UCD Deja Vu

I sat in a presentation last week on User Centred Design. It’s not a new subject. But it is where I started my career more than 20 years ago.

It was a bit of a “home coming” and I was amazed at how passionate I was even though I haven’t worked in the area for the last 5-6 years.

A number of thoughts struck me listening to the presentation: 

•  The UCD proposition hasn’t really changed much in the last couple of decades. We are still talking about usability, reduction of errors, more fit for purpose etc. The companies and the faces have changed, but the fundamental issues are still the same;
•  I am now a senior manager in a Global SI/Outsourcer. The one thing that was going through my mind during the presentation was “Who designs the user interfaces for our systems?” We deliver £100M’s of software each year and I have no idea where the user interfaces come from. I must make an effort to find out!
• As we move to Software as a Service, UCD is likely to get a new lease of life. In the future, organisations will purchase their software as a Service. If it doesn’t live up to expectations, then the customer will move to another Service that does provide want they want. Since the customer doesn’t have technology installed on-site, there is none of the inertia involved in moving to a new system. Don’t like what you see? Is it too difficult to use? Move to another Service that fits your needs better.

LinkedIn outages

One of the issues with moving towards a online services is that we can become a hostage to the system's availability. In other words, YOUR service is dependent on SOMEONE ELSE'S software. LinkedIn is the latest online service to suffer service outages. You'll find them documented on Pingdom here: http://royal.pingdom.com/2008/10/10/is-linkedin-having-scaling-issues/

I guess with the issues in the current financial markets we shouldn't be surprised that LinkedIn is getting just a little more traffic.

On a related note, at a CIO event this evening one of the speakers (Chris Neale from Harvey Nash) made a comment that people really ought to pay more attention to their profiles on online sites such as LinkedIn. In his view (and I tend to agree), people's online profiles are vastly inferior to the paper based one - often reverting to being more that a list of projects that we have worked. LinkedIn doesn't do us any favours here since the platform tends to guide us down this path, but the extra effort required will be worth it.

Software as a Service

I was in a Skateboard shop at the weekend (yeah, I know I am 46!) and they had a till that was running as a web app over a VPN. I could see it was running in browser - the guy (or should that be dude?) on the till was using FaceBook until interrupted him to buy something!
I quizzed him about the till and how it worked and although it isn’t as integrated as it could be (the Card machine was separate), it was still pretty impressive. I asked about the business model behind the device, but I think I lost him at this point and he said he didn’t own the shop (man)!

However, I did ascertain that the software (or rather Service) is from an English company called Cybertill (http://www.cybertill.co.uk/). The other part of their business is eCommerce sites which uses the same data being used by the Cybertill. Cool!

This is a very clear example of the sort of thing to come. I can imagine that this works exceptionally well for small independent Retailers (like Bath's only independent owned skateboard shop!), but it also demonstrates the way for lots of other Retailers. I can imagine that it will be the smaller retailers and the emerging markets (i.e. India, China, etc) that first adopt this technology - it will be a while before the rather conservative High Street Retailers are confident enough to go this route. But the smaller Retailers will drive this change.

What's more important here are the business models that can be used to underpin this technology. For example, it would be very straightforward to bill Retailers on a transaction basis - thus the Retailer's costs would increase in line with their sales and the technology provider can scale out the technology as and when it is required. What a change from the current situation!