I'm off tomorrow for some family turkey day festivities, so the pickings here will be slim for the next several days. But in the spirit, let's leave you with this "meaty" question...are usability and innovation diammetrically opposed?

On one hand, we have Nico Macdonald, who asks whether design is for or by the people? He notes:

Usability and the cautious thinking it embodies has come to dominate thinking about the design process. ... If usability becomes the focus too early in the development of a product it is likely that a more ingenious and ambitious way of solving the problem will be missed, and a less useful and desirable solution will be polished to perfection.

Contrast this thinking with the latest from Jakob Nielsen, regarding the rather poor usability of current web applications:

A key lesson from many other fields is that continuous quality improvement is the way to true excellence. That's a lucky break: Web usability is so far behind that there's no hope of reaching acceptable quality in a single leap. Continuous improvement is our only chance.

Maybe it is my philosophical bent, but I continue to believe that there is a useful middle ground between user-centered design and designer-centered design. Thus the question shouldn't really be usability versus innovation, but more "given this specific project, what is ideal?" There are people in the UCD camp (like Whitney Quesenbery) who espouse this balanced view, but alas, it doesn't seem common yet.

08:45 PM | | linkme | home

You may want to file this one away as an example of how graphs can mislead. Dave Weinberger notes that in "an otherwise balanced article on Linux's challenge to Windows," InfoWeek illustrates its points with some questionable graphics. Such as:

The casual reader may miss an important point...the scale on the two graphs. The Windows graph scale goes up to 80%; the Linux graph that appears very similar goes up only to 40%.

I don't know how the graphs were laid out in the print version of the article, though since they aren't on the same page in the online version at InfoWeek (except on the printable version), I suspect the print version is the one that caused Dave to cry foul.

The text of the article is less misleading, clearly noting that:

With Windows, 79% worry about software vulnerabilities and overall quality and 64% about high cost of ownership. With Linux, 40% cite concern about the lack of a complete and fully integrated software environment and 37% about accountability if problems arise.

Thanks to vanderwal.net for the pointer.

05:17 PM | | linkme | home

One of my very regular reads, xblog, turned 4 earlier this month, and celebrated by re-tooling the back end :). I'm very flattered to have been included in their list of recommended reads while they were offline.

Right back at ya, Bill!

06:02 PM | | linkme | home

Yesterday's search mining also yielded the term hargadon, which apparently refers to professor and author Andrew Hargadon. He's an Associate Professor of Technology Management at the Graduate School of Management at UCDavis and author of .

A Google search turned up this recent interview in ACM's Ubiquity magazine. The interview discusses why "out-of-the-box thinking" may not be so great, the myth of the "Great Man" theory of invention, and how artists approach innovation and what we can learn.

The main focus of his research/book:

The book recognizes the importance of continuity and its critical role in the innovation process. By focusing on recombining existing ideas -- rather than inventing new ones -- we can better exploit the sources of innovation and, at the same time, increase the likelihood of their impact. It's much easier to think of things that have already been done and, when you introduce those ideas into new markets, they are already well developed. The trick is putting yourself or your firm into position to be the first to see these opportunities.

I wonder if this view of innovation might be more palatable those who despair innovation fetishization.

12:26 PM | | linkme | home

So, if you're a Movable Type blogger, I hope you have the search capability enabled! I find it fascinating to check and see what folks are searching for on IDblog (usually after my weblogs.com ping has failed).

With this last entry, I was embarassed to see that someone had come looking for the National Cancer Institute's (hosted on usability.gov) and I didn't have the pointer. Mea culpa!! I hope you come back :)

But this is well worth the download (if you aren't on dialup). The team who produced this collected web design guidelines and then rated them based on their importance and evidence. There are some plans to review printing additional hard copies (the guidelines are full of examples, which makes black and white laser printing less than satisfactory); more as they develop.

10:58 PM | | linkme | home

Wow! On Tuesday, I created just a tiny bit of controversy on the interaction design list by suggesting that interaction design was essentially "digital industrial design" (this in response to some discussion about this new uber organization of industrial and graphic designers).

The responses have been incrediblly interesting and thoughtful, and from some heavyweights in the field (like Robert Reimann, who co-authored ).

One very interesting pointer to come out of it was to a seminar on HCI that Stanford's been holding this fall. All of the lectures are available as video on demand; some of this fall's speakers included Bill Moggridge (designer of the first laptop computer) and Howard Rheingold (author of Smart Mobs).

Well worth checking out if you have the bandwidth!

