John Zimmerman on Idea Generation and User-Centered Design
— John Zimmerman on strategies for creating and developing user-centered designs. (
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Macromedia Bound
— I'm going to be working for Macromedia! (
203 words, 4 comments)
Newsapple
— Apple's news aggregator sure does look a lot like mine... (
210 words, 0 comments)
Gmail and the Desirability of Scarcity
— Gmail is desirable because it was scarce, and this partially accounts for the enthusiasm about the product. (
453 words, 1 comments)
Goodbye, Comment Spam
— I've installed the CAPTCHA anti-spam plugin, which means you have to read and type a short number to post comments to my weblog now. (
241 words, 0 comments)
Role-Oriented Workspaces
— A proposal for an operating system that is more aware of the many roles some users assume while using their computer. (
361 words, 0 comments)
More Friends with Jobs
— Congratulations to Mathilde, Chad, and Haven on their recent job offers! (
94 words, 0 comments)
Scheduling Tasks Collaboratively
— A cheap and easy technique for collaboratively managing the timeline for a group project. The only requirement is sufficent permanent wall space. (
1258 words, 1 comments)
Rob Log Episode IV: A New Server
— I've switched servers. (
154 words, 1 comments)
On Being a User Researcher
— Thoughts on the skills and qualities a person must have to be a good user researcher. (
482 words, 4 comments)
Vienna's Through With Me
— A quick overview of my trip to CHI, Vienna, and Prague. (
259 words, 0 comments)
Design, Usability, and Innovation
— Design can spur innovation, but not through creating brand new ideas. Design makes existing ideas accessible enough to become innovative. (
425 words, 0 comments)
Marketing and User Research
— Why marketing doesn't do design research, and why design research shouldn't do market research. (
408 words, 0 comments)
My URL Just Got Shorter
— My URL has changed to loki.lokislabs.org, but the old one still works. (
73 words, 0 comments)
NEC's Future Designs
— Some links to designs by NEC that are similar to some stuff we did in IID. (
125 words, 0 comments)
The Usability of Security
— Some thoughts on a framework for thinking about the HCI of security systems. (
391 words, 0 comments)
Averting Starvation
— An article on Norman Borlaug, an agronomist whose work has saved around 1 billion lives. (
97 words, 0 comments)
Some Simple Rules of Argumentation
— Some time-saving rules of argumentation. (
220 words, 2 comments)
Life Lessons for Designers
— My thoughts on "The Top Ten Things They Never Taught Me in Design School" (
230 words, 0 comments)
The End of the Tunnel
— Private entry. (
10 words, 0 comments)
Moving Outside the Device
— An argument that product manufacturers should look at the entire user experience in which their devices live, rather than just designing their specific device. I use the Apple iPod as an example. (
330 words, 5 comments)
Feline-Centered Design
— Tycho's rant about how a product he purchased failed to do proper cat-centered design. (
65 words, 0 comments)
Sorting Environments
— A design research technique that involves having users sort photos of environments to indicate their impressions and preferences. (
204 words, 0 comments)
Nielsen: Qualitative Is Better Than Quantitative
— Nielsen claims that qualitative user studies are better than quantitative user studies for the purpose of guiding design. Q disagrees, but I'm with Nielsen on this one. (
488 words, 1 comments)
Newsable Redesign Mockups and a Request for Feedback
— Mockups of a new and improved future version of Newsable are now available for critique. (
146 words, 4 comments)
How to Make an Oldsk00l Text Adventure Game
— A link to an article that discusses the history and craft of text adventure games. (
151 words, 0 comments)
Making Web Log Analysis Tools Better
— I'm starting a project to develop new ways of visualizing web log data for webloggers. (
189 words, 0 comments)
IBM's Social Computing
— Reflections on an IBM talk I attended about social computing, the notion that people's information and identities should be represented in computers. (
398 words, 0 comments)
The Quality of Consumption
— An article claiming that having experiences makes people happier than having stuff. (
215 words, 0 comments)
Eric Raymond: Open-Source Usability Advocate?!
— Excerpts from an article by the famous Eric S. Raymond championing Open Source Usability, of all things, with commentary by me. (
1263 words, 1 comments)
Information Design In Practice: Agnew Moyer Smith
— The work process and environment of Don Moyer, an information designer found in the wild. (
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Users as Co-designers
— A defense of the role of participatory design and involving users in the creative portion of the design process. (
1040 words, 2 comments)
RSS Feed Now Contains Summaries
— The default RSS feed now contains summary descriptions only, but a full content version is still available. (
133 words, 2 comments)
Robotic Walker at CHI 2004!
— Our Social Robotic Walker poster got accepted at CHI! (
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Ready, Fire, Aim: Parallelizing Design and User Research
— An approach towards user-centered design where user research drives design and design drives user research through running user studies and rapid low-fidelity design ideation in parallel. (
301 words, 0 comments)
The Art of Being Critical: How to Give Design Critiques
— A proposed procedure to follow when you wish to give and receive effective design criticism. (
961 words, 1 comments)
Velcro Modeling
— A quick description of velcro modeling, a participatory design technique for creating product forms. (
264 words, 0 comments)
Career Planning
— A Boxes and Arrows article on how to plan your career. (
84 words, 0 comments)
roBlog is Printable
— All pages on roBlog will now print properly. (
126 words, 1 comments)
Email Notifications are Operational
— If you subscribe to receive roBlog updates via email, it will now actually work. (
162 words, 0 comments)
Camera Studies
— A technique for collecting lifestyle data by asking users to take periodic pictures of their environment with disposable cameras. (
397 words, 0 comments)
Divvying Up Research
— Our mechanism for dividing up initial user research activities in our capstone project group. (
446 words, 0 comments)
Kberger @ Macromedia
— Kenneth leaves for Macromedia! (
64 words, 0 comments)
The Aims of Rob, a Mortal
— Private entry. (
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Movable Type Needs Multithreaded Rebuilds
— Why MT needs to employ multithreading to improve system response times for some critical operations. (
297 words, 0 comments)
When Reuse Is Bad For Real Use
— Software modularization is a good thing, but it shouldn't create hassles for end-users. (
265 words, 0 comments)
A Map of my Daily Walk
— The results of a project to create a map of my walk in to school. (
282 words, 0 comments)
Autolinking URLs in Movable Type Comments
— A method of using the MT Regex Plugin to autolink URLs in comments while still allowing HTML in comments (since MT, oddly, doesn't allow both). (
115 words, 0 comments)
Ratings and Online Forum Design
— An argument for why most collaborative comment systems based on explicit user moderation are overly simplistic, even if they're also overly complex. (
613 words, 4 comments)
Of Maps and Diagrams
— Notes from my Mapping and Diagramming class on maps and diagrams as information objects, and how communication designers must design them to convey their information clearly. (
445 words, 1 comments)
Defining SMART Objectives
— SMART; the ideal of a project objective. Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. (
534 words, 0 comments)
Sleep Makes You Smarter
— An article claiming scientific evidence that getting a good night's sleep increases mental performance. (
152 words, 2 comments)
Setting the Agenda
— The components of a good meeting agenda item. (
374 words, 0 comments)
The Problem of Evil
— Under heaven all can see beauty as beauty only because there is ugliness.
