User Experience (UX)

The worst 'About Us' page I have ever seen!

2011-08-31T15:43:00.000-07:00

http://www.thermakote.com/about-us/company.html

It starts like this...

Thermilate Europe Ltd (TEL) traded unsuccessfully under the Managing-Directorship of Mr Mohammed Ashfaq for a number of years to the extent that by June 2009 it had racked up losses of £370,000. By late 2010 the shareholders, having grown frustrated with Mr Ashfaq’s performance and stewardship suspended him from his office whilst certain investigations were conducted.

Mr Ashfaq was then dismissed from the company for gross misconduct in December 2010...

I was quite interested in this company's offerings. I am not now!

Windows 7 now backing up to Apple Time Capsule

2010-12-17T14:30:00.000-08:00

Wow, there are LOTS of drawn out threads on this. I was very lucky to find this one...
http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=11302436#11302436

After first setting up Time Capsule on my Macs and running Time Machine on those; I installed Airport Utility on Yolanda's Acer Laptop (5741) and it easily saw the Time Capsule NAS device.

Looking for backup options for Windows I came across SyncToy by Microsoft so installed that - http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?familyid=c26efa36-98e0-4ee9-a7c5-98d0592d8c52&displaylang=en#Instructions

And then I read how to use 'Task Scheduler' to auto run SyncToy, here... http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/25046/schedule-synctoy-to-run-automatically-with-task-scheduler-in-windows-7/

Quite a lot of surfing discussion lists but actually quite a simple result! Nice.

Some things are just meant to be...

2010-12-01T13:11:00.000-08:00

Now on iTunes!

Dan Lockton's cards

2010-08-09T15:35:00.000-07:00

Pretty impressed with Dan's cards as nice ways to think about design...
http://www.danlockton.com/

iPad and kids

2010-05-11T15:51:00.000-07:00

I was pretty disappointed at the amount of energy people spent destroying the iPad concept before even laying their hands on it. I was sure it was worth withholding judgement for a while.

This, for example, is interesting...

http://www.lisnews.org/ipad_and_toddler

(Thanks Julie)

The experience of contacting Virgin about Mobile Broadband (which I don't seem to get at the advertised 20% off)

2010-05-11T15:39:00.000-07:00

I'm having some trouble contacting Virgin. When I email them I get a response which is 99% standard text, with perhaps an extra sentence if I'm lucky. Each time they tell me to log in and fill out a 'contact us' form. When I try this, their website script falls over, as you can see in the picture below. When I tell Virgin about this by email they apologise that 'I am having trouble getting online' ask me to try again or phone them (for 10p). I keep trying and keep getting the same response. Now my only option is to make time during the working day and pay the requisite 10p to ask then why I am not getting my 20% discount. Not the best user experience I can imagine. Perhaps I should stop paying my bills and ask them for 10p to phone me about it!

Where to get cheap/free persona photographs

2010-02-22T08:52:00.001-08:00

It is really important to ensure that photos used for Personas are legal. You really need to know where to source your persona photos and I wouldn't recommend:
- taking any old image from the web
- google image search
- dating or personals websites

You might try the following
- Stock.Xchng - some free photos
- Fotolia - photos for a few pence
- Dreamstime - photos for a few pence
- Flickr - some photos on here may be licensed to use for free

Does anyone have any other ideas?

Word headings - mysterious renumbering of headings

2009-11-04T07:45:00.000-08:00

OK I'm trying to do the right thing with Word 2003 headings but keep seeing this...

7. Big heading
1.1 Next heading

When what I want is

7. Big Heading
7.1 Next heading

This has confused most people I know apart from the very clever chap I sit next to, Tim.

If you are like me you will know that you need to do the following to modify the style of 'heading 2'...
Format - Styles and Formatting
Right click on 'heading 2' and choose 'modify'
From modify dialog, click the 'format v' button and choose 'numbering'
From the 'bullets and numbering' screen hit 'customise'
And lo and behold you are at the 'Customise Outline Numbered List' dialog.

From there I could not figure it out and no matter what I tried it did not work.

It turns out that my level 1 headings and level 2 headings were 2 unrelated lists. Tim figured this out by changing from 'Level 2' in the topmost and leftmost position on the dialog, to 'level 1'. The 'link level to style' field was NOT set to heading 1.

Sounds simple but unless you realise that you need to change the level in the top left to level 1, you will miss this like me and about 5 other people did (all experienced Word users).

Nice design pattern for a premium web service - flickr

2009-10-15T08:38:00.000-07:00

Like many people I pay for a premium flickr service. The basic service is free but with the premium service you can have hundreds of photos and sets of photos on-line.

When your premium subscription runs out, your service reverts to the basic one. This is a bit alarming since a lot of your photos disappear. But, a simple message and a $24 credit card payment sorts it all out for you and all of your old photos and sets re-appear without incident.

I've always regarded this as a nice way to offer both a free service and a much better premium service that is worth paying for.

Do O2 have the new iPhones or not?

