The election guide also struck me as encouraging very simple designs, almost to the point of being “dumbed down.” For an election, this is probably appropriate, since your audience runs the entire gamut of skill and intelligence levels. It’s a harsh reminder of how far ahead some of us are, but a necessary one since many forms have that wide audience.

A lot of the principles in form design cross over with market research and survey design, a field I’m currently involved in. Specifically, the guidelines about consistency and conciseness align very closely to survey principles. This makes sense, because both a form and a survey are trying to guide a person through a particular thought process as smoothly as possible.

I thought the discussion on co-operative forms was a good addition because we often think of simplicity from the form creator’s perspective more than the form user’s perspective. This ties in to general information ergonomics, but it’s a critical point because, as the example shows, having the user input their post code is more work for the programmer, but it makes a huge difference to the user.

These ideas are most commonly understood in discussing whitespace. For example, on this blog layout, the “ground” white page is essential to forming text blocks and paragraphs. It is the basis for the “form” of the text, regardless of how minimal. This balance is critical to establishing a layout that is easy to read and evokes the right response from the audience.

Entertainment Weekly reported the following statement from Netflix:

Steve Swasey, vice president of corporate communicates at Netflix, says he’s well familiar with the user backlash. “Most of [the comments] have the same theme, which is ‘what was wrong with before?’ What we’re saying is we’ve tested this extensively, we know the vast, vast majority of people like this. It’s new, it’s easier, it’s cleaner.” When questioned about whether Netflix is planning on keeping the new interface despite the negative response, Swasey said, “Absolutely. We made it and tested it and researched it and tried it out and everywhere we tried it, it had a better reception. Otherwise we wouldn’t have made the change.”

My interpretation of this comment is that Netflix is standing by their usability testing and going forward with the rollout despite the backlash. There is some justification for this position. When Facebook introduced the News Feed, the complaints could be heard from space. Each iteration of Facebook’s layout resulted in a gaggle of groups full of users threatening to leave. But after a few days, the noise died down and people settled back into their routines. Netflix could have looked at these past examples and expected the inevitable push-back to disappear in short order.

But it’s fundamentally naïve to stand by user testing as the sole indicator of a design’s success or failure. As xkcd reminds us, even a 95% confidence interval is wrong 5% of the time, and you don’t need to watch too many episodes of Mythbusters to realize that small-scale testing doesn’t always translate to the real world. Many of the comments on the Netflix blog raise some legitimate usability issues. Swasey’s statement shows a general dismissal of these users because the testing showed it was fine. Even Facebook eventually listened to user concerns over privacy.

Usability testing is a fantastic way to find early interface issues and make sure that your users have a positive interaction with you. But it’s not an excuse to put blinders on. Of course there will always be resistance to change, but don’t assume that all negative feedback is just kvetching. If you have a failure like this, you’re better off with a mea culpa and a designer’s bruised ego than you are with weeks of bad press. Netflix should have said, ”We hear you and we’re working to improve it,” instead of “We know what we’re doing; deal with it.” A successful trial is no reason to commit 100% to a plan. To quote Conan O’Brien, “Don’t be afraid to fail.” At any stage of the game.

I love to see Universities making an effort to develop technology projects centered around students at large and not just closed-off research projects. This week, I’m happy to say that UW-Milwaukee is one of those Universities. I had the privilege of serving on this year’s Educational Technology Fee committee, and want to use this opportunity to talk about some of the cool new things coming to campus next year.

First, a little background: Starting around 1998, UW set aside 2% of tuition to increase student access to things like computer labs and IT services. They call it the “Student Technology Fee,” but UWM feels that they should be different, so they call it the Educational Technology Fee, or “Ed Tech.” Every year, various departments on campus dream up projects that fit this mission. A committee of five students and two faculty members decides which of these projects are the best.

This whole process normally flies way under the radar. We finished the hearings in just a handful of hours, but the total pool this year was over $3 million. The Student Association’s Senate Appropriations Committee dolls out a mere $640K by comparison, but receives a hundred times more scrutiny. Funny how that works.

Anyways, we had a weird situation this year. Normally people ask for more money than we have, so some projects don’t make the cut. But for the first time since anyone could remember, we had a surplus. This meant that every project received funding, and we even gave a little extra to those we thought could be bigger. Here are the highlights:

• The UWM Mobile app is well underway. I have to really commend Michael Hostad and his team for putting together something really slick, and for embracing open-source technology to save over $100,000 on licenses. This isn’t just a brochure for the University; you can see bus schedules, find open laundry machines, search the white pages, and other cool things. In the future, they hope to reach out to student organizations to develop new modules for the app and to possibly start a course in mobile development. Look for the app sometime next year for iOS and Android.

