Executing Design, Data Viewer, Speech Recognition, and more

Executing Design

It’s time for FileMaker’s take on UX design, brought to you by Chih Hsiao, Senior UX Designer at FileMaker:

How do you incorporate design into your day-to‐day development activities? Design is not an afterthought but an ongoing practice of planning, testing, and validating your ideas.
In this session, we look at examples that demonstrate key checkpoints, deliverables, and testing methods throughout the development cycle, as well as a scope-driven strategy to help you improve the quality and efficiency of your design output.

Hsiao talks about getting started, figuring out what your client wants, even when they don’t know for sure what that is. His path to solving this includes:

  • Value
  • Appearance
  • Control Interface
  • Content Structure
  • Tasks
  • Purpose

FileMaker’s Data Viewer

You may not realize the full potential of FileMaker’s Data Viewer, a tool most developers heavily depend upon to bring a solution to their clients.  Learn more about the data viewer here:

The Data Viewer can be a great tool to test your pudding before serving it at the dinner table. In this article we’ll take a look at some things you can do with the Data Viewer. You can test your data while debugging a script, you can write and test calculations, and you can even set variables to use later. Data can be sorted by the column headers, if you hover over with your mouse you can expand the data that is in a variable, you can even retype and change the data in your variable and you can double-click on it to see it in its entirety

I use it heavily to mix text and variables in emails and/or custom display fields, as well as debugging scripts. Being able to see the values of variables and fields as the script progresses is invaluable in finding the bugs.

Source: Data Viewer in FileMaker Advanced – Soliant Consulting


Microsoft made speech recognition software that’s as accurate as humans

It turns out transcribers have a 5.6% error rate, and that is accuracy level this new software achieves:

The software itself relies on deep neural networks — technology that interprets data in a way similar to how the human brain works — as well as specialized graphics processing units (GPUs) that allow the software to learn at speeds not previously possible.

The milestone has far-reaching implications. On a practical level, it means that Microsoft’s products could soon be a whole lot better at understanding humans. The researchers name Microsoft’s personal assistant app Cortana and the Xbox as two products that could immediately benefit from the research. Accessibility software, such as instant transcription services, could also benefit from the advancement.

The next step is to get a computer to understand the captured speech.  That’s when computers will surpass humans, as humans are notoriously bad at comprehending the both the written and spoken word.


People don’t believe what you tell them.
They rarely believe what you show them.
They often believe what their friends tell them.
They always believe what they tell themselves.
Seth Godin, Seth Godin’s Blog, 07-29-06

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