Ethlabs on the way…

I’ve decided to create a website offering education and consulting on field research for user centered design. The domain is now secure and I’m in the process of building a plan and a website. Some of the topics I plan to cover are:

• what are field methods and how can they help in user centered design
• what are the methods out there that are good for short-cycle UCD
• Tips and reviews of good/bad website designs

Portable GPS functionality wish list

I’ve been using a car GPS (global positioning system) for about six months and I can’t believe it took me so long to get one. There’s a lot I like about GPS units, but they’re far from perfect. One feature I’d like to see in a future version is a parking finder. GPS units currently guide you to an address you specify, but that address might not have parking. Take any downtown address for example. The GPS tells me how to get to the front door, but there’s never any parking allowed or available for an ‘out’ -towner like me. Having a feature that would allow you to tell a GPS to guide you to the closest available parking that meets a set of personal criteria (e.g. below $2 an hour, within 2 blocks, gated, etc.) would make these units much more usable than they currently are. Such a feature would require more than a bit of programming of course. Map providers would need to add a whole new meta layer on top of their maps and maintaining accurate data on parking prices and features would be enormously costly. So how about allowing the public to contribute and maintain that content? Sort of like how vancouvergasprices.com gets content for its site. Let the public maintain the information and have the necessary mechanisms in place to verify and maintain information accuracy (e.g. community feedback, ‘revertability’, and user ratings). Then make GPS units updateable and customizable - allow users to add their own meta layers on top of the built in maps. I can see whole cotton industries building add-ons to GPS units, not unlike the industries that have developed around open source CMS software like Joomla, blogging software like WordPress, and multimedia devices like the iPod.

Photo exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery

TruthBeauty: Pictorialism and the Photograph as Art, 1845-1945

This exhibition is showing at the Vancouver Art Gallery from February 2 to April 27, 2008. Photographs from artists such as Julia Margaret Cameron, Baron Adolph de Meyer, Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen and Josef Sudek will be on display to the public. For more information, visit the Vancouver Art Gallery site.

Visual Analytics Science and Application Workshop recap

The Visual Analytics Science and Application Workshop was the first major event on visual analytics in Canada that brought together key thought leaders, scientists, designers, artists, and government and industry representatives together in once place to witness the current work being done in the burgeoning field of VA and to explore future research and collaborative possibilities. The 3 day public (and free) workshop took place from Feb 2 - 4 and was organized by the Canadian Network of Visual Analytic Centres (CNVAC). The first two full-day sessions were held at the Segal Centre at SFU’s Harbour Centre campus while the third day took place at the Peter Wall Centre for Advanced Studies at UBC. This outstanding workshop was a significant step towards solidifying SFU and UBC, led by Brian Fisher, John Dill, and Ronald Rensink, as the locus of VA research in Canada. Many exceptional scholars from the US and Canada, and a few from Europe attended the event, which hosted respected scholars and designers such as Bradford Paley, Dave Ebert, Colin Ware, Ronald Rensink, Pat Hanrahan, and several others. Talks ranged from keynotes by Joe Kielman and Jim Thomas to project demostrations such as JigSaw by John Stasko’s team at Georgia Tech, a range of Microsoft development projects by George Robertson’s team, and IN-SPIRE from PNNL. For a complete list of presentations, visit the Visual Analytics Science and Application Workshop site.

Joomla administration pain #1

Joomla is a great project. It’s saved budding content providers like bloggers thousands in software costs and has helped create a whole industry around custom components and templates.

However, despite it’s general usefulness, there are several usability issues I’ve experienced with Joomla content administration as a novice user.

One pain I have with Joomla’s content management system is a minor one, but frustrating none the less. This particular pain is one that’s probably only relevant to new content providers who are still mucking around with their website content structures.

The problem has to do with deleting content using the default administration control panel. If you try to delete a whole content “category”, a message appears to prevent you from deleting it if there is a “section” that still contains content. If you try to delete a “section”, you can’t unless there isn’t any content in it.

Now you say, what’s so bad about that? Isn’t that a good thing? Doesn’t such a safety feature prevent accidental deletion of content? Yes, this safety feature is good in principle, but it’s the lack of guidance through deletion process and the extended time on task that irritates me.

You see, if I want to delete all the content from a category, it prevents me by telling me that there’s content in one of the categories’ sections. Why can it just ask me if I want to delete the section as well. Instead, it makes me go into the top menu to select the section and then delete that before I can remove the category. It’s just as irritating when the section contains content and I have to delete that too, requiring me to go back into the top menu, select all the content belonging to its parent section, and delete it. This seems like way too many steps to achieve such a simple goal.