2009-10-14T16:45:00.000-07:00

The O2 Business website seems to be giving mixed messages about the availability of the new iPhone!

- or am I missing something?!

Symbolizing Disability / Accessibility - how about using the Universal Quanitifier which means - "for all"?

2009-09-23T13:51:00.000-07:00

I recently read Joe Clarke's article about Symbolizing Accessibility and was interested to note that the international symbol of disability is a person in a wheelchair and this is really the only general symbol there is (and I believe even some wheelchair users find this offensive).

For the work I am doing I need to denote people with accessibility needs and it seems wrong to use a wheelchair to denote someone who has dyslexia!

There are specific symbols for blindness or deafness but there really is nothing that is general purpose.

Joe talks about the Apple Mac icon which he believes recalls Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man. Joe called this his winning idea.

Anyhow, over the weekend I had an idea of my own, how about this symbol?

This is Universal Quantification in Predicate Logic, known in formally as the symbol representing For All. Isn't that exactly the kind of thing we want a universal accessibility symbol to say?

It has a number of advantages:
- the symbol is readily available in unicode 0x2200;
- the symbol already means 'for all'
- the language of mathematics is fairly internationalized so this probably means 'for all' in every language in the world;
- it looks a bit like an 'A' (at least to dyslexic people like me!) and that should make it easy to remember as representing 'accessibility'
- if we borrowed it to mean accessibility it is unlikely to get confused with its mathematical context of use (apart from in some fairly peculiar situations).

So, what do you think?

US Voting Cartogram Visualization

2009-04-28T16:56:00.001-07:00

Using something other than area to show meaning...

http://www.sciencefriday.com/videos/watch/10176

Thanks Dave.

Visualization of Human Consumption

2009-02-03T15:50:00.000-08:00

Interesting... http://www.newscientist.com/gallery/dn16488-running-the-numbers

More Visualization websites

2009-01-22T23:51:00.000-08:00

Reflecting on this old blog post I am shocked to notice I didn't mention the grand father of the Visualization websites. Ben Shneiderman has worked in the field of Visualisation for many years as can be clearly seen by the HCIL Projects at the University of Maryland.

For some reason, this blog post update has also made me remember the interesting work of Mark Billinghurst's HITLab in NZ. The work is about visualizing things in a different way than is typical when talking about 'visualization'. The HITLab is more about visualizing in an 'augmented reality' sense than in a 'getting your head around massive amounts of data' sense. The 'Outdoor ART' GPS project is quite an easy way to get your head around what they are getting at with augmented reality.

I still think Florence Nightingale was one of the founders of the field of Visualization. I'm stoked to see that she is now getting recognition for her contribution and love the animation on this site.

services.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/app - IBM's Many Eyes Project. Classic information visualization stuff with some interesting new applications. Neat and thought provoking. I like this treemap visualizing highway versus city mileage for cars.

www.visualcomplexity.com - an interesting site showing a boat load of different data visualization examples.

www.swivel.com - "Swivel is a place where curious people explore data — all kinds of data" It has some interesting data and clean graphs but the representations are not especially novel.

infosthetics.com - and don't forget my old favourite, infosthetics.com. Lots of night examples on this one too.

www.joeparry.com/blog/ - Joe Parry is also keeping an interesing blog on stuff like this.

Source: IxDA Discuss and other sources

Deliberate overcharging (?) by Southern Electric

2009-01-21T14:39:00.000-08:00

Every month I have a Direct Debit (DD) come out of my account, to Southern Electric, for £35. I have chosen their online billing and have neglected to check the bills over the last year. I quite like the DD approach since companies usually gently move the monthly amount up and down in accordance with how much you actually use.

You can imagine my surprise when I found the following phrases on my last 4 bills:

This is your gas statement for 10 October 2007 until 10 January 2008.
As you are spreading your gas costs throughout the year, we will carry forward the
balance we owe you of £20.74 as payment towards your future bills.

This is your gas statement for 11 January 2008 until 09 April 2008.
As you are spreading your gas costs throughout the year, we will carry forward the
balance we owe you of £54.72 as payment towards your future bills.

This is your gas statement for 10 April 2008 until 09 July 2008.
We owe you £92.33.
In the meantime, we have reviewed your account and the good news is your monthly
payments do not need to change.

This is your gas statement for 10 July 2008 until 09 October 2008.
As you are spreading your gas costs throughout the year, we will carry forward the
balance we owe you of £148.10 as payment towards your future bills.

Notice anything funny? I just did. Every month my amount of overpayment has escalated. I have a growing credit balance with my Gas company and they are getting the interest on that money. Even more insulting is the fact that they reviewed my account in this period and decided to ignore the fact that I routinely overpay and have a large credit balance.

I switched to Southern Electric sold on their customer service. I'm afraid I'm feel rather let down by this. I go to great lengths to reduce my carbon footprint and have achieved something here with my gas bill. My gas company has penalised me for doing this. It's a bit of a cheek done you think?

How to find the RRP of books

2009-01-10T13:52:00.000-08:00

I've needed to find the RRP of my books for some tax reasons. I was surprised how hard it was but then I came across the Blackwells website. These folks sell books at the RRP. Quite expensive but rather handy if you need to know those RRPs!

