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

<Blowing own horn>

Check UBlog out at http://ui.alltop.com/.

</Blowing own horn>

A contributor to the IxDA discussion list posted about the availability on iTunes of Stanford University lectures in human-computer interaction.

I just browsed the list of lectures. Looks like real good stuff. Some lectures I’m particularly interested in hearing:

• The Design of Implicit Interactions, Wendy Ju, Stanford, Spring 2007
• Designing Interactions, Bill Moggride, IDEO, Winter 2007
• Innovation on User Research Methods During the Development of Windows Vista, Gayna Williams, Microsoft, Fall 2006

You can point your browser to this link to get to the class listings within iTunes.

Here’s a mini-rant about the usability of Apple’s Mac OS X:

I use Spaces, the multiple desktop feature found in OS X 10.5. It’s a nice feature for us Windows-on-VMWare-Fusion (or Parallels) people. I assign Fusion’s window to a separate space, and cmd+arrow down or over to get to my Windows window. I’ve assigned the Finder to be present in all spaces. (I only use the default four spaces.)

The problem I run into is the stupid no-op that sometimes occurs when I’m in Space 1, the Finder is in Space 2, 3, or 4, and I click on the Finder icon in the dock. Sometimes - but infuriatingly, not all the time and with no predictability - a click on the dock’s Finder icon does absolutely nothing. It doesn’t bring the Finder to my current space, nor does it pop me over the the space where the Finder window currently resides.

What I have to do then is cmd+arrow all over tarnation trying to find my frakking Finder window. Lame.

Interestingly, I just tried to reproduce the problem, and I couldn’t. So I don’t know whether it’s a strange interaction between the behavior of several OS X features, or an actual bug. One thing it definitely is is annoying.

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.

Hopefully this won’t read too much like a Twitter post…I’m on my way to Beijing China to speak at and attend User Friendly 2007, the annual conference put on by the China chapter of the Usability Professionals’ Association.

The title of my talk is “Changing Processes and Cultures: Setbacks and Successes On The Road To Building Customer-Centric Product Teams.” I’ve posted a slightly longer version of the talk to UsabilityBlog at this URL, if you’re interested in looking at it. (The longer version is what I presented last week at the Atlanta chapter meeting of the IASA, the association for software architects.)

The talk is a three-year retrospective on the process of incorporating user-centered design at Sage Software in North America. Here’s the blurb from the conference site, if you want more information about the talk:

We in the user experience field know that user-centered design and usability activities have the most positive impact when they’re carried out early in the product/service ideation, design, and development cycle. And our stakeholders - those colleagues in neighboring disciplines such as product management and product development - are often eager to become more customer-centric, and would like UX practitioners to help achieve this. However, our colleagues, and more importantly our executives, don’t always know just how disruptive it can be to successfully integrate UX processes and people into the organizational culture.

This presentation will describe the setbacks and successes experienced by the UX group at Sage Software as we drove the adoption of user-centered design and user research processes across multiple product teams in North America over the last three years.

Enjoy. -Paul

I meant to post this ages ago but didn’t get around to it. Better late than never.

As a board member of the Usability Professionals’ Association, one of my duties is to ensure that the UPA periodically surveys the user experience field to learn more about people’s roles, titles, salaries, etc. A few weeks ago, we launched the 2007 Salary Survey. I strongly encourage those of you in the user experience field to take it. You do NOT have to be a UPA member to take the survey. Please help the UX community - and yourself! - by taking the survey.

The UPA runs this project for the entire UX community, which means that you will be able to download a version of the report in about three months. Our most recent salary survey netted more than 1,300 responses from nearly 20 countries, and is used world-wide by UX professionals and hiring managers. You can access the UPA 2005 Salary Survey at this link (or use http://tinyurl.com/2wutr9) to learn more about this UPA project.

Please encourage others to take the survey as well. To take the survey, simply browse to this URL. You can also access the survey from this alternate URL: http://tinyurl.com/2n2oc2.

Flock is no longer in pre-release, it’s 1.0bn-ware now.

You really ought to try Flock. It’s that good. Remember that feeling you had when you first loaded Netscape Navigator 1.x? Or Firefox? You’ll get that feeling, a little bit of it anyway, if you give Flock a shot. It’s really usable and very enjoyable.

A reader (omg I have those?) just pointed out that the Space.com story I critiqued is down. I checked; it’s not down, exactly…it just leads to a blank white page. No 404, no “the page you are trying to find doesn’t exist”, just…blankness.

OK, I guess that qualifies as “down”.

Today Susan and I bought a Roomba. Yay! My first robot.

Some questions I know I’m going to have:

• What’s setup going to be like?
• Will it really just work, or am I going to have to follow it around shouting “No Roomba! Don’t vacuum up my toddler!”
• Will I soon have that “how did I ever live without this” feeling, or will it be a big letdown?

And most importantly: Will we name it?

I’ll report back in a few.

I apologize to all [insert small number here] of my readers for going dark in February. A house sale with a 26-day closing and a double move really puts a crimp in one’s blogging habits.

