Sunday, August 10, 2008

I'm digging the http://www.nbcolympics.com site in Silverlight. I can see sports and interviews that I'm interested in and review close plays as much as I like. I've shown this to the wife and the extended family over the weekend.

One thing that really keeping this from being the best thing ever is the user experience. For example, the Control Room is a place where I can select up to four videos to watch at once; one large and three side videos. That's really cool. However, the extended family was the real test; and they were a little frustrated.

The sucky part of the Control Room is the search interface. Here, I'm given a tiny up/down arrow at the bottom of the thumbnail stack. This is something visitors will do many times, every time they visit the site to see the next six or previous six videos in the stack. Why not make this click experience really easy to hit with big, phat arrow overlay icons? Maybe even advertise key strokes that do this. Its just really frustrating for non-technical people to use.

There's too many obfuscated clicks like this in the app. Just a few slight UX improvements would have gone a long way here. NBC Silverlight team, I give you a straight B here. Good job on the insight to give us what we want (choice in viewing Olympic events), but a "meh" job in giving me to the tools to make that choice.

Sunday, August 10, 2008 10:00:47 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)  #    Disclaimer  |  Comments [0]  | 
 Saturday, August 09, 2008

There's a really cuil set of photos showing the Large Hadron Collider being setup in Europe. Very high tech stuff.

Just a little bit down from the top of the photo stack is an image of someone way down the aisle in the server room. You get the idea that there are just racks and racks and racks of servers with a mind for effective use of power consumption, space utilization, heat and all the other green elements.

The person at the end of the aisle is working on a server. They're sitting at a workstation, typing on a keyboard... looking at a monitor. Not a slick flat screen, but a huge honking cathode ray tube monitor from 1994! Hah! That thing probably takes up the space of three or four servers and gives off as much heat!

Saturday, August 09, 2008 9:32:43 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)  #    Disclaimer  |  Comments [1]  |