I couldn't find all of the books I needed to find on there with the normal search, but the vast majority came up when I entered the ISBN. Very handy.

World Usability Day - Signage - Lost in Translation

2008-11-13T17:51:00.000-08:00

This one made me chuckle.

"When officials asked for the Welsh translation of a road sign, they thought the reply was what they needed.

Unfortunately, the e-mail response to Swansea council said in Welsh: "I am not in the office at the moment. Send any work to be translated".

So that was what went up under the English version which barred lorries from a road near a supermarket."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/7702913.stm

World Usability Day - Transport - French Train Signs

2008-11-13T17:24:00.000-08:00

I quite liked the electronic train signs I saw in France last spring. They provided good information on where the train would park on the platform so I could reduce my stress levels by figuring out in advance where I should stand to get on. Nice one.

I generally think we are a lot less helpful in the UK. When we took bikes on the train to Cornwall in the spring we stood at the "High Speed Train Loading Point" but of course the train didn't stop there. Only the high speed trains stopped there and there was no way from the timetable to figure out which were the high speed trains!

We also use very odd language on our trains. I'm sure this is to confuse foreigners. Train announcers commonly use the word 'Alight' to talk about where one should get off the train - do people know what that means?

If you ever come to London you can cycle right through town on canal paths. They are awesome but for a couple of obstacles like this one. I would like to see the designer of it negotiate this with my bike and Bob Trailer combo. Here is a photo of the trailer - I had to uncouple it and pick it up to get past this pesky thing.

World Usability Day - Transport - Consider this Usability Test

2008-11-13T16:42:00.000-08:00

I received this leaflet through the post. It is asking a simple question, "would you use this new electronic bus sign or not?". What do you think of this approach to usability testing?

Tog's Article on How to Write a Usability Report

2008-08-14T16:02:00.000-07:00

Tog's excellent article on how to write a Usability Report without sounding too negative. A little old now but still worth reading.

Vista rudeness

2008-07-22T14:47:00.000-07:00

I'm getting a bit fed up with Vista. I bought it because I figured the most obvious defect with XP was the way it interrupted you so much when you are trying to work. I assumed this was so obvious that Microsoft would have had to sort it out with Vista. I can't believe they have made it so much work. These days when I click on 'Word' I get a prompt saying something like, "A program called Word is trying to run do you want to let it?". Now, I just clicked on it moments before so I wonder if the answer could be inferred from that.

Perhaps the rudest it gets has to do with shutting itself down. Sometimes I'm in the middle of writing an email or doing some work when the application I'm working on just closes. Apparently it is scheduled to do this and it doesn't even warn me that I will lose work. It shuts down and then shuts down Vista, at least, switches it into 'Installing Updates' mode. Once it has decided to shut down, that's it, off it goes. Imagine the scenario. I work until 3am on a presentation to be given the next day. I wake up at 8am and switch on my machine to run through my presentation as I eat my oatmeal. Spotting a few spelling mistakes I make a few changes. Then, after a few minutes PowerPoint shuts down 'pop'. Then everything else shuts down. Then Vista says, "Installing 6 updates". Blind panic coupled with some fury ensues. I have a presentation to give in 30 minutes and Vista has decided that RIGHT NOW it HAS TO install updates WITHOUT ASKING ME. I though the first few times it happened that I must've made a mistake but the last time I just sat there and watched it snatch control back from me and do it's own thing for 20 minutes.

Can you imagine the Starship Enterprise as 3 romulan warbirds decloak off the starboard bow. Piccard says, "red alert, raise shields" and the computer says, "naff off I've got important updates to install. Try me again in 20 minutes". If I was Piccard I'd buy a Mac.

Recently my computer has started to ask me to run 'check disk' because of some corrupt files. This is a bit alarming but I played along. I tried about 4 different ways to run chkdsk. All of them failed. I've spent a couple of days trying. I have a call in to Dell and one in to Microsoft. Nobody seems to know why chkdsk does not work - though it is clear from the web that this is a common problem. I eventually found out that if you hold down 'F8' as Windows is starting you can get into a options mode for starting windows and one of the options is to repair. Oddly, one of the repair functions is chkdsk (though of course it is not actually called that). Running it actually worked - if fixed the corrupt files! Amazing but why did it take 2 days and multiple phone calls to discover how to do it. Dell had already told me to use the 'restore to factory settings' option, which would have deleted all of my existing data. Pretty unhelpful.

My current challenge is to try to install Vista SP1. No luck so far, mind you, I've only spent 2 days on it so I've hardly started trying. Oddly the Mac operating system needed updating yesterday. I pushed a button, waited 10 minutes and it was done. This is normal on the Mac. The Vista experience is normal on the PC - I don't know why I bother with it!

Ultrasaurus Blog - Extreme Programming (Agile) versus Interaction Design

2008-05-22T14:45:00.000-07:00

Extreme Programming vs. Interaction Design? is an interesting read on the subject of Agile Usability. It relates back to the original Beck and Cooper ding dong interview (a link to which she's pulled out of the web archive.

