Perhaps the most fun entries to write are about awful sites, and here's a real winner, courtesy of BoingBoing. The site is by the British government, and it's trying to discourage knife violence. But the site has two major failings: it's all in Flash, and it has enough stupid lawyerly language to discourage a Supreme Court justice from reading the site. The BoingBoing article is here. The awful site is here.
New Scientist is reporting a Microsoft patent application for monitoring a test subject with an EEG during usability testing, so that testers can see how people really react, instead of relying on second-hand information like behaviors or think-aloud protocols. Apparently Microsoft believes it has a way to separate out the dozens of noisy signals from the ones they believe relate to user responses. Are all the rest of us out of work now?
An article in Slate points out that Iraqi jihadists are every bit as clever about creating IEDs as the Viet Cong ever were, but with vastly updated technological help. To counter the problem, the military has come up with seemingly workable ideas, such as a drone lead vehicle in a convoy that could be driven from the back, but which makes the virtual drivers carsick, door armor so heavy it can't be moved, and images so detailed that the human eye despairs of picking out field from background. The article says quite plainly
The enemy's simple technology suits human limits; our complex technology defies them. Our crazy menu of jammers confused our troops, making them think they were jamming the right frequencies when they weren't. Our tutorials in wave propagation flummoxed them. When the $800,000 IED neutralizer flunked real-world tests, the company that built it blamed operator error, denying that the machine was "a failure in any way." But if humans can't operate your machine, your machine is a failure.
Researchers at the University of Washington have built a "joystick" that works entirely with basic vocal sounds. Vowel sounds move the cursor in various directions, while consonants like "k" and "ch" simulate clicks and releasing the mouse button. Saying the sounds louder moves the cursor faster.
Existing joysticks for the disabled require a stick in the mouth, which is tiring and interferes with speech, or head or eye tracking, which is hard to do properly. The inventors say that they elected not to use full voice recognition because it was far less efficient. That makes sense to me - syllables are much shorter and universal than whole words or phrases, and they can't be misinterpreted as easily.
I see double standards everywhere, I guess. It's not so much a moral failing as a human condition. Take file sharing and offshoring. Proponents of free file sharing like Slashdot and BoingBoing speak for a huge number of users and techies who dismiss the entertainment industry's hissy fits over the practice with replies like "Get used to it", "Globalization has made your old business model obsolete", and "File sharing opens up the market with more diversity".
My personal take on file sharing is that is indeed a new game that threatens the business model of the choke point that entertainment companies have profited from for more than a century. It's never safe to dismiss the creative energies of millions of users who want to circumvent the old restrictions on their pleasure. Getting around "The Man" is also more a human condition than a moral failing. The simple fact for the entertainment moguls is that file sharing exists and can't be effectively stopped, so they will indeed have to learn how to live with it. Further, file sharing has begun to live up to its potential as a redistributor of talent, a true exercise in globally democratic artistry.
But then there's B side of the technological album - offshoring. The same globalization and foreign talent development that opened up music and movies has also enabled engineers and developers in Eastern Europe, Asia, and other places to cater to the markets of America. I've heard the anecdotes about how foreign code is often bug-ridden and flaky, but so is much of American code. Further, the quality of the code continues to rise as foreign programmers become university-trained. Only a fraction of the toys from China are lead-coated, and only a fraction of the code from India is trash. We can't confuse media hype with reality.
I have to admit to being conflicted about offshoring. As jobs drift away from Americans, even in small percentages, the net effect is to make talented high schools pause at the door to computer science and engineering. Both the now-historical dot-bomb and current tales of offshoring have combined to devastate computer-related programs in higher education all over the country. We're losing a generation. Offshoring itself doesn't scare me, but its reputation does.
On the other hand, the egalitarian meritocrat within me can't help but marvel at what the other nations on Earth can accomplish with some money and markets. A recent review of a Korean Kia model, for example, compared it favorably with a Lexus, and for half the price. India's Bollywood is now producing movies that can compete in quality with many indies in America. "Dil Se", a Bollywood film that broke into the UK top ten, features an energetic crowd dance on the top of a moving train. Why not put more money and projects into these people's hands? If technology is an unstoppable force for globalization, so is commerce. If we can't stop offshoring because it works, we have to change our business model, don't we? We need to stop bemoaning it and get on with doing whatever we find we can do best.
This curtain control is said to be an example of truly bad design. As the cutline says:
There is no natural mapping between the buttons and their functions. I went through quite a bit of trial & error before figuring it out. And the problem is that even once you figure it out, it's not very logical.But one commentator responded that
From the printing around the buttons,. it looks pretty clear... The right column is for the solid curtains and the left column for the sheer curtains. The top button in either column opens the curtains, the middle button stops them while opening or closing, and the bottom button closes them.This seems reasonable only after you've studied the panel for a while. In low light, in poor position, or if an old person is looking at it, the design is still bad, in my opinion. Most Americans, at least, tend to think of controls being arranged in vertical clusters, not columns. Maybe they could use some icons to improve effectiveness, or have two controls. Even better is to just use the old-style rods that you pull to open or close drapes. One big plus to the rod approach is that the visually impaired can figure it out, while the electric control doesn't even have a braille equivalent for its labels. Why overcomplicate things?
