City of Bits Blog
Usability, user experience, technology, ethnography, design, the workplace and public policy, from a UK perspective
Saturday, July 31, 2004
Publications and manifestos
This week IPPR launched the work programme for its Manifesto for a Digital Britain, while new IPPR fellow Will Davies wound down his stint at The Work Foundation with Proxicommunication: ICT and the Local Public Realm. I couldn't make it to either event, as I´m not in London right now.
Another publication fresh off the press, from First Monday, is a Manifesto for the Reputation Society. Reputation is a subject that has been kicking around for some time in the context of online communities.
Here in Spain, Que Web! ('What a website!') is a blog bringing together some of less fine features of the Spanish-speaking Web. Air Europa's website is the letest to get it in the neck.
And on to the sale of Lycos by Terra (owned by Spanish telecoms operator Telefonica). I could never figure out why they bought Lycos in the first place: it was always an inferior search engine, and Telefonica/Terra didn´t do anything with it - but now it's being sold to a South Korean ISP for around 1% of the original purchase price. Not sure what will be happening to Wired. But I loved the statement in El Pais that Terra had at one time planned to convert it into a "rival of Microsoft". A plan it recently abandoned. Building castles in Spain anyone?
Finally, the eternal Spanish gnashing of teeth over why Spanish TV is so bad. There's currently a 'committee of wisemen' looking into the matter, led by a philosopher without a television. Their verdict: British TV is better, the British public pay a licence fee...Perhaps not quite as simple as that, methinks.
Lou Rosenfeld has announced the launch of UXnet, a user experience network. This aims to co-ordinate events across the various professional organisations as well as to get these organisations talking to each other. Those involved include Beth Mazur, Whitney Quesenbery, Keith Instone and Challis Hodge.
There's been the need for a while now, and I know Lou has been planning this for some time. It's finally off the ground. All volunteers who wish to contribute to development welcome.
A picture of some of the Touching the State team at the Design Council, taken on the day the project was launched. This first stage of Touching the State focuses on the design of three citizen encounters with the state: voting, jury service and the new UK citizenship ceremonies. There'll be a publication coming out in September, to coincide with the London Design Festival I think.
On 20 July, Anthony Wright MP asked the following question of Douglas Alexander, in the House of Commons: "What steps are being taken to ensure that Government websites are designed around the needs of the general public?"
The reason I was able to find this exchange easily was that I used They Work For You, not the official online Hansard report. They Work For You accurately indexes the topic 'government websites' for 20 July, and links to exactly that exchange, clearly differentiating visually between the question setter and the government spokesman, and even providing photos of the relevant individuals together with linked information on their voting record and registered interests. I can even link to any component of any debate or parliamentary question. And I can comment on anything I read there.
Douglas Alexander responded to the question from Anthony Wright as follows: "Designing services around customer needs has always been at the heart of the Government drive to put services online. [...] Directgov was designed around the needs of the user by bringing together information, from across many Departments, in a way that makes it easy for people to find what they want online."
But I encounter severe difficulties finding this exchange on the official Hansard report. While the daily index for questions on 20 July does include the topic 'government websites', the landing page shows no sign of this heading. The record is sequenced by 'columns' (from the paper version?), but column numbers do not necessarily appear on the same webpage as the following content. Even though I know what I'm looking for, I have problems finding it: it's on a different page (not on the link provided by Hansard).
In general, the Hansard page design, a replica of the traditional print publication, is not helpful. For example, text width is excessive. Many of the landing pages involve scrolling large amounts of undifferentiated text. I'm not given any background information on the speakers, and the website's use of frames makes any linking (only possible to large chunks of text) a little trickier. Online Hansard is a data dump.
Its fundamental problem is that it's not designed around the needs of the user. Only the dogged - political journalists, say, or MPs - would persist with it. The people who run Hansard clearly know little about the Web. They Work For You would have no reason to exist if Hansard provided a user-centred offical record of parliamentary proceedings.
I now hear from reliable sources that Hansard is none too happy about They Work For You, and would rather it disappeared. If true, this head-in-the-sand attitude is a little surprising. They Work For You is produced by a group of volunteers, aiming to make parliamentary proceedings - the words of our political representatives - more accessible to the general public, and in general contributing to the raising of political awareness and increase in informed debate. I thought one of the great concerns of our time - among parliamentarians, at least - was a perceived decline in political engagement.
