Last month I attended a uxbri triple bill event at iCrossing.

My first impressions were of the building. Having sat pondering its contents from the window of Food for Friends it looks exactly like a factory/hostel/home to bad people in the mind of Roald Dahl or Lemony Snicket. It does not look like it should house a fancy Jamie Oliver restaurant and some very snazzy offices belonging to a usability company! But appearances can be deceptive, don’t judge a book by its cover and all that because it does, not a witches gnarly finger or a slave driving workhouse owner in sight. The event was very good, there was free beer and snacks and I even recognised a few faces from other events, beside my fellow students.

After a long and engaging conversation about Twitter and views on life Carsten and Poppy from Bunnyfoot entertained us with stories of “How (not) to run successful international user research projects”, joking aside they brought up lots of issues, mainly around translation, that are very important and could nullify your research before you’ve even collected any responses.

Following on from Poppy and Carsten was Rob from Human Factors who discussed “Designing for Persuasion, Emotion and Trust On The Web” with us, his presentation led to an interesting discussion on the morals of leading and influencing people.

The evening was rounded off by an eye tracking demonstration provided by Bunnyfoot which unsurprisingly led to much discussion on the merits of eye tracking and the limits of its use. All in all a very interesting evening, lots of food for thought around perception, persuasion and methods of research.

Thanks to everyone who organised the event. I’m very much looking forward to the September event on gameplay research and design (tonight).

Doing a Masters and having offices in the Innovation Centre (built to encourage innovative start up companies) the topic of setting up a business has been bandied around a lot over the past year and I’ve talked to various people about their ambitions to set up various companies for doing pretty much everything under the sun.

Throughout all these discussions, be they firm plans, already a reality or elaborate ideas dreamt up over a pint, someone has always raised the issue of ‘job security’.

They, whoever brings the point up, intends this as a negative thing – ‘working for a large company has much greater job security’ they say. But working for a large multi-national corporation I’ve witnessed job cuts due to the ‘current economic climate’ (call it what you will). The message comes through the ranks ‘you know this team of nine? well there are only six jobs from next month’ and a guys with kids, mortgages and 25years of company loyality under their belt are joining the dole queue.

Now I don’t know, having never run my own company, or even attempted to, whether its a good or bad time to ‘go-it-alone’, I don’t know all the trials and tribulations of the young start up but I do think that this sense of job security in large corporations is a false sense of security.

Ask yourself; wouldn’t you rather have some sort of control over the existence of your employment?

If your answer is no, were you the one that defended your employment using the ‘job security’ line in conversation? Are you likely to lose out if your large secure company hits bad times?

If your answer is yes, do you really want to do all that paperwork? Have all that responsibility? How about a nice secure 9-5 job?

After I recently managed to ‘break’ Firefox (all sorts of things would occur upon opening a third tab) I decided that instead of fixing it, or attempting to, I would see what this Google Chrome malarky was all about.

Now Chrome fulfills the usual function and layout of other browsers (it’d be pointless if you couldn’t actually view the web!) but with some subtle differences.

Firstly the tabs are above the address bar, this makes it much easier to relate to which tab you are manipulating, the address bar is also the search bar making the top ‘ribbon’ less cluttered, and the progress bar at the bottom is only visable when its making progress – if you’re not doing anything it stops taking up your valauble screen space.

One of the most useful features is the page that displays upon opening a new tab. This action, completed by selecting the plus sign next to the existing tabs, displays a really useful history overview with thumbnails of your most visited sites – simply click the thumbnail & your whisked away to your desired site.

Also on this page, towards the bottom right, is a list of pages you recently closed the tabs for. So when you accidently close a tab you can open it or them right back up again (if you close the whole window there is a re-open all entry). Not only this but it also saves the pages history so you can re-open the page and navigate back through where you had been to get there! This function made me very happy when I presumed a link had opened in a new tab, read it, closed it, then realised it hadn’t and I’d closed the whole site.

Another tweak performed by Google that I like is the menu when you right click a link. Most browsers that I’ve used have ‘Open’ as the first option – if I wanted to open it I’d have left clicked! – but the Chrome makers realised this & took it away leaving ‘open in a new tab’ as the first option, this saves so much time and effort for me. But does confuse me when I revert to IE for work resulting in many new windows cluttering up my desktop.

But Chrome has an answer to this too! If you were to open multiple windows and want to condense them you simply click the tab and drag it into another tabs window, the old window disappears and you are left with one window with both your tabs sitting side by side. You can mix and match your tabs, separating and merging their windows and re-jigging their order to your hearts content but once you have the tabs where you want (or you were happy with them how they were) you get to the bit that makes me go Grr!

I have found this to be either very over sensitive or have a glitch. When I change tabs by clicking on the one I want & I then move my mouse down to interact with the page, too often for my liking it brings the tab down with it – GRR! This generally only takes a second or two but my page is more often than not now off the bottom of my screen and I have to spend another few seconds moving it or re-adding it back to its original window. It doesn’t take long but those few seconds become very frustrating when you are a heavy tab user like me.

I’m not sure how I would want this fixed as it is a useful feature, when I actually want to make use of it, but it definitely needs changing.

