City of Bits Blog
Usability, user experience, technology, ethnography, design, the workplace and public policy, from a UK perspective
Friday, August 29, 2003
Blogging and the 2004 Presidential election
James Crabtree has organised a Voxpolitics blogging event at the US Embassy (Grosvenor Square) for 23 September (evening), with an impressive lineup of speakers including Phil Noble (President, PoliticsOnline), Rachelle Valladares (International Chair, Democrats Abroad, and Member, Democratic National Executive Committee), Gordon Corerra (BBC American Political Correspondent), Jim Ledbetter (Senior Editor, Time Magazine, and Author of Starving to Death on $200m) and of course James himself.
Big question: Is Howard Dean going to be out on his own, with Dean campaign activities taking place via Meetup and other online resources, or is this the year that the Internet really takes off for US political campaigning?
To attend, email your name, job title and organisation to: james@voxpolitics.com
James needs FULL NAMES OF EVERY ATTENDEE, and you must take full ID (e.g. passport) on the night. For full details, see the Voxpolitics post.
Dave Winer of the Berkman Centre at Harvard has posted some advice to politicians about how to use the Internet, and in particular encouraging them to blog.
His main advice is
1. run a real weblog 2. get a pied piper (an experience blogger to write your main weblog) 3. include independent bloggers 4. publish advocacy guidelines 5. if you must, offer hosting, but also offer choice 6. have the candidate speak about democracy
In the UK, we already have our very own, home-grown Tom Watson, who already knows more than most about the blogging game. I hope others follow in his footsteps. Tom has recently been joined by Paul Richards, who has launched a blog called The Thinker.
Laura Barton visits Darlington to use a hole-in-the-wall Shop 24 and asks: is this the future of shopping? [I write this following a 1 hour power interrupt in south London, the first I've experienced since the great storms of October 1987, and which caught me in the middle of an online shopping trip to Waitrose supermarket partner, Ocado.]
Like some giant Mars-bar dispenser, the new Darlington vending machine operates 24/7 without staff. Laura's shopping list seems quite straighforward - Rizla rolling paper but no tobacco.. ('this is after all The Guardian' she excuses herself). Maximum order 7 items, pay by card or cash, includes chilled and ordinary shelf items.
"The machine whirs gently, then unceremoniously spits my card on to the pavement". Oh well, some teething problems, clearly. Then "the toilet rolls get stuck in the hatch".
Apparently there are now two Shop 24s in Darlington - following outlets introduced in Belgium - with a further 50 planned across the North-East. They are still ironing out some of the creases, according to Sandy Douglas, responsible for bringing the concept to the UK. According to Laura Barton, "the top purchase is condoms."
Well, I know we've just about got used to taking cash out of automatic tellers in the street - or in some countries, out of machines in enclosed foyers - but what about standing in the street as you conduct your entire shopping process (never mind whether the shop has the things you want). On the other hand, with Shop 24 you can avoid the chirpy shopkeepers when you 've got a hangover and just need a ton of asprins.
As someone who has been waiting for hosting company - in California - ehost to get their damned stats back online after a NINE-day hiatus - after TWO days of host faffing at the back end of last week - I feel a particular affinity with this lovely cartoon re-enactment of the website owner hosting encounter/404 error. Grrrr....Lyle's got some other stuff linked to on the same site.
And no, my my host won't even allow me my own 404 page...."Why 'ja wan won uf thows?" Time to change host?
To promote his ThisIsBroken project, Mark Hurst of Good Experience is offering some free digital cameras to be allocated to contest entrants by lottery. Entries - with photo or URL - by 18 September.
Simon Waldman has been proved marvellously wrong: we are not the only two people in the world interested in the usability - and accessibility - of the Hutton Inquiry website.
How do I know? Well, Matthew Somerville has put a website online that is an echo of the Hutton site, but minus the frames, excess cookies, Javascript. He's also added links to convert some of the PDFs to HTML. Some pages are auto updated (evidence, transcripts).
All we need now is a better 'way in' to the rising tide of evidence (currently listed by day and by source).
An inveterate campaigner in favour of plain language is Caroline Jarrett, who recently argued on UsabilityNews that legalese on websites was unnecessary.
Simon Caulkin followed the subject up in Sunday's Observer management section, pointing out that companies using plain language in their communications - websites, annual reports, press releases - seem to perform better financially. The conclusion came out of a survey conducted by Clarity, which campaigns for plain legal language.
