Confusability

Usability E-Reports Comparison Tool

Adaptive Path have joined 37 signals, NN/g and UIE in selling usability reports on their site. They have a free offering to whet your appetite, but the report on Presidential Campaign Sites may give the wrong impression of their pay-for reports. Their Registration and Login report comes in at a hefty $8.17 per page (6 pages at $49) which is the highest cost-per-page in the comparison table. The cheapest at $0.34 per page is Flash Usability from NN/g (188 pages at $64).

This comparison is not really fair as the Apaptive Path reports (badged as Simple Solutions) are actually fully realised design patterns that may be more cost effectibe than buying a set a set of scatter-shot guidelines.

The most popular report is E-commerce User Experience from NN/g (which also has the most pages).

UIE are the most generous with 4 free reports, 37 signals and Adaptive Path provide one free report, whilst NN/g provide no free reports.

The e-reports comparison on usabilityviews.com took about four hours to design, build and populate. I spent half an hour discussing my decision not to put bi-directional sort options on each column with Jason Hyland, who tried to persaude me that it should work like the columns in Microsoft Outlook. I prefer the simplicity of a single direction sort where the most expensive reports appear at the top. If I then want to see the cheapest reports then I can scroll to the bottom of the page and work my way up. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred I am more interested in the popularity search showing the most popular items at the top.

I think that it is laziness when the designer gives the user all the possible sorting options rather than making the interface simpler. How many times have you clicked twice on the Date Modified column in Windows Explorer because it always defaults to oldest at the top rather than using the sort order that you last used for that column.

So this report comparison sorts in one direction only because I designed it to work that way. Not because I am lazy and not because I thinks it's great to overhwelm the user with pointless choices.

The Plastic Hydrogen Bomb

"It turns out we were all wrong," he said, "and that is most disturbing."

In his evidence to the Senate armed services committee, Mr Kay repeated his assertion that there were no illegal weapons stockpiles in Iraq.

"I believe that the effort that has been directed to this point has been sufficiently intense that it is highly unlikely that there were large stockpiles of deployed, militarised chemical weapons there," he said.

He said that the failure to find such stockpiles exposed weaknesses in American intelligence-gathering.

"It's quite clear we need capabilities that we do not have with regard to intelligence," he said.

From WMD intelligence wrong, says Kay BBC News 28 Jan 2004

The stockpiles of weapons cannot be found, but I have uncovered the plans for a plastic hydrogen bomb that can be hidden in a pocket and can be smuggled undetected through metal detectors. This is clear proof that the Evil Dictator has forced Iraqi children to assemble weapons of mass destruction that can be used as justification for his evil regime.

In schematic form, the bomb looks like this:

The result is a nice looking bomb

The full assembly instructions can be found at the Science Toys You Can Make With Your Kids site.

A diagram of the Baird's Crystal Palace Studios from 1935

Love the pipe.

Soul States

There are seven possible states [globes] of the human soul. There are twelve possible transitions [arrows] between these states. These transitions are made via six event portals [discs]. Also note there are four possible deaths [dots] a person can die.

This helps me understand why I am an atheist.

Top Ten Nielsen Words in 2003

So I lied about the Top Ten, but it appears that the most popular alertbox articles include the words Top Ten in the title.

I have analysysed all of the words in Alertbox articles and sidebars since 1995 to come up with this set of data.

Company words analysis

Google have overtaken Microsoft to become the most referenced company. Amazon were the most mentioned company in 2000 but were not mentioned at all in 2003.

Technology words analysis
PDF is top again in 2003 after losing the crown to Flash in 2002. Book made a strong showing in 2003 after being in the doldrums since 2000.

Usability words analysis
Guidelines continue to increase their domination whilst Search is top again for the third year in a row, but Advertising is making a comeback.

If you don't spend a lot of time re-examining old alertbox articles then you may have missed the excellent job that Jakob does changing old articles to contain relevant links to more recent alertbox articles.

Twenty oh four NOT Two thousand and four

I was listening to the news on BBC Radio 4 this week and I heard the news-reader pronounce the year as twenty oh four rather than two thousand and four. The newsreader repeated this a minute later, so it was clearly a deliberate policy rather than a mistake.