UPDATE, 11/21: Molly Steenson of Interaction-Ivrea pointed out that Bill Moggridge was a speaker at their recent symposium and that the abstract for his talk contains quite a bit of detail related to how he sees the relationship between interaction design and industrial design.

10:31 PM | | linkme | home

I'd really like to add this one to my conference calendar for 2004! It's Internet Research 5.0: Ubiquity? in Sussex, UK, September 19-22, 2004.

Internet Research 5.0 will feature a variety of disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives on the Internet. Examining and challenging the visibility and prevalence of the Internet and Internet discourses, the conference will bring together a wide range of researchers, practitioners and scholars for the exchange of formal and informal ideas. As with previous AoIR conferences, the aim is to promote a deep, coherent and situated understanding of the Internet and connected networks.

Deadline for submissions is February 2nd.

12:29 AM | | linkme | home

I don't normally read the Onion, but this entry caught my eye: Mom Finds Out About Blog. An amusing read if you're so inclined.

06:58 PM | | linkme | home

Talk about messing with minds! And forget about the pregnant Mr. Lee...a few other adjectives come to mind after seeing Mike's baby status simulator on his moblog:



His description includes:

I put water in the bag, sealed the doll inside with the tie, and jammed its head into the ketchup cup. This only begins to illustrate the load that is in my wife's pelvis right now.

The next six months here at work--where our Mr. Lee will be filling in for his (very patient :) wife Amy--should be very interesting indeed!

06:39 PM | | linkme | home

The DSL comes back tomorrow...yeah! Only two weeks after the move...guess it could be worse. I'll be back to more traditional blogging then. In the meantime, here are a few more interesting links for your blog surfin' pleasure:

• Implausible fictions by Jessica Helfand on what she calls "faux science: namely, that making facts pretty and palatable, while a conscientious thing to do, often minimizes a kind of intellectual engagement that should be equally essential to design practice."
• From Scott Hirsch at Adaptive Path: User Experience Accountability: Assessing Your Impact on Business Results, which asks some great questions about UX/ED and applicable metrics.
• Christina pointed me to Movable Type scalability and Scot Hacker's speeding up Movable Type.
• cogdogblog had this pointer to a PHP-based open source BBS system called phpBB that looks very promising.
• On the interaction designers list, Challis points to the announcement of the International Design Alliance. Hmmm...wonder if this means anything to UX/ED?

07:05 PM | | linkme | home

Here's another collection of (I think) interesting links. As they say, your mileage may vary! What struck my fancy:

• Yes! An easy-to-understand article on the basics of RSS. Thanks to Nick and Nick for the pointer.
• A typography cat fight. What happens when Joe Clark disses a typography guru...and the comments are as interesting as the post.
• More good ideas for the taking. Open source meets innovation.

09:50 PM | | linkme | home

Here's a sweet pointer from Tomalak's Realm: it's news that the PTO has ordered an examination of the patent in the Eolas/Microsoft case:

In what could be good news for the Web, the Director of the US Patent and Trademark Office has ordered a re-examination of the '906 patent, which was the subject of a patent infringement lawsuit this summer brought by Eolas against Microsoft.

Issued in 1998 to Michael Doyle of Eolas Technologies, the patent (#5,838,906) covers the ability to embed and control applications (or objects) in a web browser. Doyle succeeded in obtaining a $500M judgement against Microsoft. In the aftermath, Microsoft said that changes to the browser were necessary to work around paying royalties on the patent, and that these changes would impact developers who create and maintain web pages. Many believe that the patent would also affect other technologies such as Flash and Java as well, which are launched from a browser.

On October 23, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) filed a request for re-examination, citing prior art that defined the early HTML standard, written by Tim Berners-Lee and Dave Raggett.

Here's more on this from the W3C itself. What a shame they don't have individual memberships!

06:29 PM | | linkme | home

I noticed that the call for IPCC 2004 has gone out. The conference will be September 29 to October 2 in Minneapolis. (Side note: PDF-only are a bummer!)

The program chair for this conference is George Hayhoe, who is an STC buddy and editor of its journal Technical Communication.

06:50 PM | | linkme | home

There's been an interesting discussion on the SIGIA list about information visualization. It was originally about the relationship about IA to infovis, which I thought a really cool topic, but it has morphed into a discussion about the general usefulness of information visualization, period.