It's difficult to know which is the chicken and which the egg in this case: as Clarity speculates, firms that are failing may be likely to try to disguise bad news. At the bottom of Clarity's class comes Shell, Capita, Shire Pharmaceuticals and Gallaher.
Capita manages to convert 'absence management' for schools into 'providing clients with tailored and off-the-shelf solutions to a broad range of absence-related challenges'.
Many have complained of the blot on the design landscape that is Jakob Nielsen's website, UseIt.com, but finally some people have got around to doing something about it, with a competition launched by Built for the Future to create a revamped site design, ReUSEIT.
In the words of Built for the Future, "Design a usable, intuitive layout and navigation, organize the content with usability in mind, and create a work of art which still reflects the importance and influence of Nielsen's work."
The contest is a friendly project being run with the blessing of Nielsen, although he doesn't plan to use the winning design, apparently. The deadline is the end of October.
Postscript: The organisers have promised to put a woman or two on the judgin' committee, after comments expressed by yours truly and others. "You're in collusion, aren't you?", said Bob Sawyer. Well, no, we just all seem to have the same startlingly obvious idea at the same time.
Well now Elizabeth Castro has been invited on board....as has Molly E. Holzschlag....
A preposterous report in today's El Mundo: the - small - town of Jun in the province of Granada will use remote electronic voting "for the first time in the world" and will thus [their bold] "get ahead of the US project". Integrity guarantees in the autonomous (regional) elections in March will apparently be achieved through the issue of a card and password.
First, this is hardly the first such project. Second, how on earth are they guaranteeing integrity, the security, of the voting system? Have these people not been reading what's been going on in the rest of the world? The only thing that appears important to the project sponsors - or at least to the journalist reporting the projec t- is being ahead of somewhere else.
Who are the people who run these projects? And the people who write this stuff?
I recently bemoaned how some attendees at a recent Experience Design event in London, looking at mobile devices, did not seem at all interested by - in fact in some cases protested - the idea of conducting ethnographic studies/field studies/contextual inquiry/whatever you want to call it, before the event - that is, before designing something.
Seeing how people work did not seem to strike most attendees as significant information in the requirements gathering process. 'Throwing designs over the wall' - I borrow an expression that Geraldine Fitzpatrick recently wrote to me, and which I'm quite taken by - seemed to be the way they wished to operate (with perhaps taking a look afterwards to see how people use things being a potentially interesting add-on).
Nice therefore to see Jared Spool now coming out with Field Studies: The Best Tool to Discover User Needs, singing the praises of getting out there and watching people doing things. There are big issues with the use of the word 'needs' (we need food and drink, but we don't really need the latest HP Jornada or what it can do), but never mind.
I'm surprised that people are held in such little regard by so many designers, viewed as mere ciphers that cannot inform the design process. 'Hey, I don't want people stifling my creativity' and 'Why should I care about people finding it difficult to use?' are commonly expressed views, here and now, in companies across the UK. This position strikes me as arrogant.
A restaurant worker in the backstreets of Waterloo (London) has created a word-processed version of the day's menu, then has printed it out to copy the text to the blackboard in the street.
If the Hutton Inquiry website civil servants are really to post some 900 new documents today - with more to come later in the month - to the Inquiry website, I feel the website architecture to be somewhat lacking.
Going on the present structure, documents are listed purely in relation to hearing date they relate to, and then morning or afternoon. For a body of texts that will probably finally exceed 1,000 in number and could amount to many more - another round of hearings begins on 15 September - this is highly unsatisfactory.
Surely, this cannot be the only 'way in' to the evidence? It is a pure reflection of paper-based filing systems.
Ideally, there will be an index of some kind, and a search facility is essential too. Has there been any consideration of metadata?
Webword today blogs a news report on The secret world of doctors' slang, covering the launch of a new dictionary of these inventive and often insulting terms, written by Adam Fox, a specialist registrar at St. Mary's Hospital in London.
As Fox says in the news report, such shorthand can serve to "depersonalise the distress encountered in doctors' everyway working lives". It may also act as a code that is not decipherable by patients in these days of increasing access to - increasingly electronic - medical records.
I don't know if it's in Mr Fox's new dictionary, but my own favourite term, seemingly widely used in British hospitals, is PIP, or pyjama-induced paralysis: that strange languor that overtakes the person who never manages to change into their day clothes.
I've discovered there's a short series of UK dates for 'Unprecedented: The 2000 Presidential Election'. The film, described by the Los Angeles Times as 'illuminating', 'persuasive' and 'incisive', has already won Best Documentary at a number of US film festivals.
