2 commentsIt’s a sad day for the USiT team, we’re losing our big toe. Stephen is moving on and whilst this is a great loss to the team, we wish him all the best.
I for one can say I have enjoyed working with, and learning from, Stephen and that his expertise and camaraderie will be sorely missed.
0 commentsI’ve found Ross Dawson’s piece on Tapping the power of Social Media: 6 steps for marketers to be a very useful primer for marketing-focussed clients and colleagues who wish they knew more about this whole “social media” thing. Here’s a taste:
1. Participate and play
The only way to understand social media is to participate. Don’t just open Facebook and Twitter accounts. You need to play extensively with a wide variety of tools and discover how they are being used. If you think you don’t have time, think how much time you’ll have if you cannot work effectively in a world increasingly driven by social media.
The other five steps are:
What tips or info do you refer people to when you want them to find out more about things that lie “in front of the wave”?
1 commentsThis is an interesting post from www.Baekdal.com, not least because of the interesting visualisation which tries to examine how and where people have and will get information / news in the future.
Visualisation of news sources over time (with permission www.baekdal.com)
It’s an fascinating visualisation, I’m not sure I agree with everything on there (or the use of a variable timescale), but there are some good ideas and things to discuss, such as the suggestion that social networks will provide less “news” in the future and that “social news” (news straight from the people who make it) will rise in importance.
0 commentsBill Thompson talks about Unasking the Right Questions in the latest E-Access Bulletin:
…we keep thinking about ‘accessibility’ and ‘usability’ as separate, almost orthogonal aspects of design. Unfortunately, this remains the dominant model, and it has now become a barrier to future progress because it encourages designers to think about creating tools and services for the ‘normal’ population before considering accessibility [...] Instead of thinking about ‘access’ at one end and ‘usability’ at another, we should attempt to recast our debate in terms of what technology does for all of us, not just those whose have ’special’ requirements.
Fairly standard argument for properly integrating accessibility into design practices, but where I think the article gets more interesting is with this:
So how should we frame our debate if we move beyond what I think is a dangerous attempt to retain the distinction between ‘usability’ and ‘accessibility’? I think it is time to explore the idea of affordance’, as it could offer us a way forward. [...] Bill Gaver [...] wrote: “Affordances go beyond value-free physical descriptions of the environment by expressing environmental attributes relative to humans. For example, the physical measure of height, which has no inherent meaning, can be recast in terms of the affordance of accessibility, which does. Because accessibility emerges from the relation between elevation and people’s physical characteristics, it is an objective fact about a situation.”
[...] If we start to frame the issues facing users whose capabilities deviate from the norm in terms of affordances rather than simply of accessibility, this might free us from the ‘modal totalitarianism’ that infects so much design, whether in products like screens and keyboards or on-screen in websites, widgets and services.
Affordances matter equally to the ‘abled’ as to the ‘disabled’, and so the same design methods can be used, and outcomes can be evaluated in a much broader way. This allows us to start to move away from the current model, in which we have ‘assistive’ technologies to overcome ‘deficits’ that make some users ‘abnormal’, to one in which we all have skills and abilities that vary along a large number of axes.
Has anybody used this approach to reframe their requirements in terms of affordances instead of accessibility?
1 commentsAll our thoughts and well wishes go out to USiT member Patrick Kennedy as he reaches the 24 hour deadline for Full Code Press 2009. Here’s a snapshot video of him looking “serious and very good looking”.
0 commentsAt the risk of becoming known for the phrase “I might be a bit slow on the up-take but…” I’d like to share with you designgames.com.au. Created by my friend and fellow Aussie UX expert Donna Spencer, this catalogue of workshop techniques is a great resource for anyone looking to facilitate a workshop and get useful output, anywhere during the project life cycle.
For example:
Divide the dollar Participants are provided with a list of features and $100 to ‘spend’. They distribute the money across the features according to how important those features are and explain why they have divided their money in this way.
While most of these games are fairly well known to experienced practitioners (or are based on classic techniques) some have been given a fresh spin, and by publishing them to a blog and allowing feedback, Donna has allowed those newer to the field to add them to their toolbox.
This is of interest to our team as we’ve recently done some workshop facilitation training and you can never have enough workshop activities up your sleeve!
0 commentsThis article by Matt Haughey from the “A whole lotta nothing” blog discusses the fact that you really shouldn’t be paying social media marketers to get your products into tweets or blogs, rather it is the value of your content that should make the big difference to the buzz generated around your product or service.
There are interesting parallels here for me in regards to the value of the experience you design for customers and things like search engine optimisation (SEO). The ultimate value of a page you design and the way you communicate information comes from the content and the value that it provides to the consumers. The challenge is the balance between allowing people to find the content and ensuring that in the process of making it findable you aren’t destroying its inherent value.
I know this is obvious, but it’s something i’ve been wanting to say for a long time.
8 commentsSoftware and buildings. Like any analogy I can only go so far before jumping that line into nonsense. Hopefully what I’ve written here is sufficiently handwaving without going too far back the other way to being pointless. Anyway…
With a bridge or a skyrise the physical laws such as gravity mean that for the life of the building you can’t really change the foundations. Changing the foundations generally means a new building.
Software construction is amorphous in comparison. The underlying code can be refactored and rearchitected whilst the software itself is still considered the same thing. Change the UI though, and you’ve probably got a new piece (or version) of software.
Having meetings standing-up aside, software is still often approached like bridge building. In fear of it “falling down” the architecture for the software is given utmost importance from inception right down to the code level where Christopher Alexander’s Pattern Language work has been somehow morphed into implementation guides and class diagrams.
Yet, with software it seems to me that the most physical part of the system is the user. Just like gravity will make a poorly constructed bridge fail, bad software will fail primarily with the user. Essentially, the user is the primary constraint.
Could it be argued that doing software development and not starting with the user is like building a bridge and not starting with gravity?
3 commentsVia Rod Peno’s ImMEDIAtely (internal) newsletter.
The Guardian today launched “Guardian Open Platform” which allows people / “partners” to reuse content from the Guardian in mashups etc. They have opened their data stores allowing people to access all sorts of interesting numbers like:
Interestingly, they are also setting challenges on their “datablog” asking people to look at some of their data sets and create something from them. Sounds like a good Design Friday exercise perhaps?
If only there were similar free sources of data available for Australia. Does anyone know of any?
3 commentsI was attempting to catch up on my overflowing Google Reader account recently and I came across this post entitled How Not To Sort By Average Rating by Evan Miller. He starts by describing several simplistic ways in which web designers approach ranking, and how they are far from adequate. He then offers a superior method, the essence of which is:
Score = Lower bound of Wilson score confidence interval for a Bernoulli parameter … We need to balance the proportion of positive ratings with the uncertainty of a small number of observations. Fortunately, the math for this was worked out in 1927 by Edwin B. Wilson. What we want to ask is: Given the ratings I have, there is a 95% chance that the “real” fraction of positive ratings is at least what? Wilson gives the answer.
This is a nice little tip for something that we are including in user interfaces more and more these days; ranking content based on the ratings/scores given by users. Anyone who has designed user ratings into a website will know that it can be easily thrown out of whack by one or two odd ratings.
As one of Evan’s examples illustrates, you might find an item with 2 positive ratings and 0 negative ratings appearing above another item with 100 positive ratings and 1 negative rating. This isn’t fulfilling the spirit of user ratings, which is to show what the audience thought was better (or more valuable) overall.
I freely admit I don’t have the knowledge of mathematics and statistics to full understand the recommended algorithm. But that’s the beauty of it, you don’t have to, you just let the code do it’s thing and you will have well ranked content.
[via Anu Gupta]