Hansard sits in a curious position: it is controlled and run by Parliament, not by the government or civil service. While the official report is sold to the public by The Stationary Office, the copyright is apparently not held by TSO, but by Parliament, in the figure of the Speaker of the House of Commons. Something of Hansard's chequered history can be found on the Hansard site itself, which indicates that those responsible for producing the daily official report have chopped and changed over time, the present arrangment only being settled on in the 20th century, following evidence presented to a parliamentary committee by a range of witnesses.
Perhaps it's time - now we've moved from the print to the digital age - to once again debate how the offical record is produced. Remember, they really do work for us.
Nice to see Slugger O'Toole winning the New Statesman award for community and information websites this year.
At Monday's Hansard Society publication launch, the site's editor, Mick Fealty, was pondering over exactly what role the website should have outside times of political activity, and recounting how certain figures, unwilling to accept complexity, wished to pigeonhole his politics. It's good to see Mick in London again. I think more of us should go to Northern Ireland more often.
The August meeting of the Usability Professionals' Association in London will be looking at the future of the profession. To oil the wheels, there'll be a range of drinks and nibbles.
Recent discoveries: the Daft Punk remix of Franz Ferdinand, and the curiously mesmeric William Shatner/Joe Jackson cover of Pulp's Common People (Shatner is masterly, better than Jarvis Cocker; Jackson is tiresome, both him and his guitar).
In the last few months, Simon Waldman (of Words of Waldman) has transformed himself into 50 quid bloke, and has just launched MP3 blogs aggregator. I predict that Simon's going to have to expand his bandwidth soonish.
How legal are MP3 blogs? Probably about as legal as Napster in its first incarnation, althugh most responsible bloggers post a mixture of MP3s and links to purchase material. I believe recently reported research to be true: there is not a close correlation between music file sharing and music buying: 50 quid 'bloke' will always be spending at least 50 quid - downloads just encourage him/her to explore and buy more widely; while penniless students would not have bought the CDs in whatever case. The success of commercial download sites seems to support this.
What I object to is the attitude of Jeffrey Veen, though. Advocating the use of tools such as wget, which essentially just strips out MP3s from sites, means that the blog is more or less pointless: wget users don't read, they just scrape. Some MP3 bloggers are now starting to implement anti-wget code, and I don't blame them.
NB The Harvard research was covered in The Guardian this week.
Radio has been much in the media new these days, following the Radio Festival in Birmingham last week. New digital radio (DAB) products have been arriving fairly regularly, with the latest being the Pure Bug, which allows broadcast pause and rewind as well as record.
A couple of months ago I acquired my third DAB radio, this time a pocket device from Philips, the DA1000. I particularly like BBC Radio 6 Music, only available on digital.
While the tabletop DAB radios perform well, my experience with the DA1000 is that DAB signals degrade a lot less gracefully than analogue. Railway cuttings are particularly bad: one minute the signal is great, the next it has disappeared. So not much cop on many cross-country rail trips. On a recent journey from Birmingham to London, I just gave up listening.
It was good to see a broad spectrum of bloggers turn out for the Political Blogs - Craze or Convention? launch organised by the Hansard Society and held at Westminster Hall earlier this week. Among the throng were the award-winning junior bloggers from Hangleton School in Hove (Sussex). Jonathan Briggs and Richard Allan MP were rather preaching to the converted, though: there was a notable absence of non-blogging MPs.
Not too impressed by the accompanying House to Home exhibition, currently residing in Westminster Hall and open to the public.
On a recent trip - with Northwest Airlines - from Gatwick (London), the best part of two-and-a-half hours was taken up with a long chain of 'security' exercises at Gatwick itself, with a transfer at Detroit adding another one-hand-a-half hours of 'security'. I nearly missed my connecting flight.
That makes some four hours of 'security' on the outbound trip. I wonder how sensible many of the measures implemented really are. In total, on the way out I removed clothing at least seven times, my carry-on bag was searched by hand four times, scanned in its entirety seven times, and some of the individual items in it - e.g. a necklace - selected for individual scanning four times. Just what could I do with a necklace that I couldn't do with any trinket bought at the airport shops? And does it really make sense to subject passengers getting off one plane to the same rigmarole all over again before getting directly onto the next? After, all we've already been flying through US airspace.
I've always had an issue with that bizarre set of questions about whether you've been given a package by someone else. (This tradition seems to have been instituted by El Al in the 1970s, or at least that's when I first experienced it.) When was the last time a plane was blown up or hijacked by a complete innocent? The real questions are: Are you a terrorist? Do you have a bomb? But those are questions I've never been asked.
