Stopwatch graphic by Casey Marshall

Recently, I watched a series of people observe informal usability tests.

Two of the observers have recently graduated with Masters degrees in HCI or an adjacent field.

Both recent graduates used a watch to record time-on-task and completion of the task. One actually broke out a stopwatch while the other referred to his wristwatch.

While these stopwatch fixations livened my day, I do wonder about graduate education in the usability field.

I recall that for the first half-dozen website usability tests that I moderated, I also recorded time. Then I realized that timing tasks obscured more important observations, and I haven’t bothered with timing since then. Besides, we can get times off the recordings.

Is the working world really that far off from graduate studies?

So why did these two graduates pull out timers?

Well, I think they were parroting “proper” methods they were taught without understanding when it is useful. If, in grad school, they only practice for ideal research situations, they’re missing out on the realities of the work world.

I’ve worked in an Agile development environment for the last couple years, and for the decade prior to that I worked on fast-moving projects that used whatever SDL I applied to them. The mission: Deliver value, ASAP.

With that charge, decisions are made that don’t allow for insight from in-depth, long-term studies with huge numbers of participants. I’m grateful for even the small, quick sessions of user and design research.

Regardless, I got a chuckle out of seeing these two bring out timers for a completely informal, one-off usability test. As expected, they both missed seeing key interactions because they were watching the clock.

When to be concerned about time, usability-wise

Okay, I’d hate to give the impression that time doesn’t matter. I just find that a long time to complete a task on a website is rarely the issue, instead it may be a symptom of other issues which become apparent during research.

However, I do find response times of a system to a user’s actions to be very important because too much delay in a system’s response can really hurt the user’s experience and even distract people from completing whatever they set out to complete. Still, this class of problem is often noticeable during observation. (Unless you missed it while you were fiddling with your stopwatch.)

With that in mind, I’ll gesture towards Nielsen’s take on response times.

Home page of Newsweek.com, May 31, 2010

I don’t know when it happened, exactly, but Newseek.com was recently redesigned. There is so much to say about it, and it is mostly good.

I’ll start with the most obvious: the design.

In short, the home page is easy to scan. There is a clear visual hierarchy. The lead photos and articles have been spot-on for Memorial Day news items, and the clarity of the layout made certain I couldn’t miss them.

The article pages are easy to read and keep enough of the patterns, like the byline and publication date, that it’s easy to figure out what’s what.

My biggest complaint is one that they no doubt haven’t figured out how to get rid of yet: the banner ads.

There’s more talk about the visuals for the new newsweek.com at nymag.com. I won’t go on about that, myself, other than to say, gee, it looks like a professional blog. Oddly, that’s a compliment.

Now let’s look at the markup.

Newsweek.com's namespaces point to interesting uses of meta data.

I’ve had a penchant for information architecture since the late 1990s, and about the first thing I noticed when glancing at the markup for the home page is the references to the Dublin Core meta data definitions and other meta data sets.

I was suddenly intrigued. Good use of meta data is sadly absent in many large-scale websites, and it’s really great to see an effort to play the game for real.

So, at a quick glance through the markup you’ll notice some unusual pieces, first this:
data-track="{'title':'stories being discussed'}", which is an attribute with a value that looks a bit like JSON.

I admit to being behind the times with studying HTML 5, but that attribute spurred my suspicion that this page was using HTML 5. I stopped wondering a few lines later when I spotted an article element, followed soon thereafter by a header element, and a nav element sporting an attribute of role="navigation". Whoa. Newsweek jumped right in.

So what about the meta data? Well, I can’t really know what they’re actually doing, but here is an observation. In a sidebar, they have a list of quotes. Each quote is marked up as a blockquote with an id attribute. Following each quote is a span with attributes like property="dc:creator" and about="#q1". The about attribute refers to the id of the blockquote in question. The content of that span itself is the name of the quoted person, plus which publication the quote came from.

Pretty cool idea: internal markup references like this can build relationships into the content. It could provide some interesting opportunities for parsing later on. Yeah, that’s right, the semantic web.

The problem with this all is…it’s half-baked!

Newsweek.com used "http-equiv" when they needed "name". Oops.

