In an effort to get to know better the needs of developers are from the Human Interface Guidelines, I solicited several groups of developers to participate in a survey which ran for two weeks in May. The outcome was very good with 52 participants providing their comments and suggestions.

After reviewing the results and compiling them in to a report I think several things are safe to assume about developer's relationship with the HIG:

• They don't trust it.
• They don't trust us.
• They expect more from it.
• They didn't know it existed.
• They might actually use it.

They don't trust it. The old guidelines are just that -- old. Being out of date and inaccurate are strong reasons why developers might not use them. Being incomplete also raised some questions in their validity.

They don't trust us. Some of them flat out said they didn't trust them (and those who write them) and won't until they see some theory behind the claims. Trust in the usability community has always an issue. Theory is fine and dandy, but misunderstood or out of context its useless. Just because you don't like it or don't understand it shouldn't be grounds for creating inconsistent interfaces. If you really feel that strongly against that particular guideline, there are better ways to change them than ignoring them.

They expect more from it. The quality and quantity of the guidelines are an issue. There isn't enough there and what is there is dated and old. If the HIG is to be a definitive guide then it needs to be current and updated frequently. Important issues need to be added in order for them to be referenced, there were many comments of fruitless searches because content was missing.

They didn't know it existed. Apparently it isn't very easy to find the guidelines because many of the participants didn't know they existed, or had looked for them and never found them. Along with a community-wide effort to promot the guidelines, it has to be more easily accessible.

They might actually use it. No one was really against having guidelines, infact many were optimistic they would use it if it met their explicit demands. If we can solve the Q&Q (quality and quantity) problem which is present in the existing guidelines, I'm optimistic the new guidelines will be happily adopted.

What you've been waiting for: KDE4 HIG Developers Survey Results (PDF 601KB)

This and next week will be busier than average. Tonight I met up with pmax (who was in town for biz) with Justin to drink some beers and play some darts at a local bar. Its too bad pmax wont be in town long enough to visit downtown, the cherry blossoms are in full bloom (last night's storm had spared them for yet another week) and its always nice to go site-seeing in the nation's capital.

I've been running back and forth between client offices and I have a long day in Baltimore tomorrow. The day will be even longer in York, PA on Thursday as I complete on-site user surveys. Travel doesnt normally bother me (unless it is via plane), however I feel like a chicken with my head cut off (how many of you understand this expression?) this past week.

Later this week El and Jan will be in for the weekend to do some usability geeking before we head to Atlanta for an OSDL meeting. A friend from Boston will also be in Thursday for the weekend, so it will be quite a time. After the short trip to Atlanta things should slow down for a bit for a well needed breather. Perhaps I will be able to go back to blogging on a regular basis then

Recently I went to Ohio to interview young students and their parent about a client's home schooling education system. They were surprised (although I wasn't) how the students were actually using the system (software, materials, teachers, etc.). It just reminded me of how important it is to identify your audience in order to have success. Here are a few things I took away from my trip which could be applied to KDE-Edu (grades K through 6)...

Make it fun

If possible, make anything and everything a game. Anything which takes score, counts levels, or gives you a report of success works the best. Children are very reward-oriented and are more interested in completing a task if there is some kind of incentive (special animation, possibility of recorded high score, printable certificate of achievement).

Make it pretty

Most adults appreciate a nice looking design, but are almost always annoyed by blinking, flashy, colourful items in an interface (this is a learned aversion to online Ads and spyware). Children on the other hand enjoy these decorations especially while engaged in play. You as an adult may find it annoying to have a *bleep* and *flash* every time you clicked a button, but in a way that is a form of positive feedback and reward for a child. Make it pretty and engaging to hold attention and make it memorable.

Make it challenging but not too difficult

Children like to be challenged, but they are easily frustrated. If a puzzle or problem is consistently difficult without success, they will quickly become frustrated and uninterested with the game. Often it is better to repeat moderately difficult puzzles than solve a single challenge.

Make it short and sweet

Unless the user has ADD (attention deficit disorder), they're going to get bored, fast. Games for younger children should have shorter sessions (levels, problems, etc.) with many problems/puzzles than several large problems/puzzles which take up most of the time. They want instant gratification and are only willing to dedicate a few minutes before expecting to see some kind of progress before giving up or getting bored.

Kids are smarter than and not as smart as you think

Children are a very interesting user. They can be clever and inventive, but keep in mind they haven't developed the same affordances or metaphors we have over our much longer lives. They may be able to identify and quickly grasp the concept of a certain icon, but be completely confused by another. Just as seniors, children have certain interaction and accessibility needs you need to consider when designing your application.

A lot of this might seem like 'no duh', but you would be surprised how often it is overlooked or dismissed. For example, the client I was working with was under the assumption that most of the students required constant supervision from their parent (or whoever is the 'teacher'), wasn't capable of completing assignments or being responsible for themselves, and spent most of their time with books than the interactive assignments provided by the software.

