For the last few months my team and I at Roundarch have been working with Bloomberg Sports on Decision Maker for iPad.  We’re happy to announce it’s now live and available for purchase from Apple’s App Store.

Decision Maker is an application that uses custom algorithms to deliver quantified head-to-head analysis of your favorite NFL players to help you manage your lineups each week. The Bloomberg Score, or B-Score, is based on factors that include the player’s Performance, Opponent Matchup, Team Support and Game Conditions for that week.  The player with the higher B-Score is the better bet that week.

We tackled the project holistically, from concept and user experience flow to the user interface design, iconography and  branding, down to development within the iOS environment.  One of the goals throughout the project was balancing simplicity and complexity.  It had to be simple enough for novice fantasy players but also provide the complexity and details advanced fantasy players demand.

We encounter this simplicity as soon as the application loads – select one player from column 1 and one player from column 2 (or use the auto-complete fields in the middle) and click “Run The Numbers.”  Alternatively, you can refine your search from the entire NFL to a specific position or team through the settings button at the top of each table.

Once we “Run The Numbers,” we’re taken to a head-to-head view of the results of our player comparison.  Once again, we start out in the top half of the interface with the most essential information – do I sit this player or do I start this player?

As we move down to the lower half of the screen, we can view the details that make up the scores.  Even for those who might not initially want to see or understand the data presented below, the interface is designed to encourage users to drill down and explore the various factors. Everything is tap-friendly and provides more context and information – from the risk/reward chart overlay to the info tool tips, to the radar chart tips.

A big thank you to everyone at Roundarch and Bloomberg Sports who made this application a reality.

iTunes App Store: Decision Maker – Football 2010 for iPad

A little over a month ago I came across an interesting thread on Brenden Dawes’ Twitter stream on the lifespan of iconography that I thought warranted a longer post:

Brenden asks:

And:

These are very valid questions.

I think answer to the first question is that we’re not so much wed to familiar, analogue objects – they’re part of our iconographic DNA. We don’t have a say in the matter, we’re stuck with our analogue icons until our technology progresses far enough to render them obsolete, killing them off and forcing us to reference these extinct symbols through fossilized JPGs, GIFs and PNGs.

Every generation is inherently transitional. What’s different with each successive generation are the specific things that are mutating, evolving, dying and spawning.

Horses to automobiles. Radio to television. Gas lighting to light bulbs. Even now, those previous three examples are could still be used be used as icons (the horse might come across a bit obscure and humorous, but I bet it would still work to convey ‘transportation’).

When we transition from one technology to another, this doesn’t mean the technology being replaced has run it’s course. Radio technology was invented in the late 1800′s but we still have it to this day (Hell, the Microsoft Zune still come equipped with FM tuners, god knows why). It is the reason the NPR iPhone app can use an old-fashioned radio to indicate their ‘radio’ programs and a radio tower to indicate their stations. We still understand what these things symbolize.

bottom row of icons on the NPR iPhone app

The bottom line is, for the time being, our icons of televisions, radios, cars, envelopes, paper pages and hardcover books are more than sufficient to represent their digital counterparts.

Beyond the Digital

Fine. As long as we have our living analogue ancestors around, our iconography can stay in place and mutate when some of them become extinct. We get it.

Let’s stretch this out to it’s logical conclusion – there is no interface. We become the interface. The interface becomes us.

We’ll reach a point in the future where what Mr. Dawes is saying does come to be. People will no longer understand that bell telephone means ‘call someone’. Phones will become implants and we’ll simply say a person’s name to our interfaceless voice recognition system. We have HUDs in jets and cars, is it really a stretch to image an HUD eye implant?

Picture an iPhone without the iPhone.

Ironman without (or with) the special suit.

Given enough time, I could easily expand this post into a full thesis, but alas, I have to get back to work.

*in addition to Brenden Dawes tweets, I also found great thoughts by Samuel Cotterall here, here and here.

…and it’s name is Palm.

To be more specific, the iPhone (Canon 50D) now has it’s Nikon D90, and it’s the Pre.

