Bet you didn’t know that showers had operating systems.

(Click to see picture full-sized)

Originally uploaded by Dan Szuc of Apogee Hong Kong.

Say what you will about Wil Wright’s Spore. One thing he and the team got right: the creator interaction. Ever since I downloaded Creature Creator, my 5- and 9-year old have been building ships, buildings, and creatures endlessly. And more importantly, they’ve discovered how to do this with minimal intervention from me.

Video of Hattie’s creature is here. His name is “Spino Jerry.” Not sure where she got that, exactly.

This week I went to Washington DC to attend the U.S. National Design Policy Summit, a gathering of academics, government employees and representatives of professional associations who were focused on raising the profile of design in the United States. The gathering was organized by Dr. Elizabeth Tunstall of the University of Illinois - Chicago, a design anthropologist who wants to “create an actionable agenda of U.S. design policy for economic competitiveness and democratic governance among professional design associations, design educational bodies, and the design-related Federal government agencies.”

I’m still processing and internalizing my reactions to the meeting and what it all meant. I’m glad I went though. I met interesting people and learned about the trials, travails and tribulations of other professional associations like the DMI, AIGA, and the IDSA.

Long time no post. Sorry. Been too busy obsessively following the U.S. election at www.FiveThirtyEight.com. If you’re a hardcore stats junkie, this is - or was, after Tuesday - the site for you.

Anyway, since my last post I traveled to Hong Kong and Shenzhen to take part in the User Friendly 2008 conference, put on by UPA China, a group of China-based UPA chapters.

As current UPA President I was asked to give the kick-off talk. I took the invitation as an opportunity to focus the audience on how far our discipline has come, and how far it has to go to be truly strategic in scope and reach.

You can download the presentation from this link or the one below.

User Experience: Drive Change, Become Strategic ::  Paul Sherman

I have kept politics off the table during my 3+ years of running this blog. I just think it’s a private thing, and not germaine to the topics I cover here. Suffice it to say I’m a something like a rabidly capitalistic social-liberal-fiscal-conservative-with-a-libertarian-streak. Or a Second Amendment-supporting Democrat (befitting my Texas residency) who believes in states’ rights and a limited Federal government. (In other words, there really is *no* real party for me in the US…but that’s another story and another blog…)

But today I thought I’d point to a really top-notch user experience, and in the process reveal that I am a contributor to the Obama-Biden campaign. After reading about how Sarah Palin’s RNC convention speech raised 1M for the Replicans and 10M for the Democrats, I was reminded that I wanted to contribute. Rather than browse to barackobama.com, I decided to go to www.mybarackobama.com, the social networking site run by the campaign.

I was impressed with how easy it was to not only contribute (it darn well better be), but to quickly and easily increase your level of commitment to the cause. Obviously there’s been some research behind this. They hooked me with the drop-dead simple way to register, and the ease with which they asked me to contribute time, money, or my personal network. They also offered registrants the ability to harness network effects by setting up a personal donations page, where you can ping your friends for donations in your name. Check out my page at http://my.barackobama.com/page/outreach/view/main/pjsherman. The page took no time to set up. My only nit with the site? Why oh why did they make the username/login fields the same color as the background?!? Amateurish mistake, that.

Now I’m sure that the McCain campaign has made it easy to contribute as well, but from my forays onto the McCain site I don’t see the same social networking aspect. And I have to say, I don’t like having a video start up automatically when I visit a site. It’d my choice whether I’d like to watch video content, thank you very much.

File this post under “more signs of the USPTO apocalypse.” In a story reminiscent of The Onion’s parody news article “Microsoft Patents Ones, Zeros“, iTWire reports on Microsoft’s patent “Method and system for navigating paginated content in page-based increments“… which is a fancy way of describing the Page Up and Page Down buttons.

The iTWire article isn’t bad, though like most news outlets it doesn’t provide sufficient background on why the patent system is in such a sorry state. (I did explain this in some detail in my UXmatters article; follow this link to read “Your Design Is Infringing On My Patent.”)

