Pat’s Point of View

Merry Christmas to you all, and a happy new year for 2007.

Jenn and I enjoyed our first Christmas in our new place, and after a great day yesterday it’s shaping up to be a good holiday season.

As always, my wife went all out and got me a new iPod video, black. It’s the 80 gig model so it’s going to be a while before it fills up. This is a most excellent replacement for my 1st generation iPod which is showing it’s age (but still going strong! so we’ll probably use it for in the car). Now I can have all our music plus photos, video (wonder what it’s like watching a DVD on an iPod!) and plenty of room left to use it as a portable hard disk. Thanks baby!

Tomorrow we drive off to Queensland for a quick holiday with my brother’s family, then back to Sydney to return to work on the 2nd! :(

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I’m currently reading both Don Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things and Ann Jordan’s Business Anthropology (thanks for the tip Ash).

Great books, but I’m getting a little concerned. It’s dawning on me that I’m not a very good designer. That’s design as in coming up with a solution to a known problem, not any particular field of design such as fashion or interior design. This is a little odd considering what I do involves quite a bit of design: technical design, graphic design, information design, solution design, high-level design. I wouldn’t say I’m bad at it, but it doesn’t make me happy. Don’t get me wrong, I very much appreciate good design and will usually place it above other criteria. So as a consumer of design, there’s no problem. I find the actual act of designing very frustrating and it doesn’t produce a great deal of joy—even when I get it ‘right’.

I’m much more of the analytical type; thoroughly introspective (eg this post). I’m more at ease observing and analysing then acting on motivations. I’ve always thought of myself as ‘the great observer’, quietly watching everything that goes on and making sense of all that information. Which is a likely explanation for why ethnographic research comes naturally to me, and the design of solutions to problems I observe, does not.

These are things I think I have always known, but am only just now recognising for what they are. Or perhaps it’s a case of admitting the truth. I do have a creative side (writing, drawing etc) but even that has an observational or descriptive tendency. I can draw something I see but would find it difficult to create something new from scratch.

With all of this in mind, I’m much more interested than ever in psychology and anthropology, and I hope to study in these areas at some stage. This is fairly distant from what I wanted to study (industrial design) and rather a long way off what I ended up studying (computer engineering). I guess it’s better late than never.

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This is Chilé, our chilli plant. He’s about 4 months old and is growing at a rapid rate. About two weeks ago he sprouted his first chilli, which has now increased by at least a factor of 500%. Several days ago another chilli appeared.

It shouldn’t be too long before his fruits become so enormous we will have to pick them (and devour them no doubt). We just need to think which recipe will be best suited.

And to think, we have about 50 more seeds left in the packet.

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Lately, I’ve been thinking about recruiting users (or I could don a lab coat and call them subjects) for usability testing.

I’ve spent the last year focused on intranets, which when it comes to this, are a breeze. You have a captive audience which can be defined quite well—in terms of job roles and information needs—through a bit of ethnographic research, they are usually close by and are usually quite happy to participate (if it comes to it you can always get their boss to make them do it…<evil laugh>).

Now, working on a website is a whole different ball game. There’s a lot of talk about usability testing—who to test, how many subjects, how to run the sessions—but not a lot on how to find a good source of representative subjects.

In the past, I’ve used two techniques when working on public projects: guerrilla style and external testing. By guerrilla (I just love that word) I mean low-cost, in-house testing where you make use of carefully selected colleagues/friends/family. At the other extreme we almost totally outsourced the recruitment and provision of test labs. Each is a valid technique, if applied appropriately, but both have obvious drawbacks.

Your client might already be in contact with key customers (such as in the case of B2B) and allow you access to their staff, but this is not that common for most projects, and more importantly, are these going to be representative users?

Probably the most popular method of recruitment is to use an external recruiter, normally a market research firm, who can get you subjects. Sometimes they even get you subjects you specify! But this is pretty bloody expensive.

A recent addition to the proverbial toolkit is Usability Exchange which makes it a bit easier by facilitating remote online sessions (specifically for accessibility). But remote testing of this nature has major drawbacks. It’s not surprising that it’s focus is on the more mechanical aspects of accessibility; so much of what you might learn from a one-on-one session is lost with this arrangement.

AGIMO have an interesting bit in their tookit on recruiting participants, although it doesn’t go into specifics. Some of their suggestions are interesting, and the list of pros and cons seems very sensible. Having never used some of these methods (such as cold calling or advertising in the newspaper) I’m not sure how practical they would would be, or how enthusiastic most clients would be to use them.

So it’s looking like the best approach is still to try a combination of methods that are suitable for the specific situation you find yourself in. No silver bullet here…or is there? Do you have a favoured technique for getting hold of usability testing subjects? C’mon let’s hear it.

(And this is just for your usual usability testing, what about cultural probes and other more ‘intrusive’ techniques? How do you find subjects for those?)

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Received in a recent email, surely written by an Englishman.

