<Blowing own horn>

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

</Blowing own horn>

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

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Tags: patents, open source, law

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.

Over the last six days I have had the pleasure of traveling, presenting, and sightseeing in Beijing. The occasion was the User Friendly 2007 conference, where over 700 user experience professionals from around the world gathered to present and share with one another. It was another excellent and enjoyable event. As per most professional conferences, there were good presentations, a few outstanding presentations, and also a few less-than-good ones.

But by far the most enjoyable part was the hallway chatter - the impromptu conversations, informal gatherings, etc. Looking back, I realize that nearly every conversation I took part in eventually touched on how much energy and growth user experience is seeing in China and Asia Pacific. The UPA China chapter has leveraged this by recruiting young volunteers, often fresh out of school, to help organize and run chapter events and the UF conferences.

In return, the young volunteers are able to network with potential mentors and more experienced peers from in-country, as well as UX professionals from outside China. Clearly this is a golden opportunity for UX practitioners at the beginning of their careers. I would’ve loved to have had this opportunity when I was coming up.  

These are interesting times in the UX field. China and India are coming into their own. While most native people I meet who hail from and work in Asia Pacific are individual contributors or first-line managers, I fully expect that as UX becomes more integrated into the systems development life cycle processes I will meet more and more homegrown Directors, Senior Directors, and VP’s. The same progression has happened here in the US over the past 15 years. It is happening in these regions now. 

The real interesting thing I am seeing is that the the UX communities in Asia Pacific are not simply adopting the old methods and processes. They are adapting them, changing them, improving them. I can’t substantiate this with quantitative data, it’s more a combination of gut feel and some anecdotal data. I promise to explore this in future posts. For now, I’m content to just set it down here and pick up on it at a later date.  

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 don’t know about y’all, but I sometimes find it vey hard to blog consistently.

I just looked at my list of entries, and noted that I went six days and nine hours between posts.

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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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.

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…

I was fortunate to be asked to participate in my company’s press and analyst event in May of this year. For the main event, I put together a short presentation about the user-centered design program I built at Sage Software (the marketing folks sexed it up by labeling it “Customer-Connected Design”, which I’m fine with…)

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…kinda off-topic. I just reloaded UsabilityBlog’s main page and saw these two Google ads:

• Free Apple Mac Mini! We’ll ship you a Mac mini free! Just complete our online survey!!!
• Great Deals - Laptop and Computer Bundles! Large Selection, Buy Today!

A number of online commentators have mentioned that Adsense ads seem to be getting kinda hokey.

What gives, Google?

Since my post about the UPA 2005 Salary Survey, which referenced WebWord’s post about the survey, John Rhodes pointed out the gender disparity in pay.

It’s true, we did see a difference.
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