"Working through Screens" available as a book

"Working through Screens" is a remarkable achievement.  Jacob Burghardt of Flashbulb Interaction has produced clear, elegant material that supports the difficult bits of designing user interaction.  I haven't seen anything that even tries to cover the same topic.  In addition to being available as a .pdf download, it is available as a Lulu book.  Do have a look and buy the book. Well worth the investment.

User Feedback Device - the Form Response Form

The Document Design Center seems to have disappeared, which is a great shame. In one of their 'Simply Stated' newsletters, they had a Form Response Form, which may well be of use to people today. Enjoy.

Integration, resilience and specialization in meeting the user experience

Information Arbitrage has a very interesting post on vertical integration. It, and the comments, go wider than vertical integration, into what sorts of organizational structures are best able to support an experience economy and keep up with user needs and aspirations driving technology. The author, Roger Ehrenberg has moved from a firm belief in a tight organizational focus and specialization, citing Apple as an example of how having tight control over hardware and software enables them to provide a user experience not matched by Dell/Intel/Microsoft. His case for integration is based on speed. My suspicion is that flexibility in investment, freedom from IPR wrangles and the ability to move resources are more important than organizational speed. The need for flexibility and redundancy in supply chains is discussed. There are some very good comments.

The move to deglobalisation or reglobalisation with much less material travelling round the world (especially with slow steaming) looks quite likely.

HCD for dementia care

Gerry Robinson is doing two programmes for BBC2 on re-designing dementia care. The first one was wonderful and is on iplayer. The second one is 15th Dec 2009.

The revolution in dementia care is understanding the patient experience and looking at care from the patient's point of view, using an activity logging approach called care mapping. Apparently this is a radical thing to do. So it is, in terms of the' service provision' community.

The regulator, of course, is concerned with box-ticking and paperwork rather than the Quality In Use of care. It would not be hard to adapt HCD standards and apply them to service delivery such as dementia care, to the immense benefit of all parties.

He shows that good care is attractive to relatives and helps the bottom line in privately-run care homes.

Global cost of poor HCD in IT

Roger Sessions has a great post on the cost of IT failure. His estimate, including direct costs and lost opportunity costs, is USD 6.18 Trillion. Almost enough to make a banker interested.

How much of this could have been prevented by applying Human Centred Design , usability assurance? Perhaps half?

For the UK, his figures (in B USD) are
GDP 2260
Cost of IT failure 200

If usability represented about 10% of IT spend, then in the UK it would be a USD 6B business. So, at say 1.5 dollars to the pound, and GBP 150k per usability person (including overheads etc.) that would be 28,000 usability people in the UK. Some room for growth there, I suspect.

His numbers come from WITSA. I didn't find the document. A google search of the site found 1 reference to the word usability (not a particularly focused reference) and none to ergonomics.

User-centred design vs. expert-centred design

The rather tacky graphic above is an adaptation of a figure in Edgar H Schein's Process Consultation. I have used versions of it for about the last 30 years. I am posting it unimproved, prompted by annoyance at the abuse of the term user-centred design in a post by Liz Sanders that was revived in the Design for Service blog. She seems to think that user-centred design and participatory design are mutually exclusive. Not so. The ISO standards on Human Centred Design certainly support particpatory design.

For my money, the further right a project can move on the diagram above, the better.

Redesigning the Stop Sign

Needs no words from me. Tells it like it is.

Knowing your users vs. being nosey

I am learning Inkscape. Two reasons. Firstly, since Smartdraw and Fireworks got ruined, I have needed to find a decent vector graphics package that does not require too much learning. Secondly, when can I use sees .svg being usable in a year or two, and it will take me that long to learn the package. I heartily recommend it. Anyway, I wanted to buy the manual. This is not open source, and comes from InformIT. When I get to the checkout,I have the choice of answering 14 questions, including salary, age, gender, type of work, or 'just create my account'.

Obviously, I choose the latter. Amazon don't ask questions like that. It doesn't work. I use the 'contact us' to tell them it doesn't work, and get an email from PTG (Pearson Educational Customer Technical Support) (fortunately I opened it rather than treating it as spam) telling me I have to answer (some of) their questions if I want to buy the book, but not admitting they insist I have to answer all of them.

Inkscape needs to find a better publisher.

Pearson need to understand the difference between obsessive market data-gathering, and being customer-focused. In my experience, companies are quite likely to choose going bust over making such a change.

Customer focus, user-centredness - definitive statement

The man from Glenbuck, born this day 1913.

Augmented reality

Presselite has an iPhone app that combines information from google maps, GPS and the camera to give an augmented picture. The photo above shows a MacDonalds icon for the branch across the road. The image comes from a YouTube video that demonstrates the need for an anti-reflection coating on the iPhone. There was a time when my wife worked on military applications of this kind; the idea that you could just download them onto a phone was beyond imagining then.



Seero is a website for geo-broadcasting, which is an interesting development with lots of practical applications - the emergency services, for example.



However, my favourite is a mash-up by a Mr McQueen, of a car chase. He can drive, but has an odd spelling of Bullitt. Worth watching again just for the sound track. Purely in the interests of research, of course.

User Value

In a fairly heavy piece in IDJ, Suzan Boztepe has a very nice graphic on categories of user value, copied above. A mapping to QIU would not be difficult; her scheme adds considerable richness, and is clearly the result of a lot of thought and analysis.

User-Centred Innovation - reaching the laggards

User-centred innovation has been around for some years now (and will be one of the main themes of this blog). The diffusion of this approach appears to have become mature, to say the least, on the basis of a couple of recent developments.

NESTA have found the term and are taking baby steps in their lab; very welcome. If they can convince the public sector to listen to users for new ideas, it would be a big breakthrough.

The European Commission has recently finished a consultation on user-centred innovation (I know, chalk and cheese, but there we are). The consultation is based around a Commission Staff Working Document on 'design as a driver of user-centred innovation'. The document is a decent synopsis of policy and measurement issues. Their measurement problems could have been simplified immensely if they had known that there are International Standards aimed at doing much of what they want. I suspect that the authors were briefed to try and combine design-driven and user-driven approaches, which makes for some confusing writing in places.

Still, nice to see that user-centred innovation is no longer solely the province of smart companies.