A: No… I’m not falling into that one again! Last time a friend of mine asked me, I told him where i’d got them, he went out and bought some as well. Every time we went out we ended up looking like twins. Now we actually phone each other to ask what shoes we are wearing, it’s ridiculous.


Q: In five sentences, tell us what a typical day in the life of a UX designer at Caplin is like….starting with your preferred breakfast in the Caplin kitchen.

A: Peanut butter (yum) on granary or seeded, fresh orange juice.

Check email and meetings for the day.

Overview of what was achieved yesterday set out a plan of action for today, re-assessing priorities.

Sketch out ideas on paper and discuss with team, helping us decide where our time will be best utilised.

Take sketches through to wireframes or design concepts.

Show these designs and wireframes in meetings as a visual support for communicating ideas.

Have vision.

Take feedback and incorporate where appropriate

Catch train.


Q: There are a lot definitions out there used to describe UX design. What’s yours?

A: For me UX is an attention to detail, not just from an aesthetic perspective, but from an emotional one. It is often thought that software or anything done through a computer is all about function, a binary appreciation for whether it works or not. It is not only that it should of course ‘work’ but it should work pleasingly, engage  and be aware of users’ expectations, this gives confidence in the fact that we have thought through all these processes carefully and with love. This builds trust in our clients, and as we all know that is the foundation of a successful relationship.


Q: Have you always been a UX designer? What made you get in to UX design?

A: I had started out in the e-learning industry as a UI Designer , but found that I had many ideas on how we could develop new interactions or optimise our working methods. This meant that I naturally gravitated towards a greater awareness of the users’ experience of an  e-course, as well as wanting to minimise our pain points in creating these courses.


Q: Tell us about the focus of Caplin’s UX Design Service.

A: Caplin is in a great position at the moment, our clients are seeing the benefits of what a good User Experience can do for their workflows. Software/ Web Apps have reached a point where complexity, flexibility, and usability are colliding violently, we can use UX to focus this into a manageable stream. Practically, this means that we help untangle a system that has gone out of control and out of touch with what it’s users originally needed it for. Lipstick on pigs, no more.


Q: UX designers take inspiration from obvious technology like websites and mobile phones. But what about less obvious things like cars, kitchens and clothing?

A: Nature, in a word. I’m inspired by the living models and modalities I see around me in everyday experience. The natural world around us has great design and has already solved a number of issues surrounding complexity and structure. It is an endless source of information and beauty, nice balance.


Q: The cat was lost in negative space……explain.

A: That thread is truly hilarious… I really get his point though. A commonly misunderstood aspect of design is that everything is subjective. I do not think it is that simple. Eyeballs have physical limitations and constraints (ie. Field of view, contrast, resolution)  not to mention how the brain interprets these to create what we call optical illusions. Therefore, it is important to consider how the eye reads a composition or image, I often discuss how the eye travels through a design. Where it’s entry point is and tracing out its path to see where I need breathing room. Though this often just sounds like ‘arty farty’ to most, it is based in science and how the brain is hardwired to respond to certain type of visual stimuli.  Easy example: You have black sheet of paper with a white circle off centre  on the page. The eye is immediately drawn to the white circle, because the brain is responding to it as if you were in darkness and are looking for a light. An understanding of this means that you can force peoples’ eyes to go where you want them to (this what magician classically use for misdirection). Space is important, it is not empty, it is pure potential onto which you can project meaning. In the above thread the negative space was being used to represent the isolated emotional state of the cat.



Q: Favourite book on UX design?

A: I must say I’m terrible with this, books are expensive and mostly out of date by the time that they are published. I understand that certain ergonomic principles remain the same no matter the situation, however I prefer to take in information as current as possible. I regularly look at presentations from industry experts as well as reading blogs which I follow and online communities for feedback. I really enjoy the dynamic response which is in that medium. Books tend to encourage a stagnant frame of mind in me, as the words feel like stone imposing, immovable, and unresponsive.


Q: There seems to be  some conflicting views surrounding UX design and its place within a software development environment. What’s your take on it?

A: I would advocate that the more UX can involve itself in every step of the process the better. This does not confine itself only to the software in question, but also an approach to client relationships, company image, and other modes of communication such as presentations, tone of language, and vision. The one thing that it is definitely not, is a more elaborate UI sensibility. A good UX team will mean that developers no longer need ponder on what is the best UI solution for a given problem as they will know which is the most meaningful interaction as it is driven by the persona of the end user.


Q: From a UX POV, what are some of your favourite websites/applications?