All can know good as good only because there is evil. (
118 words, 2 comments)
Nifty Movable Type Extensions
— A list of helpful MT extensions I came across while redesigning roBlog. (
412 words, 1 comments)
Meet Heimdall
— Ladies and Gentlemen, allow me to introduce you to Heimdall, release 1. (
145 words, 3 comments)
So It Begins
— Capstone project course begins, and I had to help assign people to projects. (
314 words, 0 comments)
A Deeper Look at CSS
— The benefits of using CSS, as well as a couple of major complaints. (
517 words, 1 comments)
The Case of Powerpoint
— Why the problems with Powerpoint spring from the tool being used for tasks it wasn't designed to support. (
323 words, 0 comments)
A New Year and a New Look
— The start of a project to give roBlog a face-lift for the new year. (
266 words, 4 comments)
An Obsession with Measurement
— Quantitatively measurable objectives are a good thing, but not all objectives can be quantified. Qualitative objectives must not be sacrificed just because they can't produce a number. (
544 words, 0 comments)
Quality
— The nature of "Quality", as defined in Zen and the Art of Motorcyle Maintenance. (
645 words, 0 comments)
A Note on Terminology
— Clarifications on my usage of "design" and "usability", and a lament that there is no general word for "people who do user-centered design and usability". (
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A Systemic Problem with Software
— An analysis of the paradox of simultaneously designing for a specific audience (usability) and a general audience (interoperability). (
634 words, 0 comments)
A Usable Open Source Software Community
— I've written a lot before on the subject of bringing usability to open source software. I've been silent on the topic recently, but not idle; I've been working diligently all semester long with my friend Dana Gelman for our CSCW... (
808 words, 0 comments)
Divide and Conquer
— Now, I'm thinking about team projects and efficient ways for several people to work on the same project. In The Mythical Man Month, Fred Brooks confronts the problem of how to effectively divide up the work of large, complex software... (
562 words, 0 comments)
On Ideas and a Community of Ideas
— I've been busy with the end of the semester recently, which is why I haven't been posting much. This, of course, means I've generated a huge backlog of things to say. Now that classes are behind me, I'm going to... (
587 words, 0 comments)
Echo: The Emotional IM Companion
— For my fourth and final project for VIID, I worked with Dan Saffer and Jeff Howard on a system to enhance emotional communication over instant messaging (IM) and potentially other text-based mediums. Our target audience was teenagers, since they tend... (
471 words, 0 comments)
Communicating Interaction
— We just completed the last leg of VIID right now, having worked late into the night finishing up our last assignment (on which more will be forthcoming soon). As part of my final reflections on the class, I'd like to... (
956 words, 0 comments)
Don't Make Me Flip Out and Design User Interfaces
— You all remember the Official Ninja Webpage, right? That was nothing. HCI students are the Real Ultimate Power! Read it, or I'll leave you out of my target audience.... (
30 words, 0 comments)
Weblogs: An Antidote To Misquotes?
— One of the biggest problems for people who are in the public eye is published misquotes from reporters or other mass media producers. This ranges from quoting out of context to inaccurate paraphrasing to flat out made-up statements, whether intentionally... (
185 words, 1 comments)
Infinitely Screwy Math
— Mark Pilgrim has an interesting post on doing math with infinity over on his weblog (and I usually don't go in for math articles). It illustrates the mind-bending stuff that can happen when you apply the mathematical model to extreme... (
119 words, 0 comments)
Augmented Reality Graffiti
— Cary sent me a link to a website complaining about the iPod's allegedly short-lived battery life. Here's to hoping my iPod holds out longer; no matter how great the design is, I can't afford to buy a 300$ music player... (
511 words, 2 comments)
Architect Programmers
— This is exactly what many software architects have to deal with, so this analogy is more true than even the author of this joke thinks. I'm all for understanding the user's needs and all that, but that doesn't change the... (
76 words, 0 comments)
The Design of a New Machine
— There's an article in the New York Times titled "The Guts of a New Machine" that discusses the rise of the iPod and Apple's approach to design innovation with the product. The author takes the position that the iPod has... (
577 words, 0 comments)
A Splintered Psyche
— This entry is private. Forgot the password? Ask the Keymaster!... (
11 words, 0 comments)
A Naked User Interface
— Dave Thomas, one of the Pragmatic Programmers, has an interesting ramble on his weblog that covers a variety of topics of interest to user-centered designers. His analysis of Raymond's discussion of X windows and its lack of imposition of a... (
868 words, 0 comments)
Zen and the Art of Interface Design
— I've recently been reading "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", a fascinating, deeply insightful novel that delves into such philosophical areas as the nature of thought, reason and emotion, the role of technology, and the definition of quality. Midway... (
196 words, 1 comments)
Maintenance Projects and U&SA
— Turns out Dan wrote an article for Boxes and Arrows about a year ago titled "Tackling Maintenance Projects". The article is excellent and I recommend reading it. What I found most interesting, however, is how Dan's advice relates to the... (
278 words, 1 comments)
A Foundation for HCI?
