April 19, 2005, 1:17 pm

Those that “can’t be bothered to vote” or think “they’re all the same” and won’t be trotting down to the community hall to pop their ballot in the paper miss the point. We shout and dance about being a “democratic” country and flog this ideal to anyone who will listen (and a few who don’t want to listen as well). In this country people have died for the vote; no more… the only thing that many seem to vote for now is big brother or pop idol. This strikes me as a bit rude. Apathy and laziness are no excuses for not exercising your democratic right. Even if they are all the same there is something you can do to register your protest. That is spoil your ballot paper. Be creative, make the returning officer smile with a well crafted cartoon covering the boxes. It is the least you can do if you “think they are all the same”. In a moment of civic duty I investigated setting up a web site dedicated to spoiling the paper, but alas all the domain names had been taken. So here is someone elses call to action… http://www.spoilyourvote.co.uk/

April 19, 2005, 10:43 am

Just had a call from a colleague in the States about my pending trip to do some user experience work on the west coast. it’s 10.30am. I go to www.timeanddate.com and take a look a PST. It’s 2.30 in the morning! Doens’t he sleep? This isn’t the first time this is happened, often I will be on work calls, or have IM conversations with people in the US at a sensible time of the morning for me, but a stupid time for them! Is work really that important?

April 18, 2005, 2:38 pm

I’m thinking about buying a Lear jet. I’ve got a million or so in the bank and I want to buy a plane and I’m told that Lear Jets are pretty good. I’m going to want it customised to my requirements. I’m told they can do that. What am I going to do? Hand over my requirements with a large pile of cash and hope I get what I want?

I’m told there is a more agile way where I can watch my jet built bit my bit and work iteratively with Lear to develop it as we go along. That’s better, but hell, if I’m going to spend my millions I at least want to sit in a Lear jet seat before I part with my cash. I want to sit in a cockpit and see what it could be like. I want to know that the Lear jet is going to be what I want. What I Really Want.

Let’s take a tangent. Let’s forget about Lear jets, (could never dream of affording one working at ThoughtWorks anyway). Close your eyes and think of a car. Picture yourself sitting in the car. Hear the music playing, build up the experience of the car in your mind. Got it? Great. I can guarantee it is different to mine. Everyone’s picture is going to be different. We are all thinking of a car but our models are totally different. Let’s try and capture the model so we can share it. We write a story, it’s a blue car, it’s a large car, it’s a country road, blah, blah, blah… our mental models of the car are beginning to converge, but we are still not quite there. My car is still different to yours. We could spend more time describing the car, defining it in detail but we don’t do that. We don’t have time for that.

How about if I do this…

http://www.dancingmango.com/sadbus/img/15window.jpg

Suddenly we all have a common frame of reference. We no longer have to think, we no longer have to digest and make meaning out of words, we have a visual expression; the picture speaks a thousand words. And that is what the prototype does. It allows everyone to see a vision of what we are designing, to comment on it, to add to it or to change it quickly and at minimal cost or pain. There is less ambiguity and everyone has a common frame of reference.

Prototyping is a fundamental first stage in physical product design. Cars, buildings, a toothbrush, all will have been subject to physical model mock ups to test and validate the physical design. Polystyrene, clay, Lego, cheap and simple materials for creating visual representations of the final product. That visual representation can be used to share with all stakeholders to gain buy-in to the approach, with the obvious caveat that it not the final product, rather a step towards it.

The prototype need not be complex. In the first instances it can be rough pen and ink scribbles. The simpler the prototype the better. The essence is that we have a tangible visual model to nod our heads against and say “yeah” that is what we think we want. So next time before you go head long into the project, how about taking some time to think about what those stories will look like. And maybe get a GUI guy in to help.

March 21, 2005, 5:35 pm

India was christened over the weekend. With no cooker to cook food we turned to Marks and Spencers to handle the catering. I arrived at the Banstead store to be told that they did not have the salads I had asked for. The store manager was full of apologies – and was eager to right her companies wrong. She substituted the salad (free of charge) and was exceedingly pleasant in the way she went about things. I was impressed. And left feeling positive about M and S.

Sunday morning and I was in ASDA (ugchhh) buying fresh french bread for the afternoon. I’d also bought a large serving bowl. The young geeky guy on the checkout tried to make light conversation.
“A-ha, you like lots of Weetabix.”
“Eh?”