A: My favourites are simply websites/applications that enable me to work more efficiently, I’m quite a fan of DropBox as it immensely practical allows me to not have to carry around USB things in my pocket (which eventually get misplaced or lost anyway). I’m also a member of the DeviantArt community which has some powerful functions and is a great source of feedback in terms of what is successful or not by viewing analytics. The overall winner for me at the moment though is Wordpress. The way in which it has been changing how we use the web is inspiring, they also have great documentation and support.


Q: Arthur, tell us what the future holds for UX design.

A: More enjoyable experiences, in life. I want to unleash everyone’s creative potential so that we can stop wasting our time and mostly our energy.

(as i’m not really sure that time is real anyway…..yet).


Q: Last computer you bought?

A: How can any self respecting UXer have anything else than a Mac?

Q: Next Thursday is the infamous Caplin summer party on our rooftop. This year we’re doing a “Mad Hatter’s Tea Party” theme….can you give us any hints about the inspiration behind your hat?

A: Non … (^___-)

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Some of my blogs relate to Liberator, but I don’t often talk about it directly, explain the different versions or describe what you can do with it.

Caplin Liberator is a commercial product that we sell, usually as part of a larger framework called Caplin Xaqua. Liberator was first developed in 2000 and has been used in many large deployments since then.

A few years ago we decided to release Liberator FE, this is a free edition of Caplin Liberator.

So what can you do with Liberator FE?

The short answer is ‘pretty much everything you can do with the commercial version’, but what is that and what are the differences?

Liberator FE comes with two APIs. Most people familiar with Comet will understand the idea of a JavaScript library that runs in the browser talking to a Comet server and exchanging information – Liberator of course provides this, it is called StreamLink for Browsers. Not all Comet servers provide server side integration APIs though. For some the model is ‘everyone is a client’, so even if something is conceptually a backend component it might still use the same API as the clients. Liberator has the concept of DataSources, as the name suggests these components provide the data. Clients can also provide data, but it is treated differently. Liberator FE provides a Java DataSource API.

So you might take the Java DataSource API and write an application that feeds data into Liberator that is then available for clients. The client application would be a web page using the StreamLink for Browsers JavaScript API to subscribe to the data that the DataSource is publishing. It will receive data in real time, as soon as it is published, and clients can also publish data back to the server – it is fully bidirectional.

What kind of applications can you develop? How long is a piece of string? You can use your imagination.. Caplin’s main focus is financial trading applications, but anything that could benefit from real time data or highly interactive experiences can be developed. Sports scores, chat and other social media applications, real time monitoring, games, whatever you can think of! We’d love to hear of other ideas.

So what can’t you do?

Liberator FE is a full blown version of Caplin Liberator, performance, scalability etc, it is all the same. However, you don’t get other language APIs, for example, .Net, Silverlight, C/C++. You don’t get two further integration APIs, for handling realtime permissioning and monitoring.

You also cannot use Liberator FE for a commercial application – it is against the license.

Liberator FE has been downloaded by a lot of people and we hope this is a good way for people to get familiar with Liberator and Comet technology – whether it is for a non-commercial project or as a way of easily evaluating Liberator for a commercial project.

So if you want to try out Comet, if you are interested in some of the things I blog about and want to try it out, Liberator FE is a good place to start! Let us know how you get on.

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Here are the links:

Video/Slides: http://skillsmatter.com/podcast/ajax-ria/comet-panel/zx-486

Photos: http://flickriver.com/photos/dylans/sets/72157624493006656/

Now you can see what a bunch of Comet vendor geeks look like!

Thanks again to Dylan and Skillsmatter for hosting the event.

Thanks to Dylan for organising the event, and thanks to the other panelists for taking part. It was good to finally meet Alessandro from Lightstreamer, and its good to see the various open projects talking about their technology too. A couple of guys from Nirvana were in the audience and we had a good chat down the pub afterwards.

Everyone on the panel seemed to have similar views on WebSocket, although some have implemented it and some have not.

I’ll post a link to the video and slides when they are available soon.

This is an interesting post by Anders Ramsay.

I definitely think design agility is an important skill, I think it goes without saying that if you do not have agility then you are not agile, but I also think that design ability is also just as important for agile teams.

Sometimes when we need to produce ‘presentable’ wireframes to show a client complex interactions in an animatic we’ll spend some time polishing them up; but lately we have just been scanning in rough sketches. It makes it much more obviously ‘unfinished’ and definitely leads to looser design discussions.

Often when we need to resolve design issues that come-up ‘in sprint’ we will have a quick chat with the team and produce a 10 second sketch to facilitate the design solution, job done. This is design agility to me. It does depend on the development team having at least some design ability though – luckily at Caplin our devs are all cool techreatives at heart.