I've always viewed information visualization as a technology-supported kind of information graphics. Where the latter tend to be two-dimensional and static (think USAToday), the former is typically software intensive, database-driven, and often representing attribute/value pairs that can be viewed in user-selected ways. I've been exposed to how cool infovis can be thru peripheral experience on a infovis prototype for DARPA.

Ah, but there's the rub. Can infovis be commercially successful? That's the gist of the recent discussion. Here are two interesting links that appeared on the list today. First, on the pessimistic side is this interview peterme did with Marti Hearst from UCBerkeley:

Marti forecasts a significant change in how visualizations are approached. In the past, they've been treated as standalone applications ... Where as the key for the future will be incorporating it as a small part in a larger system, integrating it with the rest of the interface. In doing so, this will require visualizations to seriously take the problem that users want to solve into account, a motivation currently lacking from many visualizations.

On the optimistic side, Ramana Rao looks forward to 2007, when he hopes we'll have overcome some past distractions:

We were willing to drop back considerably in interface quality for many years because of the rich sources of information and knowledge, new services, connections to other people available through the Internet. Only now are we getting back to considering simpler and richer ways of interacting with content, services, people.

If you want to check out information visualization, I'd suggest starting with OLIVE from the folks at UMD and this resources page from Stanford.

06:43 PM | | linkme | home

I came across Moluv's Picks today. I'm on dialup for another week until Verizon gets my DSL moved, so I'm not going to surf this site too much for now. But design fans may want to check it out. Too bad there is no obvious RSS feed.

06:32 PM | | linkme | home

Here are a few links that caught my eye recently:

• Re-UseIt. Here are the entries for the contest to redesign Jakob's useit.com. I wasn't that into this contest when it was originally announced, but what's cool about it is to see how 50+ different people approached the same task. And how really challenging it apparently must be to improve on something so originally boring.
• Dan Saffer is doing an interaction design degree at Carnegie Mellon and blogging all about it. Thanks to classmate Chad Thornton who is a year or so ahead (and also sharing cool stuff) for the pointer.
• Across the pond, there's a cool initiative called mySociety.org which aims "to build internet projects which have strong, real world benefits, and which do so at very low cost per person served." They have an impressive list of proposals that they've already received. Thanks to anne galloway for the pointer.

06:37 PM | | linkme | home

Over on the ID-Cafe list today, there was quite a bit of discussion about Jessica Helfand's recent weblog entry about Edward Tufte re his appearance with David Byrne in Wired (which I mentioned a while back).

It's an interesting read, but I'm not sure I get what seems to be her actual criticism:

Both Byrne and Tufte are self-proclaimed experts. Yet in spite of what they might have you believe, neither are artists -- in that formally attuned, conceptually rigorous way, for instance, that one might look at Jasper Johns or Andy Warhol ...

Huh? That's the criticism that can be leveled by one of the talents of the graphic design field? It's not that I disagree with another of her criticisms:

Tufte's expertise is not only self-proclaimed -- it is also deeply and irrevocably self-serving.

In this area, I think Tufte has much in common with Jakob Nielsen...both are as adept at media spin as they are in their field of expertise. That said, I would far rather see a criticism based on the merit of some of Tufte's actual work (much like this one at Boxes and Arrows re Nielsen) than to point out that Tufte isn't Andy Warhol.

06:41 PM | | linkme | home

I was poking around IDblog's activity log, and noticed someone searching first for medical examiner wages (seriously?) and then tech writers wages. So, while the person searching may not come back, I figured it couldn't hurt to point to STC (the Society for Technical Communication) for all things related to technical writers and technical communication and their salary surveys (sorry, members only) in particular.

The main STC jobs database is also members only, but if you're not a member, check an STC chapter (or chapters) near you, since they often have this kind of thing available for free.

08:38 PM | | linkme | home

If I were HCI queen, here are a few things I would change:

1. Banks would not ask you if you wanted your ATM transaction in Spanish or English when you hadn't ever chosen Spanish (after several years).
2. Applications would know when something was singular or plural, so you wouldn't see "You have one new emails!"
3. And just because I chose the "ski" lifestyle content from the Weather Channel's email forecast service, I wouldn't see the subject "Beth, here is your weather and ski forecast for Washington, DC" when the expected temperature the next day is 80 degrees!

They do provide me with a link that shows snow quality (hey, let's hop on a plane...there's poweder in North Dakota!). But still...I think that dropping the "and ski" from the subject might make sense when it's only the Rockefellers or the Vanderbilts who may be jetting off thousands of miles to find off-season snow.

08:08 PM | | linkme | home