In reality, the students were quite the opposite. The majority of students (however I didn't experience the norm; all of the students I interviewed were doing well) were completely independent with their studies other than the 'teaching' sessions with their parent. They often repeated the interactive portions because they liked them more than studying from a book and had no problems completing assignments and turning them in on time.

I think it would be very beneficial to the KDE-Edu apps to define the scope of their application and come up with realistic user groups (eg: students learning French in 3rd to 6th grade rather than anyone who wants to learn French) and do some user-research backfilling. This will help a lot when it comes to writing content material and designing the interface and increase the usage and success of the app.

I've been a buzzy little bee for the past few weeks. I would have posted a few days ago, but it ended up turning in to a DOT article.

I started my new job a few weeks ago. Yay for working at home, but I'm having trouble leaving work at work and actually "going" home. Last night I came home from class at 2300 to make phone calls and write emails until Justin reminded me I was "home". Its easy to roll out of bed and go to work, but hard to leave the keyboard at a certain time and stop being a IxD for the rest of the night.

Its possible I am flying to Ohio for a day trip tomorrow. I was supposed to go last week but the interviews wern't scheduled soon enough, and so far there is only one lined up for tomorrow. I can't say I'm excited about the day trip to Cleveland (being from Pittsburgh and all), but hey, it could be somewhere in Idaho or someplace. The trip will give me an opportunity to interview users of my client's software and get a better idea of how their product is actually being used rather than how its supposed to be used.

The Vegas countdown has begun and we leave in 15 days. As most of you know, I am from Pittsburgh. Many of the friends I had in college and beyond have moved on to different parts of the country and a big group of us (12 or so people) are going to meet up in Vegas.

El and Jan are coming to visit me in D.C. before we head to Atlanta for the printing meeting in April. I'm pretty excited for their visit, especially since El hasn't been to the U.S. yet. I'm also going to be in Atlanta for Monday and Tuesday (instead of just Monday) so I'll have the chance to catch up with other people too.

The kde-usability and kde-usability-devel lists have been pretty active lately with random threads here and there as well as preparation for the meeting in Berlin as well as future planning for the project. I have to say I'm happy about how well people are communicating lately rather than the normal troll and rat-hole sessions.

School has been suprisingly tame, but I have been very good about scheduling my time (I hope I can keep it up, I am notorious for 'putting things off'). Now that I got the usability reports up on the site, I can continue with my 'resolutions' list from the beginning of the year. Jan and I have an article forthcoming, and I am in the process of writing another for an industry newsletter. I would like to get moving on some KDE-Edu work as well (time and sanity permitting).

But first I must worry about Ohio. I dont even have a plane ticket yet!

Although earlier this year I had hoped to get the reports up by the end of January, that they got up by mid-February isn't too bad. The 2005 reports page is here.

Reports were added for: KBruch, KMail Recipients, Koffice Startup, Kopete, KOrganizer, KPrinter.

There have been more reports than this, particularly through OpenUsability.org. These were just the ones which were specifically sent to me to get posted to the site. Also, much of our contribution is through talking and working with the developers and not necessarily preparing web-ready deliverables.

I also cleaned up some of the links to the XML contribution style we dont really use (OpenUsability.org however does, and reports can be submitted through them). I also removed some of the links to the older reports while I clean up the structure, and I will eventually add them to the archives.

BTW, I also have a Jabber account on kdetalk.net (celeste at kde dot org). I have never used Jabber before, so I'm still figuring out what this is about.

According to a recent C-Net Police Blotter, email surveillance without any evidence of criminal behavior has been approved. The new law only allows monitoring of email headers (hence justifies as 'constitutional'), but the fact that they can freely monitor and log email traffic is alarming.

Also, our president seems to think its ok to monitor phone telecommunications in the name of 'fighting the war on terror'. My question is how do they get through all the datanoise to find these 'terrists' without violating regular citizen's privacy?

Remember Cindy Sheehan at the state of the union address? Now it seems as if protesting is an act of terrorism.

Where was that logic on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade a few weeks ago when we had thousands of pro-life protestors waving full-colored posters of dead fetuses in D.C? They'll blur out a boob on T.V. but its ok to wave pictures of dead, mangled corpses in public. If I were protesting rape and incest of children, would I be able to carry a poster of an dead, 11-year-old boy who was sexually molested? I'm not suggesting it is in good taste (I certainly wouldn't do this, but follow my logic here). Your first argument would be that dead boy is someone's child. According to pro-life advocates so is that fetus, yet that hasn't stopped them.

Free country to do what now?

