• SSIS Team Development Experiences - Another example of database developers being left out in the cold when it comes to first-class development tools and practices. It's getting better, but we're not there yet...
• Adaptive Path UXWeek - Simon Guest is at UXWeek and will be blogging about the experience. I hope that the number of EAs only increases in coming years and hope to attend myself in the future.
• Go old school with a notebook - I'm a tried and true notebook guy. There is no and never will be an adequate replacement for pen and paper for me...
• User experience and the analysts - A nice piece of research done by Rosenfeld Media on major Analysts use of certain UX-related terms. The Gartner ones weren't surprising to me as a Gartner client (though I would imagine that they would argue that the "Consumerization of IT" term is a UX term, thus should be on the list), but it was interesting to see some side-by-side comparisons. More research along these lines would help an organization like mine have some good insight into which firm, if any, should get our money.
• DSLs bringing the end of single language development? I hope so... especially if one is more open with the terms "language" and "development."
• Are You a Synthesizer? Enterprise Architects have to be... I sure hope I am. If I'm not, I'd like to become a professional fly fisherman...
• Enterprise 2.0 is about building a collaboration platform that is better than e-mail - The reality, as Jason states himself in this article, is that Enterprise collaboration (I won't use that term in the title) is less about replacing email and more about repositioning email to be used correctly (messaging) and bringing other tools into the enterprise which are better suited for collaboration (like Parlano). (via Joe Lewis)

• Microsoft: My way or the highway with SOA? Though Microsoft can certainly afford to do "SOA their way" and though such approaches have certainly worked in the past, I wonder if this one might actually hurt them is the long run. As Joe says, "What Microsoft appears to be doing... goes completely against what SOA is supposed to be all about, which is the ability to deploy and run what you need based on what you need, unencumbered by the limitations of vendors' systems." Wouldn't it be ironic if Microsoft's way of forcing organizations to "do SOA" causes organizations to turn to SOA itself as a way to minimize their dependencies on Microsoft systems?
• Project Zero: IBM enables REST-based development - Not surprising to see IBM adding support for REST, especially since Microsoft is doing the same by adding a Web Programming model to its WCF upgrades in the .NET 3.5 Framework. In many ways, this simply underscores David Chappell's assertion that the REST versus WS-* debate is over. While we may still have a place in our hearts for one over the other, the major vendors seem to be saying "why not both?"
• Binding SOA to BPM instead of BPM to SOA - Not sure I understand the assertion that we should attach SOA to the swimlane diagram and not BPMN Nick. Pools and Lanes are used heavily in BPMN, so what is it about BPMN that you have an issue with? If it's the BPEL/automation side of BPMN, then I agree, but I think that BPMN can be very useful to organizations without that side, especially since what you get is a standard Process modeling language where none exists today.
• Why Sales isn't process driven - According to Steve Jones, the "mechanism for the implementation and measurement of a service" (process) isn't always the same thing as the drivers for and value of the service (goals). Meaning that our services ought to pay attention to user goals first and the underlying process second. It's a UCD/UX perspective for SOA...
• PowerPoint: Boon or Bane? I tend to fall into the camp of PowerPoint is a misused tool, not a bad tool in and of itself, though its conventions in the form of automatic title and bullet regions do encourage bad behavior. 
• Stuff - I read recently that it took the self-storage industry 25 years to build the first billion square feet of storage space and only 8 years for the second billion. Yet our houses have grown by 80% and we still face a storage crisis. Stuff is best gotten rid of...

• Enterprise Architecture, REST and SOA all sit down at a bar? - More on REST, SOA and EA and EA's responsibility to be relevant to project teams.

• Do Enterprise Architects ask Stupid Questions? - There are no stupid questions, only questions that self-righteous people think are stupid.

• Build versus Buy versus Opensource - Good advice if you can get Opensource in the door. Of course, vendors charging a premium to solve common problems already solved should be reason enough to adopt opensource...

• Loc.alize.us - A Google Maps and Flickr mashup that brings photos of different lands to you. I'm planning a trip to Italy right now and it's nice to be able to get more than just the top-down view that Google Earth and Maps provide. Google Earth has functionality similar to this, though I like the UI here better.

• What SOA needs to learn from Ruby On Rails - Though I'm not sure what "Canned SOA" would look like, I agree with the argument that SOA needs some measure of default convention which can be leveraged.

