I was going to explain but Carl Kessler sums it up rather nicely here:

Usability is more than a pretty face (or a good user interface)

(Yay! Someone else who gets annoyed when people assume usability == user interface.)

As a long-time user of the Gallery software for our photo gallery, and having recently totally fallen out with Gallery 2 (the software, not the people who I’m sure are lovely), I am just a little bit excited to read about the all-new Gallery 3 version which is now in its alpha release cycle. In particular, this insightful paragraph which nicely sums up the fundamental problems with Gallery 2:

Gallery 2 does many things for many people and this diversity has made it unhealthy. The code base is too complex and over-engineered because it was designed to fix every single thing that was wrong with Gallery 1 (Second System Effect) leaving its scope hazy and broad. And while the Gallery 2 code supports DB2, MSSQL, and Oracle we don’t actually have anyone on the team that knows much about them, so there is nobody to fix bugs or add features in these areas. Gallery 2 was designed from the bottom up with architecture and design patterns first, so the User Interface and User Experience need a ton of work! This is shown by the huge number of strings and documentation that need to be provided in the product for people to understand it, and multiple attempts for tech writers to document Gallery 2 have all failed. Lastly, the product is immensely complex which forces developers to take months or years to get up to speed. This makes it very hard to attract new developers, and that makes us sad.

(Gallery 3 Begins)

This paragraph, in its analysis of where they went wrong in their approach to designing Gallery 2, could easily be applied to numerous other pieces of software; it epitomises the approach taken by so many software developers (both Open Source and proprietary):

• Not clearly identifying who the software is for and what they want to be able to do with it. And not sticking with that definition, with the result that the software tries to become all things to all people and fails everyone by being too complex.
• Reacting to, and implementing, every user request indiscriminately. Yes, listen to users but do not be led by their requests. Users are not designers. They just want to do what they want to do and don’t really care what other users want to do. Some requests will conflict with other requests. Which is why you must have a clear understanding of who your users are, what their skills are, and what their goals in using your software are. Only then can you make informed decisions about which requests should be absorbed and which should be ignored. You can’t please everyone but, as long as you know who they are and you’re careful to design for them, you can please the people who you want to use the software.
• Making the software difficult to maintain and support. Aside from lacking contributors to the project, it increases the risk that when updates are released, they break other parts of the software because no one in the development team really understands how everything hangs together.
• Expecting documentation to paper the cracks in the software’s design. Documentation (not just the manuals but the labels on the User Interface or the titles in a wizard) has an important place within the whole product but always check honestly for whether the documentation is really necessary or whether it’s just covering up for a dodgy bit of design.
• Assuming that User Interface is the same as User Experience. The User Interface (UI) is only a part of the User Experience. One example in both Gallery 1 and 2 (though it’s way worse in Gallery 2), is the expectation that users implicitly understand Unix-style permissions. The UI didn’t help but the underlying concept of Unix-style permissions makes the software (and the UI) so much more complicated than it needs to be. (Gallery 2 was way worse because I still can’t work out how to set permissions – and I do, to an extent, understand Unix-style permissions.)

I think it’s really cool that Gallery have openly recognised and acknowledged the problems with Gallery 2 and what they need to do to make Gallery 3 successful. The really hard part now, though, is to make sure that the development team don’t fall back into their Gallery 2 ways of thinking. That’s not to disparage the development team; it’s just hard to adopt new approaches. But it will get easier with practice. The clearly stated Gallery 3 list of priorities is encouraging and, while I’ve not looked at their progress in the alpha yet, I look forward to the first release.

As you may have heard, I recently acquired an OLPC laptop. At some point I am going to write up my experiences with the OLPC/Sugar software so far (in the meantime, to uphold a promise I made, here are some useful tips for using and setting up software on the OLPC). For now, here are my thoughts on browsing the Web from the OLPC Browse activity.

The killer bit of the Firefox browser, IMHO, was the ability to open multiple Web pages in separate tabs within the same browser window. Of course, internet Explorer now does multiple tabs (in a rainbow of shades) but back in my Windows (pre-IE7) days, I frequently did parallel browsing of websites by simply opening each webpage in a new window. The advantage of multiple tabs is that you don’t end up with a clutter of browser windows all over your taskbar.

I suspect that multiple tabs in browser windows, and (in Firefox at least) being able to bookmark all the tabs at once, has slightly altered how people browse.

Opening in a new window set me off down the path of parallel browsing but multiple tabs ensured I got there. Especially as websites got more interactive and state-sensitive (meaning that you can’t switch to another website then click ‘Back’ to return to your internet banking session). And I got less patient waiting for pages to load (ironic seeing as connection speeds have increased).

So now I’ve started using my OLPC to browse the web occasional when my other laptop is unavailable. This is an interesting, and slightly frustrating, experience.

