City of Bits Blog
Usability, user experience, technology, ethnography, design, the workplace and public policy, from a UK perspective
Thursday, January 30, 2003
Extending disability rights? In the UK, the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) already addresses issues such as access to education and to some extent the provision of services, but is less specific and perhaps as a consequence less powerful than US legislation.
Next year, the introduction of the Disability Discrimination Act's final duties on service providers to make reasonable adjustments for disabled customers come into force, although these relate mainly to physical premises, and it's uncertain whether the DDA could be enforced against service providers - there is as yet no case law in the UK.
Last week, the UK government announced plans to produce a draft disability Bill later this year. "Among new measures we intend to include in the draft Bill are changes to the Disability Discrimination Act affecting the public sector, transport and premises and some widening of the definition of disability." Once again, it's unclear how service providers will be affected. Stay tuned.
Usability on Radio 4 This afternoon the BBC Radio 4 programme Shop Talk addressed the subject of usability. For a whole half hour. With speakers who know something about what they are talking about. Customers, users, personas! Users say one thing and do another! Criticism of market research which leads to function bloat! Fashion versus usability! My golly gosh, I could hardly believe my little ears.
Politics of Code Lawrence Lessig, Diane Cabell and Ian Brown will be among the speakers at Politics of Code: Shaping the Future of the Next Internet, organised by the Oxford Internet Institute, taking place on 6 February.
Lessig - Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and founder of the School's Center for Internet and Society - has recently ended up the loser in a US Supreme Court case addressing the constitutionality of the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. The legislation gives copyright owners an extended term of protection under US law, which will be of particular benefit to corporate copyright holders such as Disney. Diane Cabell is associate director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, and Ian Brown is director of the UK Foundation for Information Policy Research (FIPR), which campaigns on issues such as privacy, e-democracy and data retention.
Retreat on ID cards? Interesting developments on ID cards in the UK. The Register reports a story from the BBC, suggesting the scheme may be dropped. The enthusiasm exhibited by Home Office Minister Lord Falconer back in December at an LSE-hosted debate on the subject appears to have waned.
Differences over claimed number of responses to the Home Office consultation continue: the Home Office claims it has only received 2,000 responses, around two to one in favour of a card scheme, while Privacy International and Stand say they have submitted more than 7,000 responses to the consultation process. My own submission - via Stand - stated is was around the 4,600-mark, somewhat knocking Home Office claims on the head - but even 7,000 is pretty paltry when we're talking about such an important issue.
Assistant Information Commissioner Jonathan Bamford has stated his office was unlikely to favour the idea of an ID card: "Do we risk changing the fabric of our society so that the highest level of identification becomes the norm for the most mundane of services?" he asked. "Will the benefits outweigh the risks to privacy, human rights and social values?"
Back to ineffective ID cards I blogged about ID cards a couple of weeks ago, rejecting the argument that they would assist in the exclusion of terrorists. Here we go again.
News reports today are full of stories of 16 alleged terrorists having been found in Barcelona, my old city of residence, and Girona in north-east Spain. They had 'a number of documents' in their possession, as well as an interesting variety of noxious materials.
I'll wager that some of those documents included either real - and stolen - or fake identity documents; or legitimate ID cards issued to them by the Spanish authorities. Spain is one of those former dictatorships that requires ID documents to be carried on the person at all times; a lack of such documents gives the authorities the right to put you into custody on the spot.
British home secretary David Blunkett "last week underlined his support for the introduction of the electronic identity card", according to this week's Computer Weekly. I'd love to know exactly what role Spanish ID cards - or their absence - have had in the capture of this particular group of individuals. But Spanish press reports are clear that "investigations began following the detention of the Islamic terrorist Mohamed Bensakhria, in Alicante, in June 2001" (from La Vanguardia, Barcelona). In other words, identity documents proved of no assistance. The alleged terrorists had apparently "settled" in Spain, according to the same publication. Presumably with ID cards of some description.
You still have time to object to the proposed British ID card scheme, if you wish: the government deadline for responses is 31 January, next Friday. Stand has a rapid-response package you may wish to use. It only takes two minutes.
