Long before terms like Deep Learning (DL), Machine Learning Operations (MLOps), and Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) were common in the news and internet posts, Artificial Intelligence had already been born. Born, and healthy growing years before the launch of famous tools like ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion, SAM, LLaMA, Bard, and AlphaZero.

However, the name Artificial Intelligence has been controversial since its first days. Claiming for machines to be intelligent was something big, especially in a time in which the limits of what a computer program could do were shorter than we know today. The origins of computer AI date back to the decades of 1940 and 1950, even when we could find many previous traces of the design or construction of automatic machines in human History.

But the real question is: what is it? Is Artificial Intelligence an umbrella term for computer programs that can actually think as we humans do? Is it the name for computer programs that can actively learn and adapt themselves? Or something else?

The answer is not easy, but I will try to clarify the idea.

Seeking the definition of Artificial Intelligence

Russel and Norvig wrote a marvelous introduction for their infamous book Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, in which they discuss what AI is and how it became what it is. Even the authors don’t have a complete and absolute definition of AI, but they give us brilliant hints:

The field of artificial intelligence, or AI, is concerned with not just understanding but also building intelligent entities — machines that can compute how to act effectively and safely in a wide variety of novel situations.

Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach. Russel and Norvig.

In general terms, what we understand today for AI is the development of computer systems that can perform tasks that typically require human intelligence. These tasks include many fields like visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and language translation or generation. As Russel and Norvig say:

AI is relevant to any intellectual task; it is truly a universal field.

Following this broad definition, the literature usually considers at least two main types of AI:

• Narrow or Weak AI. The program is designed and developed to perform a particular task, and/or in a specific environment.
• General or Strong AI. The program is designed and developed to perform any task, learning and adapting from any environment as humans do — better or worse.

As you can guess, current AI models are still stuck in the first group. Even when the development of modern LLMs is one of the most promising paths in the search for a General AI, there isn’t any program yet capable of complete and autonomous reasoning and adaptation. Computer programs, be they AI or not, are still running with many internal and external limitations. However, AI research is currently focused on the development of more general and adaptive models, capable of performing multiple tasks and learning from different environments, tending bridges between the two types of AI.

But how can we differentiate an AI program from any other computer program?

Think about this: any Python script that sums up the prices of your grocery list and adds the taxes to the results, could be considered “a computer program that performs a task that typically requires human intelligence”.

In the end, you make use of your own human intelligence and your math skills, to sum up those prices by yourself. It is a human task, requiring human intelligence. So why shouldn’t we consider AI that Python script?

Many experts will tell you that AI systems are also designed to learn from experience, adapt to changing inputs, and perform tasks without being explicitly programmed for each specific task. And that is true for many modern AI systems (remember: we are on the seek for more general AI systems), but not for all. There is AI beyond Machine Learning: Bayesian Networks, Fuzzy Logic programs, or Inductive Logic Programming systems are typical examples. Even when we are accustomed to hearing about highly deep and complex neural networks, plain deterministic algorithms can be part of an AI system too. Remember: the most Narrow AI is still AI!

So, what makes a grocery Python script and the object detection software from Telsa different? Is it just the complexity?

No, it is not the complexity. It is the purpose. AI performs tasks that simulate human behavior or reasoning. Sometimes the program simulates the human mental process, and sometimes just the outcome because we know little about our own brains. In the end, the AI program is a mathematical model for the resolution of a human task, that simplifies the whole mental process. It is not an exact implementation of the same steps we perform in our heads, but a workaround!

Bringing back the example of the Python script: summing up a list of prices is an already well-determined mathematical operation, that we can describe unequivocally and repeatedly. On the other hand, the recognition and spatial allocation of vehicles in our field of vision is a task that we humans perform with knowledge that cannot be expressed mathematically, and thus requires a model to simulate the results.

The first cannot be considered AI, since it does not model the intelligent agent that performs the task. It just solves a problem, just performs a task, as any other mechanism in human History has done before. There are no more mental processes, no reasoning, no thinking or feeling about the problem.

The vehicle recognition looks more like AI. It simulates the human reasoning that we are not able to completely explain and gives us similar results, using a mathematical model. Even if we tried, with our current knowledge we cannot describe and reproduce the exact mental process. If you believe the trick still relies on complexity, think of simpler tasks, like text recognition: identification of black characters over white backgrounds. AI does that, simulating our own reasoning, even when we humans don’t use “letter recognition equations” when we read.

Conclusion

Even the simplest algorithm can be an AI if it models the agent performing an intelligent task, and simplifies the complexity of our human intelligence. We want AI programs to decide for us, to guide our decisions, to challenge us, or to automate our tasks. But it’s easy to understand that, when we are modeling something extremely complex as human thinking, we will need more and more complex models in the future to improve our results.

Do you want to read more about why the term intelligent makes everything so complicated when we talk about computer programs? I hope you like my previous article on this topic:

Are AIs actually intelligent?

Are you sure you know what Artificial Intelligence (AI) is? was originally published in DRILL on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

If you have a peek of the latest changes in the top cryptocurrencies by market capitalization, you will find that the scenario is far from being positive. In fact, almost all of them are losing value in the market.

Is it a good or a bad moment for entering the crypto-world? Let us analyze the reasons for this drop before taking any decision.

As usual, one can find interesting learnings by observing the evolution of the most relevant cryptocurrency at the moment. The Bitcoin chart shows a critical descent of its price and market cap on November 14th. Since that moment, the vale has been permanently decreasing.

The answer to this sudden fall is clear. As Steven Rossolillo explains, it is mainly due to “panic”, as it happens in every other economic market. But why do the investors decided to sell on that specific moment?

The reason is called hard fork. It is actually very interesting to notice that the hard fork was executed over Bitcoin Hash, and not on the original Bitcoin chain. However, the split of Bitcoin Hash into Bitcoin VS on 15 November 2018 may have been the last push to make some investors leave this unstable market.

The last hard fork was just additional proof for the low confidence on the crypto market. Actually, the confidence of the investors has been fragile during this whole 2018, and there were no signs of an early recovery since the big price drop in December 2017.

The interest of miners on BTC decreased during the last months, and we can think of a relationship between the decreasing hash power of the network (computational effort put by the miners) and the decreasing revenue obtained from that power. The reward needs to be attractive enough for the miners to keep working.

We can summarize the key facts that we have collected from the public information about the Bitcoin blockchain and the market capitalization of the cryptocurrency:

• The rewards paid to miners has been decreasing for the last year.
• Miners are losing their interest on Bitcoin, and the computational power of the network is decreasing.
• The price of Bitcoin has not recovered from the big fall from December 2017, and the hype for Bitcoin seems to be over.
• A new Bitcoin split, produced on the Bitcoin Cash chain on 15 November, created the new currency Bitcoin VS. This damaged the confidence of the investors and the massive selling started.
• The price of Bitcoin and most cryptocurrencies has been decreasing for the last month.

From the statements above, the future of Bitcoin does not look very good. However, it is too soon to make a reasonable prediction about the cryptocurrencies market. There are actually other indicators that can change our perspective.

In fact, cryptocurrencies are supposed to be digital money. Even when most of the people just think of cryptos as a speculative financial product, we cannot forget that they are used for economic transactions. Actually, the number of daily transactions of Bitcoin is increasing, slowly recovering from the crash of the last December. The price of BTC may stabilize one day in the future if the users normalize the use of cryptocurrencies as an alternative method of payment.

Another interesting fact is that the difficulty of the network adapts to the hashing power. This means that when the computational effort of the mining network decrease, the blockchain makes it easier to mine a new block. This way, if many miners leave the network it will be more attractive for others to start mining for the rewards.

