A Donkey on the Edge

So still no Seed notes eh? I’m struggling a bit because I filtered a lot out and on balance didn’t really pick up anything practical that I wasn’t doing already…

Jason made a comment about hospitals being broken in response to Peter’s question “if you could fix anything what would it be? and earlier on in the day Carlos Segura had made a comment about only ultra-creative types using the collage medium.

This triggered a memory, check out this awesome collage by Anna Sandberg which was supporting MUF’s proposal to CABE’s Healthy Hospitals project.

The full MUF proposal is still online and is well worth a look :-)

Well, the panel is finishing up and we’ll be heading out for wine soon. As per Serge’s request, I’ll try and get some notes up tomorrow.

Just saw this on LinuxKungFu. I love “how the analyst designed it” nothing like solving the wrong problems by not looking at the bigger picture. Fantastic:-)

Hey, Jed’s on TV :-)

Well, the afternoon was pretty good too, but with a dead powerbook battery and no charger I ended up sending commentary via Twitter.

13:00 — Lunch

One design direction will do — AMEN

12:38 — Larissa Meek (AgencyNet) Getting your designs approved: 12 Simple Rules
watching a demo of an Aston Martin website and I hate it! Hard to beleive but this agency team is making exactly the same mistakes the boo.com crew. They are trying to replicate a sensual experience using tech and it just doesn’t work :-(

… and at this point, Dug’s battery expired and he switched to iphone mode. I can’t believe I forgot the bloody charger this morning!

Casino is a “feedback engine” (he’s describing what the adiction thing call “near-win experiences” ie gamblers never loose, they just almost win) Vegas master of feedback…

Creating delightful experiences: Innocent’s “stop looking at my bottom”, fun, easter eggs (find it and share)

Andy just said “social object”

11:36 — Andy Budd is doing great things showing examples of great experience curves

[ interview break ]

I just interviewed Steve Pearce, I wanted to ask him the agency questions I posted earlier. How does Poke get clients to focus on the bottom of the iceberg after the pitch was won on the basis of the shiny top of the iceberg.

He reckons Poke has solved this by saying “no”, by never going to the client with a ready-made solution. In ongoing work, he always keeps referring to interaction, thinking about the backend and appserver looking for hooks into the experience. He quotes the example of the Topshop re-skin where his team looked carefully at the appserver and found a number of services that had been disabled, never implemented or under-used. As a result, he was able to use an up-sell module to create a dynamic user-ratings system.

The second question is the Hugh McLeod question about agencies being asked help clients redefine their business and how agencies are going to fit into this new world. Steve’s take on this was

that agencies live the client’s product (use Windows machines to sell Microsoft products) and build deep relationships with clients such that the feedback mechanism from agency to client can be about a lot more that just the current project.

Finally, Steve reckons

that Poke is based on values and that if those are always kept at the core of all projects, the thinking about the project (and by extension the client’s business) will naturally flow back to the client.

11:25 — Andy Budd (Clearleft) is doing “Designing the User Experience Curve”

(Break: back at 11:20)

10:42 — Andy Clarke of Stuff & Nonsense & Steve Pearce are taking questions

Well, I came to see Steve Pearce from Poke and managed to catch the last five minutes of his chat.

He did an interesting presentation on the process of creating user experiences. He uses a great iceberg metaphor (see others on this) to describe the process.

It’s an interesting parallel to Jesse James Garett’s “Elements” in that in the iceberg metaphor you dive under the surface to the bottom of the experience and then float up to the top will in JJG land you float up from abstract to concrete via the stages of strategy, scope, structure, skeleton and surface :-)

Wow, you know, I don’t normally read Bob Lutz’s stuff over at the GM FastLane Blog which is odd because I quote the blog to clients all the time. Just took a peek today and saw this:

… In the end, it cost us much more than that; it cost us our reputation for technology leadership and innovation.

We made that mistake once. We won’t make it again. I think the whole company has learned when you step out and do bold things, you win and when you’re cautious and let other people do the bold things, you lose.