My last gripe before a suggestion for improvement is that when you close the last or only tab in a window the window goes away. Now maybe my expectations have only been set by other browsers but if I’m say, reading the news and I want to visit a page that I know is in my history on the new tab page I close my current tab (this is the only tab I have in the window) and the window goes away, my browser is closed and I’m left looking at my wallpaper (or what ever other junk I have open). I don’t want this, I want it to effectively close my tab and open a new one. Maybe this is too much to ask but I don’t expect it to completely go away unless I click the little red cross in the top right corner…

Enough of features I can’t use and onto one that doesn’t exist yet. I’d like to see an addition to the base page for a new tab, I’d like to be able to specify groups of tabs to open, if I’m going through my finances I want to bring up all the banking webpages I use, if I’m catching up with peoples activity I want Roundcube, Facebook, Twitter & Google Reader, etc. being able to select such a group & have Chrome open all the relevant pages would be a really handy feature.

All in all, other than the tab movement issue, I think Chrome is an improvement on other browsers in the usability stakes…although I’m yet to work out how to actually bookmark a page…

This morning on my walk to the station I noticed an advert for double velvet toilet roll with the familar red & white circle announcing “As seen on TV”.

It struck me that all this meant was that the company had paid for a TV advert for the product – in this case a succession of successful adverts but still all paid for by the company - rendering the sticker in the advert an advert for another advert.

To me this causes “As seen on TV” to lose its value.

But did it ever have value? I remember, years ago, thinking that items marked as such were cool, it gave them street cred. But I was young then and it may always have been the case that “As seen on TV” meant the company had paid for an advert rather than it being such a good product that people on TV were using it or recommending it out of choice.

Or is my decline in value of the phrase or the product placement merely because TV is so common place, back when the phrase influenced my perception of the product we had 4 terrestrial TV channels at home, now I can pause, record and watch 34 channels on my computer via freeview. TV is readily available to the masses and advert breaks no longer last 2 minutes but last up to 7. Many many products are seen everyday by many many viewers, if all of these were marked then I would imagine that the exclusivity of the stamp would be lost & products “not seen on TV” would seem more attractive.

A decline of magazine style programs reviewing products or the over familiarity with TV, either way the mark has less impact on me than it once did.

Although its stirred enough in me to produce a blog post and have been thinking of the kid/MD of double velvet playing and planting trees all day so maybe its still a clever link of advertising…

As the time for my first ever flight approaches I await it with excitement and apprehension. It seems to me a very ‘unatural’ thing to jump in a large metal object & be propelled (safely) across the sky but it is also one of mans incredible inventions that seems to be taken for granted nowadays.

When I tell people I have never flown before most reel with shock, having flown countless times before, and I recently read a really good blog post by a friend who is very accustomed to ‘jet-setting’.

I hope I enjoy airports as much as he does and I’m glad my first flight is a 2 hour short hop

Having not thought about this before I would say that generally if I call someone a geek it’s because they are unusually passionate about something technical. For example, programming, electronic gadgets, planes or cars, but I don’t just mean a love of them I mean knowing all the parts, the names, the brands, the spec and the defects of each model and their eyes lighting up when they talk about the topic. I am aware that others classify a geek as someone/anyone who studies harder than them, but this is what I classified as a geek. 

However after a recent dinner party conversation my opinion was changed. Maybe it is possible to take ‘non-geeky’ topics to geeky levels.

 

To establish which was a more accurate view use of the word I have used Wikipedia for gain a ‘common insight’ and OED for the correct definition.

Firstly the common view, someone has defined a geek on Wikipedia as:

• A derogatory reference to a person obsessed with intellectual pursuits for their own sake, who is also deficient in most other human attributes so as to impair the person’s operation within society.
• A person who is interested in technology, especially computing and new media. Geeks are adept with computers, and use the term hacker in a positive way, though not all are hackers themselves.
• A person who relates academic subjects to the real world outside of academic studies; for example, using multivariate calculus to determine how they should correctly optimize the dimensions of a pan to bake a cake.
• A person who has chosen concentration rather than conformity; one who passionately pursues skill (especially technical skill) and imagination, not mainstream social acceptance.
• A person with a devotion to something in a way that places him or her outside the mainstream. This could be due to the intensity, depth, or subject of their interest. This definition is very broad but because many of these interests have mainstream endorsement and acceptance, the inclusion of some genres as “geeky” is heavily debated. Persons have been labeled as or chosen to identify as physics geeks, mathematics geeks, engineering geeks, sci-fi geeks, computer geeks, various science geeks, movie and film geeks (cinephile), comic book geeks, theatre geeks, history geeks, music geeks, art geeks, philosophy geeks, literature geeks, historical reenactment geeks and roleplay geeks.

The first four points describe how I previously thought of a geek with the references to technical skills or pursuits, with the final point being more in tune with my new thinking, a geek is someone with an unusual depth or intensity of knowledge or passion for the subject of their interest, this can be any interest at all. This is closer to the definition from the Oxford English dictionary:

 

1. an unfashionable or socially inept person.

