The Newly Rich

In my work as an interaction designer and UI developer, I’m constantly checking out new applications and technologies. Sometimes it’s just for inspiration, but usually I’m looking for tools that help me (or people I know) do their jobs better. As you can imagine, that can really chew up a lot of time- time that’s not spent building my own applications or billing clients.

I’ve been having George do more of the initial exploration. This week he introduced me to Google Notebook. Last week he experimented with creating forms that insert data into Google Spreadsheets. In the past few months we’ve been playing with:

• RescueTime
• GrandCentral
• Wufoo
• the new multi-user Backpack
• TripIt
• Google Apps for your domain

…and a handful of others. It’s usually the case that trying to “half-outsource” a task results in really inefficient use of time; I generally prefer to hand the whole thing over. But in these cases it’s worked out really well to toss ideas and findings back and forth. I spend less time than I would if I were on my own, but I glean as much (and often more) information about the tools.

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