brightly colored food

I’ve been trying not to pay too much attention to the whole Interaction Architects brouha that Mr. Tog has incited amongst the easily excitable. But it pulls me back in, and now I find myself linking to Beth’s reasonable recommendations regarding what to do about promoting this nascent profession of ours.

Ah, such navel-gazing. I always get a bit embarrassed when my non-design friends tell me they read this weblog - sorry friends, we’re a profession that likes to publicize our infighting. Move along, nothing to see here.

In a parallel life I’m a freshwater biologist, forever weblogging about my fascination with evolutionary stable strategies, particularly the mating system of one lepomis macrochirus, the bluegill sunfish. In another I’m a teacher, too busy for this silliness, and in yet another life I’m off in a band somewhere, completely and entirely oblivious about weblogging.

But in this strand of spacetime I’m now headed off to finish my slides for my final presentation to Big Blue tomorrow. School starts two weeks from today and my time here in Boston is just about up. Hopefully I’ll be able to talk about my summer here a bit more sometime later, once everything is finished.

Thank you Molly, you’re wonderful.
Interaction Architect Job Title Generator

My favorites so far: Observation Designer, User-friendly Manipulator, Coalescence Deviser, and Interaction Philosopher.

Here’s a nice overview of some of the main user interface differences between apps for Windows and OS X. It’s well-written, and it’s a nice overview if you don’t want to read all of the Apple HI Guidelines. What’s especially interesting is the emphasis on how a good interface promotes the brand of the product and the company behind the product - I wouldn’t expect to see that in a document like this.

If you haven’t already seen it, Kevin Fox of fury.com has an excellent bit of parody in response to Apple’s decision to cut off everyone’s .mac email addresses/accounts who won’t pony up for the full service. It’s called “Bait and Switch”. Also check out his response to all of the comments he’s received.

How much is goodwill worth? Apple is only estimating that 10% of the users with a .mac address will upgrade. Any idea how much this might be? Maybe a couple million? How much is not pissing off the other 90% worth? It’s a poor business decision, especially for a company that relies on brand as much as Apple does.

Kevin’s a newly-minted friend from the West Coast who will be joining us shortly here at Carnegie Mellon. He’ll be in the HCI Masters program, and we’ve already committed each other to the task of tightening the bonds between the HCI program and the Interaction Design program, where I reside. He’s a terribly bright guy, and previously worked as an interaction designer at Yahoo! on their instant messenger app. He also possesses quite a fine apartment in the Squirrel Hill area of Pittsburgh. I know it’s a nice place because I’m subletting it from him until my own place opens up (one day left). I only wish it came furnished - I’ve been sleeping on a tiny camping mattress for a month now and eating my meals picnic-style on the floor. Very glamorous, let me tell you.

As Andrew noted, Web Techniques has now changed their name to New Architect. Their subtitle is “Internet Strategies for Technology Leaders”. Maybe we’ll be calling codewarriors and other technologists “New Architects”; perhaps this is their big landgrab in the architecture namespace….

Did you know that in Texas it’s illegal to have “Engineer” in your job title unless you have a college degree in some type of engineering?

To give “New Architect” a little credit, their articles are pretty decent, even if their branding may be a bit off the mark. As editor Amit Asaravala mentions, in addition to their feature articles they have case studies, legal analysis, product reviews, Q&A to strategic questions, and guest editors. That’s a pretty good mix, I must admit.

On May 29th, 2001, the D&AD SuperHumanism conference took place in London, convened by Richard Seymour of Seymour Powell. The event brought designers and other professional creative people together with historians, social theorists, technologists and policy makers. Their shared goal? To reassert human values over the technological and commercial ones that sometimes seem to have taken over our lives.

The site has transcripts of all of the speeches given at the conference. There’s some good discussion around using design as a force for social change. Naomi Klein, Rem Koolhaas, and John Maeda are some of the contributers you might recognize.

George Olsen has some thoughtful commentary on the latest Alertbox, which is about watching what users do rather than listening to what users say. He points out that what Jakob is really taking to task are the surveys, questionaires, and other marketing-type approaches which simply test preference rather than user behavior. I couldn’t agree more.

Have you ever seen a marketing person conduct a usability test? Have you ever seen someone fishing for data? I have, and it’s not a pretty sight. I’m not against using anyone but a “usability specialist” to run a test - anyone with a couple hours of training can do a decent job - but it’s so easy to go fishing, to lead the participant, to come to your own conclusions. As George mentions, it’s fine to use well-designed, quantitative marketing approaches to get at attitudes, but asking eight participants which design they prefer doesn’t qualify as a usability test.

Focus groups have lost their focus. Once a cutting-edge technique for probing the psyche of the public, they’ve outlived their usefulness. They are like a tired magician performing the same tricks week after week in the Catskills. Call ’em focus-pocus groups, for after a company has conducted hundreds of focus-group interviews, its likelihood of uncovering a truly fresh perspective is almost nonexistent. It isn’t enough to hear what people say they want. You have to find a way for people to show what they want, and that won’t happen in the stilted environment in which focus groups occur.