NHS IT : promises promises This week the FT carried an interview with Richard Granger, new NHS IT supremo. The money on the table for NHS IT has shrunk - from £2.5 billion to £2.3 billion over the next three years - since last December, and also seems somewhat lower than the original £5 billion over five years proposed in the strategy document 'Delivering 21st Century IT Support for the NHS'.
Previous attempts to earmark money for NHS IT investment have always suffered from lack of ring-fencing. As a consequence, it has more often than not ended up being spent on high-profile - and laudable - non-IT targets, such as reducing waiting lists. It's not a good sign that proposed funds are vanishing even as they fly through the air towards the NHS IT pot.
More women on Userati Nice to see that Chris McEvoy has added more women to the Userati list. I don't know whether this is in response to my earlier comments (read 'rant') on this blog and those of David Crow - who then created a fat list of links to influential HCI women on his blog - but recent Userati additions include Rosalind Pickard, Gitte Lindgaard, Karen Holtzblatt, and Marti Hearst. No Bonnie Nardi yet though...or Lucy Suchman.
On a different note, Chris's aim of setting up the list as a way of getting more usability people to talk to each other may well be having results. In my own case, although I already knew some on the list, I made contact with William Hudson (Oxford) and Tom Smith (London) partly through seeing more of their professional profile through the list, and this week I met William in the flesh for the first time. In fact, there were at least four Userati (a billing of? a glut of? a grumble of?) at this week's UK UPA meeting in London - or at least imbibing in the pub afterwards. I'd be interested to hear if anyone else is exploring similarly...
Rage against the machine The 'Bad Day' clip may have been a set-up, and 'Howard the Happy Paper Clip' - linked to from the right-hand column on this page, under Just for Fun - was definitely play acting, but this week Usability News reports on a real case of computer rage, originally reported in Personal Computer World. Armed police swoop on PC rage row recounts how a SWAT team was called in to deal with a gun-toting man who wanted to kill his computer, which he described as "the bitch". This all happened in Boulder, Colorado.
This University of Maryland site has some material about effective but non-dangerous methods for engaging in computer rage - you might also want to complete the accompanying survey. A BBC article on the subject a while back generated these real life descriptions of anger at computers.
Samuel Pepys the blogger A fascinating implementation of the Diary of Samuel Pepys as a blog set in Movable Type. There's a fairly dense network of hyperlinks, both internally and to outside sources of information. A rich annotation layer from blog visitors following the story add extra clarification and almost make up a reading group community - although it's clear that many of these readers also have different editions of the paper version of the text, each with a different set of annotations itself, which clearly add further context.
Reality "The centre of reality is wherever one happens to be, and its circumference is whatever one's imagination can make sense of."
Northrop Frye - author of The Anatomy of Criticism - said this frequently in lectures at the University of Toronto, according to one-time student Margaret Atwood (in Negotiating with the Dead, which I've just started).
Congestion charging The BBC and others report on Finland's plans to use position data from mobile phones to locate traffic jams and warn drivers of congestion. Pilots are already under way, the plan being to monitor 5% of mobiles, with updated information being supplied every 30 seconds...The effect of everyone then responding in the same way to the same information will be interesting to study.
Meanwhile in London - with far greater traffic congestion problems than Helsinki - a new congestion charging system is due to start on 17 February, and nobody really knows what's going to happen. A planned deal with the Post Office to enable drivers to pay daily charges has fallen through, hardly any residents have registered for their discounts, and the Evening Standard newspaper reports difficulties with machines able to supply tickets (but then the ES has always had a gripe with London's mayor, Ken Livingstone).
It's unclear what kind of design or testing process the self-service machines have gone through, but some of the few early users report frustration and failure. Shop assistants working in outlets with machines have not been shown how to operate them. The internet facility has failed to accept bank debit cards, and is also has not permitted card expiry information to be entered. The Guardian reports "the launch of cclondon.com was beset by crashes", while the mayor himself saying that telephone menu options - on the charging telephone hotline - need clarifying. There is also an option to pay by mobile phone text - but this requires credit card expiry details in date/month/year format, while credit cards only provide month and year information.