Ultrasaurus, Sarah Allen's blog, is a nice to have a look at too.

Where to find jobs in User Experience Design

2008-03-17T11:54:00.000-07:00

Some of my friends have been laid off recently. I told them I would do all I can to help them find jobs so here is my list of the best places to look for jobs in User Experience Design. Feel free to add to my list!

Job Boards

UPA (Usability Professionals Association) Job Bank - international jobs listed by the UPA
Usability News - Jobs (British HCI Group) - UK/European feel but also has international jobs on it
SIG-CHI Job Board Browsable Web archive - looks GREAT, thanks Susan
The Inoformantion Architecture (IA) Institute Job Board - pretty active (thanks Peter)
The Human-Computer Interaction Resource Network (HCIRN) Job Board (thanks Avram)
The Internet Technical Group (ITG) Job Board (thanks Avram & Scott)
Boxes and Arrows Jobs - quite a lot of jobs on here (thanks Peter)
Mark Hurst's Good Experiencejob board primarily for US jobs.
Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (HFES) Job Board (Members Only Unfortunately) - thanks Ronald
The Society for Technical Communicators (STC) Job Board - mainly for jobs in technical communication but related enough to include here I think

Career/Job Site Aggregators

indeed.com job site aggregatore (thanks Dan & Susan)
Simply Hired (thanks Susan)

Specialist Agents

Bo Cheng, Evolve Consulting UK - mainly jobs in London and the UK. Bo handles a lot of UX and IA jobs.
Recruit Media - an agency with a team dedicated to usability, IA jobs etc.
Nick Tooley at Ideal People also specialises in UX recruitment, especially in Cambridge.

Networking Tools

Linked In - my profile but you get the idea.

Discussion Groups and Newsletters

Check out the UPA list of Email Lists and Communities

[IxDA] discussion group - an active and vibrant group. Lots of jobs come up too
Mark Hurst's Good Experience Newsletter - has regular job postings and there is also a job board (see Job Boards above).
SIG-CHI discussion lists and the SIG CHI Job List - thanks Susan
[Agile-Usability] - has occasional jobs
[London-ia] yahoo group - great for jobs in London
[London Usability] yahoo group - great for jobs in London
[Experience Design] Yahoo Group - has occasional jobs

Other Resources

UPA Resource Directory

You may also like to check out your local UPA Chapters to look for local jobs (thanks for that thought Whitney) and you could also look up local chapters of STC, SIGCHI, and HFES (thanks Avram).

Virgin Media Voicemail Number

2008-01-31T09:36:00.000-08:00

If you cannot figure out how to get your Voicemail without dialling 222 every time and being chastized by the automated system, try this. Type *#67# and it will send you your voicemail number!

Tufte Analyses iPhone

2008-01-25T11:08:00.000-08:00

Ask E.T.: Interface design and the iPhone - An interesting analysis of the iPhone by Edward Tufte explaining why the high resolution device is pretty nifty and some ways in which the resolution is under-utilised.

McAfee - user out of control

2007-12-18T12:02:00.000-08:00

When I bought a new Dell I was forced to accept the Vista operating system. I was quite positive about it. With XP the computer, too often, rips control away from the user. This was such an obvious flaw that I was sure, if they had done one thing with Vista, they would have put the user back in control. How could I have been more wrong? Vista rips control away from the user more than any system I have ever come across in more than 25 years of messing around with computers. It is appalling.

Today, McAfee Anti-virus decided to upgrade itself. After doing so it asked me whether I wanted to restart the system now, or, do it later. I was working so I selected the 'do it later' option and got on with my work. I was asked the same question about every hour throughout the day. At one point I started Task Manager and killed the process but it came back. I was making my dinner later and scanning some documents at the same time and the message popped up again. This time, finger trouble caused me to select the wrong option and everything shutdown without further ado - I WAS IN THE MIDDLE OF SOMETHING!

My Apple Mac does not have such bad manners. Vista causes me stress on a routine basis with little bells dinging telling me it needs to do something. My Mac does not do this, it just lets me get on with my work, or messing around with photos or whatever. My Mac makes me smile. I'm not religous about this. I've used PCs since the 1990s and switched to a Mac in 2004. The transition was not always smooth and I still can't remember how to print screen but it has such good manners it's cute.

EBay Item "promotion" Removes your item for up to 8 hours

2007-06-06T22:10:00.000-07:00

I'm selling my car on ebay. I only have the time for a 3 day auction so tonight I was wooed by their "promote your car for $29" option and I went for it. The result? The listing completely disappeared. Trying to follow this up with ebay support chat wasn't very effective as you can see below. Apparently when you "promote" an item it can disappear from the listings for as much as 8 hours. I sure didnt see that in the small print.

Here's the chat...

