Today I rode my last mile of 2008. It was a brief 18-mile loop near my home. I’ve been off the bike for the last 7 weeks, and in case you didn’t know, here’s why:

On this final day of the year, I look back on the goals I set for 2008 and see how I’ve done.

Goal: 3 organized rides
Exceeded: 4 rides

Goal: 52 individual rides
Not Met: 44 rides total

Goal: 1,500 miles
So close!: 1,483 miles total

Clearly, if it wasn’t for the pesky kid I would have beat my mileage goal and likely come close to meeting my individual ride goal. Ah, the joys of parenthood

Looking back on it, 2008 was a great biking year for me. I met some new riding partners, accomplished some new feats, picked up a new ride and raised some cash for worthy charities. Who knows what 2009 will hold.

I’d like to thank everyone who helped me to get the most out of cycling this year including folks at work who ride with me, local partners game for a pick-up ride, Tracy for the support and everyone on Twitter who deals with the ride feed cluttering up my tweet stream.

I’ve written a couple of time about the amazing Tour Tracker. This is an app that offers cycling fans real-time access to follow a race via their computer. the app was written by a cycling addict at Adobe as a proof of concept for their Flex platform. Until now, most of what I’ve been able to find about the creation of this app is from the developer perspective.

Today the design behind the most recent version of the Tour Tracker was explained on Adobe official UX blog.

“The Tracker had to provide access to an enormous amount of data, from video to photos to race-tracking maps to play-by-play commentary and GPS info… And we figured that racing fans—our user base—would want easy access to all of it, all the time.  So how did we keep from cluttering up the UI with controls and display windows?

Well, to be honest, it can be cluttered up… but only if that’s what you want. Otherwise, every bit of chrome can be shrunk and dimmed to the point of near-invisibility, all the better to experience the full-screen goodness of video, interactive course maps, stills… that is, of whatever visual you choose. The key to putting users first, we decided, lay in letting them follow the race in whatever way they wanted.  So we made the Tracker’s UI as configurable as possible—less a UI than an experience-design toolbox.”

ps. This post was written using the brand new WordPress app in the beta version of Yahoo! Mail, part of their new “open” strategy. Worked like a charm!

I commute about 40 minutes each morning and afternoon via the local BART train service. While twittering about my fellow passengers is fun and all, I have found a new way to pass the time. Launching the new Brightkite iPhone app, I can watch the phone’s GPS report back my train’s current address. Here’s a segment of my travel home tracked between San Leandro and Castro Valley, about an 8 minute trip.

Last week a new show debuted on the Discovery Channel. Prototype This! describes itself as “a team of engineers and PhD’s are inventing the future one prototype at a time”. I watched the premier with high hopes. As a fan of similar reality shows like Dirty Jobs and Mythbusters, I was looking forward to Discovery’s take on hardware hacking and digital prototyping. It was a let down. The pace felt wrong and there was WAY too much repetition. For example, an animated sequence showing a car pulling off the road must have been played 15 times during the 1-hour show. Tomorrow is the second episode and I’m hoping it gets a bit better.

While the show could use improvement in the editing and writing department, I found that the team’s prototyping methodology is in alignment with my personal views for creating design prototypes. Here’s what I jotted down:

1. Give yourself a deadline. By constraining the amount of time available, the team is naturally forced to find quick solutions that “get the job done”.
2. It doesn’t have to be pretty. Since the usefulness of a prototype is in proving some idea, the physical attractiveness of the final product is less relevant. Wires hanging out or non-ideal typefaces are acceptable.
3. Use existing components. You need to move quickly and re-creating something that already exists is a waste of valuable time and energy. If there’s a physical or digital component that works, just use it. You can always swap it out when you move into production.
4. Rely on experts. There’s something to be said for “doing it yourself”. Lots of learnings about your product will be determined this way. Save that for final production and during prototyping, use experts who can accomplish tasks quickly to keep moving.
5. Use throw-away materials. The prototype lives simply to show off your concept and then be put to the side. Don’t get hung up on creating something that you can’t bear to throw away when finished. The prototype is NOT the thing!

The design room for Prototype This!

In August of this year, Leah Buley and I presented at the Agile 2008 conference. We made a case for sketching and prototyping as a means to bridge the gap between traditional agile and UX processes.

Today that presentation was featured on the homepage of Slideshare. As of this morning, it was viewed 668 times. Wow!!