free klm calculator

I need to download and try this free Keystroke-level Model (KLM) calculator.

blogging chi2006

No, I won't be blogging on CHI2006 because I'm not there, but for those of you who couldn't make it this year (like ME!) you can follow along with these blog sites:

The Official CHI2006 blog
The UNofficial CHI2006 blog

Thanks to Rashmi Sinha for the pointers!

Update, 26-Apr-2006: The student volunteers' blog for CHI 2006 is probably the most interesting of all.

javascript kung fu

We've formed a user experience (UX) team at my client site. We're employing an iterative design process that involves a lot of prototyping, both low-fi and high-fi. In doing high-fi prototypes, I've found several new JavaScript libraries to be invaluable.

Yahoo! User Interface Library
Offers support for animation, connection management (AJAX), DOM traversal, Drag'n'Drop, and event management. The event management is really nice. If you try to attach an event handler to an element before the page is finished loading, the YUI Event API will store off the handler and defer its assignment until the page load is complete. Cool! The Drag'n'Drop API is also particularly awesome. I'm using it in one of my prototypes to create draggable content boxes (not unlikely Google's personalized home page).

JQuery
Some people use JQuery for its animation capabilities (pop-down/slide-down effects and transitions), but I use it more for its DOM traversal capabilities. JQuery allows you to select elements using syntaxes that resemble CSS selectors and XPath (yes, XPath!). For example, if you're looking for the child of a node 'A' that has a class called 'X', you'd normally have to get an element reference to the node and then iterate through its children using a for loop. With JQuery, this could be written more tersely as:

$("#A").find(".X")

This returns a list of all the elements that match. To grab the first, you'd just invoke .get(0).


I've started playing around with script.aculo.us, moo.fx, and Prototype too. We'll see what treasures those yield.

Side note: Anyone know if there's any documentation on Prototype? I haven't seen any.

stop indicting your users

A couple of weeks ago, I had trouble accessing a system I needed in order to do my work. Unable to resolve the problem, I submitted a support request to the company's support request database where it was fielded by a "Web team" engineer. It turns out that the URL I tried to use was wrong. "Strange," I thought, especially since I found the URL directly from the Web team's online documentation. It turns out they kept some of their documentation updated (the documentation that was less visible on their site) but not other documentation (the documentation for this specific system). Granted, it is not uncommon for documentation to deteriorate in an IT setting. It was a simple, easily correctable mistake (which they still haven't corrected, by the way).

Now for the funny/disturbing part. I glanced at my support request the other day. The Web team engineer had closed the support request with the diagnosis "USER ERROR." Excuse me? I had followed their documentation to a "T"--at least the documentation that was visible for the task I was doing.

The problem lies in how younger IT professionals are "programmed" by their peers to regard users as "stupid" and usually the root of the problem in any support call situation. This myopic view propagates from one generation of professionals to the next. So, how can we combat this view? I would suggest educating professionals early on in their careers (while they're still being educated/trained) with themes central to HCI and usability. When desiging an interface, maintaining a system, etc., one must remember that users perform tasks to meet goals using their knowledge in a given context. If each of these are not considered (users, tasks, goals, knowledge, and context), the interface or system will fail and it will be the fault of the IT professional, not the user.

Stop indicting. Start serving.

infotec 2006 ppt uploaded

You can find the PowerPoint slides for my Infotec talk "A Crash Course in Web Usability" over here.

firefox extensions

Here are the Firefox extensions I'm using these days (see screen capture below).