Ars Technica is reporting that several patent reform advocacy groups have banded together to collaborate on the effort to abolish software patents.
Says Ars:
Supported by the Free Software Foundation, the Public Patent Foundation, and the Software Freedom Law Center, the End Software Patents (ESP) project aims to challenge the legal validity of patents that do not specify a physically innovative step. In addition to helping companies challenge software patents in the courts and in the patent office, the ESP project will also work to educate the public and encourage grass-roots patent reform activism in order to promote effective legislative solutions to the software patent problem.
This is an important effort, and one that UX professionals should support. As I described in my article a few months back in UXmatters, software patents do more harm than good. They stifle innovation rather than protect and nurture it. As I wrote in UXmatters:
The sad fact is that companies often file for and the US government actually grants patents for user interface and interaction design “innovations” that are either strikingly obvious or have appeared before in other systems—that is, when prior art exists, as someone in the field of intellectual property would say. This means, as user experience practitioners, we are at risk of litigation every time we design an application. Each time we fire up Visio or Photoshop, create a new design, then put it out into the world, there’s a good chance we’re infringing on someone’s patent.
I hope that those of you who are active in the user experience field will learn more about this issue and choose to stand with the ESP project. Even if you don’t agree with me (and them), it behooves you to learn more about the issue. It’s quite easy to ignore – until you find yourself staring down the barrel of an injunction or subpoena.
Patent Reform Coalition Aims to Abolish Software Patents
Blogged with Flock
Tags: patents, open source, law
While setting up my newest install of Flock (the Mozilla-based social web browser), I ran across a blog posting that brought it all back home for me. A guy named Darren Barefoot wrote about the trouble his stepmother had posting pictures to Flickr.
His stepmother had some family pics she wanted to post and share with friends and family. No one could see the pictures. Turns out his stepmom had quite naturally selected “Visible to friends and family” when uploading the pics. Of course, none of the friends and family had been tagged as such in her account.
What a great example of the gulf between design and user intent and mental model.
A Parable About User Experience
Blogged with Flock
As a member of Usability Professionals’ Association Board of Directors (and now President), I have been fortunate to be involved in the UPA’s user experience salary survey project. I actually wrote the 2005 report and just finished the 2007 report, the full version of which is now available to UPA members at this URL. (A free version is available to the entire UX community here.)
One thing we noticed back in 2005 was the marked difference in salaries between men and women in the UX field. In 2005 we found that the gender gap was about $8,500 USD: the median salary for men in the UX field was a bit more than 80K; for women, 72K. This finding got a bit of attention in the part of the blogosphere concerned with user experience.
We also found upon further analysis that the gender gap seemed to have narrowed slightly between 2000 (when UPA last did a salary survey) and 2005. But the gap narrowed by only $1,000 USD in those five years.
With the 2007 report in the can I am happy to announce two findings: One is that average and median salaries in the UX field increased since 2005. The average salary in 2005 was $78,466 (median = $75,000); in 2007 the average salary was $83,297 (median = $80,643), representing an increase of $4,831. (The median salary increased $5,643.)
The second finding is that the difference in average and median salaries between men and women has narrowed. The average salary for men increased $2,878 from late 2005 to late 2007; women’s average salary rose more than twice this amount, or $6,384. (Median salary for men increased $5,000; for women, $7,000.)
I am of course happy about this from the social justice perspective. And I have more personal reasons to be happy: my wife also works in the user experience field.
Just ran across this article about the accessibility of the US Presidential candidates’ sites. Obama gets the A+, good on him. Sad to hear that Ron Paul failed in this respect. I would’ve thought his organization was capable of more, given it’s strong grass-rootsiness.
Making the Grade: The Candidates and Accessibility
Blogged with Flock
(Click picture to see full-sized)
I bought a TomTom GPS device. The application that comes with it seems pretty usable overall, but there’s a funny interaction design on the “create an account” page. It displays the scolds in advance, before the user enters anything in those fields. I’m not sure what I think of it; I found it jarring when I first saw it. It does make the requirement obvious, but it’s kinda scoldy.