The Bitcoin blockchain has some technical flaws that produce a natural deflation of the Bitcoin on a long-term basis. However, even when Bitcoin is the most representative cryptocurrency, there are many other alternatives out there that can take its position once the crypto market finally reaches a stable state. The technology evolves, and cryptocurrencies have been on the top of an overwhelming hype cycle.

• Blockchain for Dummies
• BITCOIN case study: applying basic Digital Signal Processing into financial data

The future of cryptos is uncertain, but now we can understand the latest reactions of the market based on the evolution of Bitcoin. The 18th-century nobleman Baron Rothschild stated that “the time to buy is when there’s blood in the streets.”. The cryptocurrencies are bleeding, but who knows if they will not die this time.

Innovation is always spinning forward. Just like a Drill.

Did you like this article? Follow me on Medium for reading new contents!

Do not hesitate to contact me on LinkedIn.

Why do the Cryptocurrencies fall? was originally published in DRILL on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has revealed that the third official version of HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) will not use TCP anymore. Instead, it will run over the QUIC protocol first developed by Google back in 2012.

WHAT IS QUIC?

Quick UDP Internet Connections (QUIC) is, as its name states, a transport layer protocol based on multiplexed UDP connections. In fact, QUIC uses a combination of TCP + TLS + SPDY over UDP with several enhancements with respect to the current HTTP/2 over TCP implementation.

The IETF has been working on a standardized version of Google’s QUIC since 2016, and it was recently that they announced their intention to include it for the new HTTP/3 version. However, the IETF QUIC version already diverged significantly from the original QUIC design.

QUIC protocol aims for simplicity and speed while maintaining security thanks to the TLS 1.3 encryption. They developed a more efficient protocol in terms of connection establishment and data transfer. According to Google, QUIC handshakes frequently require zero roundtrips before sending payload, as compared to 1–3 roundtrips for TCP+TLS. Actually, the first connection ever requires one roundtrip and the followings will work with zero.

Furthermore, it deals better with packet loss than the current TCP. Every retransmitted packet consumes a new sequence number, hence eliminating ambiguities and preventing losses from causing RTO. As Jana Iyengar from IETF states, QUIC is not only a redefinition of the Internet transport layer but a reinvention to do the transport right.

At the moment, only 1.2 % of the top websites support QUIC, but they are generally high-traffic sites: almost every Google service supports their own QUIC protocol.

IS QUIC SECURE?

QUIC first development included its own encryption. However, it was just a temporary implementation destined to be replaced by TLS 1.3 as described by the IETF.

Actually, the connection establishment strategy of QUIC is based on the combination of crypto and transport handshake.

QUIC relies on a combined cryptographic and transport handshake to
   minimize connection establishment latency.

With QUIC, Everything will be encrypted by default. Nevertheless, there are indeed security risks with QUIC as with any other technology.

The work of Robert Lychev and Samuel Jero in 2015 reported several weaknesses of the protocol. QUIC performance can be degraded by attacks like the Server Config Replay Attack. However, the confidentiality and the authenticity of the data seem to be properly secured according to their security model and tests.

• Understanding Event-Driven Architectures (EDA): the paradigm of the future
• BITCOIN case study: applying basic Digital Signal Processing into financial data

If you want to learn more about QUIC and how it will be integrated into the next version of HTTP, I strongly recommend you to check the official documentation from Google and the drafts published by IETF. You can find them in the bibliography of this article!

Innovation is always spinning forward. Just like a Drill.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

[1] ”QUIC, a multiplexed stream transport over UDP — The Chromium Projects”, Chromium.org. [Online]. Available: https://www.chromium.org/quic. [Accessed: 18- Nov- 2018]

[2] M. Thomson, “draft-ietf-quic-transport-16 — QUIC: A UDP-Based Multiplexed and Secure Transport”, Tools.ietf.org, 2018. [Online]. Available: https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-quic-transport-16. [Accessed: 18- Nov- 2018]

[3] S. Turner, “draft-ietf-quic-tls-03 — Using Transport Layer Security (TLS) to Secure QUIC”, Tools.ietf.org, 2018. [Online]. Available: https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-quic-tls-03#section-3. [Accessed: 18- Nov- 2018]

[4] E. Rescorla, “The Transport Layer Security (TLS) Protocol Version 1.3”, Tools.ietf.org, 2018. [Online]. Available: https://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-ietf-tls-tls13-23.html. [Accessed: 18- Nov- 2018]

[5] R. Lychev, S. Jero, A. Boldyreva and C. Nita-Rotaru, “How Secure and Quick is QUIC? Provable Security and Performance Analyses”, 2015. [Online]. Available: https://www.cc.gatech.edu/~aboldyre/papers/quic.pdf. [Accessed: 18- Nov- 2018]

The Internet changes: HTTP/3 will not use TCP anymore was originally published in DRILL on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The first steps for every UX design methodology are focused on the research. The designers need to understand who are their target users, and how do they behave. For this purpose, we will learn about the concept of Persona, which is one of the key tools for the user research.

We will first cover the explanation of this concept, and why is it important for design and business.

After that, we will learn to construct Personas for our UX projects.

Getting started with UX/UI apps design

1. USER PROFILING AND PERSONAS

Before starting with Personas, let us have a brief look at the concept of user profiling. User profiling has been a well-known marketing tool for many years to create market segments.

The companies use previous data to identify the main features of their customers in order to segment the public [1]. User profiling is very common nowadays thanks to Big Data and Machine Learning algorithms [2] [3] that help the industry to identify clusters and groups of customers with different necessities, based on their actions and living conditions.

This is indeed helpful. Here is a simple example of different types of users for an ISP company:

• Profile A: middle-aged, middle income, USA, city.
• Profile B: middle-aged, middle income, USA, countryside.
• Profile C: Young, little income, USA, city.
• Profile D: Young, middle income, Europe, city.
• Profile E: …

As you can appreciate, user profiles are defined by labels according to their status. In this case, the company identified some age ranges, income ranges, the origin of the user and the living environment. From collected data, we can categorize a new user into one of the Profiles. The company can create different strategies to aim to these users, and they can even forecast how will do the users behave.

However, for UX design we will not work only with user profiles. There is a powerful tool that we need to know in order to simplify our design process and improve our efficiency: Personas.

UNDERSTANDING THE USER MODELING: PERSONAS

Alan Cooper worked on the idea of the user model to create the concept of Persona. This concept origins from two important points [4]:

• Models are used to create useful abstractions of complex phenomena.
• The best way to successfully accommodate a variety of users is to design for specific types of individuals with specific needs.

“If you design for everyone, you delight no one. That is the recipe for a mediocre product.” — Alan Cooper [4]

Personas are user models, that help us to understand our target users and focus on their needs. They are not real people, but fictionary users created after collecting different data about real users.

In this way, it does not seem to be very different from the user profiles that we described previously. However, the concept is not the same: as a model, they are specific users, that provide us with specific information about their thinking and their own reasons for their actions. In words of Cooper [4], Personas are based upon behavior patterns we observe during the course of the Research phase. Personas reflect those patterns.

The idea is to create a fictional person for whom to design, and we usually make use of a name and even a real face. This creates empathy. Since these fictional users are created from condensing the information obtained from real users, we can use them individually to obtain global results.

THE BENEFITS OF USING PERSONAS

This chapter will summarize the list of key points of using Personas on your design process:

• Personas help the designers to focus on the needs of the customers since they should always answer questions like “what would Charlotte prefer in this case?”
• Personas create consensus about the target users. Stakeholders and designers will work for the same objectives.
• Personas simplify the understanding of the user behavior. They are easy to remember and the designer can empathize with them.

