Hackers are Heroes?

Today I came across an interesting article by Gary Hamel on Facebook Generation vs. the Fortune 500. He talks about the "Generation F" and their expectations from the workplace, as well as unique skillsets and working styles they bring to the table. Read the entire article on Opensource.com

Lessons of Comic Books make better UIs

As someone who grew up with comic books and viewed them as some kind of a "secret pleasure", it took me a while to come around to the fact that narrative and visual devices used in sequential art not only apply to the digital media, but can in fact be a driver for better, more immersive User Experiences. With the proliferation of SmartPhones and iPads we have more digitally literate people then ever, and that will only keep increasing.

Somewhat shortsightedly, the main concern of comic book companies has been how to get their print comics on the web, gettomg a second source of revenue for the same basic product (recycled story and art, minus printing, so it's essentially cost-free the second time around).

But why not consider tweaking that product and above everything the delivery model so that the user truly has a different experience, and not just a digital copy of the printed page? Think about it. Comic books were developed on the premise that you want to pack action and essentially bring drawing one step closer to animation. Yet animation and digital comic books have essentially evolved in separate directions, even though the very format of sequential art lends itself to presenting different types of content in different frames. And the technology can handle it now. What it does require is an investment in bringing the "envelope" to the next level, and while it's admittedly more involved than just copy/paste from the print medium, it allows the user to substitute the tactile experiences they're losing in transfer from print to digital (interaction with paper, un-evenness of page due to printing, owning a physical comic book, etc.) they can potentially replace not just with widgets, but with a truly improved and altered user experience.

What's interesting here though, and brings it outside of the world of comic book geeks sitting in dark basements is that the same lessons apply to just about any other vertical. No, it's not just a case of the Geek and the Suit sailing off in opposite directions and meeting each other again half-way across the world. While it's a fact that the comic book properties have flooded the mainsteream in the recent years, there is no reason not to believe that the spike will drop at some point. But for intents and purposes of strictly improving user experiences in any vertical or type of content, the true driver is the fact that today's user has come to expect and prefer information to be delivered in a manner that strikingly resembles, well, a comic book page. We multitask everything. We look at a few things at once. We prefer it that way.

In recently working on User Interface screens for CABEM's upcoming update to our Livia_vLab application it really hit me that this is exactly what we're trying to do. Even though the narrative is not necessarily sequential, everything else applies. User experience design was always about organizing and displaying information in a manner that is engaging, logical and well organized. Comic books do the same. If anything, being free of having to follow a completely linear narrative, the layout becomes even more engaging. It's not a book, it's a command module. And it's not just about storytelling anymore, it's about project management, organization, collaboration, archiving, and every way you find yourself working and looking at information every day.

Ten Strikes

A number of web sites block logins after just three failed attempts. Every site wants a different login and password, so sometimes it can take more than three tries to remember which password to use. The paper "Ten strikes and you're out": Increasing the number of login attempts can improve password usability takes a step toward quantifying the costs this policy. They find that increasing the number of allowed attempts to 10 could potentially eliminate 47% of password reset requests.

Pipes for Windows?

Today I had to get a list of files out of a zip file and append them into an Excel formatted spreadsheet. As a long time Unix user and being someone unfamiliar with Windows, the easiest way I could think of in under a minute is to use zipinfo and sed and sort to build a CSV file and then paste it into the Excel spreadsheet. It's pretty simple, just:

zipinfo -1 foo.zip | sed -e 's/.*\///' | sort -n -t_ -k2 > foo.csv

(The parameters to sort say to sort by the second field, delimited by '_' characters, which I need to do for this problem).

All very easy on -- from the Unix/Linux shell. The system that will ultimately use these files runs Windows. Is there any quick and dirty way to do this kind of throw-away scripting on Windows?

I have used Cygwin before, and could install it, but it always takes several hours to install, which seems like an awful lot of work to avoid a few file transfers. Of course, I could do the entire process manually under Windows, copying and pasting filenames from Windows Explorer. However, I have about 15 of these files which would make it pretty time consuming.

At the other extreme, I could probably write a .NET program in a few hours, but I have few enough files that copying and pasting from the CSV file is faster just typing a simple command line (though with .NET stuffing data directly into the spreadsheet becomes pretty easy).

So how would you handle this on Windows? Is there something similar to Unix pipes that lets you quickly handle one-off tasks like this?