabs open at any point of time in my browser.

My initial thoughts with an idea related to leveraging News distributions could be validated by creating such prototypes. Requesting some of my friends to use my product and faking the experience they could get from it, could help me refine my concept. Also, I am pretty curious about the feedback they would give, which could potentially help me add/remove the features I envisioning currently.

Burt Herman's lecture emphasized about building a start up, creating a team, community, and few other processes one would go through while building a startup. I think I understand what he means by saying "marrying your partner", "flexible, be ready to throw away to make the product better". I liked the examples he showed about how storify started and later changed for the good from the user feedback. I would like to highlight to myself for my project, about keeping things simple at the start. Also to concentrate on creating core product experience and later understand how the product needs to evolve from the users-- the early adopters.