Many great ideas die every day because we value the safety of the tried-and-true over the risk that true innovation requires. This is not going to be the case with Volt; we are going for the brass ring.

Great stuff, a senior VP publicly admitting he fucked up (and promising not to trip over the same log twice).

So this volt thing seems pretty cool. It’s a different strategy than the Tesla plan. The board at Tesla Motors are banking on a high-performance car (the 2008 Tesla Roadster) to get the ev ball rolling and they plan to roll out an inexpensive family saloon after that.

Also, the Volt is an E-REV so still factoring in the petrol pump…

I am currently looking at a guideline which reads:

• All sites must be resizable
• User can select higher and lower resolution and layout must adapt
• User must be able to resize font and layout must adapt accordingly

The next line reads:

The grid is fixed and pages will be exactly 955 pixels with a 21/40 pixel step.

So hum… the site is both fixed and flexible, not sure how to approach this one. I guess a slight distortion of the space-time continuum should let me produce a design that passes muster with the brand police…

Ah guidelines ;-)

You know, the last couple of years I’ve bought conference passes and then failed to escape work long enough to attend which is daft really… so I’m going to fowd this year ok?

Anyways, I signed up on the carson website and was reading the about the speakers (looking forward to hearing Steve Pearce) when I stumbled on a link to Headscape the online home of conference chair Paul Boag.

Now, Nicky always has to explain jokes to me and I’m never sure if people are serious or not and this gets worse as I get older… So I’m gonna take a punt: I think headscape could do better. A lot better.

I’ve been following the birth of the Tesla roadster and this morning Scobble twittered his test drive in the first production car with the company CEO. Things have really been moving along and the Tesla Motors website has been updated with lots of juicy stuff.

The item that I am listening to right now is an mp3 of the January 2008 Tesla Town Hall meeting (I’ve grabbed the file so the link stays valid). This is just great, it’s all the senior management giving a report and answering questions from the leading lights in the EV business. Dry as hell but very interesting if you’re curious about the inner workings of a business that is trying to kick-start the EV revolution by producing road-legal, safe and of course high-performance cars in large enough numbers to make them a valid alternative.

The recording includes the CEO talking to disappointed customers (length of waiting list), goes into technical details about gearbox design and even covers comments and questions from individuals who put $50,000 money down for a car who aren’t being allowed to become investors (I know if I put that kind of money down as a deposit I’d be wanting a little love). This is live dialogue and certainly shows access.

Of course, it doesn’t hurt that the Tesla out-performs most petrol-powered super cars (including the McLarren F1 at some speeds).

Apple says get a Mac So you know, I replaced my lovely 12” iBook with a lovely 12” powerbook back in 2006. Since then, I’ve travelled miles and miles on motorcycle and Eurostar and the whole time my mini workstation has been powering through… I tend to have Virtual PC, Photoshop, Illustrator, Indesign, Omnigraffle, BBEdit, three or four browsers and Omnioutline all running at the same time (while downloading podcasts and listening to iTunes) with snappy response and power to spare…

Now, I know that’s no big deal in modern laptop terms but for me (as I create my own unique value in partnership with apple’s products) it’s both great and exactly what need. Unfortunately, everything is beginning to run on Intel macs, Adobe CS3 looks like Leopard only so if I upgrade I’m also gonna need a new system… add to that the running Windows without VPC and I really need to update my Powerbook.

So, dammit Steve, I thought you were going to anounce the new 12” powerbook last month, but nooooo, you had to go and do the Air™ thing:-(

Steve, this is a machine I cannot use. For starters, I don’t need thin, I need small. I need bounce-resistance (speed bumps and motorways) and I need crush-resistance (as I get kicked out of the conference room again and hastily stuff reports and coiled cables into my already overstuff laptop bag).