• The laptop checkout program at the library has been wildly successful, and this year it graduated to a continuing project, meaning you can expect it to stick around. So far they’ve hobbled together secondhand laptops and what few machines they could afford over the years, so the current fleet is in a state of general disrepair. Next year they’re getting a whole new set of laptops, and look for new trial programs involving the iPad. The Student Association has expressed its concern over the $10/hour late fee, but the staff is pretty lenient about that anyway, and they are open to segregating late fee revenues for purchasing new equipment.

• UITS will be purchasing a 96-core “supercomputer” for student projects. We already have a high performance computing cluster on campus, but researchers are the only ones who have access to it. Now we will have a system dedicated to student projects that is fully supported by on-campus resources. This removes the technical barriers of a cloud-based solution and creates more access to this important new technology.

• The stand-up kiosks throughout the Union are being replaced. The existing Sun-ray thin clients are really slow and functionally very limited (for example, you can’t open a Word document in an e-mail). We don’t have the network infrastructure for something like Windows Terminal Services, so we’re getting a bunch of iMacs instead. A bit luxurious, but maybe they’ll distract people from noticing how old the Union is.

• Students who get a virus on their computer can now have their systems cleaned for free. (There is a limit, so you still need to pay attention to your own security.) In the past, UITS offered this as a $100/incident service.

• Students will soon be able to print from their own computers (including off-campus), saving countless hundreds of hours spent shuffling flash drives and waiting for open spots in the lab. This will integrate with the existing print card system. UITS wasn’t sure yet if you would be able to retrieve your documents at any print station, or if you’d have to choose one ahead of time. Either way, this is a massive convenience. Look for it next Spring.

• The Elluminate group conferencing platform will be integrated into D2L and available for all students to use. I was pretty skeptical about this at first, since it looks like an overpriced, big version of Skype. But when I saw the videos of how PASS is using it for online tutoring and review sessions, I warmed up to it. PASS is also expanding their offerings substantially, especially online. I still don’t know if any students will use Elluminate on their own, and there are probably cheaper solutions from other vendors, but the request came down from UW System so there wasn’t much point in arguing the details.

Although not funded by new Ed Tech fees, I was also able to confirm that UITS is starting to roll out a new WiFi network with higher capacity and improved security. It will start this summer, focusing on the Union and the Library first. This is a long-overdue project, but one that I’m happy to see progressing.

The committee also changed how they check projects with continuing funding. There is now a three-year review cycle to make sure that they always get some oversight. I’m not sure why this wasn’t done from the beginning. These reviews will take place in the fall.

Even with all these new projects and all the existing ones, we had over $130,000 left over. In the fall, we’ll probably have another session to hear more experimental small projects, and will probably roll the bulk of the surplus into next year’s budget. I’m not sure why this was such a slow year for IT proposals, but it was a good chance for smaller departments to break into the arena and gain some traction for future requests.

This was a really positive experience and I hope that next year’s reviews go just as well. Leave a comment telling me which project you’re most excited about and what you think we should do with the surplus!

While out campaigning, several people asked what they would get if they voted for me. Here are a few points that I would like to work on if elected:

• Parking: This year, the residing party voted to increase segregated fees by $15 per student to make the newly acquired northwest quadrant garage free parking for all students. While I understand that such a taxation model is effective for many issues, this isn’t one of them. I’d like to lobby for a parking revenue model more in-line with other Milwaukee-area colleges and 4-year UW colleges, where commuting students pay a reasonable semester or annual fee for unlimited parking.
• Technology: The Wi-Fi system at UWM is overloaded and out of date. We’ve allocated hundreds of thousands of dollars to UITS so they can upgrade the system, but the process is proceeding too slowly and we’re not seeing enough results. I want to fight for the secure, modern wireless infrastructure that one expects from a university of our size.
• Accountability: We constantly hear that without adequate funding, UWM can’t attract talented educators or researchers. But we don’t really have any statistics to support or oppose that argument. The existing course evaluation forms are deeply flawed and barely accessible to the public. We need a stronger way to correlate salary with performance. Does more funding mean better teachers? I want to find out.
• Fiscal Responsibility: Our Athletics Department is deeply in debt, but the program needs to grow to build campus morale. If we want strong Division-I sports on campus, we need to have strong oversight to make sure that Athletics is allocating the students’ money toward this purpose.