“Widening your target doesn’t improve your aim.” — Alan Cooper [4]

• Personas produce efficiency in the design process. Design for the primary — accommodate the secondary. [5]
• Personas help the designers to do the preliminary tests of the design choices, checking the expected reaction of the model.

Alan Cooper mentions that Personas help the designers to avoid three typical design issues [4]:

• The elastic user.
• Self-referential design.
• Edge Cases.

2. CREATING PERSONAS: THE UX RESEARCH

And here is the gold. How do we create good Personas for our project?

The first thing you need to understand is that the creation of Personas must aim to be meaningful for the design process. Laura Klein says that Personas must be predictive tools and not only a user description.

“A problem: even the best personas tend to be descriptive, but not predictive.” — Laura Klein [6]

When you create a truly predictive Persona, you can use it to identify real potential users. Furthermore, you can use the model as a validation for your design choices, and use the patters of your Persona to drive the requisites of the product.

USING YOUR DATA TO CREATE PERSONAS

Your user research can be based on different techniques and methodologies, for example:

• Ethnographic interviews
• Focus Groups
• Card sorting
• Usability tests
• A/B tests
• Game surveys
• True-Intent Studies
• Cultural probes

The following process [4], developed by Robert Reimann, Kim Goodwin, and Lane Halley, consists of several steps oriented to the identification and synthesis of user patterns from the data that you collected from the user research and analytics:

• Identify behavioral variables. For example user activities, attitudes, motivations or specific skills. The variables to be observed will depend on the research conducted.
• Map interview subjects to behavioral variables. You can define a measurement of the behavior related to every user: for example, one user may have 45% of cooking skills in that Skill range, and 90% of Learning attitude.
• Identify significant behavior patterns. Some users may share common variables and ranges mapped. You can define patterns from those repetitions.
• Synthesize characteristics and relevant goals. Focus on the behavior patterns and describe the details that make those patterns something real for your Persona. The environment, the relationships, the story behind that pattern. Try not to be too fictional, you are not writing novels! Extract the context from your data. It is important to create social interactions for your persona, and adding some demographic information like location, job, age, and gender.
• Check for redundancy and completeness. When you are creating more than one Persona, check that every pattern is properly represented and they are not overlapping (too much).
• Expand description of attributes and behaviors. The narrative about your Persona should be no longer than one or two text pages. It should reflect the most important facts observed during the previous research, but your descriptions should be as detailed as your research was. At this point, add pictures! Not only one profile photo but some graphical references to the Persona lifestyle, their work environment or their social life. At this point, you should choose a name for the Persona.
• Designate persona types. In the case that you created different Personas from the user research data, you should group them to prioritize the design target user. Types of Personas are Primary, Secondary, Supplemental, customer, Served and Negative.

These steps will result on the creation of one or several Personas that you will use as the reference users for your design project.

• Learning the basics of Adobe XD in one hour
• Nostalgia as a UX driver on video games

Innovation is always spinning forward. Just like a Drill.

REFERENCES

[1] Cufoglu, A. (2014). User Profiling-A Short Review. [online] International Journal of Computer Applications. Available at: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/eecb/f9358916a8e7db20511c611eaceaac554417.pdf [Accessed 8 Nov. 2018].

[2] Kanoje, S. (2014). User Profiling Trends, Techniques and Applications. [online] ResearchGate. Available at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/269704924_User_Profiling_Trends_Techniques_and_Applications [Accessed 8 Nov. 2018].

[3] Wang, G. (2016). Unsupervised Clickstream Clustering for User Behavior Analysis. [online] Cs.ucsb.edu. Available at: https://www.cs.ucsb.edu/~ravenben/publications/pdf/clickstream-chi16.pdf [Accessed 8 Nov. 2018].

[4] Cooper, A., Reimann, R., Cronin, D. and Cooper, A. (2007). About face 3. Indianapolis, Ind.: Wiley Pub.

[5] Ilama, E. (2015). Creating Personas | UX Booth. [online] Uxbooth.com. Available at: https://www.uxbooth.com/articles/creating-personas/ [Accessed 8 Nov. 2018].

[6] Klein, L. (2015). Predictive personas | Inside Design Blog. [online] Invisionapp.com. Available at: https://www.invisionapp.com/inside-design/predictive-personas/ [Accessed 8 Nov. 2018].

UX Research: modeling target users for your design project was originally published in DRILL on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Adobe XD is one of the most used free tools for UI/UX design and prototyping in the mobile design world. As a part of the Adobe Creative Cloud, eXperience Design offers many options and an intuitive interface. You can create and test your experiences while previewing the complete interface of your app.

If you are new to mobile apps design, you should read my previous article too:

Getting started with UX/UI apps design

This article will help you to understand the potential of Adobe XD and how to get started with your own design project for Android or iOS. It will not take you more than one hour! Adobe XD is available for both Windows and Mac OS.

We will be following the official tutorial of Adobe XD, adding some comments, tips and additional steps to clarify the usage of this tool. In the end, we will be able to use almost every aspect of the software. You can just read this article to understand the steps, but it will be even better if you follow the tutorial by using the software at the same time.

STARTING WITH ADOBE XD

You can download the free version of XD from the Adobe website. Once you open the software, you will find different design templates for your new projects.

In the next article, I will create a new project from scratch. In this case, I will use the tutorial of XD to show its characteristics.

Push the Begin Tutorial button. The main window will open, loading the Tutorial project. The basic navigation in your workspace is as follows:

• To pan: use your trackpad, or press spacebar+mouse, or press the mouse wheel.
• To zoom: two-finger pinch trackpad, or Ctrl(Cmd)+mouse wheel, or Ctrl(Cmd)+(+/-). You can also zoom to a selected item by pressing Ctrl(Cmd)+3.
• To select: use the left click of the mouse. To select groups inside a rectangular area, click and drag.

Use these simple navigation options to zoom into the project screens, and you will see something like this:

The tutorial is created so that you can finish the Campvives App, from Talin Wadsworth. From now, we can follow the steps of the tutorial. I will explain them and add some other new exercises to cover the essentials.

1. PREVIEW CURRENT DESIGN

As the tutorial says, press the play button to open the app preview. A new interactive window will prompt, displaying the first screen of the app.

This preview will be our main prototype screen with Adobe XD. We can test the app by pushing the buttons and checking the different screens and transitions.

Tip: The preview screen will automatically update when you change anything in your workspace. You can open it on a second screen to preview your changes in real time!

Of course, the preview is not a functional app. It will only display the UI that we define in our workspace, moving between the different screens according to the Prototype linkages. However, it is a good example of how will the final design look, and how good is the interaction of the user with our app.

Tip: you can take screenshots or record the screen (Cmd+Shift+5 for Mac, or Windows+G for W10) to share your preview and receive feedback. However, we will learn a better way to share the preview in the last chapter.

2. CREATE A SPLASH SCREEN

Note that the workspace has two tabs in the upper left corner: Design and Prototype. By default, the project opens in the Design tab, which is used to create and modify the visuals of the UI.

Select the Artboard tool from the tools panel (left side or shortcut “A”), and you will see that the options panel will change to show you different artboard templates corresponding to the most used devices.

In this case, the project is created for iPhone 6/7/8 artboards. Just click inside the box to add the new white screen. For different projects, you can choose any other template to create a screen with the exact dimensions of your target device.

You can change the name at the left-top of the screen by double-clicking on it. Rename it with “Splash”.