While "the system as a whole has been working perfectly okay", according to a Transport for London spokesperson, it has to be said that this was during a period with virtually no users. The contractor responsible for all this is one of the usual suspects, Capita. UK readers may recall that this was the firm behind the Individual Learning Accounts, an IT training grant scheme that turned into a fiasco, when the Capita website allowed dozens of training organisations to fraudulently claim government funds, sometimes amounting to millions of pounds - the entire scheme was abandoned and the IT training sector thrown into turmoil as a result. Capita was also behind the passport agency fiasco a few years back as well as the 2002 failure of a national security checking system for teachers.
Accessibility - Mass communications protest The following is courtesy of E-Access Bulletin: http://www.e-accessibility.com
'A mass lobby being organised by the RNIB for 4 February will aim to force the UK government to make amendments to its Communications Bill to ensure digital TV, radio and mobile phones are accessible to everyone.
'The institute is expecting up to 500 people to convene at the House of Commons to express dissatisfaction at the bill, currently proceeding through Parliament, which will set the standards for the digitisation of television and radio. Caroline Ellis, Parliamentary manager at the RNIB, said: "The objectives are not woolly-minded - there are precise amendments we want made to the bill."
'Among the protestors' demands is the raising of the prescribed quota of audio description for TV programmes from ten to 50 per cent over ten years; and ensuring accessibility of digital products and services such as remote controls and electronic programme guides. Lobbyists want to see all such amendments established as guidelines for the new communications 'super-regulator' OFCOM (http://www.ofcom.gov.uk).'
'Direct lobbying for change by disability groups has seen success in the past, with groups representing deaf people for example winning increased TV subtitle quotas.'
'The February rally, which is supported by seven other organisations including the British Computer Association of the Blind and the Guide Dogs for the Blind Association, begins at 2pm at Westminster Hall in the House of Commons. A coach will take people from RNIB Judd Street in Kings Cross to Westminster. For more information email campaign@rnib.org.uk or telephone 0207 3912123.'
Open Office Michael Andrews is enthusing about OpenOffice, the open source version of Star Office. "Amazing amount of stuff for free. The presentation software called 'impress' looks full featured..."
Coward that I am, I await further reports before taking the plunge.
Italian IA event Nice to see that Beatrice Ghiglione and Laura Caprio have organised the first Italian information architecture (IA) cocktail hour, to coincide with the launch of the Italian edition of Information Architecture for the World Wide Web (Lou Rosenfeld and Peter Morville). Topics to be discussed include 'Information Architecture in Italy: the state of the art of the discipline and the profession' and 'Information overload and the need for Information Architecture'.
Venue: Macatwork, via Carducci angolo galleria Borella, Milan Date: Thursday 23rd January, Time: 18.30
Hold the front page - Usability wars break out It's not just the US making war-like moves - usability wars have now broken out in London, it seems.
"My usability study is better than yours", screams The Register, the source of all scurrilous IT rumour. It appears that The Usability Company, a usability firm, has taken objection to a report - already referred to in this blog a week or two ago - from Interactive Bureau. The firm's report judged each FTSE-100 website hompage based on "design, usability, innovation and technical proficiency," according to The Guardian.
While it's never particularly good for professional wars to break out in public - it generates public confusion and uncertainty - there are significant moves afoot from the advertising, marketing and graphic design fraternities to take over the mantle of 'usability' or 'user experience' without really knowing what it is, a development that can do little good for the profession. [Although the fact that the profession has still to make up its mind what to call itself probably doesn't contribute much to public understanding either.]
Last year, I heard one designer refer to usability as being about running focus groups. I think he was getting it mixed up with marketing. Now Interactive Bureau, an agency that seems to work primarily in web design, branding and related activities, appears to suggest - I don't have access to their report unfortunately, so can only go by their press release and the report in The Guardian business pages - it's about whether a home page has particular functions or not. The Interactive Bureau research did not involve user testing, and was carried out by a firm I wouldn't put at the top of the list to do UX research (and whose staff I have not spotted at professional UX events). In fact as far as I'm aware Interactive Bureau does not in fact sell itself as a usability company.