These are just a few of the issues that I have an opinion on, but I’d like nothing more than to hear what the students themselves have to say. Argue with me! Let me know what you think! That’s what I’m here to do, and I hope to have to opportunity to represent those opinions in the SA Senate next year. Remember to vote on April 12, and I appreciate your support!

This little program gives you nothing but a black screen with green block text and a blinking cursor, reminiscent of days on the Apple II. (You can customize the colors to something a little less retina-searing if you like.) Everything else on your screen is hidden. You have a real-time spell checker and a word/page count if you like, but that’s about it. No formatting options, footnotes, or file management. There’s no more temptation to play with margins or fonts. You don’t even have to think about hitting Save; it automatically saves every few seconds. In a room without many external distractions (TV, piles of magazines, cat, etc.) I found it very easy to become immersed in my writing and I felt like I was getting a lot more done.

Unfortunately, it’s still pretty easy to break out of your hermitage. Growl notifications (such as new instant messages or Twitter replies) are still visible over the editor window, so it’s not a perfect isolation. The menu bar reappears when you move the mouse to the top of the screen. And even the most Thoreau-like writers need to consult a reference source once in a while, so Alt-Tab remains active to quickly flip you back to the circus of the Internet. I have seen programs which take a more hardcore approach, refusing to let you exit or change windows until a timer has elapsed. But the point is not to actually cage you in; the point is to make you think you’re caged in.

If WriteRoom did a more complete job of hiding pop-up notifications and background sounds, it might be worth paying the $25. I did feel more productive in the minimalist environment, but I never quite achieved the literary zen I was hoping for. I suppose I could turn off my Wi-Fi, but at that point I could run Vim in full-screen mode and have the same effect. I’m now less skeptical about the concept of minimalist editors. Using WriteRoom has inspired me to seek out similar tools. But I can’t say I’ve found the product that does it right.

Business Administration 370: Operations Management

Taught by Dr. Xiang Fang

This course was an absolute walk in the park, which is a little disappointing because I happen to think the topic is pretty interesting. Operations Management covers things like process logistics, resource planning, and project management. It’s a nice middle ground between accounting, where records are essential and math is king, and marketing, where you cause alarm when you put numbers on a pie chart. The content is equal parts concept and practice, and I felt like I could actually apply the exercises to a business, unlike, for example, control charts, which need a sampling and measurement history system in place first.

However, as interesting and useful as I found the material, you can skip every lecture and still get an A, which is pretty much what I did. Your entire grade comes from three homework assignments and three multiple-choice exams, none of which are very intimidating. Throughout the 16-week semester, I attended two lectures, spent about 4 hours of time outside of class, and I ended up 1.67 points short of a solid A. Admittedly, with my 18-credit load, this was a blessing, but it doesn’t exactly give prestige to the SCM department. This class was so far off my attention radar that once I completely forgot to finish a homework assignment, due before an exam. After finishing the exam, I asked if I could go “print out my homework.” I walked upstairs to the computer lab, finished the entire thing in 15 minutes, and scored 24.5/25. That’s how easy this class was.

The professor prescribed an expensive textbook had good information, but all the exam material came from the lecture slides. The only time I heard the book acknowledged was when we watched short videos from the publisher. Dr. Fang provided useful sample problems, is a good lecturer, and is clearly knowledgeable on the topic, but I was hoping for more of a challenge from a 300-level course. We skipped almost half the topics in our book, and in the chapters we did cover, the more challenging aspects weren’t tested. I think that moving a little faster and including more material would bring this course up to par.

Grade I Got: A-
My Rating: B+

Business Administration 434: Database Management Systems

Taught by Dr. Kurt Pflughoeft

I had a lot of database experience going into this course, so was expecting an easy A. However, the lack of clear goals, torturous workload, and short-tempered professor made this the most stressful class I have ever taken. One of my biggest complaints with the Management Information Systems program so far is that I’m not sure whether they’re training me to be a manager or a software developer, and this course embodies that conflict. On the one hand, we had extensive homework on SQL coding and spent an eternity talking about searching, sorting, and hashing algorithms, topics solidly rooted in computer science. However, there was almost no specific instruction on using common database tools, our SQL exercises involved high-level managerial questions rather than data processing, and things like ADO.NET (the way your software accesses the database) were only mentioned in passing. There was good information on both sides of the coin, but the lack of a cohesive vision left me a little confused about why I was taking the course.

