This site is rarely updated. benbrophy.com is more up-to-date. - Ben
What day was it when you were born?
(This is a rare cross-post from my family blog)
Our friend Michelle mentioned that her kids keep asking her which day of the week it was when they were born, and she wasn't sure. So I whipped up a little PHP script to answer the question.
Michelle said she wrote down the days and hung them on the wall so now everybody knows. I am one proud nerd. Plus, now I know Lisa was born on Sunday and Nathan & I were born on Tuesday.
What day was it when you were born?
Tags: PHP
The Persona Lifecycle
I went to a presentation today on user personas by Tamara Adlin. Great presenter, she was very funny (looking at her websites I see two of her recent publications were Are Your Corporate Underpants Showing? and Let Them Pee - which is right at the level of my sense humor). She had to deal with the Stata center's faulty projection system and wound up presenting from a chair with her lap top facing us in her lap, the audience gathered around her in a small circle. It was like preschool, quite fun. Luckily the audience was small, since there is quite gale blowing through Boston.
I've always had a hard time working with persona's. I have some tacked on my cubicle wall, but I still tend to work on a persona that is in roughly formed in my mind after several interviews with the people who will use our software. In large projects I have spent time contributing to the creation of personas only to see them have little influence over the actual design process.
I didn't have the breakthrough I'd hope for, where I would say "A ha! Now that I know this our whole team will embrace personas, refer to them by name and let their imaginary yet prescient needs drive our our work." But I did see some good strategies for bringing the personas into requirements and design work.
I chatted with Jean Foster after the session and we may give personas another go in helping us plan for stage two of Stellar Images (in stage two we'll let people take all those images they found and turn them into class room presentations). Maybe we'll pick up Tamara's book and really make it work this time.
How Jira works
We've been using Jira to track bugs an feature requests in Sakai. At first I found it overly complex and hard to use, but I've adjusted to it, and now really value it's functionality. I get an email every time a Jira request is added. Those that I'm interested in I add to my watch-list so I'll know how and when they are resolved.
But here's something funny. This feature request -- Group enable worksite setup tool -- was created at 9:09 AM. 15 minutes later new code was checked into the repository to solve the issue, and at 9:39 the issues was marked "resolved."
Now this is a controversial issue, and there was a highly charged email debate about it. But I'm not writing about the content of the Jira request here.
What's funny is that it shows how important Jira is now in the development process. In Catch-22 there's a chapter about the map of Italy that the officers keep near their tent, showing the positions of allied and axis forces. Based on the position of the little axis flags on the map, the air crews will be sent on bombing runs. But the base is so fixated on the map, they lose track of the war. They start moving the flags around just to manipulate their flight plans. Don't want to fly over the anti-aircraft guns? Move the flags. Have some code you want to check in? Create a Jira issue.
Online Calendars
Jason Fried posted a note asking "Should calendars online look like calendars offline?"
I thought the same thing when designing Stellar 1.0 eons ago, I decided to forgo the grid calendar, and opt for the list of dates I saw in Syllabi instead. Mostly this was to handle the challenge of people creating events with long titles, which would then some how be crammed into a little calendar grid. Years later, the schedule tool is little improved. Few people use it, fewer complain about it, it has remained a low priority.
But now Sloan School representatives have reported that having a grid calendar is highly desirable. If you read the comments on Jason Fried's note you'll see a majority of people speaking up for the old grid calendar. It's not just the grid, people have come accustomed to seeing weekly views and day views as well.
When the time comes to bring a new Calendar into Stellar/Sakai (Sakai is much closer to what people want). It's going to take a lot of work to deliver the calendar people now expect. Ideally I think the solution would be to not have the calendar appear in the course management system, but instead appear on a institutional calendar (like Tech Time at MIT) so class deadlines appear side by side with other events.
Shoplifting MP3s
From Walter Mossberg's column in the Wall Street Journal, Media Companies Go Too Far in Curbing Consumers' Activities
Even if you think the record labels and movie studios are stupid and greedy, as many do, that doesn't entitle you to steal their products. If your local supermarket were run by people you didn't like, and charged more than you thought was fair, you wouldn't be entitled to shoplift Cheerios from its shelves.
I agree by and large with his message, which I read as "leave the consumers alone and go after the people pirating for profit." But I can't stand that metaphor. It's the old copying a music file = shoplifting metaphor. Except, it doesn't work. If shoplifted some Cheerios, the store would then no longer have the Cheerios. It is simply not possible for me to make a copy of the Cheerios and leave the original Cheerios box in the store.
You see what I mean? The metaphor gets so surreal when you start trying to follow it.
A more accurate metaphor is that instead of buying the Cheerios, my friend gave me some free Cheerios he made at home (violating General Mills' Cheerios patent). The store doesn't get my business, but they get to keep their Cheerios.
The media really need a new metaphor if they want a breakthrough on this copying music business.
Paparazzi Screen Capture
Wow, sometimes I bump into a little app that solves a small annoyance I have had just perfectly. Take Paparazzi, this little app that can grab a screen capture of the full length of a web page. I want to do this every six months or so, and wind up settling for with less than optimum cropped screen shots instead. It's just a beautiful little app. Now all I have to do is remember that I have it next time this comes up.
