Friday, November 10, 2006

Usability Around The Globe: A Pitch For Contributors

by Paul Sherman on November 10, 2006 · 0 comments

I guess books are like potato chips. It’s hard to stop at just one. I’m planning a second book about usability and user-centered design, and I’m looking for a few more people who are interested in contributing chapters. If you’re interested, contact me.

The book I am planning is a follow-on to the book that I just finished editing, “Usability Success Stories: How Organizations Improve By Making Easier-To-Use Software and Web Sites.”

I am planning a follow-on to Usability Success Stories because usability engineering and user-centered design are growing in importance worldwide. While the case studies in Usability Success Stories are quite compelling, all of the contributors are based in the US. (This was due to the fact that I had relatively few contacts outside the US when I began planning the book in 2002…)

I believe that the high-tech industry would benefit from hearing about the great work being done by usability and user-centered design practitioners around the globe, not just in the US. I am confident that there are many compelling stories to tell.

Like Usability Success Stories, the follow-on book will contain case studies of how user-centered design contributed to a successful outcome, be it a web site, software product, or hardware product. The authors will also explore the organizational factors that helped or hindered the application of UCD. Because this will be a collection of stories from different nations and cultures, I would also like the contributors to explore how their national or regional culture played a role – positive, negative, or a bit of both – in the success.

If you’re interested, let me know!

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The Most Useful Software Product In The World (To Me)

by Paul Sherman on November 10, 2006 · 0 comments

in Everything Else

I have a problem: I habitually click “reply to all” when responding to emails. I can’t help myself. I do it EVERY time I reply to an email. I don’t know why. But I can’t stop.

As you can imagine, this has caused me no end of embarrassment. Countless times I’ve responded to an email, intending to communicate only with the sender, and shamed myself by writing to everyone on the To: list.

The last time I did this was particularly embarrassing. So I went googling for a “behavior-modification” tool. I found one. It’s a plug-in for M$ Outlook called Reply To All Monitor. Full disclosure: I have no formal or informal relationship with Sperry Software, the producer of Reply To All Monitor.

The plug-in pretty much does exactly what the title suggests. It monitors you as you reply to emails. When it detects that you’ve pressed the “Reply to all” button, it simply pops a confirmation dialog. If you in fact intended to reply to all recipients, you click Yes. If not, you click No, and the plug-in strips out all respondents but the original sender.

Simple. But for me, incredibly useful. It’s by far the best 10 dollars I’ve ever dropped on a software product.

Whoever runs Sperry Software is pretty savvy about email-related behavioral disorders. Check out their product page. They’ve got a plug-in to remind you to include attachments (and who hasn’t forgotten the attachment once in their life?), strip attachments from incoming emails, and more. Nice.

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