While I'm sure there are some PR motives on both sides of this story, my own conclusion is that whatever the quality or otherwise of the Interactive Bureau report, the firm is merely filling a vacuum that the usability community itself has allowed to exist.
If UX people don't generate their own stories, it's hard to object when others come up with some column inches. We can object on professional grounds, but somehow it always makes the profession look like it's washing its dirty linen in public, a view reinforced by current discussions of the affair on various IA and UX lists.
Promoting the activities of our own professional bodies and running our own professional surveys and so on has to be the way forward. After all, which journalist takes a story from a little-known doctor on Harley Street when he or she can phone up the Royal College of Physicians for an expert assessment?
Right up my street UpMyStreet Conversations is working out well. I posted a query about local fishmongers and I've had several replies with information within a short time. I can see some long-term conversations developing on the local cinema situation. In the meantime, the site has gone live.
Gel in New York Mark Hurst, founder of Creative Good and editor of Good Experience, has been in touch to remind me of this year's Gel - Good Experience Live - one-day conference that takes place in New York in May. With an eclectic collection of speakers including Marissa Mayer - product manager of Google - Maryam Mohit - VP UI product reviews Amazon - Bob Tedeschi - e-commerce columnist The New York Times - cartoonist Ze Frank and photographer Gillian Zoe Segal, the aim is to "explore what it means to create a good, meaningful, or authentic experience," according to Mark, giving people new ideas about how to create a good experience. Sounds good.
National ID cards - your chance to respond Privacy International, Leafnet and others are running a campaign informing people about the UK national identity card scheme and encouraging them to respond to the government's consultation. At present the Home Office is claiming that there is an overwhelming public response in favour of these ID cards, which I find difficult to believe - although I suspect only the relatively well-heeled have the resources, time and inclination to download the Home Office's unnecessarily large - 13MB - consultation document.
As someone who lived and worked in southern Europe for many years - former dictatorships seems to be particularly prone to having such schemes - and having amassed an entire boxful of other people's national ID cards without any effort whatsoever (merely moving house a few times) I have to say that ID card schemes are of little benefit in guaranteeing identity. They merely indicate that a person has been sent or given an ID card or has stolen one, not that the holder is the person stated. But these cards can prove very problematic for the individual whose ID is stolen by others, which happens all too frequently: officials tend to believe whatever the paperwork says rather than reality, with the consequence that the cards give a false sense of security to the authorities (remember, all this goes back to events of 11 Sept). Such cards are also a major driver for street crime.
And this apart from the privacy issues involved. When you get to a situation where you can't make a tax enquiry without providing your national ID number to the civil servant concerned - the situation in a number of 'modern democracies' with such schemes - then privacy is out of the door and wholesale paranoia sets in.
Check out the Privacy International website for more information and an excellent set of links. If you want to distribute leaflets take a look at Leafnet, print out some leaflets and distribute them in your neighbourhood. To submit a superfast online response, check out Stand, which has an automatic response generator for the time challenged. The deadline for responses to the consultation is now 31 January 2003.
Update: Simon Davies of the LSE has just informed me that Privacy International has set up two local rate numbers: in favour of the ID Card: 0845 330 7245, against the ID Card: 0845 330 7246. "Each message left on these lines will be converted to an audio file, and then emailed to the Home Office. The government has confirmed that these will be regarded as legitimate consultation responses."
Request for Information - NHS National Programme Oh dear. Last Friday saw the deadline for submissions in the Request For Information round of the NHS National Programme, concerning future ICT investment in the UK NHS. The RFI was issued on 19 December (the Thursday before Christmas) and the deadline came the week after New Year, so there will have been many cancelled holidays out there.
Sad to see that the RFI, in the possible categories for interested parties or RFI information providers, did not included any reference to users or usability or anything related. 'Change management', 'business process reengineering' and 'training' was as good as they got.
Chinese excluded from Blogistan Chinese bloggers are being denied access to Blogspot, the area of Blogger where bloggers post their content to, according to a post on Boing Boing. Blogger is perhaps the most popular instant web logging program on the Web. See the story in Openflows, which states that "Initial scans indicate that blogspot.com is being blocked by IP number at the international gateway level", and suggests that the denial of access has now been going on for several days. In Who let the blogs out, Frank Yu discusses the importance of blogs in China.
e-minties united Well, e-mint (UK online communities group) kicked off to a really good start this year with an excellent meeting last night in central London, Dan Dixon and Ian Jindal being the two speakers with contrasting and complementary perspectives on 'trust and reputation models'.
