Lately I’ve been wrangling a research report into shape and I’m finding it so much easier to just print stuff out, cut it up, organise and rearrange it, then stick it together with sticky tape. Then I’ll go back and edit the document electronically.

Alternative titles for this blog could have been “You know you’re getting old when you…” or “You know you’ve been playing craft and colouring-in with your kids when you…”. (Actually that last one is very apt since I have been loving colouring in with my daughters lately!)

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Hopefully I’ll be able to blog a few things soon, when I have a spare few moments.

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You often hear people refer to the tendency for Apple to hide functionality from the user. Most recently the iPhone and it’s gestural interface has been the source of complaints from users who discover stuff they didn’t know they could do (eg swipe to delete an email from your inbox).

Well I’ve found another one whilst driving to a business meeting the other day. When you stop at a set of lights and think it would be handy to look up your business associate’s number to give them a call to let them know you’ll be late. But as soon ad you grab your iPhone to perform that task, the traffic lights will change to green and you won’t be able to find the information you need (unless you keeping using your phone while driving but I don’t recommend that).

It also works when trying to use the maps app to check your destination, or anything else you might really need to do while stopped at traffic lights.

Go on, give it a go :)

(image credit: http://nittygriddy.com/2010/04/17/traffic-light-changer-iphone-app/)

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Lately I’ve been having fun (that’s a lie, it wasn’t fun at all) trying to get VOIP to work as our home phone. If you just read that sentence and are asking yourself “what’s a VOIP?”, then the rest of this post probably won’t be very useful to you. But so that you don’t leave here totally and utterly bewildered, VOIP stands for “voice over IP” and is a method of replacing a normal telephone line with calls made over the internet.

The background

When my family and I moved house recently, we decided to ditch the landline we hardly ever used and go with iiNet’s “Naked DSL”. As a broadband service it’s been pretty good, although it took ages to get connected. They throw in VOIP as part of the package, but I thought nothing of it at the time. But as often happens my wife changed her mind I realised that it was stupid of me to not have a landline installed.

Neither my ADSL modem nor router give me VOIP capability (which is not to say they don’t “support” it) so I worked out I needed an ATA (Analogue Telephone Adapter) which would turn any old telephone into teh interwebz fone. So I did a bit of hunting around and quickly found a Linksys PAP2-NA ATA on eBay, in fact there are heaps of them on eBay for a pittance. Heaps cheaper than the Belkin ATA that iiNet try to sell you.

The problem

I bought a PAP2-NA from eBay, well, Hong Kong to be precise. Installed it, which is easy if you use these instructions specific to setting up a PAP2 on iiNet. Tried it. Didn’t work. All outbound calls cut off after 30 seconds (including the ringing time).

Then I did what I should have done first, which was to do a bit more research on the Linksys device. The PAP2 in its various forms is extremely popular by all accounts, but also very dodgy in many cases. You’ll find many horror stories on the web about PAP2s from Hong Kong that don’t work, or devices that are “locked” to a specific service provider (eg Vonage) or people “bricking” their devices whilst trying to get them to work. Actually, you’ve probably read some of these stories if you’ve found your way to this post via Google.

It wasn’t looking good. What followed was a lot of mucking around and a lot of Google searches, trying to work out what might be wrong with my PAP2.

Port forwarding

One of the first things that often gets mentioned on the various discussion threads relating to PAP2 problems is the router’s firewall and NAT capability. My router is an Apple Time Capsule, which is used to share my Naked DSL connection with all the devices in our house. It’s essentially an Airport Extreme Base Station. There is no firewall, so that was not applicable, but I thought I’d better make sure the necessary ports were making it through the NAT (network address translation).

I setup the following rules in the Time Capsule, which forward traffic on the specified ports to the PAP2 (which has a fixed IP assignment in the router’s DHCP):

1. “VOIP SIP”: TCP and UDP ports 5060-5061
2. “VOIP RTP”: TCP and UDP ports 16384-16482

(To be honest, since I got VOIP working properly I haven’t gone back and removed these port forwarding rules to see if they are really necessary, so it could very well be that you don’t need to do this bit)

PAP2 logging

After a while I came across this post about logging what the PAP2 was doing so that I could diagnose the problem, and then hopefully solve it. The PAP2 doesn’t keep logs but it can spit out logs to a syslog server, which is what most network and telephony devices do.

