I just returned this weekend from a business trip to India.  Aside from being a very productive trip, it was also personally relevant.  My mother lived in India until she was 18.  As a consequence, I grew up with some Hindustani cuisine, religious and secular decorations and quite a few stories.  The last two opportunities for me to visit with her coincided with my graduation and my marriage.  This was to be my first trip.
Friends and family alike have asked what I found to be most amazing.  The answer is simple: I did not see any traffic accidents while I was there.  That is amazing because driving in major Indian cities makes DC commuter rush hour look like a relaxing weekend spa.  More people with more vehicles in the same space, 24 x 7, with no lanes, signs or lights.  Traffic is regulated by frequent use of the horn and by constant bravado.

This reminded me of an old post on the 37Signals blog.   The post discusses the “less is more” philosophy of roundabout traffic circles and applies that concept to web software.  Admittedly, it’s a bit of a stretch.  37Signals is sometimes controversial–they are the creators of Ruby on Rails and a number of popular web-based productivity tools to which I am thoroughly addicted.  Most of the controversy comes from their frequent criticism of software development, web design, enterprise software, the public web company craze and other things which people feel passionate about.

Although this was an old post, I remembered it while thinking about the traffic in India.  I started to think about what lesson there might be, if there would be any, for the Trading Grid and for software in general that could be derived from the traffic in India.  This was the most interesting thought:  speed limits are not necessary, since the traffic is too constantly high volume to present an opportunity to speed.

I thought this was a very good example of embracing your constraints.  Embracing your constraints means not fighting against a limitation you have, but accepting it and building it in to your design as a principle or design factor.  Speed limit signs would rarely be applicable.  In fact, they might only be distracting.  In that kind of traffic, people need to watch their bumpers and not read signs.  On the off chance that there is an open road, there’s an incentive to move a bit more quickly and keep it open as long as possible–the chance of a multi-vehicle accident is lower as well since the road is open.

Embracing your constraints or acknowledging the environment in which your tools are used is an important factor in good, human-friendly design.  When I write requirements or work on design with the engineers, I always try to present the customer’s working environment as a driver in the design.  The average EC coordinator, for example, probably does not have two hours per day to sit down working on complex reports and workflow.  They generally need snap, overview health or checkup information.  If there are exceptions, they need to narrow in.  Sometimes, they need to isolate a particular event when supporting their partners.

The dashboard, drill-down, deep-dive approach to analytics workflow is an example of embracing your constraints and scaling your tool according to how much attention the user can really pay during a normal work day.  I think Google Analytics does this very well, and that is even more true with their new UI.  I could also bore you with other examples, like our web forms security time-out handling designed to recognize end users in the shipping dock or the warehouse moving away from the station constantly, while still in progress on forms.  But what I’d like to hear is what constraints you face (or your customers, if you’re not an end user) during the day that your tools need to embrace.

Do you get no more than 5 minutes of face time with your apps in one go?  Do you work in a noisy environment where audio alerts are always drowned out?  What constraints do you need the Trading Grid, or any other tool, to better embrace?

P.S. - Sorry Mark .  I will leave all the driving topics to you in the future