So where does that leave me…

I need a new laptop with an optical drive, an ethernet, an intel processor and a 12” form-factor. I need it soon, so if I can’t get a 12” Powerbook, what are my options? I may actually have to shudder switch to a PC and go with a Dell or a Toshiba…

MWSF 2008 keynote bingo

It’s Stevenote - 5.

I’m now pining for an iPhone hardware update: a better camera, a hardware camera button, 32Gig storage, etched or rubberized grips, no disgusting pimp-my-handset chrome surround. OK?

I’ve been thinking quite a bit about colours since before Christmas and have been trying to build a couple of colourways. In the process I’ve been playing with swatch books and boy, the whole pantone colour system has continued to grow in size and complexity since I first started designing stuff (hey Daniel, you remember buying sheets of stickyback Pantone color to make comps with?). Now you can even get an expresso set.

Not exactly the colour scheme I was looking for but with my birthday in late January a treat may be in order:-)

OK, so I’m finishing the Orange gig which means new phone. I picked up an iPhone on Sunday and so far, the experience has been mixed…

I’ll add to this as I get used to the device…

Phil asks an interesting question: open source experience design?

If Nokia were running the US Federal Emergency Management Agency, New Orleans would be 20 feet above sea level by now.

I’ve not read Michael Mace before but with a quote like that he’s being added to my feedreader:-)

Mobile Opportunity: The war between Nokia and Apple (thanks phil)

Terrible pictures but astonishing transport system. The docking kiosk allows individual or subscription payments using your oyster card—get out of the metro and hop on one of these:-)

One of the things I’m enjoying about facebook is the complete lack of rounded corners in the interface:-)

You know, I just twittered this, but I get the odd S60 developer reading my nonsense here so I thought I’d put the question on the blog.

My current S60 wish list:

• I want to run software on my N95 so when I plug it into my mac with the usb cable, it emulates my iPod and causes iTunes to sync a number of playlists onto my phone memory. How cool would that be?
• and while I’m begging, has anyone thought about turning the N95 into a portable wi-fi to 3G bridge? Imagine the scenario, you all get to the meeting and no one can work out the wep password or find the right cable and it’s all going tits up (I’m always amazed at how difficult large corporations make it to get on the internet). You whip out your N95, turn on wi-fi and the base station triggers a 3G data connection. All your co-workers go into their wi-fi menus and connect to “dug’s phone” and voilà, we’re all online!

I don’t know enough about radio transceivers to know if that second one is possible. It could be that the wi-fi card in the N95 can’t be configured to be a base station. Still, it does two-way traffic so you could see how that oughta work…

…and here’s a link to something interesting NRC - Mobile Web Server

So we’ve all been using the logo-in-the-top-left-corner as a link to the start or “home” page for years. Perhaps as a nod to the brand guidelines, it’s always seemed like best practise not to tamper with the logo in any way. I’d sort of parked this issue in the never think about it again department until I noticed this:

So simple, so effective… Not a big deal, but nice work:-)

I closed my Zopa account yesterday and requested the paypal funds I had invested be returned to my Paypal account. The folk on the phone were helpful and courteous but I can’t help feeling a bit amazed by the experience (Zopa is supposed to be a great site, so perhaps my expectations were inflated).

I’m reluctant to pointlessly hurl vitriol at the company because on balance, while the experience ultimately sucked, there were some very good bits as well as bad to the service.

The good news:

• Brilliant idea, cuts out the middle-men
• UK-based telephone support
• Friendly staff
• Beautiful design
• Secure (https) email system

The bad:

• The risk-to-interest rate ratio
• An email support loop that didn’t resolve my difficulty
• The interface experience

It’s this last problem that pushed this Zopa customer over the edge. It’s interesting to see how superficially minor problems in the user interface can have such a large impact.

The interface really is very beautiful, but it degrades quickly once you start clicking around. To be fair, I wasn’t able to explore the whole service, and in particular I never got to the ‘magic moment’ of actually lending or borrowing funds (I did try). But the journey I did manage was a rough one. The problems seem to arise from the site’s scripts.