System
Initial Question/Comment: Selling
21:58:32

System
Ana F. has joined this session!
21:58:32

System
Connected with Ana F.
21:58:37

Ana F.
Hello and welcome to eBay Motors Live Chat! My name is Ana. If you're a registered member, may I please start by having you confirm your User ID and first name?
21:58:44

carl.myhill ID: carl.myhill
21:58:46

carl.myhill name: carl
21:58:53

carl.myhill
item: 250126280587
21:59:01

Ana F.
One moment please while I look into this for you.
21:59:21

Ana F.
Is this regarding the 2001 Chevrolet : Tracker?
21:59:26

carl.myhill
i hit the 'promote' button tonigth and spent $29 to "promote" my item
21:59:29

carl.myhill
yes a tracker
21:59:33

carl.myhill
the end result
21:59:38

carl.myhill
the listing has disappeared
21:59:45

carl.myhill
how is this promoting an item?
22:00:00

carl.myhill
it's only listed for 3 days and now it has been unviewable for one of those evenings
22:00:47
carl.myhill

hello?
22:00:52

Ana F.
It’s also important to note that revising a listing may start the clock over on a listing that is not immediately indexed. This can add to the time the item is not visible via Search.
22:01:05

carl.myhill
yes i was told before that it might take an hour
22:01:11

carl.myhill
that was over an hour ago
22:01:14

carl.myhill
so what is happening
22:01:15

carl.myhill
?
22:01:22

Ana F.
Please wait for your item to be searchable on the site. This usually takes a few hours only up to a maximum of 8 hours before your listing will be searchable in the category you chose.
22:01:35

carl.myhill
how is that "promoting" something?!
22:01:46

carl.myhill
that is demoting it
22:02:00

carl.myhill
it has cost me $29 to REMOVE my listing
22:02:02

carl.myhill
great
22:02:17

Ana F.
I sincerely apologize for the inconvenience. The site ensures that your vehicle will index properly on the site.
22:02:38

carl.myhill
i'm not talking about whether it indexes properly
22:02:55

carl.myhill
it has disappeared for a critical evening within a 3 day selling window
22:03:20

carl.myhill
if i knew it would disappear for hours i would not have spent $29 on a "promotion" opportunity
22:03:31

Ana F.
I understand. We run updates on the site every day. But sometimes there is a slight delay between the time the information is entered and its appearance, especially at peak listing times.
22:03:53

carl.myhill
yes thanks for the standard paragraph, i am getting the idea
22:04:00

carl.myhill
not impressed
22:04:53

Ana F.
It will undergo indexing in our system. Don't you worry, I'll personally monitor your listing so that it will post the soonest possible time.
22:05:01

carl.myhill
in internet time i would think "slight delay" means a few minutes not 8 hours
22:05:27

carl.myhill
can you give me an idea of how long it will take?
22:05:53

Ana F.
These listings may not be viewable for several hours. Unfortunately, it’s not possible for us to give a number of hours, because this will depend on the specific criteria for each effected listing.
22:06:03

Ana F.
Please wait up to maximum of 8 hours.
22:06:36

carl.myhill
did it explain that in some of the "promotion" smallprint?
22:07:08
carl.myhill
you do see that with a 3 day listing this is very bad news indeed and very poor customer service (just pick a standard paragraph)

22:08:13 Ana F.
It needs to update on the site. That could explain why you haven't seen your listing in your search results.
22:08:32

carl.myhill
you do see that with a 3 day listing this is very bad news indeed and very poor customer service (just pick a standard paragraph)
22:08:59

Ana F.
I do understand your frustrations. Given the same concern, I would felt the same way if I’m on your shoes.
22:09:03

Ana F.
Just wait a bit more.
22:09:25

carl.myhill
Thanks
22:09:38

Ana F.
You're more than welcome. Thank you for your patience and understanding.
22:09:38

Ana F.
I apologize for the inconvenience.
22:09:43

carl.myhill
I could probably get this chat on the internet faster than the listing appears
22:09:48

carl.myhill
Let me try that

Biodiversity Wiki? The Encyclopedia of Life

2007-05-09T16:38:00.000-07:00

www.eol.org - an electronic page for every species or organism on Earth availalble everywhere by single access on command.

An excellent effort by many, not least TED. Design from Avenue A-Razorfish in just 3 weeks of pro bono work.

I really can't imagine having the confidence to contribute anything to this but I hope it grows very well. There are so many millions of species we don't know that it would be a great effort to get to know a few more!

Is your Business Card made from Illegally Logged Prime Rainforest? Mine is not - here's how I know

2007-05-05T17:48:00.000-07:00

A massive amount of wood imported into countries such as the UK is illegally logged at source. There have been extensive investigations of this and it still goes on. Check out The Friends of the Earth's Good Wood Guide by Georgina Magin.

Making decisions about wood, paper and card you buy is very simple. Here is the recommended approach:
1. Reduce the amount you use to begin with
2. Buy 100% Post Consumer Recycled
3. Buy FSC certified products (this is the only accreditation universally accepted by environmental organizations - see the 2001 FERN Report entitled Behind the Logo - An environmental and social assessment of forest certification schemes.)