A possible solution might be to prompt the user to delete all the content belonging under a category with a simple yes/no option set if an attempt is made to delete the parent category. That would reduce the number of steps significantly and made dumping old content and categories much easier for site administrators.

Where is the ‘E’ in E*Trade?

I love the idea of trading online. It sure beats the old days when I had to call into the broker to place an order for me. It’s also a lot less expensive now and the information resources to help me make decisions about my financial assets are extremely useful.

I used several discount brokerages over the past ten years. Most of them have been from Canadian banks. Just a year ago, I took advice from my mom (who’s an avid online trader) and opened an E*Trade account to trade equities. I’ve been using online banking products for several years now and thought it should be a cinch to perform my usual saving duties with E*Trade’s corpus of financial tools.

Now I think a little differently. By it’s name, I presumed that I would be able to do the vast majority of my financial tasks electronically. Simple things like applying for an RRSP account and making automatic tranfers from my chequing account from another bank to my E*Trade savings and trading accounts. To my surprise, such tasks are not open to customers to be done electronically - at least not for me anyway. To open an RRSP account, I have to download a PDF form, fill it out, and then mail it…yes ’snail’ mail it (with stamp and envelope) back to E*Trade’s offices in Toronto. The same goes if I want to set up a regular automatic funds transfer. How slow and primitive. I understand the security concerns, but by the time the application is received an processed on the other side of the country, the price of the financial equities I desire to invest in have long changed (Many people have complained on other forums about E*Trade’s snail pace when it comes to setting up accounts).

Why can they offer an electronic application that is sent immediately for processing at a click of a button? Wouldn’t it be better for their clients? Wouldn’t it save data entry costs on their end too? I understand that they need a signature on documents for legal and security reasons, but couldn’t a electronic signature of some sort help address that issue? Other financial institutions allow their clients to quickly set up regular automatic transfers quickly online, which can E*Trade?

Not only do they make clients go through the arduous task to printing, filling out, and sending a paper copy of an application form for fund transfers, they have the gall to call the paper form: “Quick Transfer Authorization Form”; there isn’t anything “quick” about it. I’m now guessing that if I want to change the amount of my regular transfers, I’ll probably have to go through the paper process all over again (taking up to two weeks to make a simple change).

They make the process potentially much slower by printing the wrong mailing address on the authorization form. On the top left corner, the address written is “60 Yonge Street…”, when the destination address for application forms is “30 Adelaide Street E…”. I’m sure they get a lot of phone calls about lost application forms.

E*Trade needs to make simple banking tasks truly simple by making the process of submitting forms as electronic as possible. No one wants to waste time licking stamps. People want efficient and effective processes that get them to their goal. In this case, that means allowing clients perform simple tasks like setting up a regular automatic fund transfer using electronic means. It also, means making sure the right delivery address is supplied with every form. Not only will these changes make clients happy, it’s improve the bottom line on E*Trade’s end my removing costs related to data processing and application inquiries to their phone board.

The Garmin Nuvi 250: D’ho! missed another exit

In-car navigation devices are supposed to be one of those things that should improve our lives. The reason I bought one was because of all the in-car squabbles I had with my wife when we get lost looking for an address. I thought having a navigation assistant would help put an end to that, but it didn’t. Now our verbal fisticuffs are over what the navigation device is really trying to say.

But let’s be fair. The Garmin Nuvi 250 navigation device, which is essentially a GPS unit with built in road maps, really has helped a lot, but in other ways. I no longer have to spend time before a trip printing out long reams of turn-by-turn directions from Google Local (which hasn’t been all that accurate either); I also no longer put my life in peril by fumbling with maps in the car while processing driving directions or have to use a flashlight from my car to pin-point house numbers at night. I also like that I can discover new restaurants and other local points of interest without having to waste a single drop of petro.

Yet despite all the marvelous benefits, there are still some simple functional aspects of the device that need improvement. The one frustrating aspect that stands out is how the voice guidance system gives directions on exiting highways. This is probably the most confusing aspect of the device, and I don’t think it’s just the Garmin Nuvi 250 GPS that’s affected. My uncle in New York uses a Magellan device that is just as confusing (my aunt regularly gives him grief as well over his over reliance on the device for navigating around the Big Apple).

There will always be some that will say that the directions it gives in entirely comprehensible, but I’m here to say that to the majority of average Joes and Janes, exiting directions are the most confusing and troublesome aspect of this otherwise useful device (conceptually anyway).

I use the highways in metro Vancouver a lot to get places and I still get confused when the device starts chirping. The device also provides textual directions on screen, but many driver (especially myself) have become accustomed to going by the pleasant audio directions spoken by, which in my case, a digital feminine guide.

