If you’re in the UK you may have seen this in The Guardian today, but if not - check out this this article by Charlie Brooker. A great takedown of the Samsung E900… As he puts it: “The whole thing is the visual equivalent of a moronic clip-art jumble sale poster designed in the dark by a myopic divorcee experiencing a freak biorhythmic high.”
Love his choice of words!
In this BusinessWeek article, Jakob Nielsen calls the OLPC UI design approach “reckless” because they have done no user testing so far. Meanwhile, John Maeda bizzarely praises process as “…the Steve Jobs method. […] You don’t use focus groups. You just do it right.”
You just do it right? …You just do it right? … That’s a little overconfident don’t you think? You are talking about children’s lives and huge chunks of the education budgets of governments that don’t have money to spare. And no self-respecting UCD practitioner would use focus groups in this context anyway. Imagine trying to explain the UI to a bunch of kids in a room. The only way to test it is to put it in the target environment, and look at the way it’s adopted.
What exactly would the UI designers have had to loose from doing a bit of field testing every month from the outset? They had everything to gain and nothing to loose. After all, the UI is hugely adventurous:
Innovation is a wonderful thing but you have to reality check: are these concepts really the best approach for the user requirements? And have they been implemented in the best possible way? They are making a lot of assumptions - it’s a big gamble.
I’ve yet to hear about the plans they have for releasing UI updates for the OLPC. Since when in the history of computing did version 1 of anything turn out to be the panacea of good design? At least when you buy version 1 of something, you know what you’re in for. The kids wont have a choice.
My chum Mel works for a company called Headstar who - from the one’s I’ve met - seem like thoroughly decent chaps. They describe themselves thusly:
“Headstar is an independent publishing house and events organiser based in Brighton focused on technology and social issues. It publishes two free email newsletters,
the fortnightly E-Government Bulletin on electronic public services, and ‘e-democracy’ and the monthly E-Access Bulletin, on access to new technologies by people with impaired vision, although this is soon to expand its remit to all disabilities.”
Well they’ve decided to leap head first the exciting new world of blogging with their E-Access blog:
http://www.headstar.com/eablive
Go and say hello and say that I sent you.
Ok I acknowledge that I’m no security expert and this probably isn’t a major security risk, but do you recognize this scenario?
You’re on some two-bit website trying to log in. Maybe its a royalty free photo bank, maybe a discussion board, or some random online game.You’re in a hurry, not thinking too hard, and suddenly find you’ve tapped in the username and password for your email account, or - even worse - your work VPN. It comes up as “incorrect username / password” so then you go on to try another likely candidate - and then another again. By the end of it you’ve hammered in pretty much every username and password you’ve used in the last 10 years.
Have you ever considered the possibility that this site is storing all the rejected username and passwords? They may be storing them with or without nefarious purposes, but either way, it’s a genuine possibility. It seems reasonably possible that if you were a nasty person, this kind of list would be useful for a dictionary attack. I’d love to be enlightened by an expert on this stuff.
Password security seems to be primarily a human problem… I’m no expert but I’m really intrigued to read more about this…
The Help Desk (via My Confined Space - be warned some of the other stuff there isn’t particularly safe for work - or particularly good - but the video clip is a corker)
The Museum of Lost Interactions (via Boing Boing)
and finally - and with slightly more information content - How much control should our users have?
I’ve recently been talking to a number people about the “release early, release often” mantra. If you’re working on a new web app for the mass consumer market, be very wary. “Release early, release often” was written with open source software in mind.
If your first public release is too raw and too hard to use, there’s a risk of it not “going viral”. People won’t start shouting off the rooftops about it. The first blog posts and reviews that appear may have a negative tone, and this sort of thing is so hard to wash off in later releases.
In the open source community, people are keen to pitch in and help with the development in whatever way they can. They are tech savvy people who will put up with bugs, teething problems and constantly changing user-interfaces. They will happily give you their feedback and opinions - open source code is a worth cause. This is the world where the saying comes from.
If you are making a web app for the mass consumer market, “release early, release often” is dangerous. Sure, you want to get it out there and get some momentum, but first impressions count. In this day and age user-experience is one of the key differentiators between similar services. Also, your early adopters aren’t going to appreciate you forcing a poorly designed UI on them just because you were too tight to spend a bit more time and money in the design phase. Your early adopters are your nearest and dearest customers. They will make some effort and give some you feedback but you have to begin the relationship by giving them something that’s up to scratch.
So, throw away the old mantra, here’s what you should do:
I realise I may be preaching to the converted here - but if this article is helpful to just one or two people, then it was worth it … 
That'll be me, Harry Brignull. I'm User Experience Consultant at Madgex in Brighton (UK). My work involves making experiences by blending User Research, Interaction Design and UCD process consultancy. In the past few years I've consulted for Nokia, British Airways, Vodafone, O2, AOL and many others.
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