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.

Google Maps recently added the moon and Mars to its mapping service.

If you go to the moon version and zoom down to the highest magnification, it displays…swiss cheese. How great is that?

I am not making this up.

Damn you, Google! You make it so hard to dislike you.

http://moon.google.com/

Zen and the Art of Inbox Management

It’s completely clear and understandable! I know exactly what is expected of me from this email.

If only all my emails were this simple and soothing.

Found this on Digg today: a nice article on using CSS and Javascript to provide form field hints.

Readers of UsabilityBlog have probably gotten the impression that I’m a whiny b*tch. I do tend to slag on designs that aren’t immediately learnable.

OK, I’ll own that. I am a bit of a whiner. But it really does cheese me off when products make implicit claims of learnability and usability, but in fact possess neither attribute.

So it’s with all this in mind that I’d like to talk about the incredibly high usability and utility of the GUI’s ancestor, the command line interface (CLI).

CLI: Not “Walk-Up-And-Use”
Let’s be clear about one thing: in most circumstances, a CLI is NOT a “walk up to and use” interface like the touch-screen kiosks at the airport check-in counter. Using a CLI requires that the user possess *some* understanding of both the syntax and command set, AND the general concept of interacting with a computer via a command line interpreter or shell.

But once a person takes the time to learn a particular CLI, they possess the ability to perform tasks and accomplish their goals in an incredibly efficient manner. It’s the old tradeoff, learnability vs. efficiency. It’s not exactly a zero-sum game, but these two attributes are often in opposition.

Let me give you a real-world, personal example of how learning just a little bit about a command line interface provided me with an incredibly powerful, comprehensive, customized, and trustworthy method of regularly backing up my and my wife’s data.

The CLI and I
First, a little bit about my situation and goals: ever since grad school I have been obsessive about backing up my data. I make (somewhat) up-to-date redundant backups of my and Susan’s data files to two large external drives. And yes, I even maintain an offsite backup, although the drudge of carrying that drive from work to home and back again means that the offsite backup is hardly ever as up-to-date as the onsite backups.

Lately, with the pace of work picking up for both Susan and I, I’ve been feeling the need to keep the backup stores as up-to-date as possible. And I had grown tired of running the backups manually.

Finally, since Susan and I have both become avid podcast consumers, I have noticed that the backup drives are filling up with unwanted podcasts. So my goals are:

• Back up my and Susan’s critical data safely and redundantly.
• Automate the execution of backups.
• Conserve space on the backup drives by deleting files that we don’t need anymore (i.e., old podcasts).

Now I’m sure that I could buy a software product that would make periodic, maybe even continuous incremental backups. And I bet that a premium product might even let me specify which data can be discarded. In fact, many external drive manufacturers provide “lite” or even full versions of backup software with their drives. But I build my own external drives from empty enclosures and drives I purchase from eBay or Newegg. So that’s not an option for me.

I first started using computers back in the dark days of DOS 6x, so I know a little bit about Microsoft’s CLIs. Not much, mind you, but just enough to accomplish some rudimentary tasks.

So about four years ago, I started opening up a command line window in Windows 2000 (and later, XP) and entering DOS commands to copy all the data in the directories holding my data (as well as all subdirectories underneath) to another directory. (I always split my laptops’ drives into an OS partition and a data partition, so in essence my D: drive is the first line of defense. It keeps a backup of the contents of my user folder.)

The command I used was xcopy.

Using various options provided by xcopy, I could specify that I only wanted to copy files that had changed, and suppress confirmation prompts (”Are you sure you want to overwrite foo.bar”) as well. Pretty powerful.

I soon grew tired of entering the backup commands manually (yes, I kept the syntax on a post-it on my monitor…), so I put the xcopy commands into a batch file, and then executed the batch file whenever I remembered.

Obviously, I’m much less reliable than a computer, so about two years ago I decided to schedule the execution of the batch file using the scheduler feature of Windows XP. If you want to find it, go to Start / All Programs / Accessories / System Tools / Scheduled Tasks.

