BlogHer ‘08 is going on in San Francisco right now. I know some ladies who are there, and it would’ve been great to be there just to meet a new-and-noteworthy group of people.

But I have to be honest — something about it just doesn’t feel right.

BlogHer is a community for women who blog. Their mission is “to create opportunities for women who blog to pursue exposure, education, community, and economic empowerment.” I am totally in support of anyone with the ambition to get themselves heard, involved, and recognized. I have huge aspirations and it’s great that there’s an organization who wants to help me achieve them.

Let the record show that I have nothing against this organization. Please do not send me hate mail.

The thing I’m struggling with is the woman qualifier. Is a woman blogger someone who writes about women’s issues, or simply someone who has a vagina? I think it’s nonsensical to draw attention to a blogger simply due to the latter. Lots of women can write, read, and think. We don’t need to be congratulated.

I can’t help but wonder if this distinction is actually hurting us; it’s a segregation. How would we feel if there were a BlogHim? (Doesn’t sound as good without the double entendre.) But wouldn’t a bunch of women get up in arms about men trying to distinguish themselves from us by holding their own conference? Isn’t being considered among the men a sign of success?

Now before you get all angry and say that I’m a traitor to my own kind, please hear me out. Of course I recognize that there are many fewer women in technology and we need services/organizations/outreach to support and encourage women in the field. Hell, if a very special teacher hadn’t approached me in the 8th grade and strongly suggest that I sign up for the Computer Science class in high school, I might have ended up a lawyer or a math teacher (thank you, Dan Kramarsky).

Instead I was one of two girls in the course, and ended up taking the same course for all four years of high school because it was the only course they offered. My CS teacher encouraged me to continue my path at Carnegie Mellon and put me in touch with his friend, the Assistant Dean of the School of Computer Science (thank you, Charles Rice).

I was one of 30 women in a freshman class of 135. (The graduating class before I got there had more Daves than women — I shit you not.) Boys frequently came by my dorm room to see if I needed help with the homework. Not because I asked them, but because they assumed I needed it. They were wrong.

I ended up dropping computer science after 3 semesters, but not because I couldn’t hack it. With the exception of a dismal showing in Discrete Math (pure torture), I had all As and Bs. But I was tired of spending my weekends in the computer lab hunting for misplaced semicolons. Instead, I wanted to write — English. So I switched.

Still, if I hadn’t gone to Carnegie Mellon, I might never have been introduced to the term “Human-Computer Interaction” or the exploding field of researchers, practitioners and evangelists behind it (thank you Mark Stehlik, thank you Scott Kaufman, thank you Richard Scheines).

Oh, and if I’d never gotten a degree in HCI, I’m fairly certain I wouldn’t be writing this blog right now. Thank God for that.

My point is: look at all the men who encouraged me along the way. I can say with absolute certainty and sincerity that not one of them ever told me that they expected I’d be a successful woman _______ someday. They just said I’d be successful. No qualifier.

Because no matter how you slice it, a qualifier is a limit. And there is nothing stopping me from playing with the big boys. No need to call attention to my gender because in my mind it has nothing to do with it.

The other day ReadWriteWeb posted their list of favorite “women bloggers.” These are great women, but they deserve recognition for much more than their chromosomes.

I want to see a list of favorite redheaded bloggers, and I better be on it!

• New blog template is up
• GEL 2008: Day 2, Session 4 “Success”
• CrowdVine Schedule problems
• Randy Pausch loses battle with pancreatic cancer at 47
• Bloglines vs. Google Reader: A Usability Evaluation

Top 10 Twitter accounts to follow

1. @having (FoodFeed), a way to track your eating habits through tweets [via @hikirsch]
2. @s (I Want Sandy), interact with Sandy, your personal e-mail assistant
3. @snaptweet, post your Flickr photos to Twitter
4. @notches, share your reviews of movies/music/restaurants/anything [Full disclosure: Notch.es is a client of mine]
5. @trackthis, track FedEx/UPS/USPS/DHL packages
6. @gcal, add events to your Google Calendar
7. @twittersecret, anonymously post your innermost thoughts, just like PostSecret
8. @lotd (Lyric of the Day), short lyrics to brighten your mood or make you think
9. @livetwitting, for when you’re live-tweeting from a conference or event
10. @missingchildren, missing children alerts in the U.S. from http://missingkids.com

What did I miss?

What are your favorite Twitter bots? Organization accounts? Content providers? Other miscellaneous Twitter services?

• Twitter: Fun and Effective
• Upcoming Posts
• links for 2008-02-26
• Feed Reader: Inbox Zero
• My Twitter Karma

These 10 books are what I consider the must-haves for any user experience designer. There are certainly more than 10 amazing books on the topic, many of which I own, but the widget forced me to think about which ones are absolute essentials.

If you create digital products, you have a responsibility to make them easy to use. Honestly, it’s mostly common sense; it’s just not common practice. These books will teach you how to design products that are useful, usable and desirable. Do yourself a favor and read these if you haven’t already. You don’t want to end up in the “Pain” category of this blog, do you?