Two items caused me to fail my tasks. The first is a javascript validator that prevented me from successfully choosing and saving my security details (this should be really easy to fix) and the second is a series of redirects and cookie-setting choices that mean I didn’t get feedback as to where I was in the lending process (I got as far as getting cash to lend into the system but never managed to set up a loan).

The Javascript thing makes an interesting example of how things can go wrong.

Here’s what happened (if you can’t read the text, click on the images for a larger version):

Step one—I tried to complete the logon form like this:

Which returned this screen:

Now I always assume I’ve done something wrong when a form comes back like this so I also tried this:

and this:

and this:

and even, after taking a long look at the “dd/MM/yyyy” prompt:

All of these returned the message:

Oops, please check that the memorable date is correctly formatted and between the years 1753 and 9999

(I did finally get in by typing the numerical equivalent of asdfasdf which of course meant I couldn’t retype the date when later prompted for it)

Some possible solutions?

Option one, the bare minimum. Change the text of the error message so that it contains an imperative. It should read “do this and achieve that” not “this might be wrong”.

Option two, if the date range is so important (remember the original error that specified a range from 1753 to 9999) then don’t allow the user to input an out of range date. Give them a select statement which only contains valid years.

Option three, make the error message specific to what is wrong and suggest a correct alternative. Offer links to fix the problem.

Finally, as I was about to hang up from my last call with the nice folk in customer support, I was told that the system didn’t work in Firefox and that I needed to use Internet Explorer. Yes, she actually, really, did said that…

You know, I wasn’t going to get all huffy about it, but I just don’t believe the explanations coming out of Yahoo.

I ignored the many emails explaining how this was going to be a seamless transition and that us early adopters who sent Katerina our cash from day one would be happily assimilated into the collective and that really this was for the best for all concerned. So I finally got this today:

Aside from just not liking their style or their products, one of the main reasons I never got a yahoo id is because the options suck. Well, not in any inherent way, but because they’ve been carrying a registration database around since 1996 so have more than two users.

Call me a wanker (and many do) but I’ve grown used to having nice logins, I’m “dug” on delicious and most other places. If not, I’m Bozo (generally for thing’s I’d be a little embarrassed to discuss with my mom) or even donkeyontheedge if I’m trying to extend or integrate with the blog.

So of course I tried donkeyontheedge@yahoo.com (and co.uk) and hey, of course they’re gone, as are dieyahoodie, dieyahoodiediedie, yahooarescum, filthyyahooscum (which I thought sounded a bit like self-criticism but which Nicki suggested) and any permutation of yahoo and sucks…

Nope, I’m not kidding;-)

So yeah, has this harmed my experience of Flickr, has it impacted our network of one? Well, yes it has. Am I going to stop using Flickr? No. Am I going to stop fantasising about Katerina? Well, probably not but I’m gonna try, dammit. In any case, while I was regressing to the state of a vindictive six-year-old, I finally managed to find a yahoo id that wasn’t taken:

This rant inspired by Digital Mavericks: Opal Fruits, Marathon, Jif, now Flickr - Grrrrr! via Technorati.

Recently, I’ve been working as part of the Orange group design and usability team. It’s been quite interesting as I’m involved with teams who are busy developing the offerings well into the future.

Today I’m in Paris at a their future thinking conference. Should be very interesting. Confidential, but interesting. Ever since seeing that Cory Doctorow video on the theme of self-determination I’ve been seeing the mobile network operators I work with in a whole different light, as custodians of some really important stuff.