Now, choose the Selection tool from the tools panel (left side or shortcut “V”) and drag the logo into the splash screen. Now, click on the “Splash” name or double-click the splash screen. We can change the background in the Appearance options from the right-side menu. A common color-selection window will prompt. We can take note of some things here:

• Saving colors. When we select any color, we can save it for later use by pressing the “+” button. If we want to delete any color from our project palette, just drag it out of the window.
• Using gradients. Clicking on the “Solid Color” tab, you will open the gradients menu. You can use them to create a gradient background.
• Eyedropper. Of course, you can use the eyedropper tool to select any color available in your screen.

If you select the Campvives logo, you will see additional options for Appearance. You can choose not only the fill but also the borders of any image. In the case of shapes created in Adobe XD, you can select the details for the strokes. It will help you to change the style of your app’s branding, testing different rounded or sharped forms.

RESIZING AND POSITIONING

You may have noticed also the Responsive Resize option, directly above the Appearance options. This functions came with the September 2018 update, and it allows groups of objects to keep their placement and scalability when resizing.

For a more detailed explanation about how to use the Responsive Resize, I recommend you to spend 4 minutes watching the official video from Adobe CC in Youtube.

In the upper part of the right menu, you will find some buttons to easily resize or relocate the objects. They often save your time when looking for exact dimensions or positions into your layout. Another helping tools are the Grid options that you will find at the bottom of the right menu, when selecting the Artboard’s name. You can choose to display the layout of the screen or a square-cell grid to help you with positioning and proportions.

3. PICK A PROFILE IMAGE

In this section, we will show how to adjust images to shapes, and how to create custom shapes.

You can directly drag into the shape an image from your computer, or from your workspace in Adobe XD. It fill adjust to fit the shape, but you can just double-click on the image to resize it, and only the part of the image located into the shape will be displayed.

We can replace the bottom rectangle with a new one. Select the rectangle and press Del, or right click+Delete. To create a new rectangle, choose the Rectangle tool from the tools panel (left side or shortcut “R”).

Select the starting point for the shape, and drag the mouse to the opposite corner. You can select any Fill, Border or Shadow option for your new rectangle. For example, we can drag another picture as we did with the profile circle.

Tip: if you select the rectangle, you will notice little circled points close to its corners. You can drag them into the image to round the corners, making a smoothed form. This way, it is really easy to create buttons!

More than the Rectangle tool, you can also try the Ellipse (shortcut “E”), Line (shortcut “L”) and Pen (shortcut “P”) tools to create free forms.

4. EXTEND BLOG POST LIST

In this section, you will learn to repeat grouped grids. This is commonly used to create repetitions of the same structure, for example when creating menus, blog entries, lists…

Just select the whole grid, and push the Repeat Grid button from the right menu. The grid will be highlighted with green dotted lines. You can select and drag any of the border buttons to extend the grid, that will repeat its contents.

Using the Pro Tip from the tutorial, you can quickly update all the images. If you want to modify the grid of the items separately, you can push the Ungroup Grid button.

5. LET IT SCROLL

What if we want to create scroll screens? We can do it, but only for vertical directions for now. The horizontal scrolling is still in development.

Just select the artboard and change the Scrolling option to Vertical. Next, expand the bottom of the artboard to the point you desire. Done! You can check the scrolling in the Preview window.

FIXING OBJECTS

You may want to fix objects during the scroll, for example top or bottom bars. Just select the items and tick the option “Fix position when scrolling”.

Tip: Be sure that the fixed items are in the top layers of your design, so that they are not covered by scrolling objects. To check this, go to the Layers menu in the bottom-left corner of your workspace (Ctrl[Cmd]+Y).

6. MAKE IT INTERACTIVE

It is time to learn about the prototyping mode. Start by clicking on the Prototype tab at the top-left corner of your workspace.

You can connect your screens, so that later you can preview how the users will interact with your app. You will use the Preview window to test the user experience from the prototype connections.

Every object can be linked to another screen. When you click on it, you can define the connection by dragging the blue arrow to its destination.

Once you create a connection, you can define various parameters:

• Trigger. It describes when does the action start. By default, it happens when tapping on the object. You can define also a timeout, so that the screen automatically changes to the destination after some time.
• Action. The default state is Transition. It makes the app to change the destination screen. Other action is Overlay, that can be used for accessing menus or non-complete screens over the current screen. We will see the overlay action in more detail later. The last action is Previous Artboard, which makes the screen to go back to the previous one when the trigger condition happens.
• Destination. It is the next screen, the end of your blue arrow.
• Animation. Describes the transient effect from one screen to another. You can select the easing and the duration of the effect.

CREATING MENU OVERLAYS

To create a menu overlay, you must design a new artboard with transparent background. you can adjust the opacity of the background color from the Appearance options in the right menu.

On this artboard, you can create you menu. If you want to download free design resources like menu templates or icons, I recommend you to check my previous article where you will find useful information and links.

Since the menu we designed does not cover the whole screen, we can use it as an overlay. For that, we just have to define the connection at the Prototype workspace and select the Overlay action.

7. SHARE YOUR PROTOTYPE FOR FEEDBACK

This is the final chapter of the tutorial. Until now, we have been checking our progress on the Preview window in our computer. However, the sharing functionality allows you to create a public or private link to open the Preview of your app in your browser.

The official documentation of Adobe is actually great in this case, and you can read more about the publishing options here.

Tip: when you publish your app preview, you can send yourself the link by email to open the preview directly from your smartphone. You will be testing your app from the mobile device!

8. EXTRA CHAPTER: EXPORTING YOUR IMAGES

This is one of the most easy and important parts of your work. If you want someone to use your UI design on their development, you must export the images into the correct formats.

Adobe XD supports image and whole-screen exporting for different device specifications. You can select the output assets, and XD will generate the image files in separated folders according to the target screen densities.

You can select and export specific objects from the workspace, or do a general export of all the screens in the project.

CONCLUSIONS

Following these steps, you should have learned the basics of Adobe XD. The software is in constant development and every update brings new capabilities, so that we have to stay tuned to the future releases.

Adobe XD is a very simple, intuitive and yet powerful tool to create the interfaces of your app, as well as designing and prototyping the user experience.

Top 3 Features from Adobe Photoshop CC 2019

If you have further questions, do not hesitate to ask them!

Innovation is always spinning forward. Just like a Drill.

Learning the basics of Adobe XD in one hour was originally published in DRILL on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

User Experience (UX) and User Interface (UI) design are trending terms nowadays. In the same way, creating apps is currently one of the most attractive markets for developers, designers and digital creators all over the world. The reason is clear: smartphones are ubiquitous and the potential uses for apps are infinite.

Only well-designed apps will retain the customer’s attention, and thus create value for the user. This is the basis for most business models, from what we will expect some profit.

When facing your first app design, you will need to understand some basic concepts and answer preliminary questions. Once you do that, you can put hands to work and start the process.

This article summarizes some valuable information and resources that will save you much time when starting your first projects. In addition to that, we will cover some guidelines and good practices that will help you during the design process.

Do you like video-game design? Check this article about UX based on nostalgia:

Nostalgia as a UX driver on video games

WHAT DO I NEED TO KNOW BEFORE STARTING?

This is the basis for your design work. Make sure that you understand every point of this chapter, and feel free to ask any question if you need further information.

1. DESIGN TOOLS

You will need tools to design and test your app. I definitely recommend Adobe XD for beginners, which is very intuitive and offers you many options. Furthermore, it is free! However, you can find many other solutions like Sketch, Framer, Figma and InVision. Depending on the case, it may be a good idea to have a look at them.

We cover the basics of Adobe XD in our next article:

Learning the basics of Adobe XD in one hour

For the color scheme of your UI, you should definitely try the Color Tool of the Material Design. It is a very simple and effective tool that helps you to choose the right color palette for your app, previewing sample mockups. More important, you can check the legibility of text with different combinations of font and background colors.

