This just in, the House is limiting constituent email because the huge crush of email (due to the interest generated by the economic bailout legislation) is causing systems to go down. Here’s the error message constituents will get when they send their email to a House member:

“The House of Representatives is currently experiencing an extraordinarily high amount of e-mail traffic. The Write Your Representative function is therefore intermittently available. While we realize communicating to your Members of Congress is critical, we suggest attempting to do so at a later time, when demand is not so high. System engineers are working to resolve this issue and we appreciate your patience.”

What a fascinating scenario. The power of a shifting technology put into the hands of interested citizens is a wonderful thing to watch.

Over on Jon Gruber’s influential Daring Fireball, there’s an observant quote about the iPhone’s persistent black UI from Paul Goracke and Gruber’s response:

The black iPhone UI look doesn’t look bad, per se, it’s just different than the standard theme.

I’d chime in and say the difference isn’t merely a question of aesthetics. At some point, the prevalance and superfluity of the black UI in any and every application strips each application the opportunity (or responsibility) to brand itself and go through the difficult task of distinguishing its particular user experience. In other words, the varied applications remain undifferentiated because the black iPhone UI is being used by everyone.

Black’s cool. But not at the cost of a decrease in independent creativity, or an increasingly prevalent (and disturbing) uniformity.

Our team’s split between the two offices in Austin, TX and good ol’ Berkeley, CA. The places couldn’t be more different. Texas and California: ’nuff said. But we’re on the same team and try really hard to behave like one: passing ideas to one another, dropping by one another’s virtual cubes to see what’s up, IM’ing, sharing prototypes and mockups, and everything else under the sun.

With the advent of Web 2.0, the big thing is social networking. It’s also sharing information. And it’s also sharing work not as a finished product, but work that’s in the process of getting there. Our team uses a bunch of tools. Some of them have been helpful, and some not. Some have been adopted with a bit more fervor than others, and thought it’d be good to write them down.

• 37signal’s Basecamp is just plain cool. Messaging, commenting, and tracking conversations so we don’t have to search through email. Posting images, screenshots, and mockups. We don’t use it as a project management tool, although I think the recent feature of adding files and comments to the to-do’s was brilliant. But we really like the fact that our conversations, ideas, comments, screens, and everything in between has a historical record online.
• Skitch is self-described “fast and fun image sharing!” It’s what we use for our virtual whiteboarding and sketching so different product stakeholders and team members can be in the conversation together, commenting on different screens they might see, having the designer revise on the fly, and then posting inline on the fly. It’s cool, it’s free, and the easy drag click and one-button upload takes care of so many in-between steps that it’s a plain joy to use. It’s Mac-only too, but not a problem. I think I was sold after reading (and watching) tap tap tap’s design session.
• We recently started using Yammer. We’re into daily status reports so we know what we’re working on and stuff like that, but it’s tough to capture a day’s events (the previous or the current day) in a single bullet point email. Yammer is enterprise Twitter, and it’s a little like peeking over into someone’s cubicle. You can just as easily walk by if you’re not interested (but at least you know they’re there), or you can see what they’re working on and say, “Hey, that’s cool. I want in on what you’re doing.”
• Fast prototyping’s done with Balsamiq’s Mockups. It’s better than OmniGraffle, InDesign, Photoshop, Visio, Illustrator and a whole bunch of other things I’ve tried. Don’t get me wrong. I think those other programs are awesome. And when it comes to working on the visual design of a screen and doing a hi-fidelity pretty pictures UI, I still wouldn’t trade anything for Photoshop (I’m really psyched about CS4). But in that step after requirements, after whiteboard sketching, and in trying to quickly communicate what the Product Manager and I have in our mind’s eye to other stakeholders and developers, Mockups is a great tool. There’s knocks against it that it doesn’t give room for innovation and creativity because you’re using a palette of already made UI elements. On the other hand, understanding where a new interaction can be introduced comes when the designer is trying to figure things out at a UI elements level, past the level of abstraction and theory.

There’s more, of course. But at the risk of overloading and overwriting, this was a foray into some of the new technology we’re playing with, trying out, and have incorporated into our workflow as a design team.

In the last release, we did some crazy stuff: we got rid of the Previous button.

Yes, I know, what were we thinking? Part of our design team’s reasoning had to do with clarifying the visual cues in our multi-step forms, which our clients have to use for virtually everything they put together (i.e. Advocacy Action Alerts, Fundraising campaigns, Email campaigns, etc.). There’s so many buttons and links, garish greens and squished dull grays and purples all coagulated together in a row. It wasn’t pretty, nor was it usable, and with some of the bandwidth we had, our team jumped in to do a little cleanup: functionally, usability, and visually as well.

It was fun, and it was a first step to visually refreshing an admin interface that needed it. BUT (where’s the story without this word, right?), there was a lot of pushback. It was good pushback in the sense that we had a whole lot of feedback internal to the company from all sorts of people: developers, product managers, services, training, engineering management, our own usability team, the entire gamut. What was good about all this were the kind of conversations we were able to have:

• What kind of negative (or positive) impact will this have on our clients?
• How are we going to communicate the change to our users?
• Will our users like the change?
• Will the change be appropriate for all the different levels of users, from the novices and “I’m scared of technology” folks all the way to the power users?
• Can we solve the problem another way without impacting so many people?
• What design principles are we abiding by?
• How does this affect accessibility? Visual impairment? Screen readers and tab indexes?
• Does the design decision have hard evidence and numbers supporting it?
• Ultimately, is this the right decision?

You can imagine that all the feedback gave our team an opportunity to think long and hard about the choices we were making, and also to engage in discussion, build consensus and arrive at a solution we could all agree on as the best solution.

On the one hand, why all the hubbub over a Previous button? Or a Next button? But then again, I ran across this discussion on the Interaction Designers forum, and with over 75 comments, it seemed like no one person has a good answer.

Cheers and Kudos to the entire Convio team that was willing to start our own conversations so we could arrive at the best solution for our clients, no matter how small or insignificant the change might seem to be.