This idea comes from one of John Gruber’s posts on Daring Fireball back in 2007 titled, ‘Apple Needs a Nikon‘:

The point being that much of what gets chalked up as devotion to/obsession with Apple is, in fact, devotion to/obsession with great design, and there’s an utter dearth of rival PC or handheld gadget makers that value design as Apple does.

And:

Canon’s cameras are better because there’s Nikon — and vice-versa. Canon-vs.-Nikon arguments can get ugly, but in the end, they’re arguments about two companies that make great cameras and great lenses. Apple has no such rival.

Like tech columnist Stephen Fry that Gruber quotes, I don’t have sole allegiance to Apple. The fact that Palm was able to get their business back on track and launch the Pre in the short time they did is remarkable and I’m excited that the iPhone is not in this game alone.

It’s easy to compare the iPhone and the Pre on pixel-level similarities – and blast Palm for copying elements from the iPhone, but the fact remains that both phones have very different priorities and Apple does not hold the rights for using glossy buttons or reflections in a GUI.

Ars Technica did a thorough review (as usual) of the Pre, and made it a point to emphasis how the 2 smartphones differ.

iPhone’s starting point:

In the iPhone’s case, whatever Apple’s mobile may have evolved into, its origins are very straightforward: in the keynote that introduced the iPhone to the world, Jobs described the device as a fusion of three products: a “widescreen iPod with touch controls,” a phone, and an “Internet communications device”. And thus it remains; the iPhone is a widescreen, networked media player that also does a bunch of other stuff, telephony and Internet included.

And the Pre’s starting point:

The Pre, in contrast, was introduced by Rubenstein as a cloud messaging device that also does a bunch of other stuff, media playback included. And this primary messaging orientation has had as deep an impact on every aspect of webOS as the iPhone’s media orientation has had on the iPhone OS.

What’s great is there’s already a handful of Pre owners at Roundarch now (and growing), where there used to only be a sea of iPhones – and yes, some of these Pre owners are iPhone defectors. I know what you’re saying, impossible!

Yes, it’s true, and I think it can only help us keep a better pulse on the ever-evolving mobile market. We’ve already produced iPhone applications for clients like Avis and the band Wilco, and that’s great, but we’re much more than one-trick ponies. Understanding multiple systems can only strengthen our understanding of the broader canopies of interactive and application design under which the iPhone OS and webOS live.

FULL DISCLOSURE: The author owns an iPhone, Canon Rebel and a small handful of AAPL shares.

In order to be truly worthwhile, organizers have thoroughly plan out how they want people to experience their trade conferences. The delivery of content must align with agenda and objectives of the conference.

Case in point – the Wall Stree Journal’s D – All Things Digital Conference (aka D7).

Over at PBS, Mark Glaser has an insightful article on the D7 conference, highlighting what they got right, what they got wrong, and what they’re still working to improve.

Glaser explains that in the conference program, there was a section titled Welcome to Web 3.0.

First off – the whole Web 2.0/3.0/20.0 crap is tired. Tired.

“Web 3.0″ about as relevant to the individual contributors/technologies/companies it claims to encompass as the term “Beat Generation” was it it’s contributors. Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and WIlliam S. Burroughs are about as different in literary style and objectives as you can get.

The same can be said for 37Signals, Google and Flickr. Yes, they are all from the same ‘generation’ but that’s where the similarities end.

The other important point Glaser brings up is how D7 used (and didn’t use) technology as a vehicle for increasing and improving overall communication and thus, the overall experience and learning.

Glaser writes:

Another problem at D was the uncertain contract between conference organizers and the press and bloggers covering the event. I was told in advance by Swisher that I would not be allowed to do live-blogging in transcript form. Usually, I attend conferences and try to provide a running commentary on what people on stage are saying, largely paraphrasing what they say. It seemed like the D folks were against that idea, and they also didn’t provide WiFi Internet access in the main hall.

I first started thinking about this point after my colleague Victor wrote a post last September on his experience at The Minitek Music and Innovation Festival. Victor was disappointed that there were tons of great technological mashups and combinations available to enhance the experience of the Festival, but they weren’t exploited to their fullest.