In the words of Variety, "The filmmakers quickly examine such topics as the purging of alleged felons, overwhelmingly African-American, from voter rolls; the problems with ballot design and counting; the infamous "spontaneous" demonstration that helped cut short the ballot recount in Miami/Dade County; and the conflicts of interest that many felt should have forced at least three of the Supreme Court justices to recuse themselves from the election decision. Pic's only flaw is its brevity; the subject is so vast that an enhanced DVD release is called for."
ICA, London - Thursday 11 September Showroom Theatre, Sheffield - Saturday 13 September Spitz Gallery, London - Monday 15 September London Action Resource Centre - Tuesday 16 September Glasgow - Wednesday 17 September Edinburgh - Thursday 18 September
A quick chat with Whitney Quesenbery this week and she has managed to do some - fairly gentle - arm-twisting to persuade me to get involved in the Usability Professionals' Association (UPA) e-Voting Project.
Whitney has created an excellent resource on the main UPA website, covering masses of high quality US materials on e-voting and usability (and related) issues.
I'm off to do some research...but if you know of anything that's happening - research, writings, events - in either the UK or Europe, do let me know.
Some have noticed that I have a new pic on the blog page. Well, new-ish. I was taken a couple of years back. Anyway, for anyone who can figure out
- where I am standing, and - what is in the background on the right
there is a Japanese dinner in waiting, if you happen to be in London. [PS Anyone who's been there with me is not allowed to enter - that includes you, Ann!]
Last week The Economistcovered blogs. Today the Guardian Online section puts out more stuff about blogs, including a letter from a reader protesting about how much they publish about blogging, and an article from down under protesting at the uncritical coverage given to blogs.
And I - even I, as a blogger - have to agree. Supplements such as Guardian Online are perhaps excessively concerned with those very things that are the heartfelt obsessions of their contributors. And who are their contributors? Generally geeky blokes who love gadgets and other tech in a way not encountered in the real world. These are the people for which Stuff is published and for whom the term 'early adopter' was coined. Say no more.
Well, I will say one other thing. And that is that a preoccupation with blogs and gadgets leads to other matters, maybe affecting many people and of more widespread interest, not being covered. It's the opportunity cost of the present pattern of coverage that concerns me.
Challis Hodge has had enough, in the wake of severe Sobig inbox assault and holey MS code:
"And you! Yeah you, Microsoft. I'm thinking we change your name to Microswiss for that swiss cheese code you're putting out there. The public is starting to get nervous Bill...."
E-voting: Can't attack the study? Why not just attack the authors?
Following on from recent posts on e-voting and Diebold, from a post from Prof. David Dill at Stanford:
"The results reported in the Johns Hopkins/Rice study are generally accurate and can be independently checked.
"Diebold's attempts to 'rebut' the study have been so lame that they have now resorted to attacking the authors. If Diebold is sincerely concerned about 'bias' in the Johns Hopkins/Rice study, it would be easy to clear up: They should simply agree to an a review of the study and the code upon which it is based by truly independent computer security experts. It would help greatly if they would release the reviewers from any liability from violations of copyright or trade secret law in the process (Diebold would have no legitimate basis for objecting to this, since the code has been downloaded by hundreds or thousands of unknown individuals already).
"I doubt that Diebold would do this, because they know that the results of such a review would confirm the major findings of the study. No matter how much propaganda they churn out, they will never be able to justify 'wiring' cryptographic keys into the software.
"For more background on the Diebold security flaws and their rebuttal of the Johns Hopkins/Rice report, see the commentary by Prof. Douglas Jones of the University of Iowa. http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/~jones/voting/dieboldftp.html#rebuttals Jones is a computer scientist and election machine examiner for the state of Iowa."
'upload a governor', 'election results' and more: Jello Biafra is faring considerably better than Gray Davis in this digital race for governor of California but not as well as Marilyn Manson.
Is this any more ludicrous than the 'real' contest? Probably not.
Meantime, I'll just dig out my Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables LP (California Uber Alles) for old times' sake...
By the way, I have a feature in eGov Monitor today on the 'Quality Framework for UK Government Website Design: Usability issues for government websites'.
If you're interested in public sector issues, you can sign up for the - free - weekly at http://www.egovmonitor.com/
It's interesting how Government departments still post documents to the Web without checking the information they're putting out there. The BBC reports today, in an article entitled 'The Hidden Dangers of Documents', that "Your Microsoft Word document can give readers more information about you than you might think".