So about two years ago, my batch file looked like this:

Filename: Backup.bat

REM Copies Susan’s Favorites to the D:\ drive.
xcopy C:\DOCUME~1\Susan\Favorites\*.* D:\Susan\My_Docs\Favorites /s /d /e /i /r /y

REM Copies Susan’s desktop files to the D:\ drive.
xcopy C:\DOCUME~1\Susan\Desktop\*.* D:\Susan\Desktop /s /d /e /i /r /y

REM Copies Susan’s My Documents, Outlook data file, and desktop files from the D/: drive to the USB drive backup folder.
xcopy D:\Susan\Desktop\*.* U:\Susan\Desktop /s /d /e /i /r /y
xcopy D:\Susan\My_Docs\*.* U:\Susan\My_Docs /s /d /e /i /r /y
xcopy D:\Outlook\*.* U:\Susan\Outlook /s /d /e /i /r /y

You probably noticed that I used the 8.3 name for the “Documents and Settings” folder. A bit of trial and error taught me that xcopy will indeed preserve long folder and file names at the destination, but doesn’t always recognize long names in the xcopy command itself. So I used the 8.3 name for “Documents and Settings,” which is (usually) “DOCUME~1″.

Podcasts Improve - And Complicate - Our Lives
This little batch file served me well until last summer, when we both started downloading podcasts. This lifestyle change was definitely for the better; as we no longer had to listen to any of the incredibly annoying local radio stations. But it had one unintended effect: every time the backup batch script ran, it would back up all the podcast files that happened to be sitting in “My_Docs\My Music\iTunes\iTunes Music\Podcasts.”

Even though Susan and I erase listened-to podcasts on the source drive, they started piling up on the backup drives. I needed a way to regularly clear out the contents of the podcast folder on the backup drives so the backup devices didn’t become overrun with stale copies of “This American Life” and the Battlestar Galactica podcasts.

So I went prospecting in the Microsoft KB, and found that the RMDIR (”remove directory” or RD) command has some very useful options. For example, “RD D:\Foo\Bar /q /” will delete the folder “Bar” and all its contents, without asking me for confirmation.

I added some RD goodness to my batch file, and this is what I ended up with:

Filename: Backup.bat

REM Copies Susan’s Favorites to the D:\ drive.
xcopy C:\DOCUME~1\Susan\Favorites\*.* D:\Susan\My_Docs\Favorites /s /d /e /i /r /y

REM Copies Susan’s desktop files to the D:\ drive.
xcopy C:\DOCUME~1\Susan\Desktop\*.* D:\Susan\Desktop /s /d /e /i /r /y

REM Deletes the old podcasts from the backup drives before kicking off the current backup.
RD U:\Susan\My_Docs\MYMUSI~1\iTunes\ITUNES~1\Podcasts /q /s
RD S:\Susan\My_Docs\MYMUSI~1\iTunes\ITUNES~1\Podcasts /q /s
RD O:\Susan\My_Docs\MYMUSI~1\iTunes\ITUNES~1\Podcasts /q /s

REM Copies Susan’s My Documents, Outlook data file, and desktop files from the D/: drive to the USB backup drive.
xcopy D:\Susan\Desktop\*.* U:\Susan\Desktop /s /d /e /i /r /y
xcopy D:\Susan\My_Docs\*.* U:\Susan\My_Docs /s /d /e /i /r /y
xcopy D:\Outlook\*.* U:\Susan\Outlook /s /d /e /i /r /y

REM Copies the same data as above to the secondary backup drive.
xcopy D:\Desktop\*.* S:\Susan\Desktop /s /d /e /i /r /y
xcopy D:\Susan\My_Docs\*.* S:\Susan\My_Docs /s /d /e /i /r /y
xcopy D:\Outlook\*.* S:\Susan\Outlook /s /d /e /i /r /y

REM Copies the same data as above to the offsite backup drive (when I remember to bring it home that is).
xcopy D:\Desktop\*.* O:\Susan\Desktop /s /d /e /i /r /y
xcopy D:\Susan\My_Docs\*.* O:\Susan\My_Docs /s /d /e /i /r /y
xcopy D:\Outlook\*.* O:\Susan\Outlook /s /d /e /i /r /y

So there you have it. It’s not rocket science, but it works pretty well for me. It’s usable - provided you have some working knowledge of CLI’s. And I didn’t have to buy a separate application.

What did we learn today kids? First, the command line is your friend. Second, it can save you money.

Slagging on software EULA’s (”end user license agreements”) goes in and out of fashion. Since I’m perpetually the third-to-last guy to hop on a bandwagon, I figured I’d at least be consistent and join this party late as well.

So let’s get right to it: software EULA’s are broken. They’re unusable. And not just for the reasons you might think. Pretty much everything about the EULA experience is horribly, horribly wrong.

Let’s start with the legalese. I’m aware of how and why legal writing has become so impenetrable and difficult to parse. (For more on this, check out this Wikipedia article.) Defenders of the language and style of legal writing point to the need to disambiguate as much as possible and cover all potential contingencies when writing law or a contract. But that argument is specious. Bloated, meandering legalese is created by lazy people who can’t be bothered to express their thoughts and intent clearly and succinctly.