Victor laments:

Finding a beautiful evening space (Penn Plaza) and distributing RFID bracelets wired to the concession booths was a great place to start. There was other RFID technology present in the Innovation exhibits, but sadly they weren’t configured on a unified system. This represents the single biggest missed opportunity, a central theme I’ll return to again and again, which was that there was no unifying system/platform to integrate all of the disparate moving parts. And in the wake of that lack of unification, the crowd was neither engaged nor challenged to become part of a shared experience in any meaningful way.

The other great point mentioned in Glaser’s post is the fact that the audiences at these conferences are full of talented people – why are we taking advantage of their presence? This is a great question.

I immediately think about people I work with (and people at other companies) and how great it would be to get their thoughts, impressions and ideas in real-time at events. Dave Meeker, Jeremy Bierly, Pek Pongpaet (and many more) – these are people who speak at events, but even if their sitting in the back of the room, why not let them be part of the conversation? I want to know what they think.

When we get the impulse to hold recurring industry events and create new ones, we really need to think things through and make sure that we crafting experiences that are communicating the messages in the right mediums.

Yes, many of us need to go back 40 years or so and give McLuhan another read.

Safari launched Safari version 4 Beta on Tuesday. There’s some good things and bad things about it.

I won’t go through every facet of the update (you can find a list on Apple’s site). I’ll be focusing on the features that stand out to me the most.

Tabs

Tabs are the most obvious UI change in Safari. In version 3 and earlier, Safari had inverted tabs placed below the address (and bookmarks) bar.

before:

Now, tabs are integrated into the top window bar and serve 2 functions:

- a draggable bar to move your application window around
- a group of individual tabs you can cycle through

after:

the bad: Because the top bar is now serving a dual function, it’s harder to focus/select an individual tab. This is because Safari’s first response to an interaction (click/press) with the top bar is to treat it as an application window you can drag. If the interaction hierarchy were flipped, and tab selection was first priority, window dragging would prove to be nearly impossible.

While you can focus a tab by carefully clicking anywhere on the bar, it takes a few tries, unless you start to train yourself to move straight to the right corner of a tab, where you’ll see the ‘grip’ lines.

Bottom line, Fitt’s Law is being comprimised.

the good: On a positive note, about 20 pixels of vertical screen real estate is gained with the combined browser/tab bar. Economy of space is a great thing and it’s especially relevant on laptops.

Web Inspector – Design Consistency & Data Visualizing

A great feature that I probably won’t be using very much is the Web Inspector. For developers out there that use programs like Firebug within Firefox, the Web Inspector will look very familiar. It allows you do to look behind the scenes of a given page and view the HTML and style sheets as well as see how quickly all the elements within a page load. Coupled with the Activity window, it’s a great way to debug websites.

Like all things Apple, its not only how well the Web Inspector works that makes it great, but how well it’s visually designed. When I toggled from Elements view to Resources view, I was again pleasantly surprised to see that they had appropriated repurposed the iTunes Resource visualizations for the iPod and iPhone:

Web Inspector – Resources:

iTunes – iPhone capacity:

RSS Feeds

I don’t get the option to choose what application/service I want to use to read feeds when I click on the RSS icon in the address bar. Firefox gives me the option to choose Google Reader.

What happened, Apple?!

Address Bar & AutoComplete

This is the clincher for me. Safari 4 Beta does not let you type in any part of the address, or title, of the site you want to go to. This has become an integral part of navigating the web for me and the best improvement from Firefox 2.

It’s a feature that’s easy to overlook until you don’t have it anymore, then you realize you can’t live without it.

Summary

Safari 4 is in many way’s a solid step up from from Safari 3. Nothing feels broken or incomplete, and it is dramatically faster (as reports have claimed). Along with the autocomplete issues, the lack of add-ons is the only other major drawback that’s keeping me from switching from Firefox 3. Adblocker, Delicious, Tabs Open Relative – sure I only have 3 add-ons, but they make a world of difference when browsing.

For the non-techie user, Safari is an excellent choice.

It’s like a Porsche without power windows and door locks – sure they’re drawbacks, but the car still drives like a dream.