Sometimes this place is ass-backwards. You can sue someone for almost anything in this country. The freedom of speech only applies if its pro-government or else youre a terrorist. If you dont support the war you dont support the troops. A computer is a tool only to steal media, look at porn, or hack in to another computer. You can murder someone on T.V. but 'suggestive' sexual acts get censored.

We're a nation of prudes in love with war. We are with war with cancer, sex, drugs, terrorism, obesity, iraq, nature, and our neighbors. Bush claims a terrorist plot on LA was thwarted yet there is no way of proving this. This constant manipulation by the government is making me think twice about our recent history. What if we really didnt go to the moon in 1969? I wouldnt be suprised.

What's next? A tinfoil hat.

Friday is my last day at .gov where I will be moving on the bigger and better things. For the past 14 months Ive been through three natural disasters (Indian Ocean tsunami, Katrina/Rita hurricanes, Pakistani/Indian earthquake), watched a few funerals on TV (Pope John Paul II, Rosa Parks, Coretta Scott King) and scandal galore (too many to list).

I can't say I'll miss the job very much, but I will miss my coworkers. They were really the ones who made the job interesting, and while being a consultant I wont get that same 'Office' atmosphere.

There needs to be a better solution for syndicating my blog. I have two active blogs, this one and my personal one. The difficulty with this is that I often cross blog because I have the same interesting things to say to both audiences. The KDE developers blog is the account which gets syndicated to Planet and LinuxChix, but it misses a lot of the random usability and interaction design rants I write. Although Planet reaches a lot of people, not everyone reads/syndicates it so I would be missing people who read only KDEDevelopers. But I've also had my personal blog for many years. What a dilemma, because one will have to go.

I will be doing some interesting work in the upcoming weeks in which I should be able to donate some of the materials to the KDE-EDU project (I still have to work out the details to see what deliverables I can release from the contract). I will be conducting in some in-depth requirements research for education software for children from Kindergarten to 12th grade. Non-proprietary materials such as personas, survey results, usability studies, and style guides could greatly help the KDE-EDU project in creating better educational software. I'm excited for the project mostly because I'll be able to give some of my daily work back to KDE.

For those of you who play WoW (world of warcraft): an addiction test

Well on your way!
You are 73% Addicted!
You play a lot, and you're starting to get hooked. Keep it up and soon you too will be part of the ever-growing group that is totally addicted. Or, see the warning signs now and get out while you still can!

Truthfully, if I took this test a few months ago I probably would have been 90-95% addicted. I've been very busy lately and havn't had the time/opportunity to sit and play for hours on end because of homework, housework, and other random things. My second character (undead rogue) is slowly leveling up, so I think once she gets to 45/50 I'll be in get-to-60 mode.

El mentioned in her recent blog entry about an issue with the Defaults button in many of the application configuration UIs. She also posted this thread (list membership required for archive) about this issue, which led to a discussion about it in #openusability.

A preliminary solution would be to create '[Reset all defaults] [Reset (Fonts) defaults]' buttons to better save the user from accidently resetting ALL defaults instead of just the current tab defaults. In the end we'll just have to test it and see if it is a better solution and by how much.

I will be in Las Vegas March 17-20 if anyone is going to be in the area. Also, there were some small talks about having a Usabiltiy/HCI-WG meeting in Washington, D.C. in the beginning of April before a meeting in Georgia. If there is any interest in this, drop me a line so I can work something out.

And finally, a funny story:

This morning, I bought a banana from the cafe in my building. The only bananas they had were green, and I tried to pick the ripest one. When I got to my desk, I thought about my banana and said 'I wonder if it would riped if I put it on my laptop?'. Fruit, afterall, ripens with the help of heat not time, and my laptop runs very hot. And so I put this banana on my laptop (I use an external keyboard and mouse) and told my friends about it. 'Do you think this will work?', I ask my coworker as he looks at me with a strange look. 'Guess what I did!', I tell a friend who proceeds to laugh at my silly idea.

Well guess what. Four hours later my banana no longer has green spots, so by the time I leave for class I should have a nice ripe snack for the drive. Whoo!

sorry for the caps, but i *am* yelling

this weekend justin and i went home and watched (and later celebrated) the steelers play in the super bowl.

for those of you who are not familiar with the super bowl, it is the championship game for american football (you know that weird game that is nothing like soccer). for those of you who are not familiar with me or the steelers, you should know that i am from pittsburgh and so are they

saturday night in the south side (one of the bar districts) reminded me of mardi gras. people dressed up in black and gold, drunk in the streets singing "Here we go STEEEEEELERS, HERE WE GO!", cars blasting steelers polka (yes polka, dont ask) and blaring horns down carson street, and almost every store/bar/restaurant/house decorated in black and gold for the Big Game.

