Pat’s Point of View

A friend has just launched a new website selling Chakra stone necklaces:

www.chakra.net.au

I lent a hand with hooking it up to PayPal, but the site you see is the product of much hard work by Kieran Ots. The site is looking fantastic.

The necklaces are very elegant, and quite a bargain too. You can buy one form the collection, or create your own, mixing and matching the stones which mean the most to you. Order yours today!

OK, ignoring all other considerations for a moment, the Windows Vista website looks brilliant. If that’s anything to go by then I’m looking forward to the OS when it’s launched.

Today is exactly one year after Jenn and I got married. We spent the night at the Sebel in Manly, where we also spent our wedding night (although it was the Radisson then). We also went up to St. Patrick’s estate where we actually got married.

It’s looking very nice and tidy up there, despite ongoing building works nearby. It even looks like they cleaned the exterior of the buildings, probably for Nicole Kidman’s wedding :)

A lot has happened in the last year, and it feels like much longer, but we’re looking forward to many more years together.

By the way, the photo above was taken using the brand spankin’ Canon EOS 350D that I gave to Jenn as an anniversary gift. OK it’s not paper, but she was happy enough.

Well, after piking early last night and going home, I had little trouble in getting to the 9 AM start in good shape, but I think others were a bit worse for wear :)

Today’s topics were less interesting than yesterday, but I found Julia Prior‘s Technology Designers as Technology Users intriguing, especially considering my technical background. I also enjoyed Christos Katsanos‘ InfoScent Evaluator talk, although I don’t think that will ever be any better than a simple QA tool similar to an web accessibility validation tool. On the subject of accessibility it was good to hear Chris Law’s talk on the usability of accessibility guidelines for designers, except for the fact that he totally excluded web accessibility from his study (he had a reason but I’m not convinced it’s valid).

To wrap things up today, Bill Gaver gave an excellent keynote, which like the opening keynote, was very inspirational and had us all thinking how cool our work could be. But in reality most of us have much less freedom to do work we really want to do, even those with access to cushy research grants :)

His talk was a wonderful mix of interaction design, industrial design, ethnography, film-making and art. And I love the exploratory nature of his work; sniffing around life and seeing what things might be cool to build and play with. I particularly like the drift table, which I would happily place in my living room.

I think the things I have got out of this conference have been that there are lots of different people working in the rough area of HCI, taking many a different approach, and using different talents and skills. We all need to focus on what it is we are good at and want to do, then do it, then appreciate and utilise everyone else’s choice.

I also think we can all learn from one another too. For example, I readily admit that I don’t have a academic background and could certainly learn much theory behind the work I do. On the other hand I think the academy still needs to learn from industry and practitioners operating in commercial environments. One example of this is that a few of the academic presentations I saw lacked real-world credibility, they came across as nothing more than nice big terms for quite simple (but valid) techniques. Trying to pass off some research that involved observation and listening to people as something more than that, by giving it a fancy title, is not building any credibility in my opinion. Don’t get me wrong, there are many researchers doing great stuff, but some need to drop the pretence, and stop looking down on practitioners who use the same methods without the name. (They could also learn to prepare more succinct and to-the-point presentations).

See what people are blogging about: ozchi 2006, hci, chisig

The second day was quite an interesting one. I spent most of the day in the ‘industry cases’ sessions, as they seemed most relevant, but I did pop into a few other sessions. It was quite difficult to decide which room to spend time in as there were interesting things running in parallel.

Of interest for me were Anna Liu‘s talk Architecting Good User Experiences and Shane Morris and Matt Morphett’s User Interface Design as a Facilitator of IT Project. The Going for Goals panel chaired by Hiser also sparked some good discussion.

Donna’s keynote in the afternoon (on the state of User Centred Design in practice) caused some conversation well into the night, but I think it was all healthy discussion and she made points well worth making.

And we wrapped it all up with drinks and then the conference dinner at Zilver Chinese restaurant, along with a totally incomprehensible video detailing a system of sort from some of the major sponsors.

See what people are blogging about: ozchi 2006, HCI, CHISIG

I was delighted to attend the first day of OZCHI 06 today.

Without a doubt the highlight of today was Genevieve Bell‘s keynote speech, I don’t know how anyone could not walk away from that with at least a renewed sense of excitement about the field of HCI/UCD, if not a new found hope for the intelligence of large American corporations.

I also enjoyed the short paper presentations by Gerry Gaffney and Stephen Cox.

I found the discussion that took place in the final panel session quite interesting as there seems to be a definite line (if not divide) between those involved in research and those involved in design, even though there are definitely some who are involved in both (and I would include myself in that group). Perhaps it’s those of us who are more web focussed that sit across this line and are thus more comfortable with both aspects, as opposed to pure academic or big-software-corporate folk. Of course, I am only new to this community so I can’t be sure.

I look forward to the next two days.

See what people are blogging about: ozchi 2006, HCI, Sydney

Try these on for size:

• Colour: www.etsy.com/color.php
• Geography: www.etsy.com/geolocator.php

In the context of a shopping site, these are quite useful alternatives to menu-based navigation and search.

I must admit when I first used this site the colour page had me a bit stumped, but since someone pointed what it’s for I think it’s better :)

You know Mark Hurst’s Good Experience (if you don’t I recommend you subscribe), well I was going over some old editions and at the end of one, where the funny stuff is listed, I came cross this link: www.zefrank.com/psbi/

At least some Americans have a sense of humour.

I actually find it quite entertaining to watch what spam I get. I don’t read the emails, just browse through the list of subjects caught in my spam filter.

I think some spammers out there are quite talented in the way they attempt to trick you or get around spam filters. It’s quite inventive how they spell key words or break them apart such that the spam filter can’t recognise it, but humans can. Rather like that viral email that went around a while back illustrating how you can jumble the letters of a sentence but humans can still understand it, so long as the first and last letters of each word remain the correct. We have built-in error correction :)

…a disappointment, that’s what.

I got home late today, so I decided to order a pizza, and our local pizza joint is Dominos. Since I had some of their ‘internet vouchers’ I went to their website to order. I found a newer version than I remember (think they just recently rebuilt it) and my first impressions of the ‘eShop’ interface were high, it’s a nice looking site with plenty of AJAX-style interaction (built in Flash) for doing some fancy things like select pizzas, toppings, sauces and the base, and even attach vouchers to the order!

But, it didn’t work so well. It was s-l-o-w, so much so that it became unusable. The interface stopped responding for very long periods; I suspect that if I had waited long enough I would have ended up with 10 pizzas in the cart.

It could be because the Flash player in Safari isn’t so crash hot, or it could have been because I was downloading MacOS updates at the time. But more likely I think they just haven’t engineered the asynchronous data transfers very well. What a shame.