I much prefer the new form of pronounciation and have started to use twenty oh four myself. Some might argue that we shouldn't use the twenty oh form until 2010 but I am tired of enunciating the extra syllables and am happy to use the more familiar form of twenty oh as it means that we are becoming comfortable with the new century. We are at the point where you stop calling your girlfriends father Sir and start referrring to him as Dave instead.

I am glad the BBC have taken this step and would love to hear how the decision was made. I think that they got the idea from an episode of Early Doors where two of the characters are discussing why we say nineteen oh two rather than one thousand nine hundred and two.

Dashboard-Symbol Plan Sets Off Warning Signals

From Washington Post

Vehicles were much simpler when the current standard was put in place in 1967. Then, the systems drivers paid attention to were windshield wipers, the heater, the radio, and the fuel gauge; they weren't getting much feedback from what was happening under the hood. Under the current rule, manufacturers can use a combination of 29 words, symbols and abbreviations to communicate with drivers.

Since then, of course, the complexity of vehicles has increased dramatically and so has the messaging to drivers and the controls they have to keep track of. Marketing also plays a role. BMW, for instance, has models that use a single remote control in the console -- a system called iDrive -- that generates eye-level displays with multiple functions, allowing the driver to change the heat pattern in seats or play a CD.

"In vehicles there are more and more sophisticated things to look at and control," said Stephen Kratzke, NHTSA's associate administrator for rulemaking. "What does it mean when the light comes on? We're saying you have to use these symbols."

Instead of trying to create larger standardised vocabularies for drivers, why aren't these people trying to make driving a bit simpler? Why is it accepted that driving a car has to get more and more complicated and feature rich. Cutting down on the number of things you need to keep track of whilst driving would be a lot safer than trying to standardise on 160 icons to be used on all dashboards.

And I would be very grateful if anyone can point me to a site where I can actually look at the proposed icon set as I have had no luck in tracking them down (The nhtsa.dot.gov site doesn't even seem to be alive).

To make a flying fish

What preceded the blackboard?

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

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.

Mostly, the example simply says that the past suggests that we might want to look at the future differently than we have been.

From the BBC: Does teacher still know best? (2004)

Education Secretary Charles Clarke has pledged an extra £25m to providing whiteboards - an interactive computer display which can incorporate graphics, film, sound and internet links - next year.

You name it, the whiteboard seems to have it. It focuses the classroom on technology, the way blackboards once did the written word. But will it help learning?

Time for a change at Microsoft?

No, the Microsoft Smart Watch is, to put it bluntly, for gadget freaks. It's for early adopters, guys who love "because it's there" technology, people whose pupils dilate at the mention of the word "wireless." Others are likely to give these watches the backs of their hands - and not in the way Microsoft is hoping.

From NYTimes

Over the last three and a half years, Microsoft has sunk $50 million in R&D funds into SPOT, and has about 35 developers on the project. The buzz about SPOT around other research labs sounds a lot like snickering, though no one wants to put his or her name to a critique. Researchers at Palo Alto Research Center, in California, “literally cannot stop laughing. [But when they do,] they say, ‘I can’t even begin to talk about this,’ ” a PARC source told IEEE Spectrum. Four Intel Corp. researchers contacted by Spectrum for their perspective on SPOT also refused to comment. In these days of research collaborations, licensing arrangements, and endless litigation, if you don’t have something nice to say about the 800-pound gorilla’s latest research baby, you don’t say anything at all.

But while industry researchers are understandably shy about giving their honest opinion about SPOT, academics aren’t.

“If you’ve got a wireless PDA, or a cellphone that’s Web-enabled, then you could get the same information through those technologies,” says Steve Whittaker, a professor in the information studies department at Sheffield University, UK, and a user interface expert.

Alex Slawsby, an analyst in the mobile devices group of IDC Consulting, Framingham, Mass., agrees. “Given the proliferation of other devices that can surf the Web and give you personalized information, and the fact that a lot of people who own watches also own one of those other devices, there’s a concern that there’s a limited group of people who will say, ‘I want my watch to be more,’ ” he says.

From IEEE Spectrum