Step 1 saves you money, whereas step 2 and 3 will cost you a little more and the planet a little less.

I tried to buy 100% Post Consumer Recycled or FSC Business Cards last year for my company, User Experience Design Limited, and I couldn't find any from the regular vendors of custom busines cards. In the end I managed to source some appropriate card from Neenah and printed it myself at a Kinkos in Denver and cut them to size there too (a little unprofessionally)

I used 'Neenah Environment® PC100' a 100% Post Consumer & FSC Certified Recycled Paper and found it made very good business cards.

So, that takes care of business cards. What about the paper hanging out of your printer - is it freshly logged (illegally) from an indonesian national park?

OK, now I had better get back to buying carpet from my house. 100% Wool from the UK seems to be the best option, with Hessian/felt underlay...

Sustainable CHI - a new group

2007-05-05T17:43:00.000-07:00

Sometimes things happen to remind me why I like working in usability. The people I meet are pretty like minded. Several have just started a 'Sustainable CHI" group. It's early days but it looks like a group of people starting to think about how to do our bit for the environment. As a total tree-hugging vegetarian green nut I totally approve.

For bonus points, if anyone can think of a GREAT JOB for me combining bottomless eco enthusiasm and 15 years of UXD skills, even if it's paid in lentils, do let me know.

Gas Station Arco AM/PM

2007-04-29T09:59:00.000-07:00

It is odd how a poor user experience can infiltrate day-to-day decision making. I didn't used to have any preference for one gas station over another but the bad experience of getting gas at Arco AM/PM stations has indelibly etched itself on my mind. I had to use one yesterday because I was so low on gas and the bad experience etched itself deeper.

The bad experience has many levels:

- firstly the 'smart pay' center is far from obvious. Yesterday the person at pump 7 was putting cash into it and I was waiting my turn to get pump 8 ready. It was not obvious when the previous transaction was complete and in fact, the guy in front of me had to return to the machine to finish something before I could start. This situation always makes me feel like I could end up paying for someone else's gas.

- the design of the 'smart pay' machine itself isnt too clever. The intructions are not very clear. In fact, at each 'Smart pay' center you can see this. The machine instructions include images of the buttons you should push. Many people push on the button images in the instructins rather than the buttons themselves. You can see this because the image of the buttons in the instructions is warn away. This is a kind of desire line (PDF).

- as the transaction gets underway I am disappointed to not be able to use a credit card.

- as I proceed with my debit card I am further disappointed by the transaction charge of 0.45c

- the design of the pump itself is further annoyance. With a completely empty tank yesterday I had trouble filling it and had to constantly hold the pump to the car. This is very un-American. I've grown used to putting the pump in the car, setting it to fill and going off to clean my windscreen as the car fills. You can't do this at AM/PM pumps.

You perhaps wouldn't think that poor petrol pump experience could be bad enough to have etched itself into my mind so that I avoid going the again. If Arco fixed this problem tomorrow I wonder how many years it will be before I lose the poor association with their brand.

"Reverse Osmosis Water"

2007-04-29T00:01:00.000-07:00

What possible purpose does this sign serve? I imagine most people don't know what "Reverse Osmosis Water" is. If it's drinking water why not just say that? The only reason I can come up with for the obscure label is that people perhaps walk away wondering what it means and ultimately find out and so learn something. But when I'm getting a glass of water all I really want to know is whether it's safe to drink

Welcome to the new TED website

2007-04-15T22:10:00.000-07:00

OK, throw out your TV, you no longer have time to watch it. Check out the new face of TED in the form of the all new TED.COM. You may even see my profile on there somewhere.

TED is the place to see the most important people of our time talking about what is important to them. Check it out.

Bump Top UI - 3D Desktop Modelling like you haven't seen before

2007-03-24T20:03:00.000-07:00

Check out this Bump Top UI on uTube. I thought it was a joke at first but it seems to extensive to be a joke. It seems to have some merit though I'm not sure I really want to simulate my untidy desk when I have the potential to organize things neatly with a computer.

Source: Dave J

Product Review: Walk-EZ Revolutions

2007-03-05T19:51:00.000-08:00

Kevin at The Sporting Rage (TSR) outdoor shop in Carson City helped me figure out a good way to walk a half mile to the ski run in my plastic books. In fact, they gave me some Walk-EZ clip ons to try out. I liked them a lot and wrote a Cool Tools Review of the Walk-EZ Revolutions on Kevin Kelly's excellent Cool Tools website with the help of the guest editor Steve Leckart from Wired Magazine.

Sugar - the UI for the $100 Laptop

2007-03-01T16:48:00.000-08:00

The Face of the $100 Laptop - looks like an extremely innovative UI on the $100 laptop.

"Usability Testing. Oh, The Things You Can Learn."

2007-02-28T16:25:00.000-08:00

Usability Testing. Oh, The Things You Can Learn.. An interesting article by Jared Spool. It leaves me wanting to ask him for some further clarification on some of his points but a couple of them I wholeheartedly agree with. If you read it, keep in mind that I think Jared is mainly talking about testing websites. There are some differences in emphasis when you compare that with a large scale corporate system but the points essentially still hold.