2. an obsessive enthusiast.

So with a brief investigation and an open mind I have changed my mental definition of a geek to mean an obsessive enthusiast and re-labelled most of my friends as geeks in one fell swoop!

Are you a geek?  

 

 

 

While at the UPA event last Thursday somebody mentioned something that got me thinking.

I’m not sure that there is anything in it or where I’m going with it but I thought I’d write it down so I don’t forget and maybe it’ll provoke some discussion… if anyone is interested enough to read this!

Unfortunately I was too excited about my train of thought to make a note of exactly what the gentleman said. The general conversation was along the lines of the effect of the recession on how usability companies get business. The gentleman (who works for a usability consultancy) put forward the idea that companies looking for consultants want an agency to sort everything out for them rather than recruiting individual companies for each stage of the process or each time they have a project.

As he said this my mind went off at a tangent – why is the most practical solution what we are most scared of? Why can’t we work together / let everyone work together?

When I have a problem I want it fixed. As much as owning my own house would be great, the major benefit of renting (I have a very good landlord) is that when something goes wrong I call them. I don’t run around ‘getting the best deal’, calling people, making appointments, waiting in for them to turn up, chasing them when they don’t, paying for it… I pay them to do all of that for me.

Why is anything else different? Why when my phone, broadband, tv, gas and electricity can all be provided by the same company is this a ‘monopoly’? My landlords have a monopoly over the house I live in and I like it!

Now I’m not stupid (well, not very), I do appreciate and understand that competition drives prices down and also customer service up, that ‘putting all your eggs in one basket’ is a risky business and the recent recession/credit crunch/financial fiasco has shocked many people into realising this.

But why are people afraid of stable ventures that provide a range of services? I recently read that Microsoft have had to remove certain products, an internet browser for example, from their operating system bundle as it breaks ‘competition laws’ in certain European countries.

This law (and ongoing legal battle) means that a user now gets no internet browser as part of their package. I may be being naïve here but with no browser surely it’s a little difficult to access the www in order to download one…?

(I believe Microsoft have given users a link/app in order to make it easy to download an IE browser which is not pleasing the people who made them remove it in the first place)

But why are we so scared of ‘world domination’ to the extent that every user in Europe* will have to spend the time to individually download their own browser, seems a little silly to me.

I would speculate that some of this fear could be attributed to great works such as 1984*. At school, when I was even younger and even more impressionable than I am now, we studied the book, we wrote essays about it, read it out loud and acted scenes out until the depth of the book was lost, but it still left the impression that a Big Brother set up is a bad thing.

1984 is the only book to come to mind but I’m sure you, as an intelligent reader, can think of more examples.

Now I could make examples of decisions I’ve witnessed in business, voluntary organisations, personal finances, but they all illustrate the same point and I don’t really have a conclusion to this. Human behaviour is far too complicated to put a finger (or even a thumb) on the exact reason why we distrust companies who offer ‘to sort everything out for us’, it seems that we want to make it as difficult as possible for others to succeed, even to the extent that we sabotage ourselves. Do we really think this is the best solution? Or do we remember a few sensationalised incidents and so ignore the logical, rational thought that we could apply?

 

* this is worded to sound OTT but is technically true

* Book by George Orwell – if you haven’t read it go do it now!

As the evening of Thursday 25th June drew near I jumped on a train in Brighton, collected Emily at Preston Park and Sam at Burgess Hill, and headed up to London to visit the nice UPA people at their event in Brick Lane.

Having only been able to attend one event before (Novembers Transport based event) we knew little of what to expect but after the quality of the last event we had high hopes for the evening.

The LBi building was as cavernous as we remembered and refreshingly cool as we stepped in. 

Unlike the last event, which was a showcase of current work by representatives of 3 companies, this event was careers based. Several companies were represented, talking about the work their companies are doing and opportunities available. They also had a reverse job wall where applicants posted themselves and companies perused them as adverts. 

Our purpose for the evening, well mine at least, was to scope out how the skills we’ve developed through our Masters course were applicable to actual jobs and their relevancy to job titles. Regardless of whether I stay employed by my current company or move on when my contract ends, knowing how the skills I am developing can be applied to actual jobs will be invaluable to me.  

After some wine, nibbles and the introductory talk we were free to network with the companies present. I set about working my way around the room and met some very interesting people.

I learnt about information architects, graduate programs, virtual textbooks for medical students, touch screens allowing meal planning & direct ordering and received a great deal of conflicting advice on ‘specialising’. 

I also discovered that contracts between these companies and the companies that employ them mean that any research that is conducted cannot be published until after the fact by which time it is often considered as ‘old news’ and so does not get published. This helped to reassure me because I have been having a hard time finding relevant material to review for my dissertation but also frustrated me to know that lots of work may have been done in this area – it just hasn’t been written about!

I meet people who were ‘there from the start’ and people who are very new to the area, people who were very passionate and people who had ended up in the area accidentally. And one guy on his third summer in a row – good work!

Overall I learnt a lot about the field, companies and relationships out there and how the Masters topics and skills can be applied to tasks. 

Thank you UPA for organising the event.

I also won a book : – )