That list of quotes with the ID attributes? All that meta data is duplicated and thereby meaningless! Further, why use a span element when they could have used a cite element? More semantic and those attributes would’ve played as well. Gah!

And back at the top of the markup by those meta data namespace references there is another set of meta tag elements which are sadly marked up incorrectly.

There is a stack of 5 meta elements that use the http-equiv attribute when they should have used the name attribute. I’ll bet whoever coded that knows the difference, but I wonder if they were rushed to get this version out. It feels like a beta.

They are so close to providing some really great examples of meta data use in HTML 5! I hope they release another version soon that gets more precise and cleans up some of this code.

View from top of Yerbe Buena Gardens, San Francisco, March 2010.

Saturday PM: Sunshine!

I actually began to sweat under my blazer from the warm sun shining brightly through the window.

I had arrived in San Francisco a little early on Saturday, dropped my suitcase off at the Intercontinental Hotel, and walked around the corner to a sandwich shop for a bite to eat and to get online. As I draped my coat over the back of the chair, I decided I really like San Francisco. It’s the sun, I admit it. Oh, and I had already noted that the two billboards I noticed on the taxi from the airport were pure tech: one for an enterprise search system and another for PGP. Billboards talking to me? Amazing.

After settling in at the hotel, I had dinner with my old colleague Chris Burley and his girfriend at a nice Italian restaurant. Chris is awesome. I love talking with him because he has such passion for what he does, which currently is to help lead efforts like urban farming in the Bay area.

Sunday AM: 3 good things

The next morning I woke early due to the time zone difference, and I had three excellent experiences:

1. In the aching fog of caffeine deprivation, had the best cup of coffee of my life, thanks to the Blue Bottle Café. (I admit, I ordered a second cup to go.)
2. Paused in the Yerbe Buena Gardens where some elderly practiced tai chi and parents snapped photos as their little children hid behind a waterfall. I stood on a bridge and watched the morning sun ripple on the glass of San Francisco skyscrapers.
3. Crashed a church service at a music venue called Mezzanine put on by a group that calls itself IKON. I was the oldest person there, amidst a crowd of art school students. We sang, we listened to a teaching from the Word, we had communion. It was good.

Sunday PM: MX day 1

Sunday afternoon saw the start of the 2010 MX Conference.

MX2010 is largely focused on managing user experience and less on the tactical end of UX practice, and there were some thought-provoking presentations from people who have been managing user experience for a number of years, in a number of different types of companies. Off the top of my head, presenters represented firms in financial industries (Vanguard), publishing (Harvard Business Review), retail sporting goods, and online media (Youtube).

The series of talks was fantastic, and was kicked off with a keynote by Jared Spool in which he shared insights like that Gallup’s Customer Engagement (CE11) metric has high correlation to the quality of user experience. Spool’s keynote actually turned out to predict some themes that carried throughout the many presentations. Among them were the importance of establishing a vision for user experience and that experience ultimately must be addressed well across multiple channels (web, mobile, physical space, etc.).

Spool talked about three core attributes necessary for great user experience: Vision, Feedback, and Culture. He posed three questions that UX managers should ask.

1. VISION: Can everyone on the team describe the experience of using your design 5 years from now?
2. FEEDBACK: In the last six weeks have you spent more than two hours watching someone use your design or a competitor’s design?
3. CULTURE: In the last six weeks have you rewarded a team member for creating a major design failure?

After the conference reception, I wound down the evening by taking a walk around a few blocks and ending at a nearby bar. I ate a burger and watched the Academy Awards for a while. Back at the hotel I watched the end of a Clint Eastwood Western flick and fell asleep.

Monday AM+PM: MX day 2

I woke at 4 in the morning. I checked analytics, email, and my usual RSS feeds. I stretched, washed, dressed, and still had time to kill. I read a few chapters in The Shack, a book Adam gave me last week.

I chatted throughout the day with Haakon, a usability specialist attending from the design company Tarantell in Norway, and as he sipped his coffee, I decided to not mention my mere three hour time difference.

The rest of the day was another series of excellent presentations. Themes: customer (more than user) experience, vision that guides the business, new models for working in the network, UX leadership stories from Youtube, customer experience in renovation of thinking at Harvard Business Review Online, understanding the holistic customer, data-driven design decisions (and when not to rely on data for design decisions), experience design as business strategy, and operating as a chief experience officer in your company.