• The Developer Theory of the Third Place - My third place is usually one of several coffee houses or restaurants with free WiFi close to my work or home. BTW, If you're ever in Colorado Springs Scott, we'd love to have you drop by and share some of your expertise.

• Free Code - Getting IT out of the Applications business - IT takes EIM and the Business Event Ontology and gives the business (Biz Process Devs specifically) the ability to write "free code." While it sounds a little counter-intuitive, it certainly has some promise.

• Daily Lit - Get daily installments of public domain books delivered via email or RSS. I've started with Walden and should be done in 124 days... assuming I read these installments daily, of course.
• The Manifesto of the Futurist Programmers - There's nothing like a thousand words of propaganda to get your blood boiling over vague ideas and foggy platitudes (via CodingHorror).
• Does Visual Studio Rot the Mind? - A great article from Charles Petzold on the ways that Visual Studio might hinder us as programmers. From a User Experience perspective, I think that the broader critique here is that systems which define our way of working instead of conforming to our way of working probably cost us more than we realize.
• Ha Ha, you must be joking - This is what happens when governance isn't seen as an enabler and a way to support a person's natural action. Instead, this is governance from an "us vs. them" perspective.
• A First look at IronRuby - Microsoft's venture into Ruby looks pretty good so far, and the plan to move IronRuby into Rubyforge is worthy of applause. Tactically, I am still trying to wrap my head around this Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) idea and it's place on top of the .NET Common Language Runtime (CLR). Is it just a deferred compilation model? If so, is that really dynamic? Maybe I am missing the point, but I am having a hard time finding a good summary of the inner workings of the DLR. If anyone has anything, please send it my way.
• All models are wrong, some models are useful - A true statement, and the extension of this maxim to include communities is correct as well. When we worry less about "correctness" of the community, its makeup and its work and more about gaining value by creating value, we succeed, I think.

Since I last crafted a legitimate post to this blog, I have enjoyed several months of changes, excitement, bombardment and general much ado about everything. Here are a few highlights:

1) Finished my first Quarter of LIS in one piece.

2) Spent a week in the Dominican Republic leading a Men's Conference with 3 other men.

3) Was promoted to a new role at Compassion as the Enterprise Applications Architect. I am currently ramping down on day-to-day development work and ramping up (quickly!) into that job. It's been a lot of fun so far, except the part where I tried to work on all tasks old and new for about two months.

4) Spent 3 days (starting the day after I got back into the country) in San Diego at the Gartner Enterprise Architecture Summit. That was a fun way to get started on the new job, esp. as I got to attend with my new boss.

5) Decided not to take class during the summer Quarter (see #3), but I am getting ready to start the Fall Quarter on September 12. I'll be taking two courses:

• The Corporate Information Environment
• Legal Issues in Knowledge Management

I am looking forward to those. Not so much the cost of the textbooks, but I am looking forward to the classes themselves.

6) Compassion is at the end of a building expansion and parts of the IT department have been cube and office-less this week. One good friend also managed to find a way to move into a new house this week, I think he's been sleeping at Panera Bread. As a side note, it's too bad that good ideas always come to me too late because it would have been cool to have everyone that has been misplaced to take pictures of where they were working this week. I alone have worked from:

• My boss's office - He's on vacation this week.
• The World Prayer Center at New Life Church (Colorado Springs)
• The Lobby of New Life Church
• Panera Bread
• My house (This can be further sub-categorized into: the dining room table, the couch, a recliner and on the deck... I am a restless creature)

