http://www.dehesa.co.uk/

Why? Because I don’t play games anymore.

Games was the single most reason I wanted to get a hardcore workstation. I’d call it a playstation but that’s already been taken. But back when I was a college student, I didn’t have enough money to keep up with new games so I gave up and decided to play with the Internets instead.

Today, I live on the Internets. I move from one place to another. In fact, today, I told some Facebook people that I wasn’t living on Facebook so much anymore. I was trying to be nice, and I was hinting at nicer places on the Internets compared to Facebook.

When new technologies change, people change along with it. You can’t control the way people change their tech habits, but it’s important to understand why it happens. Thus, when we build for user experiences, we’ll need to take this into account, because we’re ultimately designing solutions to support the habits that people have grown accustomed to.

While it’s easy to assume the ubiquity of email, the slickness of the iphone, and the power of the internet, there are occasions when those technologies will fail – and this is why we shouldn’t grow too fond of them, lest we become victims of our own devices.

This one by Whitney Hess is superb:

http://whitneyhess.com/blog/2009/06/so-you-wanna-be-a-user-experience-designer-step-1-resources/

In fact, i had come across it from understanding usability, or more specifically, web usability. And I think I was most familiar with the work of Nielsen’s first book, Designing Web Usability, that led me there. I had no idea (at the time) that it was related to HCI in that sense, which I acquainted mostly with robots and artificial intelligence.

But between that time when I first started learning about HCI and User Experience, to the point I really understood what it was – took about 6 months. That’s 6 months of constant, thought-provoking, soul-searching months – and not something I kind of stumbled upon and appeared to me in a flash of light.

That got us (Darren and I) thinking – if it took us that long to “figure out” User Experience, how long does it actually take regular people to understand it? And some of these regular people can end up being our clients, our bosses, our customers, our co-workers. Do we need to take this into account when we’re trying to communicate the stuff to people, and just be patient about it?

Or, could it be that people do get it once they actually see it work – as in, good design blends into the background – you don’t even notice it’s there.

But some of this matters, right? When you’re trying to communicate design in a project, or when you’re trying to sell a concept to a client, or when you’re trying to push forward a piece of work that no one else seems to understand except you.

My question is – does it matter? And if it does, how can we communicate user experience in the most effective way?

I was volunteering on the Conan initiative earlier on in the year but dropped out due to increased workload. I’m happy the project is going well and I wish Liz and the rest of the team the best of success.

IxDA is awesome!

One of the main changes for me was the use of my thumb (for the apple key) instead of my left pinky. I do a lot of alt-, shift-, ctrl- combinations to highlight, navigate, and select large and specific portions of text like words, lines, and sections of concatenated strings. I also use the HOME and END keys a lot on my PC, and I’m having to re-learn that a bit on a Macbook (Apple-left and Apple-right).

What I am experiencing, I believe, is a interaction paradigm originally set up by Apple, and probably borrowed by Windows since Windows 95, that has carried on until now. I am unsure whether which is better, but there are certainly differences in the way the two keyboard paradigms work, to achieve almost similar effects.

The keyboard layout also feels very different, but is probably a matter of adjusting. While the keyboard layout is quite consistent across all the Mac platforms, there are probably more dramatic variations between PC brands. However, I’ve used many PC keyboards in my life and I’ve not really had any problems with that - even with my logitech wireless keyboard that had an odd layout for the home-end-delete-pgup-pgdn “island” section.

The only thing is that it is now a double effort - getting used to a new keyboard layout AND fitting that into a Mac paradigm. The plus side is that I’ve always loved the tactile feedback of the Macbook keyboards.

I like that Apple makes it harder to shut down applications unlike Windows (x at the top left of window). You have to either go to the menubar or hit APPLE-Q. It’s a bit confusing but I guess that’s the price you pay to “get it” - you don’t want to shut down applications by mistake all the time - a good way to maintain consistency in the states of the system. I’m just not sure how a Mac handles the resource management for “minimized” applications, but it feels like they’ve done a good job of it.