— I've written before about Graduate Design Seminar, a class I'm not actually in but which I'm experiencing vicariously through Dan. A couple days ago, I was talking to Dave Holstius, an HCI PhD student who's also taking the class. He... (
125 words, 2 comments)
How the IT Industry Really Works
— This cartoon is an oldie (I think I first saw it in "Developing User Interfaces" by Hartson and Hix), but it's worth repeating. It's a great 8-pane summary of the product development communication problems that I keep rambling about on... (
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Competing Definitions of Design
— Dan has a post up about Dick Buchanan's definition of design: "Design is the human power to conceive, plan, and realize products that serve human beings in the accomplishment of any individual or collective purpose." Just for fun, let's compare... (
335 words, 6 comments)
Flexible Designs and the Role of the Designer
— My good friend Kerry has a post up on an art exhibit on rethinking the role of design in everyday life. The exhibit includes a project called Felt 12x12, which is essentially a collection of felt squares that the consumer... (
429 words, 2 comments)
Live Long, Eat Well
— At Kenneth's recommendation, I've been making use of Epicurious recently, which is an excellent online resource for recipe ideas if, like me, you're too busy to read cooking magazines and don't own a whole lot of cookbooks. In an effort... (
123 words, 1 comments)
Discussing Disconnects
— At the SSS two days ago, I led a discussion on how we can bridge the gap between interaction designers, usability professionals, and software engineers working together on real-world development teams (as I promised I would). I started out with... (
799 words, 1 comments)
Radical Colocation is a Good Thing
— Joel has an article up on the subject of adopting methodologies for software development. He makes a lot of good points about the state of the practice, but when discussing the subject of whether software development should occur in private... (
528 words, 1 comments)
Storytime and Pretty Pictures: Data That Informs Design
— One of the things I'm interested in is studying how to guide design through empirical research, "science-guided design" you might call it. The problem with classical research methods is that although they are effective at uncovering truth, they are too... (
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SSL Certificates - Unusable and (Mostly) Useless
— Matthew Thomas has an interesting rant about the poor usability of the SSL Security Certificate system, the mechanism pretty much all web browsers, email programs, and other internet clients use to establish secure connections to servers over the inherently insecure... (
258 words, 0 comments)
Usability and Creativity
— At the last SSS, MHCI student Jesse Kriss gave a talk on digital music and live performance, focusing on the technologies available for changing the way musicians perform. The important feature of all these technologies, according to Jesse, is that... (
999 words, 2 comments)
The Principles of Design Research
— Last Thursday, Dan posted a nice meta-summary of user research techniques. The principles he describes are all embodied in HCI's most prominent user research method, Contextual Inquiry (CI). Basically, CIs are ethnographic observations combined with impromptu interviews, wherein the researcher... (
450 words, 0 comments)
Navigation Assistance for the Elderly
— Yesterday, we presented our final designs for the third assignment in VIID; a socially-aware robotic walker for the elderly (you might recall my first assignment, a scheduling application, and my second, an interface for keeping in touch with friends, from... (
417 words, 0 comments)
Weblog Home Page Design Idea
— Mark Pilgrim has an interesting redesign of his own weblog's home page that he posted recently. I'm not sure if I agree with the page as it stands, but it's given me a few ideas for roBlog that maybe I'll... (
83 words, 1 comments)
Logos
— A couple evenings ago, I put together this design to serve, henceforth, as my personal logo: The design was inspired partly by Raymond's proposed hacker emblem and partly from some playing around with pennies I did a couple months ago... (
348 words, 0 comments)
A Deep Foundation of Disciplines
— Last week, Dan posted about his Graduate Design Seminar class (as is his wont on peaceful a fall evening), specifically covering the nature of arts and the nature of products. I recommend reading them if you haven't already. While reflecting... (
338 words, 2 comments)
Why Trusting Pretty Web Sites Is Rational
— Paul gave a lecture in CSCW yesterday on the topic of economic analyses of reputation systems. One of the points he discussed relates to an earlier post of mine on how people judge the trustworthiness of web sites. The upshot... (
511 words, 0 comments)
OK/Cancel on Focus Groups
— Today's OK/Cancel comic has some nice discussion from Kevin and Tom about the benefits and problems with focus groups. At first, I wasn't too fond of OK/Cancel. The art is nice but I rarely find the comics fall-down funny. But... (
119 words, 1 comments)
The Open Source and Usability Problem
— As regular readers are aware, for the past few months I've been working on the problem of bringing improved usability techniques and practices to open source software. Since the beginning of the project, my perspective on the problem has changed... (
729 words, 0 comments)
The Glider and Design
— Eric Raymond has proposed an emblem to represent hacker culture: The image depicts the "Glider" pattern from the Game of Life. The glider is notable because it is the simplest pattern that moves. I'm not thrilled with the idea of... (
129 words, 0 comments)
Online Community Currency Analysis
— The ever-insightful localroger has an article on K5 analyzing comment moderation system currencies (like Slashdot's Karma and K5's Mojo) and providing some design recommendations for improving these virtual economies. Although I'm filing this under Meta it is not a specific... (
210 words, 0 comments)
Information on Personas and an Argument for Design
— There's a good, thorough overview of personas on Information Today. The article gives a great digest of Cooper's description of personas in Inmates, although once again I could ask for a little more guidance on how a researcher is supposed... (
308 words, 0 comments)
The Canonical List of Companies Rob Would Really, Really Like To Work For, Part I
— Here it is, just as the title says: Google, Inc. - because they apparently have a great work environment and corporate culture (according to Kevin, who should know), because they do interesting things with information storage and retrieval, a big... (
266 words, 1 comments)
Rethinking File Transfers
— Joel is posting about tokens, a new way of transferring large files and/or complex folder structures: It's hard to believe that here it is, what, 2002? No, I think it's 2003, and when you want to send a really big... (
219 words, 0 comments)
Is Usability Destroying Innovation?
