Tuesday, December 31, 2002
Standards
British Summer Time was thought of in 1904 by a man near Pett's Wood who was keen on running....according to a report today on BBC Radio 4.
Sometimes devices, appliances and other features of our daily landscape have a similarly arbitrary origin. I have been told that the European standard for safety vests (those fluorescent things worn by emergency crews, police and others) was agreed in a pub in Kent one night......
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Monday, December 30, 2002
Another report from the people at Pew
The Pew Internet Project yesterday issued its latest report on the Internet habits of Americans, Counting on the Internet.
The Internet is becoming an important source of health information:
"When asked where they will go for information the next time they need health or medical information, Internet users are about as likely to say they will turn to the Internet for information as they are to contact a medical professional; 46% say they will find health care information online next time they need it and 47% say they will contact a medical professional. Overall, 31% of all Americans say they will find it online, while 59% say they will contact a medical professional."
As far as business is concerned:
"For business, it is clear that an online presence is important, regardless of whether a business actually sells its wares over the Internet. If a store provides product nformation online, even if it doesn’t sell products at its Web site, nearly half of all Americans (46%) said this would make them more likely to go to the physical store to buy the product. About the same number (45%) said it would make no difference, and these numbers were the same for Internet users and non-users alike." In other words, "having a Web site helps a business even if the site does not enable transactions."
You can down load the full report from the Pew website in pdf format.
Another recent Pew report is Email at work, issued earlier this month.
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ROI of Usability
I've posted a collection of quotes and links about the benefits of usability in the resources area of this site. It's split into short quotes and links to press articles, and quotes from the research and academic literature.
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Sunday, December 29, 2002
User experience books for 2002
(in no particular order)
Among my favourites this year has been The Elements of User Experience by Jesse James Garrett (New Riders), an excellent introduction to the whole jumbled edifice and terminology of user experience. It's a book that can safely be put into the hands of anyone from a developer to a designer to a manager, all of whom would find it approachable and informative. Garrett's book is not a 'how-to' book - readers in search of practical advice also benefit this year from a worthwhile volume, Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug (Que). This is a common sense guide providing just what the non-expert needs to know when designing a website.
A new arrival on the publishing scene is web books publisher glasshaus (Birmingham, UK), the source of many new titles. These include Constructing Accessible Websites (Jim Thatcher, Cynthia Waddell, Shawn Henry et al) - one of a crop of new books on this subject - and Usability: The Site Speaks for Itself (Kelly Braun, Max Gadney, Matt Haughey et al), providing true tales from the field courtesy of usability practitioners themselves.
In the area of mobile usability, Handheld Usability by Steve Weiss (Addison Wesley) has made a valuable contribution to the field of PDA and mobile phone interaction design.
Moving on to information architecture Information Architecture for the World Wide Web (Louis Rosenfeld, O'Reilly) is a welcome follow-up to the first edition of this book, and required reading for anyone undertaking mid-to-large size web projects.
On the academic front, Interaction Design by Jenny Preece, Yvonne Rogers & Helen Sharp (John Wiley) is a new introductory textbook, rather that an update of their 1994 Human-Computer Interaction.
As far as the bigger picture goes, Ben Shneiderman's Leonardo's Laptop: Human Needs and the New Computing Technologies (MIT Press) attempts to raising public awareness about interfaces that are 'unusable at any bandwidth', and also user expectations about what is possible. Shneiderman also considers how computers might support new approaches to e-healthcare, e-learning, e-business and e-government.
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Friday, December 27, 2002
Voting machine usability
Paul Herrnson, Benjamin Bederson & Owen Abbe, three researchers at the University of Maryland's HCI Lab, have conducted an evaluation of Maryland's new touch screen voting machines, used in the 2002 elections, and have now published a second report. The report focuses on voter acceptance, voter trust and usability issues.
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Wednesday, December 25, 2002
Blogosphere
This blog now appear on Peter Bogaards' InfoDesign list of blogs, while Lucian Millis of LucDesk fame has suggested the inclusion of yours truly in the Userati experiment (see earlier post), which has now happened (many of them seem to be bloggers). I in turn wondered why Yvonne Rogers had not been include, and she immediately was....thanks Chris.
This week I received news of BlogTalk, a blogger conference to take place next May in Austria, organised by Thomas Burg at the Centre for New Media in Vienna. Good to see James Crabtree - of public policy think tank The Work Foundation - also plans to present a paper.
