Confusability

Find, Listen and Label - Audio Tagging from the BBC

In October 2005 Tom Coates described one of the projects he was working on in his final days at the BBC:

I consider it one of the most exciting projects I've ever worked on, and BBC Radio & Music Interactive one of the only places in the world where I would have been able to have done so.

The project we undertook was focused on Annotatable Audio (specifically, but not exclusively, of BBC radio programming) - and we decided to look in an unorthodox direction - towards the possibilities of user-created annotation and metadata. We decided that we wanted to develop an interface that might allow the collective articulation of what a programme or speech or piece of music was about and how it could be divided up and described. Our first ideas looked for approaches similar to del.icio.us, Flickr or our own Phonetags - which create collective value by accreting the numerous annotations that individuals make for their own purposes. But after a fascinating discussion with Jimmy Wales, we decided to think about this in a different way - in which (just like Wikipedia) individuals would overtly cooperate to create something greater and more authoritative.

Whilst listening to "Feedback" on Radio 4 this evening I heard a segement about an "audio wiki" being used to annotate episodes of "All In The Mind" on Radio 4.

From Find Listen Label Help

This is a tool for adding notes to radio programmes. You can split the programme into smaller sections, called snippets, and then add a Label.

Radio programmes can be split into snippets, like chapters. These may be associated with articles in the programme, like interviews, or just mark out interesting bits. The purpose of dividing the programmes like this is to make it easier for everyone to Find and Listen to specific parts of the programme

It is also a wiki - this means that anybody, including you, can edit any of the information for everybody to see. This allows you, the listeners, to work together to create something that is useful to everybody.

I can't wait until we can annotate Today in real time. We could see how many times they cock up the time-check much more easily.

Blogging About Work

The TUC have published some very well written, common sense guidelines for blogging about work:

• What are the rules on blogging about work?  more...
• Can I avoid getting the sack for blogging about work?  more...
• Do any employers encourage blogging? Why?  more...
• If I am sacked for blogging, what are my rights?  more...

I choose not to blog about work as I like to keep my work and personal life completely separate.

Simply Google at Web2.0 Awards

Simply Google got an honourable mention at this years Web2.0 Awards.

Here is the screenshot from the awards results site.

Thanks to whoever nominated me!

Simply Google has also been recently featured on Lifehack, Read/Write Web, DMXZone, and Digg.

Jakob 'Major' Nielsen Calls For Return To Victorian Values

Jakob 'Major' Nielsen today called on the BBC to turn away from Web2.0 hype and return to the golden age of blue links and horizontal rules.

He presented a version of the future for the BBC that harked back to the time when a bbc news page could load in under 0.5 seconds and was only permitted to include one image in each page. No extraneous navigation is allowed in the new world order and text can be any colour you want as long as it is black (apart from links).

This revolutionary "WebLite" version of the BBC News Page is expected to prompt web designers to start editing the raw "html" of their in simple text editors in an attempt to "get back to content" rather than concentrating on the gaudy baubles of ajaxian trinkets.

See Also : Why Ajax Sucks (Most Of The Time)

BBC : Web 2.0 'neglecting good design' (decadent version)

BBC : Web 2.0 'neglecting good design' (WebLite version)

Usability Quote Of The Month

From The Cranky User : Passion - 24 April 2007

Usability evangelism

Sometimes, what it takes to get an institution committed to a new course of action is simply for one person to make it a priority. If no one cares strongly about usability it's not going to happen. Few Web sites are as awful as those driven by a mandated checklist. Such formalized requirements ultimately miss the point. I once came across a usability standard that mandated JavaScript pop-ups to warn people when they were leaving the set of fully accessible pages. As a standard, it was incoherent at best: many of the people who need fully accessible pages don't have functional JavaScript, and many more might find that the implementation actually prevented them from following links!

If you care passionately about usability and accessibility, and you want your organization's Web site to be usable, you will have to convince people it's important. People who don't think about usability aren't going to suddenly start thinking about it because the boss sends out a memo. So make the case for usability. It starts with you.