Color Tool allows you to export the color palette for Android and iOS so that developers can apply it directly into the code.

In addition to the general UX/UI tool, it will be good if you can use Adobe Photoshop or any other image and photo editor like GIMP or Photo Pos Pro. If you do not use such tools, do not worry! There are plenty of free resources on the Internet.

Here you have the complete list for the tools I have mentioned:

• Adobe XD (free!)
• Sketch (macOS only)
• Framer (macOS only)
• InVision (free!)
• Figma (online, free test!)
• Color Tool (online, free!)
• Adobe Photoshop
• GIMP (free!)
• Photo Pos Pro (free!)

2. TARGET DEVICES

I will focus on Android and iOS. Most mobile and wearable devices use these operative systems nowadays, so designing for them will be the most common case.

However, designing UX for Android and iOS platforms can be different in some aspects. You can read here some interesting information about the different behavior of Android and iOS users.

You will need to prepare every image or video of your app for different sizes and screen densities, based on the different target devices. There are thousands of different Android devices, but Google recommends to design for some standard screen specifications. The most common approach is to design for medium-density (MDPI) or high-density (HDPI) resolutions and then convert your images by proportionally scaling them.

Luckily, Adobe XD and other tools are already prepared to export your images into the standard formats, as we will see in the second article of this series.

For iOS design, Apple establishes 3 different resolutions based on their standard devices. The process is considerably simpler.

You can also check the metrics for most common mobile and wearable devices on the Material Design online documentation.

3. ONLINE (FREE) RESOURCES

You don’t need to re-design the whole UI app paradigm when creating your app. Of course, experienced designers may develop new concepts and open the path to new trends. But for a beginner, it is recommended to follow the guidelines and make use of online resources as much as possible.

Of course, take care of copyright laws. You can only use free-of-use resources for your app! However, there are plenty of free images, icons, and templates that you can download without any risk.

As a starting point, I strongly urge you to visit the Material Design website and browse through it to learn about good design practices.

And here is the gold for the UX/UI starters: the following list contains some of the most useful websites from where you can download free UI resources.

• Material Design — Free Icons
• Adobe XD — free resources
• UpLabs — free design templates and resources
• XD Guru — free UI kits for Abode XD
• FlatIcon — free icons
• Freebiesui — free resources for UI design
• Google Fonts — free typographic resources
• Pexels — Free high-quality stock photos

The amount of free resources is really high. If you need something specific for your app, consider taking some minutes to explore the Internet before creating anything from scratch.

4. SOME EXTRA GENERAL TIPS

• UX’s aim is to create positive experiences for the user. This means that you will need to think about who will be the users of your app, and how will they use the app.
• To create those positive experiences, you can follow the latest trends and just imitate what other apps do. Investigate the market! For example, try to minimize the user journey and keep the navigation as simple as possible.
• The User Interface (UI) is one of the key parts of your app. Again, follow the common trends and simplify the color scheme to make things clear and visible, or make use of full-screen images or videos if they fit the case of use of your app.

UX and UI design require much work time, creativity, prototyping, iterating and correcting your own failures. You will probably find it when doing your own projects. Nevertheless, there are lots of guidelines, examples, resources, mockups, and kits that you can use to ease the design process.

• Learning the basics of Adobe XD in one hour
• Top 3 Features from Adobe Photoshop CC 2019

Do not try to be the most original app designer in the world during your first week: usually, it is better not to fail than doing something unique.

Innovation is always spinning forward. Just like a Drill.

Getting started with UX/UI apps design was originally published in DRILL on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

If you want to learn more about this, just check the previous articles:

• LEAN production #2: the Three M’s to improve your business
• LEAN Production: the method that made Toyota the most valuable car brand in the World

This article will explain the basics of the production process analysis. We will start with some definitions, and then one can see some examples to understand the matter and the reach of the contents. The definitions and explanations of this article are mainly based on [1].

DEFINITIONS FOR THE PROCESS CAPACITY ANALYSIS

The following list includes the most basic definitions for the capacity analysis of a production process:

• Processing Time (PT). For each activity, resource or step of the process, it is the time required to process one unit.
• Flow Time (FT). It is the minimum time to produce one unit, adding the PT for all the sequential activities.
• Resource Capacity (RC). It is the maximum quantity of units that one activity of step can process per unit of time. RC = m/PT, being m the number of resources that can be working in parallel to process different units at the same time. The study of the capacity [2] will be the key part of this article since all the other parameters will be indicators based on this.
• Bottleneck. It is the resource of the process with the minimum RC. It is, RC(Bottleneck) = min(RC).
• Process Capacity (PC). It is the maximum quantity of units that the whole process can generate per unit of time. PC = min(RC). The Bottleneck limits the PC.
• Flow Rate (FR). It is the real capacity of the process. If we have not limitations of input materials and output demand, FR = PC. However, this can be different in a real case in which the output demand of the process is lower than the PC.
• Resource Utilization (RU). Percentage of utilization for a single resource during the continuous processing of materials. RU = FR/RC. For an FR = PC case, the Bottleneck RU = 100%, that is the maximum utilization.

ANALYSIS OF A BASIC PROCESS

We will use the definitions above to analyze a basic production process. We will assume deterministic processing times, and consider unlimited input materials and output demand from our customers.

In this example, our production process should be working continuously and in the best case possible the process will not include any idle time.

Let us imagine the production process for a table board game. The process will be divided into four steps, that we can associate to four activities:

1. Printing. We print the board, box and cards of the game.
2. Cutting. We cut the board, the box and the cards in their final shape and size.
3. Assembling. We assemble the box.
4. Packing. We pack everything and close seal the box of the product.

In this oversimplified example, we will assume that every activity needs to be finished before the materials pass to the next step. It is, we must cut everything before assembling the things.

So, now that we knot the 4 steps, we must know the Processing Time (PT) for every one of them. We can know this by directly measuring it during the production process and doing some statistics. We assume the PT as follows:

1. Printing. PT = 15 minutes.
2. Cutting. PT = 10 minutes.
3. Assembling. PT = 8 minutes.
4. Packing. PT = 5 minutes.

At this point, we can draw our process as a Gantt diagram, as we can do for projects management. For this example, we will use a free software called GanttProject, that can be found here.

As we can see, the duration of every step is different according to the PT defined above. Every activity is preceded by the previous step, starting from the printing and ending with the packing.

From here, we can calculate the Flow Time (FT) of our process. It is as simple as adding every PT:

FT = 15 + 10 + 8 + 5 = 38 minutes.

That is all the time we need to produce a new board game. If one of our customers required one, we cannot provide it in less than 38 minutes assuming that we can start the production immediately and we have not any output stock.

We can calculate the Resource Capacity (RC) in games per hour from the PT of every activity. Since we have only one printer, one cutting machine, one assembling technician and one packing technician, we assume that the number of parallel resources for every activity is 1. Then:

1. Printing. RC= 1/15 games per minute = 4 games per hour.
2. Cutting. RC= 1/10 games per minute = 6 games per hour.
3. Assembling. RC= 1/8 games per minute = 7.5 games per hour.
4. Packing. RC= 1/5 games per minute = 12 games per hour.

It is clear now that the bottleneck is the printing step, that has the lower RC. And since we were analyzing a simple case with infinite input materials and output demand, our Flow Rate (FR) = Process Capacity (PC) = 4 games per hour. It is the maximum number of units that we can produce in one hour, in the best case possible.

