Pat’s Point of View

The car saga has ended—today we bought a car! A 2003 model Subaru Impreza RV, and a very tidy example too. Excellent condition, stock standard, low KMs and a good price.

I spotted it on the internet yesterday and emailed the dealer, looking for his best price for a quick cash sale. He rang back this morning and suggested we come take a look. Despite having to catch two buses to get there I managed to drag Jenn along, but she insisted “we’re not buying anything today!”. When we got there (Tom Kerr in West Ryde) it wasn’t long before Jenn was hooked and demanded a test drive. She gave it a good work-out and we decided it was a great find.

Although Jenn didn’t negotiate in her usual manner (ie the salesperson won’t get fired this time) we negotiated a good deal and walked away with a car. We pick it up on Wednesday. They even lent us a car in the mean time, which saved us from further bus-bound torment.

The RV is perfect for us: lots of room, sporty styling and performance, AWD for the snow/country trips and reliable Subaru quality. And we couldn’t have found a better example, it was like a brand new car (minus the ugly grill Subaru have added to the 06 Impreza range).

We’re very happy :)

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I was recently reading UX Magazine (from the The Usability Professionals’ Association) and they had an article on cultural probes and another on moving with a magic thing, both new methods of user research.

Essentially cultural probes are a technique where you hand over control of the user research to the users themselves. Rather than observing them you provide them with a ‘kit’ with which they record their own behaviour and experiences. Typically this kit would include a diary, a digital camera etc. It’s like ’scrapbooking’, where you write and stick stuff into a book to record what’s going on.

“Cultural probes are designed to prompt and elicit information from people about their lives and local culture.”

The original developers, William Gaver from the London Royal College of Art, suggest this technique is useful in non-work contexts or when more traditional techniques (such as lab testing or contextual enquiry) would either influence behaviour or be logistically difficult to perform.

The second technique, “moving with a magic thing” works according to a similar concept. It’s claimed to be useful when finding uses for new technology, by giving users the new thing (or a mock-up of it) and getting them to go away and discover uses for it. This beats a bunch of designers and engineers sitting around a table trying to think of how to use new technology, which is what most often happens. Why not employ the potential end-users to work out what it might be useful for?

“Users are met in their environment and given a ‘black box’ or a mock-up of a device. They are then told what functionality the device has and are asked to go about their life as they normally would…They are given a digital camera for a week and asked to take pictures of the situations where they would use the ‘magic thing’.”

Obviously this technique is most useful for technology-driven products/projects and only at the initial stages; different kinds of research would follow once the initial set of use scenarios have been collected.

I think these techniques are quite fascinating and could be valuable additions to the ol’ UX toolbox. I might have a use for the probe method soon, but the magic thing method might need to wait a little longer. It would be great to hear some feedback from people who have used these techniques and how successful they were.

Whilst the UPA don’t make the magazine articles available online—or at least not immediately—there’s plenty of stuff on the web. Gerry Gaffney has written quite a useful guide on using cultural probes, and Anu Kankainen has made her article on the moving with a magic thing technique available online.

See what people are blogging about: UX, UPA, moving with a magic thing, cultural probes, user research, usability

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Last weekend Jenn and I spent five days in Melbourne. I had to go down for work (to run the Scott Berkun workshop) so Jenn came along and we extended the weekend to see my brother and his family.

We spent a bit of time relaxing and wandering around the city, which thankfully had some lovely weather—unlike Sydney where it rained for the whole time!

But most of our time was spent with our nephews and nieces, whom we haven’t seen since our wedding and not too often before that. It made us want to start a family of our own :)

My photos are now up online.

See what people are blogging about: Melbourne, kids, holiday

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After truly summer-like conditions over the last two weeks of winter, now it’s raining in spring.

Even worse, it dumped about 40cm of snow yesterday…mere days after we came back from skiing! Isn’t that always the way; when you’re skiing there’s no snow, but when you’re not there is.

We’re off to Melbourne for a long weekend, hopefully the weather is truly bizarre and there’s some sun down there :)

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Do you find you often can’t decipher song lyrics? Me too. Currently I’m baffled by Black Fingernails Red Wine by Eskimo Joe in which, as far as I can tell, the singer states “I don’t understand the point of fingers” (allegedly the correct lyrics are “I don’t understand the point, I’ve been good” but I’m sure it’s a conspiracy).

Some classic examples that have confused me in the past, are:

Purple Haze by Jimi Hendrix: “excuse me while I kiss this guy” instead of “excuse me while I kiss the sky”.

Stand By My Woman by Lenny Kravitz: “I can’t go on without a ho” instead of “I can’t go on without her”.

Going Gets Tough by Billy Ocean: “Well go and get stuffed” instead of “When the going gets tough”.

Money For Nothin’ by Dire Straits “Money for nothing and chips for free” instead of “money for nothing and chicks for free” (hey, I was a school boy and going to Red Lea after school for hot chips was much more important than any girl!)

One more I thought for sure I was misunderstanding was What You Waitin For by Gwen Stefani, which I heard as “take a chance you stupid hoe”. But when I checked, that is the actual lyric! Guess that makes sense, considering the artist.

ps: yes I got my hearing tested last week, it’s almost perfect! :)

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We’ve been back in Sydney for one year today!

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Just got back from a week of skiing at Thredbo. The snow wasn’t that great, but we enjoyed some lovely spring weather. It wasn’t too crowded during the week, which is another bonus.

We hired a van and drove down during the day, nice and liesurely. We stayed at the Lake Jindabyne Hotel, which was basic but good enough. There are much nicer places to stay in Jindabyne but they can cost an arm and a leg.

There were six of us and we all took to our Snowblades, except for Rosemary who was a first-timer so she chose skis. We must be getting old since it wasn’t quite as easy as it used to be; we were all pretty sore even after the first day. At least that means there were no complaints about the odd rest :)

Not much partying either (except for the last two nights which were quite entertaining—I’ll never think of the Brumby Bar the same again). However that didn’t stop other people from partying. One night there was a band playing at the LJH and it was really, really loud even from inside the hotel room. And the walls provided no protection from the sounds in other guests’ rooms either; our neighbours liked watching TV really loud. Sleeping was difficult that night.

There were some good skiing moments, like Jenn’s first “360″ and some fantastic crashes (but no chapstick injuries this time).

Photos are online now, video coming soon.

See what people are blogging about: ski, snow, skiing, Thredbo, snowblade, skiboarding

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