We heard about how online communities can build reputation, how reputation relates to rating and recommendation, how incredibly multidimensional such concepts are, what different kinds of reputation axes can be applicable, the importance of identity in building trust, why models such as Web Trader - recently abandoned by Which - are such a waste of space, what the badges of trust of a site might be (fully recognising that each site is unique and so solutions will be likewise), how reputation has a half-life (and what might influence it), why the human factor is so important in content selection and moderation, how P2P business or expert communities have their own rules of the game, how friend-of-a-friend systems differ from collaborative filtering reputation systems. And why so many public sector community efforts are failing. Wow.
For future events - e-mint and others - see my events page.
"Many of the applications we use aren't sympathetic to our workplaces" A worthwhile article from Tom Smith that clearly explains how studying users in their own habitat can be much more fruitful that sticking people in a usability lab.
London UX events I've started posting a list of user experience-related events - UX, IA, HCI, interaction design, online communities - in the London area to a page on my website. If you know of any events not listed, let me know and I'll add them.
Alternatives to Microsoft Interesting account by Rashmi Sinha of adopting Star Office after being a Microsoft user.
For those interested in an open source version of this suite, there is Open Office (download free if you have broadband, or send off for a cheapo CD-ROM if not). Thanks to Michael Andrews for the info.
Up Your Street? A couple of months ago, I was having a chat with someone from Poptel - they do websites for local councillors, among other things - about how easy it was for people to be spammed regardless of distance - I seem to be a particular favourite of Argentinian spammers trying to sell English courses - but how difficult, relatively speaking, for people to organise locally on the Internet.
A solution appears to be at hand in the UK. Up My Street Conversations is now in beta. As Up My Street users will know, you type in your postcode, then get local information. With Conversations, users get access to forum conversations relating to their own area. A good way to organise locally, publicise local events, discuss local issues and so on. Up My Street is a popular site, so here's hoping Conversations takes off.
Corporate sites "wallowing in mediocrity" FTSE-100 websites are "wallowing in mediocrity" according to a report out yesterday from Interactive Bureau (London). Based on research conducted by Porter Research, the survey looks at the websites of the UK's top 100 companies, considering home page design, navigation, content and performance, and follows on from a similar survey last year.
Although ICM report standards to be on the rise, more than half the sites have problems that need fixing, while sixteen sites were thought to be so bad that the research company recommended taking the site down and starting again. In total, 72 sites "vary from needing some substantial attention in one area or another, to needing a lot of urgent attention, to being irredeemably bad and in a state where they should be thrown away".
A third of the websites have undergone a redesign during the last year, according to ICM, but the results are not always an improvement: eight are considered to be worse than they were before. These included Schroder, Severn Trent, Granada, Friends Provident, HSBC, Reuters and Standard Chartered.
Faults found included not giving the company's share price, not indicating on the home page what the company does, not providing an investor area or information for the media, and not providing any search facility.
The top five sites, said ICM, were National Grid, Six Continents, Kingfisher, Sainsbury and Pearson, while at ther bottom of the pile came Man Group, Severn Trent, Schroder, Alliance UniChem and Next.
Women and Userati David Crow has responded to my blog about the seeming invisibility of women - Guys and Gals - by posting on his own blog a list of links to women in the user experience who have influenced his own work. There are more than 40!
First maps of the blogosphere? Ross Mayfield has published his Blog Tribe Social Network Mapping of the blogger tribe at Ryze on his own blog, with some rather nice social network maps courtsey of Orgnet's Inflow software. Yes, I'm on it somewhere, he tells me ;-).
He points out: "Unlike Ryze, Weblogs are not currently designed as networking tools, as: Identities are not explicit (save for a person's URL), and transaction costs are higher for linking from an identity to another. Aside from networking, the absence of these characteristics is a strength in and of itself. Non-explicit identities appeal to many users and content-to-content linkages are formed easily."