Perhaps Elizabeth Osder quoted in Wired this week - Blogs Make the Headlines - is right: we're all a bunch of navel-gazers. But there's a lot of it about: Tech Central also claims 2002 as the Year of the Blog, Online Journalism Review points to Trent Lott getting Bloggered, The Independent newspaper in the UK claims that bloggers have come in from the cold, and there are even conferences and workshops at universities such as UCLA (My Life As A Blog).
How easy is it to blog? For those of a non-techie inclination, applications such as Blogger are a godsend, allowing almost code-free functioning provided you don't want to modify anything. But once the blogger seeks influence or control over content - design, organisation, archive access - things become a little more tricky, and the idea of adaptive design or end-user computing starts receding into the distance for the ordinary user. Setting up blogging program Movable Type - which has a nice 'categories' feature - is just a tad more complicated that setting up your central heating program ;-).
The issue of the position of blogging on the more inaccessible end of the end-user computing spectrum was something raised by Dan Hill at the recent AIGA Experience Design event in London, which I'm supposed to be writing something on for Usability News these days......
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Backed by research
Some useful review material of usability research has just been published.
On the Web, Bob Bailey's Do's and Don'ts list is fully referenced to relevant research in the area, useful for anyone seeking to answer those “I'm looking for research that supports...” questions.
In print, meanwhile, the latest issue of the UPA's User Experience magazine carries an interesting ROI analysis for usable design, courtesy of Aaron Marcus. "Return on Investment for Usable UI Design" includes a summary table of quotes referencing usability statistics for a range of value propositions. Of particular interest is a four-page spread entitled "Proof for Usability's ROI Statistics and Examples", an extensive set of referenced quotes to a wide range of studies addressing issues such as trust, ease of learning, litigation deterrence and much more. The marterial draws fairly heavily on Bias & Mayhew's 1994 volume Cost Justifying Usability, but there are plenty of other references too. It's good to have so much ammunition in one place. According to the magazine, there's a plan to put this material on the UPA website, but there's no sign of it there yet.
4:54 PM|
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Completely off topic - Joe Strummer
Joe Strummer's sudden demise is a bit of a shocker. No we didn't know each other. But there was a common interest and location, one of those where you wonder how you didn't in fact encounter the other.
Joe Strummer was part of the Elgin Avenue squatter community in west London. Back in the 70s, when I was a student, I squatted in Carlton Vale (just off Elgin Avenue) and then co-led a squat in south London, with 'Mr' Elgin Avenue, Piers Corbyn (brother of Member of Parliament Jeremy). The large squat that Piers and I and a couple of others later led - Kilner House - reared its head in the national news as we summonsed George Tremlett (as a rock press journalist perhaps the unlikeliest ever Conservative head of housing at the Greater London Council) to appear in the High Court. We also got a pat on the back from safari-suited opposition leader Ken Livingstone (later to abandon the safari suits, as part of his GLC leadership bid), for trying to stop wholesale sell-offs of public housing.
Meanwhile we ran the London Squatters' Union office - apparently funded by Joe Strummer - which was great fun. Others around the scene in those days included Eric Mattocks (who sadly died three years ago). My own experience was to include the crazed millionnaire owners of the closed-down Swiss Girls' Hostel in Belsize Grove - Virgil Berti was the head honcho's name, if I remember rightly, a man who tried to prevent squatting white rabbits from roaming the verdant Belsize gardens listening to Eric Satie's Trois Gymnopedies; various joist-less properties in Vauxhall Grove - where the bleach-wielding neighbours complained to the police when a coconut was cracked one day; and the concreted-up toilets and bricked-up windows of Bonnington Square - courtesy of Labour-controlled Lambeth Council, an organisation ever keen to prevent dozens of homes that had been empty for many years from being occupied by the homeless and the low-waged. I will never forget connecting the water supply in the basement of 11 Vauxhall Grove - the present-day Bonnington Cafe or Bonnington Centre - with garden hoses, butterfly clips and a fairly high-pressure horizonal water supply (we wore head-to-toe waterproofs to connect the water, as we were unable to switch off the supply in the street). Many of these Bonnington Square and Vauxhall Grove houses were later to form part of Vine Housing Co-op and similar ventures. There's some early squatter history here, but there's also quite a bit waiting to be written.
Perhaps the craziest thing was that we sublet our tiny LSU office (in William IV Street, just off Trafalgar Square), a room next to St Mungo's hostel for the homeless, from the Family Housing Association, who in turn rented from London's Metropolitan Police. That is to say, the Met were simultaneously trying to get us out of properties across London and subsidising our squatting advisory activities. I always liked that. It seemed fair ;-).