My approach in a large corporate setting has been to give testing a fairly low priority in introducing User Experience Design. My rationale is a bit like Jared mentions in his 'Preventing Usability Problems in the First Place'. I figured that if the design team never gets the chance to meet and try to understand the users and their goals at the outset, there is little point testing it with users at the end. In these situations I have often focussed on getting out at the start of a project because without that you are adrift before you begin and no amount of usability testing later is going to help you.

Jared puts it this way...

"If you trace any usability problem to its inception -- the point where the problem was introduced into the design -- you'll find the same underlying cause: someone on the design team didn't have a key piece of information. Had they had that information, they would've made a different design decision. That design decision would, subsequently, have resulted in a different design -- one without the usability problem.

The most successful teams have learned that the best way to produce a usable product is to make informed decisions from the outset. They don't look at usability testing as a final validation tool. Instead, they see the technique as a method to learn the necessary information to create great designs in the first place."

All that said it is one of my great regrets that I haven't managed to get more usability testing set up. I am very eager to get to use Morae to get a bit more scientific about this user experience design.

Jared also makes an interesting point about analysing the test results. This makes me smile. I was once conducting a usability test with a programmer friend sitting in. As an individual user expressed a concern he dived into the code to begin changing things. Here's Jared's take on why that might not be the best approach.

Preparing the test results is akin to assembling a story. You need to organize the characters, discover the plot, and set the scene. Sometimes, the characters take on a life of their own and take you in a direction you never expected.

The same is true when analyzing the data. Sometimes, patterns emerge you couldn't see as the testing progressed. It wasn't until we had the stickies all over the wall that we noticed every user had used the same term to describe a sub-goal. It was a term we'd never used, so we noted it every time we heard it. What we didn't realize was we had actually heard it from every user. The design subsequently changed to include that term.

Source: UIETips

Joel on Customer Service...

2007-02-27T15:17:00.000-08:00

Seven Steps to Remarkable Customer Service - an excellent article on customer service by Joel Spolsky.

Source: Optimal Usability Newsletter

Broken: 'Push to exit' sign

2007-02-15T18:00:00.000-08:00

When leaving the swim centre in Christchurch (NZ) you are confronted by this sign. I wonder what it is that you push to exit, the gate, the green button or the red button?

WinDirStat - Windows Directory Statistics

2007-02-15T12:20:00.000-08:00

Interesting to see Treemaps in use to analyse disk space usage -
WinDirStat - Windows Directory Statistics. Seems like a good use of this visualisation representation.

Source: Paul W

The Usability of a Book (funny)

2007-02-13T23:46:00.000-08:00

YouTube Video about the usability of a book - really quite funny and I'm sure IT support people around the world will love it too.

Source: The usability discussion group which must remain nameless

"Usability by Copying" - Optimal Usability's Newsletter

2007-02-09T21:48:00.000-08:00

My straight talking kiwi mate Trent from Optimal Usability has written an interesting piece on doing usability by copying. I imagine some people are horrified by this suggestion, not least a few lawyers, but I think Trent is right. I remember a designer who worked on a project for us once who designed a new kind of scrollbar. Not only did this cost our organization money but it made the user learn how to use something new when they didn't need to. We have enough complex problems to solve without needlessly re-inventing the wheel as a way to express ourselves.

Here's what Trent has to say on the matter.

Last week I was walking through a proposed site design with a client who had a limited usability budget. They wanted to make sure they had a very usable site, but couldn't afford to run a full research study. My advice? That they straight out copy. Imitate the date-picker widget at Cathay Pacific. Base the booking engine on expedia.com. Use a sign-in process like at Google.

You don't need to reinvent the wheel every time you are trying to solve an interaction problem. Many companies have significant usability budgets, and the result of their work is publicly available on the web. While these designs might not be perfect, they offer a great starting point. Here are a couple of things to take into account if you decide to copy other's designs....

Read more in the Optimal Usability Newsletter.

More on graphs - garmin gps training centre - hopeless

2007-02-09T15:50:00.000-08:00

Following on from my previous post about graphs, here is an awful example from my Garmin Training Centre. The Garmin Forerunner 305 is a GPS device for runners. The graph shows my pace over a 15 mile run. You can see from the graph that I stopped a couple of times (to check the map - honest). The problem with the graph is that the fixed scale, which you apparently cannot change, goes from -10:00 min/mile pace (?!) to 1:10:00 min/mile pace (?! Walking pace is 20 min/miles). My normal running pace is from 6:30 min/mile to 8:30 min/mile pace. Even at the extremes I might need to see 5:00 min/mile to 12:00 min/mile. With this ludicrus default y-axis on the graph, the data shown is impossible to interpret.

Interesting Web-based Graphs

2007-02-08T16:42:00.000-08:00

Relating to a project I've been working on for some time I often take a look at interesting graphing applications I come across. I just found a new graph on the Morning Star website showing stock data. The graph has useful crosshairs so you can walk along it seeing the closing price and the day's high and low price. The design is nice and clean and the text easy to read. If you want to take a closer look at a particular time period you can click to create your own time range of interest (the tab turns to 'custom'). It's neat.