Learning about the future from the past

Seeing No Progress, Some Schools Drop Laptops - New York Times May 4, 2007

So the Liverpool Central School District, just outside Syracuse, has decided to phase out laptops starting this fall, joining a handful of other schools around the country that adopted one-to-one computing programs and are now abandoning them as educationally empty — and worse.

Many of these districts had sought to prepare their students for a technology-driven world and close the so-called digital divide between students who had computers at home and those who did not.

“After seven years, there was literally no evidence it had any impact on student achievement — none,” said Mark Lawson, the school board president here in Liverpool, one of the first districts in New York State to experiment with putting technology directly into students’ hands. “The teachers were telling us when there’s a one-to-one relationship between the student and the laptop, the box gets in the way. It’s a distraction to the educational process.”

Such disappointments are the latest example of how technology is often embraced by philanthropists and political leaders as a quick fix, only to leave teachers flummoxed about how best to integrate the new gadgets into curriculums. Last month, the United States Department of Education released a study showing no difference in academic achievement between students who used educational software programs for math and reading and those who did not.

Those giving up on laptops include large and small school districts, urban and rural communities, affluent schools and those serving mostly low-income, minority students, who as a group have tended to underperform academically.

A Few Thoughts about Common Sense, Computers and Education by Bill Buxton (1999)

Let me step back and discuss the future in the context of history. My example comes from Volume II, Plate 55, of the Historical Atlas of Canada [1].  What the plate does is document the introduction of the blackboard into schools in Upper Canada in the period between 1856 and 1866.

Now you will be excused if you are now asking yourself, "Why do I care about blackboards in the 1800'sin Canada no less?". Nevertheless, I beg your patience.

The key to the example (regardless of year or country) lies in posing the following question: "What preceded the blackboard?"

With just a little reflection one will come to the obvious answer: "The slate."

But, you might ask, "Is not a slate just a little blackboard? If so, this cannot be very important."

Well, from a technological perspective, the answer is yes, slates are just small blackboards. They are made from the same materials, and in the jargon of today, employ the same "user interface", the same "text editor", "operating system" and even the same "erase" operator.

Consequently, one might quite legitimately ask, "What is the big deal?" After all, "all" that they did was make a bigger slate and put it on the wall.

Well, I would argue that this seemingly "simple" change was a "big deal". In fact, I believe that an argument can be made that the introduction of the blackboard has had more impact on classroom education than any innovation in technology since, including the introduction of cheap paper or the introduction of the internet and personal computers!

That may seem like a bold claim. But for my point to work, you only have to concede that this argument is plausible. It need not be true. The gist of the example is to illustrate that a very significant impact resulted from a change in scale, location and usage, rather than a change in technology per se. The change was social and educational, not technological in the common sense of the term.

Leaping ahead, this example from the mid-1800's sheds some light on the deployment of technology in today's schools as well. What it suggests to me is that perhaps we should be spending as much time looking into the potential of computer-driven electronic whiteboards, at the front of the class, as we are spending in the seemingly ubiquitous quest to put a computer on every student's desk. However, my perception is that his is not even remotely the case, to the misfortune of future students, I fear.

Accessible Gaming

Why Action Games Suck (And What To Do About It) by Ernest Adams

For the last few years – OK, maybe about the last fifteen years – I’ve been noticing a related phenomenon in gaming that really annoys me. Call it “creeping actionism.” Creeping actionism is the tendency of game developers to add action elements to games in which they aren’t needed or wanted, and it has similarly pernicious consequences. More and more action elements are turning up in genres that never used to have them – like role-playing games, for example.

...

At the Game Developers’ Conference this year, I took part in Accessibility Idol – a game design competition sponsored by the IGDA’s Accessibility SIG. The goal was to create a multiplayer game that a quadriplegic player could play head-to-head against able-bodied players. I’m pleased to say that out of five contestants I came in second – my friend Sheri Graner Ray beat me by one vote. (She created a really cool design that involved training dragons with a pitch pipe, so her victory was well-deserved.) My game was a combat flight simulator for zeppelins. Because airships are large and slow-moving, the game more closely resembles naval warfare during the battleship era than modern aerial combat, and I called it Dreadnoughts of the Skies.