Mark Ward goes on to describe how, "The time when most information tends to leak is when you are using a document that has a number of revisions or a number of people working on it," quoting Nick Spenceley, founder of computer forensics firm Inforenz.
According to Ward, "the UK government has now largely abandoned Microsoft Word for official documents and has turned to documents created using Adobe Acrobat which uses the Portable Data Format (PDF)".
And he goes on to further quote Spenceley: "I'm not sure many people check Word documents before they go out or are published."
Well, if we look at what we get on the Office of the e-Envoy website, there's both a PDF version and Word version of the Quality Framework, and the Word version, with 'Track Changes' switched on, reveals a surprising amount of history about the document. This includes the names of companies that have clearly supplied content for the report, allowing us to see why certain information was included.
Since writing the piece for eGov Monitor, I'm being inundated with emails from both sides of the Pond, telling me about what people have found in the Framework report behind 'Track Changes' (I haven't gone through it myself, as I just don't have the time). This information is already being posted by others to the Web, on sites such as Webword. It has to be said, such information makes the Government look just a little foolish.
Postscript: Here's the original eGov article from 18 August. Usability News republished it on 19 August. Then Ann Light followed up with her own piece on Usability News. And I wrote a follow-up on Usability News. The original piece was blogged on Webword, with a number of comments, and has now been added to the Usability Views Usability Heretics collection. And now the follow-up article has been added to Usability Heretics too.
Simon Waldman's blog reports on usability of the Hutton Inquiry site, and in particular the use of frames.
Postscript: Simon tells me that he thinks we are probably the only two people in the world interested in the usability of the Hutton Inquiry site. Wish that this were not so, but he could be right...
There's some interesting stuff coming up at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (London) in September:
'Unprecedented: the 2000 Presidential Election', a documentary by Richard Ray Perez, telling the story of the battle for the Presidency in Florida. This is accompanied by a short from Rita Michel, 'Voice of the Faceless'. (11 September at 5pm.) http://www.unprecedented.org/
Among Talks, there's - 'Typographic Experimentation and Creative Language' (10 September)
- 'Copyright: Fair Pay, Fair Play' (18 September, all day event): speakers include Peter Shepherd of the Copyright Licence Agency and John Buckman discussing Creative Commons.
A couple of weeks back, James 'Crabbers' Crabtree, of Voxpolitics fame, remarked to me on how much time laptop users were purportedly spending in the smallest room, con teclado [a finding based on some daft research].
Now the Daily Mail Ideal Home Expo website reports on the Internet Toilet Roll Browser, with graphic and all: "a novel and unique product designed to make best use of the time you spend on the loo! The product allows you to search the Internet whilst sitting on the toilet and print out any pages you are interested in on your toilet roll."
All I can do is pooh-pooh such a preposterous scenario....
And for a whole heap of light amusement-come-spam revenge on the Nigerian theme (hey, they're even writing from London these days!), check out the Brad Christensen Exhibit. Better than soap opera, better than stand-up comedy...
UK citizens are this year to spend more on mobile phone ringtones than pop singles, according to a feature in today's Guardian G2, Fellowship of the rings.
"[...] like a calling bird, a ringing phone demands a response. Public uses of the mobile spread this tension to all those within earshot, while leaving them powerless to intervene: only the person to whom the call is made is in a position to respond." (Sadie Plant, "On the mobile: the effects of mobile telephones on social and individual life", Motorola)
And that annoying Nokia theme?: Francisco Tarrega's Gran Vals, apparently.
"Direct TV has already initiated approximately 9000 (that's no typo!) federal lawsuits against individuals. These individuals did not necessarily do anything illegal... most of them merely bought a piece of technology called a smart card programmer. Direct TV claims that the only use for such tech. is to steal satellite broadcasting... however, readers of Politech and IP know that they can be used for, at least, one other thing: loading them up with bogus votes and using them in Diebold voting machines!
"The EFF and Stanford's Center for Internet and Society have now launched a website ( http://www.directvdefense.org/ ) that aims to aid individuals that have been threatened by Direct TV with lawsuits or just plain sued."
Beth Mazur has a extensive post on her blog - IDblog - concerning the UX community and what is should call itself, a subject that has been preoccupying Tog and others recently:
A few weeks ago, the Guardian Weekend magazine carried a report about the way retail outlets use customer information, and specifically discussed how razor blade manufacturers and retail outlets were starting to use RFID (radio frequency identification) tags to take photos of customers in-store. Retailers and manufacturers in the US and Europe that are testing RFID technology include Wal-Mart. RFID devices sense when packs are removed from a shelf and take a picture of the consumer handling them.