— Dan has a post pointing to an article in the Guardian on innovation and user-centered design. The article's short so it's worth the quick read, but in brief it claims that user-centered design has become dominated by usability practitioners, that... (
628 words, 5 comments)
Paul's Online Social Science Weblog
— So it turns out one of my professors for CSCW, Paul Resnick, has a weblog (on livejournal, no less). Doesn't look like he updates it very often, but when he does he posts some nice, lengthy reflections on his experiences... (
105 words, 3 comments)
A Compendium of Usability Resources
— Usability Net is a great reference site for all kinds of usability techniques and processes. They have a table of usability methods along with some "filters" that show which methods are appropriate in different circumstances (I'm not sure how much... (
140 words, 0 comments)
Mark's Bread and Online Identity
— Mark Pilgrim is having problems baking bread: I have been coping with my new bread machine for several months now, with distinctly mixed results. The first loaf came out great, an outcome which I attribute entirely to beginner's luck. The... (
247 words, 6 comments)
Active Reading
— Since I came to Carnegie Mellon, and especially since I started roBlog, I've developed a new approach to reading nonfiction books and articles, both for classes and for myself. In the past, I've found that I got very little "take... (
243 words, 0 comments)
Posting Tool Wish List
— Micah has been pondering switching from his beloved Radio Userland to Movable Type, but has found a few of his favorite features in Radio missing in MT. In particular, he wants: Rich text editing. Basically, an embedded HTML editor. Automatic... (
453 words, 1 comments)
The Design and Development Disconnects
— I've been thinking a lot recently about the communication between software developers and usability/design people, for my usability and software architecture work, my open-source and usability work, and for an SSS topic I proposed. Here's a preliminary list I came... (
642 words, 4 comments)
On Constrained Diets
— There's an article on K5 written by a guy who's giving up vegetarianism after 8 years. It presents an interesting perspective on what it means to be a vegetarian in our society. As a vegetarian of 9 months (and the... (
319 words, 1 comments)
Deos It Mttaer Waht Oredr the Ltteers in a Wrod Are?
— Matt Davis, an actual researcher at Cambridge University, has an interesting page discussing the word scrambling and perception net-meme that was going around last month. The bottom line is that some of the claims in the email are at least... (
96 words, 0 comments)
Using Research to Guide Design
— As I've mentioned before, I'm taking CSCW: Designing Online Communities this semester and one of the stated goals of the class is to figure out a way to translate the knowledge gleaned through social science experiments into a set of... (
332 words, 0 comments)
CSS and Linked File Types
— Andy writes of a CSS rule to auto-insert file type images after your URLs, so that your readers will know what kind of file the link points to. This struck me as a nice, easy way to warn readers about... (
251 words, 0 comments)
The U&SA Book Chapter
— I realized I haven't been posting much recently about what I've been doing for my actual job. For those of you that I haven't yet told, I'm in the process of writing a book chapter for an upcoming book on... (
114 words, 0 comments)
Weblogs As Common Ground
— Last week, we had an SSS on weblogs. Unlike last year's hour-long talks, this one was more of a freewheeling discussion session. Neema provides a taste of commentary. Chad made an interesting comment during the session. He remarked how being... (
198 words, 0 comments)
Friendster Trading Cards
— My friend Scott Davidoff and I were discussing Friendster this afternoon. Scott is not normally a big online communities fan, but he checked out Friendster since it relates to his CSCW project. Now, one of the interesting (although not so... (
202 words, 5 comments)
The Way We Really Speak
— As part of our background research for CSCW, Dana and I are reading some social science articles on how people build common ground. "Common ground" is a term that refers to the customs, norms, and other background knowledge and experience... (
741 words, 1 comments)
Welcome to Wiki
— I set up a Wiki last night for Dana and I to use for our CSCW project (sorry, no link to the actual Wiki; it's an invitation-only affair for now). I happened across PmWiki (which is open source) when searching... (
194 words, 1 comments)
The Ivory Blog Bubble
— Oliver Willis asks whether webloggers are taking themselves too seriously: During one of the Saturday sessions a member of the audience referred to the assembled crowd as "utopia". Now, yes, I loved the blog camaraderie but quite frankly I don't... (
290 words, 2 comments)
Keep In Touch
— As a follow-up to my wicked-cool scheduling application design, I've been working for the past few weeks on a new assignment, this time a design for a situationally-appropriate interface for helping people keep track of long-distance friends, lovers, and family.... (
784 words, 0 comments)
Bill Joy and Language as Architecture
— I'm reading an article on Fortune's web site interviewing Bill Joy about his recent departure from Sun Microsystems. He made an interesting comment while discussing Windows' architecture: Also, Windows isn't well architected. There's a simple way to find out if... (
289 words, 0 comments)
Metacrap and Categories Revisited
— I came across (Micah -> The Midnight Blog -> The Well) Cory Doctorow's essay on Metadata, entitled "Metacrap", where he outlines the reasons why the sort of universal metadata-enhanced world that information storage and retrieval experts dream of (he calls... (
115 words, 2 comments)
Newsable: Ready to Rock!
— It is, after all, Rocktober. I've just unveiled Newsable 0.8 beta to a breathlessly-awaiting public (this public, in case you were curious, consists of Kerry and Jordan), thus marking the first release of my web-based news aggregator / modest experiment... (
329 words, 8 comments)
Producing High-Level Documentation
— An article on Kuro5hin got me thinking about software documentation and how poorly designed so much of it is, to the point where programmers often waste weeks generating reams and reams of completely useless prose. The author's main point is... (
1051 words, 0 comments)
An Online Community for U&SA
— As many of you already know, I am currently employed here at Carnegie Mellon as a research assistant for the U&SA project. By day, I investigate the relationship between the usefulness, usability, and desirability of software systems (the human-centered view)... (
387 words, 0 comments)
The Problem with Data Objects
— I've been working on the code for Newsable a lot recently, and I'm coming across a problem I confronted when working on EE way back in my code monkey days (about two years ago). The problem relates to a software... (
413 words, 0 comments)
Small Groups for Design Critiques
— In VIID today, we divided up into small groups to discuss our design sketches for the second project with members of the class who were not on our project teams. I wound up in a group with just Kerry, although... (
270 words, 3 comments)
Redesigning Scheduling
— Our first assignment in Visual Interface and Interaction Design (a.k.a. "Jodi's class") was due last week. This was my first attempt at real, live interaction design (well, my first intentional attempt), so I'm documenting it here for posterity or something.... (
949 words, 1 comments)
Newsable Beta: Getting Close...