I wasted a bit of time trying to get my iMac to accept syslog messages from an external device. Never had any luck, something was stopping it from getting the messages; potentially it had something to do with the fact that in later builds of Snow Leopard the syslogd config is different to earlier builds as well as Leopard and older versions of Mac OS X, and so there was no information out there on how to do what I needed.

So I gave up and used a Windows laptop I had lying around, installing Kiwi syslog server. In a matter of minutes I had a stream of log messages from my PAP2 so I could monitor what it was doing. (If you do this you might want to change the PAP2′s debug level so that it spits out as much detail as possible)

Firmware update

Along the way I also discovered a lot of talk about PAP2 firmware. There seem to be many different versions of the PAP2, so you need to be very careful about getting the right firmware. My PAP2 was originally distributed by Vonage and is a “PAP2-NA” hardware version 0.03.4 and had firmware version 3.1.12(LS) when I bought it. The latest version of firmware for this model is 3.1.23(LS) which you can get from here. To install it follow the instructions at the end of this post (note the firmware he refers to is for the PAP2T-NA which is a different model and that firmware will not install on a PAP2-NA).

But alas, this was merely a clever distraction from the fact that VOIP wasn’t working and I didn’t know why. The logs from the PAP2 gave no indication that there were any errors etc.

The ADSL modem

Then I started thinking about how many people kept talking about “routers” causing their problems. In my case my router (the Time Capsule) is separate from my ADSL modem. My modem is a Siemens SpeedStream 4200 left over from a previous Optus broadband package. It does ADSL2+, is easy to setup and has worked flawlessly for years. Despite these facts I was now looking at it with scorn and suspicion.

Research quickly revealed the most excellent website TheVoipStore and their information on the SpeedStream 4200. Earlier I made the distinction between a router/modem having VOIP “capability” and “support”, and it appears the 4200 does neither. Something about asymmetrical NAT, but anyway I had found the source of my “outbound VOIP calls drop-out after 30 seconds” problem. There is an easy solution, however! Put the modem into bridge mode.

At about this time I remembered that I had been using the modem’s built-in “router” to dish out DHCP to my Time Capsule which was in turn acting as a router and dishing out DHCP to everything else. No particular reason, was just the easiest way of setting it up. But I used to run another modem bridged to the Time Capsule, so I simply returned to that arrangement (following TheVoipStore’s instructions for putting the 4200 into bridge mode).

Voilà, VOIP started working instantly. Outbound (and inbound, but they were never affected) calls can be made for any length of time.

So in the end, there was nothing at all wrong with my Linksys PAP2-NA, it was the modem/router configuration all along!

I hope this tale is of some use to anyone who has part or all of the arrangement of devices described above. Best of luck.

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A person then walked through, rather sheepishly, but intentionally; in one door and out the other, weaving between the few customers and staff in their path. Both the othe guy waiting and myself noticed this. The other guy saw the owner/manager of the coffee shop looking on and asked “does that happen often?”.
“All the time” replied the manager in a thick Italian-Australian accent.
“People try to walk through, saying ‘is it ok?’. I say, ‘sure mate, at least you ask’. Most of them don’t [even ask]”
“Is that right?” said the other customer, rather surprised.
The other staff nodded in agreement as the the manager said “It’s just rude…rude”.
“I say to them ‘it’s not a street, it’s money!’” he exclaimed whilst pointing both hands at the passageway.

We chuckled in agreement. His use of English might have been comical, but the manager summed up his frustration perfectly clearly with that last line.

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But I’ll let you in on a little secret: I hardly read any of them on a regular basis, I just don’t have time. Again this is nothing unusual.

The ones I do find myself reading quite regularly are grouped fairly precariously under the the label “Strategy”. Here are my top 5 (in alphabetical order):

• acidlabs (Stephen Collins)

  Stephen (or @trib as you might know him) is passionate, if nothing else. He writes on the topics of social media, government 2.0 and collaboration. His posts are enthusiastic, intelligent and well written. I might not share his opinions on some issues, but I do look forward to what he has to say. Stephen also sets a great example for anyone wishing to build a reputation and establish themselves as a thought leader in a certain field.

• Anecdote (Shawn Callahan & Mark Schenk)

  Shawn and Mark don’t blog as often as others in this list, but when they do it’s always a well considered and informative piece. The topics are quite diverse but mostly centre around stories (ie story telling for business) and collaboration. I’ve learnt a lot from reading their posts, and attending their “story listening” workshop, that has helped me during user research and stakeholder consultation.

