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The sign of Google
Originally uploaded by kinetisonic.

The sign is up on the Google Ann Arbor outpost.

An insightful post at Ed Vielmetti’s blog where Ed responds to a few questions posed to him by a researcher at SPARK – a Ann Arbor economic development group.

“From a technology point of view, the opportunity is to turn Ann Arbor into a global knowledge hub knit together by and for people who have shared time and perhaps a bowl of bi bim bop in Ann Arbor but who have scattered to the four winds.”

I really like this article: “Liberating Usability Testing” by Phil Carter of Auckland University of Technology.

I grabbed the march/april 2007 the ACM Interactions magazine off a stack in my house – a little reading after the kids fell asleep – and switched from skimming to reading when I hit this article because I have a user testing session coming up in mid-May, and thought it’d be good to stir my knowledge.

It includes a table with examples of interventions for eliciting verbal reflection from a participant during a “talk outloud” usability test, when, for example, the participant is only giving non-verbal cues in reaction to using the product being tested. The examples showed increasingly less-controlling interventions. The idea being highlighted was that many commonly recommended intervention statements (e.g. “What are you thinking?” and “Why are you frowning?”) trigger a constructive cognitive activity that, while probably eliciting the desired self-reflection, causes the participant to start searching for reasons for their behavior and thus gets in the way of their direct experience of their use of the product. The author suggests light-weight intervention, such as “Something’s up, eh?”, encouraging users to stay in their experience, and yet creating an opening for the user to naturally comment.

Then the author introduces the general concept that “being alongside the user” is a more honest and accurate approach to observing during a usability test. This is in contrast to the approach that encourages the interviewer to remain neutral – an approach that Carter suggests destroys genuineness and comes off as threatening to the user. Recognizing and respecting that an observer is in relationship with the observed frees both the observer and observed to create an open safe environment that encourages exploration and curiosity.

Then the article starts to get down-right transformational. “The relationship establishes a strong motivation for a truly ethical approach that can have an ongoing attention to the well-being of all.” Wow! This is not the usual usability ROI-speak.

Then he starts to talk about the initial introduction and warm-up phase of the usability test – when the observer first meets the user – as an opportunity to develop gratitude for the participant. So very cool. And “In addition, emphasize and clarify the value of the artifact during the warm-up phase so that the whole enterprise can take on greater respect and dignity.”

I really like this way of talking. It bridges the separation between work and the rest of my life. Usability testing where the words surrounding the activity shift to include words used to describe conscious awareness and respect for others. Buddhist awareness training through usability!

“Sit along side someone as they use something, and find out how it’s going: That’s usability testing. It’s that simple….. There is room for us to attend to what is actually happening. We avoid the narrowness of thinking we are dealing with the process of extraction – we are in a human process. We bring the human qualities of inquisitiveness and friendliness because they are most effective.”

Nice work Phil Carter.

Electronic sheep, you served me well. Your ever changing patterns mystified me. I must bid thee farewell, for your energy eating ways.

These days will go down in history as the time in which the model used to evaluate the profitability of a corporation was updated to take into account the corporation’s effect on the health and good functioning of the system in which it is embedded.

I just put up my review of last week’s MOCHI talk by Mark Stock.

The Internet of Things keeps coming back to my attention. A vision of a world where designed objects have extended well beyond their physicality. Where the information being produced by the object (or spime) is as primary as the object itself. Things that are aware of themselves in context, communicating with services around them. John Seely Brown gave an early hint at a begriming of the Internet of Things when he wrote about concepts at Xerox – mentioning remote interactive communication (RIC)

“is an expert system inside the copier that monitors the information technology controlling the machine and, using some artificial-intelligence techniques, predicts when the machine will next break down. Once RIC predicts a breakdown will occur, it automatically places a call to a branch office and downloads its prediction, along with its reasoning. A computer at the branch office does some further analysis and schedules a repair person to visit the site before the expected time of failure. … the ultimate conclusion of this technological transformation is the disappearance of the copier as a stand-alone device.”

Research That Reinvents the Corporation, Harvard Business Review on Knowledge Management, 1991 Harvard Business School, Boston, MA

What I find particularly fascinating from the Internet of Things idea is the notion of the materials constituting an object being valued for more than their brief moment of being part of that object. Instead seeing the material as being in a stream of use and application. The idea of “all the uses for my dell keyboard” at various levels of disrepair, and then when it is only good for parts, what are those parts good for? What else I might want to use the buttons for (and how to detach them without damaging them) or where they can be sold. Or where to send them for recycling.

I keep imagining this information being organized through some (RDF?) ontology, with the abstract object as a primary organizing node for this information. Instructional videos (a al John Udell’s ideas of using video to communicate material that is hard to convey in explicit text) linked to various points in the life cycle of an object.

How would a multiple branching chain of possible life paths for an object be represented in a way that makes sense to users? And when is the sum of parts the central entity vs. the parts themselves becoming primary objects of interest? Questions abound in this space.

The cute face on the People’s Food Co-operative home page is none other than my brother Jon Cooney.

“visualize success, but don’t believe your eyes”
– Jackie, The New Pornographers

nice.

This morning a guy in Cafe Ambrosia said, “yeah, this is the Michigan summer that we love.” and then talked about how last year sucked, and how it cycles, but how great this year has been already. I agree.

I’ve found my mind wandering to summer good memories. I figured it was all from having kids and thinking about what they are thinking, and wondering how they see things. But now I also think that this summer must be doing something familiar, too – eliciting these memories.

And I really love the fireflies. I’m so glad their time has come this year.