With downloaded music, you lose part of these related materials. Almost everybody that offer music to download online forget about it. But with a little bit of common sense the downloaded music can be also an enjoyable experience.

The first issues that bother customers of online music stores are the identifiers, tags and metadata embedded on the downloaded files. The present Standard is ID3.
In the ID3 metadata can be embedded information like: Song Title, Artist, Album, etc. These ones are the most common, but there is other metadata that make the downloaded music more enjoyable, like: Artwork and Lyrics, these two are the most forgotten.

One good example of good practice a great User Experience for downloaded music is the Albums Ghost I-V and The Slip from Nine Inch Nails. On these products, the use of metadata to increase the final User Experience is just unbeatable: including several Artworks, the lyrics and comments related to every song, also a companion PDF file with the Album Artwork to print.

Why is this important Again?

Any step to increase the final User Experience of your products is reflected in the perception of the customer, and they are certainly willing to recommend the products to their friends. Increasing, of course, the distribution and reach of such products; using the best way possible: Word of Mouth.

Almost all decent Media Player today are designed to display this metadata in a nice way, so the user can enjoy their media with a better Experience. Saving the user of typing and filling this metadata on a product they already bought is nice step on the right direction.

If you are distributing downloadable media online, try to make the Final User Experience enjoyable. Cause the customers may be more time interacting with the downloaded files than with your distribution channel/website/store.

We now understand better how our brain and memory works; but at the same time our lives have grown a lot more complicated. We have to remember more things than before: Login credentials, phone numbers, appointments, PIN numbers and a big etcetera.

User Experience can help users not to remember another thing, or not to remember the path to get to what they want. A simple example to illustrate this is, and you’ll agree: sometimes, you don’t remember the exact url of the article you are looking for, but, your remember exactly the search terms you put on google to found it. This happens very often.

Making, for example, all the info/features your have easy to find and access will save a lot of time to the user and increase the satisfaction of finding what they are looking for quickly. Resulting, in a better User Experience, on your product.

Also the user know that the information/feature they want resides on your website or application and the only thing they remember is that is easy to get to it. That will make a great feature for your users and is certainly more probably that your users recommend your product/service to their friends if they had a good User Experience.

So, let’s do something for decrease the amount of things the users have to remember on our next project. Give the user the possibility to use the stuff they already have. Implementing Facebook Connect can be a day savior for a lot of users that are scared of another sing up form.

Minimizing the things to remember on your product/service/website will make it more usable and your users will get more satisfaction using it.

Lately

With the advent of mobile communications, the first intents were to squish the same old metaphor into mobile devices, resulting in the unusable User Experience we have in mobile devices today. Lately are starting to appear some initiatives with better User Experience like the iPhone, but there is still a lot of room to make things better.

The desktop in the other hand is petrified in the same old metaphor with almost no signals of changes in these 30 years. The current Desktop GUIs, like Windows, Mac OS, KDE, Gnome among others are still not able to move in other direction.

The companies are starting to realize the importance of having a great User Experience for their services and products and taking steps in the right direction… but is too little to late. Is a fact that the best User Experience win; and the ones with a poor one will perish, more in these hard times when consumers will take a second (and sometimes a third) look before pull out their wallets.

People or Developers

What is holding the change? Well, this is a vicious circle where Users don’t like disruptive changes and the Developers knowing that (and willing to sell their products) don’t make any significative innovation on the User Experience and User Interface.

Also the current OSs are designed in concordance with the old metaphor, making more difficult to make any change at all. With a new metaphor is also needed a new concept of Operating System to match this new metaphor.

More like we are now

The old stuff work back in the day when things where disconnected and sporadic; all that changed. Today we have real-time lives and social networks and we are able to connect to the internet almost from everywhere.

The current work flow is “Open an App to do a task” giving the application the principal role. This application centered design of the current OSs is constraining the innovation in the User Experience. The applications are “boxed” in their “windows” and frames and rarely expand outside.

