The Blackout of 2003

Michael has the best blackout story I’ve heard yet.

The best blackout idea I’ve heard yet was from a waiter who said, ‘We should do this every year.’ Yes, every Earth Day. If we could plan for it, there’d be no commuters trapped on trains, and we’d keep power going to essential places. But all residential power would go for one day. That would be good.

My Website Doesn’t Smell Good

“Hey Kathryn. Hello? What’s wrong?”
“My website doesn’t smell good.”
Brad had stopped by for his morning cup to go (large, French roast, black). I thinks he likes me, but he never asks me out. “Oh, come now. I’m sure your website smells fine.”
“That’s not what Mr. Nahzah says. He looked at the home page and couldn’t smell where to find the French Roast. I almost gave the poor guy a heart attack. Here,” I swivel the screen towards him, “is it really that bad? Can you find the French Roast?”
“Let’s see, Home, Blends, Grinds, Beans…” A pause. A really long pause. I know he’s confused, and he knows I know this. He pinches his nose, “Damn girl, that website stinks!”
I slap him, laughing.
Brad grins, “Seriously, the labels don’t really help me find what I’m looking for. Maybe if they were longer, or you could put a picture there.”
“How am I going to fit a picture in there?”
“Well, why do you need to use this nav bar?”
“What’s a nav bar?”
“This thing on the side. Why do you need it? Isn’t it just boxing you in?”
“Uh, yeah, I guess. But a lot of websites do that.”
“Come now. Do you run your cafe like other cafes?”
“Of course not. Most cafes are totally lame.”
“Right. So stop being lame.” He shoots me his best mock-intense eyes, gently challenging me.
“I hate you. This is a lot harder than I thought it would be.”
He drew out his words in a mocking tone. “‘This sooooo hard.’ C’mon. It’s not like you’re curing cancer, you’re moving stuff around on the screen. Have fun with it.”
I stared at him and let out a heavy sigh. I feigned vulnerability and tried to create a moment, give him an opportunity, but he didn’t pick up on it.

Krug Report

Steve Krug last night was his usual humble, humorous self with more than enough advanced common sense to please everyone. He spoke of kayaks (unexpected user behavior that’s not all that bad, like rolling over in a kayak), boxfish, and a missing chapter from the book: Why Your Website Should Be a Mensch. Indeed.

The one revelatory idea I remember was that, regarding accessibility, screen readers need to improve. It can be uncomfortable to think about not accepting full responsibility for improving accessibility, but he has a point: better screen readers will remove a huge burden from everyone else involved.

The Real Origin of Personas

Alan Cooper, in his new column The Origin of Personas, claims to have developed personas as an original idea. While he qualifies his words (“introduced the use of personas as a practical interaction design tool”, ” the history of Cooper personas” (stress mine)), he cites the first published mention of them was 1998′s The Inmates Are Running the Asylum.

I learned them from Tog, who discusses their use in his 1992 book Tog on Interfacecuses on the scenario aspect of personas, but the same technique of selecting a small set of prototypical users is there. He in turn cites Laurie Vertelney‘s 1989 CHI paper on Drama and Personality in User Interface Design which Jakob Nielson summarizes for us.

Update: Laurie found this post and writes in:

It seems like we’d been using scenarios for ages to do design work at Apple and at HP Labs before that. (mid-late 80s) I was personally inspired by some of the work at MITs Architecture Machine Group back in the early 80s. It just seemed obvious to me that in order to invent future user interfaces-you have to envision specific “types” of people engaged with the technology you are creating. I’ve been using this technique literally for decades.

So perhaps there were parallel efforts, or maybe some cross-fertilization took place in the Bay Area interaction design scene. In any case, it seems there are still the unwashed masses fiddling with personas and real persona creation has become the domain of the Jedi masters… Interaction designers at Cooper spend weeks of study and months of practice before we consider them to be capable of creating and using personas at a professional level. Many practicing designers have used the brief 25-page description of personas in Inmates as a "Persona How-to" manual, but a complete "How-to" on personas has yet to be written.

Designer Virus

Challis points out Welchia, a noble virus that repairs damage done by the Blaster virus. Now all we need is a noble virus that infiltrates web servers and fixes crappy navigation.

IT & Society on Web Nav

Last Winter the online journal IT & Society quietly published an entire issue on web navigation. It’s somewhat ironic that the issue is one page of abstracts that link to PDFs :-) Still, there’s probably goodness there; I’ll be starting with David R. Danielson’s Transitional Volatility in Web Navigation.

Faceted Metadata and Choosing the Right User Interface

Tanya’s revealing of her technique for setting facets for her blog was the catalyst that reminded me of a comment Peterme made regarding facets: ‘The system can never know which particular strategy a given user wants to employ — so why not avail them of them all?‘ I don’t think he really means all facets we could imagine, I assume he means all facets that correspond to the most important metadata fields for a type of information.

I’m thinking about this because I’m working on a system that stores the information using a number of facets, but which is presented with a hierarchical browsing user interface: it displays information pre-filtered by a couple facets, and as you select items it displays more items further filtered by the facet you selected. I didn’t design it, but I must complement those who did as it probably (usability testing will confirm this) maps to the mental model of the user. And yet the faceted scheme on the back end keeps the data set flexible and available to display using alternate schemes.

And I mention this for two reasons: One, I’ve noticed a tendency to want to use every facet we have in the user interface instead of relying on our knowledge of users to serve them only the facets that are useful without extra clutter. Second, even experienced IAs want to literally represent the back end structure in the user interface. I see this especially with semantic networks of information stored as nodes and connections, where people want to rely on Thinkmap like interfaces. The information model just might be a better way to store and manage information that, in user interface form, corresponds to user’s built-in understanding of categories.

(Out of courtesy I should mention this is not a criticism of either person or site mentioned above, they were just catalysts.)