On design collaboration…

Obviously collaboration is a fundamental part of the design process, but this doesn’t mean that the whole design process needs to be collaborative.

As Tim Brown of IDEO discusses on his blog about ‘Design Thinking’ being a problem solving approach, I think the same is true for UX. There are the two sides of the process, divergent (creating choices) and convergence (making choices)… Analysis (breaking problems apart) and synthesis (putting ideas together).

The skill for ‘agile design facilitators’ is knowing when and where to collaborate. When to ask for input from subject experts, when to gain insights from users and when to open up for multiple inputs. But also knowing when to downsize and focus on synthesizing the design.

Collaborative design doesn’t need to lead to compromised design (nicely pointed out by Andy Rutledge) but both the designer and the organisation need to cultivate a culture of design and trust in design, the seven core perspectives offered by Brett Lovelady from Astro Studios distills this idea nicely.

As Twyla Tharp (author of The Collaborative Habit) says…

Collaboration can be internal – an act of listening to others and then having a silent, private conversation with yourself.

Agile attitude – yes of course but with design agility must come design ability across the organisation.

Silverlight is now supported on mobile devices before even the release of Windows Phone Series 7. As Single Dealer Platforms grow to focus more on mobile devices (we’ve worked on trading, pricing and alerting projects on more conventional mobile platforms like the Blackberry & iPhone), it’s interesting to see new opportunities with Windows Phone 7 and Silverlight on Symbian. Any standard Silverlight XAP file will run on your Nokia 5800 and N97 handset without changes, meaning Silverlight can now be used as a framework for building high powered trading workstations on mobile devices.

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Q: Firstly, the important stuff: iPhone, Blackberry or Android?

MT: iPhone 4 for me

Q: Biggest contribution to Caplin?

MT: I’ve had a hand in most things, but writing Liberator is probably the biggest single achievement.

Q: Favourite blog post you’ve written on Platformability?

MT: I’m not sure about ‘favourite’ but Why we don’t need HTML5 WebSocket gets a lot of hits.

Q: You’ve been blogging about Comet for some time. What has changed most about Comet since you first started blogging about it, and how does it better support Caplin’s core technology?

MT: I’m not sure that a huge amount has changed. Caplin and some others have been doing Comet for over 10 years, and over the last few years browsers have improved, new browsers have come along and Comet has had to keep up. This usually means variations on how the transports work – most Comet solutions will use slightly different techniques to give the best experience in each browser. WebSocket is meant to avoid all that, but it is such a long way off being ubiquitous all it does is add another tool to the box.

The biggest change is probably the number of Comet solutions out there, commercial and open source. For basic Comet, it is really a commodity now – unfortunately basic Comet doesn’t solve everyone’s requirements – they need performance, stability and more advanced features, which is where Comet vendors can add real value.

Q: What’s Google doing with Comet these days?

MT: There are a number of Google products that use Comet under the hood, they use it to get the job done and don’t really talk about it directly. I blogged recently about a few announcements and this year’s Google IO conference.

Google are a big part of WebSocket too. Google Chrome supports a version of WebSocket and they have done various demos of web applications using WebSocket.

Q: You’ve been doing a lot of work on benchmarking lately – tell us about that.

MT: I find benchmarking really interesting. Over the years I have benchmarked Liberator a number of times and we have a good set of tools and scripts that automate a lot of the process. The fun comes in analysing the results and looking for areas of improvement.

Until recently we’d only ever run up to 30,000 clients connected to a Liberator – but this time I decided to go further and tested 100,000. The main difficulty is actually the clients. Even with an optimised test client that makes multiple connections, running multiple instances across multiple machines, it is still hard to get high numbers. Liberator is barely breaking sweat at 100,000 clients receiving 1 update/sec each – but the client machines are starting to struggle since each is running thousands of clients – we need to beef up our test hardware to test further than 100,000 clients.

Q: In five sentences, tell us what a typical day in the life of an architect at Caplin is like….starting with your preferred breakfast in the Caplin kitchen.

MT: A bowl of Shreddies. The day usually consists of meetings, mainly internal, but often with customers or prospects. Interacting with the various product and project based development teams. Talking about new work, such as new or updating APIs and helping with planning and estimating new work. I don’t often do a lot of coding these days, but the recent benchmarking involved coding.

Q: Last computer you bought?

MT: A MacBook Pro 15” – great hardware.

Q: Do you tweet? If so, why?

MT: I got into twitter slowly. I don’t tweet about my lunch or how I am feeling – it’s usually more about techie stuff, or sport quite often. Why? It’s good to share, just not too much! @martintyler

Q: Who will win the World Cup?

MT: England already won the world cup… (The T20 Cricket World Cup!)