Archive for September 2006

I was enjoying a quiet evening at home, thinking about doing work (but not actually doing it), when suddenly the fire alarm went off in my building. I always say that you haven’t really lived in a place until you’ve evacuated because of a fire alarm, and it holds true in this case. It’s always interesting to see who actually responds to fire alarms, what they do when they’re outside, and if people care enough to heed the warnings.

Well, it turned out to be a false alarm (as if you’re surprised). The culprit, it turns out, is this guy right here:

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OK, so I partially felt bad for the anti-Google sentiment in the last post, but I’ve also been thinking about this topic for quite a while. So what better way to handle both issues at once than to talk about what I like about GMail.

While there’s a lot of things that I think they’re doing right (and maybe some things that I’m not a huge fan of), the best element behind GMail is the conversation view. If you aren’t using GMail (seriously? Are there people like that out there? Cuz I have 99 invites), the notion is that each email thread is represented as one email with multiple messages. Here’s an example from a conversation from HCI Methods class…

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One of the themes at the Microsoft company meeting was the push to use Microsoft products. “Get rid of that Google search bar, and make Live search your homepage!”

That’s all well and good, but I think people are missing an opportunity when they correct people who say “Just Google it.” Sure it’s recommending a particular brand, but you’re missing the bigger opportunity! While “Google” being added to the dictionary as a term for searching shows Google’s popularity, it also bodes negatively for their brand – exactly why they’re discouraging the use of their name as a synonym for web searching.

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Man oh man, so many interesting stories from the conference, I feel bad leaving the geography post up front and center for so long. Big big study at work next week, but I should get back to some stories soon. In the meantime, waxing poetic on features.

What matters to the software consumer today? Pine and Gilmore published a book on the Experience Economy, which was scripture for Dr. Wagner’s students back at UNO. Applying the notion of an experience economy to software is a big part of the reason why job titles in usability are changing from “Usability Engineer” and “Interaction Designer” to “User Experience Researcher” and “User Experience Designer.” OK, so that’s the case at Microsoft, but I see it happening elsewhere too.

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The concept of eurocentrism is well established as the notion that the white, European way of life, culture, etc. is central to consideration, and an inability or unwillingness to look at other cultures or viewpoints. Sadly, that idea can’t even begin to hold a torch to what I call US-centrism, which consists of the narrow understanding (rather, awareness) of other countries held by US citizens. Eddie Izzard said it best: “Do you know there are other countries?”

Quick. Name the Northern European countries in the picture below, from left to right. Here’s a hint: I just spent a week at one of them.

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At the Mobile HCI conference this week, the poster that Samantha and I worked on won the Best Poster award. If you didn’t get to see it yet, here it is zoomed way out. The file is large, so you’ll have to take my word for it that it’s really nice. =P

The Best Poster judging was an impromptu competition, announced Thursday morning in the session before the formal poster session. “Please take time to look at the posters over lunch. You can then vote for your favorite poster as part of the Best Poster competition.”

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Today is my birthday (yay!) and if you’ve been reading, I’m celebrating over in Finland. Yay!

September birthdays seem to be eerily common, and I was shocked to find out that another MHCIer shared my birthday once I got to Pittsburgh two years ago (Happy Birthday Hari!). It makes you wonder, just how common is that? Well, if you haven’t done this exercise in statistics class, you should do it at your next party.

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Everyone has been freaking out today (seriously) about the new Mini-Feed feature on Facebook… so much so that less than 24 hours after the release, the Facebook staff had to write a retraction to try and compensate for all of the bad feedback they were getting.

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I was walking down a stairwell at work today, and there were two employees who I didn’t know standing at the foot of the stairs, looking at a laptop screen. When they saw me walking down the stairs (like ya do), they started whispering and closed the laptop screen so I couldn’t see.

Like it was on my agenda?

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Prepare to be underwhelmed. The desktop of the future (short vid, medium vid, full vid) looks a lot like Mac OS X. By the desktop of the “future,” they must mean the next year or so, because the one interesting, functional new feature that I can find is the concept of putting multiple desktops on the face of a cube, so you can have windows on multiple, identical desktops. I say the “future” is coming in the next year or so because that feature is exactly what Mac is striving for in OS X.5 with Spaces.

As a Mac user (don’t tell my employer), I think the desktop shown in the videos is cool. But is that really all we can do in the future? One cool new idea (spaces) and a bunch of meaningless aesthetic improvements (a physics engine for moving windows and “wrapping” windows around multiple desktops)? What can we do to account for larger screen sizes? What about a new device to interact with the computer instead of a mouse and keyboard?