The last parameter is the Resource Utilization (RU):

1. Printing. RU = 4/4 = 100 %.
2. Cutting. RU = 4/6 = 66.67 %.
3. Assembling. RU = 4/7.5 = 53.33 %.
4. Packing. RU = 4/12 = 33.33 %.

This give us a very bad scenario, in which we are using resources down to one third of the time. There are so much idle time for some of the activities, and we can actually check it if we update our Gantt diagram with the production processing of various items:

The diagram shows the dependencies of every process from each other. If we consider that every activity is associated to a certain key resource, we can identify the idle times in the production process for every resource:

The printer is our Bottleneck, and we can see that it is constantly working during the production of these 3 units. It makes sense, since the RU of the Bottleneck is always 100%. The most important: we can appreciate the under-utilization of all the other resources.

THE LEAN ANALYSIS: HOW TO UNDERSTAND THE PROBLEMS

From the previous analysis, we have found some important facts about our production process:

• The activities are not correctly equalized. We have long idle times and under-utilized resources, due to the different Processing Times. We could be doing a more efficient use of these resources!
• Our Bottleneck is the printing process. It is the activity limiting our production process, and the resource associated to the activity -the printer- is working all the time. That is a hot point.
• In the best case possible, we can produce 4 games in our hour. If our game goes viral and we have 4000 sales in one day, we will take 1000 hours (more than 41 days) to produce the demanded products. The customers will probably not like this!

So, what can we do to improve our production process? First, we need to understand the source of the unproductiveness. We can declare this process as “MURA”, according to what we saw in the LEAN Production #2 article. There is an irregular work-load for the different resources, driven by the “MUDA” or waste during the idle times.

There are many different types of wastes, and tools that we can use to work on their reduction. An overview of these matter was already discussed in the LEAN Production #1 article.

For this simple production process, we could work on dividing the tasks in different sub-tasks for the pipeline, or to investing in reducing the processing time of the Bottleneck and other slow activities.

If we buy a faster printer, our production process changes drastically: lowering the PT of the printing step down to 10 minutes, our Bottlenecks are both the printing and the cutting processes, increasing the FR to 6 games/hour.

Other action could be buying a second printer, so that they can work in parallel. For the printing process, the RC= 2/15 games per minute = 8 games per hour. In this case, the Bottleneck is not the printing process anymore, and the RU of the printers is lower than 100%. The hot spot will be the cutting step from now.

CONCLUSIONS

A basic understanding of our process capacity is the first step to analyze its productivity and the source of any possible problem. We can detect the weak points of our production, and take specific actions to improve the process by using the core concepts of LEAN.

This article used a very simple production process example, but real life productions have many other variables to take into account. Probabilistic production times, stock limitations, time-variant demands, reparation and maintenance tasks, and many other points that require the use of the LEAN thinking in order to simplify the process and grow for an efficient production.

Innovation is always spinning forward. Just like a Drill.

REFERENCES

[1] Grunow, M. and Ott, H. (2018). Lean Production. [online] edX. Available at: https://www.edx.org/course/lean-production-tumx-qpls3x-0 [Accessed 22 Sep. 2018].

[2] Isixsigma.com. (n.d.). Capacity | iSixSigma. [online] Available at: https://www.isixsigma.com/dictionary/capacity/ [Accessed 22 Sep. 2018].

LEAN Production #3: learning how to manage your resources was originally published in DRILL on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

You may have heard about Event-Driven Architectures already. The concept originated in the early 2000’s referred to new message handling methods, and eventually became known as EDA [1]. Even when it is commonly used to refer to programming and software-designing, the EDA paradigm is also racing into the definition of business models and strategies.

This article will offer a brief overview of the EDA model and its benefits and challenges in different fields of application.

1. THE NEW THINKING: EVENTS

EDA focuses on the generation and handling of event notifications. This concept defines strongly flexible architectures, in which the elements generating event notifications do not need to know the receiver components. In addition to that, an event-driven architecture has not a deterministic response time for processing input events, but it is much faster adapting to changes. This paradigm makes possible to create real-time responsive architectures.

Event notifications imply modifications in the current state of the system. Notifications can be triggered by external sources such as user inputs, environmental conditions or needs of the market. However, there are also internal notifications of events, such as data sending for the pipeline work-chain, multicast of parameters for heterogeneous processing, internal triggers for certain services and generation of outputs. In the end, events can be understood as something similar to messages between different modules of the system [1], containing relevant information for the general and particular functioning of the system and its services.

2. EDA FOR DIGITAL BUSINESS

In words of Garner [2],

“By 2020, eventsourced, real-time situational awareness will be a required characteristic for 80% of digital business solutions. And 80% of new business ecosystems will require support for event processing.”

Situational information of events provides value to our business. Nowadays, many emerging companies use business models based on the On-Demand Economy. In addition to that, the acquisition of information is getting massive thanks to technological and sociological trends like social media and IoT. EDA is the natural paradigm for making use of this real-time information and designing flexible systems able to adapt to the changes.

The Daitan Group [1] identifies different cases of companies making use of EDA: Uber, Deliveroo, Monzo Bank or Centrica among others. All of them share a smart use of real-time information provided by the customers, IoT networks, and movements in the market.

The traditional request-driven model and the event-driven model are complementary, and both of them have their own purposes. Digital companies are usually called to specific business actions triggered by business situations. Business situations are nothing more than the result of a logical test to an income of different events, and the identification of this situation creates an opportunity. These opportunities are mostly lost in a traditional request-driven model, which creates rigid and orchestrated architectures that are certainly very efficient when developing simple and invariant tasks. EDA, when using continuous monitoring of incoming events, gives the possibility of making real-time decisions. [2]

Experts say [3] that digital entrepreneurs and IT architects must change to the ‘event thinking’ to adopt this kind of solutions, that are diametrically opposed to the old paradigm.

3. THE EDA TECHNOLOGY

From both technical and strategical perspectives, EDA breaks with the traditional Data Warehouse (DW) architecture [1]. Data is currently stored in the DW and analyzed to generate reports, dashboard or other tools used to guide management decisions. However, this is a slow process that is completely useless for an on-demand service in which the environment changes every couple of minutes.

One of the main difficulties when developing an EDA-based solution is that there is not any dominant development framework yet. However, developers can integrate solutions from different technology providers to create an EDA project [1]:

• Event capturing with Dell Boomi, SnapLogic, Mulesoft, Hortonworks Dataflow, Apache Apex.
• Routing with RabbitMQ, ActiveMQ, Apache Kafka.
• Processing with Apache Flink, Apache Storm, Amazon Kinesis, Azure Stream analytics, TIBCO BE.

The Event Stream Processing (ESP) is the general idea of the data integration and analysis. The ESP flow is divided into four steps of event processing, that are Collect, Enhance, Analyze and Dispatch. The whole flow creates a non-homogeneous process in which events are acquired by the system and generate a certain output response, thanks to the processing of different services.

The typical event-driven implementation makes use of an event bus and various simultaneous services accessing to the bus. Data is stored in local memories and replicated for every service so that they can work independently [4]. Every service can acquire and generate event notifications. The architecture can be extended to the use of various event buses and specific interface services.

Once an event reaches the event bus, the flow of actions from the different services is not easy to predict and control. However, every service is easily modifiable and replaceable since the architecture is loosely tied. Every service is programmed to perform specific tasks, following different priorities or timing restrictions, and they will not be affected by the change in any other process. This way, long-term optimization and adaptation of the system are perfectly feasible.

Glue Reply UK [4] likens the Event-Driven Architecture for business to the concept of Brownian Motion in physics, which stands that the movement of a particle in a fluid is almost impossible to predict but easy to trace after the event. The path of the particle is the chain or group of actions performed, and the collisions of the particle are the events. This simile refers to the non-structured system behavior in response to events, delivering business results nonetheless.