It was great to hear first-hand the stories from these user experience leaders. Now, for what to do with it all when returning to the office.

Tomorrow and then

Tomorrow morning I fly back to Michigan, and need to get my head back into product owner and user experience work. But I also need to hold onto the ideas from this conference, and shift into actively leading user (or is that customer) experience work at Covenant Eyes.

The purpose of release notes is simple:
Release notes explain what changed with this version of your software. Period.

I hope this article will help you write release notes with clarity and brevity.

Title format for release notes

The title for your document should include specific information:

• Name of product
• Version number

For example, if your product is RubberDucky and this release is version 3.3.5, the title for your release notes document should be RubberDucky 3.3.5 Release Notes.

Make the title big and bold at the top of the page. Refer to it in links exactly as the title reads.

Consider following the title with these bits of information.

• One sentence overview of the product
• Date of the release
• System requirements
  • Note changes, like “Discontinued support for Windows XP.”
• Link to installation instructions
• Link to a user manual
• Link to a release notes archive

Other sections in release notes

Break the release notes document up into sections, each with its own heading. Here are some sections to consider.

• Additions
• Removals
• Changes
• Fixes

Keep the actual descriptions brief. Release notes are often little more than a bullet list of updates, and that’s fine. If there are a series of small technical changes, try to describe them as a theme. For instance, “Improvements to the communication between the software and our servers.”

However, if there is an update that is important for users to understand, do not sacrifice clarity for brevity. Write enough of a description to explain the feature, but no more than necessary.

How do you know if an explanation is too short or hard to understand? Ask someone who is familiar with the software but doesn’t really know about the release to read the explanation and explain it to you in his or her own words.

What about personality?

Release notes should be easily scannable, and inserting witticisms should be avoided. However, if the company is proud of some feature, it doesn’t hurt to brag about it, so long as it is brief.

Here’s a nice example from TextWrangler 3.0 Release Notes.

BareBones Software inserting a little attitude into their release notes.

What about posting existing, known defects?

This question quickly becomes a philosophical one. In my opinion, a company should be transparent about known defects with their software and earnestly try to fix those problems. You can see this type of behavior with some open source projects in that they have a public defect tracking system. The bugs are out there for the world to see. With enough of a user-base, defects with your software will probably become known eventually anyway.

However, I do understand that in some cases advertising known-defects is a security and stability liability and just shouldn’t be done. My preference is that that sort of decision is made on a defect-by-defect basis, and not as a corporate blanket statement.

Regardless, known defects or incompatibilities do not belong in your release notes document. You could, however, link to a list of them in your release notes.

Organizing archival release notes

What do you do with all those release notes from prior versions of your software? Archive them on your website so you and your customers can get to them.

One page, all release notes

If your release notes are brief, you might want to include each version on a single page. The most recent release notes should be at the top of the page. Fetch Softworks currently takes this single page for all notes approach.

One page of release notes per version

For the sake of clarity, I would prefer to have release notes for a specific version on that single page, with a release notes archive page that links to every version. BareBones Software takes this index of release notes approach.

Some companies keep a current release notes page up-to-date so they don’t have to continue updating links. Again, BareBones follows this approach: http://bbedit.com/support/bbedit/current_notes.html

Do you have good (or bad) examples of release notes?

Not having seen any “best practice” document for release notes, I wrote this article. Do you agree? Disagree?

If you have examples of great, or really awful, release notes, please comment with the web addresses so we can all see them. Thanks.

The basic functionality is to provide a checkbox on web forms to reveal the password text, so people can choose to view the password they are entering as they enter it.

Photocredit: Tony Hall. Click photo to visit Tony's photostream @ flickr.com

Pen-less. It’s 9:30 in the evening, and I need to write out some thoughts (about a split-complementary color set).

At work last Friday, the pen that I’ve had with me for some months now finally gave up its last ink. It was a Pilot Precise V5, black.

My habit has been to have that pen in my left front pants pocket, reliably at hand. I guarded it, making sure to have it back if I let a colleague or a daughter use it for a moment. I gave other pens like it away, but kept that one.

