A little Lagniappe anyone?
I guess everyone is looking for "a little something extra." That is how I first learned the definition of Lagniappe when I moved to New Orleans. As a product manager we always talk about trying to find that "little something extra that thrills the potential customer or owner." These are the things that differentiate what you have from everybody else. One way to find that these days is in good design of software interfaces. I heard this last week at Lightfair as people looked at Light Designer - the new Light Manager-like software that is being introduced as a part of the Paradigm system.
There is "something extra" in the design of Light Designer in many places. My personal favorite is the "Know limits" screen. A user may use this screen to ask, "will this work?"
In Light Manager, experienced users knew that the system had performance limits. At one point the engineers introduced a formula you could use to "know your limits." Different point values are applied to presets, stations, zones and macros and your goal was to keep the sum of all these items below 10,000. How's that for an interface? Of course not that many users have to deal with this - only those doing really large systems.
In Light Designer "know limits" is a series of speedometers that show you how your system will perform using the hardware you have. When you enter the screen the speedometers move to the appropriate values. And remember the old term "it goes to 11" ? The speedometers go to a value of 2 - or 200%, double the capacity of a given processor.
Mark Ramsey has slightly different take on Lagniappe in his post on the Weinie.
David Lincecum