Just as an off-topic, one can check a Brownian motion simulation here. [6]

• You may NOT need to leave the Comfort Zone
• Understanding non-profitable projects: the strategic positioning
• BITCOIN case study: applying basic Digital Signal Processing into financial data

Innovation is always spinning forward. Just like a Drill.

REFERENCES

[1] Daitangroup.com. (2017). Event-Driven Architecture. [online] Available at: http://www.daitangroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Daitan_Whitepaper_Event-Driven_Architecture.pdf [Accessed 9 Sep. 2018].

[2] Cearley, D. (2017). Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2018. [online] Gartner.com. Available at: https://www.gartner.com/ngw/globalassets/en/information-technology/documents/top-10-strategic-technology-trends-for-2018.pdf [Accessed 9 Sep. 2018].

[3] Currie, T. and III, S. (2017). Event-Driven Architecture Is the Wave of the Future — The New Stack. [online] The New Stack. Available at: https://thenewstack.io/event-driven-architecture-wave-future/ [Accessed 9 Sep. 2018].

[4] Richardson, C. (n.d.). Microservices Pattern: Sagas. [online] microservices.io. Available at: https://microservices.io/patterns/data/saga.html [Accessed 9 Sep. 2018].

[5] Reply.com. (n.d.). Event Driven: how can we deliver full business value?. [online] Available at: http://www.reply.com/Documents/7937_img_GLUE11_Event_Driven_Architecture_eng.pdf [Accessed 9 Sep. 2018].

[6] Wang, H. (n.d.). Event-Driven Brownian Motion Simulation. [online] CodePen. Available at: https://codepen.io/huiwang/full/epEZVJ [Accessed 9 Sep. 2018].

Understanding Event-Driven Architectures (EDA): the paradigm of the future was originally published in DRILL on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We have been hearing for years these two words put together as a symbol of resignation, stagnation and even failure. However, when you talk about ‘comfort’ alone it has nothing to do with those negative aspects by itself.

The ‘Comfort Zone’ is a trending concept originated to boost people into enterprising, growing and developing their career and their lifestyles. It has been continuously repeated that we must extend our horizons out of our usual environment to discover new opportunities. Staying safe, still and cautious make the people never reach the success. At least, that is what we have commonly heard, and there is actually some truth in this thinking.

Despite that, the path for personal and professional success is not only determined by rejecting your habits and leaving your stability. Actually, what most of us really seek in life is self-accomplishment, and that is something one can find through different means like money, peace, luxury, happiness, love or fame. Of course, basic necessities come first.

Why do you think of leaving your Comfort Zone?

The need of leaving your Comfort Zone is a statement of your seeking for an improvement. If you consider leaving it, then your current means for reaching self-accomplishment are not appropriate or not good enough. You need more money, you need true peace, or you feel that you can be happier elsewhere. It is clear that the idea of improvement is always present in the human thinking, and personal development may never end.

But there is something more. If you want to leave your Comfort Zone, we can assume that there is a Comfort Zone. And here we come back to the meaning of comfort: “a state of physical ease and freedom from pain or constraint”, according to Google. It does not sound bad, does it?

In the end, the Comfort Zone is nothing but a psychological state in which we feel to have control over our environment. We feel secure, and levels of anxiety and stress are low. When you are in your Comfort Zone your role, relationships and tasks are familiar to you. However, this is precisely the barrier for your improvement: you are not taking any risk in your life, in the means of possible.

Is it necessary to leave the Comfort Zone to achieve an improvement?

The answer to this question is not simple. Sometimes yes, it is necessary. For some steps in your life, you may need to embrace insecurity and be willing to assume some risks.

However, this is not the case in many other situations. Having your own Comfort Zone means that there is a certain skill set, a certain environment and a certain role in which you are strong. So pay attention to this:

You are living a routine in which your anxiety has been reduced to the minimum because you adapted yourself to the surrounding conditions and polished the skills required to live in the best way possible.

And this is actually not bad. The only problem is that it is probably not enough. So here you have a clear option, which is getting out of that mental zone and trying something new. You may be in that moment of your life in which you can choose changing your job, quitting your studies to work, moving abroad, studying something new, joining the gym, or even joining a different creed. Of course, all of these options sound quite sudden and experts will recommend you to make things step by step. But the final result is the same: you will have to face the moment of changing your habits.

But there is a second path. As in any other investment field, there is the risky way and the slow way. And, in my opinion, the risky way is the option for those who have nothing to lose. But we have already seen that the Comfort Zone implies the existence of something positive in your life, so you will probably have things to lose even when the price can be much higher.

The other way: do not leave it, expand it

The Comfort Zone has been typically explained as something fixed around us, a separated space of the area that contains everything we want. We can imagine it as something like this:

For this situation, the classical answer for reaching the goods has been the following one:

But we can identify two risks on this image: the first is that you are leaving behind your secure space to venture into the unknown. The second is that the ‘magical’ zone you want to reach, may not be accessible to you.

Now, we can have a look of the second way: the slow path, the low-risk investing.

I would like you to remember this set of drawings, because they contain the key concept of the article, beyond the words.

To follow this second path, you must have clear some concepts:

• The Comfort Zone is not bad by itself.
• The Comfort Zone is not a static and immovable place. You can work to make it have the shape and size you prefer.
• Adapting your environment to enter you Comfort Zone can be a slow and hard process. However, your risks and anxiety levels are lower and it implies some quality of life.
• Choosing the slow path must never be an excuse to be idle. If you do not work hard, you will never reach your rewards.
• There is a risky way and a slow way, but there is not an easy way.

How do I actually expand my Comfort Zone?

The first key concept is organizing your time. If you want to acquire new skills, discover new opportunities or new places without leaving your habits, you will need to schedule your life carefully. You do not want to leave your habits behind, so you will need to make a place for new things in your life. Consider reading about the personal and professional organization, and you will find many interesting ways to work on this.

The second is the identification of your objectives, and those impediments to reaching them. Take some time to analyze it. Observe your own life, your environment, your possibilities. What is separating you from success? If the path is too long, identify shorter objectives. Work for something smaller, and make it bigger step by step.

The last main idea is making use of your strengths. Make use of your skills, your hobbies, your friends or contacts. Networking is an important tool for getting access to new experiences, and I will write a dedicated article about it soon. You do not need to be the best at something, nor the most popular and outgoing person in your surroundings. You should just keep polishing your habits, the same habits you already have, to climb higher.

When you find some free time, you can fill it with new experiences. You can take courses, learn languages, find places to meet new people. But you do not need to sacrifice anything you already have: you will have the certainty that you are not putting anything at risk.

In case you want to launch a project, like creating a startup, you will probably know already that there are two important factors to take into account: time and money. Because of that, you do not need to leave your job or acting in secret so that the people do not steal your ideas. You only need to save money, have patience and find the perfect partners and contracts so that others can contribute with their time while you do it with your money and your free time. No more than your free time, no more than the money you saved and you did not need to spend. And yes, it may take years, so always have it in mind.

Conclusions

This article shows a brief introduction to the concept of “Comfort Zone” and identifies two possible ways of acting to reach success out of it. Even when we usually hear about the risky one, which is leaving your Comfort Zone, I wrote an introduction to the idea of working to expand your Comfort Zone from the inside. It is the slow and more secure way.

Both solutions can be valid, but it will always depend on the risks you can take. However, it is important to notice that the Comfort Zone is not bad, but its existence reveals positive aspects of your current life. You can work to make use of these aspects, your strengths, to improve your conditions.

