2006

The steady sonambulism

  • Tuesday, 6 June, 2006
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A new baby means a lack of sleep. In the first few weeks they figure that the baby will be fed 6-8 times in a 24 hour period, so you can assume that you will be up every four hours. But what they don’t tell you / what you forget is that you start the feed every four hours. The feed takes say half an hour, add ten minutes trying to get the wind up and you could be looking at another half an hour to an hour settling the baby back to sleep. So she starts screaming at 3am, 4.15am you crawl back into bed giving you 2 and 3/4 hours sleep before it starts again. Whaaaaaaaaaaaaa. Hence if my eyes are red and I sleep walk through the afternoon I trust you will understand. Yawn. zzzZZZZZZZZZZ

It’s a girl!

  • Tuesday, 30 May, 2006
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And so at 11.50am on Thursday 25th May Lindsey gave birth to our brand new daughter. A bit of a surprise, we all thought it would be a boy – but that was a relief to Lindsey, we wouldn’t have to discuss the finer points of my preferred choice of boy’s name – Ozymandias. Instead we have a healthy girl, weighing in at the imperial 7lbs and 7oz. And her name? Sadly it is not to be Orphelia (my choice again) but Olivia Ita McNeill. India is delighted with her new younger sister, and Lindsey and I wonder if we will ever know sleep again. Oh, photos (can’t upload them on wordpress so on flickr):- http://www.flickr.com/photos/dancingmango/

I feel like a client

  • Wednesday, 24 May, 2006
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I took all of last week off to install a new kitchen.  The only thing I couldn’t do was fit the surfaces so I got the professionals in to help.  Air was sucked in through the teeth, the head shook.  “What numpty fitted this lot in?  Look at the gaps”  …Well I was going to use filler.  “If you want the kitchen to look good in a years time, we’re gonna have to pull it all out and start again”.  I don;t have time to start again, new baby arrives tomorrow.  Grrrrr.

And it occurs to me that this is just like the real world of business.  “We don’t need the consultants in, we’ll do it all in-house”.  But just like my kitchen, inevitably things go wrong, deadlines get missed and you end up having to start again and pay more than you ever anticipated.   Moral of the story, if you are going to do something, do it right.  Know your limitations.  Get the experts in.  Trust them.

Standing room only

  • Friday, 28 April, 2006
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“The airlines have come up with a new answer to an old question: How many passengers can be squeezed into economy class?  A lot more, it turns out, especially if an idea still in the early stage should catch on: standing-room-only “seats.”” [source]

This is depressing.  It is bad enough standing on a train, I hate to imagine the experience of being crammed in a real cattle class flight, standing all the way.

What is missing in this proposition is the question of the customer experience?  Is there a customer appetite for this?  Have the airlines done market research to understand the demand for standing room only flights?  (And not just run a few focus groups but mocked up the experience  and gathering feedback on it).  It is all to easy to drive a business case based upon the extra sales volume that this shoddy experience will be expected to provide, but when it goes to market, will the demand match that predicted in the business case?

Some people say anything to recruit

  • Friday, 21 April, 2006
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Recieved an unsolicited mail yesterday from a consulting firm looking to recruit developers (not a well targetted mail for me to receive it). What can they offer?

“Unlike many “consulting” firms, we don’t hire and fire based on client and project demand; we’re interested in a long-term relationship with people that share our drive. We hire employees because WE like them, not on the say-so of our clients!!”

Hmmm. so that’s a sustainable business model that inspires confidence…

I could’ve told you that…

  • Friday, 21 April, 2006
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Sometimes you have to wonder about academics in their ivory towers of research.  At the Ergonomics Society Conference a paper was presented on a usability evaluation of MP3 players and virtual jukeboxes.  The researchers used “reparatory grid analysis”, a pretty cool technique that got subjects to create their own “constructs” by which evaluations were made.  I’m not knocking their work – it was a good peice of research,  what I do question is it’s worth.  The research took several months and signficant effort to complete.  And thier conclusions?  Of the dozen or so products evaluated the iPod and iTunes were top of the class in usability.  I could’ve told you that after a couple of hours playing with all the devices (backed up by “heursitcs” if you want a veil of research rigor behind the results).  But accademics don’t do the pragmatic.  They need validity and relaibility.  Business needs results fast that sometimes only pragmatism and a healthy disregard of scientific method gives.

