Working with (real) developers ...

At the moment I'm finalizing a project at work where we're building a single-sign-on solution for all our services - which includes local user administration (our customers will have to maintain their own user access data). I'm the project manager - but just can't leave the user experience alone. And this has been *really* interesting. I thought (maybe somewhat naively)  that most developers had grasped the concept that user experience is more important than database modelling. Boy, was I wrong. It has been a struggle to get them to deviate from how the system is designed deep down (basically AD). I've tried telling them that a system with about 10-15.000 infrequent users *needs* to be completely self-explaining.

As we're using ADFS 2.0 you need to tell the system which organisation you're from (in truth you need to tell the system which AD it needs to ask permissions from) -  the initial solution (by far the easiest from a system point of view) was to have the user select either his/her organisation (if they were federated using ADFS 2.0) or a "generic" organisation (basically our AD for those who do not have a federated AD). After some debating we found a solution to present all our customers in an auto-complete input field. Kudos go to the developers for both developing the solution and also for acknowledging that it was a good way to go. Now we only need them to actually tell the users who their local user administrator is based on the organisation they have chosen. I'm told this is no small task, and although I believe this - I still find it strange. I *know* that the information is there. And if we can present the user with a choice of organisations from the same source it shouldn't be witch-craft to conjure up one small matching record from the database.

As we go live we will not have this feature. The out-come will be that users who are not registered will be directed to a customer support page, where they can leave a ticket or call our customer support people. They in turn will have to look into the system and inform the caller who their user administrator is. The customer will then have to contact his local user administrator and ask for access. Talk about a detour just because we can't show a name!

Samsung Flatpanel LED TV

We got ourselves a new TV. Because we had to re-paint the living room.

Anyway: The deal was that I had to get rid of the Media Center PC. I did a thorough analysis of the most used features and concluded that what I initially thought (back in the day): that it would be cool to have PC-access in the living room on the big screen, really wasn't cool at all. What with emergence of the iPad and notebook PCs and all. What we did use, though, was the guide, and especially the ability to record TV and occasionally watching a movie - this almost solely by streaming from various Internet services.

So I started hunting: and ended up with a 40" Samsung LED TV. The picture is crystal clear, it can record TV (although it only has one tuner so we can't really record something and watch something else), it can stream movies, which was exactly what we wanted. The sound does not match up to the external speakers we had on the Media Center PC, but no one expected it to.

It does a host of other things, too. Facebook, Google Maps, Twitter(?) - you name it. And the thing is this: it doesn't do it real good. I don't know why they bother - do people really want to spend 5 minutes waiting for the TV to connect to Facebook - I can walk to the kitchen, grab the iPad, check my mail, Facebook, make myself a cup of coffee and get back in front of the TV before it's ready. Sheesh. And then there's the dialogues - I don't know where they teach developers that you need to confirm that a file was deleted (after being presented with a very nice progress bar). I can only confirm that I noticed the file was deleted. Hmm.

Apart from these small glitches I do believe that we've got what we need - and the user experience is probably better than I expected (feared?).

Now I'm just waiting for the Microsoft Surface to come around; now that will be a treat and make Apple think.

I'm being forced into the Apple Sect ...

My company has switched to Apple phones (and me with them). I was actually very happy with my Windows 7.5 Phone. It was sleek, looked cool and was not exactly mainstream :-)

Now I'm the (happiness-wise undecided) owner of an iPhone 4S. And frankly I'm not impressed and have some difficulty grasping the almost religious approach to all things Apple. OK - from a User Experience point of view it works. Kinda. But, and there are a few of those, there really isn't anything special about it. Apart from the fact that they were first (which of course counts for something), and therefore has a head start into the app-market. This was where the Windows Phone fell through. If I was Microsoft, I'd spend 5 developers with only the job of cranking out cool apps for the Windows phone for the next year (they can just start with the most successfully ones on the iPhone and copy those!). Note to self: create next "killer-app" for Windows Mango and I don't have to work no more - this is an untapped market.

Microsoft's handling of contacts is way superior to Apples. Although the iPhone does a better job recognising phone numbers and generally is better at making the user interface context aware. And finally - Microsoft should either scratch the ridiculous Bing-thing for us Europeans (and everybody else not residing in the US). Especially the maps which are nice enough but doesn't have anything apart from telling me where I am to offer (searching for Pizza gave me the Italian city of Pisa?????).

The thing I miss most from my Windows phone, though, is the hold-finger on item to give me options (this equals a right click on a normal computer). Really useful and a gesture that's sorely needed in the iOS where I have to click an Edit button on the top of the screen. Also it baffles me why I have to scroll to the top of a list to be able to search it on the iPhone. Man, that sucks!

I like my iPhone - but I refuse to succumb to the pressure and become a preacher. They aren't better (anymore) - just different.