Guys and gals There's been some discussion over the last couple of months on Peter Merholz's weblog (Peterme) about why there seem to still be so few women in science, technology and computing, a situation seemingly reflected in Chris McEvoy's Userati list and at a range of user experience and technology industry events. New UK web book publisher glasshaus reinforces this view, referring on its blog last month to Userati as a 'useful list of all the big guys in Usability'. And the gals? While I kind of accepted the Userati list 'as is', one comment posted to Peterme's blog started me thinking: '..if there's nobody to invite, can you blame the organizers?' The problem according to Anil, referring to two other events (computing & social software), is a lack of candidates.
How untrue. I began to realise how many significant women players in this field did not figure on the list, and don't get 'invited'. Yes, there are fewer women than men in such fields, for a range of reasons, but then the women that are there also seem strangely less visible.
I can think of a few reasons why this has come to be, and why women have such low visibility compared to men:
1. Parents: what your parents do does influence you, and the same goes for the other adults you know. How many girls have mothers in science etc right now? How about any 'hard' science (physics, chemistry), maths and IT teachers at school? Who hosts the popular science programmes on TV (apart from Susan Greenfield, in the UK). Who is profiled on the obits page of your heavyweight newspaper? Not too many women, huh? So what messages are presented in *your* culture to young women?
2. Schools: in the UK at least, there has been an increasing trend over recent decades away from single-sex and towards co-ed secondary schools. Paradoxically, in single-ex schools girls do more science to a higher level *and* go on to study more science at university (more science teachers and heads of dept. are women, so more role models, no 'unladylike' view of science re boys etc. etc.), so the trend towards same-sex may reduce the presence of girls in science. (In general, girls don't seem to benefit from co-ed education in the ways boys do.)
I went to an all-girls school, with women physics, chemistry and maths teachers (several had PhDs), from where many, many girls went on to study hard science at university. That's not generally what happens at mixed schools. Check out also the day-to-day, relentless language of the co-ed classroom: my experience in ICT teaching in London completely supports the findings of Dale Spender's classic works Man Made Language and The Schooling Scandal and Robin Lakoff's Language and Woman's Place.
3. Higher education: I can tell you it's really off-putting sitting in a lecture theatre of 150 unwashed geeky guys and two women. I speak from recent university experience in the UK. Who would undergo this voluntarily? Anyway, science books are really heavy ;-) Women in higher education also get propositioned by men who have significant influence over their results - how often does this happen to men?
4. Childcare: far, far more women than men are still responsible for this (proportions depending on culture e.g. compare Spain and Sweden) and many women drop out of research and jobs etc. during the crucial career-making years. This means they lose out in academia and in business on that relentless career ladder. Women end up being older for the same level of experience. Then this is counted against them.
Being a carer can result in some pretty strange forms of discrimination: a couple of years ago, I pointed out to the British Computer Society that they were charging more in membership fees to (mainly female) non-grant-aided child-carers in part-time degree courses (often the only ones open to them) than to either fully grant-aided full-time students (mostly male) or even well-paid graduates in full-time work following graduation (mostly male). I did not get what I consider to be a satisfactory response and nothing has changed.
5. Politicking: women seem to be less good at playing politics on the professional networks and in the workplace (they tend to concentrate on the job rather than jockeying for position), which is what you need to land the management jobs quickly and ascend the power hierarchy. Can you be a part of - and take advantage of - the 'old boys' network' when you are a woman? (When you don't 'piss in the same pot', so to speak)
6. Ethics: related to the previous point, women tend not to make a career out of 'using' their colleagues' work, something - in my experience - surprisingly frequent among men. I have come across so many parasitic men in my professional life over the years, and those who are prepared to do the dirty without compunction...but no women of the same inclination, strangely. They do this in many ways, perhaps suggesting - no, no, *insisting* with a barrage of communications - that unless they present your work at a particular conference - under their name or the name of their organisation - you will not have any professional profile to speak of. Or perhaps persuading you that you should not sign your name to an article - or ten - which enables them to conveniently take the credit for it in public at a later date. I've even had multiple male candidates angling to present the same material at the same conference, none of which they were responsible for, finally only backing off when informed of their the rival pretender's ambitions ;-). This seems to be the only thing that embarrasses them.
