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The team at Silicon Valley Product Group published an excellent blog entry on why, first and foremost, product managers need to make sure that they're empowered to meet with customers regularly. One piece of advice I particularly like was the following:

For whatever reason, if you work at a company where you're told you can't talk to your users, my advice is to first try hard to change this policy, but if that doesn't work, dust off your resume and find a place where you can practice your craft and have a shot at creating great products. I really don't know how you can build products users will love without a deep understanding of those users, and you won't get that without lots of direct communication, including face-to-face interactions.

I would only add that it's not only important to meet with customers, but to know how to engage with them for maximum impact. Also, to achieve real success with experience design, it's also important to conduct more than one visit with a customer as your design for the product or service advances. The insights uncovered in properly structured meetings can lead to not only major revelations about an existing product, but provide the evidence needed to trigger new ideas on new to the world products and services.

Posted by Rob at 11:37 PM | Permalink

Tim O'Reilly announced that it's now possible to purchase chapters from O'Reilly books online. While I'd suspect it'll take awhile before this catches on, I personally would have found this to be a very valuable option in the past -- at least for technical books.

After years of plotting, and many hours of dedicated developer time, our customers now have the ability to buy our book content by the chapter in PDF format. This feature is being rolled out on 714 books initially, the same books that are part of the CCC RightsLink project, but does not include HF or Digitial Media titles. For the rollout, pricing per chapter is $3.99.

Posted by Rob at 9:46 PM | Permalink

Wow, progress. Technology Review is running a wonderful article on Stanford's new autonomous car that's capable of making three-point turns and following the rules at a four-way stop. With nearly 42,000 people dying of vehicle related deaths per year in the United States alone, the research related to this project could prduce amazing results.

Importantly, says Thrun, Junior has a lot more "intelligence" than Stanley so that the computer can deal with intersections and traffic. Such tasks simply weren't a part of the previous race, which basically involved driving down a curvy desert road. This intelligence comes in the form of about 500 different probabilistic algorithms that process all the environmental information collected by the sensors and make the decision that is most likely to be the best. Thrun says that these decisions are made in less than 300 milliseconds, which is sufficient for slowing down or changing lanes if a car in another lane tries to merge into Junior's. "In the last race, you basically only had to decide whether to speed up or slow down," says Thrun, "but this time there are discrete decisions on top of that."

Posted by Rob at 5:59 PM | Permalink

Though I haven't made an official announcement on my blog yet, a I recently switched over to a new role at Adobe. In my new role, I'm one of two product managers responsible for a new cross operating system runtime known as Adobe AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime). The goal of Adobe AIR is to make it very easy to build desktop applications with the skills and technologies web developers are already familiar with such as HTML, JavaScript, AJAX, Flash, ActionScript and Flex.

Just as Flash and HTML are designed to run the same on different operating systems, the objective of Adobe AIR is to extend that same concept to desktop applications. To the best of our ability, we'd like to abstract away operating system specific application development. Another goal is to reduce the time it takes to develop desktop applications as well as make it easier to create richer, more compelling applications (see Kuler). Creating a desktop application with a transparent window is just a few lines of code using AIR.

Once the AIR runtime is installed, the same file can be installed on a Mac or Windows (Linux coming soon). Applications built using Adobe AIR have read and write access to the local file system just like a native application. Other features include local SQLite database, drag'n'drop between applications, clipboard support, a simple and painless install, native file pickers, code signing, support for embedding PDF's and more. Since a web browser is built-in (WebKit), you can also use your favorite AJAX libraries to build applications entirely in HTML and JavaScript. Or, if you want more creative control, you can use Flash and Flex. There are several tools for building AIR applications including Dreamweaver CS3, Aptana (open source), and Flex Builder 3 (public beta). Since the command line tool for building applications is included in the AIR SDK, you can technically use whatever your code editing tool you're comfortable with.

Last night we announced the beta version which includes many new features. Also announced was the on AIR Bus Tour. I wrote an article for the Adobe Developer Center called Six must-see Adobe AIR sample applications that highlights some of my favorite programs built so far. I'll post more information soon including example code.

Here's a screenshot of one of my favorite applications built so far called DiggTop:

Posted by Rob at 3:40 PM | Permalink

Congratulations to the Movable Type team at Six Apart for releasing a radically new version of their flagship blogging tool. Anil Dash says that they're on a mission and I believe him based on my initial experiences with beta 1.Kudos to my friend Walt for helping with the design of this as well. The new version includes:

• a better installation experience
• a vastly improved text editor for creating new entries
• a streamlined image upload workflow

What are you waiting for? Download the Movable Type Beta now!

Posted by Rob at 10:40 PM | Permalink