Saturday, September 22, 2007

WordPress and Flash Video files, effortlessly!

I've been setting up a WordPress installation for an Arduino course website, and wanted to put up Flash Video content. I came upon the Simply Working WP plugin "flv-embed", and it saved my day.

By the way, WordPress has been a good experience so far. This is the largest installation I've ever made (meaning I only ever played with it before), but it does just what we want and not much more (unless you make it).

flv-embed has simple configuration, and is implemented using a very simple wp template tag: [/path/to/video width height]

Sometimes I just feel like pluggin :)

Wednesday, September 19, 2007

Experience Design - "Awesomeness"

Andrew Crow of Adaptive Path spoke at this month's talk at Vancouver User Experience group. The theme of the talk was "awesomeness", and how design is a powerful force that can evoke emotion and awe. The following is a paraphrase-analysis of the talk.

To evoke desire in consumers, and keep them coming, designers have to consider how the product they are designing is part of a larger system. Experience design can be thought of as design carried out with attention to the entire context that affects the designed product, its' users and dependent systems. The iconic image for successful design right now, of course, is the iPhone:



As a designer you are not designing a product. You are in fact designing an experience that may (no, should) change how people live their lives.

The example that Mr. Crow gave is a classic one, but one that bears to be repeated: How Eastman-Kodak transformed the complicated and mysterious technology of photography, and made it into an accessible, and, in the long run, indespensible part of people's lives. The users of Kodak no longer had to mess with dangerous chemicals and handle sensitive photographic film. The philosophy?
"You press the button, we do the rest."




And that is an offer you cannot resist as a consumer. If the product (the system) is providing a desirable service, and on top of that is offering to minimize the consumer's effort in obtaining that service, you're hitting gold.