Now lawmakers in California have scheduled a hearing for next week to discuss privacy issues surrounding this controversial technology, reported in CNET.
And an Australian publication carries a report of a proposed worldwide boycott of Gillette over the use of RFID tags. Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering (CASPIAN) are protesting about the introduction of a so-called "smart shelf" spy system.
In the latest issue of its newsletter, Witchita State University's Software Usability Research Laboratory (SURL) further reports on research into breadcrumb navigation: Breadcrumb Navigation: Further Investigation of Usage, from Bonnie Rogers and Barbara Chaparro.
See also Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think! and these graphics from Keith Instone.
Media Guardian carries a piece about how blogging MP Tom Watson's teen column has been taken without the requisite pinch of salt by one Ian-more-fogey-than-IDS-Hislop at now venerable institution Private Eye.
Yes, I know this is in bold. After Blogger Pro went bonkers around 13 August, all posts 1-12 August went bold. And re-posting has no effect. Sigh.
A prominent critic of electronic voting was booted out of last week's conference of the International Association of Clerks, Recorders, Election Officials and Treasurers in Denver.
"It seems the nation's election officials aren't open to input from anyone but the industries that are wining and dining them to buy their equipment," said Rebecca Mercuri, a computer science professor at Bryn Mawr College.
Mercuri on Thursday was asked to leave the conference at Denver's Adam's Mark Hotel after she and several other computer scientists raised questions earlier in the week about technological vulnerabilities with voting equipment that could lead to election tampering and fraud.
Group officials said she did not belong at the meeting because she is not a public official.
The UPA (main US site) has launched its new site. Areas of interest include Members (get together with others), the Projects pages (e-voting, egovernment, usability body of knowledge and more) and Resources.
Computer Weekly yesterday carried a column from Simon Moores, related to the Government's Quality Framework for UK Government Website Design.
Simon's position seems to be that:
- it's ridiculous to regard public sector staff and their families as a cheap alternative to usability firms (I think that's what he implies) - Agreed, although something is always better than nothing
- government websites, and particularly transactional ones, are often difficult to use - Agreed
- feedback from representative end-users and testing are crucial - Agreed
- "'optimal' size of a testing group one for target audience [is] six to eight people" - The implication in the report is not to recommend one-on-one testing, but to use groups, which I think is wrong; Simon is merely echoing the report here
- e-government is supposed to shrink public sector workforce, but instead it's getting larger, to the point where seemingly everyone is doing something for the government, even volunteers - Well yes and no: the idea that e-gov will rapidly cut costs has been bandied around, but I'd beg to differ: if e-government is about providing choice at the consumer face, then costs may not fall in the short term, as more channels may need to run in parallel; while in general the view is that the public sector needs to invest to save; if e-government is about cutting costs, then choice has to begin to disappear, funneling people into lower cost processes - see the recent SmartGov report from iSociety, for example. Fundamentally, though, giving technology to people costs money - people need to be trained, systems need to be designed and supported...So while we might employ fewer traditional staff members, we still need network support, trainers, web editors, information architects and so on
- websites "should be usable and friendly from day one" - My response is: how do they get to be usable, and who conducts this work, and doesn't this cost money too? This all feeds into total cost of ownsership (TCO). and what the heck is 'friendly'?
- "let's start worrying less about guidelines and more about accessibility and what this means in, first, making government websites attractive and useful enough to encourage people to use them..." - This displays a singular lack of understanding: since when has accessibility been about attractiveness and usefulness? There's a patent lack of understanding of issues here: accessibility is about catering for people with disabilities, a separate idea entirely from usability, and certainly a long way from ideas of 'attractiveness'
Well, by about half way through, I though he might be getting somewhere, but by the end I'm totally confused: what exactly is it that Simon Moores is advocating? As someone said at a recent event where Moores spoke: "I really don't know what he was talkiing about."
Corporate intranets - throwing money down drains and all that
This weeks' Computing carried a double-page spread - I know, I know, paper! - on corporate portals that have succeeded and failed.
"The frequency of stalled portal projects is shocking", reports Mark Ballard. It seems a quarter never make it beyond the pilot phase, while a third are implemented and then flounder. "Fewer than 10% were cited as an unqualified success," according to a recent Gartner survey.
As Mark says, if people don't use it, a corporal web portal is a colossal waste of money.
Meantime, a little colleague-birdy has been telling me about current experiences at a recently implemented big five consultancy portal, which sound horrendous and disastrous. Do they never learn?
