Beyond | IT : User Experience

How WPF can help your golf game, or PING’s new beginning

john.mullinax — Thu, 14 May 2009 22:18:15 GMT

This app from PING, called nFlight, is extremely cool. Beautiful, sophisticated, and fun. nFlight analyzes your golf swing to develop specifications for custom fit golf clubs. The app performs complex simulations and renders beautiful displays that show actual ball flight with different club parameters, humidity levels, wind conditions, etc. It even shows the leaves blowing and water rippling.

For the richest experience and highest app performance, the PING team built this app in WPF. Orders are sent from the retail locations where people get custom fit for their clubs off to PING for manufacturing, and PING manages updates with Synchronization Services. A simple, but compelling example showing the best of software and services together. :)

PING originally planned this as an 18-month project, but a year into it they were struggling. Developing an app that was both beautiful and also computationally sophisticated proved a real challenge. With 6 months to go before the project was due, they basically started over.

Fortunately, they were able salvage some graphic design concepts. Those were created in Expression Blend and handed off to developers working in Visual Studio. You might guess how the story goes from here on out:

Controls that took weeks to build in their old environment were now getting done in a day
The new workflow for developers and designers had a huge impact on the teams productivity and agility
The nFlight app maintained high fidelity to design intent
The PING team re-worked their original efforts in less than 3 months, and had a production version of the app 2 months after that
By early 2009, over 400 PING dealers around the world were using the app

For PING, the benefits of their WPF nFlight app go beyond developer and designer productivity… they make better consumer experiences practical and reinforce the innovation leadership credentials for which the PING brand is known.

I’m a terrible golfer, but with custom-fit clubs maybe there’s hope for me? Well, I probably still won’t be able to golf, but getting custom-fit clubs sure looks like fun!

Like to learn more?

Learn more about what PING did and their nFlight app here.
See a cool video that shows folks from PING talking through the app and showing demos here.
Find an nFlight fitting location near you here!

Technorati Tags: Software-plus-services,WPF,User Experience,golf

Have you heard of Living Ink yet?

john.mullinax — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 18:47:00 GMT

My last post talked about an envisioning video that shows how we may use technology 10 years into the future. Turns out, not all of the technology concepts are that far away. In fact, one of the interesting technology innovations is already here: It’s called Living Ink.

Remember the very first scene in the actual envisioning video where the kids draw a dog and a ball on a collaborative display surface, and then “throw” the ball and the dog comes to life and chases it (about the 15:00 minute mark in the embedded video)?

We don’t have the collaborative display wall (darn!), but my kids have been making their drawings come to life at home since they got ItzaBitza for Christmas. It’s quite amazing, actually.

The kids draw scenes on the computer screen, and characters called sketchies interact with the drawings. Draw a door, and a sketchy can walk through it. Draw a tree, and it may start growing fruit. The sketchies help guide kids through the game to different scenes. Sometimes they’ll ask players to draw something specific, like a house. At other times, kids are free to explore the scenes by pursuing quests built into the game.

As an added bonus, ItzaBitza helps my three-year old son learn how to read… but even my 7 year old daughter, who can already read, enjoys playing because it’s so exciting to her to see her artistic creations come to life.

BTW, we use ItzaBitza at home on a tablet PC to make the drawing experience as “natural” as possible, but you can play using a regular PC as well, just drawing with the mouse, and it’s still fun. I think our next PC will be a large touch screen to take advantage of Windows 7’s built in multi-touch capabilities, so that should open up the screen real-estate for an even more immersive ItzaBitza drawing experience.

ItzaBitza is a made by a children’s software startup called Sabi, which was founded in partnership with Microsoft’s IP Ventures Program. It costs about $20. Well worth the money, IMO, but also, check out what USA Today had to say.

Technorati Tags: Living Ink,natural interaction,windows 7,multi-touch,user experience,microsoft ip ventures

Making tool bars interesting again. No, really.

john.mullinax — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 10:04:00 GMT

Here's something interesting from InfoSpace... a tool bar! No, really. In fact, see for yourself over at Sam Chenaur's site. He's got a nice screen grab, too. This is not your "father's toolbar".

I tried to get my own screen grab from the Recipe toolbar I installed, but it's really quite hidden until you engage with it... so it's completely innocuous until you want to use it... and then it looks great. Other notes:

The requirements say IE7, but seems to work just fine for me on IE8 so far.
The UI is context sensitive, and uses some of the same conventions as the "ribbon" in Office UI.
I like this is as an non-traditional "software-plus-services" example to "get" what that's all about... (assuming for the moment you can have a "non-traditional example" for a term without too much of a tradition yet!) :-)

What I mean about "software-plus-services" is this: software that runs on a computer you control, plus services delivered over the internet from a computer you don't control, working together to enable cool new experiences that make both software and services better than either by themselves. There are certainly more complicated ways to describe software-plus-services (sometimes called "S+S" around Microsoft), and i'm frequently guilty :-) ... but that's the essence of it.

