Chris McLay. Designer

I came home this evening to find a letter written by my son, Gene, waiting for me in the mail box. This was great firstly because Gene has had some trouble with his writing and this letter was almost entirely legible. Reading through it I was stunned by what it contained:

Hey dad! i’m making a club. Can you make a blog for it? this is what is needs:

• book comment and photo box
• hand code ideas / teaching box
• rating box (add photo)
  • pages instead of stars
  • rating out of 5

love Gene

ps: thanks

Wow.

a) my son is in year two and he wants a blog;

b) he wrote a pretty clear brief (better than many I’ve received in my career).

I’m pretty impressed, and he’ll get his blog once I can find a good domain :-)

As many of you know I finished up at Sensis at little over a week ago, but I haven’t had a chance to tell everyone where I am going, so without any further ado…

Tomorrow I start work with Symplicit down in Docklands, Melbourne. Symplicit is a small research and design agency run by Stephen Moule and Jodie Moule. To quote their own web site, “Symplicit is a Customer Intelligence and User Centred Design consultancy, that offer services that help clients understand their customers, and in turn, design effective interfaces.” I’ve enjoyed working with both Jodie and Stephen on a couple of projects in the past, so I’m really looking forward to working with them on lots more.

In many ways the job at Symplicit is very similar to the work I was hired to do at Sensis, just agency side – lot’s more projects and lot’s of different clients. From what I know so far these clients include Telstra, NAB, Bendigo Bank, and a whole bunch more.

For now all contact details remain the same, just a new work email address to add to the mix – chris@symplicit.com.au.

Last week I lucky enough to speak at the Enhancing Online User Experiences conference in Melbourne. The whole experience was really enjoyable – maybe a bit stressful when my presentation notes disappeared just as I started to talk…

There was a range of wonderful presentations from a very diverse group of people. The two stand out presentations for me were Rod Farmer’s talking about his experiences in bringing better user experiences to 3 Mobile through better UX management, and Glenn Williams talking about how he brought a user-centred approach to the design of LotteryWest’s intranet.

In my own presentation I tried to expand beyond “straight” usability testing to show the broader value of involving users in the design process of online products and of other products. Overall I think this went down well, but I think I needed to cater for the very broad audience more specifically to really achieve this aim.

I’ve attached a PDF of the presentation below for anyone who is interested.

Working With Users Presentation (5.2MB PDF file)

Well, I finally got my thesis back and I’m very happy to say that I’ve come away with a first class honours. I’m really relieved. Firstly because I worked really hard and think it is really good work, but also, I expected to get stung by my slightly unorthodox writing style. Luckily it all seems to have gone well.

Thank you so much to everyone to who helped, and supported me during this time, especially my supervisor Ingrid, the nameless people who gave up their time, Jacquie and Gene, Geoff, Claire, Klazina, Neil, the clients who have gone without, and friends and family who haven’t seen me lately.

I’ve put the thesis up online for anyone who is interested, or wants to pretend that they have read it: http://eeoh.com.au/chris/honoursthesis/

So finally I have found time to post the final version of the score for everyone to see. I’m pretty happy with the overall experiment, even if I don’t really like the final product — visually it’s a little rough and child like. That said with more time (and a faster computer) I think a more aesthetically appealing version could be produced.

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After choosing the piece of music, the next step I outlined for myself was to create a visual map of the music which I could use as a design tool for the following stages. What I wanted from this was a rough break down of the various layers in the music that would be represented visually on the screen, and to know when these layers were being played.

This sounded fairly simple to me and I thought I could knock out my first draft in an afternoon of listening. It took much much longer, so much so I have no idea actually how long it took. It was rewarding in many ways and made me much more familiar with the music and how it had been constructed.

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The following four books – Apple Human Interface Guidelines, The Art of Human Computer Interface Design, Design Research, The Origins of Creativity – have also provided interesting reading over recent months, though perhaps not as through provoking as others read recently…

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Shneiderman, Ben., and Catherine Plaisant. Designing the User Interface, Fourth Edition: Strategies for Effective Human Computer Interaction, Boston: Pearson Addison Wesley, 2005

When I first picked up this book, I had the feeling I was onto a good thing. It’s a brand new 2005 fourth edition (over 19 years), it’s heavy with a well-packed 650 pages, all printed in full colour, and flicking through the book, it is obvious the authors have applied the subject matter of the book to it’s design and layout.

I have to admit at this stage that I have not tried to read the entire book, that said I have read several sections and it does appear to deliver everything my initial anticipation suggested. The book is well structured and aimed at practitioners, researchers and students in the field. It covers a broad range of subject matter, from basic theories and guidelines, through design processes, interface evaluations, detailed discussions and examples of various interaction styles, and specific design issues. Each section provides substantial further reading guides, and solid summaries of the content covered.

Overall this book is a combination text and working reference. It is comprehensive, well balanced and up to date. Every student, researcher or worker involved in the production and development of software or hardware that interacts with users should have a copy and be familiar with this book.

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Raskin, Jef. The Humane Interface: new directions for designing interactive systems. Stoughton: Addison Wesley, 2000

By many, Jef Raskin, is believed to be the creator or inventor of the Macintosh computer, and while he did father the project inside Apple, he left a long time prior to it’s eventual release and has been a heavy critic and opponent of Apple and their products ever since. It seems to be one of the longest love-hate relationships in the industry, and it comes across as very personal. Even in this text, which was written at least 15 years later, Jef shows a strong personal antagonism towards Apple and it’s products.

It is this constant personal critique, which is almost whinging in places, which in my mind really lets this book down. Especially when the few positive critiques are almost exclusively for Jef’s other products such as the Cannon Cat. I don’t really have an issue with the use of projects which Jef has been involved in, but there is little or no distance shown in this book and this makes many of the ideas and concepts presented difficult to take seriously.

If you can get past this then the book has some excellent coverage of the issues facing computer users, and the designers of such systems. I feel this is where the book is most valuable. The solutions and interfaces presented by Jef to get around these issues, feel clunky and too focused on avoiding one or two key issues raised. I’m not convinced they are always significantly better than some existing solutions, but they certainly make interesting reading and are cause for considerable thought.

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Shneiderman, Ben. Leonardo’s Laptop: Human Needs and the New Computing Technologies, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002

“The old computing is about what computers could do; the new computing is about what users can do.” (p. 2) So opens Ben Shneiderman’s book on the future possibilities for human computer interaction. Leonardo’s Laptop is a cast into the not to distant future to inspire both users and developers to improve the functionality of our computer systems and bring them more into line with what users are actually seeking to do in their lives.

When I started reading this book I was looking for a much stronger level of practice from the book, especially as it is loosely based around the works and practices of Leonardo da Vinci. However I found the book much more philosophical and inspirational in it’s overall tone. Where the book does venture into practice I didn’t find the leaps and bounds I expected, but did find solid well considered examples of how computers could (and probably already should) operate with us in our every day lives. As the first book I read in starting this unit I think this was actually a very good thing, as it refreshed my existing knowledge of the area, and opened up my mind to different ways of thinking and different perspectives without getting bogged down in practical theory and whether or not I thought the theory could be applied directly today.

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