These days, of course, Piers leads a highly respectable meteorological organisation, not a squatting one. We all grow up and move on, but I hope we never moved too far from our ideals.
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Tuesday, December 24, 2002
New Year event
Ann Blandford (of UCL) will be talking on Thursday 13 February 'Designing for Humans' (at Barnard's Inn Hall, part of Gresham College), according to the Gresham College website.
Thursday 13 February: Ann Blandford, 'Designing for Humans', 6pm, Barnard's Inn Hall, High Holborn, London
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In Google we trust?
Much has been written recently about just how far Google can go before it runs into public disapprobation. Some of this dialogue has taken place in fora such as the ACM's discussion lists. This month, Wired magazine takes up the baton.
"Don't be evil," is the mantra of Google's Sergey Brin, according to an article in the January edition of Wired. Brin aims to always do good by users.
Google is certainly innovative. We have recently seen 'search results as slide show' in Google labs viewer; Google webquotes; the product search facility Froogle. And on and on grows the gigantic Googleplex.
But in recent months, Google has not had an easy ride. Daniel Brandt of www.google-watch.org has attacked Google's PageRank mechanism. Of perhaps more interest in terms of freedom of speech, when Anita Roddick - founder of UK chain the Body Shop - criticised in her blog actor John Malkovich (a "vomitous worm") and later Google itself, Google pulled her ad.
The search engine has also had confrontations over the last few months with the Church of Scientology and the Chinese government. All too often, it seem that Google is willing to make a compromise that smells unhealthy. For example, those citizens of China searching for human rights information may now be directed to a standard-looking - but Chinese government-approved - page. This follows negotiations that took place between the Chinese government and Google after the search engine was pulled in mainland China.
In October, two Harvard researchers alleged that Google had begun blocking users in France, Germany and Switzerland from accessing sites carrying material likely to be seen as racist or inflammatory in each country. [This follows, remember, past sagas with Yahoo in France, an Internet directory fined by local courts for permitting French citizens' access to international material deemed illegal locally].
Meanwhile, the empire grows apace. Google is fast becoming the new Goliath.
Of course, there is no lock-in with Google, so we are free to use any Internet search service. The market domination arguments that are hauled out in respect of Microsoft are not so relevant here.
But nevertheless, many of us are becoming particularly reliant on Google for producing our research results. So just how far can Google go in its concessions to realpolitik before it is judged to be violating the trust of users? And if Google does go public - rumours abound about a Google IPO as saviour of Wall Street - won't its problems worsen, as the 'purity' of long-term user interests clash with the short-termism of shareholders (who have never been particularly known for their concern for 'evil'). Will Google spawn its own serious 'watch' industry, just as ICANN did a few years ago?
Elsewhere on the search engine front, my original favourite search engine - which fell on hard times when taken over by Lycos/Terra - seems to be undergoing a rebirth. Hotbot now provides a unified interface to four of the web's best search engines: Google, FAST, Inktomi and Teoma. This is not metasearching - it's a half-way house, allowing the user quickly to compare results without having to go to their home pages.
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Wednesday, December 18, 2002
'Tis the season
Rather than putting on the usual monthly speaker, us folks as the UK chapter of the Usability Professionals' Association (UPA) last night organised a pub night in London, for anyone interested in UX, IA, online communities or anything in between. Excellent turnout, and a good time had by all.
But it started me thinking. I note the IA fraternity - as opposed to the usability fraternity - generally refer to these events as a 'cocktail hour', whether or not the venue in question (Barcelona, Amsterdam, San Francisco etc.) serves cocktails. (In fact, the IA fraternity in Barcelona does not appear to frequent either of the two classic cocktail venues in Barcelona, being Gimlet - down in the Borne area, and Boadas - just off the Ramblas. Instead they retreat to the nether regions, a regular local bar in Poble Sec). Am I missing something? Does the very concept 'pub night' need to be rebranded? Will the trendies not turn up if we give it the wrong label? Will new media types turn up their noses at the very idea of 'pub'? Does this vary cross-culturally? All responses gratefully received ;-).
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Sunday, December 15, 2002
Handhelds for Doctors
A good book has fallen into my hands this week, courtesy of its author. Handhelds for Doctors, by Dr Mohammad Al-Ubaydli, is a handy volume designed to encourage doctors to take up the PDA habit.
