Layers and more layers

To develop in the web, the applications have many layers that the developer or developers have to take care of; starting from the bottom is: Databases, logic, back-end scripting, front-end, front-end style and front-end interaction; just mentioning some of the most used.

This means that all this elements have to play nice and interact with the others in a nice and smooth way, so the users get a good Experience. As many layers and elements you introduce in the application, more difficult is to make all things to work together. This increase the development, deployment and testing time.

In a standard, “native” application; you need only a few of these layers to take care. Meaning the development time and deployment time is drastically reduced.

The web as development platform

For applications running on the web platform the deployment happen server site and the users get always the most up to date version of the application.

In the development of a web application, many technologies can be used: for the server-side and also for the front-end. This lead to a myriad of technologies and methodologies that developers adopt based on their taste, the popularity of the technologies and the requirements of the applications.

Some other stuff must be keep it in mind: in the web we don’t have to deal with cross-platform compatibility, but cross-browser compatibility, this one can be a terrible time eater mostly when the developer of the application need to address for instance Internet Explorer 6.

Native applications as a development platform

These are the oldest technologies; that’s why they are really more advanced than web technologies. Also the Development Environments, the debugging etc. are a lot better.

Native applications can use the local resources in a better way, this increase notably the performance of the application. These applications can use then resources like local storage, sound and graphics acceleration. Also are better integrated with the Operating Systems.

The difficult task for native applications is, distribution and deployment; because not all users can or want to upgrade every time. Also the deployment time take longer on native applications, because you cannot deploy a new version every day and get the 100% of your users to update in a small amount of time.

Finally

The selection of the best development platform has to be based on the requirements of the application itself. Also how the users have to interact with your application, the amount of user collaboration you want to insert in the application, and a long etc.

One thing is sure, Native applications are easier and fast to develop as web applications; also as said; the development environment is friendlier.

All started with a URL with a deal from Vistaprint.de I got inside a box from an Amazon purchase. The deal was pretty nice: Order cards and get a free Etui for your cards. Great, right? Wrong!

Ordered my cards, making my way with the scrambled e-commerce thing VistaPrint.de have -If you are a GoDaddy user you know what is like- avoiding complementary articles they offered all the time. Must say I succumb to the temptations and added a T-Shirt with logo and slogan. So far, so good. Selected the payment and delivery method. Pay… and what a surprise when reading the email with the confirmation (which arrived 1/2 hour later)… The only reason why I bought from VistaPrint is not included in my order… Yes, you are guessing right: The Etui.

Back to vistaprint.de freighting site, check my order again, there was also not Etui. I thought -Okay I’ll send an email to the customer service, explaining the situation, how hard can be dropping an Etui on my order anyways? Wrote the email and pressed Send. Got a confirmation, Vistaprint have received my email and will answer as soon as possible. All must be good now, right? Nope.

Spend all 14 days waiting for my answer from Vistaprint, but they don’t answer. Instead I got a considerable amount of offers -read spam- from Vistaprint the whole time.

Yesterday my order arrived; I open the box and found inside: my cards and the t-shirt, of course no sign of the Etui. Was not very happy with the quality of my cards and the t-shirt is really crappy. But I thought: Well what can I do?.

But… Today! I received the answer of my email from Vistaprint support… Exactly one day after my order arrived! Perfect timing don’t you think? In the email they told me they have looked my order and certainly the Etui was not there and also they could not send it now. The next paragraph of the email was to tell me how I should use the Vistapring scary e-comerce system the right way. That was the last drop.

I also have to say that I had an exchange with their PR team via twitter, but went silent when I sent the order number via direct message so this happens.

Finally I’m sending back to Vistaprint my complete order and I’m actively looking for alternatives to print my cards and maybe I get a t-shirt too… but I’ll run away from free Etuis.

This post is not to blame Vistaprint for their bad User Experience and Support. I know out there are many Vistaprints and the users are suffering from bad User Experiences. In this time of economic crisis, is better treat the Users as what they are: The core of your business, without users you certainly will not have business. Vistaprint certainly loose a user today, and forever.

With downloaded music, you lose part of these related materials. Almost everybody that offer music to download online forget about it. But with a little bit of common sense the downloaded music can be also an enjoyable experience.

The first issues that bother customers of online music stores are the identifiers, tags and metadata embedded on the downloaded files. The present Standard is ID3.
In the ID3 metadata can be embedded information like: Song Title, Artist, Album, etc. These ones are the most common, but there is other metadata that make the downloaded music more enjoyable, like: Artwork and Lyrics, these two are the most forgotten.