Instead of saying “exit right” as one approaches a highway exit, the device says, “keep right”. Now it may not seem all that confusing as you read this, but take it in context. While on the highway, the device will usually advise you to keep to the right lane as you approach your exit. It’ll also advise you to keep to the right on roads if you’re suppose to make a turn at the next intersection. Why this is confusing is that it uses that same expression for keeping on the right lane as it does for advising you to make a highway exit. So quite often, I’ll miss the right exit because what I think it’s trying to tell me is to stay on the right lane, but not exit.

It’s even more confusing when a highway exit branches and there are two exit lanes that take you to completely different places. In such a case, the Garmin Nuvi instructs you to “keep left” or “keep right”. Now if this isn’t confusing for a driver unfamiliar with the territory, I don’t know what is. To me, “keep left” feels like I should miss the exit and stay on the highway’s left lane. “Keep right” feels like I should stay on the highway’s right lane. To me, for some reason, it doesn’t seem intuitive that “keep right” means exiting a highway.

Why can’t the device include useful verbal directions for “exiting” a highway? This is a classic case of failing to understand a user’s semantic model and also failure to provide adequate feedback. When most people give directions for exiting a highway, they’ll say “exit at the next ramp” or or “take the next exit” or something similar. People generally understand what “exit” means on a highway. On the other hand, “keep right” can be easily misconstrued for staying on the right lane.

What this device needs is an improvement to it’s audio guidance system for highway exiting. It should go without being said that driving is one of the most dangerous things people do on a daily basis, and adding to the confusion of driving using a bad semantic model for directions can be outright deadly - especially on highways!

What shoud Garmin (and other navigation system providers) do? Perform a field study to better understand people’s semantic models and how they communicate directions to each other. Try to better understand the terms people use to communicate complicated directions, such as in situations where a single highway exit has several branching ramps. This might be done through a non-participant observational study where microphones are planted to record direction-giving from passenger to driver. Learnings from the audio data could inform ways of communicating directions to drivers that most closely matches their understanding of what to do.

Such improvements would not only save drivers from getting even more lost and wasting valuable time and fuel, it should definitely save me from my wife’s constant nagging and criticisms every time I demonstrate my woeful reliance on my Garmin Nuvi GPS on the highway.

Canon Digital Rebel XSi Annouced

PMA is here and the long awaited replacement for the beloved Canon 5D is still myth. However, Canon did announce a new successor to it’s popular entry level SLR camera, the XTi. The new SLR is the Canon Digital Rebel 450 or XSi. The street price for the body only will be about $800 (USD) at time of the announcement. Here are a few of the highlights:

• 12.2 million pixels (effective)
• 4% spot meter
• dust reduction
• DIGIC III image processorx
• 1.6x field of view crop
• Auto (100 - 400) ISO
• Live view
• 3.0″ LCD
• higher capacity battery (up to 500 shots)

Here’s a quote from Canon USA:

“ For stunning photography with point-and-shoot ease, look no further than Canon’s EOS Rebel XSi. The EOS Rebel XSi brings staggering technological innovation to the masses. It features Canon’s EOS Integrated Cleaning System, Live View Function, a powerful DIGIC III Image Processor, plus a new 12.2-megapixel CMOS Sensor and is available in a kit with the new EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 IS lens with Optical Image Stabilizer. The EOS Rebel XSi’s refined, ergonomic design includes a new 3.0-inch LCD monitor, compatibility with SD and SDHC Memory cards and new accessories that enhance every aspect of the photographic experience.”

I’ve never owned a digital rebel before. In the past, I’ve opted for Canon’s prosumer level of cameras. There are a few features here that look like they’re be winners amongst Canon fans, such as the auto ISO (100-400) , the spot meter, and live view. Have more pixels is nice too, but in reality, it’ll just mean that you’re going to use up memory space more quickly. What I really wish they’d do is to reduce the crop factor, at least to 1.5, but that won’t likely happen anytime soon. Another feature I hope makes future version are programmable external buttons. As an event photographer, I often have to move between varying lighting locations quickly, so having a set of buttons I can pre-programming for different light situations will definitely help to improve my shooting. Now that this PMA is over, I’m eagerly awaiting the next, where I’m almost sure that Canon will finally announce the replacement for it full frame 5D camera.

WordPress chosen for blog

I’ve decided to go with WordPress for my blog. It was a decision between MoveableType and WordPress. At the end of the day, it came down to the size of the community and the size of the application. WordPress “felt” like it has a slightly larger following and the size of the application download is just 1mb vs. 4mb for MoveableType. Moreover, just as advertised, it installed in under 5 minutes. I’m attending the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies workshop “Visual Analytics - Science and Application” this weekend (Feb 2- 4) in Vancouver. The list of speakers is amazing and a very good networking opportunity for people doing visual analytics research in North America. Visit again for more posts coming up in the next few days.