i’m to here with it, i say
ok, so what is the real thing that i need to know to improve the way we categorize things? to improve the way we find things? to help us find what we want when we need it? to help us trip over what we want to trip over? so many of the things that people are doing around me are relevant to this question… i sit here listening to a pandora generated radio station and have been using a search engine that aims to allow me to refine my queries by augmenting my keywords with natural language to revisit so many of the interesting things that i’ve found over the months.
there are a lot of ways that the haystack project really is the kind of thing that i want to be doing. they have really great goals, and a good view of the problem space. but it’s still project-centered… it still seems to require so much work… i have absolutely no good reason to say that, though. the only criticism i can fairly offer is that the prototype is so ungodly processor-intensive that i have been put off from downloading it to try it out myself. but i should do it at work anyway. tomorrow.
otherwise, i just need to give myself that real good stark look in the mirror.
i think that i am resisting the storyboarding and prototyping because i feel like pulling together some kind of mockup at this stage that tries to incorporate all this big stuff in my head would just be for the sake of trying to put a face on things that are not really ready yet. it feels like i’m trying to prove that i’ve done something, but just spitting out an interface feels kind of masturbatory – “look! this is a neat rollover effect, isn’t it?! this will TOTALLY ROCK the user’s world!”
whatever.
i’m not even saying that the ideas that i am turning around are bad.
or that giving them form and testing them would be bad.
i’m saying that i haven’t really done enough of my homework on what others are doing to make the best offering i can, and i regret that.
and i’m saying that i don’t think i’m giving enough credit to the other work that i Have been doing.
i don’t just want to go all web 2.0izer on the bigger ideas and say that the answer lies in greasemonkey hacks.
i don’t want to draft some airy proposal about how things will be better in some shiny, happy future.
i want to do something real.
even if it’s tiny.
i feel like i’m just searching for what looks and sounds good, and i want to stop that crap.
so here’s what i’m asking myself now:
if you had two weeks to do something that would improve the way that people relate with their email, what would you do? what has this year really taught you about what is needed?
now DO IT
May 17th, 2006 at 4:23 am
[…] which brings us to “today” i got up at 11, took a shower, ate a poptart, and came to informatics. 3 in the morning was, for me, the equivalent of 11. i worked for 2 hours and took a little break for a snack and a cup of coffee. in that two hours, i succeeded in getting a full skeleton of my presentation out of my head, where it has been spinning around and driving me crazy for the past two days. it’s far from perfect, and it’s ugly right now because it’s basically just bullet points, and not even the best of those, so i need to do some honing and image hunting. but it’s something to build on and i feel like i see the path for the day, which feels really good after the circles that i feel like i’ve been running myself ragged with this week. i have been feeling unfocused, and worried about how interesting the thread that i am isolating for this presentation is going to be, and annoyed at myself for worrying about such things rather than just knuckling down. i’m sure i’m not totally out of those woods (there’s still a week and a half and a paper and a poster to go!), but right now i feel good, and excited about the day. […]
May 17th, 2006 at 4:31 am
[…] which brings us to “today” i got up at 11 last night, took a shower, ate a poptart, and came to informatics. 3 in the morning was, for me, something like the equivalent of 11 in the morning. i had been working for 2 hours and took a little break for a snack and a cup of coffee. in that two hours, i succeeded in getting a full skeleton of my presentation out of my head, where it has been spinning around and driving me crazy for the past two days. it’s far from perfect, and it’s ugly right now because it’s basically just bullet points, and not even the best of those, so i need to do some honing and image hunting. but it’s something to build on and i feel like i see the path for the day, which feels really good after the circles that i feel like i’ve been running myself ragged with this week. i have been feeling unfocused, and worried about how interesting the thread that i am isolating for this presentation is going to be, and annoyed at myself for worrying about such things rather than just knuckling down. i’m sure i’m not totally out of those woods (there’s still a week and a half and a paper and a poster to go!), but right now i feel good, and excited about the day. […]