One good example of good practice a great User Experience for downloaded music is the Albums Ghost I-V and The Slip from Nine Inch Nails. On these products, the use of metadata to increase the final User Experience is just unbeatable: including several Artworks, the lyrics and comments related to every song, also a companion PDF file with the Album Artwork to print.

Why is this important Again?

Any step to increase the final User Experience of your products is reflected in the perception of the customer, and they are certainly willing to recommend the products to their friends. Increasing, of course, the distribution and reach of such products; using the best way possible: Word of Mouth.

Almost all decent Media Player today are designed to display this metadata in a nice way, so the user can enjoy their media with a better Experience. Saving the user of typing and filling this metadata on a product they already bought is nice step on the right direction.

If you are distributing downloadable media online, try to make the Final User Experience enjoyable. Cause the customers may be more time interacting with the downloaded files than with your distribution channel/website/store.

We now understand better how our brain and memory works; but at the same time our lives have grown a lot more complicated. We have to remember more things than before: Login credentials, phone numbers, appointments, PIN numbers and a big etcetera.

User Experience can help users not to remember another thing, or not to remember the path to get to what they want. A simple example to illustrate this is, and you’ll agree: sometimes, you don’t remember the exact url of the article you are looking for, but, your remember exactly the search terms you put on google to found it. This happens very often.

Making, for example, all the info/features your have easy to find and access will save a lot of time to the user and increase the satisfaction of finding what they are looking for quickly. Resulting, in a better User Experience, on your product.

Also the user know that the information/feature they want resides on your website or application and the only thing they remember is that is easy to get to it. That will make a great feature for your users and is certainly more probably that your users recommend your product/service to their friends if they had a good User Experience.

So, let’s do something for decrease the amount of things the users have to remember on our next project. Give the user the possibility to use the stuff they already have. Implementing Facebook Connect can be a day savior for a lot of users that are scared of another sing up form.

Minimizing the things to remember on your product/service/website will make it more usable and your users will get more satisfaction using it.

Lately

With the advent of mobile communications, the first intents were to squish the same old metaphor into mobile devices, resulting in the unusable User Experience we have in mobile devices today. Lately are starting to appear some initiatives with better User Experience like the iPhone, but there is still a lot of room to make things better.

The desktop in the other hand is petrified in the same old metaphor with almost no signals of changes in these 30 years. The current Desktop GUIs, like Windows, Mac OS, KDE, Gnome among others are still not able to move in other direction.

The companies are starting to realize the importance of having a great User Experience for their services and products and taking steps in the right direction… but is too little to late. Is a fact that the best User Experience win; and the ones with a poor one will perish, more in these hard times when consumers will take a second (and sometimes a third) look before pull out their wallets.

People or Developers

What is holding the change? Well, this is a vicious circle where Users don’t like disruptive changes and the Developers knowing that (and willing to sell their products) don’t make any significative innovation on the User Experience and User Interface.

Also the current OSs are designed in concordance with the old metaphor, making more difficult to make any change at all. With a new metaphor is also needed a new concept of Operating System to match this new metaphor.

More like we are now

The old stuff work back in the day when things where disconnected and sporadic; all that changed. Today we have real-time lives and social networks and we are able to connect to the internet almost from everywhere.

The current work flow is “Open an App to do a task” giving the application the principal role. This application centered design of the current OSs is constraining the innovation in the User Experience. The applications are “boxed” in their “windows” and frames and rarely expand outside.

The new metaphor have to reflect our current state, have to interconnected, open, manageable and powerful; to make the right impact in our lives.

We really need this new Operating System and as soon as possible.

Update: More Discussion at IxDA.

We also add some realtime notifications to the whole system integrated with facebook, twitter, email etc.

On other posts will explained more about more about the whole project and the idea we have to a Netbook Operative System.

We are using a new metaphor, totally diferent from the “application based” we are used to. This new metaphor is “task based” to you can concentrate in the task you are making without get distract for the hole User Interface.

No name till now… What you think of “Rention“?

That’s why nlapse is experimenting with a totally new take on the netbook OS, centered in tasks instead in applications and the focus is in the user needs on the go. So take a sneak peak of it.

Remember: this is only a very first approach (still no name). All feedback is welcome, here in the comments and also in twitter with @nlapse.

User Experience is one of the key aspects that will diferenciate you from competidors. Understanding how users interact with your product is a must these days. That’s why we are giving away a Free User Experience Report for your website or startup.

What you get?

