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I read an exciting article today.  Exciting for music and gaming fans anyway.  And beyond the incredible eyecandy and anticipation in Wired’s coverage of Rock Band, there’s a whole ‘nother layer to this story.

Brief background if you haven’t heard already - Harmonix is a game developer, built this little thing called Guitar Hero that puts you in the music with a “real” guitar.  Incredibly popular.  Anyway, their publisher (after a buyout) is taking the franchise to a new developer, presumably for money or other contract reasons.  Abandoning the guys who built it into what it is.

I’m not going to get into the great details here (read the Wired article for that).  In summary, not only has Harmonix not given up, but they’ve taken the original idea and 1) expanded it to an entire band not just guitars and 2) refined the original controllers for better feel and more function.  While Guitar Hero 3, their old game and new competition, has added new songs.  And a new competition mode.

Takeaway: Passion (Harmonix has it in spades, read the article already!) trumps straight cash, and don’t automatically give up after rejection.

Yeah, so that was a pathetic attempt at starting a blogging lifestyle.  Mostly laziness there, but I have to admit I was bummed out by my own writing.  I tend to get very critical of things, which is good for my job, but what I had been writing depressed me and I just sort of slacked off.

So I’d like to try again, this time in a more positive direction, and maybe not always so focused on work.  We’ll see if this lasts more than a post or two.

Actual content coming soon.

Lost in the whole discussion over Cisco’s right to the trademark “iPhone” is why anyone would realistically use an “iName”. Just three I can think of:

• You make an accessory or otherwise supporting product for one of Apple’s products, and you want to indicate this with the name.
• You see Apple’s success in the past decade and somehow think you can steal some of that magic yourself by naming your products similarly.
• You have no creativity and can’t come up with anything remotely original.

Seriously, trademarks and laws aside - Apple owns all iNames due to their multi-line success over the last decade with them. “iName” means “Apple” to the average person.

Oh, I guess I should add a fourth reason to the above list just for Cisco:

• You happened to stumble onto the rights to the name and you’re holding out (and manipulating the system) to take money from Apple for no reason other than you can.

I’ve been pretty happy with the IE7 adoption rate so far. Not that IE7 is in the league of Firefox by any means, but it is a lot better than IE6 in every aspect other than UI design (what’s with moving the Refresh button?). After building Scrubshopper.com for FF, IE6 and IE7 (and just now wrapping up some of the last remaining validation errors for 1.0 Strict), IE7 takes less work to develop for than IE6 by a fair margin.

So it’s been fun to see the growth rate below. Keep in mind that these stats are for a ecommerce site targeted at nurses, doctors and hospitals, and a large volume of our traffic comes directly from Google and Yahoo - these aren’t Web 2.0 early adopters (who I would hope to see on FF anyway). These stats are IE7 out of all IE visitors, ignoring all other browsers (we have a consistant ~8.8% Firefox by the way). Average normal (non-holiday) weekly traffic is about 4,000 visitors.

• 4.6% (Oct 29-Nov 4)
• 7.0% (Nov 5-11)
• 8.5% (Nov 12-18)
• 12.6% (Nov 19-25)
• 14.5% (Nov 16-Dec 2)
• 17.0% (Dec 3-Dec 9 - not quite over yet)
• 18.0% (Dec 3-Dec 9)

That’s an average increase of about 2.5 on the percentages per week (I’m not a stats guy, so please don’t laugh at how I’m figuring this).
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Ever been in a situation where someone is very helpfully explaining how to do something, and you appreciate it, but eventually you just want to go ahead and do it? And they won’t stop explaining and let you? That’s how I feel right now.

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I’ve always been a bit scared of ecommerce site development. Sure, I’ve done it, but it’s so complex. There’s SSL, merchant accounts, etc etc. And there’s that scary thought in the back of your brain (at least, my brain), that this is serious because it involves money transactions and I really don’t want to mess anything up.

But I’ve recently found a great bonus to designing an ecommerce site - objective, real-world, fast and irrefutable feedback on how well the design works. How often on a design can you get data within days at the most that says “Yes, it worked” or “No, try again”?

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Came across an ad today for Microsoft Dynamics. I’ve noticed these ads around the web lately, and sometimes they’re funny. So when I saw this one, I clicked “Replay” just to see if it was worth watching (missed the first run through) with the sound on.

And there was the problem. No sound! The ad player interface said “SOUND ON” in the lower left corner now, but nothing to hear. It’s a really short ad, so I played it once or twice more turning my speaker volume up, etc. No dice.

So I play it again and clicked the “SOUND ON” text. Now the UI shows “SOUND OFF”, and the sound plays.

OK. That’s just bad design. The sound on/off switch link looks just like a label, not an action, and there is no indication that an action will occur in the text itself. The design is visually simple and elegant, but completely disfuntional in that its appearance and function are on opposite sides of the fence.

If you’re going to make the link look like a label, at least give an action word which would indicate something will happen when you click the area.

There. That one simple change shows that this text is not a status indicator (as its appearance and styling still somewhat indicate), but is in fact a function to “turn the sound off”. It’s not perfect because if your speaker volume is off it takes a reverse thought to deduce “if there is a button to turn the sound off, then the sound must currently be on”, but at least it’s worlds better. And hardly changes the design at all.

Just getting this thing started up. I have some designs, but not quite final yet. For now, you can see some of my current design work at www.scrubshopper.com and www.eponym.com.

My main goal with this site is to discuss design problems and solutions with my friends and colleagues. I’ve started one critique I need to finish, and that would probably be the best way to kick this off, but I’ve found I tend to continue putting things off indefinitely, so is the official start. A post about nothing in particular. Oh well, I’ll get back to work and see if I can at least make it a post about nothing in a decent looking design.