I don’t blame the Microsoft employees who put their name on this patent; they’re just playing the game that they were hired to play. (Though I do wonder whether they look at that patent plaque in their offices and feel a slight twinge of embarrassment.) It’s not Microsoft’s fault either. They’re playing the game too. The fault lies squarely with the USPTO, and with a Congress that is too deep in the pockets of large incumbent businesses from many domains.

I hate to keep ringing this bell over and over, but the fact of the matter is that patents stifle innovation and provide a means for lazy and litigious people to live off the work of others. And by patenting something so (pardon the pun) “patently obvious” as Page Up / Page Down buttons, Microsoft degrades the user experience for us all. Think about it: every time Microsoft (or some other software company) patents a commonly-used interaction pattern or UI design, they make it less likely that other product producers will want to pay a licensing fee to use the pattern or design. Which means that the producer will have to skirt the patent by creating a new interaction or design, even though a common and perfectly reasonable one already exists.

This isn’t just an academic problem, folks. If this is allowed to continue, we’re headed even farther down the slippery slope. What’s next? Will Microsoft or Apple or IBM patent the “OK” button? Will we have to label it “Affirmed” to skirt the patent? How many other patent landmines are sitting out there waiting to be stepped on?

If you’re interested in patent reform but don’t know what you can do or where to start, check out these organizations. You might find a way you can contribute to the elimination of obvious and overly broad patents. (These are taken from my UXmatters article.)

• The Electronic Frontier Foundation — The EFF is a nonprofit organization that advocates for free speech and individual rights in the digital domain. Its Patent Busting Project is an initiative “to protect innovation and free expression” by fighting against vague, obvious, or overly broad patents.
• Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure—Based in Europe, this organization currently runs the NoSoftwarePatents.com campaign, which has as its aim stopping enaction of a US-like patent system in the European Union.
• The Free Software Foundation — Founded by Richard Stallman, the FSF promotes and supports the free software movement. The FSF supports a less restrictive approach to patenting intellectual property. Founded as a US-based organization, FSF branches have opened in Europe, Asia, and Latin America.
• Another advocacy group is the Software Freedom Law Center, which Eben Moglen founded in 2005.

Microsoft Granted Page Up Page Down Patent  ::  iTWire

Tags: patentreform, user experience

I believe Samsung has surpassed Apple with this OOBE…

Samsung Omnia i900 Unboxing: Greatest. Packaging. Ever. :: Digg

Tags: OOBE, mobile, UX

This article has been making the rounds today. Thought I’d do my part to keep the meme alive. OK, this isn’t really a meme. But it’s an interesting little compilation of UI concepts. Of course the author cites Adaptive Path’s Mozilla Labs effort called Aurora.

My last article for UXmatters also touched on the topic of this article.  I was focusing on 3D virtual spaces and navigation. Still, I would suggest reading that article of mine if you’re interested in uncommon user interfaces.

10 Futuristic User Interfaces  ::  Monday Inspiration  ::  Smashing Magazine

A few colleagues have pointed me to the article by movie director-sounding blogger Matthew Paul Thomas entitled “Why Free Software Has Poor Usability, and How to Improve It.”

I’ve given you the link to the original Thomas article, but I’m more interested in discussing Johnathan Gruber’s take on it. Says Gruber in this post:

I posit that the usability and elegance of any product, software or hardware, tends to reach and seldom surpasses the level that satisfies the taste of whoever is in charge of the product. This applies universally, not just to free and open source software. For example, it explains why Microsoft produces such crummy software even though the company employees [sic] thousands of talented programmers and even designers — Microsoft’s decision makers have no taste. But the problem is endemic to open source.

The people in charge of most free and open source software products tend to have poor taste in user interfaces; people with good taste in user interface design are seldom in charge of open source software projects.

Put another way, if you have to ask for better design, you will lose. You need to be in a position to demand it.

Yes. (Adding some more later in the day…) Aside from the comment about Microsoft’s decision makers having “no taste” - undoubtedly a reference to Steve Job’s comment about Microsoft - I have personally seen what can happen when leaders demand better design…and what can happen when they don’t.