The US process doesn't seemed that well-designed. For example, a single pair of Northwest employees - working together - acted as a funnel before anyone got near the check-in desks at Gatwick. With this pre-check-in process taking anything up to 4-5 minutes per person in a considerable queue, the four check-in desk staff were left twiddling their thumbs for most of the time. Although US citizens seem fairly aware of the new procedures, those arriving from overseas are only informed that luggage locks will be broken after they have been, with a leaflet inserted in the offending suitcase. Sitting in a plane at Detroit, I saw a number of suitcases with clothes tumbling out onto the tarmac as broken closures failed to cope with tightly-packed possessions.
Individuals who seem to have been particularly targetted - iris scanning and fingerprint, broken cases and damaged clothing, as occurred to one colleague of mine - are not happy people. That there seems to be - in my experience, based on a small sample of individuals - selection for some procedures on the basis of ethnic origin is somewhat disturbing.
Any system is only as good as the people who operate it. When I fly out of Bilbao - an airport with a number of international flights - it's rare to see any staff even looking at the scan monitor: they are generally chatting with each other. And this in a city that has lived with terrorism for decades. Whether items are detected during scanning is more down to human factors than technological capabilities. Perhaps there should be more attention focused on getting up to a basic level of security at all airports, rather than going to ridiculous lengths at a few.
The only place I've tracked down information on luggage locking policy is this obscure - for the overseas visitor - US transportation website. None of this information was provided prior to departure by Northwest Airlines or anyone else. Nor does the Northwest website pages devoted to baggage have any information on this.
Writing in this week's (Guardian) Friday Review, Stephen Moss considers the issues for classical music on download. While classical tunes have a 6-8% share on iTunes - considerably more than their 2.5% of the overall bricks'n'mortar market - there are some information architecture issues.
What is a 'song' in classical terms? (How many songs to the symphony?) Many classical 'tunes' can only be bought as albums on iTunes in the UK, as all their 'songs' are longer than 7 minutes.
How is it that Beethoven's piano sonatas are organised by movement, not by number? Music download stores are based on a rock and pop model of information, which doesn't fit certain other genres.
Lynne Truss rounded off her look at The Indispensibles today (BBC Radio 4) with 'the fax machine'. Others in the series have included the lift, and the baby buggy. You can listen again on the programme page.
Broadband publications continue to land thick and fast. The latest is a freebie from the New Statesman, to which colleagues Simon Roberts and James Crabtree have contributed (both of whom were behind last year's iSociety report on broadband, Fat Pipes, Connected People). As Simon again states, the point about broadband is not so much speed, but more the capability for always there, always on.
Maybe that's what we expect from broadband, but so often that's still not the experience. I can have three or four weeks of 'always on', then the connection goes on the blink for a day or two (as happened yesterday and today) and I spend too much time recovering lost connections. The worst case is having to reboot the computer to get the connection back up. Added to problems generated by the computer itself, this makes for some lost working time more weeks than not.
Last year, Nicholas Carr argued in the Harvard Business Review that IT was now a commodity like any other, and compared it to utilities such as electricity. If only broadband were so reliable. When was the last time my lights went out? Apart from spells living in Spain, where the lights tend to go out with alarming regularity, I can only remember two occasions I have experienced this since I was a child (one was the 1987 great storm that swept across southern England, felling thousands of trees). How often do I turn on my taps to find no water? The last time I can remember was in the 1980s, so not too often. These kinds of disruptions only occur with established utilities under very exceptional conditions in this country. And when they do occur, we are not slow to complain.
Whenever I turn up at a research or client site, the enterprise network invariably goes down at some point during the day - and sometimes even stays that way all day - but I'm often assured by management that this is a one-off, a highly unusual occurrence. They look at me quizzically, as if to say: 'This has only happened because you turned up'. Is this a rationalisation for bad decisions taken (e.g. lack of spending to create reliable systems and networks) , or can we really not do any better? Meanwhile, employees abandon or put aside work, or do it by hand, only to do it all over again when the system recovers.
While my main issue with Carr is his position that the use of information technology is just a technical issue to be addressed by commoditzation, rather than a people issue, I really don't think we're there yet with many of the hardware and software components in the technology chain either.
