Rambling Thoughts

What is strategic design?

Strategic design is the fusion of your organizational goals with every aspect of your design process. You aren’t simply designing a user interface that looks good and is usable and accessible. You’re designing an interface that will help you accomplish your organization’s objectives.

Let’s take a look at how we can use six steps to think strategically about a Web design project:

1. Establish your goals
One of the first things you need to do before starting work on a Web design project is to be clear about your client or organization’s goals. What are you trying to achieve with the new website or redesign? What is the website’s main purpose? Ask your client, your manager or yourself what those are. If they or you don’t know yet, then they should be discussed and agreed upon. A clear direction is essential if you want your design to have a purpose.

2. Identify your audience
Who your audience is will play a big role in how your website should look and function. There are many demographics here that can influence your design, ones like age, gender, profession and technical competency.

3. Determine your brand image

A lot of designers tend to get a little too inspired by the latest trends and then implement them without thinking first about what sort of image they really should be conveying. Glossy buttons, gradients and reflective floors may work for some websites, but they may not be right for your brand.

Think about color. Think about the feel you want to achieve and emotions you wish to elicit. Your design should embody the personality and character of your brand.

4. Goal-driven design direction
You’ve established the purpose of your website, set some goals you want to achieve, identified your audience and determined your brand image. You can now proceed to implement it.

5. Measure results
Once you’ve designed and deployed your website, it’s time to measure your success. This is just as important as the first two steps because until you test how well your design performs, you won’t know whether or not it is effective in fulfilling your goals.

6. Kaizen
There is a Japanese philosophy called “Kaizen,” which focuses on continuous improvement using small steps. When you work on your website, you should be thinking of Kaizen because the version you’ve just published is not the final version. There doesn’t even have to be a final version.You can always make improvements, and the very nature of a website will allow you to introduce these at any time.

1. A day without sunshine is like night.

2. On the other hand, you have different fingers.

3. 42.7 percent of all statistics are made up on the spot.

4. 99 percent of lawyers give the rest a bad name.

5. Remember, half the people you know are below average.

6. He who laughs last, thinks slowest.

7. Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm.

8. The early bird may get the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese in the trap.

9. A clear conscience is usually the sign of a bad memory.

10. Just remember — if the world didn’t suck, we would all fall off.

11. Change is inevitable, except from vending machines.

12. If you think nobody cares, try missing a couple of payments.

13. Light travels faster than sound. That’s why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.

14. OK, so what’s the speed of dark?

15. When everything is coming your way, you’re in the wrong lane.

16. Hard work pays off in the future. Laziness pays off now.

17. How much deeper would the ocean be without sponges?

18. Eagles may soar, but weasels don’t get sucked into jet engines

19. What happens if you get scared half to death, twice?

20. Inside every older person is a younger person wondering, “What the hell happened?”

Cloud computing is becoming one of the next industry buzz words.

Cloud computing overlaps some of the concepts of distributed, grid and utility computing, however it does have its own meaning if contextually used correctly. The conceptual overlap is partly due to technology changes, usages and implementations over the years.

The term cloud computing probably comes from (at least partly) the use of a cloud image to represent the Internet or some large networked environment.

Cloud computing is now associated with a higher level abstraction of the cloud. Instead of there being data pipes, routers and servers, there are now services. The underlying hardware and software of networking is of course still there but there are now higher level service capabilities available used to build applications. Behind the services are data and compute resources. A user of the service doesn’t necessarily care about how it is implemented, what technologies are used or how it’s managed. Only that there is access to it and has a level of reliability necessary to meet the application requirements.

In essence this is distributed computing. An application is built using the resource from multiple services potentially from multiple locations. At this point, typically you still need to know the endpoint to access the services rather than having the cloud provide you available resources. This is also know as Software as a Service. Behind the service interface is usually a grid of computers to provide the resources.

Top perceived benefits of cloud computing:

1. Easy/fast to deploy
2. Pay for only what you use
3. Less in-house staff & costs

Top challenges of cloud computing:

1. Security
2. Performance
3. Availability
4. Hard to integrate with in-house IT
5. Inability to customize

What customers want from cloud computing:

1. Competitive pricing
2. Performance assurances (SLA)
3. Understand my business & industry
4. Ability to move cloud offerings back on-premise

CFO magazine has an interesting article about cloud computing, which includes this hype-vs.-reality chart:

Hype: All of corporate computing will move to the cloud.
Reality: Low-priority business tasks will constitute the bulk of migration out of internal data centers.

Hype: The economics are vastly superior.
Reality: Cloud computing is not yet more efficient than the best enterprise IT departments.

Hype: Mainstream enterprises are using it.
Reality: Most current users are Web 2.0-type companies (early adopters).

Hype: It will drive IT capital expenditures to zero.
Reality: It can reduce start-up costs (particularly hardware) for new companies and projects.

Hype: It will result in an IT infrastructure that a business unit can provision with a credit card.
Reality: It still requires a savvy IT administrator, developer, or both.