The Sugar interface on the OLPC basically does away with the idea of windowing environments. That is, you don’t have a desktop on which to drag around and switch between windows. instead, each application (known as an ‘activity’) runs moreorless full-screen, like this:

This means a return to linear browsing. in some ways it’s a liberating experience in that I read what I want to read of the current website or page before moving on the the next. And when reading blogs and the like, I can always click ‘Back’ later. In many ways, though (and i’m a great believer in computers supporting user-behaviour, and not the other way round), it’s just frustrating.

For example, in writing this blog-post, I couldn’t easily open my blog or Andy’s OLPC tips page to check that I used the correct URL in my links. Nor could I quickly check my usage of a word in dictionary.com. I can, and sometimes do, open other instances of the Browse activity – essentially opening in a new window but with a little more effort – but more than three instances, I’ve found, tends to crash the whole lot.

Now, the OLPC and its software isn’t designed for me; it’s an education tool for children in developing countries. On the other hand, how soon before the older or more tech-savvy children start to want to browse in parallel – especially when internet access gets more ubiquitous?

I have resisted putting Firefox on my OLPC but tonight I’m sorely tempted…

At the beginning of September, I went to the HCI 2007 conference at Lancaster University (in the North of England).

I was Chairing the HCI Practice Day (the Thursday) of the conference so it was all a little bit hectic but still, as usual, a lot of fun.

This year, in line with the times I guess, there was a fair number of papers on Second Life and other virtual environments, including one about BDSM in Second Life. In fact, there was definitely a bit of a trend this year for erotic HCI… (that, as a statement, either makes HCI cool, or it just goes to show that academics can make *anything* boring ).

There also seemed to be a fair amount about emotions – that is, how we engage with technology; eg why we happily waste an entire evening on Facebook or watching random videos on YouTube. Web2.0 was also in there, of course.

There were also some papers on bluetooth, several (as usual) on eye-tracking, and stuff about Accessibility, usability of the Web, methods of evaluating interface usability, and so on.

IBMers featured quite heavily in the HCI Practice Day (as you might imagine):

• Mark Farmer (IBM Warwick) introduced the IBM Task Modeler tool that he develops (the link takes you to the Task Modeler page on Alphaworks where you can download a copy to try yourself).
• Colin Bird (Master Inventor and Information Architect at IBM Hursley) followed up Mark’s introduction with a presentation about how you can (and we do) use Task Modeler to support information architecture: to model user tasks and create the navigation for information centres.
• Ben Fletcher (Senior Inventor at IBM Hursley) did a great presentation on deafblind technologies, including the possibilities of virtual worlds in supporting deafblind (and deaf or blind) users.
• Me (Technical Author at IBM Hursley) – I was raconteur for Alan Dix‘s panel discussing the HCI issues in Web2.0 technologies.

The keynote speaker for HCI Practice Day was Jared Spool (the usability guru who isn’t Jakob Nielsen – and is much better and more credible, IMO) who moved heaven and high water (kind-of) to get here. He did a fantastic presentation that was very very funny and entertaining while being relevant and interesting too. He also attended as many of the other conference sessions as he could and participated by asking questions and making suggestions.

In fact, all the keynote speakers were great this year. Sometimes keynotes fly in, do their thang, then collect their expenses and go. All three (the others being Stephen Payne from Manchester Uni and Elizabeth Churchill from Yahoo!) all got involved in the conference, especially Elizabeth who was able to stay for the whole conference and seemed to be on every discussion panel going!

You can get the full proceedings of HCI 2007 (and, at some point, previous HCI conferences too) from the BCS eWIC site.

As a delegate, I also got the full proceedings as pdfs on a funky little USB drive, which I like.

It’s not long now until the call for papers will go out for HCI 2008 (to be held in Liverpool, City of Culture). If this blog is still active by then, I’ll post the call here. I encourage you to get involved in HCI – it’s more than user interface design or usability; it’s also about being innovative in how to design technologies for human beings.

Piccies here: www.flickr.com/photos/tags/hci2007/

I’m a newbie to Flickr and it took me some time to work out what exactly I wanted to do with it. I created a group for conference delegates to upload their photos to. But, having just finished uploading my photos, I think it’s easier just to stick with tagging. Happily, there seem to be several people who have used the same tag ‘hci2007′ for all their HCI 2007 conference photos on Flickr. So if you follow the link above you can find them easily.

Including pics from Elizabeth Churchill who was one of our three excellent keynotes. The others were Stephen Payne and Jared Spool (Jared outdid my hopes and expectations by being incredibly funny and entertaining while still being very relevant and interesting.). All three were excellent not only because they did great presentations but because they attended as much of the rest of the conference as they could and actively participated in sessions, in particular Elizabeth who seemed to be on every panel going!

Oh, and here’s The Purple Press blog…