The new metaphor have to reflect our current state, have to interconnected, open, manageable and powerful; to make the right impact in our lives.

We really need this new Operating System and as soon as possible.

Update: More Discussion at IxDA.

We also add some realtime notifications to the whole system integrated with facebook, twitter, email etc.

On other posts will explained more about more about the whole project and the idea we have to a Netbook Operative System.

We are using a new metaphor, totally diferent from the “application based” we are used to. This new metaphor is “task based” to you can concentrate in the task you are making without get distract for the hole User Interface.

No name till now… What you think of “Rention“?

That’s why nlapse is experimenting with a totally new take on the netbook OS, centered in tasks instead in applications and the focus is in the user needs on the go. So take a sneak peak of it.

Remember: this is only a very first approach (still no name). All feedback is welcome, here in the comments and also in twitter with @nlapse.

User Experience is one of the key aspects that will diferenciate you from competidors. Understanding how users interact with your product is a must these days. That’s why we are giving away a Free User Experience Report for your website or startup.

What you get?

• Custom Report of how users may interact with your current website.
• Recomendations on how to improve the User Experience on your website including task flow, simplifing process, information architecture, layout, flow, design and interactivity.
• Discovers what’s holding back your success in terms of User Experience and how to fix it.

How to get it?

1. Follow @nlapse on twitter.
2. Re-tweet this tweet.
3. Ask for the User Experience Report on twitter; something like “@nlapse Hey @mycompany need a User Experience Report” will do the trick.

nlapse will select one winner based on the value the website or startup can give to the public and state of the current User Experience. Also will influence in the decision how you use social media.

So fire up your twitter account and good luck to everyone.

Microsoft Cloud Strategy

Microsoft own the OS and Office Market, no doubt of that, but to maintain this status they have to provide solutions on the cloud. Actually, Microsoft have already solutions in the cloud, they have Exchange and Share Point for the Enterprise, which are pretty much the standard in synchronization right now, they also have the Office live thingy but like many things from Microsoft is hard to see where is the benefit we can get using it, cause is buried under a lot of Marketing and unrelated stuff that -at least for me- is not working.

The next evolutionary step for Microsoft is migrate their Office suite to the cloud, that’s when Silverlight come to play. last year release of Silverlight was toke with a lot of skepticism from the community, the purpose was not so clear to the majority of us. I saw Silverlight like a “me too” project to compete with Adobe and the ubiquitous Flash Player -thanks to video for that penetration numbers. But looking more closely to the last steps from Microsoft, like the partnership to broadcast video from the next olympiads on the net, that will surely rocket the Silverlight penetration numbers.

With a Silverlight in the ~98% of the computers connected to the cloud -like Flash player is right now, Microsoft will be ready to roll out an Office Suite in the platform ready to be used from the cloud. That may be Microsoft’s master plan right now… or something similar. But surely they have a plan to deploy Office to the Cloud.

Google Cloud Strategy

Google is native to the cloud, they where born in the cloud. In the last years Google was unveiling a set of services, starting with Google Mail, Calendar, Documents, Reader and a long etcetera. Starting to make the transition to the cloud their most successful services in that set are GMail, Calendar and Reader. They are also taking steps to make this products easy to use for collaboration which is other hot trend in cloud computing.

Their strategies to take over the cloud are simple, offer a better service (anyone is using hotmail out there?) and the APIs. Let’s take a look at the APIs and why they are important. The APIs from Google services provide a way to migrate this services to other platforms and uses depending of specific requirements, for instance I can sync my GMail and Calendar on my iPhone using 3rd party applications for the iPhone who rely on the Google APIs. Also Google don’t have to worry about make this applications cause the community is empowered to do it.

Next evolutionary step is: mobile, and here is where Android is invited to the game. I’m very sceptic about Android -mostly cause I hate Java- but I’m sure that Android play really important role in the Google’s master plan. Of course we still have to wait for the first device loaded with Android -hey HTC where is your Android ready device for this month? you are late already.

