Richard Filing

In this ‘I’m not actually a geek’ post, Hutch Carpenter looks at how all social software applications are not the same when it comes to the level of employee adoption required for value.

EXCERPT: You don’t need a high level of adoption to get value from some Enterprise 2.0 apps. Others require broad participation. In some ways, that may seem obvious. Yet I don’t tend to hear this distinction being made. Usually, all social software is lumped together under ‘Enterprise 2.0? and there is a collective view that wide-scale adoption by employees is a necessity.

Read the full post here

This is a comprehensive look at trends, challenges and considerations for mobile web design from Smashing Magazine.

Excerpt: Web designers know that the industry involves plenty of change, and continuous adaption and development of skills is required in order to stay up to date. In the past few years, one of the biggest areas of change has been the amount of Internet users who are accessing websites via phones and mobile devices. As a result, Web designers have a growing need to be educated in this area and ready to design websites that accommodate this audience.

Read this excellent post in full here with useful examples and links to other mobile web design standards and issues.

John Gruber in his guidepost to sweet iPhone like UI design gives us a great quote for simplicity and focus:

Figure out the absolute least you need to do to implement the idea, do just that, and then polish the hell out of the experience.

Keywords: least and polish.

Read the complete post here

                                                         Excerpt: ‘…. increasing evidence abounds that Enterprise 2.0 adoption has begun in earnest with a typical example being Wells Fargo taking the plunge, having rolled out Enterprise 2.0 platforms to 160,000 workers. It has become clear that we’re moving out of the early pioneer phase to a broader acceptance phase. From the production side, a brand new analysis indicates that the business social software market will be nearly $1 billion strong this year and over $3.3 billion by 2011. In these and other ways, such as the growing collection of success stories, Enterprise 2.0 has arrived.’

Lesson #1: Enterprise 2.0 is going to happen in your organization with you or without you

Lesson #2: Effective Enterprise 2.0 seems to involve more than just blogs and wikis.

Lesson #3: Enterprise 2.0 is more a state of mind than a product you can purchase.

Lesson #5: The benefits of Enterprise 2.0 can be dramatic, but only builds steadily over time.

Read the full Hinchcliffe article here

From Tom Fishburne

A nice finish written upside down in salt

I recently remembered this Fast Company interview from 1999 and didn’t want to lose it again
Excerpt: Freeman Thomas has designed two of the most distinctive cars of the ’90s. He is codesigner of VW’s New Beetle. He also designed the Audi TT — a sports car of such purity that a New York Times critic called it “historically significant” and nominated it for “car of the century.”
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/30/thomas.html

Over on Vitamin - Robert Hoekman has posted a great template and ‘how to’ for a powerpoint slide deck that shows detailed use cases alongside wireframes or comps in an effort to detail all the interactions in a design.
Excerpt: The Design Description Document cures all of this. First, it communicates to the boss how each interaction will occur, so he has no questions. Second, it tells the developers exactly how things need to work so they know what to build and can immediately start cranking it out. Third, it gives the Documentation team something they can start writing about sooner than later. After all, if the developers know exactly how everything needs to work, odds are much better that the final product will be in line with the original design.