I turned to my sister on the train this morning and said, “Steve Jobs is why I do what I do.” I had alluded to this in the past, mostly to close friend and colleagues, but his passing drove it home. It made me want to rip off my tie, change into some jeans and a t-shirt and get back to innovating and iterating. I need to make experiences that matter, tie be damned.

Steve is the reason I do what I do.

The first Apple product I encountered was an Apple IIe, at my friend Chris Smead’s house. I promptly was scolded by his mother for hitting the keys too hard while using it. I remember thinking the keys were meant for hitting.

My friend Angus Jennings father bought a Mac in 1984. It changed my life. Instead of going over to play legos or star wars, I spent hours on Mac Draw creating pictures with a mouse. I was addicted. A Mac at my house soon followed.

In high school, as PCs became ubiquitous, my school papers started needing to be printed. My Apple StyleWriter inkjet printer did the deed. In response, many of my friends with dot-matrix printouts convinced their parents to buy $1000+ laser printers. If only they knew my printer cost $250.

By the time I headed to college in 1993, I left with a Mac. When the OJ Simpson verdict was announced, I was in my dorm on the phone with Mac support troubleshooting my Performa. The rep on the phone told me she was the only one on a call at the time.

I suffered through the lean Mac years with a Power Computing clone. I searched for the “you can take the Mac out of my cold, dead hands” tee. I never found it. Upon Steve’s return to Apple, I bought an orange iBook. Its $1000 price tag took a big bite out of my 23k salary.

Apple had become a large part of my life.

Then, when the iPod arrived, I was in the midst of recovering from a tumultuous relationship. Just owing it buoyed me in a way that no other product ever had. I was 26 and spending lots of time in bars, so first chance I got, I brought my iPod one night to show off.

“I don’t get it. This is hard to use,” my friend Bill Brady confided, “I’ll never buy one of these.”

He had one within two years.

As much as Bill was wrong, he had a point. The iPod was one of those products that would have never gotten out of a focus group at HP. Usability testing would have ditched the scroll wheel in favor or a myriad of dedicated buttons. Anywhere else, Steve would have been laughed out of the building.

But the thing was, it was actually an easier way of dealing with long lists of music than the traditional rewind and fast forward buttons. It was a task that users had never had to deal with, so they couldn’t know the best way to do it. Steve’s solution was simple and elegant. He knew.

It was an epiphany for me. Outside of my Apple experiences, I had grown up consuming products that had been tested and marketed into one-size-fits-all blandness. And the iPod was the most brazen attempt at bucking the need to quantify and over analyze everything in business. It was a big “fuck you” to the bean counters who hedged every time a small minority of customers said they didn’t get it. At least that’s how I saw it.

That was just it: under Steve, Apple created products for me. Products that were easy to use, exciting and beautiful.

Steve made it important for products to not just be useful or beautiful, but to be both. He brought art to products and humanized them in the process. He made both UX and designer integral – perhaps even the most important – parts of product development. And in doing so, he made a job for me.

Thank you Steve. I will miss you.

What the hell is “mobile?”

Lets put a stop to labeling, shall we? Blame it on politics, the media or pop culture, but as a society we’re obsessed with having a buzz word for everything.

When I started out in design, photoshop could solve all image ills.

Then, for a while there, aol was the Internet.

The Internet became super cool (and O’reilly became super rich) when web 2.0 ruled.

Now we’re off on “mobile.” It’s the “in” thing.

But like the rest of the labels, it’s sadly lacking in both meaning and accuracy. To some extent, every computer you own is mobile. Even the lowly home PC is mobile if you’re ambitious enough, and if you’re not, PCs almost not worth talking about – they’re losing relevancy faster than Paris Hilton.

So when you say mobile what do you mean? It’s not a trick question or a stupid one. Is it a laptop? A netbook? A tablet? A smart phone? A feature phone? An iPod? A watch? Or some combination of the above? Any one of them is quite mobile.

If we have to name them, lets try to be more specific. How about that. Let’s start labeling by capabilities, not portability. Let’s label by interaction type and size. Perhaps we can even imply some behaviors and usage patterns. How about this? Why not use device categories?

When people say “mobile,” don’t most mean “touch?”

Let’s do every senior exec in big business a favor and rid ourselves of at least one ambiguous buzzword. Let’s stop calling it mobile. (They can have html5.)

Since last Wednesday’s announcement of the Mac App Store. There’s been a lot of talk about how the Mac App Store is the death of choice (see Big Brother Apple and the Death of the Program) or that choice’s death has been grossly exaggerated (see Lies, Damn Lies, and Mac App Store Skeptics [Part 1 of 2] and Steve Jobs Isn’t Big Brother, and the Mac Remains Open [Mac Skeptics Part 2]). But I have yet to see anyone call the Mac App Store a game changer.

