<Blowing own horn>
Check UBlog out at http://ui.alltop.com/.
</Blowing own horn>
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Announcements
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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”.
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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.
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Oh. My. God. Amazon.com actually updated the price of “Usability Success Stories“.
Maybe some peeps will buy it now…
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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.)
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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.
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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!
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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…)
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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.)
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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.
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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?
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