Of course I have other pens. Bic ball-point pens: the kind you get in bulk in the plastic bags during back-to-school sales. I hate those pens. They fail so often, and you have to drag the ink out of them, scraping across paper. Scribble in circles first just to get them warmed up. Lazy bastards. Then you have to draw across your strokes again, filling in ink on the empty indentations of your first pass at writing.

I’m irritated at myself for getting into this pen-less position. Luckily, I have Plan B: pencils and a sharpener.

One of Adam’s projects is Nephtali: a web framework that focuses on security and considers the usability of the framework itself. Adam has labored over details in his latest version of Nephtali that will make life better for developers. For instance, he planned the naming convention and namespaces for functions so that in an IDE like NetBeans, the functions appear grouped logically in an easy-to-access format.

Nephtali is up to version 3.0.5 at the time of this writing, and the earlier versions were completely Object Oriented PHP. In version 3, Adam re-thought Nephtali away from the OOP base and rewrote it utilizing FP, Functional Programming.

For the last month or so, Adam has been lobbying various hosts to upgrade to PHP 5.3 or higher, because Nephtali requires at least that version. It is right on the cutting edge. I asked Adam a few questions about Nephtali, and that dialogue follows.

Davin: Nephtali requires the latest version of PHP, version 5.3 or higher, but many hosting providers don’t provide that yet. What about PHP 5.3 is worth waiting for?

Adam: PHP 5.3 includes many enhancements and bug fixes, but the features that facilitated Nephtali’s general approach and architecture were support for namespaces and the new Functional Programming (FP) capabilities.

Davin: I’m familiar with object oriented programming, but you’re talking about “functional programming.” Can you summarize the difference, and explain why you decided to go with FP instead of OOP with Nephtali?

Adam: Most programming languages offer the ability to define functions, however that doesn’t necessarily make them functional programming languages.  It’s easy to to get into flame wars over what a “true” functional language is, but I’ll lay out some general principles:

• Functions can be passed around just like other datatypes.
• Closures allow variables that are in scope when a function is declared to be accessed and carried around within the function.
• Side effects (changing the value of a variable within a function) are limited.
• Many FP languages natively support currying (the ability to define a subset of a functions arguments and then allow other functions to finish defining the others.)

PHP now supports the first 2, and with some discipline, you can limit the impact of side-effects within your code (there are even some clever hacks for the currying issue.)  But the big question is, “What does this buy you?”

Simplicity.

Object Oriented Programming (OOP) bundles variables with the functions (methods) that directly interact with the variables.  This does provide a degree of encapsulation, as the accessor methods make sure that instance and class variables contain what is expected.  However, the issue often isn’t “What” a variable is changed to, but rather  “When” a variable is changed.  This problem of “When” is most glaring for OOP developers when implementing parallel processing, an issue that has produced many complex, clunky answers.

Taking an FP approach simplifies the question of “When”, as you move from a paradigm of altering variables to one of acting on values returned from functions.  Relatively speaking when following general FP conventions, writing unit tests is simple, writing parallel processing apps is simple (see Scala, Clojure, Erlang, etc.), and as it turns out, writing a capable web framework is simple, too.

Davin: What about models? So many of us in the web field have become familiar with the MVC (model, view, controller) architecture in frameworks, and it seems like Nephtali doesn’t use the models concept at all. Is that right, and if so, what do you do about databases?

Adam: Simplicity.

In terms of DB interaction, I like PHP’s PDO capabilities and security.  Performing simple DB work is easy in Nephtali, as you can generate code very quickly using the Nedit, the online code generator for Nephtali.  Nephtali provides some simple enhancements (functions that automatically table inserts, updates, and deletes; easy connection management; etc.), but you’re always working close enough to the basic PDO capabilities that it’s still very easy to perform transactions, connect to multiple DB’s, work with existing tables that don’t follow particular naming conventions, and whatever else your unique environment may entail.  One line of code is all it takes to grab a set of rows from a DB.

Second, utilizing the parallel processing capabilities of CURL, Nephtali provides some special capabilities for web requests.  A couple lines of code can retrieve a web request (in parallel with any other web requests) and format the retrieved data into whatever container (object or array) you’d like.

