links for 2006-03-31

links for 2006-03-30

My Tabs Teach Me Things

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210-Open-Tabs
Originally uploaded by meriwilliams.

I have learnt three things today from this little dialog:

  1. My laptop MIGHT just be running slow because of Firefox
  2. Kottke is a complete lightweight ;-)
  3. I’m taking continuous partial attention to a whole new level now

links for 2006-03-28

links for 2006-03-27

links for 2006-03-26

The Problem With Mobile Phone Interface Design

Over on SvN there’s been some discussion about the ideal mobile phone UI and how it hasn’t really been designed yet.

I imagine the market in the USA may be completely different, but from what I know about the South African and UK mobile phone markets, I think that the lack of progress in simplifying the user interface design of mobile phones may in fact be deliberate.

The reality is that pretty much all brands of mobile phones have their unique brand of user interface. The usability isn’t great in ANY of them — pick up a strange phone and half the time you can’t even work out how to make a call! Some people view this as a real limitation and only really learn how to use a very few functions of their phones. More often, especially amongst younger people, a LOT of time is invested in working out how to use the phone, finding all the hidden little features that are badly (or not at all!) documented. Learning how to use your new phone is almost like a game.

With each successive phone, however, it can get very tedious to learn how to do the bog-standard things (making a call, sending a text) all over again. Even those who like the challenge would prefer to be finding NEW functionality rather than rediscovering the wheel every time they buy a phone. This is what leads to self-imposed brand lockin.

In the UK, there are many people who won’t even consider moving away from the brand of mobile phone that they first bought (and invested the time to learn how to operate). There are Nokia people, Motorola people and Ericsson people, but very few people move brand, unless there is a really distinctive new feature to move across for. One such example was the introduction of the Motorola Razr — the thin shape was so desirable that many people crossed the brand line to try the new phone.

When you consider that the cellphone manufacturers have actually managed to get people to self-impose brand lockin, it’s hardly surprising that they continue to keep the UI divergent and non-intuitive! After all, this has previously been a great strategy in other markets — you can’t tell me that there’s any other reason that usability lock-in to explain the prevalence of Lotus Notes?

links for 2006-03-24

links for 2006-03-23

SXSWi 2006: Day One Retrospective

The first day of SXSWi this year was a little overwhelming. Perhaps I was still recovering from the Geeks with Guns episode; perhaps there were just that many more people here this year. Nevertheless, it was great to see so many folks coming together. There also seemed to be fewer people attached to their laptops this year — although I was an exception to this rule. For the record though, I don’t even have wireless so I really was just taking notes!

Knitting Tag Clouds for Grandma — Beyond Folksonomies

The official site for this panel can be found here and my full notes are here

Key Thoughts:

  • FOLKSONOMY — bottom-up way for organising information, more general than a taxonomy
  • TAXONOMY — formal, top-down, specific way of organising information
  • Lot of talk about taking folksonomies to the next level and developing into something more generally useful. The chaps on the panel seemed to think this needed technological innovation; the ladies disagreed
  • Eventual consensus was that we really need to expand the use of tagging/folksonomies beyond the geek community and into the general public for the next level to be reached
  • Barrier is usability problems with current tagging implementations — everyone is focusing on growing their own tagging systems, without enough standardization or improvement

Quotes

  • “I’m Liz Lawley and my blog is not my identity!”
  • “This will be more an exploration than an exposition”

Dan Gilbert: How to do Precisely the Right Thing at All Possible Times

This guy was fantastic and I took a lot of notes — you can find them here.