Top 10 (in no particular order)

1. Communicating Design: Developing Web Site Documentation for Design and Planning by Dan Brown
2. Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design by Bill Buxton
3. Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, 2nd Edition by Steve Krug
4. About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design by Alan Cooper, Robert Reimann, and David Cronin
5. Subject To Change: Creating Great Products & Services for an Uncertain World: Adaptive Path on Design (Adaptive Path) by Peter Merholz, Todd Wilkens, Brandon Schauer, and David Verba
6. The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman
7. Designing for Interaction: Creating Smart Applications and Clever Devices by Dan Saffer
8. Designing for the Social Web by Joshua Porter
9. Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior by Indi Young
10. The Elements of User Experience: User-Centered Design for the Web by Jesse James Garrett

If I had more room I also would have included…

1. Designing Interfaces: Patterns for Effective Interaction Design by Jenifer Tidwell
2. Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things by Don Norman
3. Designing Visual Interfaces: Communication Oriented Techniques by Kevin Mullet
4. Information Architecture for the World Wide Web: Designing Large-Scale Web Sites (the Polar Bear book) by Louis Rosenfeld and Peter Morville
5. Usability Engineering by Jakob Nielsen
6. The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity by Alan Cooper
7. Set Phasers on Stun: And Other True Tales of Design, Technology, and Human Error by S. M. Casey

What’s on your list? What do you think I missed? Any of these you absolutely hate or find useless?

• IxDA Interaction 08: Day 1
• Design — Architect — Engineer
• Indi Young hosts virtual seminar on mental models
• Google’s Design Principles
• Randy Pausch loses battle with pancreatic cancer at 47

• The new look of Facebook profiles
• 10 worthwhile Twitter bots
• Thank you letters
• Please don’t stalk me (geosocial networking)

If you have any thoughts or questions about these topics that you’d like to see addressed, just leave a comment and I’ll do my best to work them in. And if there’s ever something you think I’m missing or need to be discussing here, please don’t hesitate to let me know. Post a comment, send me an e-mail, chat with me on Twitter. I’m pretty damn easy to get in touch with.

Check back soon to see these new posts, or better yet subscribe to my RSS feed so you’re sure not to miss anything. (What is RSS?)

Happy Friday!

• Readers, let’s talk
• Another Twitter Link Roundup
• Internet Famous
• links for 2008-02-24
• 10 Worthwhile Twitter Bots

As I’ve said in previous posts, this blog and my active participation in Twitter have been the most rewarding professional pursuits that I have experienced thus far. As the ball dropped into 2008, I was hungry for more interaction with the astounding folks in my community of practice, and what I have tapped into has exceeded my wildest expectations.

But I’m still hungry. I’m insatiable. It’s one of my best/worst qualities (you decide). In the next six months, I’d love to bring readership participation to the next level. Please help me to keep creating thought-provoking, educational, even perhaps controversial conversations on this blog by never hesitating to click on that comments link and post one of your own. Every time I get an e-mail notifying me of a new comment, my heart goes aflutter and I salivate as I soak in everything you have to say.

E-mail me with ideas you have for the blog. Add me to your RSS feed reader. TELL YOUR FRIENDS! I want to rid the world of bad user experiences by helping people talk about what works. Understand your users. Design with them in mind. Go the extra mile to ensure they love your product. My readers are my users, and I’m here to make this the best experience possible for you. So please send your feedback, participate often and let’s give pleasure the attention it deserves.

• Finding Myself in You
• links for 2008-02-25
• Upcoming Posts
• New blog template is up
• Internet Famous

Lots of folks out there have used the Twitter API to build their own search engine, the most popular of which was Terraminds until it shut down. People were dismayed. Then Summize came on the scene (in early April, I think), and it’s all anyone could talk about. They allow you to filter results by language, have a “reply” link beside every tweet for easy access, and allow you to specifically search for tweets to or from a particular username. Also really nice is the in-page update when a new matching tweet is posted.
Real-time search means that when Twitter Track is down (as it has been for many weeks, maybe months at this point), you don’t have to miss replies and can stay on top of what’s important to you.

So was what the natural thing for Twitter to do? Buy Summize.

The transition happened today. Summize.com is no longer. What it used to look like:

Now automatically redirects to search.twitter.com

Everything works the same, so no need to worry. Twitter promises to more tightly integrate the functionality in the future. Looking forward to see what they come up with.

• Another Twitter Link Roundup
• Quotably
• Twitter Blocks
• Tim Russert dead, so says Twitter
• My Twitter Karma

In my opinion, Twitter is a powerful vehicle for synchronous communication (Asychronous = e-mail; Synchronous = AIM). It’s happening in real-time, and while it’s often called a micro-blogging platform, I think that’s a misnomer. It’s quite different than a blog — a centralized stream of content curated by one or many people. By contrast, Twitter is highly ubiquitous and conglomerate by design, not centralized and siloed like blogs. At any given moment in time, you get a snapshot of varied, layered, multiway conversations happening in your stream; an immediate, collective pulse reading of the people who matter to you.