Doing the research for the competition, I learned a lot about accessibility issues. One of the basic principles of design for the mobility-impaired is there’s no such thing as “too slow.” I specified that Dreadnoughts could be slowed down to any degree desired. Another is, keep the user interface as simple as possible. That’s good advice for any game anyway. I specified a mouse-based game that could be played via a head-mounted pointing device. I wanted to support all the traditional flight simulator modes, though, so I included a voice command system to take over the keys that flight sims normally use – throttle up and down, weapons control, and so forth.

...

Now, you may be thinking, “Who cares about disabled players? Who cares about players who suck? Why should I mollycoddle people I can’t respect as gamers?” If that’s your attitude, you’re a bad game designer – you’re basing your design decisions on your own abilities as a player rather than a desire to entertain other players.

There’s no excuse for it. I’m not saying every game has to be accessible to a three-year-old. But at the moment, even the minimum physical requirements are set much too high, and far too many games offer no support for the disabled player. It does a disservice to our audience, our games, and our industry.

See also:

Game Accessibility

Games Accessibility SIG

John Lewis - Making Technology Simple?

I was sent a link to this John Lewis Brochure which offers me the promise of "technology made simple".

But is it?

Reading the simple instructions I am told that I can "Click on the corners of the e-brochure to turn the pages".

Can I? No I can't. If I click on any of the corners other than the one in the bottom right I zoom in on the brochure rather than turn the page.

The next bullet point tells me that I can "Click on any product to see full details and to make a purchase".

Can I? No I can't. If I click on any of the products on this page I zoom in on the brochure rather than see details of the product.

So, the promise to provide "technology made simple" isn't even kept on the cover. Why didn't John Lewis spend a little bit of time usability testing this e-brochure mort thoroughly.

This is the sort of problem that occurs when you customise a standard product but forget to check if your specific customisations affect the user experience in a negative way.

Perhaps John Lewis have just taken their eye off the usability ball:

"Usability testing before launch allowed us to make sure our new site was fast, friendly and easy to use. Usability by Design helped ensure that customers can quickly find the products they want and purchase them easily, helping the new John Lewis site maintain the high quality that
customers expect from John Lewis."
John Phipps, Vice President Commercial, John Lewis

Quote taken from Usability By Design

PS. It looks like J60 might be "doing usability" for John Lewis.

Dust or Magic : Creative work in the digital age

A Message from Bob Hughes :

++ THIS IS A MESSAGE TO PEOPLE who said kind things
about my book, Dust or Magic, which first appeared at
the end of 1999, or whose MA I supervised at Oxford
Brookes University, or who came to one of our Dust or
Magic conferences in Oxford in 2003 and 2004. If I'm
mistaken, please let me know: bob@dustormagic.net ++

===============================

DUST OR MAGIC REISSUED BY BOSKO BOOKS
• New, student and pauper-friendly price: £15.95/€16.95/$19.95
• Punchy new preface
• Totally re-engineered subtitle: "creative work in the digital age"*

===============================

DUST OR MAGIC, the creative worker's guide to new media, is available again at last, from Bosko Books, Bristol. It's the same text, with the same Alex Mayhew cover as the original Addison-Wesley edition of 2000, but it has the subtitle I originally wanted, some overdue acknowledgements, a new preface, and a MUCH better price: £15.95 (or €16.95 or $19.95). The original price was quite a stretch for the students and young designers for whom I mainly wrote it. Amazon has the new edition now:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Dust-Magic-Creative-Work-Digital/dp/0954723953/
http://www.amazon.com/Dust-Magic-Creative-Work-Digital/dp/0954723953/
http://www.amazon.de/Dust-Magic-Creative-Work-Digital /dp/0954723953/ ... etc

Dust or Magic's main purpose was to point out that the computer-medium has a history. One which, moreover, wasn't made by corporations, but by people, who work in ways that utterly belie corporate wisdom.