Mo is a man with a mission, and that mission is to help doctors work more efficiently - by using handheld technology - but with the least pain in terms of learning. Mo's book assumes no knowledge on the part of the doctor, guiding the newcomer to available platforms, reviewing quality, general purpose software suitable for medics in different professional situations, suggesting best collective strategies for maximising gains within small groups of medics - such as in a GP practice or a consultants' team in a hospital - while also minimising the busy practitioner's learning curve. And the books does all this while keeping a sense of humour and welcome lightness of tone. By careful use of terminology and explanations - the medical profession is quite differnent on each side of the Atlantic - the author manages to make the book a suitable read on both sides of the 'pond'.
The trick that Mo has learned - through extensive seminar and training work with doctors across the UK - is to give enough well-chosen quality material to whet the appetite without overwhelming. Rather than drowning the new user in jargon and options, Mo's suggested approach is incremental - a few well-chosen programs - allowing new users to gain confidence rapidly.
There is also plenty of material here for non-medics in healthcare management considering introducing PDAs to their own clinical environments, and for IT managers faced with demands for PDA technology from clinical practitioners in their own establishments. Issues such as security of clinical data are given careful consideration, with references to the most authoritative sources of up-to-date information. The final section of the book is devoted to techniques needed to be a project champion in an organisation.
I should also mention that Mo is a usability fan, and mentions in his text Steve Krug's book (Don't Make Me Think), perhaps the most approachable read for a non-specialist. Mo's approach is completely user-centred: if it doesn't work for the user, save her time, increase productivity, improve team-working, add fun...it's not worth doing. He also recognises the failings of IT systems as they are currently implemented in the NHS: "We need doctors to become involved at the design stage of computer software, rather than the complaints stage," he wrote three years ago, a statement that could still do with putting into practice today.
I'd recommend this book to medics interested in entering the world of PDAs, to IT staff interested in integrating PDAs into the clinical ICT environment, to managers wanting to know more about how stand-alone PDA applications can improve clinical productivity. In fact to anyone interested in how handheld computing can take on the clinical agenda. [I'll leave for another day the issue of how existing and new desktop clinical applications can be integrated with held and handheld computing.]
Check out http://www.handheldsfordoctors.com for further information from the author, to read other reviews or to order the book. Even better, Mo's site guides clinicians through the process of buying the best handheld according to budget and needs. I'll be doing further reviews for specialised medical and medical informatics publications, but you saw it first here.
P.S. Mo also has a personal website at www.mo.md - perhaps the coolest personal domain name I've come across.
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Friday, December 13, 2002
University material on the Net
MIT now has its first tranche of OpenCourseWare (OCW) material on the Internet. This pilot gives free access to a limited range of MIT course materials in a range of scientific and social science subjects.
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Thursday, December 12, 2002
Password hell
This week, in an article entitled IT Users in Password Hell, ZD Net reveals that the typical intensive IT user now has 21 passwords, and employs two strategies to cope: Use common words as passwords or just write them down. Problems with passwords among NHS doctors and nurses also formed part of my research findings this year.
How can we reduce this complexity? The tendency is often to write down passwords, or to use very obvious and therefore easily guessable ones and then not change them. On a recent visit to a friend's house, and wanting to access the Internet on her machine while she was out walking her dog, I easily came up with her Internet logon on my first guess: the name of her dog. And she a 'new media professional' too.
Is there a better way? There were companies at this week's electronic medical records conference demonstrating the future: biometric identification through fingerprints, possibly accompanied by smartcards (with fingerprint recognition, people may logon and walk away, leaving equipment vulnerable - with smartcards people tend to remove the card to take it with them, thus automatically logging off). These options are now a reality, but still a little expensive (£30 plus) for the non-corporate.
In an article on LooselyCoupled entitled How to remember all your passwords, Phil Wainewright decribes a possible strategy for selecting and maintaining a managable group of passwords whilst simultaneously maintaining security.
2:04 PM|
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Designed by psychiatrists?
I've been away in London for a few days, speaking at an international electronic medical records conference. The venue is a little strange: the New Connaught Rooms in Covent Garden, a labyrinth of interconnecting rooms that reminds one of Alice Through the Looking Glass. Added to this is a weird system of signage, where all directions are represented by triangles - symbols that as we all know have 3 points and therefore point in three directions. Most of these triangles were positioned next to staircases and escalators. It took most of us four days to figure out how to get to the conference rooms each day.
This did not pass unnoticed. At lunch yesterday, I sat between a US physician-cum-computer-boffin, to my left, and a British consultant psychiatrist, to my right. "Tell me, who do you think designed this place?" said the US physician to the psychiatrist. "Could it have been a psychiatrist?" The psychiatrist laughed. "No idea, but one thing does seem strange: how could anyone have chosen triangles to indicate directions?" he said. Everyone concurred, including the woman from FirstDataBank, opposite.
