2013 - Geoinformatics

43
Designing Great Products
Beyond sharing the new capabilities of Esri
software that will be incorporated in imminent
ArcGIS releases, summit presentations focused
on software design that promotes productive
and pleasant user experiences. Interface and
design in general were also the topic of summit
keynote speaker Jared M. Spool. The
founder of the world’s largest usability
research organization, User Interface
Engineering, Spool has spent a lifetime trying
to figure out what makes great designs. He
observed that “the best products are made up
of decisions, lots of decisions,” but his challenge
has been figuring out how design decisions
are made.
Using numerous examples drawn from web
design, Spool showed how designs fall into
one of five styles: unintended, self-design,
genius, activity-focused, and experiencefocused.
Over decades of studying how successful
companies design, Spool has found
that activity-focused and experience-focused
design—neither is based on rules or dogma—
yield far superior results. In design work,
“exception cases far outnumber normal cases.
So you’re always designing for exceptions,”
he said. “You’re always designing for constraints.
You’re always designing for trade-offs.
So this is key.”
Keynote speaker Jared Spool, founder of the world’s largest usability
research organization, discussed how design decisions are made.
The Elegant and Evaporating Interface
In a subsequent presentation, Amber Case,
former CEO of the recently acquired Geoloqi
and now head of the Esri R&D Center in
Portland, Oregon, approached interface
design from another angle. A cyborg anthropologist,
she is deeply interested in the interaction
of humans and computers. She took the
plenary stage to discuss the intersection of
location and the future of interface development.
Case noted that tools have moved from being
extensions of our physical selves (for example,
a knife being a better version of a tooth)
to extensions of our mental selves. However,
unlike physical tools that retain the same size
and function, mental tools are much less constrained
and are changing form and function
rapidly.
For some applications, with the addition of
location, buttons disappear entirely and the
user becomes the button. Interaction with these
applications is less intrusive because the user’s
location is the input that causes certain actions
based on the locational context that anticipates
the user’s needs and wants.
In closing, Case urged developers to use location.
“I’d encourage all of you to think a little
bit wider—how you can solve real-world problems
by adding locations and how you can
actually bring more of what was formally stuck
on the web as static content to life [by] assigning
location to it and delivering it to where it
actually is, where people actually are.”
Learning, Working, Playing
This year’s DevSummit featured additional,
shorter, and more focused technical sessions
that described how to work most effectively
with Esri development tools in incorporating
location into applications. Even shorter and
less formal tech-transfer events occupied the
late afternoon and evening hours. Speed
geeking, introduced last year, was a roundrobin
of five-minute sessions presented on the
first evening by Esri staff on aspects of the technology
to constantly changing groups of 8–10
attendees. At Lightning Talks, attendees got
quick bites of knowledge on a range of topics.
Mingling poolside with Esri developers at
the Meet the Team event, attendees chatted
In addition to killer dodgeball, Dev Summit attendees could
play a giant game of Jenga.
with team members about technology interests
in a relaxed setting.
Developers also had opportunities to highlight
their accomplishments and skills. User presentations,
voted on by the community, were interspersed
with tech sessions throughout the summit.
Developers could also show off their
coding prowess by participating in two
hackathons associated with the summit.
On March 24 at 1:00 p.m., the clock began
ticking for teams participating in the Esri
DevSummit Hackathon. Gathered in one of
the large meeting rooms on-site, teams used
the new ArcGIS for Developers website; Esri
web and/or mobile APIs; and data from
Riverside County, California, to come up with
innovative, location-based projects during the
24-hour contest. With dinner and snacks provided,
contestants toiled through the night.
Entries were judged on creative use of technology,
user experience, and potential for
real-world application.
The Animal Spotter App—developed by
Christopher Moravec, Mara Stoica, and Ryan
Colburn—won first place and a set of
DevSummit passes. Michael van der Veeken
and Paul Kaiser won second place, and
Christoph Sporri, Andry Joos, and Michael
Faulcon earned third place.
For the other hackathon, the100 Lines or Less
ArcGIS JavaScript Code Challenge (ArcGIS.js