And that about catches you up to date (assuming you're still reading). The good news about the move this week is that it has given me a chance to catch up on some much needed research, reading, brainstorming and planning for the new job (with a little coding thrown in). Some more in relation to my new job: Obviously, this blog was created to be a place where I threw half-baked opinions about UX design against the wall. That was fun for a while, but then my ADD took me to some content about developer stuff related to all the goodies from last years' DevConnections conference. That was also fun for a while. All that being said, I think that this blog has never really had the unique personality that it needed to. What's cool is that my new job has created some interesting synergies between that developer in me (still there Ken) and the guy that thinks that UX matters. Case(s) in point: 1) When I attended the Gartner EA Summit, I heard a great talk by Harry Pierson called Beyond SOA: Understanding the User's Role in Architecture. Hey, that sounds like something I would enjoy... That was the first sign that I may not have strayed to far after all.
2) I found out after I got back and I was poking around that Simon Guest had given a talk at TechEd entitled Putting the User Back into SOA that I managed to grab the slides for. The second sign... (BTW, that link does not link to the slides themselves. I can't seem to find them anymore, nor do I remember how I got them. For the next best thing, you can head over to this link where Simon links to an ARCast episode he did with Ron Jacobs on the same topic.)
3) A couple of weeks ago, Simon posted once again about UX. This time, he was announcing a Forum discussion he will be hosting in California on "...the intersection of Architecture and User Experience." The third and final sign...
This was an exciting set of circumstances for me because I felt in my gut that those old passions were still important and had a place in my new role. This was just some great confirmation. The SOA aspect of this was especially interesting as some aspects of an Enterprise SOA have been rolled out at Compassion and we will continue to look for ways to use it to craft a larger Integration and BPM Platform. For more info on Compassion's SOA Implementation, Dan Fox, our resident Solutions Architect, Microsoft MVP and all-around genius has been posting about it at length. Check it out here. So what does all this mean then? It means that I will continue to blog (or start depending on your definition of 'continue.') about UX, but from a slightly different perspective. I will continue to talk about UI design and UX for the web, but I will also begin to incorporate some SOA, SaaS, BPM, Architecture and even Knowledge Management 'stuff.' If you actually read this far, my hope is that you would either a) stick around and continue reading what I write; or b) start today. I'm no expert on any of these subjects, but I love to read, write and discourse on nearly everything. So here's to a new phase in the journey. Stick around... let's hope I find reason to turn my entry in your FeedBurner client bold a bit more often.

So I'm not going to say much about the fact that I haven't written anything since January. Suffice it to say that enough has been going on to keep me from taking time to post thoughts from the swirling maelstrom in my head. For the two readers that have managed to hang on, let's hope I can get more consistent again. (Unless I write crap, of course. No one wants that) With that out of the way, I wanted to write a bit about a new experience. After a six year reprieve, I have returned to academia to pursue my Masters Degree. Two weeks ago, I started the Library and Information Science program at the University of Denver and will pursue the Knowledge Management concentration. Three weeks ago, I had my orientation for the program. Since this is a Library Science degree, a good deal of the content in the orientation was library-specific (jobs, internships, other foci of the program). I must admit that as a software developer and IT person, I wanted to distance myself from this kind of talk because I wasn't there to learn how to be a librarian (condescending and conceited, I know). But at one point in the conversation, the director of the program said this:

As Librarians, our job is to connect people with information

And I thought this:

Wait a minute, that sounds like my job as an IT person...

Or not. I realized at that moment that Librarians have a better handle on what Information Technology is all about than most IT people do. Think about it: Librarians do connect people with information. The format, presentation, color and flavor are simply a means to an end. Librarians will argue at length about how the architecture, structure and layout of a particular library is pitiful, passable or peculiar, but only in the context of how it hinders or enables the goal of a connecting people with information. In theory, we should be about the same thing in IT. But as a software developer, I know that that is often not the case. IT has unfortunately morphed into a group of professionals connecting people with technology, not information. I say this because we spend the majority of our time talking in technology terms, rather than information terms. We rave about frameworks and widgets and architectures and IDEs and all the clever things that we can make an application do, and in the shuffle, we neglect the people and their need for the information that our applications are in existence to work with. It's high time that we get back to our information roots. And thus, I remembered why I wanted to pursue this degree in the first place. And I felt good about saying "I'm in graduate school to become a librarian." Chances are, I will never work in a library, nor leave technology. But the Information Technology world (and the web in particular) needs more librarians. And that's why I am there.

