Quote of the decade

Wednesday, May 25, 2005

This is so funny...I wish I could have expressed it so well. "I mean why is it that so much usability material is presented more like the Boeing Flight Planning Performance Manual than an airline safety card? Seriously, what's with all the damn text? How can anyone possibly write about design and not provide a visual aid or two?" From a brilliant article at Design by Fire.

It’s the computer’s fault (no, really)

Monday, May 23, 2005

I started reading John Cato's User Centered Web Design this morning on the train. Something in the first pages triggered a thought. It used to be very common, and probably still is, to hear people claiming that some administrative or other disaster was "the computer's fault". I always treated such whingeing with quite some scorn: "the computer does just what you tell it to". I guess I've changed my mind now! John Cato puts it very well: "usability is being able to do the things you want to do and not the things you have to do". The computer does indeed do what it is told to do, but it is being told by a combination of developers, managers, managers' managers, beancounters and many others before the end user gets a say in things. Many of the victims of my superior scorn would probably have been far less inclined to blame the computer if the software they were using had been designed with their needs in mind rather than some budget holder's. Of course there are exceptions. These usually concern vastly overpaid and breathtakingly incompetent managers of massively overbudget IT disasters blaming "the computer". I was right about them! ps: whilst John Cato's book seems good, one thing annoys me. His book's website is useful, but all pages titles are: "Untitled Document". Ok, so it's a minor point, but still... practice what you preach ? [Posted from the scene with hblogger 2.0]

Echoes and static

Wednesday, May 18, 2005

Just a quick one - here is a comment on blogging which is well worth reading. Bob Baxley seems to share the impression that I get, even of the more "serious" of weblogs, that the signal to noise ratio is very low. Blogging seems to encourage an urge to write at all costs, even if you have nothing to say. The content becomes the content. The medium is indeed the message and the message is mostly echoes and static. And that is my soundbite ping for today.

Information (Architecture) == Power (Architecture) ?

Tuesday, May 17, 2005

I'm a little further down the "what am I doing here" road now. It involves a huge amount of reading and information ingestion, as well as feedback and valuable insights from friends and colleagues (like for example "enough talking, let's DO something" ). But I'm still perplexed. I'm trying, essentially, to find a core concept which i'm happy with, which (IT) management is happy with, and which my colleagues are happy with, AND which expresses the basic idea of "a process which describes a design methodology focussed on making things easier for customers". In the field of User Centered Design, we can identify a whole legion of sub topics. For example, some common ones:

• Information Architecture
• Interaction Design
• Interface Design
• Usability Engineering
• Functional Testing

and some I would add from my perspective:

• Solution Architecture
• Requirements Management
• Functional Testing

But when you try to focus down on these they go all blurry and try to wriggle away. Each one tries to encompass the other, tries to be top dog (whilst desperately trying to appear not to). An exmple - in "Information Architecture for the World Wide Web" by Peter Morville and Louis Rosenfeld, surely a recognised reference, towards the end of the book they start to advocate all sorts of world domination schemes where Enterprise Information Architecture teams are implanted in major organisations. Earlier, they discuss deep IA topics such as taxonomies, classification and labelling without breaking out of the context they themselves define. But in Chapter 19 we find them tabulating proposed responsibilities for an EIA team such as Link checking, HTML validation, Content Development Poilcy alongside the more expected stuff. The idea of improving a company's products or services seems to be subsumed to the urgency to create a highly political guerilla unit. And whilst the IA undercover unit is secretly plotting to take over the world, the Usability team lurks in dark corridors pursuing their own secret mission, and the central commitee of the solution architects soviet is preparing the master plan they will unleash on an unsuspecting boardroom. Peter Van Dijck, in "Information Architecture for Designers", manages to create a highly visual book that by & large restricts itself to IA. References to other disciplines are clearly just that - references, not takeover bids. I don't have a problem with Morfeld & Rosenfeld's book - I'd be pretty stupid to not acknowledge that it practically defined IA, and is a thought provoking and enjoyable read. But I rather like this from Van Dijck's Final word: "There is a problem with the way websites are built. Succesful websites combine the best of visual design, business strategy, programming, content writing, marketing and branding, usability, and information architecture". This really helps to understand a concept of what IA is, what its boundaries are, and what it collaborates with. I know many, many people are fed up with this eternal requestioning of terminology, but finally if you can't explain what something is (as well as the much easier what it isn't), how can you even understand it, let alone persuade a company to adopt it as a core strategy ?

But WHY ?

Monday, May 16, 2005

Why why why why why. Why am I writing this stuff ? The few people who actually read it would probably be far more interested if I picked up the phone to talk to them about things instead. What is this weblogging stuff for ? The vast majority of blogs I subscribe too are full of short post that boil down to one-liner musings which offer little in the way of deep discussion or debate. Some blogs are published with a "professional" slant - I read quite a lot on usability and information architecture, but these are all too often recycled, inter-referential, or just plain dull. And no shortage of one-liners there either. Another strange example is given by my former acquaintances John & Jan, with their ultra personal diary blog - see for example london: No Telly. I read their blog every morning on the train (thanks to Stand Alone Software's rather good Quick News), and am always pleased to get a new helping of voyeuristic thrills. But (a) do they spend time on this stuff, and why (b) do I read it ? Again, I could just pick up the phone to ask them how they're doing (they may have a few sharp words for me, but that's another story). Are we (ok, "we" is stretching a point) really approaching the point where our online personas are all that matters, or even all that exists, for any practical purpose ? I'm getting to the point where as soon as I have an idea about something, I immediately think of blogging it. The point of developing the idea a bit then becomes essentially to make a good posting, not a good idea. Anyway, this weekend we saw two films - "The Reporter" - very, very good, and "Spanglish" - very good. We ate pizza at Santa Lucia and I had my favourite (the world's best pizza in fact) ... spinaci e gamberoni. And now it's raining.