Davin: I saw the post on the Nephtali blog about Nephtali’s parallel processing for web requests. Can you explain when that would be useful, and when I should not run ahead and parallel process everything?

Adam: If you have a page that only makes use of one web service, you don’t gain anything.  However, if you have a page like Nephtali’s homepage, which makes a request to Google Code for the latest download and also makes a request to the WordPress blog for recent entries, you can gain a significant performance improvement by processing those requests in parallel.  Instead of ending up with serial calls to the two services (GoogleCodeRequestTime + WordPressRequestTime), the parallel request now equals the greater of the two requests (GoogleCodeRequestTime -OR- WordPressRequestTime.)

Nephtali handles the processing for you automatically.  Always use the request() and response() functions, and Nephtali will make things faster when they can be faster.  That’s it.

More about Nephtali

Learn more about Nephtali at nephtaliproject.com. When you’re there, check out the screencasts on using Nephtali. One of the great features on that site is NEdit, a tool that you can use to write up a lot of the code you’ll need for Nephtali pages.

Oh, and don’t hesitate to use the contact form. Adam loves talking with people about Nephtali, and I’m sure he’ll happily answer questions or respond to comments about the framework.

Too strong? With WordPress, you can try to use custom fields or innovative hacks like Bill Erickson’s approach to multiple content areas using H4 elements in his excellent theme “Thesis”. Unfortunately, neither of those approaches really deals with the depth of the design problem that often requires multiple content areas for pages.

As an information architect/user experience designer, I’ve been involved in many projects that required more types of content on any single screen than WordPress is designed to handle.

Let me draw out what I’m talking about here.

Exhibit A: Page content that WordPress is designed to handle

In a standard WordPress page or post, you’ll see these author-controlled pieces of content.

• Post/page Title
• Body
• Excerpt (often not-used)

Standard WordPress content fields include the title, excerpt, and body.

There are other sets of data for a page or post that an author can control, too, but these are meta-data such as tags, categories, slug (shows up in the URL), and possibly search engine optimization information like title, description, and keywords.

For a normal blog, many online trade journals, and a lot of basic websites, this really covers the bases. The body contains the bulk of the content including images, video, and audio that can be intermingled with the text itself. This model is very flexible, and it has definitely proven itself.

Exhibit B: Page content that pushes WordPress too far

In 2009, there was a small project at work to develop the website Covenant Musicians, and because the person who would keep the site updated was already using WordPress, we made the decision to build this site with WordPress too.

Well, if you look at one of the destination pages for this site, the musician profile page (here’s one for example), you’ll notice some different pieces of content which may or may not be present on any particular musician profile page. When they are present, they need to be in certain places and sometimes with certain content.

This custom WordPress page uses fields in addition to the standard options: Musician Image, URL, and Video.

The problem is, to control those extra pieces of content: the video, the band image, the link to the band’s website, the site owner needs to use WordPress’s custom fields in very precise ways, without the benefit of WordPress’s content editing tools. What a drag!

To make life easier for the site owner, we ended up recording screencast instructions on how to use these fields and delivered those help files with the site itself. (We used Jing by Techsmith, by the way.)

It would’ve been better had the interface been clear enough so that we didn’t feel the need to document the process of updating these destination pages, but that’s the trouble with stretching WordPress beyond its default content fields.

Ask too much of WordPress and ease-of-use is the casualty

Do you see the difference? When an effective design solution requires multiple types of content per page, using WordPress will actually make your website difficult to manage. WordPress is usually so easy to use that when you hit this wall, it is very apparent.

When you’re at that point, WordPress is probably not the right CMS to choose.

Should WordPress improve in this area?

Whether through the core application or through an excellent plug-in (is there one already that I missed?), if WordPress is going to grow in the content management systems field, this shortfall will need to be addressed.

However, WordPress is really excellent at what it does already, and the better course might be to decide to keep the features in check and let other systems compete in the mid-to-enterprise scale CMS arena. Scope creep never stops, and a good application strategy knows when to say “no.”

Am I wrong?