— Apologies for the silence this weekend; I've been working hard on Newsable to complete it in time for a September 30th deadline I agreed on with Jim as well as to get it ready for a project I'm starting with... (
124 words, 1 comments)
The Role Of the University in Higher Education
— After attending the whole IT in the research university event as well as reflecting on my experiences in classes here at CMU and my illustrious schoolmates' comments and complaints on their own experiences, I've got to thinking about what exactly... (
489 words, 4 comments)
Libel Laws and Blogging
— This is old news, but I think it's worth repeating (I'm just no good at being an information courier... :). Last June, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals determined that webloggers can't be held responsible for libel for information they... (
134 words, 0 comments)
Surprise-Explain-Reward
— Margaret brought up something else I found interesting in the talk I mentioned in my last post. One of her problems was getting buy-in from users that they even should test (remember, they are overconfident already). Engineers and designers often... (
370 words, 0 comments)
End-User Software Engineering
— Last Wednesday, a woman named Margaret Burnett from Oregon State University gave a talk at the HCII Seminar Series which I attended on the topic of "End-User Software Engineering". Here's the problem: many applications require end users (read: people who... (
578 words, 0 comments)
Social Loafing, Free Riding, and Online Communities
— In CSCW / Designing Online Communities last week, we read, processed, and discussed a huge volume of empirical studies literature on the problem of free riding and social loafing. These two concepts describe the same basic phenomenon except that the... (
1175 words, 4 comments)
Of Moods, Taxonomies, and Exploration in Design
— For the last week and a half or so, I've been hard at work for my Visual Interface and Interaction Design (VIID) class developing two sets of artifacts: four mechanical product taxonomies and seven "mood boards". In theory, all this... (
390 words, 0 comments)
Operating System Learnability and the Digital Divide
— Dan has a post about how Macs aren't any more intuitive to use than PCs, at least in his opinion. I'd have to say, after a year of using a Mac and several years of using PCs, that I can't... (
346 words, 2 comments)
Advanced Software Design Seminar
— Abby and I had what I believe is a really great idea for a course to run here at CMU (or elsewhere, for that matter). I'm afraid it won't have a chance to see the light of day, but I'm... (
377 words, 0 comments)
A More User-Centered HTTP Log Analysis Tool?
— I was pouring over my logs yesterday and I realized I'm getting more and more frustrated with the inadequacies of Webalizer, especially with regard to performing log analyses for the purposes of enhancing usability. Webalizer takes a very system-centric approach... (
342 words, 3 comments)
Teaching, IT, and Making Research Matter
— Last Wednesday, I attended a discussion forum on "Information Technology and the Research University", which I mentioned I was invited to earlier. There were a bunch of bigwigs from the National Academies present; they were apparently interested in how CMU... (
749 words, 0 comments)
Spam-Protect Your Email Links
— I've been putting the finishing touches on the MHCI students' bios page this evening. One thing I wanted to do was spam-protect everyone's email address (we get enough web-harvested spam already since the SCS, in its infinite wisdom, posts our... (
185 words, 0 comments)
Empirical Research on the Reasons for Free Riding
— For CSCW this week, we had to read an empirical research article relating to free riding / social loafing and summarize it for the class. I chose an article that studied the reasons why people tend to free ride as... (
1141 words, 0 comments)
Note to Phone Manufacturers: Innovate!
— Why is it that phone manufacturer's can't seem to create a phone that contains a single innovative, useful, and usable feature to save their lives? Even cell phones, which certainly have quite a bit of market variety (too much; I... (
220 words, 0 comments)
The Tragedy of the Commons
— Last night, I read a paper for CSCW on "The Tragedy of the Commons", which I believe is the seminal paper that applied this concept to modern political science. If ever there was an argument that knocked down the "Invisible... (
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Novice Teachers
— I'm reading an article called "Information Ecologies" for Jodi Forlizzi's Visual Interface and Interaction Design class. As a side point, the authors mention a company, Farallon, that has developed an interesting hiring practice for technical support persons. Instead of hiring... (
389 words, 0 comments)
Analyzing Communities
— The fall semester has begun here at CMU, and I'm taking a class in Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) from Bob Kraut. This semester, the class is focusing on Designing Online Communities and Bob is co-teaching it with Paul Resnick, a... (
753 words, 0 comments)
The Case Against Dualism
— An argument for why the theory of consciousness known as "substance dualism", which posits that minds are wholly separate from bodies, is false. (
682 words, 8 comments)
Dancing Bears
— Against my better judgement, I was flipping through the first half of "Inmates" a couple days ago. I came across an interesting concept Cooper describes as a "Dancing Bear": In essence, a dancing bear is a product that is interesting... (
327 words, 0 comments)
The Right Tool For the Right Type of Job
— I've recently found myself complaining a lot about how there are no good tools specifically designed for developing software prototypes for formative usability evaluations. Oh sure, there are products like Flash and Visual Basic that are often used for prototyping,... (
970 words, 0 comments)
Damaged Merchandise?