• Column Two (James Robertson)

  James is my former employer, and I learnt a lot from him during my time at Step Two, and have continued to do so since then. James has his finger on many pulses, and is able to sift out the most useful bits of the tide of information that comes his way. Topics include intranets, content management, knowledge management and a whole bunch of things around these.

• Seth’s Blog (Seth Godin)

  Seth has a real talent for boiling things down to their essence and then stating, simply, the core lessons you should take away. I’ve found his words on business, marketing and customer service incredibly useful and often amusing. His style is frank and to the point, which makes his writing honest and sometimes confronting. But you know it’s real, informed and motivated by his desire for things to make sense and for us all to do things in ways which make sense. Probably my favourite of all.

• Trends in the Living Networks (Ross Dawson)

  Does this guy get around or what? I find that almost everywhere I look (or read to be more precise) Ross pops up, and says something really smart. I honestly don’t know how he has his finger in so many pies, and still has time to write great blog posts, and be a father to his brood of kids! I’ll admit, sometimes it goes over my head, but the breadth and depth of his knowledge is impressive. Equally impressive is his willingness to pass on this knowledge, adopting the very “now” practice of releasing his work to the public domain (for example Implementing Enterprise 2.0)

So there’s nothing (necessarily) about UX, user research, web design or anything on that practical level. I find these blogs worth reading because they’re insightful, multifaceted and inspiring. They keep me thinking about the big picture, not staring down at my toes worrying about low level, day-to-day details.

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Yesterday (well it was yesterday when I started this post but it’s now two days ago) I ran my design research workshop at UX Australia. Very happy with the day, I had a great group of twelve people who were enthusiastic and at varying levels of knowledge regarding UX and design research, which made for many interesting discussions and many enlightened people.

Which is all good. As I said announced on the day, I’m happy if people leave at the end having learnt something (even if that something is “I already knew this stuff, but didn’t know it!”) or at least having some confirmation that what they knew was pretty much spot on.

And I’m happy to report that I too learnt a few things, for instance:

• Tableau is a statistical analysis software package, available at low(er) cost and easier to use than SPSS
• Many Eyes – data visualisation thanks to IBM
• Joint Interpretive Forum (JIF) – collaborative post video analysis method (anyone got a link to more info on this?)

As always, I was keen to get feedback from my participants. And here’s what they said they liked:

“Excellent for beginner level people in the field, like me. Took a lot of trepidation away”
“Good mix of theory and real examples”
“Keeping to [tea and lunch break] timings was appreciated”
“Having more in the handouts than was shown on-screen is good”
“Interactive structure”
“Ethnographic video”
“I liked how it gave a good overview of methodologies”
“[Patrick was] friendly and competent”
“Thorough notes and books on tables to browse”
“Activities were quite useful to match with different ideas”
“Storytelling, card sorting, diagrams”
“[Patrick was a] good communicator” (which made my wife laugh)
“[Patrick was] clear and warm, obviously very skilled”
“Links to reference materials”
“Very comprehensive”
“Videos worked really well”
“Recommendations/tips for implementation”
“Storytelling activity”
“[Patrick was] very experienced, lots of real-world examples”
“Detailed, well-written handouts”
“The process was very straightforward”
“Activities seemed a little rushed but were really helpful!”
“[Patrick was] very knowledgeable! Great willingness to share with us”
“Materials were great, chock full of examples and references we can re-use”
“Ethnographic interviews”
“[Methods for] displaying information/data”
“Anecdote Circle”
“Very competent”
“Able to associate techniques to other areas of research”
“Comprehensive”
“Content was good”
“Nice guy – friendly”
“I liked the videos”
“Structure of topics and the reflection using mind maps”
“Comprehensive”
“the videos were great”
“The storytelling activity”
“Activities; discussion with others was good, really helped get my head around things”
“[Patrick was] knowledgeable, approachable, open to going off-topic, clear and articulate”
“Clarity, comprehensiveness, referencing, practicality”
“Explanation of methods and how they work”

Storytelling (or “anecdote circle”) activity being referred to was a form of group research in which you allow participants to share their experiences about a particular topic through telling stories. It’s a great and relatively simple method of research that can elicit quite a lot rich detail, and using forms of narrative analysis you can then extract causal relationships, chronological relationships, tasks, trusted sources etc. Find out more at www.anecdote.com.au.