So I’m going to.

The Mac App Store, a game changer.
Ever heard of Bodega? No? It’s “Your corner store for Mac apps.”  It allows for the discovery and merchandization (I made that word up) of apps. It’s been around for about a year now, and, well… no one cares. So it was no surprise that, despite rumors, few people thought the Mac App Store would be a reality. On first glance, much like Bodega, it doesn’t really fulfill a need. As Matt Buchanan writes in Big Brother Apple and the Death of the Program the Mac App Store solves the problem of a kinda-sorta convoluted install process and turns it into flying icons and bouncing fun. Win!

Pffft. Think Apple would go through all the trouble of approving and curating apps to solve that? No way.

The Mac App Store is all about convergence. For developers it converges development efforts. Got your app ready for the iPhone? Want to make a couple of tweaks and make it run on the iPad? How about few more for the Mac? It’s a no brainer. Plus it opens the door for tens of thousands of games to hit the Mac, something Apple has never had. After all, the iPhone is the hottest gaming platform on earth.

For consumers it converges their devices. Currently some of the best app sync across your devices, providing an experience that takes your data and spits it out in a way that is custom made for how you use each device. Now imagine if all your apps did that. Start editing a movie on an iPad, complete it on your computer. Start a game of Madden on your computer, finish it on your AppleTV. With the App Store in place on all your devices, Apple will begin to recommend apps that work across your devices, with obvious benefits.

Clearly, convergent apps are more valuable to consumers. As a result, they will be downloaded more, thereby prompting developers to make convergent apps the norm.

Full screen apps, the untold story.
Why would Apple suddenly tout a feature that has been a part of Windows since it’s beginnings 25+ years ago, a feature that Apple, until now, has proudly askewed? To some, it seems like something that Apple should have done long ago. I mean, how many times have you lost the ability to move a window because the top of it is hidden behind a sticky bar? If you use Photoshop, you probably answered, “a lot.”

But Apple doesn’t care about that. In fact, they’d likely just blame that on a boneheaded UX decision by Adobe. Plus, Apple won’t allow that with the new App Store police, right?

The real reason for full screen apps is that with full screen apps it’s awfully simple to port iOS games to the Mac. Sure, you could argue that it makes no difference whether it’s fullscreen or floating in a window. But then you’ve likely overlooked what’s missing from a full page app: the Mac menu bar. Prior to full screen view all apps, no matter how trivial, needed to have a menu bar navigation. Lesser apps usually filled this with a couple meaningless menu items. Full blown apps use this for all sorts of things, often in confusing navigation structures.

But iOS apps don’t need a menu bar and many don’t have them. So by removing the menu bar, Apple has removed the barrier to entry for developers who didn’t have use for those menus. Now “porting” many of the most popular apps is simple. Just “res” it up from the iOS version and release (yes, I’m over simplifying, but you get the point). Angry Birds for the Mac? You betcha.

What about multi-touch games?
Well, luckily Apple has spelled that out for us too. It’s been releasing laptops with multitouch for a while now, and more recently released the Magic Trackpad. They’ve publicly stated that using a touch screen upright is hard, but what they haven’t said they won’t make a Mac with a touch screen monitor.

But pie in the sky predictions aside, Apple has made multi-touch pervasive on all their products. Without touching the screen directly, it’s a bit different to be sure. But much like a keyboard, it’s all about leaning orientation. Once you can figure out where your fingers need to be on the Magic Trackpad, playing a game of Cut the Rope will be second nature.

The iOS end around
Once again, Apple has pulled an end around. Many people were wondering how it was going to channel all this new development on its newest iOS platforms back to the Mac? Now we know. Not by putting iOS on the macs, but by giving it an app store.

Instead of another late afternoon of Lego Indian Jones on the Wii with my boy, yesterday I talked him into a project. He’s all about projects and I was all about spiffing up my home office. Win and win.

My first priority was to get a handle on the ton of wires snaking around my set up. There’s just a lot of shit that needs to be plugged in. Second, I wanted a little more shelf space. My office is in the corner of a guest bedroom on a built-in desk made out of a prefab door. I believe it’s original – three out of four of our bedrooms have them.

Unfortunately, this being a house built in the mid 60′s home computers were not in the picture, so hiding the wires is a challenge. Enter our little project. I had already removed the desk from out smallest bedroom but had no where to put it (Deck Houses aren’t known for their storage). I decided that if I ripped 6 inches off of the desk and re-attached it, I could form a ledge (see the photo) for books and my geek stuff.