Here’s an example of laziness in action (now *that’s* a contradiction in terms…) that I just encountered while attempting to install a software application I was interested in evaluating. For the curious, I was installing the open source version of SugarCRM, an application for managing customer and sales information. Let me be clear about one thing: I am NOT singling out SugarCRM for extra-special vituperation. They’re just doing what everyone else does. Their EULA experience is really no better or worse than any other vendor’s.

I started the SugarCRM install, and in one or two clicks was presented with this screen:

I don’t typically give the EULA screen more than a nanosecond of thought, but something spurred me to actually check out the license agreement. I started scrolling the text box, but quickly grew frustrated. So I put my pointer in the text box and pressed CTRL+A (”select all”) to highlight the EULA text. I planned to copy it and then drop it into a Word doc.

Surprise… the text didn’t highlight.

Now I know a usability issue when I see it. My curiosity was piqued: just how bad *was* this user experience? So I manually highlighted the EULA text on the first line, and then dragged my pointer downward. Sure enough, the text started highlighting. I figured I’d just keep my index finger down for however long it took to highlight the entire text, then try CTRL+C (”copy”).

The scrollbar indicator was taking an awfully long time to move downward. Then I noticed just how small the scrollbar indicator rectangle was… and I knew this might take a while.

After a solid 2 minutes, I had finally selected the entire block of text in SugarCRM’s EULA screen. Of course, upon pressing CTRL+C I received no indication that the text block had actually copied to the clipboard. But I took the chance, opened up Word, and pressed CTRL+V (”paste”).

When Word stopped grinding, the first thing I did was look at the page count at the bottom left of the status bar.

It said the document was SIXTY PAGES LONG.

Back in the day, I had occasionally seen Word spaz out on a page count; so I hopped to the end of the document then back to the beginning, thinking that the page count would settle down to a reasonable number.

It stayed at sixty pages.

Sixty single-spaced, twelve-point, Times New Roman, one-inch vertical by one-and-a-quarter-inch horizontal margined pages.

Guess how many words?

It has 18,284 of ‘em.

I’ve posted the EULA here so you can revel in its repulsiveness.

So let’s review: the application’s EULA is sixty pages long in Word. The text box on the EULA screen is 470 pixels wide by 135 tall (less if you subtract the gutters). And you can’t easily copy/paste the EULA into an easier-to-read format; you’re expected to read it in this tiny 470-by-135 aperture. Here’s the kicker: it’s written in dense legalese, with seemingly random switches between sentence case and upper case.

Sucks, doesn’t it?

It’s almost like they DON’T WANT you to read it. Typically, the only people who want you to agree to a legal contract without fully understanding it are slimy car salespeople and dishonest mortgage loan officers. Now I doubt that anyone at Sugar actually thinks like that; a quick perusal of their site shows that they’re committed open-sourcers who do much for the development community. In short, they seem like good people.

So why the unusable EULA? Probably the typical reasons: the developer who coded the installer forgot to enable right-click select/copy/paste in the EULA text box. And the Sugar legal team undoubtedly just concatenated the separate boilerplate licenses for the open-source components installed with SugarCRM, then added in a bit of their own liability-proofing text for good measure. In other words, they were lazy. What resulted is an unfriendly, unusable mess.

Now I was even more curious, and I wanted to do some comparative EULA-gawking. So I played around with the next two apps I had occasion to install: Windows Live Messenger and the iTunes 7.1 update.

Windows Live Messenger

Microsoft’s instant messenger app had a surprisingly readable EULA, but was a snooze-inducing 12 pages and 6,343 words long. The EULA text box was super tiny at 415 by 100 px, but it did permit both keyboard and right-click select/copy/paste.

I’ve posted the EULA here for your edification and enjoyment.

iTunes

Apple’s iTunes EULA experience was not considerably better or worse than the other two. While (relatively) brief at five pages/2,091 words, it yelled at me (i.e., was in all caps) at random times. Guess that famed Apple user experience doesn’t extend to the EULA. Here’s a screenshot showing the generous-for-this-crowd text box aperture:

The EULA itself can be found here. It too suffers from a bad case of boilerplate-itis.

Usable EULAs

This is the part of the rant where I should tell everyone how to create a better EULA experience. So without further ado…here are my recommendations for more usable EULAs:

• Content: Lose the legalese. Lawyers, say no to boilerplate. Say yes to plain language. And try your best to keep it brief. Not only will you communicate more effectively, the lay community might hate you less.
• Readability and flexibility: Display a bigger text box, provide easier ways to select/copy/paste, provide a print button, or (preferably) do all three.