The video being referred to is “Getting People to Talk: An Ethnography & Interviewing Primer” produced by Gabriel Biller and Kristy Scovel. It’s a great introduction to ethnography and the power and the challenges that come with the territory. It’s available online at: www.vimeo.com/1269848

And in the spirit of openess, honesty and transparency yadda yadda here’s what they said were the areas for improvement:

• “Activities to be longer”
• “Beginning was a bit quick…”
• “Long video was a bit long”
• “Less Powerpoint”
• “Needed more examples … and more interactive exercises”
• “Tried to fit too much in”
• “Time was not enough in the activities”
• “Slides were not readable sometimes”
• “For each technique, a worked example or short hands-on activity”
• “How some things relate to the practicality of interface design”
• “More small activities”
• “More video, eg examples in the field”

They’re all good points, and I’ll do some tweaking of the workshop to ensure I have more time for the good stuff and less of the other stuff. I’m looking forward to the next time!

Photo credit: Doc Baty

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1. Research methods workshop at UX Australia

A club sandwich is one my favourite meals. When I go to a cafe or bistro and they have a club sandwich or BLT on the menu I will almost certainly order it; it’s my “usual”. For my wife it’s spaghetti bolognese. All over the world we have partaken in our usual fare and compared the results with all others that have come before. I don’t think this is uncommon, I think most people have at least one usual.

Nor is it surprising that we do the same thing with technology. Most people have their usual methods or key metrics for assessing how well, or how easy, products work. When you open up a new piece of software or a website you’ve not visited before, there are those little tests you perform to get a feel for it, give it a test drive, to get its measure quite quickly.

My wife’s “virtual” spaghetti bolognese for a new PC is opening Microsoft Word and seeing how long it takes to load.

James Robertson, says searching for “leave form” is one of his usuals for an intranet. Almost all intranets have a form or set of instructions for applying to leave, so how well the intranet search guides the user to this content is akin to taking its pulse.

When doing an expert review of a website, I usually start by disabling CSS and Javascript and taking a squiz at the raw underbelly of the site. Not conclusive nor exhaustive but just a habit I’ve gotten into.

These quick methods of assessment are not a replacement for formal QA testing or usability testing, but rather a short-cut that gets right to the heart of the matter and gives you a feel for the qualities of the technology in question.

What are some of your technology “usuals”?

[Photo credit: Puck777 on flickr]

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[If I were to write for The Punch, this is what I'd write about.]

As a father of one daughter, and potentially another on the way, I’m concerned about the sexualisation of our youth. Music, movies, TV and celebrities are influencing our youth much more than ever before, with sexually explicit (or at least suggestive) messages.

Take for example the work of recent pop music sensation Lady Gaga. Here’s a line from her top 40 hit “LoveGame”:

I’m educated in sex, yes
and now I want it bad, want it bad

The chorus of that same song goes:

Don’t think too much, just bust that stick
I wanna take a ride on your disco stick

I’m sorry, but what a tramp! Sure you could excuse this as using sex to sell records or to distract you from her lack of talent, but when you take into account that this kind of material is being beemed straight into our kids field of view, it’s a lot more serious.

Here’s another example from Gaga’s “Poker Face”:

And baby when it’s love, if it’s not rough it isn’t fun

What message do you think this sends girls and young women?

And there’s more, other masterpieces from this tart include “I Like It Rough”, “Shake Ur Kitty” and “Beautiful, Dirty, Rich”. Seriously. I don’t mean to pick on this one individual, she’s nothing unique or original, she’s following in the footsteps of The Pussycat Dolls, Christina Aguilera, Britney Spears etc. But this latest example is pushing the boundaries of suggestive and wandering into dangerous territory, in my opinion.

I’m no prude, if you’re into this sort of thing then I’m happy for you, but children shouldn’t be exposed to it. Whether she likes it or not Lady Gaga is a role model for young girls and they will hear these lyrics and see the slutty clothes she wears and think that this is the way they should be talking and behaving. And it’s going to get them into trouble.

Some would argue that everyone has to make up their own mind and choose to follow the lead of “celebrities”. Fair enough, but when you’re young it’s often only once it’s too late that you are able to make up your mind and choose to do the sensible thing. It makes me sick that even one young girl might get into a world of hurt because some no-talent pop star and her idiot record company think they’ll sell a ton of records by lathering on the dirty lyrics. These people are so desperate to be famous they will compromise everything, and jeopardise anyone, to get get it.

