Windows 8 — Disappointing Usability for Both Novice & Power Users (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)

Windows 8 — Disappointing Usability for Both Novice & Power Users (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox):

As it turns out, users didn't mind horizontal scrolling on the Surface, which is interesting given that horizontal scrolling is a usability disaster for websites on desktop computers. Still, there's such a thing as too much scrolling, and users won't spend the time to move through large masses of low-density information.

Nielson gives a quite damming review of window(s) 8.  Good UI read.

Amazon.co.uk: Customer Discussions: Can you gift kindle books ??

Amazon.co.uk: Customer Discussions: Can you gift kindle books ??

Answer no you can't
Which is thirty shades of daft - books are things we give to each other as Birthday and Christmas presents. Not be to be able to do this suggests that there is a huge failure in the Kindle design phase.

Conversations About Direct recombination

I was talking to Simon today about direct combination. I said i had had a great idea and adventure game with direct combinations as the user interface. This was a relief as I already thought of one for doing statistics program . The conversation drifted onto How to rethink the object paradigm.

I think I might succinctly put it all together in one diagram.

Where two types have some overlap (in methods or instance variables) then this is when we have a super class. 

BCS - ICT understatement.

The BCS has released their current suggestions for what they want to see in the school ICT curriculm. 

http://academy.bcs.org/sites/academy.bcs.org/files/Initial%20Draft%20ICT%20POS%2022%20Oct%202012.pdf

I do find this a trifle underwhelming. I would have included some stuff in user interface design. This is for two reasons. 

1. I Think it's important to get over to the kids that the user interface can make a good algorithm into a pants program. 
2. You can have a lot of good hands on experience in user interface design without any exceptional skills on the teacher's part.

You could make some very powerful stuff here but they failed to get it. 

Stigmergy

I discovered this word  Stigmergy leaving information in the environment to help/stimulate the performance of another actor/agent.  


"Stigmergy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: In addition the concept of stigmergy has also been used to describe how cooperative work such as building design may be integrated. Designing a large contemporary building involves a large and diverse network of actors (e.g. architects, building engineers, static engineers, building services engineers and etc.). Their distributed activities may be partly integrated through practices of stigmergy." 

I think this means that building a physical model and using plans helps the various actors coordinate the assorted constraints. 


So from a software engineering point of view the problem is that the various stakeholders don't have a unified environment where information can be deposited. Each uses their own separate specific description (UML, wireframes) and cannot leave annotaions.   

1. Christensen, L. R. (2007). Practices of stigmergy in architectural work. In Proceedings of the 2007 international ACM Conference on Conference on Supporting Group Work (Sanibel Island, Florida, USA, November 04–07, 2007). GROUP 2007. ACM, New York, NY, 11-20.
2. ^ Christensen, L. R. (2008). The Logic of Practices of Stigmergy: Representational Artifacts in Architectural Design. In Proceedings of the 2008 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (San Diego, CA, USA, November 8–12, 2008). CSCW '08. ACM, New York, NY, 559-568
3. 
   

Sign-Up for Usability Testing - UserTesting.com

Good news for all those who want to do second generation usability testing on an mobile platform like an IPhone

Sign-Up for Usability Testing - UserTesting.com

Me on the academic ladder

I was filling in administrative forms on ORO and noticed I could find out how many papers each academic could publish. 

If you sort them and log them you can see that they form a pattern. If I was a physicist I would say that academic publishing was 'scale free' because the degree distribution follows a power law.  I would then go on to claim to  now fundamentally understood 'research' and could go on to claim insight into something else. But I'm not a physicist like Barabasi so I won't.  Instead I will point out that if you log anything then you will find some kind of correlation.

I will point out that the red arrow points to my position on the academic ladder.  

I couldn't disagree with you more. (UX developers)

I response to "

Is anyone else bothered by the job title "UX Developer"?" 

( see http://www.linkedin.com/groupItem?view=&gid=72842&type=member&item=176873246&report%2Esuccess=rcqr5cdXcY6Z2jpG_JPeLDsIvYQuZ6inDI-auB0U9hcsZ8-oDdB0jhJhOxcnz8oDkfoFuMIhbNrjmgvAMcU4swONoBr3zt_vuzPNuUy0pa1G1HSWyla0kMfabNr3ZjLuyzW0kwknWhLnZ8m3kdL0yektWNNGSkoD_znHyUdlKahvqk_QDFMgieIPfaWKqkib_ogjJbBy ) 

I couldn't disagree with you more. 

I think you said  it your self. A good UX developer can make or break the user interaction. Having UX in the title flags up that you should be up for working at the sharp end where sloppy work will be noticeable. 

You're going to have to work with UX people and that means having a broader view of how your contribution fits in with the whole experience. ( Hence UX not UI)

More over you're going to have to think about how to work with designers and from my point of view know how to evaluate the effectiveness of the UI. 

Software people are taught to talk about 'stake holders' and getting rid of that baggage takes a lot of time and commitment. UX signals that .

I think finally there are different takes. Good UX takes a user centred perspective from my point of view. This is very top down ( find out what the user wants/needs and do it). *This implicitly  assumes that the technology which is used exists*. I've met a lot of very poor self styled UX people who think that if you can't get it from a table or draw it in photoshop then it can't exist. I'm sometimes appalled by how unimaginative some UX designers can be. Bret Victor's Magic Ink ( http://worrydream.com/MagicInk/ ) is a good example of rethinking the user experience from a developers perspective. His Train schedules case study is a tour-de-force of what can happen if you can throw JQuery/Ajax/etc out of the window and just think freely unconstrained by the limitations of previous interface designs. 

If you need conformation of this - ask your self how you'r  taking advantage of multi-touch in the browser or tablet ? If not why not ? What are your barriers ? 

 I would suggest we need MORE UX developers not less. 
We need MORE developers committed to the front to back user experience not less 
We need MORE developers challenging UX designers assumptions of what can and cannot be done not less. 

Go UX Developers!!!