brightly colored food

Conversations with Don Norman and Janice Rohn[.pdf]
Conversations with Clement Mok and Jakob Nielsen, and with Bill Buxton and Clifford Nass[.pdf]
From the references in an article by Richard Anderson, linked from Christina

What gems. Reading transcripts of conversations always gives me such a better idea of what a person is all about, and these are no exception (especially with people as opinionated as Jakob Nielsen and Don Norman).

And the pairings are great: Don Norman and Janice Rohn goe back and forth about the overall importance of usability. Don correctly asserts that usability isn’t everything and that to have lots of usability testers and a great usability center is missing the point. Clement and Jakob have a similar discussion, although it’s a bit more focused on what usability can and cannot test. Bill Buxton and Clifford Nass are the odd coupling, but both have interesting things to say.

As Leonard himself tells Teddy fairly early on, “Memory’s unreliable … Memory’s not perfect. It’s not even that good. Ask the police; eyewitness testimony is unreliable … Memory can change the shape of a room or the color of a car. It’s an interpretation, not a record. Memories can be changed or distorted, and they’re irrelevant if you have the facts.” This is the very heart of the film. “Memento” is a movie largely about memory — the ways in which it defines identity, how it’s necessary to determine moral behavior and yet how terribly unreliable it is, despite its crucial role in our experience of the world.

Wow, what a great analysis of a brilliant movie. I’m a pretty bright kid, but there’s obviously a ton of stuff that I missed when I saw this. I’ll definitely need to see this again.

Amnesia seems to be in the air these days — “Memento”, Radiohead’s “Amnesiac”, and “The Vintage Book of Amnesia” are all masterpieces put out within the last year (though to be quite honest, “Memento” is much more about amnesia than the other two). What’s the obsession?

Speaking of Radiohead, I went to the show last night, and it was as good as I’d hoped. That concert coupled with The New Pornographers show that I saw on Tuesday made up for the poor showings in recent weeks by both Tortoise (postrockers posing as 70’s jazz-rock) and Built to Spill (otherwise good indie rock that morphs into hippy jam-band rock when they’re on stage).

Technomethodology: Paradoxes and Possibilities
from WebWord

The design of CSCW systems has often had its roots in ethnomethodological understandings of work and investigations of working settings. Increasingly, we are also seeing these ideas applied to critique and inform HCI design more generally. However, the attempt to design from the basis of ethnomethodology is fraught with methodological dangers. In particular, ethnomethodology’s overriding concern with the detail of practice poses some serious problems when attempts are made to design around such understandings. In this paper, we discuss the range and application of ethnomethodological investigations of technology in working settings, describe how ethnomethodologically-affiliated work has approached system design and discuss ways that ethnomethodology can move from design critique to design practice: the advent of technomethodology.

While I’m not into slogging through an academic paper right now, perhaps you are. Casts a semi-critical eye on ethnographic investigative practices in HCI. From CHI ‘96 Proceedings.

Well, the SF IA/UE Cocktail Hour always manages to be timed against my schedule, not with it (why don’t they consult me on such matters? I do not know). Tonight is no exception: Sherman Alexie, only one of my favorite authors, is reading at Modern Times tonight. And he just fought his way to a draw against Saul Williams in the World Heavyweight Championship Poetry Bout in Taos. Hmmm….

From EPSS InfoSite
A concise paper [.pdf] that details one consultancy’s approach to heuristic evaluations. Too often I just hear about a particular type of evaluation or test and not the system for supporting and evaluating that analysis, so I like that they’ve developed a process that supports the heuristic evaluation - they develop affinity diagrams to examine categories of problems as well as a cost-benefit chart (with axes of difficulty and importance) to pick out which problems are the most important to fix.

From EPSS InfoSite

Because intranets have become commonplace, it’s easy to assume they’re well designed and usable. Unfortunately, most intranets have grown undirected and unchecked, like weeds in a garden. To dispel the myth that good intranet design just happens, let’s look at the rules that my colleagues and I follow when we design corporate intranets.

It’s too bad there isn’t more sharing of best practices for developing intranets — such a different set of challenges than say, developing an e-commerce site, and it’s nearly impossible to check out other intranet sites. The best points this article makes is 1)start slow and grow iteratively and 2)use guidelines. After things wrap with Intuit.com we’re gonna spend some time looking at developing templates and guidelines around here, which will be a considerable challenge, but a fun one.

This may sound like a no-brainer, but do you ever think about which user experience design work you do helps a company to earn money and which helps them to save money?

Some decent articles about site redesigns, generally focused on improving usability and sales on the sites.

In other news, I’ve been working like mad on the site redesign of Intuit.com. In the last couple of days I’ve been all about searching. Apple has quite a nice little search on their Support section, using drop-downs to help scope out what a user is searching for. Usable web has plenty of great links to articles on search.

Two papers cited on the CHI-WEB list, and two others — a website and a paper — worth mentioning.

Examining the Effectiveness of Electronic Group Communication Technologies: The Role of the Conversation Interface[.pdf]
Argues that “different social and technical designs of electronic group communication technologies will influence various aspects of electronic group communication, such as level of participation, patterns of interaction and genres of communicative purposes”. It’s an obvious point, but from a quick look at the paper there’s some decent analysis and development.

Social Translucence: An Approach to Designing Systems that Support Social Processes
Tom Erickson from IBM has done some great research on things like patterns for interaction design, the role of storytelling in design, and social interaction online. This paper examines properties that enable graceful face-to-face interaction, identifies three main characteristics — visibility, awareness, and accountability — and looks at an online chat system that tries to support these characteristics.

The Dynamics of Mass Interaction[.pdf]
From the AT&T Labs Research Group. Looks at the relationship between demographics, conversational strategies, and interactivity.

Conversation Map: An Interface for Very Large-Scale Conversations

The Conversation Map system is a Usenet newsgroup browser that analyzes the text of an archive of newsgroup messages and outputs a graphical interface that can be used to search and read the messages of the archive. The Conversation Map system incorporates a series of novel text analysis procedures that automatically compute a set of social networks detailing who is responding to and/or citing whom in the newsgroup; a set of discussion themes that are frequently used in the newsgroup archive; and, a set of semantic networks that represent the main terms under discussion and some of their relationships to one another.

Erin Malone from the always excellent “>DesignWritings mentioned reviews of websites on Design Interact in a post to the SIGIA list. The latest review is of the IHT Website, a personal favorite of mine.

IBM Ease of Use Conference Papers
from Noise Between Stations

Guilty admission: I enjoy visiting IBM’s website. I don’t use it much, but sometimes I just visit it just to, you know, to hang out a bit. I profess my admiration only slightly in jest — it is quite a nice little site, and it’s on my shortlist of sites to check out for various best practices. They did some tweaks a while back, and there’s a pretty good article from BusinessWeek(!) about the redesign. I particularly dig the use of color, especially within the nav bar and in the search field in the local search, where it’s used to visually differentiate the local vs. global search — nice touches.

Make It Flow: Achieving the Optimal User Experience
from Tremendo

Bringing your user research out of context is often more effective than remaining in the usability vacuum. Applying too many heuristic rules to your site can backfire, especially when your end-users are looking for a more interesting experience. Don’t bore them (unless, of course, you find that they’re boring people). Only by stepping out of the digital domain and considering how you can make the product an experience that neither bores nor intimidates your target users can you begin to forge the optimal experience.