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Saturday, September 28, 2002
Here's a series of great things all in one place: MIT's "Mediawork" series of short books: "zines for grownups." The first is "Utopian Entrepreneur" by Brenda Laurel (who I notice has vanished from the Neilsen-Norman Group's list of staff. Hmm.) I haven't read it, but the Amazon reviews are glowing. Check the Mediawork site: there's not only info about the book, Laurel, and the graphic designer of the book, but also a "Web Take" on "Utopian Entreprenuer" by none other than Scott McCloud (no direct URL for this)--it's a web-era version of the kind of publishing that did the manifesto-styled McCluhan books and Semiotext(e) journals. MIT says: "Expect to see people paging through Mediawork Pamphlets while they wait for their laptops to boot up. Interstitial times demand interstitial literature." Er, a bit embarassing, that, but please publish more anyway. It sounds like MIT will carry this idea of author, designer, web-take out for everything in the series, as well.
Friday, September 27, 2002
See what the ex-CTO of Napster has to say about just how hard it was there. His number 2 item, "add significant improvements to usability and reliability, including better search tools" cannot have been an issue for them. Napster was basically perfect as a search engine. As my friend David once put it: "I think of a song I want to hear, then I listen to it." That was pretty much everyone's experience with Napster; no usability issue, no need for better search tools, and almost perfectly reliable. What else? In number 3, he admits they spent huge effort attempting something that was "not even theoretically possible": 100% accurate IDing of every file in the system.
Thursday, September 26, 2002
Want to read about fantasy-land? "Many of us have been on teams that masterfully balanced the art and science of acquiring customers, converting customers into buyers and retaining customers over long periods of time, succeeding in the face of fierce competitive pressures." Makes me feel like a sucker for working in normal places with normal design teams.
Tuesday, September 24, 2002
Can't wait to check this out at lengh: the companion site to Eric Meyer's new CSS book.
What kind of intelligence are they smoking at the CIA?
Boy, do I like this: an attempt to define a font, pixel by pixel, visitor by visitor. Kind of an Am I Hot or Not? for pixels. Be sure to check out some of the animated histories.
Monday, September 23, 2002
Nice new resource: the Social Design Notes blog, via cityofsound
I haven't seen Craig's flipflopflyin in a while (nor have I seen Craig in a while). His travel journal pieces, flipflopflyin Does Belgium, England, and Rügen, are so great! I wish I could have nice things like that on my site. How about "heyotwell boy does sitting-at-desk-entering-usability-data-into-Excel?"
Friday, September 20, 2002
Not that heyotwell.com is any great indicator of net trends, but September 2002 has been so far (fingers crossed) the first month where I've had no visitors using Netscape 4 or less. Mozilla, yes, but no Netscape browsers.
Tuesday, September 17, 2002
Well that long week in London was followed by a semi-long week in Prague on vacation with Heather's parents. The flood damage there is severe in some places. But if you didn't know there'd been a flood, you might actually just think a lot of renovation is happening at once. Really, it's amazing how much they've fixed in just a few weeks.
We're preparing the results of the London usability tests now. I'm not really a big fan of quantative data analysis. I'd rather think like a designer and try to write a report that the interface design guys will read and be able to use. Lots of data points and statistical blah blah seems good only to impress the people with the checks. With only twelve users, I don't think we should be even considering averages for most stuff, although things like "87% of users said they found the menus easy to use" is fine. Plus all that data really bloats the presentation of results, which means its even more likely to land on some designer's desk and sit there unread.
Friday, September 06, 2002
I'm finally heading to the end of a grueling and basically lousy week of usability testing in London. More on the testing later perhaps, but something that's particularly caused us headaches has been the market research agency we had screen test subjects for us.
The company I'm working with (eye square) on this project is based in Berlin; these tests have been in London. So, we hired a company called Field Facts to find us about 20 test subjects over the course of a week for a couple hours each. We had some specific requirements, a very tight schedule, and frequently had our clients in the test rooms with us. So we really really wanted someone else to handle finding subjects for us. We were frankly stunned at how unprofressionally Field Facts treated us: subjects were rescheduled without us knowing, some cancelled without anyone telling us (once leaving us a four-hour hole in the middle of the day with the client in the room twiddling our thumbs), several were told the test would be one hour when we'd needed two, and one was even told we would serve her sandwiches! We did of course have tea and coffee and cookies. Worse, a couple of the subjects had essentially no experience with the web or with computers--we'd requested people with some internet experience. We paid one woman 50 Pounds for me to teach her how to use the browser Back button. Needless to say, we're damn pissed off at this all.
In others's experience, is that typical? I mean of course you get subjects who are late or who flake out on you, but this seemed excessively bad.
Sunday, September 01, 2002
Here's a fun way to spend your one "day off" in London during a long schedule of usability tests: buy CDs to burn a copy of the test site because the rented office has no internet connection, realize that you can't access the site anyway, attempt to contact your collegues on their German mobile phones from a pay phone on the street at about a pound a minute, then race across London to try to meet up with them in the office space that looks like we're filming a porn movie set in a telemarketer's office and which we've been inexplicably locked out of! First test starts at nine am tomorrow!
At least I finally saw Scratch, the documentary about DJs, last night. Amazing! (BTW, at first I assumed that scratch.com would be the film's website. It's not, but the Scratch academy seems cool, too!)