• Understanding Event-Driven Architectures (EDA): the paradigm of the future
• BITCOIN case study: applying basic Digital Signal Processing into financial data
• Understanding non-profitable projects: the strategic positioning

Innovation is always spinning forward. Just like a Drill.

You may NOT need to leave the Comfort Zone was originally published in DRILL on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Y es que…

la forma de expresarnos e interactuar con el mundo habla sobre nosotros, y sobre cómo interpretamos lo que nos rodea.

Quería hacer un breve artículo sobre tipología de interfaces conversacionales, pero no he logrado encontrar nada parecido a lo que quiero hacer. Así que quiero que a partir de aquí os aseguréis de tener preparados los garfios y afiladas las patas de palo, n os adentramos en un archipiélago todavía sin nombres y repleto de peligros.

Aviso a navegantes: Por no hacer un artículo muy complejo y lleno de matices, he decidido usar indistintamente los nombres Chatbot, Interfaz Conversacional y Asistente virtual. No son exactamente lo mismo, pero ya tendremos un artículo sobre el tema más adelante.

Antes de arrancar, me gustaría dar las gracias a Alfonso de la Rocha, Sergio Novillo y a Alberto Fenoy por echarme una mano con el contenido del artículo! :)

Qué es una Interfaz

Para nosotros:

Las interfaces son todos aquellos canales por los cuales se permite la comunicación entre el hombre y la computadora. Lewis y Rieman (1993)

En realidad también contarían hombre-hombre, hombre-máquina, máquina-máquina, o mirlo-cacerola. Aunque esta última sería una conversación un tanto extraña. Pero para dejarlo sencillo, nos quedaremos con la definición de arriba. Hombre-máquina y viceversa.

Qué es un Chatbot

Es un robot (bot) que se comunica con nosotros mediante lenguaje natural, es decir,que habla (chat)

Fácil, ¿verdad?

Tipología

Por fin es hora de que entremos a hablar de tipos de Chatbot.

Existen tantas formas de segmentar y estudiar las Inteligencias Conversacionales como personas, y todas ellas igual de válidas. Pero vamos a centrarnos en aquellos ángulos que creo que más nos aportan a la hora de diseñar un chatbot.

Interacción (Inteligencia al escuchar)

Primero vamos a analizar cómo interaccionan el Chatbot y la persona. Esto está muy relacionado con cómo de inteligente es nuestro Chatbot al escuchar a la otra persona, y me gusta decir escuchar, porque escuchar implica recibir un mensaje y procesarlo, que es al final lo que estamos haciendo.

Cortana o Siri son de “Texto libre”, ya que puedes decirles lo que quieras. Por lo general usan Deep Learning, modelos estocásticos u otros tipos de modelado NLP muy potentes. Son los más avanzados y flexibles en cuanto a la “entrada” de información, y por lo tanto, los más difíciles de hacer.

Aquí entrarían desde los típicos chat de telegram que te dan opciones, hasta los personajes de videojuegos que te permiten escoger entre distintas lineas de conversación. Lo importante es que no puedes improvisar una respuesta. Esto se debe a que su inteligencia utiliza tecnologías menos avanzadas.

Por lo general, los Chatbot semi-guiados son Chatbots de texto libre, pero que dado el gran coste que supone analizar y explorar la gran cantidad de situaciones que pueden presentarse, los diseñadores deciden optar por una solución en la que el Chatbot recomienda flujos de conversación probados.

Esto tiene varias ventajas; no solo reduce el coste de diseño y desarrollo, sino que por lo general mejora mucho la experiencia de usuario, ya que es una forma muy natural de guiar al usuario a través de la conversación. Y es por esto que es lo que más se usa ahora mismo.

Aunque como siempre, este tipo de decisiones UX deben hacerse a medida para cada Chatbot, por lo que no toméis ninguna de mis recomendaciones como una recomendación general.

¡ Siempre debemos plantearnos qué estamos haciendo y por qué!

Inteligencia al responder

Esta vez vamos a analizar cómo de bueno es nuestro Chatbot respondiendo. Sin duda una parte fundamental de la Experiencia de Usuario.

Es importante entender que ahora hablamos del texto que responde, no del tema. Es decir, si queremos que responda sobre Buceo, no es lo mismo que la respuesta la invente el Chatbot que el diseñador/programador, por mucho que estemos hablando de Buceo. Así que analizaremos si las respuestas han sido definidas por los diseñadores o las genera automáticamente:

• Texto libre: Estos Chatbot deciden qué responder en función de sus algoritmos de Machine Learning, por lo que necesitan mucho entrenamiento y son difíciles de hacer.
• Guiado: En este caso los diseñadores han decidido qué va a decir en función del flujo de conversación, el contexto, u otros parámetros. Es el más sencillo de hacer, pero requiere tener a un buen Diseñador UX para que se asegure de gestionar adecuadamente las situaciones “troll”, gestionar bien al usuario, etc…
• Semi-guiado: Es lo que hay entre el texto libre y el guiado. Dejamos respuestas libres, pero controlamos los flujos de conversación que más nos interesen.

Existen casos grises con los chatbot que muestran emociones, ya que dependiendo la forma de gestionar ese “output” podría considerarse en un sitio u otro. Para nosotros serán semi-guiados, a no ser que tengan todas las respuestas predefinidas y escritas a lo bruto. Y digo a lo bruto, porque para un Chatbot no muy grande de 20 posibles respuestas y 3 posibles emociones, estaríamos hablando de 60 respuestas diferentes, que no es moco de pavo… estos últimos los consideraremos guiados.

Flujos de conversación

El flujo de conversación es nuestra capacidad de dirigir una conversación de forma natural

Mucho ojo, que este está muy relacionado con los anteriores, y puede parecer muy similar.

Aquí hablamos de las diferentes direcciones que va tomando la conversación, y quién las establece. Es decir, estamos analizando quién decide el tema del que vamos a hablar, que puede ser buceo, golf o paracaidismo. Vamos a definir los tipos y ya verás como se entiende mejor.

• Conversación libre: El Chatbot decide de qué vamos a hablar, puede que le apetezca hablar de golf, o de cocina asiática, o del tiempo. Es el más difícil de hacer, y se suele utilizar para Chatbots como Siri, o Simsimi. Es decir, en Asistentes Virtuales generales y Chatbots de temática genérica, ocio o entretenimiento.
• Conversación guiada: Los diseñadores/programadores han decidido que después de la pregunta A, va la pregunta B. O que en función de la respuesta podría ir la B1, la B2 o la B3. Aquí los diseñadores son los que deciden por donde se irá la conversación, y es tarea del UX evitar en la medida de lo posible que el usuario decida ponerse a hablar de cosas que no hemos pensado, como de sus vacaciones en el Caribe.
• Conversación semi-guiada: Este es el caso gris. Cualquier chatbot que muestre un “no te he entendido bien” o se salga del guión durante unos instantes. Es el tipo de chatbot más común, ya que da muchas herramientas y flexibilidad al programador, pero asegurándonos que la experiencia de usuario va a ser muy coherente entre usuarios. Se usa mucho en Chatbots para marcas, e-commerces, y corporativos.

Todavía nos quedan ver otras perspectivas desde las que estudiar la tipología de las Interfaces Conversacionales, pero lo vamos a dejar para una otro día.

Si te ha gustado el artículo, puede que te guste este:

• 5 conclusiones sobre nlp, AI, Interfaces Conversacionales y Chatbot

Iván de Ramón

Iván de Ramón (LinkedIn)

Digital Transformation & Innovation | Business developer

Dime cómo hablas y te diré qué eres. Tipos de Chatbot was originally published in DRILL on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.