I'd say that although most people know little of the ideas of usability or cognitive ergonomics, they are very clear about how unusable so many things are in our daily lives.
9:45 AM|
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Monday, December 09, 2002
For the record
There's a major electronic medical records conference going on in London right now. Lots of talk of handheld devices, and using XML with medical ontologies, but usability and ease of learning have yet to really make it onto the medical informatics agenda.
While the critical issue in implementing these systems is how to get doctors to use the computer all the time - rather than paper - when they are with the patient (you can't have a 'part-time' drug administration system), doctors, nurses and other clinicians will not use systems that they find unwieldy and overly complex, particularly where they see no benefit for themselves. Conference organiser Peter Waegemann is clear that reducing information recording time is not a benefit that can be derived by switching from paper to electronic records: input times are typically 50% greater, a figure that may be an underestimate if the results from this year's Southend Hospital study are anything to go by (100% increase in drug administration times).
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Friday, December 06, 2002
Mapping the Userati
"Mapping the Userati - A group of people concerned with issues relating to software and users, who are known to their peers". In effect, this is a ranking of usability people based on how many other usability people refer to them or are referred to in proximity to them (although the division between usability types and IA types has been ignored). In other words, if you talk about other Userati enough, you will join them.
Anyway, Nielsen - as expected - is at the top rather than Norman (Don), while Brenda (Laurel) is also up there with Ben (Shneiderman), Lou (Rosenfeld), Jared (Spool) and the rest. The Brits fare relatively poorly, although Usability News editor Ann Light makes it into the lower rungs, as does William Hudson (Syntagm).
I guess that if I put my name - Louise Ferguson - on the web enough times in proximity to such gurus - or if others do - I can expect to peck my way into the lower reaches ;-). It all reminds me of Google's PigeonRank technology. Peck peck.
9:54 PM|
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Talking to myself?
It's nice to know someone's reading you. In an article for Usability News a little while ago (The Limits of Usability are Challenged Again), I stated that "Definitions of usability are part of the problem (...). They not only influence how usability specialists market themselves, but also colour public perception of the profession." Nice to see the quote pulled out on InfoDesign Newsflash Archive. And then reading Jesse James Garrett's page on his book The Elements of User Experience, I find my book reviews mentioned twice. Ho hum. At least I'm not talking to myself.
9:25 PM|
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The Wayback Machine
It's taken me a long time to find out about this one. The Wayback Machine is an Internet archive that allows you to view the Web 'as it was' at various points in time over the last few years. Simply type in a URL - advanced search allows viewing by date. Simply great.
7:48 PM|
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Lou Rosenfeld on the similarities between university deans and cats
Returning to the Design Council in London last night - AIGA Experience Design: Adaptive Design - reminded me that I'd meant to post a little snippet from Lou Rosenfeld, which he let loose at the same venue a few weeks back. When I suggested to him that using the example of a university website to demonstrate certain principles of information architecture might not be too generalisable, as universities - at least in the the UK - are highly federal institutions, where departments and faculties do exactly what they feel like, Lou confirmed that this was the case: "It's the same in the US. Herding deans is more difficult than herding cats," according to Lou. Anyone offered a university internet or intranet project: you have been warned.
6:28 PM|
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Usability is next to profitability
Business Week lends support to the usability mantra in this week's edition. In an article entitled "Usability Is Next to Profitability", the US weekly suggests that "software companies have finally grasped the value of easy-to-fathom programs, and they're pouring resources into the task". 'Pour' might not be the verb I'd choose, but certainly the ideas of usability and user experience seem to be gaining ground with many hardware and software manufacturers, even in these straightened times.
6:20 PM|
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Thursday, December 05, 2002
Few posts over the last days, as the whole blog move to my own URL has been underway. A few tweaks still needed, but Peter has chucked his know-how at sorting major gremlins for me.
8:21 AM|
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Monday, December 02, 2002
Broadband for narrow minds
BT has now rolled out broadband access - via ADSL - to some half a million customers, according to a press release from the company. And Tony Blair is clear that Broadband Britain is high up on the New Labour agenda.
But just what are people using broadband for? How good are services designed for broadband? And how does broadband access define the kind of activity users wish to conduct. What will a generalised increase in broadband access mean for individuals, for society and for the economy? While there's plenty of policy and money going into supplying the former, few researchers in the public sector looking at the why's and how's of broadband are getting funding for their efforts.
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