(This is a Textile rendition of my OmniOutliner file)

• Not a niche
• Web authentication sucks
  • Use same password
  • Which account did i use?
  • Email addresses better
    • But which one?
    • What about out of date addresses
  • Too many usernames
  • Too many passwords
  • Too many forms
• Single sign-on will save us
  • MSN Passport
    • But would you trust these men with your identity?
  • TypeKey
    • Ben and Mena - I trust them now, but what if they turn evil?
• OpenID
  • Decentralised single sign-on
  • Identity is a URI
    • Shows zoomr.com
      • types in url —> redirects to livejournal —> log in to live journal —> grant ID validation —> back to zoomr and login with one string!
    • But…
      • openID attributes (not tokens but still breakable?)
• Is this decentralised?
  • How do we own our own identity?
    • I run my own id server (shows link tag)
      • jyte.com
    • Who provides openID?
      • bunch of folk (6A, etc)
    • Other ways to authenticate
      • dyndns
      • jabber
      • rsa keyfobs
      • secure certificates
• One obvious reason to support openID
  • Build some OpenID shit now!
  • Hey, hundreds of early adopters need to create loads of accounts. Give them OpenID
• OpenID is an example, of dumb networks
  • the intelligence is on the edges
  • OpenID conforms to the same model
• What can we build?
  • Shared profile information
  • Use OpenID to extend the lifetime of cookies
  • blog / wiki antispam because it saves readers from creating yet another account
  • Pre-approved accounts
  • Corp SSO
    • OID server behind the firewall
  • OpenID and microformats
    • hCard
    • XFN
      • You can import a user’s contact by introspecting their OpenID
  • OpenID site specific hacks
    • Login with ‘X’ id to grab the services you need
  • Social whitelisting
    • Share the whitelist with your friends
    • Publish the list of OIDs that you trust to comment
  • Jyte
    • Lightweight trust networks
      • Comment on ‘id claims’
      • Jyte group export (sort of like social whitelist)
      • Manage an invite only group using Jyte then hook that into another site’s authentication mechanism
  • Decentralised social network
• What sucks about OpenID
  • Phishing
    • Example of “more kittens” website with man in middle attack
      • redirect to evil kitten
    • Possible solutions
      • Card space
    • We can defeat phishing with competition
    • Problem can be solved at the edges
  • What happens in the OID server crashes?
    • One for the applications
      • Cascade through multiple OpenIDs with their account
  • Privacy
    • I don’t want my boss to know that I’m a furry
      • Use multiple OpenIDs
        • Pro ID
        • Furry ID
        • Gaming etc ID
  • OpenID is hard to explain
    • Ready for early adopters
    • Need to develop this to be able to explain it
• (Mentions Tom Coates twice!)

Well, had to get Clemmie to school this morning so I missed the first talk:-(

I’m taking my notes in Omni Outliner today, rather that just typing away stream-of-consciousness style. Later I’ll have a go at generating a mind map or two (mine never seem to be as wonderful as the ones you see on flickr, wish me luck…)

Here is the OO tree for the presentation by the New York Times:

Khoi Vinh: Managing UI

• What we do what we don’t do
  • We do not design the news
    • Story visualisations
  • We do design the platform
    • Exremely high volume of publishing
    • Impossible to art direct every story
    • We do slideshows
      • “Explore the great wall”
    • We do templates
  • Exceptions
    • Special editions
    • Editor and techs work together
    • These exceptions are not compatible with template system
  • Make choices about where to put resources
    • News is templated
    • Tools are limited
      • Instant publishing
      • But not instant design
• The future
  • We hope new tech will let us design in real time
• Content and functionality - from delivery to conversation
  • Shift in consumption of news
    • Consume differently
    • Consume with a different mindset
  • From “talk to” to “talk with”
    • (From one 2 many —> many to many)
  • Content begets functionality
    • memeorandum.com
    • digg.com
    • NYT is building discrete apps
      • MyTimes
      • TimesFile
        • Saving and tagging re articles
      • Times Topic
      • Timesreader
    • Dispersing technology through site
      • No ghetto for multimedia
        • Inline audio
        • Inline video
      • Permalinking through pay wall (yes!)
• The design approach - a new paradygm
  • Evolution of the tension between editors and readers
    • Shows evolution of empowering designers
    • Contrasts evolution of empowering readers
    • Consumers love both high and lo quality
      • HDTV — YouTube
      • Skype — sms
      • Times reader —- memeorandum
      • Digital SLRs — Cameraphones
    • The siren call of 2.0
      • Consumers just want what’s useful
      • Don’t want basic mission obscured
        • What are the basics? avoid featuristis
  • Management - getting it done
    • A definition of management: “the art of getting things done through people”
    • Not the same for designers
  • Establishing design principles
    • The cost of interface
      • Free isn’t really free
        • Additional interface bits
        • Additional code
        • Additional testing
        • Long term support
        • Feature noise users need to tune out
    • The cost of expression
      • In traditional media authors bear the cost of expression
      • In digital media the cost of expression is shared with the user
    • Our applications are machines
    • Over determination
      • “All things are overdetermined. For any single thing of importance there are multiple reasons” - M Scott Peck
    • Options are obstructions
    • Offend experts not beginners
      • Shows bell curve - most users are intermediate
      • But most features are used by experts
    • Navigation within reason
      • You don’t need to get everywhere from everywhere
    • Test like you mean it
      • Real users
      • Avoid executive testing
      • Test for usability not acceptance
    • Writing is interface design
      • twitter.com
        • “What are you doing?” the label is part of the interface
        • This has a big effect on content creation
    • Make a thing what it is (affordance! yes!)
      • Let tabs be tabs, let buttons be buttons, let links be links
    • Design, don’t decorate
    • Context over consistency
      • Variety, not monotonous (change OK)
    • Use a grid
      • Shows a NYT grid (note advertising doesn’t fit the grid)

Meet BT Contact :-)

I ‘ve recently switched from my shiny new Nokia N73 back to my ropey old Nokia N70.

The N70 was my second Symbian handset and to date, it is by far the best in software terms (the keypad layout on the 6600 was waaaaay better). Over the last two years or so it’s experienced loads of heavy lifting use as most of the mobloggin on Donkey was done on it. It runs stacks of software I use everyday and with a bit of configuration it can really compete with the latest smartphones.

Sometimes it feels like Nokia makes a point of taking a step backward for every cool new feature they come up with.

Like everyone else I was really psyched by the N73 and bought one as soon as it became available (I even ended up getting a Vodafone contract to get my hands on one). Anyway, I ended up returning the handset. Twice. The firmware just isn’t up to controlling the phone properly and even with the latest update from Nokia, the phone still remains borderline unusable.

The only thing wrong with the N70 was the lens cover. It just opened too easily exposing the lens to fluff. In the process of improving the handset, here are a few of Nokia’s bigger steps forward and back.

• The N73 has a Zeiss lens:-)
  Yippee, except the imaging software is crap. The white point default is way to close to 6500K verything comes out with a depressing blueish hue (this on all three handsets and two versions of the firmware). Unless you only shoot in tungsten lighting. The N70’s lens is rubbish but the imaging software is great (or appropriately configured out of the box) so quality pix a plenty.
• N73 has a 3 megapixel chip :-)
  But in such a small form factor, the end result is more garbage in the blue channel. Add to that, the increased file size and costlier uploads, and the 3meg chip becomes a complete waste of processor cycles (and bandwidth).

Still, I mustn’t grumble, the N73 has a much better lens cover. Yes indeed it does:-)

So anyway, here are the configs I mentioned earlier:

• Go into “tools” and find the “media key” app. Set the key association to “contacts”
• In settings, change the right-hand soft key to your Gmail application

With the Orange home screen app, from picking up my handset to reading my address book I have three actions: scroll, click, click. With the media key configed, that reduces to just a single click (on the talknow/symbian media key key).

The Gmail soft key thing has two benefits. Firstly, with one click to Gmail who needs a Blackberry? Another benefit is you longer launch that anoying web-browser a hundred times a day when all you were trying to do was cancel an action…

Anyways, I think I’ll go away and do a usability comparison of the 6600, N70 and N73 keypads now, more later…

Really good piece on the Zune’s user experience chez Lefsetz:

Simplicity. Usability. Delivering what the customer wants. Sounds easy, but Microsoft fucked it up.