why was it such a Big Game (other than it being the championship of course). well, the super bowl is a big deal to pittsburgh for many reasons. *) it is a family owned team (which is getting rarer these days) of which the father of the current owner won 4 superbowls with. *) jerome 'the bus' bettis has been inducted in to the hall of fame, yet had not won a super bowl AND has been hanging in with the team for 2 years trying to get a ring (he is a broken man) AND is from detroit (he is from detroit). *) ben roethlesberger is the second youngest starting quarterback (and now youngest winning quarterback) *) bill cowher has been coaching the steelers for something like 15 years and has taken them to the playoffs something like 9 or 10 times with only 1 other appearance (loss) in the superbowl (1996).

so it was time for 'one for the thumb' (the super bowl prize is a ring and trophy for the team)

oh and strangely condoleeza rice (U.S. secretary of state) was at the game and publicly picked the steelers to win (this is strange in part because a) she was at the super bowl and b) public figures do not usually publicly pick sides in sports unless they are a hometown team and she is from Alabama).

anyway.. being more interested in getting drunk and staying warm to watch the game than 'freezing our nuts off' (as justin would put it), we watched the game from the comfort of a house party in north pittsburgh rather than going down town in the craziness. popular bar districts in pittsburgh were closed for the game (south side, strip district, station square, oakland..) to allow people to wander the streets and celebrate (or riot) after the game.

people from all around the country came in to pittsburgh just to watch the game here. pittsburgh has a great following, once from pittsburgh, always from pittsburgh. i have friends in California who have found a steelers bar, a friend in Boston who has found one, and Justin and i know of at least three in DC/Balitmore. (as for stats, i think Florida is the #1 place for pittsburghers to move to, DC-Metro #2)

the game was full of ups and down, ill let you read commentary to see the close calls and bad plays from both sides, but overall it was a great game to watch.

the street scene broadcasted to the post-game news was insane. the streets were littered with cheering fans, far from sober but all smiles. luckily most of the streets around the districts were closed as well and would not be opened until 3am, which gave people plenty of time to party (er.. sober up).

im afraid to know what the scene would have been like if we lost. something would have been torn down, set afire, blown up, who knows. but who cares, bettis has a fairy tale ending, the rooney's have one for the thumb, pittsburgh native coach cowher has a superbowl win, ben is the youngest winning qb in superbowl history, and pittsburgh will be a very happy place to be for a long time.

GO STILLERS! (I is an intentional accent )

Since I havn't posted in a while, a quick QOTD:

kawakokappa (10:55:29 AM): could you imagine reproducing a series of steps with half of them missing?

seele varcuzzo (10:56:15 AM): no, and youre going to make me core dump if you make me

Oh hell.. why not. Maybe if I say I'm going to do something on public forum, I'll actually get it done

Of course, I shouldn't give myself the entire year to do some of these things, so maybe I should set an expiration on each item.

Put up the KDE Usability Project tests and reports I gathered in December

I think December was a month off for everyone. I did get a little work done here and there, but one thing I started and didn't get a chance to finish was reorganization of usability.kde.org. Many of you provided me documents or links to usability tests and reports from 2005, I just need to put them up.

Let's try to do this (or at least get started putting documents up) by the end of January

Start organizing and writing conference submissions now

Alas, I think there were 6 conferences I wanted to write submissions for and I only got to two of them. Part of the problem was lack of time, and lack of time yielded the problem of lack of material composed, and lack of material composed yielded the problem of lack of submission. I need to plan and manage my time better.

Start scanning deadlines and planning reports now. Annual conferences are typically held around the same time of the year with the same deadlines, so I should know most of them by now

Start gathering and organizing tests, references, notes, etc. for my thesis

Although my thesis is probably another year away, I seriously doubt three or four months will be enough time to test and analyze data, collect and evaluate references, and write a 50-100+ page graduate thesis. I'm in the data everyday anyway, so I might as well start taking notes.

This doesn't have a solid expiration, but I should start as soon as tomorrow with bookmarking possible references and thinking about user test design.

Get back in to KDE-Edu

The Edutainment Project was one of the first projects I got involved with when I joined the KDE development community. Sporadically over the past year or so I provided them with some feedback about their interfaces and a few reports. They are a wonderful group to work with and very welcome to feedback which is going to help improve children's success and acceptance of the software.

Ideally, I would like to have another interface and contextual evaluation done by the end of March.

...and then there's the HIG

Poor El, I think she's done the most work on the HIG without much help (from me included). I wish I had a solution for the lack of participation. I thought maybe putting it on a wiki and making it more accessible for people to edit would help -- I think I edited it for about a month before I stopped. We really need to get a move on the thing, at least get a draft out the door by the end of the year.

We need to make some serious progress in the next 6 months. In particular I will take responsibility for the Toolbars, Menus, and Labeling sections, and try to have at least debatable information by the end of March with a preliminary draft by the end of June.

Overall, I think this is a pretty ambitious list of things to get done this year (mostly in the first half). Cheers to motivation!