I'm guessing a bit about how this all goes together, but it appears that from a users' perspective, the software pieces include the tool bar itself, the XAML UI, and Silverlight to render the XAML. The services pieces come into play because the toolbar hosts a couple services (at least): recipes and pics from AllRecipes.com, and also a search product from InfoSpace called Nation that aggregates yahoo, google, ask, and live search as a meta search engine (that is, the search service itself is actually a simple composite of still more services).

You may be saying, "big deal -- none of these things are very interesting or unique by themselves." I fully agree. And yet together, they create something completely new in character as to be, literally, unique. And that's really the punch line in some ways with Software-plus-services -- thinking about how collections of software and services can go together and make each other better is a powerful way to create compelling new experiences!

So hop on over to Sam's site and check out his and pic and what he has to say about his hand in helping InfoSpace do this good work. Or, if you can't wait, jump straight to InfoSpace's toolbars here.

Another Surface video

john.mullinax — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 04:12:00 GMT

Not exactly new, but worth checking out this video if you haven't seen it and are interested in Microsoft Surface, the new multi-touch table top computer coming out "soon". More info here , too. Technorati tags: surface , user experience , UX...(read more)

The consumer value stream mind set

john.mullinax — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 22:47:00 GMT

I saw this today, and it cracked me up. It's an insightful (and funny!) one-panel exposition on the importance of understanding consumer motivations -- the things that are important to them, what they are trying to accomplish. In microeconomic terms --...(read more)

PhizzPop Interview: Silverlight for cross platform video at University of Michigan

john.mullinax — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 17:15:34 GMT

Just saw this over at PhizzPop . What is PhizzPop you may ask? It's a fledgling community site for designers to learn from and showoff to their peers. The link above is to an interview with Ken Arbogast-Wilson, Manager of Media Development and Production...(read more)

Building brand and transcending walled gardens

john.mullinax — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 03:46:10 GMT

Ok - so I've been posting about Popfly a lot lately. Why am I so excited about Popfly? It's simple, actually. Popfly is more than a mashup maker. And it's more than a Mashout tool (for sharing mashups) -- though it is that, too. What makes Popfly so exciting...(read more)

Academia 2.0? The reponse to A Vision of Students Today

john.mullinax — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 10:55:00 GMT

Technorati Tags: Adaptive , User Experience , Computing is a liberal art , knowledge , academia 2.0 Walter Stier posted a link to an interesting video made by a Kansas State cultural anthropology class on what it's like to be a college student today....(read more)

Optimizing the consumer value stream

john.mullinax — Wed, 04 Jul 2007 01:33:45 GMT

Technorati Tags: systems thinking , lean , consumer experience , web 2.0 , next web , loyalty Are you thinking about your consumers' personal value stream? The businesses I generally work with are familiar with the notion of a value chain or a value...(read more)

Mono Moonlight - Silverlight on Linux is near

john.mullinax — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 01:49:00 GMT

Technorati Tags: Silverlight , moonlight , linux , UX , User Experience Just saw this from Jesse Ezell: Mono is expected to release an alpha version of Moonlight later this week at the Paris MIX. This will let users running browsers on Linux clients...(read more)

Acropolis Lives!

john.mullinax — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 05:56:00 GMT

Acropolis is CTP! The WindowsClient.net site says: Acropolis builds on the rich capabilities of Microsoft Windows and the .NET Framework, including Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), by providing tools and pre-built components that help developers...(read more)

Want more info on Popfly?

john.mullinax — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 19:46:44 GMT

I recently got into the Popfly alpha, and have been playing around with it off and on for the last week or two. Here's a screenshot of a simple, compact News Reader that pulls in RSS feeds from the blogs of the members of the Microsoft's DPE team that...(read more)

Empowered Consumer Experiences Drive Loyalty, Profits

john.mullinax — Tue, 08 May 2007 23:00:00 GMT

We don’t get a physical newspaper at our house, but sometimes my wife will go buy one – and then throw it away (!) – to get the coupons inside. It’s not just my family abandoning newspapers -- newspaper circulations have been declining for over 15 years...(read more)

When User Experience really a matter of life and death

john.mullinax — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 04:11:00 GMT

The NY Times reports that the Department of Defense created Joint Patient Tracking Application so that military doctors around the world can access patient medical histories -- and while it's used in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is mostly not used in the...(read more)