PC Magazine carries a story on the so-called New Geeks:
"A new breed of IT professional is emerging, one with a technical background who can channel his skills into multiple disciplines: These so-called "New Geeks" are expected to help usher in what IBM's Irving Wladawsky-Berger calls the "post-technology" era, in which technology tools are applied to business and societal problems rather than to the tools themselves...."
Geek is a misnomer - geeks are misfits, socially inept. That's precisely the image that isn't reflected in the work being described.
NB The link is now fixed: glitch due to Blogger changing its posting interface :-(
Dia, a digramming program providing an alternative to Microsoft's Visio, is now available for Windows. It can be used for flowcharts, UML diagrams, entity relationship diagrams and similar.
The Dia Win32 installer provides a single-file Windows installer executable.
"Many features are implemented and the code is quite solid and mature", according to the Dia team, but don't expect it to be bug free.
I was an occasional user of the Allmusic site, but I don't like the revamped one at all.
There are distinct problems now. It's very slow and awash with "temporary connection delays", which they apologise for.
Funny things - not funny really - are happening to the introduced top tabs (constantly disappearing).
Heck, there used to be a lot of info per page...but at least it was there, it was visible, it was easy to see what you wanted. Now I'm hunting around among the multifarious links, in a sea of "temporary connection delays", wondering what's been wiped out from what was a great database.
And what about that blue that's really become the badge of 'corporate'? The tan colour really wasn't that bad, guys. Where's the character gone? I really don't want every website on earth to be corporate blue!
And now they tell me that The Cranberries are 'similar artists' to Morrissey! Just don't tell Morrissey...
It all goes to show that just because you revamp your website doesn't mean it's going to be any better. It could end up a whole lot worse.
Well, I've just had FOUR consecutive "temporary connection delays", so time to bail out...
Postscript 18 July: City of Sound (Dan Hill) has also blogged the AllMusic redesign... ...as has Mike Kuniavsky at Orange Cone.
"The oldest denizens are the electric appliance geeks, who come to purchase electronic parts and other equipment. Next are the PC geeks, who like to build their own original computers that run as fast as possible. Third are TV animation geeks whose brains can't distinguish between reality and the animation. The fourth group are the magazine geeks who have made original animation fantasy stories influenced from TV and game animation and publish them in small magazines circulated among themselves. The last group are those geeks who love to play video games in which erotic animation is used."
Has anyone attempted a similar exercise on Tottenham Court Road (London), or elsewhere?
...sends a polite letter to the Odeon's marketing director, Luke Vetere, following letters from the lawyers to Matthew Somerville concerning his accessible - and usable - version of the Odeon website.
If you also feel like writing to Mr Vetere, he can be found at LVetere@odeonuk.com.
On 2 July, the ACM launched a poll among members concerning a proposed position on voting systems (read: technologies). There may be only a couple more days left to cast your vote, if you have one (you can access it via the website home page).
At the Voting and Usability Project, we're somewhat concerned that the proposed position makes no reference to usability/ease of use. We've discovered that the ACM's original draft did include this issue, but the text was then cut. If ACM - which after all has a group dedicated to human-computer interaction issues, SIG-CHI - doesn't promote usability, then who will??
Anyway, votes to date are massively in favour of the proposition (some 95% either strongly in favour of or in favour of).
When is a bug not a bug? When nobody's found it yet?
"Software failure is a huge problem. Software bugs cost the U.S. economy close to $60 billion a year, according to the National Institute for Standards and Technology.
"Many of the problems are caused by conditions that software designers didn't anticipate. "Most failures occur when we take software outside its comfort zone" of foreseeable conditions, said George Candea, a researcher at Stanford University."
This brings to mind an experience I had on my first ever systems development job. Out at a parallel test site for a new national accounting system at a major UK telco, I was faced with around 28 boxes of dot-matrix printouts each morning, 14 from each system.
As they didn't agree, even at the section report level - there were seemingly random differences - I had to delve down into the transaction level for each system to find out what on earth was going on. It took me a while to figure out that every time a digit was '0' in the new system, the old system reported '6'.
Which one was right? The answer was the new system, and the story was a little bizarre. Owing to the increased - duplicated - workload on the accountancy staff in the district during the parallel testing, more hands had been brought in to help. These included a finance manager who was not too hot on computers. She failed to distinguish between '0' (zero) and 'O' (O) on the keyboard as she input data to the old system, and entered 'O's into what was a numeric field. But instead of rejecting the input as alpha, the old ICL system accepted it but turned each 'O' into a '6'. It then gaily added up all the rogue transaction data to produce thousands of pages of meaningless financial reports.