The group projects in this class were HELL. Not only were they an exorbitant amount of work (I’m talking 60 man-hours each), but the professor assigned them with a week’s notice and we had very little support. (And then changed the deadline the morning of the due date, after we had already finished in a panic.) He never held regular office hours, choosing instead to send an occasional e-mail informing us “I’m in my office today until about 4pm.” For a commuter, that’s not helpful. Even if you did catch him during office hours, he was either agitated by our questions or gave answers so vague we might as well not have asked. Once he even had the balls to say “Well, the other groups figured it out, so I’m not going to help you.” Well then what the hell are you being paid for? We’re forced to use Oracle, the most un-friendly and divergent dialect of SQL, and we’re expected to Google everything? That’s not encouraging discovery; that’s sheer teaching laziness. It got so bad that I e-mailed the class, telling them about helpful tools and techniques. The professor scolded me for not seeking his approval, but you know what, if you don’t want me to e-mail the class, learn how to use blind carbon-copy. I got a bunch of thanks in reply. I don’t think the phrase “Thanks for your help” is going to appear on any teaching evaluations.

Grade I Got: A
My Rating: C

Business Administration 436: Systems Analysis and Design

Taught by Dr. Atish Sinha

Good software architecture is not an easy thing to learn, but it’s also a skill that is desperately needed. I’ve seen enough spaghetti code to know that design patterns matter and developers should learn them early. This course tried to accomplished that goal, although it never really stated that directly and I’m afraid a lot of people missed the point. UML diagrams received most of the attention, but unfortunately these alone do not lead to good designers. We mostly made diagrams of general business processes without much regard to how they would actually be implemented in code. This brings up the manager-programmer balance again. While this course was very useful from a management perspective, it doesn’t make you much of a liaison to a team of programmers. You need vocabulary like “domain models,” “active record,” and “factory objects” to do that, and those ideas weren’t explicitly brought up. I have not taken and don’t need to take BUS ADM 432, the programming course, so I can’t say for sure if that’s a gap in the curriculum.

The one bomb of a topic was our brief detour into service-oriented architecture. This was tacked on to the class this semester and left many of us confused about what services are. When you don’t use words like SOAP, REST, or even XML, you’re left with a very esoteric definition! A programming course is a prerequisite for this one, so it’s okay to use a little jargon to make it clear.

The group work was okay. Since we weren’t trying to do anything more complicated than class inheritance, everything was left very open-ended and it was hard to have confidence in your work. Because of this, the assignments seemed a lot harder than they actually were. Fortunately, Dr. Sinha is a lenient grader, knows how to give constructive criticism, and gave us lots of practice before exams. He kept things entertaining but respectable, so I always looked forward to his class.

Grade I Got: A
My Rating: A-

Business Administration 537: Enterprise Resource Planning

Taught by Dr. Dave Haseman

This class was nothing but a giant sales pitch for SAP, and not a very good one. I was initially attracted to the course because SAP specialists often work as independent consultants and it’s very lucrative work. But once I started using the software, it was so unpleasant that I decided no amount of money could make me endorse it. I’ve planned a separate entry explaining why, but for now I’ll just say that I think flying an F-18 is more intuitive. I spent a lot of time clicking on buttons and typing in numbers, but I have no idea what any of it really did. It reminded me a bit too much of a government bureaucracy. Lectures consisted of watching the professor read bullet points that explained generic business processes, and then watching the professor type things into a screen to make this process “happen.” Based on the number of people in class who were playing games on their laptops (I’m talking Borderlands, not FarmVille) I don’t think he was getting through to anyone.

I have no idea how Dr. Haseman earned the title of Wisconsin Distinguished Professor. I have never had a worse learning experience. I had a better time when I failed a calculus course taught by a non-English speaker. A third of our grade was determined by a business simulation game run in SAP, called ERPSim. It went terribly. The game was full of glitches and had terrible documentation. Whenever a team asked a question, he either shrugged it off or sat there smugly refusing to answer, afraid he would “influence the game.” When a third of my grade is on the line, I expect the professor to offer a little more support than “RTFM,” especially when the “TFM” is incomplete. I eventually concluded that he didn’t have any idea how to use the damn thing either, because we had to re-start the game 3 times due to his screw-ups.