It takes that history up to the end of the "seedy-rom" slump of the late 1990s. It doesn't cover the much bigger bloodletting of 2001 (the "dot bomb" slump) or subsequent events - but these are to some extent history repeating itself, and there are now some great sources on this later period, for example Andrew Ross's "No Collar: the humane workplace and its hidden costs" (Temple University Press, 2004):

http://www.amazon.com/No-Collar-Humane-Workplace-Hidden-Costs/dp/1592131506/

... and the articles (including one by me) in "The Spark in the Engine: creative workers in a global economy" (ed. Ursula Huws; Merlin Press 2006):

http://www.merlinpress.co.uk/acatalog/THE_SPARK_IN_THE_ENGINE.html

===============================

THE BIG ISSUE that follows on from Dust or Magic, is the global pandemic of insecure work that's accompanied the rise of the "new economy". It's not just new-media workers who are insecure. Precarious work is the name of the game all the way down the food-chain from the head-offices in Silicon Valley, to the millions of young, non-white, non-unionised, predominantly female people in southern China, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Mexico ... who make the machines that make the medium possible, for wages so low that one wonders how long computerdom would last in its present form without world poverty. What would happen to technology if poverty were abolished? Going further: what if inequality were abolished? I made a first pass at outlining the issues in a fairly outspoken conference paper (Aarhus, 2005) called "From useful idiocy to activism":

http://www.dustormagic.net/Papers/Idiocy.html

===============================

WILL THERE BE ANOTHER Dust or Magic conference? I hope so. I'd like to run one bringing together educationists and global-justice activists: two groups who are solidly focused on needs rather than profits. Does that appeal? Let me know.

With best wishes,

Bob Hughes
Oxford, 1 May 2007

===============================

From the dustjacket of Dust or Magic:

DUST OR MAGIC WAS primarily written for the young, talented people whose creative instincts are kindled by computers and live to create 'good stuff', but who are systematically betrayed by the managerial types in suits who hire them, set them absurd tasks, and sack them when their half-baked schemes go belly-up. It is also for people who simply want to know how human creativity fares in the digital age.

Originally published by Addison-Wesley (under the title 'Dust or Magic, Secrets of successful multimedia design') this book is, in part, a 'secret history' of computers: a history told from the vantage point of the people who did the work. We have insiders' accounts of a range of influential products and projects, many of which were in danger of being forgotten. The scene is illuminated by recent insights into creativity and well-being from the fields of psychology and neuroscience, as well as tried-and-tested, practical strategies for workplace survival from other industries.

The author, Bob Hughes, has been a 'creative' for most of his working life: first a calligrapher, then an advertising artist and copywriter before discovering computers in the mid-1980s. He now teaches at Oxford Brookes University on the MA in Interactive Media Publishing, and researches and writes about the wider impact of electronics and computers in workplaces world-wide. He also campaigns on behalf of migrants, refugees and all precarious workers.


    "I am really enjoying Dust or Magic for the second
  time - having finally sold the children to buy my own
  copy."

      - Catharine Arakelian, Oxford


    "What you are doing is stripping away the corporate
  bullshit from this 'revolution' - its ours not theirs.
  Reclaim the pixels!"

      - Chris McEvoy (Creator of 'Usability Must Die'
        http://www.usabilitymustdie.com).


    "There are many books explaining why software
  projects go sour; this one breaks the mold by showing
  how they come good."

      - Malcolm Cook (Senior Lecturer in Human Factors,
        University of Abertay)


    "It's bloody brilliant!"

      - Brendan Dawes (Author of Drag, Slide, Fade:
        http://www.brendandawes.com)


    "It was incredibly engrossing. I expected to skim
  through it, and found myself reading it avidly, putting
  aside all the other work I should have been doing...It
  rang so true about so many things about the process of
  creating the virtual world we spend so much time in
  that I'm dying to share it with others who also create
  for it, or want to."

      - Aleen Stein (co-founder of the Voyager Company
        and CEO of Organa inc. http://www.organa.com)

===============================

  Bob Hughes
  bob@dustormagic.net
  http://www.dustormagic.net