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August 28, 2004
Designing interruptions
Ellen Isaacs and Alan Walendowski, authors of Designing from Both Sides of the Screen, convinced me that building a friendly application demands interactive development involving usage studies and the like. Ellen and Alan got many more design ideas for their Hubbub app from interaction with early users than they ever did thinking about it and developing it.
Maybe that's the message John Fowler wanted to convey by handing out copies of this book to so many of us who attended Sun's Software Technical Conference last spring. I hope he doesn't want us developing stuff like Hubbub.
In a nutshell, Ellen and Alan's app lets you stay in synchronized, instant messaging contact as you move from PC to Palm and around the world. It even plays noises at you to let you know when someone wants to interrupt you. I suppose people who work for the phone company would naturally expect people to appreciate even more interrupt-driven, synchronous communication. No intravert designed the telephone bell.
A friend of mine once wrote when we were together, "You've got to be alone to write." Paul Graham in On Lisp mentions, "As Montaigne found, nothing clarifies your ideas like trying to write them down." My friend could've written, "You've got to be alone to figure out what you think."
You won't think more clearly with "I'm still here. Are you still there?" messages and telephones ringing in your ears. But some of us nevertheless need an audience to think. Maybe the hubbub's for lazy people like me. Instead of revise, revise, revising our ideas into something worth reading, we blog, or IM chat.
Posted by Mark at August 28, 2004 09:54 PM