Sin's Notebook

No-fudge user-centred design

Since a couple of years back, I live in a country where the conversational tone is sometimes considered more harsh compared to the one in Sweden, where I come from.Maybe this has coloured my approach a bit, when I lecture on UC(S)D, User-Centred (System) Design. Of course we know that memory is a very subjective thing and my perception of the past is coloured, more or less. But when I think back on how we used to communicate usability, the image I get is of the soft, caring approach to communication, like some kind of “You know, it is nice if you think about the users, we must not make things hard for them, the users are important”, and so on. Wuss. “Think of the children” approach, my buttocks.

Last lecture I held and the one before that, was a three days course, and unlike a couple of years back, all participants came from the “system” side, IT-departments, hands-on business people. And perhaps it seems like my approach nowadays, if it has changed, suited them, because I have never got such a high judgement on the evaluations when it comes to the parts that participants usually complain about fudge (in Swedish: flum, meaning something is too abstract and your head is up in the clouds).

My approach is that we are talking about user-centred design, usability is a measure and user-friendliness is just fudge. What is “friendliness”, how do measure it? If you’re in the private sector, you’re doing business, if you’re in the public sector, you have an obligation to the citizens, your employer. Usability is a measure, maybe a complex measure, but a concrete measure nevertheless. “Extent to which a product can be used by specified users to achieve specified goals with effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction in a specified context of use.” There you have it. An internationally accepted ISO standard. Not “so easy to use your grandmother can use it”. Your grannie is quite likely not the target group of this application or site. UCD is about working with target groups and we define their needs from usage and goals, not what they think or say they want. We do this in parallel with the organisation’s objectives and in order to make the project manageable, we prioritise target groups, as well as needs.

There are no simple answers how to make a site or application efficient and effective to a specific user group. It depends on the needs and goals. Think for yourselves, if you’re a ministry, or a company on the financial market, or a retailer wanting to do e-business, and I gave you the same answer to “how do we optimise our services for our customers/citizens?”, I would either just sell you over-simplified solutions or be lying through my teeth.

It is not about being friendly or nice to the users, it is about providing them with services that are effective, efficient and support them to achieve specific goals, both customers’ and the organisation’s goals. And that is simply good business.

Quality

There are a few things I’m terribly fastidious about and know exactly what I want from them.

• a knife
• a komboloi
• a pen
• a mobile phone

Atheists are barbarians

A reply of sorts

It is very simply, and I am afraid on your behalf a little embarrasing..

You see, you claim that by tying YOUR emotions up together with your religious beliefs, you thereby automatically assume that since your emotions and beliefs thus are connected, anyone not having ANY belief, which makes an atheist, and not a muslim, for instance, since the latter one obviously has a different belief, albeit not the right one, that therefore, since an atheist does not, in your opinion has ANY belief, that person must more or less be void of emotions.

Since this line of reasoning is so bluntly silly even to you, you therefore try to ease up on it a bit, while still not abandoning it completely. Which means you imply that atheists deny that Christian dogma has given us the European culture (which, to some of my American friends, I’m sorry to say, would surprise them if they actually encountered. The range of European cultural values, that is) and thus, atheists are in fact trying to do away with culture altogether.

Atheists are in fact barbarians that cannot see the emotional, cultural and artistic sides of humanity.

Pondering about Twitter

We got a rather hefty wave of pr0n spam on Twitter, while I was on holidays and thus on mobile. It simply became too much crap running an open feed with mail notifications, something I’ve done since I started tweeting back in April 2007.

So I turned on the Private feed option, thinking I will probably turn it off when I’m back home.

Well, now I am back home. But instead, I went through my Followers list and cleaned it up a bit more, even, deleting obvious ad twitterers and some. So, I’m keeping my tweets “invitation only” for now. Not that I come up with utterly private tidbits of my life or utter profound wisdoms that should be only for an elect few. You may read the occasional profundity, but basically, it’s nice to phase out the spam noise that is generated even if you don’t follow them back.

The author Neil Gaiman (@neilhimself) said this morning [“It occurs to me that when you do it right twittering can be footnotes for life.”]( http://twitter.com/neilhimself/status/3481014740). Even if I don’t aspire on creating anything that ambitious with my tweets, now that they are private, they may just change slightly, due to this. We’ll see.

Laying out in the hammock and reading tech blogs.

The Apple fanboy armada is as always out to make sure this small, competent, supercool freedom loving company is always ready to fight against large, evil corporations like M… wait, so it’s Google that’s the bad guy now? Bill Gates has been dethroned as the Prince of Darkness?

Spin, chew & swallow.

Fresh air & reasonable temperatures. Had a huge breakfast, then resting for a while. This afternoon we’ll take a stroll down to the shores of Lake Mälaren (which is actually a net of hundreds of linked lakes). Later on, Stockholm archipelago, next week some shopping and visits to ship and viking museums, etc.

Vacation has started. :)

The "strength" of Facebook as compared to 'Apps In Space'

We don’t want to Skype, we want to talk
We don’t want to MSN, we want to chat
We don’t want to Flickr, we want to share pictures

The basic problem with the applications-centred form of thinking is just that.. you think about the application. Social web is about people… and places. You will never get all your friends to use GoogleTalk or Flickr. (Trust me, I’ve tried)

But a lot of my friends are on Facebook. AND so are several of my apps. I can drag in Twitter, Flickr and Tumblr into Facebook, where my friends already are, instead of spamming them with URLs to applications they have to go when I want to share something with them. The funny thing is I have tested a lot of social sites and applications. A lot. And somehow, nowadays, I almost always gravitate back to only three: Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Are they optimal? Do I love them? Are they the best since scobled bread? Do you recognise rhetorical questions when you see them?

But LinkedIn remains the most used professional site within my, and neighbouring, cultural spheres. Facebook is the place where my less than IT-crazed friends are. Twitter still is the quickest, easiest if not optimal stream of babble while I’m waiting for the bus. I don’t go to sit alone in a pub just because it has the coolest interior. I go where my friends are. So what if the chairs are a bit worn, as long as the atmosphere is good.

Just heard someone asking a person working with advertising in Sweden: How does it feel to work and know that less than 14% of the population consider what you create trustworthy but more than twice that find it a nuisance?

Ok, I try to not judge people’s tweets, but when all they seem to do is tweeting that they are tweeting on their iPhone and retweeting their plurks that they are plurking, it does get a bit silly.