Forget accessibility, think inclusivity

  • Wednesday, 19 April, 2006
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A couple of weeks ago I was at the Ergonomics Society Annual Conference where I presented a paper on Agile User Centred development. One of the themes of the conference was inclusive design. I think this is a concept that should gain greater prominence in software / web design.

We talk a lot about “accessibility”, and this to most organisations generally means adhering to W3C guidelines. It is driven from a fear of the Disability Discrimination Act. Yet from a business perspective there is not much of a business case for this stuff. And from a design perspective it can be a pain in the proverbial. -Being told that you can’t do all that 2.0 stuff because it relies on JavaScript (and therefore isn’t DDA compliant) stifles creativity and is guaranteed to annoy fired up developers.-

So here is where inclusive design makes things exciting. Forget about accessibility and think inclusivity and suddenly your perspective changes. You stop thinking solely about “disabled” users and broaden your horizons to a much wider audience of users. From the age of 40 the functional capability of the eye rapidly decreases; 25% of over 55s have reduced overall sensory / motor / cognitive capability which includes a declining memory. (Check out the work of Roger Coleman at The Helen Hamlyn Research Centre for more on this and inclusive design as a whole). Assumptions of what the younger population find easy in usability tests may not be valid for the over 60s.

Include the aging population into your design considerations and suddenly “accessibility” becomes “inclusivity”, a more compelling business case grows and new design decisions can be made. The “silver surfers” are generally considered to be time rich and cash rich. They are a segment unto themselves. So rather than trying to shoehorn “accessibility” into the design with the final design being compromised, isn’t it better to be inclusive and design for the needs of this different segment.

When a supermarket rolls out its in-town “metro” store format, they are not trying to shoehorn the “superstore” format into it. They design according to the needs of the task, customer and environment. Good interaction design considers these three things, but how often to we overlay “constraints” onto this holy trinity? We create personas, but how often to we create a 65 year old persona with myopia and reduced dextrous ability?

Talking of supermarkets, Tesco do inclusivity well with their website. Their retail website may not be DDA compliant, but they have an accessible alternative; a web format for the different segment. They offer a lightweight version of their site that is inclusive. And by the way, it is also muli-device compliant.

So let’s forget about making DDA compliant web sites, let’s forget about accessibility compromising the design. Let us offer compelling alternatives to the commonly excluded population, let us be inclusive rather than trying to satisfying everybody and delighting nobody.

Who is talking to who?

  • Tuesday, 18 April, 2006
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A successful agile project depends upon open channels of communication. Unfortunately this is all too often usually between different parts of the organisation that do not have a track record of talking. Getting a conversation between the business and IT can be a challenge, especially when the two sides don’t really know each other. The trouble is that when we roll up at a client we don’t really know who knows each other – what channels of communication are open and what are closed. what is the reality that the organisational chart doesn’t show (if you can get the org chart – not so long ago I worked with a client whose org chart was inaccessible – it was password protected on their intranet).

Social Network Analysis is a useful technique for identifying and visually representing the way that individuals are connected within a social structure. It can be as simple (does Jack communicate with Sarah) or complicated (is Jack a casual acquaintance of Sarah or a trusted friend). I’ve a feeling that when we first start working with a client who is new to agile, there should be an element of “organisational readiness” that would include SNA to identify the channels of communication. I’ve been playing with Agna as a tool or doing this, and am looking for others to play with.

Security nonsense

  • Monday, 10 April, 2006
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Passing through security at Gatwick airport this morning and there’s a sign showing forbidden items.  It includes razor blades.  By the x-ray machine there’s a bucket where people leave behind their forbidden items – there are plenty of safety razors in there.

Past security, airside and there’s a Boots.  And they sell razor blades.  Making a mockery of the security policy.

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