Monthly Archive for April, 2004

When user interfaces fail

Published on April 30, 2004 in Interface. 0 Comments

Some people like to do “designer bashing” from time to time. I was just in the mood to do some “developer bashing” today.

There are a number of reasons why user interfaces of many software packages fail. I assume (slightly unfair and inaccurate), that in many cases there is no interface designer involved with user interface development, but rather the interface is designed by the application developers.

Here is a list of (some) common fallacies of some developers in regard to user interface design:

Fallacy #1: User centered design approach is optional.

Some developers actually have no idea what “user centered” actually means (as many consider the implementation of software that users can interact with already as being “user centered”). Also, the most important aspect of user centrism to developers is the feature list, because the features describe what the user could do. The actual ability is a function of a) the features and b) the capability of the user. What is not agreed on many times is that “capability” is not solely an attribute of the user, but is constituted by user experience level plus interface design. The 80/20 rule is applied as 80% application development and 20% interface development instead of the other way around (and in the order “first interface then application”).

Fallacy #2: Features are more important than usability.

For some developers the loss of features during planning phase seems to be a too big tradeoff in comparison to a “minimal” usability improvement.

Fallacy #3: “Design” is just an emotional and subjective quality.

Some developers think a “design” will just become necessary if the application should not only work, but also please and delight. While “likeability” is an important aspect, it is heavily underestimated how much users dislike software that is hard to use.

Fallacy #4: Functionality is what the user could do.

Some developers consider “functionality” being an aspect of the software. In fact “functionality” is an attribute only present in the usage context – where the user is the most important variable. Functionality is not what the software provides, but what the user is able to use. Microsoft Word may have many thousand functions which most users are unable to use. So the functionality of MS Word for users is what they can actually (and not potentially) achieve.

Fallacy #5: Personal experience is the best advisor.

Some developers often think they are able to do “cognitive walkthroughs” on behalf of unexperienced users. While this is a possible approach, many developers (that usually are power users with deep knowledge about the application) do not go far enough when defining “unexperienced”. When doing cognitive walkthroughs many developers keep the same mindset about what is important inside the application. Really unexperienced may consider completely different things as being important.

Fallacy #6: Good application design is the primary determinator for good interface design.

Most developers are interested in designing the application (that’s why they call themselves “developers”). Interface design is an uncomfortable requirement to be added to the application design. While there is much truth in the idea, that well designed applications often offer cleaner approaches to interface design, it is a false conclusion, that a well designed application will necessarily lead to a good user interface.

Fallacy #7: It’s OK to reject major changes of the application for minimal interface design improvements.

Well, sort of. Most of the time it is basically a matter of a wrong design approach in the first place. There is also a persistent understanding of developers that interface design issues do not interfere with the deeper application design – which is simply ignoring the fact that in most cases it remains to be the case.

Fallacy #8: A bad user interface alone cannot set the seal on the fate of the application.

It seems to be irrational to developers to prefer going with no software and unresolved problems instead of trying to work with a hard-to-use application. Unresolved problems can often be deferred or ignored – or – other workarounds could be tried with an easier path to a less optimal solution.

Educational scenarios

Published on April 30, 2004 in Education. 0 Comments

Will Richardson on Weblogs Creating a whole new Campus Culture:

Article about the Weblogging program set up by a student at Reed College in Oregon where any student who wants one can have one. He’s got 147 going right now. An interesting read that gets to both sides of college level use of blogs and points to a number of other heretofore unknown colleges that are starting to use them, one even for recruitment purposes!
Blogging is a relatively small but quickly growing phenomenon in the world of Internet users, and, like other online technologies, it is slowly invading college life. Professors are using blogs to teach and publish. College administrators use the diaries to recruit. Students use them to learn, to opine (and whine), and to network. In the Reed case, blogging has led to a student community beyond the borders of the campus, a community that Reed administrators can’t control but can peek at.

Tinderbox 2.2

Published on April 30, 2004 in Tools. 0 Comments

Eastgate released Tinderbox 2.2. Many PC users don’t know about Tinderbox. There is a Windows version coming soon.

I mix & you mix, we all mix for iMix

Published on April 29, 2004 in Tools. 0 Comments

Today Apple released iTunes 4.5 for Mac and Windows with a number of new features:

All the artist/album names and song titles in my library have a shortcut into the music store now. And there is a party shuffle mode where you can control the flow of the songs played and see which song recently have been played. And iTunes now fetches album cover art corresponding a compilation and prints a collage from it.