Am I off-base here? This is just one aspect of WordPress that should limit its use. Another that should cause designers to think twice is when dealing with faceted-navigation which requires more than one dimension (tags can probably handle one dimension). But, again, those are more complex design requirements.

I’m not a WordPress consultant, and I’ll bet some of you would like to point to the errors in my thinking. Let’s hear it.

When I was leading many design/development projects at a time, I’d write a creative brief for each—it helped me and the team stay clearheaded about each project. An experience theme seems like an alternative to a creative brief.

The following thoughts apply Chastain’s article to my work at Covenant Eyes.

Covenant Eyes is rich with stories

At Covenant Eyes, Inc., we have a full-time blogger, Luke. As I see it, Luke’s job is to draw out the stories surrounding Covenant Eyes and to share them using the Internet. He’s our storyteller.

What are the roles? There are so many stories, from people in so many places in life.

• husbands, fathers
• wives, mothers
• children
• pastors, rabbis
• counselors
• porn addicts, recovering porn addicts, people who have beaten the addiction
• and the list continues

What are some theme concepts?

• For people fighting a problem with pornography: Learn to be honest again (These words come from Michael Leahy’s mouth while he was visiting our offices.)
• For mothers with children who use the Internet: Protect my family
• For fathers with a teenage son: Teach him to be responsible for his actions

Experience transcends our services

What work do we do at our company? Although others I work with may claim we deliver software, I think we deliver information. Our software allows us to provide information-rich reports on Internet usage that can be used within relationships. I think of these as “accountability relationships.”

The theme concepts listed above have little to do with software or even our service. The real value we provide is that we can provide the sense for people that what could be their little secret is not actually hidden. That little bit of knowledge has proven its ability to change lives, and relationships, for the better.

The hard part is carrying the experience theme across our touch points with users

I recently helped put together a spreadsheet to inventory the automated emails we send to users at various points. There were over 60 emails, and they fulfill needs ranging from billing concerns to helpful reminders after a few weeks of being a customer. Many of these messages should be revised, and keeping the theme in mind will help create a coherent experience for our users.

Covenant Eyes has multiple touch points with its users.

Beyond these emails is a myriad of other touch points:

• sign up form
• help documents
• filter settings controls
• accountability reports
• tech support phone calls
• blog posts
• and so on

Taken all together, these communications can benefit from an experience theme.

I suspect the key to pulling this off is to have all those involved with crafting these touch points understand the experience theme and leave it to them to carry it through. As the company’s user experience lead, my job may be to facilitate the definition and adoption of an experience theme, and motivate and lead by example so others will carry the vision.

The Vignelli map smartly acknowledged that for passengers of the subway focused on navigating the subway system itself, above ground geography was nothing but a factor of added complexity. So the map instead was oriented around the subway lines and stops themselves, abstracting actual geography. This was a keen simplification from an information design perspective.

But consider this observation from Bierut’s article.

To make the map work graphically meant that a few geographic liberties had to be taken. What about, for instance, the fact that the Vignelli map represented Central Park as a square, when in fact it is three times as long as it is wide? If you’re underground, of course, it doesn’t matter: there simply aren’t as many stops along Central Park as there are in midtown, so it requires less map space. But what if, for whatever reason, you wanted to get out at 59th Street and take a walk on a crisp fall evening? Imagine your surprise when you found yourself hiking for hours on a route that looked like it would take minutes on Vignelli’s map.

The concept of designing the seams between systems has become apparent within the user experience design community over the last couple years. This is an example of that problem of seams.

Passengers of the subway system are also navigators of the city itself, so their context of use spans beyond the subway and the end of their decisions are not merely which stop to get on and off of, but where they are going once they get out of the subway.

Bierut makes the point:

The problem, of course, was that Vignelli’s logical system came into conflict with another, equally logical system: the 1811 Commissioners’ Plan for Manhattan.

How can designers consider the seams between the subway system and the city plan to result in a better-designed subway map?

NYC, of course, has a functioning subway map. Is functionality the only litmus test?

(I’ve taken the subway in New York City only once, and managed to get from Point A to Point B successfully, although with some anxiety.)