And he kept on, trying to make a pun about the size of the bowl and breakfast cereals. He tried to engage me in humour but failed. He didn’t know his audience. I left ASDA, holding it even lower in my esteem.

April 1, 2005, 12:39 pm
Is this bad news for development
A long time ago, when I was working in the development business I applied for a scholarship with the World Bank. They rejected me (ho hum). If I was working there I’m sure I would have grave concerns for the new president, Paul Wolfowitz .

He is a signatory to the Project for the New American Century, a call for America “to increase defense spending significantly if we are to carry out our global responsibilities today and modernize our armed forces for the the future. Has the leopard really have changed his spots? We shall have to see. how long before the “war on terror” creeps into world Bank project criteria? A gloomy thought.

March 15, 2005

So we are now three weeks into our new house.

The things you discover.

Funny smell in the kitchen. Smells like the drains. Take up the covers and Lindsey fills and empties the sink. No water comes through. Must be a blockage. Flush the toilet, water runs down the soil stack that the kitchen outlet shares, and flows down the drains. Hmmmm. Water isn’t quite making it from the sink to the drain. Repeated emptying of the sink and a small puddle appears on the floor. Hmmmm. Remove the footplate on the cupboards and see that the space under the cupboards is a couple of inches under water. Hmmmm. Pipework is hidden behind the cupboards so have to knock them to pieces. A spur from the waste pipe has been left uncapped. Waste water is just gushing out and onto the floor. I remove the lino and the hardboard covering is sodden. I remove all the lino in the kitchen and the whole floor is sodden. Up comes the hardboard and a number of floor boards. Luckily the wood is not rotten. We are living in a kitchen with boards up, drying out. Ho hum. Did I mention that the vendors took the oven, despite it being on the inventory. We are cooking using the van’s calour gas stove. Nice. We can only presume the previous owners didn’t use the sink, just using the dishwasher – the waste water problem only occurred when a large volume of water flushed down the pipe. Great. Getting architects in – looking to build an extension to incresase the size of the kirtchen. So until then we are living in a horrible kitchen. Funny smell in kitchen is now disappearing.

To be replaced by…

Funny noise in the loft.

The pitter patter of tiny feet. Assuming it is squirrels. Pest control came around on Monday and put poison down. Lindsey just rung saying it sounds like there is an army up there. Spoke to pest control Arrr, that is a good sign. They go mental when they eat the poison. Should be dead in 24 hours. Dead and rotting? I thought they’d use new dessicating poison. Apparently not. We’ve got a loft conversion. Will be hard to remove the bodies. Hmmmm.

March 14, 2005
It was back in December when I first downloaded this blogger to my site. Since then I’ve been playing with creative ideas, style sheets and getting hung up on process rather than content. Enough. I’ll leave it vanilla- the branding can come later (as can the navigation back into the main site. ho hum. So in March I commence scribbling. I’ll start with a question posed at a meeting last week.

I met a potential client yesterday in a sales meeting. The client was looking to update the GUI on the employee facing application they’d developed. My turn came to speak and a stream of consciousness gushed out.

I should have caveated my thoughts. I didn’t. I told him how it is.

His application GUI was crap. Bottom line, it was difficult to use. It was supposed to support users through business processes, yet it was constructed around the application architecture and the database structure. Little thought had been paid to the daily needs and goals of the end users.

As I wrapped up my damning thoughts on the interface the potential client spoke.

“Anything good about it?” he asked, through gritted teeth, steam coming out of his ears.

Ummm. I’d not really looked for the good when I’d played with it that morning.

“The colour and general aesthetic is quite nice” I ventured.

And then he asked the question. “Why is it that you usability guys see things that no-one else does? I’ve only heard the things you have said about my application from one other person. Another UI specialist”.

That’s a good question. The answer I suppose lies in the fact that usability people have sat with countless users and observed how shocking interfaces can be, and how much difficulty users can have when things are not structured around thier needs and motivations. Maybe it is beauce UI people aspire to a utopian vision of software. Software that is invisible; that empowers and enables. Where others will put up with an awkward navigation, complex steps through a process we will say no! It doesn’t have to be this way….