You can watch the Force.com keynote presentation online.  Pretty good stuff.

Abe and I went to Salesforce.com’s Tour de Force in Santa Clara yesterday.  It was an extravagant affair.  Nice Hyatt Regency accommodations and conference rooms, refreshments throughout the day, deli lunch, and plenty of tech folks filling out the rooms and halls.  We walked away with a couple “cook books”, a free Force.com shirt, and hoping we won the iPhone contest.

Really interesting and compelling stuff.  Benioff gave the keynote (which was 2 hours), and preached the platform-as-a-service model.  Why spend money, time, and stress on infrastructure?  All that overhead investment causes good products to take an extra couple years to get out of the gate.  Anyway, I had already drunk the kool-aid a while ago, so he was preaching to the choir as far as I was concerned.

He gave his version of web history: Web 1.0 gave users access to things they wanted.  Think eBay, Amazon, and other retailers.  Web 2.0 gave users the ability to publish their own content.  And Web 3.0, he suggested, gives users the ability to develop their own products, leaving all that infrastructure investment to the folks who’ve already done the hard work.  Hence: Force.com.

Got some more thoughts about Force.com and VisualForce in particular, seeing as how we’re a design team after all.  More on that later.

Talk about an ideal web 2.0 mashup for our clients and the constituents they serve: OpenCongress.  From their About page:

OpenCongress brings together official government information with news and blog coverage to give you the real story behind what’s happening in Congress.

The site aggregates bill information, senators and representatives, vote tracking history, and what’s happening in the news and blogosphere.  In essence, it aggregates all the info made available from government sources and pairs that up wiht relevant news and blogs.  They aggregate using GovTrack.us, Google News, Google Blog Search, and Technorati.  Very nice site, rich in functionality, easy UI and organization to get the information that interests you and all related information easily.  Plus, you can customize and save off your searches, or pull an RSS feed based on your own defined criteria.

As a civic-minded constituent and voter, OpenCongress is an invaluable resource.  Looking to the needs of the non-profit organizations we serve: imagine crafting an RSS feed for a particular issue or legislator, and importing that into a webpage.  All an org needs to do is write their own position on the issue, link this to a campaign (e.g. take action, write a letter, or donate now), and then populate the rest of the page via RSS import with good content that’s already been aggregated from OpenCongress.  Why do extra work when other great applications do it for you?

The Pew Internet & American Life Project recently wrote on the 2008 Election:

A record-breaking 46% of Americans have used the internet, email or cell phone text messaging to get news about the campaign, share their views and mobilize others. And Barack Obama’s backers have an edge in the online political environment.

Furthermore, three online activities have become especially prominent as the presidential primary campaigns have progressed: First, 35% of Americans say they have watched online political videos–a figure that nearly triples the reading the Pew Internet Project got in the 2004 race.

Second, 10% say they have used social networking sites such as Facebook or MySpace to gather information or become involved. This is particularly popular with younger voters: Two-thirds of internet users under the age of 30 have a social networking profile, and half of these use social networking sites to get or share information about politics or the campaigns.

Third, 6% of Americans have made political contributions online, compared with 2% who did that during the entire 2004 campaign.

One thing that keeps making me think, “that’s neato,” is how the internet continues to grow as a vehicle for people to get their message out, to mobilize fellow advocates, and inform people hungry for information.

NorthTemple has an accessibility checklist that’s neat because it’s not 101 things that need to be done to ensure accessibility.  Those 101+ items lists are so difficult to navigate through, sometimes a designer or coder just wants to throw their hands up in frustration at the overwhelming list of to-do’s.  Instead, here’s a shortlist of different things that need to be taken care of, and the subheadings are intelligible and themselves accessible, which makes the probability of doing them much more likely:

• Markup
• Visual Appearance and Content
• Dynamic Content
• Images and Multimedia
• Forms
• Testing

Viral videos like this one–

Inspire emotion.  But it’s just an idea, word art, and accompanying music.  The website is well-designed too, but not being able to copy/paste any of the snappy, smart text throughout the site is a big usability no-no.

But speaking to the video, the takeaway lesson is that simple can be extremely powerful, but only if its execution is top-notch.

Virgin Mobile’s 20,000+ respondents texted in via mobile phone to participate in an election issues poll.  Interesting to note that 72% of their respondents were under the age of 34.

Pretty hot slice of the election population, which both parties are going to need come November.  And, perhaps more importantly, suggest to our non-profit sector that creating advocacy campaigns which incorporate mobile phone text messaging might be another way of interfacing with an increasingly tech-savvy Gen-Y demographic.  Think Twitter for info updates, the previous post about mobile giving, or any number of participatory engagements (e.g. polling, messaging, telling friends).

Wells Fargo hired Pentagram in 2005 to start a project redesigning their ATMs, both the hardware and software UI.  ATMs, we all know, are a bane of interaction design.  They’re prevalent, necessary, and well-frequented for most of us.  Unfortunately, they’re also terribly confusing and cumbersome.  Among their many problems include:

• the path to completing tasks often crisscrosses different buttons at different cardinal points of the screen.
• “Yes” and “No” actions are frequently switched depending on which task you’re trying to complete
• the only feature most people care about is “Withdraw Cash”.  And no one really knows what else you can do besides “Make a Deposit”.

Former Pentagram designer Holger Struppek writes about the Wells Fargo ATM project.  Research:

From looking at usage statistics, the design team learned that the single-most used feature of an ATM is the cash withdrawal. Even though many more services are available, most people simply want to be able to quickly and safely punch in their security code, get the cash, and leave. The objective for the new UI was to continue to offer quick and easy cash withdrawals, while making the other services more visible and accessible.

Being clear about the objective, the task and the goal that needs to be accomplished and completed, is one of those “must-haves” for designers.  For Pentagram, not only did they do away with the antiquated hardware buttons on the side of the screen (hooray!), they thought about how to meld shortcuts and personalization together:

Instead of one Quick Cash button, we introduced a whole column of shortcut buttons that behave somewhat like the History menu in a web browser. It is still possible to customize them through Set My ATM Preferences, but hardly necessary since they always reflect the most recent transactions.

Cool idea.  I think it actually works well.  My one beef with it (besides the color palette, but what can you do? Those are the corporate colors…) is the use of the icons on the top right of each button.  Why does “Get Cash” have a negative “No Smoking” “don’t-do-this” icon?  Shouldn’t it have been a cash with a 3D down arrow, signifying withdrawal?

Good read nonetheless, and a reminder that interaction design is the same whether online or offline because the subject is always the same: the human person.

Link of the Day, inspiration for the person who’s looking for the pick me up.  Pretty cool shot of sunset on Mars (courtesy NASA picture of the day):

The recent cyclone in Myanmar and earthquake in China have given rise to a whole new way of giving in the non-profit sector:

Starting today, customers of Verizon Wireless in the U.S. can donate to a charity called “Save the Children,” who has mobilized in this time of crisis to provide lifesaving assistance in these two affected regions. Verizon customers can text to the address 4SAVE (47283) with the keyword “quake” to contribute to earthquake relief or the key word “cyclone” to contribute to cyclone relief. They will then receive a reply asking them to confirm their donation of $5.00, which will appear on their next monthly bill.

Definitely a potential game changer.  I wonder if we should start developing for the iPhone?

The original article’s on ReadWriteWeb.