Despite popular belief, I’m not always paying attention to Twitter and therefore I’m not always engaging. Lots of interesting stuff happens that I’ll never find out about, and that’s okay. I gave up trying to backtrack months ago. I used to wake up in the morning and read everything that had been said while I was sleeping. But now I follow too many people (264 currently), and it’s futile. Besides, hours after the conversation has passed, my response loses relevance. It’s rare that I look back more than an hour now. I don’t know about you, but thoughts fly out of my head at a rapid pace, so something I tweeted about two or more hours ago is most likely a distant memory. Topics that I think deeply about and process over an extended period of time are more likely to be blog posts than tweets, and I assume the same is true for other people — or else they’ll tweet about it so often that I’ll be able to chime into the conversation later.

About TweetDeck

So with all of the aforementioned in mind, let’s talk about TweetDeck. Simply put, I think it’s misconceived.

TweetDeck is a desktop application (Adobe AIR) with a sovereign posture to view your Twitter stream. That means it takes up your whole damn screen, unless you switch to the 1-column view, which pretty much defeats its purpose entirely (more on that in a bit). TweetDeck’s major differentiation from Twhirl and Twitterific and the like is its “Group” feature, which allows you to filter your stream by organizing friends into groups.

For instance, I created a “UX Peeps” group containing folks like @jmspool, @mediajunkie, @brownorama, and @livlab (just the top of my stream, I’m not playing favorites!), and a group for “NYC Tweeps” with @mokindo @ooonie, @innonate and @askrom. Now there’s some overlap there because Chris Fahey (askrom), for instance, belongs to both groups, so I see his tweets in multiple columns.

NOTE: about half of the people I’m following weren’t listed here.

A good UX starts with a well-defined user goal

Whenever I evaluate a new product — app, device, website, whatever — my first question is, “What is the user’s goal?” I think about the most common use cases and examine how the designed solution meets the user’s need. In the case of TweetDeck, I have to guess that the Group functionality was born out of a desire to provide additional context to or make sense of a diverse and voluminous Twitter stream. Following 150+ people, or even one person who’s prolific can quickly become overwhelming. That’s why I’m actually quite particular about who I follow; I want their tweets to really mean something to me, be insightful or at least be a worthwhile distraction when I choose to check in.

HOWEVER, the randomness of the stream, the pertinence of real-time activity in backwards chronicle order, the fact that it’s a place where I periodically check in and not my main focal point throughout the day is what makes Twitter so compelling. When you start filtering tweets by context, you lose that magic.

Application posture

I can concede that not everyone uses Twitter in the way I do. Maybe you check in far less frequently. Maybe you follow many more people. Maybe you just can’t keep up But then please tell me, why oh why would you be using a desktop app to read tweets? A web app is much more suitable for periodic use, and the fact that it’s transient lets you get away with temporarily using greater screen real estate. Desktop apps with sovereign posture are best reserved for expert, concentration-needed tools like Excel, Photoshop and data dashboards. But a tool that has a single function that meets transient needs should have a transient posture.

By default TweetDeck basically takes up the entire screen (it’s resizable, but the visual design makes it almost impossible to discover that). It allows you to add or remove columns to your heart’s content, using a horizontal scrollbar to navigate between them, but you can still only see three panels at a time. Sure, there’s a single-column view, but you still have to scroll to see the other columns. There’s no Recent/Replies/Directs/Archive toggle like in Twhirl, and the horizontal swipe on the MacBook Air touchpad doesn’t work (though this may be an Adobe AIR thing).

Imagined context

Furthermore, can people really categorize their Twitter friends into neat little piles? I’m always surprised by the overlap in my networks. It’s a network, after all. Endless connections between endless nodes, always expanding, bending, breaking, regenerating. People meet. People move. People switch careers. People get busy. People get boring. People get involved. What is the value to qualifying how you relate to people based on the characteristics of an innumerable number of contexts? It would take so much management! And now with TweetDeck I have multiple streams to follow, requiring me to scroll down in multiple columns in order to read recent tweets. Sure you can say there’s always the “All Tweets” panel, but then what was the purpose of creating groups in the first place? And if you don’t want to read someone’s tweets all the time, don’t follow them! Just go to their Twitter.com page when you feel like it and see what they’re up to lately. If you aren’t going to engage in real-time, there is no point to having the person in your stream.

Recap

So to summarize: I can understand the use case, but I think TweetDeck is the wrong solution. If it were a transient posture desktop app with the functionality of Twhirl and the ability to filter by group, OR if it were an asynchronous web app that gave me a point-in-time look into the thoughts of like-minded people in my stream, maybe then I’d see what all the fuss was about.

• Twitter100
• My Twitter Karma
• Quotably
• Twitter: Fun and Effective
• Twitter buys Summize