So, not much posted here for a while - yes I admit it I've been seeing other blogs - but they meant nothing, really.
Yes well, weird times recently - Working in the Internet/communications industry right now is, er ... interesting. Especially if you are attached to a Telco.
I never joined a Telco, I never asked to be part of a monstrous corporation with all the inherent arse and elbow confusion issues. I was acquired! Plucked from dot com bliss (oh, those rose tinted retro-spectacles) and initiated into the heady world of process and procedure, power games and politics and all the other apparently essential corporate accoutrements which generally distract from the effort of actually doing something worthwhile.
As the Telco industry goes through its biggest evolution/revolution since, well .. ever, turmoil abounds, my attention has been elsewhere and this blog neglected.
The symptoms of the industry wide sea change are all too evident. Where as talk of IP technology and threats from the innovations of Internet and Web companies used to be met by the screwed shut eyed, ear clamping "LA LA LA"ing of denial, such conversation topics now elicit the arm waving , whimpering and on the spot hopping of sheer panic. We have yet to see however whether like that annoying secondary character in a disaster movie who's "I can't do it, I can't do it" hesitancy results in some other less deserving character meeting an untimely end, second act karmic demise or third act redemption awaits. Like I said ... Interesting!
A few weeks back I was working with the dev team at WGC on some interface design for our product prototype. We came across a point at which we have to give the user the ability to indicate their desire to save a current state. As we discussed the various ways in which we could visually indicate a 'save' action button, I realized that as a whole the industry has settled on the image of a 'floppy disc' such as this: Now in this day and age the floppy disk is an anachronism - have any of the myspace generation even ever seen one? It is certainly a few years since the average family PC came with a floppy drive as standard equipment and an online life requires little in the way of tangible media. - and yet the iconography persists. The more I thought about this however, the more I came to think that if we needed to provide a user action which is exemplified by an outmoded concept, then maybe we should rethink our interface and indeed application architecture at a deeper lev...
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