Human Factors

The presentation starts with another overview of the Adobe XD Team and how the team was build up after the merger of Macromedia and Adobe and samples of their latest work are shown. The focus of the group lies in creating visions to get rid of digital experiences that “suck”.
Andrew shows the development of the Photoshop toolbar as an examplen and how its appearance changed over the year to become more usable and appealing in design. The slogan is “Experience Matters” and he shows the Wii, an Ikea store and the new Virgin blue virtual screen to stress the importance and success of carefully designed experiences.

The roles and goals of the XD Team within Adobe are:

- Inspire
- Initiate

– Implement
Their work and ideas seem to be pretty well regarded within Adobe.

What makes the team work?
- Emphasize Making (Generalist over Specialist)
- Promote Trust and Freedom
- Have Fun

How do they work together?
- Communication is crucial (communication is very informal)
- Process isn’t that important (focus on creating, not on following a strict defined process)
- Focus on the visions and goals

Their 5 rules of working:
- Simplify the problem
- Trust your instincts
- Share everything
- Fail fast (to suceed sooner)
- We are all peers before the objects

How we design:
- Useful.Usable.Desirable.

Next Andrew talks about the cornerstones that Tom Hobbs and Chris Heimbuch mentioned in their session on Monday as well
- What’s your point
- Content is King
- Create and experience, not an interface
- Choreograph sequence and flow

This is the first XD guy not starting with an explanation of the XD team and their principles. Good, by now everyone at least a bit interested in them knows anyway… ;-)

Mobile devices have evolved from merely functional tools to our constant companions. But the web experiences that we can get with our mobiles are boring, especially Facebook and MySpace, the most common social networks, look awful on the small screen. Josh shows some examples how the sides could look better, richer, more accessible. He shows the outcome of a survey that mentions iPhone owners with 77% being the most satisfied users of mobile phones and sees a real opportunity for designers and developers in this changing industry. But how to get up the experience to this level? First of all it needs to be an experience that puts the user first, they must be expressive and desirable. For this it’s important to know the user and his behavior.

Design principles for creating engaging mobile experiences:
- The Mobile Context is Relevant (they should not only be smaller, but smarter than desktops => focus on the user’s mobility, fitting, get the hardware to test immediately. As an example he shows google maps on a mobile, which was just text in the beginning and was changed to a great application for mobile devices after the problem was realized.)
- Capture and Guide Users (=> establish clear focus, direction and emphasis, Maintain context, Preview and deliver. As an example he show Yahoo go, which is today easy to use)
- Differentiations is a Feature (=> stylize, demonstrate brand, deep customization, thrill, fresh and dynamic. As an example he shows “Living World”, an application that gives an identity to the device)
Sum up: there is a hunger for mobile experience and providers who realize this potential we have an amazing opportunity.

This session is about the web based word processor “Buzzword”, build in Flex and Actionscript and designed to take over the world of word processors. Honestly, I really wonder how someone can come up with the idea to build a new word processor, but thinking about it for a few seconds makes it obvious: the currently available software is crap. And just because we’re used to live with the rubbish we can use at the moment, doesn’t mean that we have to go on like this for the rest of our lives and especially younger people (“Generation Facebook”) isn’t willing to spend time on learning to cope with bad usability.

So there we have “Buzzword” now, a word processor that convinced Adobe so well, that the developing company will now join them to be a part of the Adobe Family. After a quick overview what is available on the market right now and what these word processors can do, it becomes pretty clear, that Microsoft Word, WordPerfect and OpenOffice actually do deliver the tools to produce good documents, but they are huge, need a lot of memory space on installation and are not easy to use and share. Main feature of Buzzword is the online storage of documents. It saves a lot of time and emails going back- and forward, if several people are working on the same document. You can get a list of all available documents sorted by author, number of pages, title. You can define if people are allowed to change the document or just read and comment on in. Documents that have changed since you last opend it are indicated with a red mark. Buzzword is WYSIWYG and everything from typing over spell-check to zooming works in real time and watching the demo on the screen already makes me want to try it and hundreds of ideas come to my mind how this can make my day-to-day work much easier. The comment function really impresses me – everyone who has ever worked with track changes in Microsoft Word knows how much of a pain it can be. Buzzword even offers a time line which shows the document at various stages so that you are able to get back to earlier versions without confusion about who changed what, when and why.