Lefsetz Letter - Zune (via monkchips)

The State Of Web Development - Ajax set to surpass Flash in ‘07

Which is really good news for no hard and fast reason. Ever since I first learnt about the DOM I’ve been speccing interfaces that use its manipulation and arguing with developers over their implemnetation.

In 2000 I conceived a remote aircraft dashboard as part of an online game. The designer and coder created the whole thing (an Airbus cockpit with jillions of knobs and buttons) with sprites and JS and it worked beautifully.

I think at the time, part of the problem was finding time in the project plan to do client-side scripting. It was tough to explain to clients why we needed those extra days in the budget.

Well since the big JJG Ajax article and the flood of lovely Web2.0 thingies, it’s become a lot easier to code and also a lot easier to explain.

Now that Yahoo have released their pattern library this should get even easier. We’ve all struggled with how to describe asychronous behaviour in a boxes and arrows world, take a look at the Yahoo stuff, they’ve done a pretty good job.

Yet another worthy initiative is under way by our friends at the w3c. This time they’re looking at the inaccessibility of captcha, those funny images of twisted letters one is often asked to enter when signing up for web services.

Captchas are what is known as a Turing test, used in this instance to prevent automated systems creating accounts and abusing the system. My guess is they work quite well for their original purpose. The problem is that if you’re blind, can’t see that well or have another cognitive problem like dislexia, you can’t prove that you’re not a computer.

The initiative will be looking at accessible ways for humans to prove their dna.

I’m routinely amazed at how eBay manages to be one of the internet’s most successful services with one of the worst interfaces in the business sitting on top of some of the nastiest presentation-layer code I’ve had the misfortune to view source on…

Check out this prompt. I arrived at this page after sending a response to a fellow ebay user who was querying the high postage on an item I’m selling. At the top of the screen a reasuring message tells me that all has gone as expected, that is that my message to the other user was successfully delivered.

Now look down about 50 pixels and just to the right is a huge yellow call-to-action button telling me to “Respond to this question”.

So did I send the damn message or what?

The Journal of Usability Studies (JUS) is a peer-reviewed, international, online publication dedicated to promoting and enhancing the practice, research, and education of usability engineering.

A warm welcome to issue one volume one of the Online International Journal of Usability Studies

Well, don’t get me started on the bloody ‘brushed metal’ look… OK, on the whole I’ve been impressed with most of Apple’s UX work. The iApps however are just plain shit and this little gem just about sums it up for
me.

A screen is a fixed-width grid. A photograph is a fixed width grid. If you want to decide how large or small an image should be in a window it’s really very simple. Depending on the resolution you’re running,
you want 1-up, 2-up, 3-up or more. What you don’t want is the ability to resize in infinite increments. What this ‘feature’ actually achieves is that you can never get the image to the size you want — the largest size which allows the display of x images in a given window.

In the pre-Nextstep, Apple design team, the slider you can see above would have been a drop-down, or a slider that snapped to the 1-up, 2-up etc sizes.

Grrrrr…

Received the following from a reader called Andrew MacLaren a few days ago. He does make some good points so I’ll see what I can do:-)

…by some unfortunate deep linking i somehow landed at your ‘website’, having spent a few miserable minutes reading your mostly uninspiring and often self-rightous (pap) posts, it would appear to me that in many ways you come across as a borderline wanker, and although that may seem harsh i’ve just had another look and to put at nicely its a bag of shite! and from what i can gather this is what you actually do!??

Unfiltered commentary on usability…
…interface design, advertising and marketing communication.

surely your site reflects none of the above? It certainly falls flat on its lame ass when it comes to either interface design or usabilty! Although there is consistancy in the layout (black text and blue links), the positioning of the main elements appears confusing while also being extremely flat (not sure what content / links are of most importance), and in terms of ‘usabilty’ what the fuck is going on with ‘Topics and Donkey’ and ‘Archive’ being butchered into a scrollable box? surely if ‘Topics on Donkey’ contains many of your important links / latest information - they should be instantly available to the user? but there mainly hidden, which in fairness benefits everyone!