The general ledger system had been in use for three years and was about to be decommissioned.
Gerry McGovern's last newletter, entitled Usability and listening to customers have limits, purports to tackle the limitations of usability, but seems to be talking about something else entirely. Some extracts:
Fine, but this is not usability or user-centred design. This is market research, something quite different.
"Here was someone who did not listen to his customers wishes, gave them something which they said they didn't want..."
Again, what has this got to do with usability?
McGovern has put 'usability' in his headline, and then splattered the word across his article, but not once does he actually discuss any usability work. Put simply, market research is asking people what they think (which is what McGovern is talking about), while usability testing is seeing what they do. McGovern does not address the latter at all in his article, so why use the word usability? A more appropriate headline might have been 'Why not ignore market research?"
Perhaps someone should send McGovern some links to the 'Usability 101' material out there, just so he can get up to speed.
For those doing field-based usability research, TechSmith now has the follow-on to Camtasia, Morae. This captures both screen and camera video as well as data input and system events. There's also the capability for remote viewing.
So, armed with nothing but a laptop, USB webcam and microphone, usability research can now be done easily in any location.
Will more usability people be tempted out of the lab and into the field? William Hudson may, for one, be interested in such a trend. Back in the spring, he wrote in Interactions magazine (subscription required) about usability laboratory misuse. I'm all in favour of taking usability work out of the lab, and the more portable the kit, the more easily this is done. I also feel that without context of use input, usability testing is pretty much a waste of time, as it only tells part of the story. For example, if staff have the option of several systems or sources of information, you need to understand what those systems or sources are, and how people choose among them.
There's also the possibility that with tools such as Morae, non-usability people will be tempted to run their own sessions. This I have somewhat mixed feelings about. Some usability is always better than none, but the trick is really knowing what to look at with whom, and how to interpret the data. Without such a grounding, all the information produced by Morae is really just noise.
Chris Hawker and fellow postgrad students at Oxford Brookes University diligently trailed around after the speakers at the Dust or Magic conference back in the spring, an event so expertly put together by Bob Hughes.
Chris now tells me that the first multimedia reports - which form part of their coursework - are now available online.
Chris McEvoy has kindly invited me as a guest blogger over at SWUG (not Confusability - who's confused then? ;-) ), so there's even more work to be done...
Out in the real world ;-), there's the list put together by Prospect Magazine of the 'top 100 public intellectuals' this month. No snappy name, then. But plenty of press coverage.
Propect has not been particularly generous to women, leading the Guardian to come up with its own list of 101 women. (my five votes plus a bonus wildcard shall definitely be caste in the direction of women such as Germaine Greer, Mary Warnock, Helena Kennedy etc.)
Over on the Misbehaving blog, the question has been raised this week: Where are the women gurus?, which refers to discussions currently happening on Molly Holzschlag's blog, Where are the women of CSS?, concerning the selection of authors, but also points back to a previous discussion on Misbehaving, Where are the women speakers?, considering the issue of speakers at conferences.
The list of Grandes Infonomistas is just one of many other examples of the phenomenon of male-rich lists. Not many women in 'infonomia' (roughly information sciences), then? Lucy Suchman? Susan Leigh Star? Wiped from history?
Over at Userati, there were few women on the list at the start, but Chris McEvoy quickly added a couple of dozen 20 high-profile and prolific women to his Userati list when the relevant names were provided, and continues to do so. All credit to him.
But the excuse 'I don't know any women' is starting to wear a bit thin.
'But can you hold your own writing a book, though?' asks one man on Molly's list. It's a common argument. His respondent had published 14 books. Let's return to those same individuals mentioned above. How many guys have produced a PhD thesis (published, and widely read) of the impact of Suchman's? Star has a book out there that's a must-read across a range of disciplines, on reading lists from the LSE to MIT. So how come they don't feature on the 'information sciences' list?
Liz Lawley writes: "Come on, guys. Please start looking beyond your circle of buddies..." In the meantime, while the locker room continues to be more important than any committee or board room, I'd advise women in technology to take some tips from Lois Frankel ('Nice Girls Don't Get the Corner Office'): don't give away your ideas, don't ignore the importance of network relationships, don't be modest, don't wait to be noticed, don't get coffee, don't be overly concerned with offending others, don't accept the fait accompli, don't believe that others know more than you...and don't protect jerks.