— I skimmed a paper by Wayne Gray (recommended by Bonnie) last night entitled "Damaged Merchandise? A Review of Experiments that Compare Usability Evaluation Methods". This is apparently considered one of the more infamous papers in academic HCI, since it single-handedly... (
349 words, 0 comments)
On the Inadequacy of Categories
— As I just mentioned yesterday, a common technique for organizing information is to put this information into categories, thus making it easier for users to locate specific information as well as search for types of information based on predefined properties.... (
552 words, 2 comments)
Info Design's LATCH
— This one's gonna be a quickie, but I wanted to throw it up while I was thinking about it. During the last week of CDF on information design, our instructor, Bob Swineheart, remarked that there were five ways of organizing... (
105 words, 11 comments)
Social Networking Astronauts
— Micah reminded me yesterday of an article written by the ever-insightful Joel Spolsky on "architecture astronauts", those great thinkers that have the unfortunate tendancy to get caught up in reaching for the highest pinnacles of elegant abstraction only to produce... (
463 words, 0 comments)
Extreme Usability
— How to integrate sound user-centered design practices with an agile software development process. (
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The Borg Queen Awakens
— My good friend Kerry Bodine has started up a weblog, Styleborg, that focuses on wearable computing and fashion. If you're interested in the new field of wearables, or especially if you're interested in the very new field of fashionable wearables... (
67 words, 0 comments)
Usability Impacts Architecture (But Don't Take My Word For It...)
— As many of you already know, one of the areas I'm interested in is understanding and improving the connection between software development and usability in general and software architecture and interface design in particular (in fact, I'm currently gainfully employed... (
870 words, 2 comments)
Information Technology and the University
— Last week I randomly got an email from Joel Smith, the CIO and director of educational technology here at CMU, asking if I'd be willing to meet with him to discuss "IT and the research university". Apparently Ryan pointed him... (
494 words, 0 comments)
Know Your Designer: Scott Berkun
— Scott Berkun is an amazing man with some amazing ideas whose done some amazing stuff (he worked on the IE and Windows interfaces). I met him at CHI 2003 last April and he seems like a cool guy to boot.... (
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For Wont of an Aggregator the Linking Was Lost
— Those of you who are particularly observant might have noticed that I haven't been linking to too many articles on external websites as of late and roBlog has gotten a little more introspective as a result. I credit this largely... (
298 words, 0 comments)
What Is It So What?
— My bosses, Bonnie and Len, have a heuristic for writing and reviewing academic papers that Bonnie calls the "What Is It So What?" criteria. Basically, it boils down to three questions that the paper has to clearly and satisfactorally answer... (
534 words, 0 comments)
Bringing Usability Professionals to Open Source Software
— I happened across an old article on Open Source and Usability over on Lyle Kantrovich's weblog the other day. Lyle read the paper on the problems facing open source software usability that I mentioned in my first post on the... (
254 words, 0 comments)
Generalizing Design
— Six weeks ago, I posted about the design process that we learned in CDF. Now, CDF is over (exempting the process book, which I'm struggling to compile right now). Over the course of the session, I've been reflecting on whether... (
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The Invisible Designer
— Since I first became interested in interface design, one of my favorite sayings has been "The most irritating thing about being an aspiring usability professional is that there is so much need for us out there in the world and... (
642 words, 5 comments)
My New Friend Socrates
— At my new apartment, there's a cat that often hangs around outside and sometimes comes in to visit me. Here's a couple pictures: I've named him (her?) Socrates. I'm not sure if he has an owner or not; he has... (
158 words, 0 comments)
Power and Language in Interaction Design
— I found an Ask Tog column today via Dan's weblog proposing "Interaction Architect" as a new name... er... "brand" for interface designers as well as the development of a corresponding professional association to elevate this discipline to a more respected... (
416 words, 2 comments)
roBlog's Scannability
— Neema told me yesterday that he finds all the content on this weblog hard to digest. He suggested I provide a summary or bulleted "main points" section for each points so he could get the gist of the content without... (
181 words, 5 comments)
A Foray into the Asylum
— I've finally gotten around to reading Alan Cooper's "The Inmates are Running the Asylum", something I felt I should do since I'm pushing personas and Goal-Directed Design as a key component of open-source usability (in my defense, I have read... (
778 words, 2 comments)
Quality, Quantity, Progress, and Design in the World
— Once again, CDF has reset itself and we've procured a new teacher. This week its Craig Vogel, an industrial design teacher with a penchant for waxing philosophic on the nature of design and its place in society. Craig described the... (
987 words, 0 comments)
On the Value of Constraints
— Over the course of this summer session, I've been working on a variety of projects, many of which involve skills I haven't yet developed and concepts I haven't yet fully grasped. During the course of all this, I've experienced a... (
681 words, 3 comments)
Redesigning My Space
— I've moved into a new apartment recently. I moved in two weekends ago and spent last weekend cleaning and redecorating. All my Pittsburgh friends will (hopefully) get to see it in person soon since I hope to have a housewarming... (
231 words, 0 comments)
Personality Typology
— Micah and Dan have been talking about the Myers-Briggs (/Keirsey/Jung/etc.) personality test recently, so I thought now might be an appropriate time to weigh in on the subject. I've read David Keirsey's Please Understand Me, which is an excellent book... (
566 words, 2 comments)
Expressive Type, Visual Structure, and Human-Centered Design
— This past week in CDF we studied Expressive Typography with Dan Boyarski, head of the School of Design and typographer extraordinaire. Our running assignment was to arrange a quote on a page in a way that expresses its meaning. For... (
860 words, 0 comments)
Architecturally Sensitive Visual Design Scenarios?
— Last week Dan Boyarski, the head of the School of Design, was our instructor for CDF. More on what I learned from him shortly; I have to check up on an intellectual property rights issue first. In the mean time,... (
521 words, 5 comments)
Photography as a Communication Medium
— I've been learning lots of interesting things in CDF recently; sadly, since I moved last weekend and lost my broadband internet access at home for a couple weeks, I haven't had time to post about all of them. So this... (
726 words, 0 comments)
Usable Architectures and Designing for Change
— Recently, I've been thinking a lot about architectures for software systems as well as systems in general, specifically about those aspects of system design that make future changes easy or hard. A while back I wrote up an outline for... (
984 words, 2 comments)
Ayole's Water and Technology As a Catalyst for Change
— First off, a quick apology for the recent slowdown in posting frequency. I've taken on way too many projects this summer and thus haven't had as much time to update this journal as I'd like. Today I partially taught a... (
613 words, 3 comments)
Photographing Miss Bodine
— This entry is private. Forgot the password? Ask the Keymaster!... (
10 words, 4 comments)
But Is It Art?