But these features are marginal compared to this: iMix.

iMix allows people to 1-click-publish a playlist to the store so other people can see your compilation (your “iMix”) and listen to song previews (if they are in the store). Whenever you play a song, you will also see which iMixes contain that song, potentially leading to other iMixes containing unknown treasures. I am sure anybody came up with a crisp name for it – I’d call it the “collective guidance principle”. It is the same principle that weblogs use to provide the trails through blogsphere for weblog hoppers.

By the way: There is now a custom RSS-feed generator for the iTunes Music Store.

A closer look at why people blog

Published on April 26, 2004 in Weblog Theory. 0 Comments

Here is a paper (PDF) by Bonnie Nardi, Diane Schiano, Michelle Gumbrecht and Luke Swartz about motivations for weblogging:

We discovered five major motivations for blogging: documenting the author’s life, providing commentary and opinions, expressing deeply felt emotions, working out ideas through writing, and forming and maintaining communities or forums. These motivations are by no means mutually exclusive, and can come into play simultaneously.

John Seely Brown website

Published on April 26, 2004 in Education. 0 Comments

George Siemens:

I’ve long been a fan of John Seely Brown. His views of how knowledge is shared, how people work, and how digital media are impacting society are visionary. Thanks to Maish for providing a link to JSB’s website.

[via elearnspace]

Social Computing Symposium videos online

Published on April 22, 2004 in Social Computing. 0 Comments

I completely missed to blog this link from Kevin Shofield:

The videos of the lectures from the Microsoft Research-sponsored Social Computing Symposium are now posted for your viewing pleasure at:
http://murl.microsoft.com/ContentMapDetails.asp?SeriesID=89
Enjoy!

Apple boosts professional digital media authoring tools

Published on April 19, 2004 in Tools. 0 Comments

Apple releases Apple Motion and DVD Studio Pro 3. Motion ($299) seems to be rivaling Adobe After Effects ($999). I have seen Final Cut (now with high definition support) shooting out Adobe Premiere long ago and even boiled Avid Media Composer with ease. DVD Studio Pro is to my knowledge a very good DVD authoring application. I know Logic Pro Audio is top-notch audio editing software and Shake was used for digital video compositing at Oscar award level.

This prominent suite of digital media applications is supplemented with bulk hardware that is capable of clustering resources (see newly released Xsan, Xgrid) and new cooperations to compete with production hardware facilities as well.

Apple seems to have a much sharper blade for cutting their piece out of the market for creative professionals than any other company on this planet.

Free culture

Published on April 17, 2004 in Politics. 0 Comments

Lawrence Lessig convinced his editor to release the book under a creative commons licence. Now Aaron Schwartz took it and put the complete book online – as wiki, so anyone can contribute and change the content.

3D desktop? Not again!

Published on April 17, 2004 in Interface. 0 Comments

Ingo Hinterding pointed to the SphereXP project and Sun’s Project Looking Glass. Sphere looks quite easy to use – but doesn’t seem to be an incredible enhancement. Sure: you could have open 130 windows and see them all almost at once — if you rotate fast enough! All the 3D approaches I have seen have one major drawback (that Expose has not by the way): the viewpoint. It means that most of the space is outside the view. So there is the same problem as with virtual desktop tools: you need to remember where you have left what.

I do believe, that one day the 3D graphics hardware in almost every consumer PC today will be responsible for the next generation desktop interface. But I believe it won’t happen as long there is no departure from the 30 year old interface paradigm.

I have ideas about that. But I won’t tell anyone unless he/she pays me for it ;-) .

Quotes about design

Published on April 17, 2004 in Design. 0 Comments

Here is a list of quotes about design collected from designfeast.com.

Student blogging (contd.)

Published on April 16, 2004 in Weblog Theory. 0 Comments

Will Richardson has done a very good job tracking the discussion about student blogging.

The revenue of blogging investment

Published on April 15, 2004 in Weblog Theory. 0 Comments

Will Richardson of Weblogg-ed.com has collected the most recent posts from different locations about the “weblog in education” discussion:

A number of threads about the value of blogging in the classroom have been floating here and there lately, many of them here. For context, some of the more relevant posts are

Stephen Downes adds to this:

You’ll find the bouncing back and forth between posts from four separate bloggers (Smith, Richardson, Fiedler, Farmer) frustrating, but the question is vital: where is the locus of the blogging phenomenon? In the students? Or in their instructors?