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Oh. My. God. Amazon.com actually updated the price of “Usability Success Stories“.

Maybe some peeps will buy it now…

I just noticed that the article I wrote for UXMatters.com was published yesterday. The title of the article is “Connecting Cultures, Changing Organizations: The User Experience Practitioner As Change Agent.” Quoting myself:

As UX professionals, we have many tools and techniques available to us, and we contribute to our product teams in many ways. However, while having good UX skills is necessary, it is not alone sufficient. No matter the size of our organizations or the domains we work within, our most valuable contributions are not our design or user research efforts. Rather, our most valuable contributions occur when we function as change agents.

I had fun writing. I hope you have fun reading it. The full article can be found here.

Wait a sec… oops, I meant to say that “Usability Success Stories” is ranked #1,272,131 on Amazon.

And don’t ask me why it’s still $115 at Amazon…sigh…(pounds head against wall).

(If you want to see the Amazon rank - and the insanely high price - for yourself, follow this link.)

Just remembered to mention that I created a photoset and tag on Flickr named “Questionable Design.” I’ve been posting the user interface pictures I blog to this set, and tagging them with “Questionable_Design.”

Feel free to post ‘n tag your UI and design pics using this tag.

If anybody feels like helping defray the cost of running UsabilityBlog, you can donate via Paypal. Just click the Paypal button in the sidebar to your left.

I’m not looking to make a fortune. Just trying to help pay for the hosting and bandwidth costs. Currently they’re running about US$100.00 per year.

I appreciate your help!

I’m happy to report that the publisher of “my” book “Usability Success Stories“, has lowered the price to US$60.00. With a 15% discount from purchasing via Gower’s web site, the price falls to US$51.00 plus shipping.

Yeeha.

You can click here to purchase it direct from Ashgate/Gower, or you can download the order form from this link.

(I put airquotes around “my” because I wrote 3 of the 10 chapters, edited the other contributors’ chapters, and produced or reworked the images and illustrations. So technically the book isn’t all mine. Just trying to avoid megalomania…)

I just found out that Gower has posted the first chapter of the book I edited.

The PDF of Chapter 1 can be found here: http://www.gowerpub.com/pdf/Usability_Success_Stories_Intro.pdf

I still don’t think you should buy it at 100+ dollars, though. (If you want to know why, you can read my rant.)

A few people have asked me about the presentations I gave at the User Friendly 2006 conference in Hangzhou, China earlier in November. If you’re one of them, or are just interested in seeing the PowerPoint decks, you can access them at this URL: http://www.usabilityblog.com/UF2006/.

The file starting with “Talk…” is the slide deck that accompanied my invited speaker talk. I presented about the project I led redesigning Peachtree Accounting’s user interface. Direct link is here.

The files starting with “Panel” are the slides and schedule for the panel I led, “Some Right - and Many Wrong - Ways to Incorporate Usability into an Organization.”

Enjoy.

I just looked at the sample chapters for The Usability Kit, a comprehensive resource for web site designers that explains critical usability concepts and also provides actual templates for common interactions such as login pages, help and FAQ areas, My Account pages, etc.

I really like it. It’s a great idea, and it appears to be very well executed. I downloaded the sample from SitePoint, the kit distributor, and the sample chapters read great. Dan Szuc and Gerry Gaffney cover all the right topics. I’m really glad they covered the critical information architecture concepts of faceted classification, tagging, and folksonomies.

Let me do the full disclosure thing at this point: I’ve known Dan Szuc for a few years now, and consider him a friend. And I’ve recently met Gerry Gaffney. So I’m not an impartial observer. However, I consider myself a reasonably ethical person, so if I didn’t truly feel that this resource was worth your time, I would say so. (Or more likely, I just wouldn’t blog it.)

By far the best thing about The Usability Kit is the blueprints. In providing what amount to templates for common interactions, Gerry and Dan have gone where many others fear to tread. Let’s face it: there’s only so many *good* ways to design a login box or a “Subscribe To Our Newsletter” form. And if I’m reading SitePoint’s blurb page correctl, you actually get electronic copies of the blueprints, so you can build pages from the templates. (I could be wrong about this; and besides, who builds sites with static HTML anymore? That’s so 1998…)

Unfortunately, the SitePoint sample didn’t include the chapter about user research. I am very particular about how user research is done, because I’ve seen so many ill-conceived, inefficient and biased user research projects performed by well-meaning people. So I can’t speak to how well Gerry and Dan covered this topic.

Bottom line: would I buy yet another *book* about usability for US$197? Frak no. Would I buy this kit, with all its templates and other goodies? Frak yes.

So you decide. Am I logrolling (or shilling), or pointing y’all to a quality resource?

Happy World Usability Day.

This event, now in its second year, was intended to raise awareness around the globe of how important usability is to our everyday lives. It’s succeeding beyond our wildest dreams. And that’s great.