The morning sessions were spot-on, and some of the afternoon talks were good as well. However, it was clear that some panelists didn’t understand their audience of usability and accessibility practitioners. Their talks were still interesting, but they didn’t understand the user experience industry’s take on words like “accessibility” and “sustainability,” which was this year’s theme.

So, here’s a quick recap.

Assistive Technology Expo

I attended the Assistive Technology Expo in the morning. I posted yesterday about comments regarding CAPTCHAs gleaned from that talk.

The two presenters work in the technology field providing technology support for people with various disabilities and are themselves blind. They demonstrated how they use screen readers to accomplish various tasks online, like checking the weather, tuning into a football game streamed online, checking stocks, buying groceries, and buying a computer.

I appreciate observing and listening to people with disabilities who use the Internet, because it helps counter what I know about the technology with what is clear about people. That is, people adapt and make things work to the best of their ability. These two presenters were gracious about technology-related problems that I know many sighted people would be upset with. They also pointed out that most websites are at some level usable by them, but of course they prefer ones that are more accessible. We did see a number of examples where they simply wouldn’t have been able to overcome some technical roadblocks without significant additional effort.

One part of the presentation included them showcasing how they use an iPhone. An accessibility feature on the iPhone causes a single tap on the touch screen to say the name of the application (or letter if it is the keypad), while the double-tap will activate it. So, they have audible feedback to find the function they need, plus the capability to then activate it. This seemed to work very well for them.

Another point made during the session is that these assistive technologies like screen readers and electronic braille devices are quite expensive. Some screen reader programs are more expensive than the cost of the computer itself. However, the presenters voiced hope because the prices are coming down. They cited Apple shipping Macs that have built-in accessibility features at zero additional cost. Also, for Windows, there are some screen reader programs that are only a few hundred dollars.

Special Session: Contemporary Issues of IT in the Sustainable Global Knowledge Economy

This panel session had presenters on the topics of:

• delivering broadband across the state of Michigan even to rural areas (George Boersma)
• ITEC, a center in Lansing that provides after-school programs to help youth learn about technology, science and math (Kirk Riley)
• IT accessibility (Sharron Rush)
• global knowledge economy (Mark Wilson)

All the presenters were well-spoken and interesting. Sharron Rush seemed to be the one presenter that is part of the usability and accessibility profession, though the others shared important information and perspectives.

Unfortunately, I don’t have the time to provide more details on these presentations.

Hybrid Technology for a Sustainable Future

Shane Shulze of Ford Motor Company presented information on what Ford has been working on in regard to battery powered cars. His talk was focused on battery technology, and it was interesting to see the audience’s response.

One participant spoke up and asked about how these new cars will address the safety issues with quiet-running cars. Shane’s answer was that Ford is aware of the issue. I suppose we can look to future prototypes to see how what they do with this issue. (From a UX perspective, I think that is a really interesting question: what are the design concerns in regards to the volume and appropriateness of the audio.)

e-Government Services for a Sustainable County

Salina Washington of Oakland County and Constantinos Coursaris of Michigan State University presented on how Oakland County has transformed their delivery of services to citizens of Oakland County with the eGov department of the county government.

This presentation was inspiring. We know that good, usable technology can improve service delivery and decrease costs, but this was an actual example of that happening.

The take-away from this was that when faced with a challenge, like a massive cut in budget, instead of going the traditional route of laying people off, think creatively and as a group come up with ideas on decreasing costs and making the most of the resources that each part of the government agency uses.

Sustainability and Agility: UX Designs for Eforms

John Rivard spoke about integrating UX and Agile development at a bank. He shared examples of their workflow, like work-ahead, follow-behind. This was also an excellent presentation and it seems that the way John is working is similar to how we operate at Covenant Eyes.

That’s all folks

All-in-all, it was a good day with some unexpected, but enjoyable talks. Good job to the organizers from the MSU Usability & Accessibility Center! Also, check out Tom Schult’z posts on his blog.

An interesting point in the discussion was that problems with CAPTCHAs for people with visual  impairments. One of the presenters went through a process at the DELL website, selected a computer and went to purchase it, but on the way to checking out, he had to pass a CAPTCHA that asked him to enter the characters he sees in the image into a text box.

Of course the problem was that he could not see the image and there was no alternative available. No sale.