— This week in Communication Design Fundamentals we got a new instructor, Charlee Brodsky, who is going to give us a crash course in photography (which I feel very lucky for getting; apparently last year CDF was almost entirely focused on... (
839 words, 4 comments)
The Agony of Getting Started
— Whenever I start a largish programming project, I always fall into the same trap. As with any complex undertaking, I always find there are many, many things the project requires me to understand that I don't; there are many uncertainties... (
475 words, 0 comments)
Patterns and U&SA
— At the command of my bosses, I'm working on researching the relationships between our U&SA scenarios and the software patterns found in Design Patterns and Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture Volumes 1 and 2. So far, I've gone through Design Patterns and... (
558 words, 0 comments)
The Last Straw and a New Itch
— AmphetaDesk has annoyed me for the last time. After having to manually change the localhost port from 4888 to 8888 since it sometimes randomly decides to launch the browser with the wrong port number in OS X, I wanted to... (
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How User Research Feeds Future Usability Activities
— Andy commented on my Personas and Open User Research post over on his Blozom News weblog yesterday. He suggests the use of task modeling, which appears to be a technique for expanding the users tasks into specifications for the system... (
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The Design Process
— Today was my first day of Communication Design Fundamentals (CDF), the prerequisite studio-based design course for the HCI program here at CMU. We started off the course with an exercise in the design process where the teacher, Karen, gave us... (
729 words, 0 comments)
Personas for End Users
— While plugging away at Newsable's architecture yesterday, I came up with a possible side benefit of the open-source personas strategy that I am attempting to apply to this project. One problem I frequently encounter while searching for a new piece... (
345 words, 2 comments)
Anatomy of a News Aggregator
— For the past couple of days, I've been working on the interface and architectural design for Newsable. Since I am a strong believer in the claim that the design decisions that determine whether an application is usable are not purely... (
993 words, 0 comments)
mv Micah /california/eBay, make, make install
— Congratulations to my good friend Micah, who has just accepted a job as a user interface designer at eBay. Or perhaps I should be saying "Congratulations to eBay, on their success in snagging one of the greatest interface designers to... (
127 words, 0 comments)
Personas and Open User Research
— As I described on Newsable's About page, the goal of all this user research and personae development is to provide a technique for open source project teams to design and test usable interfaces. However, thus far I haven't made this... (
842 words, 0 comments)
The Ways We Read
— Earlier this month, I ran an investigation of how people browse periodically updated websites (such as news sites, weblogs, or any page whose content changes and people keep coming back to view these changes). I ran these studies to inform... (
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Fetching Friends' Feeds
— I stayed up late tonight finishing up a small script I've been working on that's serving as a technology prototype for Newsable. If you direct your eyes down the sidebar column to your left and locate the "Friends" list, you'll... (
405 words, 0 comments)
On the Properties of Links
— I've recently become peripherally aware of a discussion that's going on among the widely-read webloggers on what makes a weblog a weblog (as opposed to a normal website). This reminded me of a discussion I had with Micah after his... (
825 words, 0 comments)
Case Studies in Open Source Usability: KDE and GNOME
— I joined the GNOME Usability and KDE Usability mailing lists this week, mostly to lurk and watch the discussion unfold to hopefully gain some insight into what the state of the practice in open source usability is like. Here's my... (
465 words, 3 comments)
Bipolar Debate Teams
— Dave Thomas, of Pragmatic Programmer fame, has a great idea for a debate format on his weblog. I've always believed it's very important to respect and seriously consider the opinions of people you disagree with, and this format strikes me... (
126 words, 0 comments)
Newsable, the Usable News Aggregator
— At the risk of promoting vaporware, I've opened up the website for Newsable, the open source news aggregator I'm working on, to the public. Right now the only section that has real content is the About section, which describes the... (
139 words, 0 comments)
Designing Against Frivolity
— I happened to hop over to Slashdot today and found a nice polemic over on the Guardian about how frivolous technologies are dominating the market nowdays. The article is full of derisive, quasi-luddite quotes, like The Innovations catalogue exists as... (
534 words, 0 comments)
Natural Programming and Expanding Open Source
— Sometimes when I come across something I want to write a weblog entry about but I don't have time to put together the full writeup (these things can take over an hour) I instead jot down a quasi-outline of the... (
701 words, 0 comments)
Waypath: A "What's Related" for Weblogs
— I ran across a service called "Waypath" today that basically implements the "Related Entries" functionality I discussed last April. You can give Waypath a URL to a weblog entry or a few keywords and it will return a list of... (
270 words, 1 comments)
The Joy of Programming
— I've been thinking recently about the craft of programming, and why it is that some people derive a strong and fulfilling enjoyment from this activity that many others do not. I'm certainly among those who enjoy programming, but I was... (
698 words, 1 comments)
Friendster and Digital Identity
— At Kenneth's urging, I joined Friendster today, mostly just to poke around. So far it seems like an interesting place that takes a new angle on the whole “meeting people” problem; it leverages social networking concepts to introduce people to... (
648 words, 2 comments)
Weblog Redesign Cocked, Locked, and Ready to Rock
— As you have probably already noticed if you're reading roBlog dot org through the web interface rather than through a news aggregator, I've finally rolled out the new design I claimed "should be changing soon" when I started this damn... (
363 words, 0 comments)
Fury, By the Book
— Kevin has embarked on a project to redesign Fury, his popular personal website / weblog. When most people get bored with their old website design, they hide away for some period of time and work on the new site in... (
264 words, 0 comments)
U&SA Website Is Live
— The Usability and Software Architecture project finally has a website. The front page has a nice short description of what the research is all about which may be of interest. All of our publications that we're allowed to put online... (
