Michael's blog

It's great to know that usability has its own Day. This Thursday, November 13, is World Usability Day and that means that a lot of events and activities will be held around the world to draw attention to making technology more usable.

Here's an excerpt from the World Usability Day web site:

Technology today is too hard to use. A cell phone should be as easy to access as a doorknob. In order to humanize a world that uses technology as an infrastructure for education, healthcare, transportation, government, communication, entertainment, work and other areas, we must develop these technologies in a way that serves people first…

Love it. It’s a mantra worth repeating every day of the year.

I've been invited by the good people at Macadamian Software Engineering and OCRI to participate on a WUD panel that focuses on “Software Usability: Listening to the voice of the user”.

Here's the summary:

Software usability is about more than an attractive design. Usability can make the difference between users liking your application or getting frustrated whenever they have to use it - affecting your company’s bottom line. To develop software that users like, developers must collaborate with users to find out what they really need. Companies that know the right way to listen to the voice of the user will have a better chance of success in the competitive market. On World Usability Day, a panel of experts in the user experience field will discuss how software companies can find out the right way to incorporate research into the development process.

While the blood is still drying under my fingernails, I want to take a moment to talk about why scaling the ramparts of Drupal's administrative user interface was such a difficult task for me as a new user.

I am a big fan of Drupal which is an open source content management system used to create dynamic web sites. It has a considerable amount of power and flexibility that, owing to a brilliant architecture, allows its central core to be enhanced by countless task specific modules.

As an open source system, the core and peripheral modules are all created and maintained by a veritable army of dedicated volunteers around the world. In addition to its highly flexible 'theming' system that allows web sites to take on virtually any aesthetic design, Drupal has a well entrenched system of semi-automatically generating user interfaces for administrative tasks.

Most end users don't see this administrative interface unless they happen to have the role of managing a web site's content. But it is here that we know that many usability issues arise.

While the system of creating administrative user interfaces presents attractive advantages to the module developer, it appears to fall far short of the needs of actual administrative users.

It's worth analysing this system and asking some blunt, usability engineering questions. What is the nature of the methodology used to generate administrative UIs? Is the developer convenience justified, given the impact on end users? What, if any, alternative is there that might alleviate the usability obstacles?

These are important questions but not easy to answer. As part of my deepening involvement with Drupal I've written an article that launches an investigation into these questions. More will follow.

To paraphrase Groucho Marx – I don't like to speak ill of the dead but in the case of our old Wordpress blog site, I'll make an exception.

Merely four postings ago I declared that I was quite unhappy with our blog web site and that we'd be moving away from Wordpress and towards a Drupal platform. Well, four months later I'm happy to say that this has (finally) all come true.

I could say a few things about why it took so long but I'm not going to do that here. Instead I'm going to use that as the basis for a number of future posts about the power, and usability weaknesses, of Drupal.

Drupal is a very well established, open source content management system. I came to know it in a sort of 'back-to-front' way because my first experience with it was by tracing through the bowels of its engine and finding out what made it tick. Compared to Wordpress innards (very scary in its haphazardness) Drupal's core looked like the work of a genius (which perhaps it is).

Shedding a Tear for Our Wordpress Blog

Last week I attended the MESH conference for the second consecutive year and once again the issue arose around evaluating the use of social media technology by a commercial enterprise.

Tom, Conchita and I at The User Advocate Group have been getting very intrigued by the possibilities we envision using the Drupal web application framework. We are happy to announce that The User Advocate Group is a Platinum Sponsor of DrupalCamp Toronto 2008 which takes place at the end of this week.

It's been just almost a year since I focused my professional attention onto usability for web applications and launched this web site. I've known for about eleven-and-a-half months that, as a hybrid between a blog and a business web site, this site has significant issues. My goal was to see if I could mix my personal perspectives with a professional profile. The experiment is over and I'm not afraid to say it's a problematic mix and change is required.

I recently jumped ship on a project that seemed destined to hit the rocky shores of missed deadlines and then sink in the swirling eddies of communication breakdown. I wasn't on board for long - about a week and a half really - but during that time I spent far too many days trying to obtain critical information about the project's code structure and database from the engineers who had developed it.

What is a software application?

When we think of a software application, most of us will conjure up the image of some sort of user interface splashed across a computer screen. As far as most of us are concerned, whatever is on the screen is the software. Period.

Engineers will tend to look at it a little differently. They are of course very aware of what goes on 'behind the screen' that makes all this stuff appear as it does and do all the things it does.

As a software artist who is focused on 'bridging the gap between end users and engineers' I have always found it necessary and worthwhile to explore the 'materials' that I work with. In doing so I can better control the emotional impact of an application on the user: the more I know about how the technology ticks, the more I can coax an application into being a pleasurable experience for a user.