I would tell every MIS student to stay away from SAP courses at all costs, but UWM runs a data center that hosts dozens of universities’ SAP training servers, and the sick bastards think this is something to be proud of. (The massive payola license fee they get from it probably has something to do with it.) So now there are very few MIS electives left that aren’t focused on SAP and it’s getting harder to avoid it. I hate to see the Lubar School used like this to promote a single vendor, so I hope the MIS program grows enough (or SAP fails enough) that the demand for SAP training dilutes.

Grade I Got: B+
My Rating: F

Information Studies 110: Introduction to Information Science

Taught by Dr. Thomas Walker

I thought that adding an information science minor would be a nice idea, to give me a little perspective on using computers for something other than bookkeeping. Unfortunately, this class wasn’t a particularly impressive introduction to the field, and I ultimately ended up dropping the minor. For some reason this field attracts many adult students who don’t have a lot of computer literacy, so everything is rolled back to the things I learned in middle school. Add in some rambling discussions that ultimately go nowhere, and you’re left with a waste of a class. The lectures had no agenda, and the professor wasn’t assertive enough to stop tangential questions from holding up the lecture. This resulted in us talking about the difference between primary and secondary sources for well over 3 hours, and spending half a lecture discussing whether people are racist for saying “Mr. Obama” instead of “President Obama.” What bothered me is that some of the students seemed to think this was a good use of our time, and what really bothered me is I was expected to sit though all of this drivel or take a massive hit to my grade. Eventually, I decided it just wasn’t worth it anymore and took the attendance hit in favor of doing something productive. My TA (Wyatt) was just as frustrated with all this as I was, and his increasing apathy made me feel a little better about it.

On the bright side, Dr. Walker is not the normal professor for this course. He was brought on at the last-minute and was completely disorganized and never really invested much in the course. (For example, it took almost 2 months for him to grade our papers, and posted final grades 4 days late.) I don’t know if that’s how he runs his other courses, but I wasn’t particularly anxious to find out. I’m tempted to audit the course with Michael Zimmer teaching it, since his syllabus requires participation beyond showing up.

Grade I Got: A-
My Rating: D

Information Science 210: Information Resources for Research

Taught by Dr. Betsy Schoeller

I needed another humanities credit, and I really didn’t want another English or history class, so I took this one thinking it would be easy and informative. Well, it was informative, but don’t think it’s an easy way out of writing papers! While you don’t have a term paper to write, the amount of other busy work more than offsets it. The professor also didn’t compensate for the fact that difficult assignments were often assigned Monday and due Wednesday, while you had the weekend to do the easier stuff. The unstable workload made this course very chaotic. 210 also suffers from the same issue as IS 110, where the content is rolled back for those without my generation’s computer literacy. This combined with Betsy’s exuberant teaching style made her seem condescending at times.

Nonetheless, I learned a lot about researching in this class, and I’m sure the skills will be very helpful in the future (especially when I pursue a graduate degree). It gave me a new appreciation for the library and the resources unique to it, as well as a more systematic way to authenticate information on the Internet. The first day of class, Betsy said, “After this class, you’ll wish you had taken it when you started college.” She was right.

Grade I Got: A
My Rating: A-

A Phoenix

Finally, the fall semester is a soon-to-be-distant memory, with 2010 not far behind. Since I finally have some evenings without homework looming over me (and all my favorite TV shows are on holiday break), blogging is finally back on my radar.

Unfortunately, being on break means I don’t have anything going on and leaves me with a dearth of interesting topics (unless you want to read a bunch of Stargate SG-1 reviews), so I won’t promise timely information. But I can promise that my posts will be profound, in the same way that tautologies are profound. In that spirit, you will either think that my posts are amusing or you’ll find them boring and obtuse, but you’ll mostly find them once a week. (Hint: p ∨ ¬p is a tautology.)

I’ve already come up with some ideas for new posts and even started writing some of them. Here’s a taste of the magical things to come:

• I will name names and be specific about which professors I loved and which I hated. (But not before they’ve posted grades!)
• I’ve got an ever-growing list of reasons to expel SAP from the Earth.
• I accidentally got the password for nearly every database at the University. I’ll tell you how it happened.

Along with political intrigue, code samples, random pictures, and the occasional dip into mania, I have big plans for this blog in 2011. I’ve done the math, and you should expect the number of posts in 2011 to increase over 2010 by ∞%. Coincidentally, this is the same percentage increase in Tea Party-endorsed candidates who won their elections. Therefore, this blog will be as big as the Tea Party. The numbers don’t lie, folks. Strap yourselves in.

You can't argue with graphs