I found this from Cool OSX Apps, which close to my favorite RSS feed lately.
Tags: osx
MIT Jabber server
Cool. MIT has a new Jabber service. I am using mine now go ahead an IM me to see. The account is the same as my email address, benbr with @mit.edu added on the end. Of course I already had an AIM and a Yahoo ID, but a third never hurts. And it will allow me to treat this account as me "work" account.
Labeling issues in UI
There's currently an issue post in sakai's change request database regarding the 'assignment' label in the Gradebook. Someone quite reasonably questioned the label "assignment" to describe those things which are graded in a gradebook. This is something we've gone round and round about, and resolved in usability testing.
You can spend hours having rational arguments about the best label for something in a user interface, only to find the most rational suggestion slows down the people who use the tool. This was one of those times. Here's my comment on the case:
This is always a tricky area, especially when you consider that tools go by different names at different schools. At MIT we plan to use the Gradebook and call it that, but we have no plans to use the Assignment tool, favoring our own Homework tool in it's place. Also, we allow instructors to relabel their tools. So in some cases a class may call it's Homework/Assignment tool "Problem Sets" and it's Gradebook tool "Feedback." This doesn't effect the precise area of the UI mentioned in this suggestion, but keep in mind the flexibility of labels.
Now on to the "assignment" label...
In designing the UI for the gradebook we conducted series of usability test using a prototype (though not in the context of the assignments tool). We gave them the UI and the syllabus of a pretend class and asked them to talk us through how they would set it up, using the prototype. We tried both 'assessment' and 'item' in the UI and found that they lead to confusion. When using Item and to a lesser extent Assessment people weren't sure if that link would do what they needed. When we switched to Assignment, that problem dropped away.
I'm not saying that means we've found the solution and shouldn't change. But I do propose that the change be made on the basis of further usability testing. We'll be doing a round of testing this Fall on the live gradebook tool. We'll share the results and the protocol, and would love to see results from other schools.
Tags: sakai gradebook ui usability
Horizon project wiki
I was just checking out the NMC's Horizon project, which I read about on Phil Long's weblog. The yearly horizon report. They have set it up as a wiki, including a space where you can add ideas that they should be considering. I went in and added federated image presentation tools, since we've found it to be such a rich topic.
Tags: NMC horizonreport
Jakob the usability guy on blogs
I have mixed feelings about Jakob Nielsen. His book got me excited about designing for user experience years ago, and I enjoy his rigor. But something about his tone sets me on edge, and his website is just so ugly, it's hard to use.
So he published a little piece on "The Top Ten Design Mistakes in Weblogs" today, and I have to say I agreed with him up and down the list. This weblog you are reading has made several of the mistakes, my pitiable 'about me' and lack of photo, for example. I often check for an about page when I first read a new blog, so I should know better.
Many of the usability issues of my weblog stem from my drive to simplicity which led me to publish a weblog in my AFS account, which could be maintained with the absolute minimum of maintenance. Here's the process of writing a blog entry for me. Write a blog entry in BBedit and save it. That's it, a little script updates my blog for me every 30 minutes. But publishing to AFS means the site is a set of static files, and I've foregone categories and individual post pages (you just get monthly archives). Sadly those monthly archive pages are so long, Google doesn't index the whole page, so they aren't even very searchable.
So, I've been a little chagrined to find myself embarrassed by Jakob, a guy who's website looks like it by a elementary school student. Honestly, I barely think about my weblog as a website, it's mostly an RS feed to me. But I may just spiff the place up a bit, here and there, for those readers who come here the old fashioned way.
Tags: usability weblog JakobNielsen
50 whole downloads
Just now Linkwalla was downloaded for the 50th time. Nice. Hitting the big time!
I have the next round of Linkwalla improvements planned out (supporting long term use by adding monthly archives). Unfortunately I am hosed between work and school and maintaining my secret identity, so there won't likely be any new updates until January.
Tags: Linkwalla sourceforge simplexml
Small Tools Big Ideas
I was thrilled to present at the Small Tools Big Ideas conference in New York last week. Carl Jones and I split a presentation on developing Stellar images as a presentation tool that uses external image repositories titled Cooperative Technology (pdf, 1.2MB).
Here are some more highlights from the conference.
I met Michael Feldstein, who's blog I've been reading for a while, and we had a chat while waiting line for lunch. His ideas on a Learning Management Operating System are looking better and better to me.
It's interesting how many people were working towards the same thing
- Separating image repositories from the presentation tools that remix the images
- Seek out a standard way for tools and repositories to talks (OKI and SRW are starts)
- Metadata that travels well
- An end to copyright insanity (or at least a good a workaround)
I got to see the best products in the 'teaching with images' market and meet the makers.
- MDID is cool, but Windows based which makes it hard for us to work with.
- ArtStor seems to be making a solid effort at being a good, sharing, edtech citizen and a money-making company at the same time. And they are using SRW now on their repositories (not sure how far that goes, though).