Whitney Quesenbery has been working fast to update materials on the UPA's Voting & Usability Project pages, and there are all kinds of initiatives on the go.
I was taken aback by a headline in Tuesday's Guardian (6 July) over its story on the Graf report. Apparently, the "BBC 'did not not have know-how for web'". I can't think of a place with more web know-how than the Beeb.
Reading further down in the story, we find that the text actually states "Graf...found governors had lacked the necessary experience and independent expert support when regulating the BBC's new media expansions".
Governors. Not quite the same thing, methinks.
Tom Coates has been blogging on the report over at Plasticbag.
I finally succumbed to Google's invitation to set up a Gmail account (offered to all Blogger users). The big selling point of Gmail (currently in beta) is that with a vast amount of free storage, you need never delete email - just store and search.
Well, I've already got the huge stack of email (too many thousand to mention) which I'd like to form part of that database. After all, none of us is starting from scratch. So my first question is, how do I import it to Gmail? Ho hum....
Where categories come from, and the problem of 'other'
Reviewing the statistical categories set up for London elections ballots cast, I'm convinced that the present arrangement is a relic of older voting systems.
Where only a first choice is possible, the lack of any mark renders the ballot invalid. Once you introduce further voting choices - as when mayors and assemblies were recently introduced - undervoting becomes perfectly valid. But the statistical categories have remained unchanged, hence the conflation of valid undervoting with invalid votes, leading to what is effectively a massive 'other' category.
However, even once (if?) this anomaly is addressed, this will still leave us with a problem: unless we know voters' intentions, we cannot distinguish between valid undervotes, and not casting all votes available owing to lack of comprehension of the options available. All classifications are approximations, just as all translations are.
Bowker and Star's 'Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences', which I'm reading at the moment, has some fascinating stories on various attempts at classification, including race clasification under apartheid in South Africa, and the history and disputes behind the International Classsification of Diseases (ICD). Under apartheid, individuals who did not fall neatly into the government's categories experienced hellish lives. With the ICD, reducing the size of 'other' (unknown causes) by creating vague rubrics ('hemorrhage', 'convulsions' etc.) is a constant theme over the decades.
Bowker and Star quote Lakoff: "My guess is that we have a folk theory of categorization itself. It says that things come in well-defind kinds, that the kinds are characterized by shared properties, and that there is one right taxonomy of the kinds". (Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind)
This is a very real issue in information architecture: we can devise better or worse categories and labels, but not an IA that will suit everyone all of the time. Reducing the effective 'other' category is often the unexpressed goal, often by adjusting the degree of ambiguity suggested by the classifying labels, or perhaps by admitting categories that don't fit smoothly into some 'system'.
I've just caught up with Simon's blog of 2 June - doesn't time fly - which referred to my own vague and meandering post about problems of representing ethnographic research to clients. Ha ha ;-).
Poor old Microsoft. It does have a few ethnographers, really. I think its main problem is that its R&D appears to be remote from the development areas. Xerox had the same problem. There's been an interesting discussion about this on various lists in recent weeks, and Peter Merholz also touched on the subject in his blog a few months back.
The supplements are full of summer reading, but I have several books on the go right now and none of them coincide. I'm clearly not a supplement type of person.
Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences, by Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star. I've had this on the shelves for ages, and have finally got around to it.
Tracing Genres Through Organisations: A Sociocultural Approach to Information Design, by Clay Spinuzzi. The text draws on both genre theory and activity theory, with its main research strand being traffic workers and traffic accidents in Iowa.
I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After Twenty Years Away, by Bill Bryson. Lots of stuff about computers, tax forms, red tape, technology, the slowness of fast food joints, customer service, town planning and bad design. Excellent light reading for the usability person.
I came back from the US with a suitcase of books, including Nicholas Carr's Does IT Matter?, an extension of his article last spring for the Harvard Business Review, Brenda Laurel's Utopian Entrepreneur, which I've been meaning to get for ages, and two curiosities by Henry Petroski, The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance, and The Book on the Bookshelf. How did books come to be stored and displayed vertically and spine out on shelves?, is one of Petroski's questions.
One of mine is, how did some cultures never arrive at a standard direction for text on book spines? (leading you to constantly rotate your head by 180 degrees as you pass down a bookshelf). And that's not the US I'm having a dig at, but southern Europe, where some bookshops still shelve their books by individual publisher's serial numbers, not by author or subject or even title. Arhh!