Someone else brought up Google’s use of audio as an alternative to the visual CAPTCHA, but the presenters pointed out that for someone who has both visual and hearing impairments, this is still insufficient.

(You can try the audio CAPTCHA on the first page of the sign up page for Blogger. Try it out!)

They pointed out that a CAPTCHA that used reasoning could be a more accessible approach, and another idea was to send an email to verify that the agent is, in fact, a human (that’s the point of a CAPTCHA).

I’ll probably post another update from this conference later.

In the 90s I’d quickly sketch different ideas for overall design, narrow it in, and then sketch out the plan to create the layout with tables, complete with pixel dimensions for each cell and notations on margins, borders, and padding. I’d annotate the sketch with hexidecimal codes for colors to use. The process placed ink before pixels.

As CSS gained ground and the industry left table-based layouts behind, I sketched fewer details, but usually still rapidly drew thumbnails of page layouts on paper before settling in.

For a time, I thought I could do most of this work with computer programs as my primary tools: Word, Excel, Photoshop, Fireworks, Flash, Dreamweaver, and straight textual coding tools like BBEdit. Later, OmniGraffle joined the toolbox, and I did first-round design digitally.

Ink before pixels again

Over the last six years paper and ink has again become my first tool. Hand-drawn sketches and notes are fast and fluid—far moreso than code or Photoshop.

With a quick sketch in hand, the coding can leapfrog some easy-to-make first mistakes. For instance, last week I needed to create some screens for a 3 page sign up process. I spent about 30 seconds drafting two quick page layouts on paper before I jumped into Photoshop and Dreamweaver to create the graphics and code it up.

By doing the second sketch, I was able to make better use of a design grid and utilize white space more effectively. That’s 30 seconds well-spent, and it means I didn’t have to waste time in Photoshop or with code on a design that had whitespace problems.

Good paper is worth it

When I started my latest job, I asked for some paper to sketch with. I was provided with some cheap cardboard-backed white notepads. Each pad fell apart within a week or two of use, and was better suited to ripping sheets off then holding together. Irritating!

I started to use my own notebooks for work, and just a couple weeks ago purchased a set of Moleskine Volant notebooks. They are softcover notebooks about 5 by 8 1/4 inches, and are well-bound with excellent ruled paper. I think they’re the best notebooks I’ve ever had.

Well, this morning I was looking through some old files and found a text document I wanted to print that I had done using Pages. Unfortunately, I had removed iWork from my Mac, so I no longer had the software to open the Pages document.

After a cursory search on the Internet for a program that would let me open Pages docs without having the program itself, I came up empty-handed.

So, I inspected the Pages document and realized it was a package. (Right click on the document icon and Show Package Contents.) The package contained an index.xml.gz file, which I unzipped and found within the body of my document amidst a whole bunch of XML code.

I momentarily considered reconstructing the text in TextWrangler, but thought it might be fun to write an XSLT file to do the work.

Please note that this is a 1st draft meant to retrieve the text from my document. It will not handle anything fancy, just text. Plus, it will only try to make each chunk of text into a plain-text paragraph in HTML, suitable for copying and pasting out of a browser window. Use at your own risk.

Ok, here’s the textFromPages.xsl file.

Others may take this initial XSL file and do what they will with it. I hope that if you take this and make it better, you’ll comment on this post to let me (and others) know.

To have it be useful to you, you’ll need to know how to apply an XSL transformation to a source XML file (specifically the index.xml from Pages).

Hint: Firefox will do the transformation for you if you include the proper xml-stylesheet directive right after the XML prologue in the source XML file. It looks like this: <?xml-stylesheet href="textFromPages.xsl" type="text/xsl" ?>

Up till the last couple of weeks search engine generated traffic to the site has been 80 to 90 percent from Google’s search. Over the last month, overall traffic has increased from around 60 visits per day to around 90 per day. Where does it come from? Well, still search engines primarily, and traffic from Google has increased noticeably during this time.

However, to my surprise, Bing is also making a surprisingly strong showing. Click on the chart below to view the details.

(Click on the image to view a larger version.) Chart of traffic sources for rangelistings.com from Oct 1 to Oct 16, 2009. The search engine Bing is suddenly showing at almost 30%.