  • Expected Happiness = (odds of gain) x (value of gain)
  • This formula is all you need to work out how to do precisely the right thing at all possible times — but our brains aren’t wired to do this well.
  • People are prone to errors in the calculation of odds, because we decide how LIKELY something is based on how easily we can ENVISION it
  • We are also prone to miscalculating the value of gain, because we are basically built to detect CHANGE — we compare with the past (how much did it use to cost?) rather than the possible (what else could I do with this money?)
  • We also make mistakes when there is greater variety (more options increases the chance of not making a decision at all!) or when things are further away (in space or time)
  • Basically our brains have evolved a long way, but not enough to deal with the new world :: “We are not stupid, but we are ancient”
  • Application of science is what can help us make the right logical decision

Cyberplace: Online in Offline Places

This was essentially a ubicomp panel, although not billed as such. It was definitely a lot more practically focused than many ubicomp discussions I’ve seen. The key point was that we need to be able to tie information (online) to location (offline).

The panelists essentially just discussed the various products they had created or worked on and the positives and negatives of the experience. The inability of cellphones to really pinpoint their own locations was a frequent bitch. The value of tying online information to offline places was obvious — although personally I’m not sure how you’d distinguish between the “plaque” style of info and the graffiti … or accommodate the people who sometimes WANT to look at the graffiti!

My full notes can be found here.

Quotes

  • “Although it seems really stupid from a safety perspective, the first thing that people do is to tag their houses: “I live here!”" — Michael
  • “Dodgeball makes me sad because I’m usually at home and all my friends seem to be out leading these interesting lives” — Heath

Designing for Global & Local Social Play — the Secret Identity game

Most of the session time was taken up with the Secret Identity game — everyone had to think of a secret and then we all went around the room trading secrets with people. The intent was that you treated each new secret as your own. At the end, people wrote their secrets on a big green sticker and stuck it on thier backs. There was a very interesting shuffle around the room, whilst everyone tried to see everyone else’s backs!

My full notes are here.

  • The dynamic of global and local is interesting — the web is global, but often we are more interested in local concepts : connecting to people we already know, finding out about the places we live in
  • Play doesn’t just mean gaming — it can mean “trying things on”, identity play and so on
  • New situations are a good opportunity for play. When you move to a new location, approaching finding out about your new surroundings as play means that you can safely explore
  • Interesting concept of “Collapsing Context” — more likely to find people you know in your online communities too. Analogous to “small world”, I suppose. Specific example is of Liz playing World of Warcraft alongside her kids

Quotes

  • “You have permission to push back on things because it is play” — danah
  • “Packing and unpacking is a process of renewal” — Irina
  • “I’m not a grad student – I’m a professor and have tenure, so I didn’t do ANY research before turning up!” — Liz
  • “Your son is acting inappropriately in the guild right now — can you please logon and sort him out?” — Liz

links for 2006-03-22

SXSWi 2006: Geeks with Guns



Ron Displays the HK
Originally uploaded by meriwilliams.

Whenever we come to Texas, we’re not just attending SXSWi, but also visiting some good friends who live here in Austin. They happen to own Pasta & Co which makes the best fresh pasta in Austin (and probably the world). The pasta-maker at this fine establishment also happens to collect guns — everything from handguns to shotguns to assault rifles. He also builds sniper rifles, on occasion. So whenever we come to Texas, we try to make a little time to enjoy the pasta, the steak and the guns, as well as the fine company of the geeks.

Last year, we took Simon along with us. The outpouring of amazement and delight at the photoset on Flickr resulted in us widening the invitation this year to include some other geeks. Molly, Andy, Yvonne, MJ and Ian all answered the call and came along. We met at the pasta shop, for a quick gun safety briefing. Anyone looking in at the shop would probably have assumed there was some sort of arms deal going on — on one of the kitchen tables salads were being prepared, on the next the differences between an AK47, an HK and a Berretta were being explained!

We piled into the trucks (everyone seems to drive a truck in Texas!) and headed for Red’s Shooting Range. What all the geeks seemed to find hilarious was the stops that were made along the way — Ron went home to grab some AK ammo and Sheryl made a pasta delivery en route. That’s just the way it works, I say! Once inside we were joined by MJ’s friend Jackson and the real fun began.