Bill Thompson may believe he's seeing some kind of long-term blogger-dom downward spiral (see his latest article for the Beeb), but I can assure him the effect is temporary.
First - and I spend several years as a journalist in Barcelona and other points south, so I feel I know somethings about this - a) the UK always falls into perpective once you are abroad - politics is one of the big victims of this, as far as I'm concerned, but so ar local affiars of all descriptions
Then b) in the hot weather - and the abusive humidity in certain locations - nobody feels like doing anything c) summer is the silly season, so people talk rubbish - what else do you expect? d) once he's in a place for a while - i.e. working there - he'll soon find a need to engage with what's going on, there or wherever. That could be internationally or locally, whether it's reading the local papers, joining local mailing lists or checking out the local Information Architects' cocktail hour... He'll soon start developing opinions of some kind about something....
Bill sould know that being at a conference or on holiday is not a reflection of real life...it's an opportunity to escape it. If you have a penthouse flat in Barcelona - as I used to have for several years - there are only so many terrace BBQs you can have before the boredom of idleness sets in...Being at a conference is the next best escape mechanism: as Thomas Hyland Eriksen describes them: "The real purposes of conferences is revealed, namely as pretexts for enjoying some hours or days of slow time with colleagues." (Hyland Eriksen, 2001)
Update: Simon Waldman posted on this on 11 August. I tend to agree with his views on this
At Wednesday's AIGA Experience Design (London) on future trends in mobile devices, there were a number of advocates of the 'suck it and see' method of developing products: make it up, then see who you can sell it to, particularly so-called 'early adopters'*.
This position was hotly criticised by my research colleague at iSociety, Simon Roberts: "I regard the single mother in Mill Hill as much more interesting than homo laptop. There's a lot of lip service paid to the user", but the early adopter is not an ordinary user. By the way, Simon was speaking to a roomful of PowerBook users with postgraduate degrees in gadgetry. While there was some support for the idea of ethnography after the event - watching what users do with your gadgets - the idea of studying people before designing products did not garner much support.
I agree with Simon - approaches involving ethnography and anthropology could tell us a lot that is of interest about mobile behaviour. I think we might achieve more interesting and successful products with such approaches. For example, the failure of tablet computer manufacturers to understand anything about the people aspects of their product perhaps contribute to the repeated failure of such products in the marketplace. We've seen so many waves of tablet computers produced over the years - pen computers have been around since the 60s - but manufacturers still don't seem to know anything about who - beyond the so-called early adopters, who just have to have one because it's there - might use such products and why, and what requirements they might have.
Today The Register reports that a leading UK distributer is dumping Fujitsu Stylistic tablets bigtime: dealer prices have dropped from £1500 to £600. "Sales in Europe have been especially disappointing, even by comparison with the US (which hasn't been good)", reports The Register, and with newer tech on the way in the shape of Centrino products, old stock may just as well go to landfill sites. This is during a time when computer sales have rise almost 16% and laptop sales over 40%.
I've used, and studied ethnographically, the use of two Stylistic models - A4 and A5 form factors - and my view is that when the technology is the centre of attention because it is difficult to use and unreliable, particularly in high-pressure and mission critical environments, then the downside is just too great. The tech needs to be invisible, behind the scenes, not a constant source of aggravation.
It seems we haven't really got beyond Diana Forsythe's 1992 assessment that the reason why most expert systems ever designed have remained "on the shelf" is that developers design, build and evaluate products that "delete the social" (Susan Leigh Star).
* Someone from IDEO, who's name I didn't catch, pointed out that there's a lot of crap talked about early adopters: early adopters are self-selected on buying power, and if we gave away devices to children, they would be 'early adopters' too.
Is this for real? An interview with a technician working on Diebold voting machines in Georgia. Other materials on the site include an interview with the voting machine examiner for the state. Which are we to believe?
The LinkTank white paper The Augmented Social Network: Building identity and trust into the next generation Internet, is now available in this month's First Monday.
The Google Toolbar 2.0 Beta has a pop-up stopper, a Blog This! button that works with Blogger (which now of course is part of the Google empire). And yes, It Knows Who You Are.
An interesting five minutes on Radio 4 this evening on a subject that's close to my heart: the usability of music categories in record shops. Which is not unconnected to the idea of a taxonomy for music.
Take a few examples: are the White Stripes blues or indie? Led Zep classic rock or heavy metal? What exactly is 'nu soul'? And 'Asian underground'? How come we never see something called 'funk'? And has the micro-categorisation of dance music contributed to its decline? Does a band that samples jazz belong in the jazz section, or is that reserved for players of jazz?