Men seem to have a much better eye for the main chance, an immediate idea of how to profit from others - in personal PR and financial terms - without lifting a finger (see also my point about George Olsen, in (9) below).
Another example: in some countries (I'm thinking particularly of the countries of southern Europe, where I worked for a number of years) it seems to be fairly standard practice for university lecturers in technology (usually men) to present their research students' (quite often women) work as their own at international conferences. I've heard enough accounts of such practices from postgrad women in southern European countries for me to believe that this is a consistent pattern.
A Dutch industrial psychologist of my acquaintance - who spends his life sorting out interpersonal problems in companies in Europe - once suggested that I should team up professionally with women rather than men: he'd seen it all so many times himself, it had become a cliche.
Maybe others have a different life experience, but the scientific literature is littered with cases of women who have come up with discoveries and research, only for those same ideas to be credited to others, invariably men.
I am not, or course, in this regard talking about people in the UE field here, but generally about how a proportion of men conduct their professional lives, both in industry and academia.
7. Two's a crowd when it comes to women, but not men. In a seminar of four speakers, one woman is considered 'enough', two 'quite enough', and three or four completely out of order (a 'gaggle of women' etc). How come four men out of four on a panel is still considered completely normal in any professional field? Well, it's justified by people saying stuff like 'there are no candidates', when there patently are.
8. Specialisation: even when they are around, women seem to be less visible than men through being involved in what are deemed to be more specialised activities or research.
Take one example, women in usability-related fields who don't appear on the Userati list: Lucy Suchman, Diana Forsythe (sadly died), Rosalind Picard, Bonnie Nardi, Elizabeth Churchill, Diane Laurillard, Geraldine Fitzpatrick, Abigail Sellen, Susan Dray etc. (to mention a few, off the top of my head) plus Gitta Salomon, Karen Holtzblatt, Deborah Mayhew, Janice Redish, Pattie Maes, Gitte Lindgaard - a few more that came to mind after an email exchange with David Crow - have had and continue to have a high profile within the 'HCI/user experience' profession (in its broadest sense), and a host of other women in the UK have a profile here too, such as Barbara McManus, Angela Sasse, Ann Blandford, Rose Luckin...., but generally in fairly distinct, self-contained parts of it, particularly in certain areas of university research. None appear on Userati (Chris?). There are *some* women's names on the list: Brenda Laurel, Jenny Preece, Allison Druin, Beth Mazur, Christina Wodtke and Lucy Lockwood, for example, in total a mere 19 from a total of 93), not too many considering how many female seriously *heavy punchers* there are in this field.
It could be argued (I'm sure it will be), "Oh, they're not usability, they're CSCW/interactive learning/workplace ethnography/medical informatics/contextual design/digital libraries/affective computing" etc etc. And damn good they are at it too.
9. Blowing your own trumpet, aka bumptiousness or even arrogance: nor are these women I mention writing in to the BBC to massage their press coverage ("One of the leading figures in the web industry, Nielsen, contacted dot.life after reading one of our stories in which his views had been given very short shrift", quote from BBC News dot.life column, February 2002.)
Ann Light is on Userati primarily through being editor of Usability News (looking at the Google stats). She also just happens to have a PhD and postgraduate teaching in the field too, together with wide commercial experience, and she's written a fair amount of academic papers, some of which appear very high in the popularity rankings. But without that UN visibility she would probably be in the same boat as the rest (i.e. not there).
Yvonne Rogers is a long-time researcher and high-profile person in this field and has written some of the major books too (with Jenny Preece), but did not appear on Chris's list until I suggested her name. Nobody had thought of her, yet she has masses of excellent publications and considerable professional stature, and what's more she has been instrumental in expanding research funding for the user experience field right across the UK. Perhaps she doesn't shout as loudly as some....
The point is that none of these women are brash, self-promotional, total-picture people, readly to opine on anything and everything for the press - or in their blog - regardless of their expertise or lack of it. Unlike some men with far more modest credentials.