• Custom Report of how users may interact with your current website.
• Recomendations on how to improve the User Experience on your website including task flow, simplifing process, information architecture, layout, flow, design and interactivity.
• Discovers what’s holding back your success in terms of User Experience and how to fix it.

How to get it?

1. Follow @nlapse on twitter.
2. Re-tweet this tweet.
3. Ask for the User Experience Report on twitter; something like “@nlapse Hey @mycompany need a User Experience Report” will do the trick.

nlapse will select one winner based on the value the website or startup can give to the public and state of the current User Experience. Also will influence in the decision how you use social media.

So fire up your twitter account and good luck to everyone.

Microsoft Cloud Strategy

Microsoft own the OS and Office Market, no doubt of that, but to maintain this status they have to provide solutions on the cloud. Actually, Microsoft have already solutions in the cloud, they have Exchange and Share Point for the Enterprise, which are pretty much the standard in synchronization right now, they also have the Office live thingy but like many things from Microsoft is hard to see where is the benefit we can get using it, cause is buried under a lot of Marketing and unrelated stuff that -at least for me- is not working.

The next evolutionary step for Microsoft is migrate their Office suite to the cloud, that’s when Silverlight come to play. last year release of Silverlight was toke with a lot of skepticism from the community, the purpose was not so clear to the majority of us. I saw Silverlight like a “me too” project to compete with Adobe and the ubiquitous Flash Player -thanks to video for that penetration numbers. But looking more closely to the last steps from Microsoft, like the partnership to broadcast video from the next olympiads on the net, that will surely rocket the Silverlight penetration numbers.

With a Silverlight in the ~98% of the computers connected to the cloud -like Flash player is right now, Microsoft will be ready to roll out an Office Suite in the platform ready to be used from the cloud. That may be Microsoft’s master plan right now… or something similar. But surely they have a plan to deploy Office to the Cloud.

Google Cloud Strategy

Google is native to the cloud, they where born in the cloud. In the last years Google was unveiling a set of services, starting with Google Mail, Calendar, Documents, Reader and a long etcetera. Starting to make the transition to the cloud their most successful services in that set are GMail, Calendar and Reader. They are also taking steps to make this products easy to use for collaboration which is other hot trend in cloud computing.

Their strategies to take over the cloud are simple, offer a better service (anyone is using hotmail out there?) and the APIs. Let’s take a look at the APIs and why they are important. The APIs from Google services provide a way to migrate this services to other platforms and uses depending of specific requirements, for instance I can sync my GMail and Calendar on my iPhone using 3rd party applications for the iPhone who rely on the Google APIs. Also Google don’t have to worry about make this applications cause the community is empowered to do it.

Next evolutionary step is: mobile, and here is where Android is invited to the game. I’m very sceptic about Android -mostly cause I hate Java- but I’m sure that Android play really important role in the Google’s master plan. Of course we still have to wait for the first device loaded with Android -hey HTC where is your Android ready device for this month? you are late already.

Google set of service are starting to take off mainly on small teams and companies, but there is a long way to go for Google Documents, cause everybody at work have Outlook, Word, Excel and Powerpoint already.

Apple cloud strategy

Apple unveiled the iPhone 3G this week and at the same time they present a new service: Mobile Me, which will sync your email, calendar, photos and files across the Macs, the PCs and your phone -if you have an iPhone. That’s a step into cloud computing. Is a paid service -is Apple- but surely will solve the sync problem.

This is a interesting approach cause Apple is not a big player on Internet Services, but I’m sure that the user experience on the service will win a lot of customers to the service. The people will love the fact that is 0 hassle involve on the configuration and synchronization of this service with you computers at home, work and your phone.

With this approach Apple will be quietly gaining some terrain on the SaaS market and will be easy to plug in more services on Mobile Me later -a Office Suite, maybe

Adobe Cloud strategy

Adobe on their site have their Flash Player installed on a big percent of the computers connected to the net and lately with the launch of the AIR platform will be very easy to deploy many hosted serviced on the net.

Adobe have already a Word Processor built on Flex, Buzzword and currently integrated on their Acrobat.com service. Buzzword is by far the best Word Processor you can use right now on the net; also is native to the net so the collaboration features are really nice.

They are rumors Adobe is developing a office suite which include Spreadsheets and Presentations software but this are only rumors right now.

Other players in the field

You have probably heard or use some of the other services and applications in the cloud computing field: SalesForce, Zoho, ThinkFree, 37signals products, etc. This is a hot field and every want a piece of the cloud pie here, let’s see who win this race.

Keep flowing.