And while we’re on the subject of readability… I also recommend NOT SHOUTING AT YOUR READER. PEOPLE REALLY DON’T LIKE READING IN ALL CAPS. Sentence case is much more civil, don’t you agree?

So that’s all I have today about the EULA experience. I know several other people have written about the sorry state of software EULA’s, so here’s a few links for you. And thanks for listening to my EULA kvetch.

More about EULAs at:

Boing Boing: ReasonableAgreement.org - the anti-EULA
Ben Edelman: EULAs Gone Bad
EFF: Now the Legalese Rootkit: Sony-BMG’s EULA

It’s always nice to see our colleagues in neighboring disciplines talk about usability. Here’s an article from PM Toolbox that, although brief and a bit simplistic, at least shows that our colleagues understand the value of a well-designed user experience.

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.

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.)

Just discovered a new resource about user experience: User-Centered.

It’s a moderated group blog with over 100 members. (If you’re interested in the nuts and bolts, it’s running on the Opera community blogging platform.)

The posts range from the mundane (”take a look at this funky interaction…”) to the in-depth. For example, check out this insightful post about the lack of feedback from crosswalk systems.

Various sites on the web are reporting first looks at the the “One Laptop Per Child” (OLPC) user interface. Try this link to see some screenshots.

If this is the first time you’ve heard of the OLPC, the short version is that Nicholas Negroponte and the MIT Media Lab are pushing the idea that every kid in developing countries should have a portable personal computer. You can learn more about the OLPC here.

As you may have gathered from the title of this post, I don’t think this is such a hot idea. I think Negroponte and the Media Lab are too sanguine about the “transformative” power of technology. There are too many unmet basic needs in developing countries. What the hell is a bunch of laptops going to do for these people?

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.

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.

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.

If you’re interested in seeing a screen grab of the error message I wrote about in this post, follow this link to see it in all it’s jenky jpg glory.

Pretty nasty, eh?

Podcasts….me likee…

Today I got an email from someone who said that they read my podcast post, and was interested in learning which podcasts I listen to.

When I finally picked myself up off the floor (someone actually *reads* this blog?!?), I sent the nice fellow a list - well, a screenshot actually - of the podcasts I’m subscribed to in iTunes. You can look at the ugly screengrab in all its glory, or you can just continue reading to find out what I’m listening to when you pull up next to me at a stoplight.

All In The Mind - “Radio National’s weekly foray into the mental universe, the mind, brain and behaviour. Everything from addiction to artificial intelligence.”

Buzz Out Loud - “C|Net’s podcast of indeterminate length.”

Cranky Geeks - “Hosted by PC Magazine contributing editor John C. Dvorak. Each week a group of expert panelists discuss the most controversial topics in tech.”

Engadget podcast - Should need no explaining to this crowd…

Entrepreneurship, powered by Podtech - “The Entrepreneurship podcasts provide information and tips about business, marketing, and other topics, including startup technology, media business, mashups, DEMO2006, information management, Web 2.0, blog trends, search engines, decentralized computing, online TV distribution, and the future of technology, to name a few.”

Floss Weekly - A show about “Free Libre Open Source Software.”

IT Conversations - A series of recorded interviews with tech heavies. From GigaVox Media.

Mac OS Ken - “Ken Ray brings 12 years of radio experience and 6 years of tech-news work to the Mac world.”

New York Times Science Times - Stories from the NYT’s Tuesday science section.

NPR: Satire From The Unger Report - “Communiques from the edge of America by humorist Brian Unger of NPR’s “Day-to-Day.”

NPR: Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me

Science Talk: The Podcast of Scientific American - “The Scientific American Podcast is a weekly science audio show covering the latest in the world of science and technology. Join host Steve Mirsky each week as he explores cutting-edge breakthroughs and controversial issues with leading scientists and journalists.”

Slate Explainer Podcast - “Explainer podcasts feature answers to those little questions you have about the news (but were afraid to ask).”

Slate Magazine Daily Podcast

The Big Squeeze - A British comedy duo’s podcast. Yes, nudity on an audio show: “Brian and Georgina’s quirky “talking bollocks” show is one of the most popular podcasts in the world! Contains strong language and nudity.”

This Week In Tech - “Leo Laporte, Patrick Norton, Kevin Rose, John C. Dvorak, and other tech luminaries join a roundtable discussion of the latest trends in high tech.”

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.

Don’t know if you use Wikipedia, but out of idle curiousity I browsed over to check out the entries for user-centered design and interaction design.

Not bad, but they could stand some improvement.