These categories are not static: Tom Jones has apparently migrated from easy listening old codgerdom to pop, according to record company executives.
Nitin Sawhney says he's had enough: he reckons that bad categories in music can actually damage careers and doesn't want to be categorised any more. Or rather, he'd like to be placed in one big category called 'human'. So which category would you put him in? In the meantime we get nowhere near the sophistication of online systems such as Amazon - "pople who liked x also liked y" - in the physical record stores.
Southwark Council in London tomorrow unveils a relaunch of its website, with "greater focus on community interaction, hosting online discussions boards to give residents an opportunity to speak out", and "online live chat events".
"Not only will residents be able to find the information they need more easily but, for the first time, will be able to share experiences, knowledge and opinions with one another", says the Council.
Ho hum, as a Southwark resident I shall keep an eye out. It will truly be a revolution if it lives up to promises, but I'm not holding my breath right now.
The nice Ian Cuddy at eGov Monitor includes me this week in his "selection of thought leaders in e-voting and edemocracy". Here are the expert assessments by Stephen Coleman (Professor of e-Democracy, Oxford Internet Institute), Jason Kitcat (Free e-Democracy Project founder), Richard Allan MP, Dr Ben Fairweather, Yoz Grahame (FaxYourMP.com)...and yours truly.
BTW, Jason will be speaking about e-participation at next week's e-mint meeting at the Deluxe Gallery in Hoxton: see the events page on this site.
You can subscribe to the weekly eGov Monitor (free) on its website.
"Good afternoon madam, what can I do to make your life a misery?"
I much enjoyed Marina Hyde's diary item in today's Guardian:
"Has anyone, in the history of the known universe, ever received a replacement Barclays Connect [bank] card the projected three working days after requesting it? Or even within a fortnight and without being drawn into some demented caper involving their courier company, customer service agents unfamiliar with computers or the Gregorian calendar, and an automated telephone system apparently designed and programmed by David Beckham?"
I'm intrigued by the prospect of a system designed and programmed by Beckham: would it perhaps have just two numeric keypad options, 7 to have an argument with a real human being (the centre's manager), and 23 to be transferred?
We've recently been having discussions about using Movable Type to create and manage an entire professional association website; that is, using Movable Type as a content management system.
I've always felt a little sceptical about some of the claims made in NN/g's report 'Usability Return on Investment', while at a recent UK UPA panel both in-company and agency panel speakers said they had never encountered the returns claimed by Jakob Nielsen and Shuli Gilutz, the authors of that report.
In a piece entitled 'Report Review' in last week's Boxes and Arrows, Peter Merholz and Scott Hirsch lay into in the report with a vengeance, with particular criticism aimed at the methodology.
Peter has posted some further stuff at his own site (and there's some unpleasant feedback purportedly from Jakob Nielsen of NN/g too) and Christina Wodtke has blogged the review at Elegant Hack.
Talking of The Guardian, there's another great story on page 11 - yes, the paper edition: "Italians keep face by faking holidays". John Hooper reports that Italians would rather buy an ultra-violet lamp and take the plants to a neighbour to partake of imaginary holidays rather than admit to colleagues that they are not going away for August. They also get up to other tricks, such as parking their cars in long-term car parks, so that the neighbours don't see them.
What a wonderful opportunity for digital intervention. After all, how to assure work colleagues of your whereabouts in the digital age? Some bright spark needs to start offering a contract service: e-mails to work colleagues, purportedly transmitted from the beach via wi-fi, assuring them of the clarity of the water and the quality of the trattoria; and images beamed from mobile phones.... This reminds me of the days when professional photographers would place their subjects in front of paintings of exotic locations...
"Our helpline gets a lot of men with an obvious gadget addiction...". No, not a comment from a computer company, but from Toby Gane of Allinson bakers.
Today's story in The Guardian on the surge in home bakery machines, attributable to men, makes amusing reading:
"Tempted by the irresistible prospect of a new and quite complex kitchen gadget, men are largely responsible for a 13-fold rise in sales of breadmakers which the average household can tuck away on a shelf".
Quite. What else would they do with it? The only male breadmaker I ever came across was sixteen years ago: he baked to sell at Camden market in London, but the finished product was so dense it could have provided excellent foundations for Canary Wharf.
"The surge in male interest is in line with previous kitchen gadget milestones," reports The Guardian, "although women have managed to retain control of blenders and mixers, probably because of the skills required".