I have previously been pretty impressed with the charts on google finance.

Source: I found these myself!

Decent & Free Usability Tool - usability.gov

2007-02-07T20:13:00.000-08:00

This is worth a look.

Free Web usability tool - usability.gov (ZDNet, 5 Jan 2007) - "The Web Communications
Division in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of
the Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs, in collaboration with "many
federal agencies," offers a comprehensive, easy-to-use,
no-cost, online how-to guide for developing usable and useful Websites."

Source: UPA MONTHLY - FEBRUARY 2007 - The monthly newsletter of the Usability Professionals' Association

New Blog: How To Be A Good Product Manager: Product management tips

2007-02-02T10:57:00.000-08:00

A great new blog about Product Management - check out How To Be A Good Product Manager: Product management tips

Recent entries include:
"Create solutions for many customers, not just one" (02-Feb)
"Customers and users are both important" (01-Feb)"
"Use caution with cannibalization" (31-Jan)
"Let go of your past" (30-Jan)

Great Minds in Development: Designing your Applications for Usability - Jakob Nielsen

2007-01-31T18:50:00.000-08:00

Thanks to James McDuffie for sending me this Jakob Nielsen talk (16 minutes) aimed at developers.

Designing your Applications for Usability - Jakob Nielsen
- why you programmers are not like users;
- use paper prototyping;
- do cheap low tech testing of the paper prototyping;
- ask users to 'think out loud';
- be conservative and not too whizz bang with new features;
- Jakob's nice sites: Yahoo - simplicity, easy to use; Amazon; Victorias Secret - glamour but has simple product page and add to cart;
- Jakob's bad sites - big companies and government; bigger the company the worse the websites;
- PDF bad for screen; dont want frozen fixed size fonts on screen; good for printing though; paging doesn't work; search is poor; not appropriate to online medium of browsing, etc.
- top thing that needs improvement is search. Search on websites is often terrible.

Other talks in the Great Minds series - notice Steve Krug has a talk on there too.

London IA group's Book Club - Great idea

2007-01-29T20:55:00.000-08:00

What a great idea to start a book club for "nerdy books" we always plan to read but never do. I hope this is a massive success. I look forward to hearing more about it.

The Costco Shopping Experience (from NY Times)

2007-01-28T10:10:00.000-08:00

An interesting read about the design of the Costco shopping experience - thanks Dave Whitefield!

24 Rolls of Toilet Paper, a Tub of Salsa and a Plasma TV - Christopher Berkey for The New York Times

"SHOPPING at Costco often goes something like this: Customer comes to buy bulk necessities like toilet paper and dish detergent. Customer buys those items, as well as a pack of giant muffins, three cashmere sweaters and a power tool.

It’s more than impulse buying. It is a calculated part of the company’s business plan. Call it the Costco effect."

Lexus Self-Parking Feature - An Amusing Consumer Demo

2007-01-20T10:17:00.000-08:00

An amusing 'user trial' of the Lexus Self-Parking feature. Warning, this is funny but the language may cause offence (though most of it is beeped out).

Lexus Self-Parking Feature - Consumer Demo?

Don't make the demo look done

2006-12-28T09:53:00.000-08:00

An excellent read from the creating passionate users blog.

Another TED talk - Cameron Sinclair founder of Architecture for Humanity - Design like you give a Damn<

2006-11-26T21:48:00.000-08:00

Cameron Sinclair, founder of Architecture for Humanity at TED in 06.

An impressive talk - this guy has managed to focus his passion, you can hear it in his voice.

"TEDPrize winner Cameron Sinclair is founder of Architecture for Humanity, and author of Design Like You Give A Damn: Architectural Responses to Humanitarian Crises In this presentation, he demonstrates the need for a design response to humanitarian crises, and unveils his TEDPrize wish: to create a community that actively embraces open-source design to generate innovative and sustainable living standards for all."

Multi-touch sensing screen - Jeff Han - TED '06

2006-11-26T18:52:00.000-08:00

Ken and Patrick sent me this demo from the TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conference. It's a pretty amazing demo of a Mult-touch sensing screen demoed by Jeff Han at TED'06.

The speaker sweeps his hands over a backlit drafting board and manipulates things naturally in this way. His photo table is particularly impressive.

There is also a decent demo of a mapping application using hand gestures sweeping across the screen.

This looks like the future.

Information Mapping

2004-06-17T05:58:00.000-07:00

A colleague recently introduced me to 'information mapping' as a method for writing documentation in a structured way. Robert E Horn (interesting link!) is credited with the method. A company called Information Mapping train people how to do it.

As I understand it, the method involves structuring information according to set templates according to what type of information it is. The method makes great claims in increasing readability of documentaton.

I remain somewhat skeptical at the moment but asking folks on UTEST about it did seem to reveal that lots of technical writers are familiar with the method but they have a mixed response to it.