UX is Your Data Telling a Story

I just heard an interview this morning on NPR with a tech startup leader who said, “Data just sits there. We want people who can tell stories. Humans are story-driven creatures.” To me this statement cuts to the heart of the UX (user experience) vs. UI (user interface) debate. Some would say that the distinction is purely academic. I argue that it is very much not. People have their own definitions, but here is mine: UX is your data telling a story. UI is the movie.

What is a Business Logic Layer Anyway?

Most developers are familiar with the concept of N-Tier Architecture. It is a software pattern that separates components of an application into separate logical layers to establish code boundaries, promote flexibility, and allow reuse. Most commonly this is accomplished using 3 layers:

Domain Driven Design with Eric Evans

Last night I attended a great DDD NYC Meetup at the Manhattan headquarters of TheLadders.com. The special guest was Eric Evans, the author of “Domain-Driven Design: Tackling Complexity in Software,” the seminal work on the concept of Domain Driven Design. Eric gave an informal walk-through of his latest side project using Clojure, a procedural language for the Java runtime, and MongoDB, an open-source NOSQL database. I was hoping that we would apply DDD analysis to it, which unfortunately he did not. I can imagine that as a DDD consultant the last thing he wants to talk about after hours is DDD. However, the project was really quite interesting. Eric’s idea is an algorithm to mine through years of emails with another individual to discover “bursts” of communication. Then a word cloud can be generated for each burst and presented on a timeline to display what was discussed. According to Eric, the word clouds are eerily accurate about what was discussed (economy, elections, new baby, etc). Finally, Eric is working on an alert engine that will tell him when he is “due” for another burst of communication with an individual; a “reminder” to reach out to a friend that he only writes to a few times a year perhaps. A truly unique concept to help people comb through the deluge of emails for meaningful and actionable information. Thanks to Eric for taking the time to talk to us and TheLadders.com for the location, pizza, and beer!