But I’d like to introspect for just a moment here. Those of you who work in the field, stop and give yourself a mental pat on the back. And then tell yourself how fortunate you are to have stumbled upon a field that is so engaging, fulfilling, and exciting. Admit it. Every day when you wake up and go to work, you’re secretely thankful that you’re not a lawyer, a doctor, a software developer, and so on. You’re a soldier in the user experience army. And it’s the best damn career you can imagine.

You know it’s true. You tell yourself that at least once a week, don’t you?

I know *I* do…

There’s a very good article on voting, accessibility and usability over at UXMatters.

Whitney Quesenbery, former President of the Usability Professionals’ Association, describes her experiences serving on the Technical Guidelines Development Committee crafting standards for usable, accessible voting systems.

The article is at this URL: http://www.uxmatters.com/MT/archives/000136.php. Or follow this link. Enjoy.

World Usability Day 2006 is coming up fast. If you haven’t found an event to attend or participate in, go here to find an event near you.

This is looking to be the biggest World Usability Day ever. There’s going to be over 200 events in more than 35 countries. That’s big!

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!

Gerry Gaffney of UXPod has posted a podcast of interviews with speakers and attendees of the User Friendly 2006 conference held last week in Hangzhou, China.

I was one of those interviewed. Listen to the podcast and marvel at my hybrid New Jersey-Texas accent. (People tell me I switch between “you guys” and “y’all” at random intervals. And you should see their eyes bug out when I say “fixin’ to”, as in “I’m fixin’ to go down to Katz’s Deli and pick up some bagels, would you like me to git you a bialy?”)

Short article about the conference and interviews is here. The podcast can be downloaded from this link.

I am here in Hangzhou, China speaking at and attending the User Friendly 2006 conference, organized by UPA China.

The conference is a rousing success: more than 500 people from around the world are in attendance, and the program of events is top-notch.

Let me put that number in perspective for you. The “regular” UPA conference usually draws between 400 and 500 people. The ACM-SIGCHI conference sees a little over a thousand. Think about that: in only it’s 3rd year, User Friendly has already surpassed the attendance of the parent organization’s conference! That is impressive. Credit for building both the UPA China chapter and the User Friendly conference goes to the fine folks who founded and run the China chapter. They have truly done excellent work promoting usability and user-centered design concepts and techniques across China.

PC Magazine just gave Peachtree Accounting 2007 their Editors’ Choice award. Am I happy? Absolutely.

People who know me will know that I came to Sage Software in 2005 to lead the effort to redesign Peachtree Accounting’s user interface. The product, a small business financial management application that predates it’s 800-pound gorilla competitor QuickBooks, has never really been designed with any appreciable amount of user input. Throughout 2005, I and my very capable team of designers and researchers worked with over 150 users, using various methods, to redesign Peachtree’s navigation system, nomenclature, main screens and workflow.

The biggest challenge was striking the appropriate balance between what new users undoubtedly needed, and what the install base needed. As I’m sure you can imagine, people who’ve spent the time and energy learning a complex product do NOT like to have the rug pulled out from under them. So we not only paid attention to new designs; we attended to supporting existing methods of accomplishing tasks as well.

We still have a ways to go; this is a multi-year redesign. But to see the industry recognize our accomplishment is quite gratifying. Props to Matt Wallens, Stephanie Brawner, Darren Hauck, Cassandra Swint, and Amanda Nance for their contribution to this effort.

Click here to read the Peachtree Premium Accounting 2007 review by PC Magazine.

technorati tags:Peachtree, accounting, QuickBooks, software, financial

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I just heard that User Friendly 2006, sponsored by the China chapter of the Usability Professionals’ Association, has made its numbers. Which means I’m going to China.

Sweet…

I was invited to give a talk, run a workshop, and participate in a panel. I’m pretty excited. In graduate school I was fortunate to be able to travel to Central and South America multiple times, but I’ve never been to Asia. The furthest east I’ve been is probably Disneyland.

Remember that book I was working on?

I just found out it’s gone to the printer.

It’ll be available in five or six weeks.

Like every other wanna-be semi-guru in this field, I’ve written a book. OK, I really just wrote three chapters, got 10 other people to contribute chapters, and edited their contributions…but still, I think this counts as “I have a book coming out.”

It will be available in September or October of this year. It’s published by Gower, an imprint of the Ashgate Publishing Group.
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Earlier this week I saw some postings on the usual listservs announcing the relaunch of usability.gov.

Check it out. It’s good.

Don’t forget, World Usability Day is November 14.

If you want to organize an event in your area, go to this page.

Giles Colborne of the UK chapter of the Usability Professionals’ Association just announced that a podcast containing interviews of people at the UPA 2006 conference is now available here. Interviewed in the podcast is Steve Krug, Shawn Henry, Jacob Nielsen and Larry Constantine.

The Usability Professionals’ Association 2006 conference ended two Fridays ago. The buzz in the halls was that it was a good conference.

The post-conference page is here.
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Just got back from UPA 2005 in Montreal. It was the best UPA conference since I started going in 2000.
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