Merry Christmas

Symptom	Fault	Action
Feet cold and wet.	Glass being held at incorrect angle.	Rotate glass so that open end points toward ceiling.
Feet warm and wet.	Improper bladder control.	Stand next to nearest dog, complain about house training.
Drink unusually pale and tasteless.	Glass empty.	Get someone to buy you another drink.
Opposite wall covered with fluorescent lights.	You have fallen over backward.	Have yourself lashed to bar.
Mouth contains cigarette butts.	You have fallen forward.	See above.
Alcohol tasteless, front of your shirt is wet.	Mouth not open, or glass applied to wrong part of face.	Retire to restroom, practice in mirror.
Floor blurred.	You are looking through bottom of empty glass.	Get someone to buy you another drink.
Floor moving.	You are being carried out.	Find out if you are being taken to another bar.
Room seems unusually dark.	Bar has closed.	Confirm home address with bartender.
Taxi suddenly takes on colourful aspect and textures.	Alcohol consumption has exceeded personal limitations.	Cover mouth.
Everyone looks up to you and smiles.	You are dancing on the table.	Fall on somebody cushy-looking.
Drink is crystal-clear.	It’s water. Somebody is trying to sober you up.	Punch him.
Hands hurt, nose hurts, mind unusually clear.	You have been in a fight.	Apologize to everyone you see, just in case it was them.
Don’t recognize anyone, don’t recognize the room you’re in.	You’ve wandered into the wrong party.	See if they have free alcohol.
Your singing sounds distorted.	The drink is too weak.	Have more alcohol until your voice improves.
Don’t remember the words to the song.	Drink is just right.	Play air guitar.

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Today we arrived back from a long weekend in the Hawkesbury region, where we went to celebrate Jenn’s 30th birthday. It was a nice relaxing stay at Loxley on Bellbird Hill in Kurrajong.

We enjoyed chilling out and taking a little break from things, as well as a bit of local sightseeing (helped along by a thorough reading of a book covering the history of Hawkesbury settlement—we were fascinated to learn about the third European settlement in mainland Australia). Among other things there was some fantastic scenery and an excellent botanic garden (Mt Tomah).

We enjoyed the area so much we’re considering moving there some time in the future :)

I’ve posted some photos from the trip.

See what people are blogging about: Hawkesbury, Kurrajong, Hawkesbury-Nepean, Sydney

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I spotted this voodoo knife holder in a store on Parramatta Rd the other day. It would make the perfect gift for that phsycho male-bashing woman that you just don’t know what to get for Chirstmas.

There’s even a well placed knife spot in the guts!

$200 might be a bit much though, considering it won’t even hold a decent sized cleaver :)

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I have had the most unfortunate luck of having to work with Confluence over the last few weeks. More specifically, I have to customise the interface for a client (to make it somewhat usable since it’s not very good in standard guise).

Besides being a complex beast of a wiki come intranet, the theme/templating mechanisms are overly complex and incredibly cumbersome. I have obviously not been close to the whole web templating scene, since this whole universe of Velocity, SiteMesh and what-not has popped up and I hadn’t heard anything about it until now. Well I was quite happy in my ignorance, because this method of customising the UI is typical of what a programmer or sysadmin would come up with (let’s just say their idea of web design is rubbish!). It’s just way too complex and avoids the point of what someone would want to do with it, that is, modify the user interface.

The approach is not new, other attempts include PHP templates, Smarty etc, but they all have the same problem. They’re so complex that they really miss the point, you may as well write all the code from scratch. And then there’s the performance overhead. The theme mechanisms for things like Wordpress, Gallery, Mambo etc are much easier to work with.

Multiplying the problems with the templating engine is the way it’s been used. Within Confluence, the use of HTML in the construction of the pages is pitiful, as is the scripting, but I’m determined to clean it up. The structure of Confluence is also a bit of a mess, with many different types of pages and links off to this and that. This bloatware aspect is pretty frustrating; half the work is turning things off, trimming it back to make some sort of useful interface. There are so many unnecessary ‘features’ stuffed in.

Then there’s Confluence’s sensitivity to, well, everything. Making changes to themes or page decorators can cause all sorts of disastrous failures for the whole server! Doing all the ‘pretty stuff’ sure is tough going when the architecture gets in a huff and won’t play ball.

I’m sure it’s quite clear that I’ve come to dislike this product quite a bit due to my experiences on the technical front, and I haven’t even mentioned usability yet. Luckily somebody else has! I’m hoping Alex also grappled with these customisation demons that plague me…

See what people are blogging about: Confluence, wiki, custom website themes

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It’s smokey again today in the city, the bushfires around Sydney aren’t getting any better. Which reminds me, two weekends ago Jenn and I went up the mountains to go bushwalking, only to find all the trails closed due to blazing fires. In fact the whole Grose valley was closed, and many other surrounding areas…all the places I used to hike frequently ‘as a younger man’.

The photos here were taken from the top of Govett’s Leap looking north toward Hat Hill Road and Perry’s Lookdown, which is where we had intended to go. It was going to be a lovely walk too, down Perry’s to Acacia Flats and the Bluegum Forest, but from the dense smoke billowing up from that area I’d say it will be a while before we’ll be doing that walk.

See what people are blogging about: bushfire, Sydney, hiking

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