Anyone out there up to the task?

Blogged with Flock

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.
Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier this week I saw some postings on the usual listservs announcing the relaunch of usability.gov.

Check it out. It’s good.

Surfing around today, I found a good set of articles at A List Apart. The articles are at this page.

My favorite: Thinking Outside The Grid by the impressively serial-consonanted Molly Holzschlag.

So here’s how this post started: I was intending to write a “roundup” piece touching on the various usability/user-centered design resources that were on the web and free for the taking. You know, like IBM’s Easy site, or Microsoft’s usability area. (I know they also have resources available on the MSDN site, but I couldn’t find them. MSDN.com doesn’t display right on my Mac…what a shocker…)

But when I got to this IBM resource, I just had to stop and post this as a standalone article.

IBM’s little ditty is called “EasyChart”, and it’s a teaching tool in application form. From the IBM site:

What is EasyChart? EasyChart is a charting tool that has been designed to purposefully violate well-known interface design rules of thumb (heuristics).

What is it used for? EasyChart is designed to demonstrate the effects of poor interface design has on the usability of an application or Web page.

Now this I *gotta* see. I can’t wait to download it to my PC.

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.

A few months back I got a friendly note from one Chris Baker, proprietor of Usability Notes. It’s a nice blog, Chris has some quality insights.

Since I can’t actually face installing a blogroll on my site (it gives me the heebie jeebies just thinking about mucking around with all those big scary configuration files…:-), I figured I’d just blog him and the site.

Recommended.

For the love of Bob, please help Linux and open-source applications get better.

The KDE organization has a usability project you can contribute to. So does the GNOME project.

If you’re interested in making open source software easier to use, start with the two GNU/Linux desktop vendors. Or start here.

If open source software and GNU/Linux are ever going to win hearts and minds, they have to stop focusing on the hobbyists and the already-converted. I doubt that any of our mothers and fathers want to stop/start X servers, or log in at different runlevels.

You probably have a couple of “guilty pleasure” web sites that you read on a consistent basis. C’mon, you know you can’t stop reading The Smoking Gun or Fark.com.

My guilty pleasure is Engadget. It’s a blog about (duh) gadgets, founded by Ryan Block and Peter Rojas. It’s now part of Weblogs Inc., itself purchased by AOL late last year.

Engadget is great because it’s all about high-tech consumer products. Though most posts are “scoop” type articles (they troll the FCC site looking for clues about new products), every few posts actually review new devices. And when something is poorly designed or hard to figure out, they’re not shy about saying it. Sample post: “Pure Digital’s Creepy-Looking Bug Too Radio.”

Highly recommended.

A recent discussion on a discussion list about setting success criteria for usability test tasks got me to thinking about what else we should measure when we put users in front of applications, devices, and web sites.

In short, I think we should be measuring a lot more than just “can the user successfully complete the task?”

We should also measure:

Whether people want to perform the task at all. Is the feature useful? Does it have utility? Is it applicable to their needs?

How they felt about performing the task. Do they feel positive? Negative? Put through the ringer, as it were?

To me, this is the distinction between studying usability and looking at the user experience as a whole.

However, there are a number of pitfalls in this area. One big one: participants’ ratings of desirability, satisfaction, and perceived utility, like all self-report measures, can all be hugely affected by social desirability - the tendency for people to behave in ways that they think others want them to behave, and say things they believe others want to hear. So this basically leaves “obfuscated self-report” and observational methods of inferring desirability, utility, and satisfaction.

Here’s a couple of resources in this area:

Joey Benedek and Trish Miner’s Desirability Toolkit: A set of techniques for assessing participants’ affective reactions to an application or device.

The Handbook of Human Factors and Ergonomics: VERY pricey, but comes highly recommended from people in the field who I trust.

A few weeks ago the release of the UPA 2005 Salary Survey triggered a cross-blog discussion about salary differences between men and women in the user experience field.

Summing up: I was the author of the report (producing it is part of my duties as UPA VP and Director of Members and Sponsors). My writeup documented a salary differential between male and female survey respondents: median salary for males was 80K; for women, 72K. (Average salaries were 82.8K for men and 74.3K for women.)

In a rare instance of Jakob Nielsen lagging the discussion and not the other way around, Jakob posted some salary info of his own here.

In a comment posted to Webword I pledged to follow up on this issue with some additional analysis. I intentionally made that public commitment. I figured I’d be more likely to actually follow up if I said it in a public forum.

Thankfully, my UPA Board buddy Lyle Kantrovich helped out with these analyses. So give him props (and visit his blog).

So here’s what Lyle and I found:
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