In an article entitled "It's time we got respect" and sub-titled "I have met the enemy and he is us", Tog (Bruce Tognazzini) has posted on the NN/g website an argument in favour of renaming and rebranding the user experience profession. Having rejected 'engineer' and 'designer' as too problematic, he comes up with 'interaction architect'. Tog describes the piece as the most important he has ever written - and has set up a Yahoo! Group to discuss his ideas.
In his blog today, Lyle Kantrovich argues forcefully against Tog's analysis, suggesting that the proposals amount to little more than creating a mirror of the UPA.
Beth Mazur has also thrown her hat into the ring at IDblog.
California lawsuit against touch screen voting systems
Wired News today reports on the escalation of this US case, involving a California resident who alleges touch screen voting machines are open to manipulation and consequently deprive citizens of their constitutional rights. The case involves Sequoia Voting Systems technology and revolves around the absence of an audit trail.
The Disability Rights Commission has a nice demo of the various ways in which a website can be inaccessible. The site demonstrates how a blind user hears a site with a screen reader, difficulties with using a mouse, how the site might look to a visually impaired user and how the web page should be built for accessibility.
UK e-voting pilots report: electronic dog bites man
The Electoral Commission's report on the May 2003 UK voting pilots, The Shape of Elections to Come, which was published on Thursday, offers few surprises and wise counsel.
In summary, e-voting appears to have little impact on turnout (0-5%, without discounting the Hawthorne effect); people like to vote by post and by phone; ease of use for kiosks and iDTV is often extremely poor; there's little merit in putting kiosks in polling stations; e-voting project management was dire in the pilots, and perhaps most shockingly, organising councils and officials left all kinds of security checks and balances in the hands of IT suppliers. It seems that once a project is classified as 'IT' (rather than a 'project involving technology'), non-IT managers seem to automatically hand over all responsibility for everything from project management to security to 'IT experts', or rather IT salemen.
The conclusion of the report is: proceed with postal voting, but don't move too fast with telephone and Internet pilot voting until systems and processes are more mature, and in particular address project management and security concerns.
What I find disturbing about this pilot process is that suppliers are each being asked to supply end-to-end 'solutions', leaving no room for independent discussion about good design principles for electronic voting systems (or any voting systems). Nor does the report document any usability or user experience findings. There is an accessibility report due out from SCOPE soon, but the only other research is a MORI opinion poll. Where is the forum for experts to contribute evidence on matters such as audit trails? Where is the dialogue? There is a terrible complacency, with a seeming belief that 'suppliers will deliver perfect products'. So it's 'your vote in their hands'.
Nowhere does the UK government's Statement of Requirement mention 'usability', 'ease of use', 'human-centred design' or any ISO related to human-centred design processes (unless my eyes deceive me). All we get is 'providers must supply a help function' and 'providers must describe their proposed approach to acceptance testing'. Oh, and 'QA'. Unfortunately, none of these is the same as usability or human-centred design. This is all very odd, considering the emphasis being put on usability these days by the Office of the e-Envoy. Either the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister is not speaking to the Office of the e-Envoy, or the e-Envoy believes that usability and human-centred design only apply to websites.
Put this together with poor project management and an absence of independent security checks and balances (both findings from the EC report), and we have a recipe for disaster.
Is anyone out there doing user research on voting or e-voting in the UK, despite all this? If you are, I'd love to hear about it. We know so little about the voting process, electronic or otherwise.
On Thursday the UK government published a framework document on smart cards policy.
As the announcement states, "The objective of the framework is to identify key issues in the roll-out and development of smart card enabled services across the public sector. The paper answers a request for guidance and leadership from both public and private sector, particular in the area of standards. Smart cards play a significant role in the Office of the e-Envoy's overall channels strategy."
The government is seeking feedback by 31 October. You can pick up the framework paper and feedback form from the Cabinet Office website.
The Register reports the announcement by Open Groupware (www.opengroupware.org) of the formation of a development community and an initial release of open source groupware server software. So the 'missing link' in open source is being addressed. Open Groupware provides for e-mail, document management and shared calendars: basically a replacement for MS Exchange et al.
Open Groupware is a similar but separate project to Open Office, but they apparently do intend to collaborate.
I've been updating my e-voting resources page, following recent publications from the UK Electoral Commission and others... I'll be commenting on the EC report in next Monday's eGov Monitor Weekly.
David 'Usability-person-who's-been-around-a-terribly-long-time' Travis has a new bluffers guide (pdf download) to ISO 9241 - "more widely cited than read" - on his website. If you don't read the ISO, you need to read this...