I’m sure this feedback is greatly appreciated and i will no doubt here from you soon.

Your extremely sincerly,
Andy

So I’m looking for satellite imagery of the island of Marawah around 100 kilometres to the west of the city of Abu Dhabi, just to the north of the Khor al Bazm. I end up with a traditional satellite image courtesy of Googlemaps:

So far so handy. I can zoom in on the island, not quite close enough to make out any real detail, but close enough to show geophysical features that when overlain onto the map of settlements makes some sort of sense (dwellings near a river, an old track linking two places an so on). Pretty neat, so I start looking at Abu Dhabi and the desert to the south. What I’m finding amazing is the level of detail you can get on some of these scan areas:

I don’t know if this is an American base, but that big grey thing on the runway sure looks like a B52 (note the empty parking spot between the other planes). The little, white, rectangular hut on the right looks a lot like the hardened hangars you operate out of in the FA/18-Hornet flight sim.

Of course, with no idea of the time the photograph was taken, there is very little ‘intelligence’ value in this kind of image. Still, it’s kinda odd being able to look at these images. Try scrolling your viewport over to North Korea—if they new the level of detail (hydro-electrics and other industrial facilities are all sharp as a pin on the close-up) being shown on Google, the NK censorship guys would have a fit!

Oh and you know, I’ve been fantasising abot the day when asynchronous javascript would let me load an image in anticipation of it being requested by the user. I could just drool at that scroll action all day…

Thank you Chris for pointing me to this piece on featuritis :-)

Give users what they actually want, not what they say they want. And whatever you do, don’t give them new features just because your competitors have them!

Ahhh love those logos with a swoosh. Speakup has compiled a definitive list of design clichés with a prognostic on each. I’m embarassed to admit I’m fond of bubble-head people… Still, I suppose I could always get my thinking cap back on.

Recently lost my rag with a very nice person on one of the HCI lists I subscribe to. My juvenile, agressive and totally uncalled-for behaviour was triggered by the fact that the person works at Verisign (regular readers may remember this, this, this, this, or even this or may even have displayed this banner). She was enquiring about font-sizes, not as it turns out whether scalable fonts in web services are a good idea (she already knows they are) but whether they were in use in real-world applications (as opposed to public-facing websites).

As part of the general flow of font-size-related helpfulness, one of the respondents posted an interesting page from Human Factors

…What can we conclude from these studies?

• No Web page fonts should be less than 10-points,
• Optimal reading speed for most adults will be elicited with 12-point fonts (size=3)
• There is probably no reliable difference in reading speed for most adults when viewing common font styles (Arial, Verdana, Georgia, Times New Roman),
• Most users tend to prefer sans serif fonts (Arial, Verdana), and
• Older users will benefit from type sizes that are at least 14-points.

All the tests mentioned in the article were performed with black text on a white background, but the three different tests used different monitor sizes and resolutions which makes useful comparison difficult.

The findings were helpful, but only up to a point. Strangely, all the research is conducted in point units rather than pixels (font-size:9px) or keywords (font-size:x-small) which would have been more useful, as point measures have no real consistency in the world web browsers, OSs, video cards and monitors.

Other factors would have increased the usefulness of this research.

The relationship between point-size and line-length is not factored in and would definitely account for some of the results. Not including a number of characters per line in a readability test isn’t such a great idea (strangely, the guy who taught me this stuff specified number of words, not characters—I’ve never worked out if the brain handles words and characters differently and whether I should be counting characters or words in my layouts).

Anyways, getting back on topic, I was able to report that a large financial services institution that I was contracting for a couple of weeks back has implemented scalable fonts even in it’s ‘private’ applications (it offers password-protected tools for UK financial advisers) which is really very encouraging.

Finally, has anyone used the Schaffer-Weinschenk Method of user-centred design and is it any good?