I then jammed the power stips, the usb hub and the extra hard drives against the wall and put the ledge over them, hiding them from view. The new ledge part formed from the old desk now floats, letting wires out under it, but still being stable enough for the bookshelf/speaker stand/geek collection.

I then took an old Crate and Barrel “wooden” file cabinet that had seen one too many moves (the wheel supporting the pull out drawer snapped off some years ago) and turned it backwards. Now I have more storage, but I don’t have to look at the mess that is the front end of that cabinet.

So, there you have it. My new spiffier office. What do you think?

I was going through old photos on the computer. You know, of the kid as a baby, some of my old iphone screen shots and places I used to frequent. Then I came upon this:

What’s a phone camera rig? Glad you asked. Back before the iPhone, in a time when phones were dumb and people thought the Moto Razr was the second coming, it was awful hard to share your phone screen across the internet. I mean, we’re talking 2007 here.

That fact really sucked when you were trying to show off how a third party could build a widget for WHERE and make it instantly appear. Sure, you could point a web cam at a phone, but as soon as you hit a key, the shaking made the screen illegible for seconds.

Enter Legos. Matt Gross and I had a big demo and no good solution, so I ran out to the local Lego Store and picked up a set of I don’t know what. In a few minutes we had a rather stable rig that kept the phone still and allowed us to screen share with our iSight without a hitch.

WIN. Though we didn’t say that back then.

Good thing we don’t need to do that shit anymore.

In other very exciting news, I’ve been featured in Galen Moore’s Mass High Tech article New England software experts put UI/UX specialists on a pedestal.

I love how he describes the “new” importance of having a great product experience:

The increased demand for good design, which began with the iPhone and online social networks and games, has come to the call center and the shopping mall security desk. Developers must try to predict how a human will use even the most mundane applications. As it turns out, that’s not an easy thing to do. Combining user focus with a good aesthetic eye? Near impossible. The UI or UX designer has a seat at the head of the table, and companies are under pressure to fill it with the best talent possible.

Thanks to Galen for the nice write up and the fine folks at Viximo who recommended me for the article.

Wow. It’s been a long time since I’ve posted anything. I need to get better at that. I guess that’s what happens when you get a full time gig.

Well, that’s all changed. I’ve gone free range again. And I’m open for new projects, new adventures and new experiences. Pun intended.

So, anyway, if you’re looking for a user advocate let’s talk.

The challenge: build a better support system. The solution: the Living Manual. Most support systems require support to use them. Breville wanted something different. A wiki wouldn’t do, as it was too open and not organized. A blog was too static. At Tippingpoint Labs, we invented the Living Manual to fill the gap between a printed manual and the real world problems that arise after the product ships.

The idea behind it is simple: put all the content – text, pdf, audio and video – about a product on one page and make it easily filterable by a customer so they can immediately find the answer to their question. If it wasn’t there, a loop with Get Satisfaction let them ask the question. The loop is completed when the question is answered in the Living Manual and the link to it is provided in Get Satisfaction.

I led ideation and user experience on this project for Tippingpoint Labs.

The 1.1 version of the Public Radio Player was a basic player app that had been downloaded literally millions of times. So with version 2.0 needing to support both live content from hundred of Public Radio stations and hundreds of On Demand programs like All Things Considered, as well search across both types of content, I was presented with no small task. The final product for which I did user experience, experience design and presentation layer coding, is one I’m quite proud of.

March has started out with a bang for projects I’m involved with.

First, Drync was rated the 4 out of 5 mice by MacWorld Magazine, making it their top rated Wine App!  My favorite quote:

With its slick interface and a reliable search engine, Drync Wine lets you keep track of the wines you’ve drank, the wines you own, and the wines you’d like to add to your cellar.

What’s most appealing about Drync Wine is the ease with which you can add to your cellar journal. The app gives you two options. First, you can search for a particular brand and then add your rating and notes with the tap of a button. It’s ridiculously easy.

Slick interface? Ridiculously easy? Awesome.

Second, today as I was heading to pick up my son from daycare, I turned on WGBH just in time to catch Jake Shapiro of PRX talk to Robert Siegel about the Public Radio Tuner on “All Thing Considered.” I love the way they position the story:

Newspapers and TV networks are being forced to re-imagine themselves or decline — and in some cases, as with Denver’s Rocky Mountain News last week, they fail completely. Likewise, public radio stations are contending with MP3 players and podcasts for listeners, sometimes successfully, sometimes not.

Thanks to new technology, there’s a new way for those stations to compete. The Public Radio Tuner was developed by a consortium of public radio entities and has become one of the top free software applications on Apple’s iTunes store.

I’m truly proud and honored to be part of this effort.

Oh, and to top it off, Public Radio Tuner crossed a million – a million – downloads at the end of February. Sweet!