Will Richardson re-instantiates a well-known argument:

By its very nature, assigned blogging in schools cannot be blogging. It’s contrived. No matter how much we want to spout off about the wonders of audience and readership, students who are asked to blog are blogging for an audience of one, the teacher.

and he continues to compare my posting with Sebastian Fiedlers. I am arguing that there is a performance assessment game in place that obscures the situation a little bit. Sebastian asks us to reconsider the change that has taken place already for many of us who learn with weblogs.

Will has a lot of very good observations that further solidify the idea pro weblogs in education. Ken Smith answers less systematic but draws an image of a “summerhill space” where weblogs can be valuable activities even outside performance goals. Stephen Downes announces a reply he himself summarizes with “two things will kill blogs: a) forcing people to write and b) telling them they can’t write”.

I want to comment on all this good thinking. I can’t comment on the K-12 questions Will raised, because the objectives and processes from a didactical standpoint are completely different. We should no mix these discussions.

So from all I can see is that students are willing to learn and invest whatever they can – but they are helpless about which “school of thought” would offer them them the best education: the “empirical learning-by-doing” path or the more “visionary re-invent yourself” path (I don’t even want to mention the monkey-see-monkey-do path that is still alive in so many programs — of course there are different learners and learning styles, but this plays a role on a much deeper level).

The weblogs in education discourse is happening a lot in context of the “re-invent yourself” party of educators (although the offer blogging as a kind of “doing” –like in learning-by-doing– but the educational story is one about self-definition through authorship.

I think even that is something students would buy into. But what is very open, is the question to what amount authorship for the definition of self is required. I other words what is the revenue of an investment into blogging for students? The problem is that there is no direct revenue – and sometimes there may be none at all. The whole blogging point seems just be too time consuming and “webbish” to keep attention to it. Like Stephen Downes said: there would also be no point in requiring him to practice field goals.

There is still some things to decide upon for me. But currently I am thinking about how to blend the weblogging activity with the campus environment more. I want to plant this tiny local blogsphere into the real spaces. The whole idea of the blogging for me was to nurture discourse among students and researchers. And that will going to happen sooner or later – this way or the other.

The humanism of media ecology

Published on April 14, 2004 in Politics. 0 Comments

Neil Postman – Media Ecology Association:

“As far as I can tell, the new media have made us into a nation of information junkies; that is to say, our 170-year efforts have turned information into a form of garbage. My own answer to the question concerning access to information is that, at least for now, the speed, volume, and variety of available information serve as a distraction and a moral deficit; we are deluded into thinking that the serious social problems of our time would be solved if only we had more information, and still more information.”

[via InfoDesign: To Surf The Community]

Isn’t that irony that Neil Postman’s messages are blogged here and displayed on web pages and books sold by Amazon? There’s is a hidden truth in this.

Neil Postman sounds as if he is suggesting a new abstinence. But what I think he is suggesting is not less information, but more good information.

It somehow indirectly reminds me of of Andrius Kulikauskas calling on the BlogTalk 1.0 conference: “I don’t need news! I need initiatives! When I have selected an initiative, then I need news! So what are we undertaking?”.

When Pythons Attack

Published on April 13, 2004 in Programming. 0 Comments

Mark Lutz:

In this article, I will chronicle some of the most common mistakes made by both new and veteran Python programmers, to help you avoid them in your own work.

[via Zope Newbies>]

Graphical SQL Editor for OSX

Published on April 12, 2004 in Tools. 0 Comments

If you ever need to design a database on a Mac you should have a look at this little freeware application: SQLEditor. It offers a grpahical drag&drop way to create tables and display relations.

Speechbot

Published on April 12, 2004 in Tools. 0 Comments

SpeechBot (from HP/Compaq) is a search engine for audio & video content that is hosted and played from other websites. It uses automatic speech recognition technology to transcribe and index documents that do not have transcripts or other content information.

Decentralzied media

Published on April 12, 2004 in Tools. 0 Comments

Umediated.org is a group blog that tracks the tools, processes, and ideas being used to decentralize media production and distribution.

Nokia Lifeblog

Published on April 12, 2004 in Interaction. 0 Comments

Nokia Lifeblog is a PC and mobile phone software combination that effortlessly keeps a multimedia diary of the items you collect with your mobile phone. Lifeblog automatically organizes your photos, videos, text messages, and multimedia messages into a clear chronology you can easily browse, search, edit, and save.

Fast rollovers without preload

Published on April 12, 2004 in Practice. 0 Comments

This tutorial by Petr Stanicek desceribes a technique to have graphical rollovers based on CSS without the need to preload images. This is also used in the Sliding Doors Part II tutorial on alistapart.com.