I live in a historic neighborhood, about three blocks from where my paternal grandparents set up housekeeping in the very early years of the twentieth century, certainly before the 1920s and quite likely before WWI, which my grandfather did not participate in. I sometimes try to imagine what life was like during that period. We like to think of today as the epitome of rapid progress, but I think it's nothing next to what they experienced. Today, semiconductor technology has made only tiny incremental advances since the breakthroughs of the transistor and the integrated circuit back in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. But consider what my grandparents lived through -
The telephone. During the period before my father's birth (1928), the telephone went from being an oddity in hotels and banks to everyday objects in homes.
The car. When they moved to our town, my grandparents could have seen horses still pulling wagonloads of coal and ice around town. By the time my father was born, horses had vanished from the streets, and internal combustion engines ruled.
Central heating. Most of the homes around here still have coal scuttles or blocked-off holes where the scuttles were. By the 1940s, coal was a dead business, supplanted by gas heat in a central furnace.
Radio. By 1930, most of the homes hereabouts were within hearing distance of a radio, and by the late 1930s every home had at least one.
Television. They appeared in abundance in the 1950s. My grandparents were only just thinking about their retirements.
Air conditioning. They never had any. Neither did most of the homes until recently, perhaps the 1970s. Many still don't. But they saw it arrive in homes.
Aircraft. They lived from the beginning of aviation until the Jet Age. Although neither ever traveled on a jet, they could watch the planes pass overhead.
Their world both shrank and expanded at an astonishing pace. When they moved here, most transportation was horse (expensive), on foot (limited), or by trolley (good for long distances). Most people lived near their jobs and walked to work. Communication was by word of mouth, or, rarely and expensively, by telegram. Perhaps by newspaper for larger news. By the time they died, they could have phoned any place in the world, heard war news from Europe, watched live broadcasts from Africa, flown to Greenland. My grandfather's jobs changed accordingly. The plant where he worked started out making farm implements and ended up making trucks. The coal and ice supply where he worked part-time shut down finally, when demand shriveled away to nothing.
Yet they never seemed to be overawed by what happened around them. Today we're terribly self-conscious about our new things, but they seemed to take them in stride. When they answered the phone, they never put the receiver down reverently. The refrigerator, gas stove, and furnace were just ordinary devices by the time I knew them in the 1960s and 1970s. I suspect my grandmother, had I asked, would have expressed joy that she no longer had to kindle a coal fire first thing in the morning, but she never brought up the subject. They saw revolutions over and over again, yet never seemed stunned by any of it. Perhaps it was a lack of self-awareness, but it may also have been simple acceptance of it all, much as they seemed to accept all the deaths in the family (two out of four children dead in early adulthood) and the antics of the grandchildren. Come what may, they did their best without any public notices about it. Maybe in their world, revolutions didn't need to be understood, just tolerated, like everything else.
I once did a project for a client that involved talking with users about their browser bookmarks. The project was a redesign of an intranet that was built like a Wild West town, with a wacky combination of independent little plots stitched together only by virtue of being under the same corporate umbrella and having links on the central page of the intranet. Every department had its own navigation and design. It turned out that employees coped by using bookmarks to provide dependable paths back to the information they had so painstakingly located. Nothing new in that, of course; Web users still use that strategy. But interestingly, the names they gave to the bookmarked pages in the bookmarks were indicative of their own quirky needs. In effect, the bookmarks were individualized navigation schemes, or IAs. By studying the bookmarks, we got a pretty fair idea of users' mental models for information.
Whenever users create informational structures, it's worth studying them to discover what's core, and what's transitory. That's the problem with today's tag or link clouds: they can't distinguish between fad and eternity. Any given cloud today may have "Britney" as its biggest member, but that probably won't be the case next year. Clouds are intrinsically time-bounded. But it would be interesting to do some multivariate work like cluster analysis on several clouds over time to see what drops out and what stays.
Here's an ice cream machine that dispenses an amount based on how unhappy the customer is perceived to be. The vending machine does a voice analysis to determine your level of the blues. Some days I'd qualify for a whole week's worth of ice cream production.
I'm teaching a graduate course in HCI, and I've learned one thing so far - how awfully much I've forgotten already. We're getting into patterns and pattern languages, and I'm alarmed to say that although I have a vague recollection of this subject, I haven't been able to use them in the field much, so they've receded into my mental archives. The same is true of other things. Names for rarely-used prototype techniques. Details about the types of conceptual models. The difference between categorization and classification. I know this kind of forgetting happens, but it's not supposed to happen to me.
Still, teaching these courses keeps the information fresher, and that's comforting to me. It's one reason why I keep teaching, even though sometimes the cognitive loading of work, home, and two or three simultaneous classes can get stressful.
