Thursday, September 19, 2002

Jakob Nielsen on Offshore Usability: "To save costs, some companies are outsourcing Web projects to countries with cheap labor. Unfortunately, these countries lack strong usability traditions and their developers have limited access -- if any -- to good usability data from the target users." Offshore usability is a specific case of the general "offshore design" problem. Put simply, software teams are not successful when design or management are done in a different physical location than programming. Once I actually had a job where I was in New York, my direct manager was in Singapore, his manager was in Hyderabad, and if I needed any management input I had literally no choice but to go to the CEO because at least he was awake during the same hours as I was. You can't get things done like this. A good project team relies on hundreds of small interactions a day. Here in the Fog Creek offices, we have 10 small conversations about FogBUGZ 3.0 development every day. What I don't understand is people who think it's OK to move the developers ten time zones away from their managers and expect good results. Those same people would scream bloody murder if you told them that you were going to send the whole management team to Bangalore or Beijing. [Joel on Software] Interesting [Brett Morgan's Insanity Weblog Zilla] My company is betting it's entire future on this working out.  I'll be keeping my resume up to date. 7:26:57 PM

w00t. Philips Marketing: You Had Me At Hello. Today I came across the web site for The Streamium, a boombox for listening to internet radio, CDs, and MP3s from your PC. Here's the description from the press release: "...the world’s first micro hi-fi system capable of connecting to multiple online music services at the touch of a button." But that doesn't come close to doing it justice. I'm thoroughly intrigued by it, which means the marketing folks did their job well. Some choice quotes from the site's home page: You only have two ears: don't waste them on dumbed down music chosen by focus groups. Plug into your DSL or cable modem and unplug from mass music. Plays CDs, CD-Rs, CD-RWs or MP3 & mp3PRO CDs. And AM/FM radio if you must. 100 Watts total power. Share it with your neighbors. wOOx technology = bass that doesn't bother knocking before it beats the door down. Song title and artist displayed before you can say "Who is this?" Now that's market research! Every one of these hits a home run with me. Over at the full Streamium page on the Philips site, we get new slogans such as "Don't dream it. Stream it!" and new nouns such as "streamies" (folks that own the Streamium). It should be available nationally any day now, and it looks like this sweet little puppy will retail for $399, which is very tempting. Tempting, indeed. Make it $299 and Streamium, I'm yours. [The Shifted Librarian] Want one. [Brett Morgan's Insanity Weblog Zilla] This sounds nice 7:24:24 PM

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