I won’t bore you with a blow by blow (or shot by shot) account of who shot what and when — rather I’ll summarise as follows:

  • Everyone was very brave and pretty much tried all the guns. Even the assault rifles. There’s a full list of what was available here
  • Andy and MJ (both gun virgins) showed remarkable courage and talent — Andy in particular even impressed Ron with his innate skill!
  • Everyone seemed to have a blast!
  • The ATF proved that they are a force to be reckoned with!
  • MJ proved that she is infinitely talented at photo composition
  • Ron and Sheryl both showed immense patience and generosity in helping us to experience this!

On Monday we are going to be taken some Aussies along for a shooting experience. Since Friday a bunch of people have approached me about being involved next year — largely due to Andy’s gushing recounting of events, I think! If you are interested in coming along to Geeks with Guns 2007, then please leave a comment here and we’ll see what we can organise. I’m not making any promises — due to the obvious issue of safety, we may not be able to do this in a big group — but we’ll see what we can do!

Denying Differences

Natalie has written an excellent article about women in technology and more specifically female developer involvement in the Linux community. She makes a bunch of great points (so go read her post!), but the one that I find particularly interesting is this:

“One huge difference that has a significant effect could be that women are less prone to self promotion; while this modesty trait may be good in polite society, it doesn’t work well in the geek world. Men are quite happy to promote their ideas, share there excitement and unashamedly display the cool things they have made, this is a great thing and I’m not generalising without exception, there are many women who are able to overcome this and be proud of what they have done. Myself and many others I spoke with are less forthcoming with our enthusiasm and this may well be to our disadvantage.”

This is exactly why denying difference doesn’t help anyone. If you assume that men and women are the same, then by the same token, if someone ISN’T extolling the virtues of their latest work, then they must not have done anything interesting. However, if you accept that it’s OK for different people to approach the world in different ways, then it’s always worth digging a little. Grand self-promotion doesn’t always equate to competence … and self-effacement or downplaying also doesn’t equate to a lack of achievement!

Given that SXSWi is starting on Friday, I have some challenges for those of you who will be attending, similar to the one I set for Ryan a while back:

  • TALK to women at SXSWi — and in the same way as you take men’s bragging with a pinch of salt, if someone is being particularly demure about their accomplishments, try to dig a little deeper. Or just make a mental note to check out some of their work and form a proper opinion based on that.
  • Don’t assume the partners are “along for the ride” — as Nat rightly points out, a lot of the time geek partners are geeks in their own right! Hell, I’m the one working as an IT manager, but Elly (architect by day, web designer by night) has significantly more web design talent. Since she’s pretty quiet, you might not realise that unless you actually tried to talk to her.
  • Don’t artificially level — it is much more insulting to women if you add a blog you’re completely uninterested in to your blogroll, or endorse a woman whose work you don’t respect/value, or swap business cards with women at a conference just so you can hit on them, than if you have an all-male blogroll. Step away from the statistics and think about what you’re really doing.

So We’re In Texas

We’re already in Austin, visiting with our friends before SXSWi. We flew on Friday and enjoyed a great flight, given that we were on a 777 (max capacity 280) with only 79 other passengers. Plenty of room to stretch out for once!

Since then we’ve mainly just been chilling, enjoying the lack of snow (especially as this is happening pretty close to home) and the fantastic food. We even managed to fit in some BBQ yesterday on our way out to San Angelo.

Looking ahead, we’re going to be teaching more geeks to shoot (as we did last year with Mr Willison) , breaking Brad with bread, generally hanging out at SXSWi causing trouble, trying hard to win cool stuff and then getting inked again by the wonderful Karen Slafter. Our lovely hosts (who incidentally make the best fresh pasta in all of Austin) have also managed to score us some VIP tickets to Texas Roller Derby so we will be at the expo bout at the Convention Center later next week as well!

For those who are going to be at SXSWi, whether we met you last year or not, we look forward to seeing y’all :-)