Design leadership *has* to come from the top. It can’t be, as Cooper said in February at IxDA 2008 - an “insurgency” driven from below.

Matthew Paul Thomas :: Why Free Software Has Poor Usability, and How to Improve It

We moved from the suburbs of Atlanta Georgia to Austin Texas this weekend. Actually, we started on Thursday night. The trip turned into a 1,000 mile odyssey. We were traveling with our two kids, the babysitter who has family in Austin and came along for the ride, and Petunia. So we were limited to pet-friendly hotels like Residence Inns. Oh, and we were wagon-training: Susan was driving the van and I was driving the car.

Because we left in Atlanta traffic at about 4pm, we only got about 150 miles on Thursday, stopping in Birmingham for the night. On Friday we drove for about 10 hours, not including an abortive stop to search for a Starbucks somewhere in Mississippi where we almost ended up in a four-car rear-end chain reaction. The little old lady in front of the truck in front of me jammed on her brakes, then the truck jammed on its brakes. I missed the truck’s bumper by inches, and Susan swerved onto the shoulder to avoid hitting me. She missed a telephone pole by a few feet. Oh and Hattie puked in the van around this time.

Sometime late Friday I noticed that my car was overheating. The temperature gauge was floating up to the top of the range, staying there for a few minutes, then dropping back down to somewhere above the midpoint. I’ve seen that behavior before. It’s usually indicative of a bad thermostat or a faulty water pump. So we stopped in Tyler Texas, at yet another Residence Inn.

On Saturday morning when I started the car it was still overheating, so I looked in my GPS device for nearby service stations. At 9AM I went to the closest one and told them that I suspected it was the thermostat. They told me they’d check it out in about an hour. I decided to send Susan and the girls ahead to Austin in the van and wait out the repairs by myself.

Seven hours later the mechanics were still struggling to get the thermostat into the car. Evidently it was a real bear to access, and another bear to swap out. They finally got the part installed and I hit the road at 4PM, with about a 6-hour drive ahead of me. Susan and the girls had arrived hours before and were shopping for house stuff.

About four hours into my drive Susan called to say that the van had a flat, and AAA was flummoxed because we changed our membership to the Texas “club” but Susan’s mobile phone still had an Atlanta area code. They hung up on her four times. She finally gave up and decided to change the tire herself. Oh and Hattie had a fever and it’s 102 degrees outside. A good Texas samaritan pulled over and helped her change the tire. Thanks for nothing AAA.

So it’s Sunday and we’re waiting for our moving truck full of stuff to arrive. We made it to Austin safe and sound, and only a little the worse for wear.

Gizmodo cites an article from the Australian site PC Authority that claims the computer mouse is going the way of the dodo.

The main thrust of the argument is that alternate input devices and modes will soon supersede the mouse.

I’m not saying that the computer input domain isn’t ripe for a paradigm shift. It is. But five years seems a little soon.

Then again, what’s that quote about humans always overestimating how much change will occur in the short term, but underestimating change in the long term?

Mouse RIP: Computer Mouse R.I.P. In Five Years, Experts Say :: Gizmodo
Computer Mouse Heading For Extinction :: PC Authority

Just found a good article at ZDNet that talks about the LinuxHaters site. It’s not really a site for true haters, it’s more a site where people can socialize and discuss particularly egregious usability or functionality issues Linux has…and the community can figure out what to fix.

If it helps drive out usability problems from Linux distros, I’m all for it.

Tough Love: Linux Needs More Haters :: Between The Lines :: ZDNet.com

This week was a good week for usability and voting. The New York Times ran an editorial about the importance of usability testing when deploying new voting systems, and BusinessWeek.com reviewed the book “Design for Democracy” by Marcia Lausen. Marcia is one of the leaders of the AIGA’s Design For Democracy initiative.

Several people from my “home” professional association, the Usability Professionals’ Association, also participated in D4D. One of them is Whitney Quesenbery, who leads the UPA’s efforts in this area through the UPA’s “Usability In Civic Life” program.

A Lesson Not Learned :: New York Times
Design for Democracy Solves Election Problems :: BusinessWeek.com

Tags: voting, usability