Chris McLay.

I’ve been trawling through my archived files, backing up, tidying up, etc. and I came across something I thought was stuck in my collection of 3.5” floppy disks. I found copies of the first ever commercial software I designed and sold – The Box Office Manager, a single user ticketing system for small theatres.

Unfortunately there is no way I could ever run the software now as it was written for the days of System 6, with black and white monitors, and Motorola 68000 processors (that’s pre-PowerPC Macs, let alone pre-Intel Macs). I will try and find the disks and an old Mac to run them on, but that’s for another day.

Luckily there was some marketing material and manuals in with the software, so I have some screen shots from what I think is version 1.0, and some from version 1.5 beta (see below). It was great to look back at the screen caps and see how bad the design was. Not that bad considering I had no real software design training.

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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/

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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