Google set of service are starting to take off mainly on small teams and companies, but there is a long way to go for Google Documents, cause everybody at work have Outlook, Word, Excel and Powerpoint already.

Apple cloud strategy

Apple unveiled the iPhone 3G this week and at the same time they present a new service: Mobile Me, which will sync your email, calendar, photos and files across the Macs, the PCs and your phone -if you have an iPhone. That’s a step into cloud computing. Is a paid service -is Apple- but surely will solve the sync problem.

This is a interesting approach cause Apple is not a big player on Internet Services, but I’m sure that the user experience on the service will win a lot of customers to the service. The people will love the fact that is 0 hassle involve on the configuration and synchronization of this service with you computers at home, work and your phone.

With this approach Apple will be quietly gaining some terrain on the SaaS market and will be easy to plug in more services on Mobile Me later -a Office Suite, maybe

Adobe Cloud strategy

Adobe on their site have their Flash Player installed on a big percent of the computers connected to the net and lately with the launch of the AIR platform will be very easy to deploy many hosted serviced on the net.

Adobe have already a Word Processor built on Flex, Buzzword and currently integrated on their Acrobat.com service. Buzzword is by far the best Word Processor you can use right now on the net; also is native to the net so the collaboration features are really nice.

They are rumors Adobe is developing a office suite which include Spreadsheets and Presentations software but this are only rumors right now.

Other players in the field

You have probably heard or use some of the other services and applications in the cloud computing field: SalesForce, Zoho, ThinkFree, 37signals products, etc. This is a hot field and every want a piece of the cloud pie here, let’s see who win this race.

Keep flowing.

The development process is expensive than hardware, so the development flaws tend to be solved dropping more hardware to the pile. That’s not the right way.

To get to a good web application many things must be in the right place, first you have to stick to standards, good practices and design patterns, you don’t need to reinvent the well once again.

I know, I’s the libraries stupid, but along with easy to use libraries you need some others tools like good IDE and a good debugger to solve the problems you get when your application is moving away from what your framework is designed for.

I miss my times of application development (for the desktop) at that times we got our IDE with all tools in the place, today we have to choose from Eclipse, Aptana, Zend Studio, Coda, Textmate, etc. And no one of these have all the features we need.

Is just me in this position or this things are a common place out there? What happen in the Enterprise development teams? I have nothing against the rapid web development but feel something missing with the web development today, some things have to change, or maybe not.

What are your thoughts about this matter, are using Ruby or PHP or Phyton or C++ or ASP.NET… what frameworks… what IDE… what tools… are you using design patterns in your applications, standards maybe?

Also they are presenting it not as a cold press release but in a blog post with a youtube video of the features in action. LinkedIn is also drop others useful features this year, you can remember their redesign, profile photos, one to one messages and the statuses. All those features where introduced ages ago by popular social networking sites and now are making their way into the corporate world.

Is interesting see how the companies profile differ from network to network based on the audience that network have, just take a look to the MTV profiles at FaceBook and LinkedIn.

Take a look to the video from product manager Maisy Samuelson showing the new features.

Keep flowing.

Having a niche (also finite) market is really good, but what happen when they get bored (everybody does) and go away. Then your have to reinvent your thing to make recover or save the day, but you must be able to see those things before they happen, otherwise you are doomed.

Lately we have heard that countries like China and Russia are having they own homemade top sites, not surprise here, since they and they only, know what’s interesting to the people on this nations, and are able to get first hand information about the trend is the society to adapt their services, but all that is all water and anyone should know it, right?

They are markets really hard to penetrate like, Japan, China, Korea, etc. but is not impossible at all, you will need some native help to get into it. You can always trust your users to help you with getting the service international, if your critical mass is getting into it, once again your web analytics are your best friend here, but this is painful if you have to adapt to get this done.

No matter how small your niche is, when your have a internationalized service the chances of increase your circle grow exponentially.

Keep flowing.