119 words, 0 comments)
Happy Birthday to Me
— As many of you may already know, today's my birthday, the big two-four. In another year, I'll be able to rent a car at non-ripoff prices. In a similar vein to how many celebrate their twenty-first birthdays, I plan to... (
747 words, 5 comments)
Innovation and Shifting Web Standards
— I wanted to add a quick (and slightly belated) blurb to the recent buzz over the release of Mozilla Firebird, Microsoft's comments on how they plan to stop releasing standalone versions of IE, and the Microsoft-AOL deal to include IE... (
666 words, 1 comments)
Consolidating Bookmarks
— For my ongoing effort to construct a usable open-source RSS news aggregator, I've been doing some modified contextual inquiries of several of my compatriots in the HCII and elsewhere here at CMU. So far, I've observed five participants as they... (
539 words, 4 comments)
Open Source and Efficient Interfaces
— I met with Jim today about my open source and usability project. We were chatting about the current state of usability in open source software projects, and I observed that although open source products tend to have inferior usability with... (
422 words, 0 comments)
The Users We'll Never See
— About an hour ago, I felt a need to feed my Chipwich addiction, so I invited Kerry to go to Entropy with me. On the way back, she needed to stop by the Hub to get some registration and class... (
925 words, 0 comments)
Another Adams Awakens
— My brother, Geoff, has started a weblog on The Labs with the apropos name of "Geoff Adams's Weblog". He is the only person I know who is (possibly) lazier than I am, so it remains to be seen how often... (
75 words, 2 comments)
Justifying My Existence, or Why I Have A Weblog
— Back when I first set up this here weblog, Micah asked me what my reasons were for doing so. At the time, my answer was "I want to have a place to record my ideas" This was accurate if rather... (
955 words, 1 comments)
Comparing Complexities: Interface Designs and Code
— I was reading Jacob Nielsen's Alertbox yesterday, and noticed he made an analogy I've frequently used myself; he compared interface design to software development to demonstrate the folly in assuming that good designers shouldn't have to user test their interfaces.... (
352 words, 0 comments)
On Cooperation and Understanding Others
— An important skill to cultivate if you wish, like me, to make a difference in the world is the ability to put yourself in the position of the people you must work with so that you can understand clearly what... (
781 words, 3 comments)
Prescriptive Interfaces Explained
— A discussion of prescriptive interfaces, or designs that teach and enforce a "best practices" approach to solving some complex task rather than encouraging less effective approaches that may seem more natural to novice users. (
1003 words, 0 comments)
Single-Sourcing, Outliners, and Normative Interfaces
— Why outlines are important components of interfaces intended to support the structure-focused single-source paradigm of content generation. (
513 words, 0 comments)
Threads of Thinking
— A proposed mechanism for automatically threading together posts in a Movable Type weblog. (
220 words, 0 comments)
Whuffie and Rejection
— A criticism of "whuffie" as a simplistic model for social respect. (
281 words, 1 comments)
Whispers of Elegance
— "If you can see a thing whole," he said, "it seems that it's always beautiful. Planets, lives.... But close up, a world's all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern...." (
100 words, 4 comments)
A Cost-Effective Problem Reporting System
— A proposed design for a cheap meatspace problem reporting system. (
345 words, 0 comments)
Journals for Lesson Plans
— A proposal to create academic journals for publishing lesson plans for higher education classes to create a market for quality lesson plans similar to the market for quality research articles. (
408 words, 6 comments)
Corporate Murder Revisited
— A followup on corporate murder laws, referencing a law in the UK that makes upper management criminally liable for their decisions. (
161 words, 1 comments)
Markets for Usability
— Thoughts on how to create a better job market for usability professionals. Usability professionals must get better at ensuring their activities show business value and consumers must get better at demanding usability. (
796 words, 0 comments)
Website Redesign Rollout Has Begun
— The new design for my website is finally up on non-weblog pages. (
133 words, 0 comments)
Lessig's Modest Crusade
— Lawrence Lessig is trying to get a reasonable copyright law passed. We should help him out. (
314 words, 0 comments)
End-User Participation in Open Source Development
— To what extent should end-users be involved in the design of open source software? (
321 words, 1 comments)
Corporations are Plural Nouns
— Americans use the names of corporations as singular nouns; the British use them as plural nouns. I think the British are correct. (
575 words, 0 comments)
The Spread of Misinformation
— There was an article on Slashdot yesterday that makes an interesting case study in how easily the truth can get warped as information propogates from person to person (or website to website), and should make us all very cautious of... (
572 words, 0 comments)
Multitasking Projects by Days
— One of the things I both love and hate about my life here at CMU is that I constantly have several different projects that I am working on simultaneously. For example, at the moment I'm: Working on U&SA with Bonnie... (
473 words, 0 comments)
A Pattern for Distributed Work
— Earlier I wrote a post on technology and life in the future and mentioned the Community of 7000 pattern from "A Pattern Language". Alexander mentions another pattern that fits even closer with the ideas I expressed in that post; in... (
177 words, 0 comments)
Drawing Work Over Time
— For our TCinC work, Matt and I are interviewing the students who just completed the course to get a picture of how they worked, what they learned, etc. We plan on performing this exercise again after Joe incorporates our redesigned... (
531 words, 0 comments)
Filtering Feeds to Free Up Focus
— Micah mentioned to me yesterday that he has been having problems recently with the volume of content he subscribes to with his news aggregator. He says it is getting to the point where catching up on his online reading is... (
409 words, 0 comments)
A Note on XML and Single Sourcing
— In reference to my post a few days ago on a single sourcing paradigm for research content management, Dave asked why I didn't mention XML as a solution to the semantic content / presentation separation problem. That's a good question... (
437 words, 0 comments)
Visions of a Distributed Future
— While walking home today I was thinking about the direction wireless and networking technologies are moving in and what impact this might have on society in the long term. Since at least the beginning of the Industrial Age, we hum