The battery life for the white Macbook is fairly decent. A lot better than my Dell XPS1330. The screen, I guess is a combination of the rendering engine and the monitor itself. The XPS has a kind of glossy glare, and the font is sharp and crisp, while everything on a Mac sort of looks polished and seamless, very well integrated together (graphics/interface/rendering system). I have yet to see windows that are half-rendered, patches of square black boxes, etc on a Mac.

I can see why many designers take so well to this. It’s a piece of aesthetic perfection - a comforting reminder, tool and environment that bodes well with the cognitive effort of producing creative artefacts that are at least on par with the status quo.

That being said, I still feel there’s a strong element of satisficing about Windows platforms. People get by with it. And that’s really all they need.

But for now, I’m taking a step in another direction for the sake of curiousity, albeit a lighthearted one.

1. Don’t assume people remember what they noted in their diaries

I started off telling my participants that all they needed to do was fill in their diaries with descriptions detailed enough so that they would be able to recall the activities. I told them the study would last two weeks, based on some ballpark figures I discussed with my supervisor, and I told them that I might give them a call every now and then to “see how they were doing”. In a recent meeting my project sponsors and supervisor suggested that I should call them daily, because there’s a high chance that the participants would forget a lot of the rich detail that you want to get in a diary study interview.

I had to correct my slip by contacting every one of my participants to ask them permission to call them on a regular basis, and thankfully the ones who have gotten back to me so far have been totally cool with that because they were acquaintances or friends. But it was just bad foresight on my part.

2. Be as specific about your population as possible

When I sent the word out that I needed participants, I had a lot of friends were willing to participate because they had they time and they didn’t mind doing it (plus there was a £40 incentive). I didn’t think too much about the demographics of the population and I let in two participants who were edge-cases – a photographer and a graphic designer. In my study about domestic image search behavior, they’d stand out in a crowd. Thankfully I had other participants who were more “normal”, but I would’ve saved myself the embarrassment had I spent a bit more time thinking about who I should’ve been recruiting.

3. Research requires testing too

I assumed that people would quickly understand how to fill in the diary forms, because they were relatively straightforward. I was promptly advised to call in and check with my participants so that I could get a quick “feel” for the differences in behavior and data, and adjust the study process accordingly. Some participants, for example, may be more active internet users than others, for example – so they would need less “checking up” since they would have a lot more stuff to report after a few days of diary-filling. I initially thought that calling them they day after I had spoken to them was too soon, but there are ways to inform the participant of how often you need to get in touch with them.

4. Don’t believe everything you read in books

I guess it’s not all method-driven and form-filling. There’s a bit of an art to this, so I guess it takes a bit of practice to get a hang of it. My supervisor/project sponsors were forgiving and kind enough to guide me in the right direction, but I could’ve saved myself by asking more questions, talking to the right people, and not just basing my ideas off books.

update: I’m still looking for a few more participants, preferrably male aged 40 to 65. If you’re interested, please email me at boon [dot] chew [at] gmail [dot] com. For more info, click here.

We basically use it to state what we’re currently working on, respond to each other’s comments and ideas/rants, post up screenshots of stuff we’ve seen (inspirational sites, examples, etc.), ask questions, etc.

It’s like IM, but I think it works better because it’s like a blog as well. Yammer sends you a summary of the day’s posts, so that you can catch up with what’s going on. I find that it works not just for remote-working solutions but even for team-related tasks because you can be working on different things but not actually see each other’s work.

I like the fact that it’s closed – so that no dumb-ass spammer can find my profile and send a request to follow me.

I also like the fact that I can upload stuff directly into my posts. That way my readers can quickly open up a screenshot, etc. Sure twitter has twitpic, but that requires opening up a separate browser window, etc. With Yammer, all I had to do was use Fireshot to grab the screen capture and save it onto my hard drive, and get Yammer to upload the file from there.

I’m not a big fan of the clients they built (PC/Mac, etc). But it’s functional, and I can use it. The interface doesn’t look and feel as nice as Twitter’s, but I guess again, I’m not really complaining.

I don’t know of any other folks using Yammer, but if you are I’d love to hear what you think.