Compare this then to another current popular artist, Lilly Allen. Her lyrics are also quite explicit, but the tone is very different. Laden with sarcasm, Allen takes a swipe at modern pop culture with her own form of social commentary. Take this line from her hit single “The Fear”:

I’ll take my clothes off and it will be shameless
Cuz everyone knows thats how you get famous
…
Life’s about film stars and less about mothers
It’s all about fast cars and passing each other
But it doesn’t matter cause I’m packing plastic
and that’s what makes my life so f***ing fantastic
…
And I am a weapon of massive consumption
and it’s not my fault its how I’m program to function

I quite like this song, because by my interpretation this is a much more positive message. It’s not ok to do whatever it takes to be famous, it’s not ok to just spend money and float through life with no purpose. The dry British sarcasm is subtle, but I think (ok, I hope) the audience can pick up on this.

Her latest single “Not Fair” is much more saucy, dealing with inequality within relationships:

There’s just one thing
that’s getting in the way
When we go up to bed
you’re just no good
Its such a shame
I look into your eyes
I want to get to know you
And then you make this noise
and its apparent it’s all over

It’s not fair
And I think you’re really mean
I think you’re really mean
I think you’re really mean
Oh you’re supposed to care
But you never make me scream
You never make me scream

Sure, it might be a bit of fun, but Miss Allen is standing up for the rights of women. The setting for the song is similar to that of Lady Gaga’s songs, young women engaging in sexual activity, but the attitudes of the two are light-years apart.

There’s no point trying to hide from the fact that young adults are going to do what young adults do, and that’s not what I’m suggesting. What I’m suggesting is that A) children shouldn’t be exposed to the same content as adults and young adults, and B) the messages we allow those in the media to send out need to be positive. For girls this means encouraging them to respect themselves and others, and to aspire to more than just buying clothes, flashing their undies and telling the boys they “want it bad”.

Let’s let kids be kids and stop those that would attempt to turn them into adults before they’re ready. I found this initiative recently, whilst reading about an unrelated topic. It’s a blog called Shaping Youth, a “forum about media and marketing’s influence on kids”, that aims to tackle the kinds of issues I raise here. I took some comfort in the knowledge that there are people out there trying to do something about the Lady Gaga’s of this world.

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I like analogies, metaphors and similes. They can help transfer understanding from one domain, or concept, to another. Here’s an analogy that I think helps illustrate the pros and cons of a agile software development approach, using an explanation of a popular automotive safety feature: Anti-skid Braking System (ABS).

A common misconception is that a vehicle equipped with ABS will stop more quickly than a vehicle without ABS. This is incorrect. All else being equal, when stopping in a straight line, ABS will necessarily cause the vehicle to take longer to come to a stop, because of the very nature of ABS. When the driver of a vehicle fitted with ABS applies the brakes very hard, a computer will continuously turn the brakes on and off very quickly, such that the wheels continue to turn some of the time and thus do not skid (well, not as much). The driver maintains the ability to steer whilst braking, because he or she can steer during those moments when the brakes are off. Thus you can brake very hard but still steer your way around objects, maintaining control of the vehicle.

Without ABS, when the driver brakes very hard, the wheels would stop turning, causing the wheels to “lock up” and skid, making steering impossible. This is when maximum friction occurs, and hence when the maximum braking force is in effect. So you can stop most quickly without ABS, but you won’t be able to steer and will more than likely lose control of the vehicle and crash. All things considered, it’s better to sacrifice some braking force in order to have control of the vehicle. Hence the popularity of ABS.

I see striking similarities between this and the argument over agile software development methodology. Agile will not make the project go quicker! In fact it might take longer to finish the project (but when exactly you “finish” is contentious). Just as an ABS-equipped vehicle can steer while braking, a project using an agile approach will be—as the name suggests—more agile, maintaining the ability to control the direction of travel. Collectively, the project team can adjust their aim if they have wandered off on a tangent, say for example if the product strays from meeting core objectives. By bringing forward design and iterating quite quickly, the end result of the project can be kept in focus and development can be kept on target (incidentally this is where agile can be very beneficial for UCD and vice versa). Agile allows you to not crash head-long into failure!

However, what an agile approach will not do is shorten your project. It’s annoying when people talk about “adopting agile” in order to “deliver in shorter timeframes”. They’re confusing agility and speed. As far as I’m concerned the only thing being delivered earlier are the early design prototypes. The final deliverable is not necessarily completed any quicker than with a good old fashioned waterfall approach, because during the iterations the design will evolve and some stuff won’t be used (either because it’s taking us off target or because it doesn’t work). In return for your agility, you must accept that there may be wastage or re-work caused by each iteration and that you might not finish any sooner.

What say ye?

[Photo source: DervMan]

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