Buzzword is free and will stay free in a basic version for indivinduals, maybe there will be a kind of premium version with additional features which could cost some money. For the future Buzzword will be available on AIR, so that it can be used on- and offline. That will be a very cool feature especially for us in New Zealand, where the speed and stability of internet connections still often sucks.

Kevin Lynch is back on the stage for the keynote for day 2 of Adobe MAX 2007. First he welcomes Bruce Chizen, CEO of Adobe, who talks about his relationship to the press and his personal privacy, leading to the reasons why he’s still loving his job. His passion for Adobe really comes through and he’s absolutely blown away by what the people build with Adobe products. It’s good to see that the community is valued again and I’m sure it’s highly motivating for everyone coming from a Macromedia background to be seen as an important part of the technology again.

Next in the spotlight is Steven Webster, showing a video about working processes at MFG.com and how they implement LiveCycle products in their daily life. Afterwards he talks about LiveCycle ES a bit more in detail.

The following part consists of four people presenting a couple of Adobe Services.

1. Dough Mack shows “Scene7″, an on-demand rich media publishing system.
2. Andrew Shebanow shows “Share”, a file sharing and store application.
3. Danielle Deibler talks about “Pacifica”, a communication tool (voice-and-video-presence-service) with very high voice quality, text instant messaging and a planned integration of video chat and landline telephone network. Seems to be a kind of Skype without using Skype… I’m not really sure what this is about.
4. Nigel Pegg presents “CoCoMo”, a new version of Connect based on a client-server platform.

Next huge topic after Services is Tools and first project that’s shown is “Thermo”, a RIA Design Tool, presented by Mark Anders and Steven Heintz.

Mike Sundermeyer presents the Adobe XD team (some of the guys I met at last night’s meet-the-team session) and shows the webpage that was presented in yesterday’s session XD:Adobe’s Approach to Application Design.

Last thing that is presented is a prototype of some Flex suff for boats, as they can’t bring a boat on stage they show a video about it.

More information about the keynote and other things that are happening at MAX are available at Aral Balkan’s Blog and in German language on Create or Die by Kai.

Here’s the second chance for Jared Spool. This time I googled the title of the session before I came here and didn’t find a video on it. But the actual title is slightly different than the one that’s advertised, so I hope that this is something I don’t know yet, let’s see…

Aaaahhhhrgs, I know these slides – I’m out of here!

Just on time for the start of this AIR-session – and there’s even a free book for every attendee: “Fusion Authority Quarterly Update, Vol. II Issue II”, nice, thank you.

The presentation starts with the question “How can AIR deepen brand awareness?” Basis are the following assumptions:

- Today, we have the power to control, create and share content.

- The value equation is fading, so to give a brand a positive look we need to provide value and do good.

AIR brings branded applications out of the browser and onto the desk top. Everyone loves their desktops and fit them to our own tastes and likes. Desktop applications require trust and belief in a brand. A web page is only a destination, while the desk top is part of our personality.

User surround themselves with touchpoints, potential environments where a brand can reach the user. The more touchpoints a brand uses the more chances a brand has to get noticed. Carefully identifying and shaping each touchpoint provides a holistic user experience. As an example Gabor shows Finetune.com, an online and offline usable music library.

Currently AIR excels at creating passive experiences and future applications will provide an active experiences. Advantages of AIR:
- AIR brings web design and development skills-sets to the desktop, which is necessary because the next generation of users are growing up on web based interfaces.
- The best UI designers in the world are currently working on web based experiences, with AIR they have the chance to create for the desktop as well.
- Cross Platform – build one, deploy many

Now Tony Mac Donnell comes on the stage and starts talking a bit more about the technical aspects of AIR. He goes on with more advantages of AIR: the opportunity to create nice atuff and having access to the file system.
The session ends with an outlook on visions and hopes for the future and a Q&A round.

This sessions covers mainly Adobe Express form the perspective of the XD team. Ty explains the team’s approach to creating new tools, where Observation is the first step of the process.

He goes on with the definition of Adobe Express: It is an online application suite that allows you to edit, create and share your media without leaving the web (build entirely in Flex). Ty then shows an example application of Adobe Premiere Express (a RIA for simple editing of digital video files) that can be customised to the clients needs. It’s currently used for example by Photobucket and MTV.

The early concepts of Express started with what was known to the team: the desktop. But it turned out that this was the wrong approach and we are guided us through some “historic” versions of Express to show the development over the years up to how it looks like today.

What’s next? Express is an ecosystem, not a singular product, so the concepts can be implemented and used in other applications for future visions.