But when women do behave in a self-promotional way, they are viewed as 'unattractive' by both men and women (though the same behaviour seems to be deemed 'attractive' - or at least not 'unattractive' - in men).
10. Recognition: Men - who dominate in terms of numbers and positions of power - seem more able or more willing to recognise other men. Put your hand up as a woman in some forums, and you stand a small chance of getting heard, whilst in others you will not be referred to by name, even when the moderator knows your name. You are a 'woman', period. Men in such circumstances seem to get noticed more, selected more, and named more, even when they know nothing about the subject.
I too have tried to pipe up about rubbish that certain men have spoken at conferences (one male panel speaker pontificating at a recent conference referred to bank staff as being 'the users of bank ATMs'), but moderators generally defer to men and not women in the audience. Just as happens in the co-ed classroom, those in charge perhaps react to the greater repercussions involved in 'ignoring' men. It all adds up to more professional visibility for men.
Try to imagine for a moment the response Chris would have received from the man concerned should one of those high-profile guys have been missed off the Userati list by accident (Nielsen or whoever). I think women don't kick up a stink so much, which means they're far more likely to get sidelined.
In London, meanwhile, recent 'spokespeople' on the usability scene have included Martyn Perks and James Woudhuysen. Neither has any expertise in the subject from the professional perspective, but it is they who are now sometimes deemed 'experts', invited along to institutional functions to speak about the subject, or to write national press articles about it, rather than those actually involved in the field.
Why? Perhaps because both of them are prepared to make complete fools of themselves by expressing controversial opinions (the latter with humour, it has to be said) at seminars and in the press, and are quite into being shouted at too. Women just don't seem to do that so much. If at all. Perhaps women just haven't cottoned on to - or are not interested in - what George Olsen refers to on Usability News as 'playing the game', so they 'get pushed aside by those who do'. Or perhaps they don't have a sufficiently high quotient of entertainment value.
In conclusion
I'm not in favour of a guru-dominated UX/IA etc profession, or a male-dominated one. Perhaps I think we all need to think about why we spend so much time talking to each other rather than to all those other people out there who need to know this stuff, and what I'd like to see is some attempt at finding ways of helping the whole profession develop a broader and deeper public profile that is inclusive (and not leave it to those who speak the loudest).
Without a firm basis in solid research in a whole range of relevant fields (some of which I mentioned above), and visibility for the structure that underpins the profession, there is every danger that the whole enterprise will be taken over by the marketeers. And will the public really care if it is?
Poorly-designed UK government websites failing to attract visitors Less than 3% of the population regularly use the web to find details of government services, according to research carried out by ICM on behalf of IT consulting firm Hedra. More than half (53%) the survey participants said they would make more use of Government websites if they were easier to use or better designed.
This latest research follows the recent House of Commons Public Accounts Committee finding that a number of government sites are out of date, with the Downing Street website not even having an up-to-date list of ministers, although it has to be said that the Public Accounts Committtee website is itself guilty of the same charge. Two months ago, Interactive Bureau reported that 20 flagship government sites needed "immediate attention", with the Prime Minister's own pages among the worst offenders.
Tracking down information - Search and indexes A book which has recently landed on my desk is fine, but has a poor index. Hmmm. Indexing is definitely an art but also has some rules, like indexing by surname rather than title. This set me thinking once again about the whole search versus indexing issue on the web.
Many owners of large websites believe that a search facility will enable users to find just what they're looking for. Try tapping 'usability' into the average IT manufacturer website, and you'll get hundreds of similar-looking entries (the example I've always used is the HP website, as I spent many frustrating months a few years ago researching content for HP itself using the company's aimless search engine).
Often, though, the user doesn't know what he or she will find on the site, and is therefore completely unable to specify search terms.
Site search is full of problems. In fact, a report issued by Forrester Research in September 2002 concluded, "Most companies already own a search engine—one that doesn't work."
I'm still a believer in indexes as part of an overall offering for providing access to information, but fewer and fewer people seem to have the skill. I've just posted an old indexing piece in the articles section of this site, but there is other guidance out there too, such as this article entitled Improving Usability with a Website Index on the Boxes and Arrows website.