Just finished a session with Michele Leroux Bustamante entitled "10 Essentials for a Professional ASP.NET 2.0 Application." Good talk. She had a ton of information to cover and didn't get through everything, but did a good job with the volume of information. I had a feeling that this session was going to be high-level and a bit of repeat, but I was drawn to it to hear those 10 things that are a must for any and every ASP.NET 2.0 application. I felt that it would give me a list of things I need to be sure to get the goods on before that first 2.0 project. I'll happily share them with you now:

1. Page Layout and Design
2. Dynamic Navigation
3. Data Access
4. Personalization
5. Localization
6. Cache! Cache! Cache!
7. State Management
8. Role-based Security
9. Reduced Attack Surface
10. Component Design and Deployment

If you want more info, check out MLB's blog or the DevConnections site in the coming days for slides. Next I have "Building Portal Applications with ASP.NET 2.0 Web Parts" with Stephen Walther. Should be a good talk. I have some session-closing activities after that talk and don't plan on blogging tonight (internet access in the hotel is $12/day), so this will be it for me. By no means am I done with DevConnections posts though. I still have a session tomorrow and some previous talks I want to share my thoughts on. Over the next several days, I plan to post about the following:

• A talk on effective User Experience Design given by Mark Miller of Developer Express. I really enjoyed this talk and learned a thing or two I'd like to share.
• A talk Jonathan Hawkins gave on ASP.Net Atlas. This was a great preview of what's to come, but the bits for Atlas are already available. I want to share some things I learned about Microsoft's next big thing for ASP.Net.
• A brief commentary on Swag. (The other) Brandon and I are collaborating on this one, with his help, it might actually be funny.

A big thanks to Paul Litwin, all conference organizers and the sponsors for putting on a great conference! I really enjoyed the speakers, the content, the other attendees and even the hotel. It was very smooth IMHO, especially considering that we had 3000 people! Paul, if you're reading this, good show! While I have you, I do have one major suggestion for next year:

Have a talk on User Experience design for the web, similar to the one Mark Miller presented in the VS track. I enjoyed Mark's talk and I learned a lot. I'd love the same concept target at web developers.

But great job overall! See you next year!

Here's proof that User Experience concerns should permeate everything we design:
I was on hold with audible.com customer support today when the speak-n-spell voice delivered the usual "please hold or you'll lose your place" message, but with an interesting twist. And I quote:

"Please stay on hold to maintain your priority sequence."
- Speak-n-spell voice on Audible.com

Who writes like that? If you guessed, "a software engineer," you're probably correct. When spoken though the roughly-synthesized voice of a recording, it sounds cold and impersonal. Almost like audible has invented the first sentient operator program and it is crafting its own responses {shiver}.

But I will not be priority sequenced!

I'm sure by now that most of you have heard of Rollyo by now. For those of you that haven't seen it yet, here's how Rollyo describes themselves:

Are you tired of wading though thousands of irrelevant search results to get to the information you want? Ever wish you could narrow your search to sites you already know and trust? With Rollyo, you can easily create your own custom search engines, and explore and save those created by others.

And it works as advertised IMHO. I love the idea of having a specialized search that cuts out all of the fat. For starters, take a look at Seth Godin's searchroll. He provides an roll that searches a great cross-section of content. And as an added bonus, I've created a searchroll of my own. I tire of searching on UX concepts and wading through the piles of ads and junk I have no interest in. So, I created the "User Experience" searchroll for your rolling pleasure (full disclosure notice: I shamelessly included this site in the roll). Here are the sites I've included: headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users adaptivepath.com www.boxesandarrows.com www.vanderwal.net robfay.com louisrosenfeld.com/home www.designbyfire.com www.alistapart.com www.webword.com www.jjg.net www.digital-web.com www.greenonions.com www.ok-cancel.com www.userinexperience.com 37signals.com/svn www.useit.com I'm sure I'm missing something. Let me know what it is and I'll throw it in. Enjoy!

In a previous post, Design for Context, Part II, I dug into the Home Depot a bit for their use of the self-checkout stand. Well, the Home Depot got it's lashes and now it's time for Lowe's to hear a few gripes. In this post and my next post, I'm going to do a side-by-side comparison on the experience of searching for a ladder at Lowes.com (in this post) and at HomeDepot.com (in my next post). Last week, I asked the question "What makes for a great search experience?" and listed a couple of my personal requirements. They were: 1. Ubiquitous (or uniform) search box 2. Results easy to identify, even on a crowded page 3. Ability to refine or start over I'll add to that list the #1 thing John mentioned in his comment: 4. Ability of search to differentiate between a search for an actual product or information about a product. I'll test this rule be searching each site for "tips on ladder maintenance and repair." What I intend to do for both Lowe's and the Home Depot is test each site according to the four rules above.