- Almagest is a great tool. They are hoping to tear it's repository half and it's presentation half apart so they can work together, but also work separately with other tools. (that could be great news for our tool!)
I had a chat with one of the reps from Saskia - a provider of high quality digital images for libraries. They are open to loading their images in DSpace and having copies moved to something like Stellar. They aren't concerned with turning off student access at the end of the semester. It's nice to hear of such reasonable policies.
Rachel Smith of the New Media Consortium gave a great keynote, drawing heavily from the horizon project at the NMC.
The Windows logo hovering over the panelists during the final panel Q&A drove me bonkers. After the short presentations, the projector stayed on, the screen saver kicked in and it was the floating Microsoft logo moving around every few seconds. I wanted to run up to the podium and smash the projector, sort of like in that seminal Apple ad where the woman smashes big brother.
There was so much more. It's hard to blog about such a rich experience. Big whuffie points to Beth Harris and Steven Zucker for their work.
I am writing this at Logan Airport on my way to Berkeley for a meeting on Sakai's course management API. It's been a busy couple of weeks.
Tags: smalltoolsbigideas mdid almaggest artstor stellar dspace
WebCT and Blackboard
So the big ed tech news (besides the Video iPod) was the purchase of WebCT by Blackboard. This gives them a tremendous market share, and gives them more power to compete against open source efforts like Sakai.
Here's quote from Jim Pease at Syracuse
Although not open, there is a large community of support and development around Blackboard and WebCT. Although I would argue that the open licensing of Sakai is enough of an advantage, I don't think it is enough to motivate a switch from Blackboard/WebCT. What argument would you pose to university officials if asked, "What is the advantage of Sakai over Blackboard/WebCT?"
To me the differentiating factor has to be user experience. Which LMS makes it easier for people to teach, learn and collaborate?
Sakai's not there yet, but hopefully as it's framework and APIs mature, and universities begin contributing their work it will be competitive with a large commercial solution on the basis of user experience. The APIs are maturing. I am writing from Berkeley today, at a meeting going over the requirements for course management in Sakai - man having reps from 5 big schools in the room really hammers on those requirements.
But I'm hopeful that the as the framework, kernel and APIs get solid, Sakai will become a reliable platform for schools to develop against. That's when the fun really begins.
Tags: WebCT Blackboard Sakai edtech
Conference tagging
I think it would be great to print a suggested 'tag' for the Sakai conference in Austin right on the conference programs, and the website.
By tag I mean the tags that people use when adding photos to flickr, links to del.icio.us, blog entries to technorati, etc. I'm adding a 'sakaiaustin' technorati tag right to this post.
I often find that there are some people at a conference either blogging the conference or taking lots of pictures and putting them on flickr. I was at a conference last week, and Raymond Yee was tagging his photos for the conference "smalltoolsbigdeas". Unfortunately since there wasn't an agreed tag before hand, he's the only one with photos there.
Daphne Ogle rightly suggested that the program ought to include a note saying what the heck a tag is for people who aren't dorks.
Tags: folksonomy tagging sakaiaustin
Web Freshener
So here's my idea for a small project to complete for my database class: Web Freshener. Web Freshener will help us and our clients keep websites current by reminding us to update stale web pages.
Have you ever been looking at a website then notice their news updates page hasn't been updated since 2002, or it mentions some event that happened months ago in the future tense? Makes you wonder how much you can trust anything you read there. On the other hand I see how it happens. I'm often in meetings in which we decide that certain webpage will have areas of fresh content, meant to be updated regularly. It happens once or twice, then people get distracted before you know it six months have gone by, and we think 'wow we should really update that spotlight link on the home page.' What's even worse is having someone outside our group point it out. Stale web pages are embarrassing.
Web Freshener will be a web based database. Managers can add web sites, and add people responsible for updating them. Then people can add updates - an update can be something like: "Replace spotlight on the home page" or "Review the feature list for accuracy" or "Write a new blog entry." Most updates will have a URL, a person responsible for the update and a "shelf life" or the amount of time after the page is updated before it goes stale. When an update goes stale, the person responsible gets an email reminder. The email will include a link they click to to say "OK. I did the update" which will start the shelf life timer back up again. Also anyone can view reports to see what updates have happened to a site, what updates are coming up or late, and who is responsible.
That's it. Pretty simple really, but it should save us a lot of memory for more important matters, and maybe help us avoid embarrassing staleness in our web sites.
Tags: WebFreshener Simmons LIS458 database
Vaccinating against babies
Here's a odd User Interaction issue. I was analyzing the website of Drs. Foster & Smith - they sell pet supplies, and veterinary medicine. I tried a sample search of "rabies." Seems like a possible search for right? Well when i searched I got a big set of returned products and articles along with a little note: "Text Search: Corrected to babies"
Now that's odd. I wonder what kind of software they are using? Seems like they are finding the closest matching key word, but it suggests a real weakness in their taxonomy.
Tags: ecommerce search userinteraction
Micro Presentations
I'm doing three presentations this week. Two are now complete. The first was to the heads of department from the School of Science, the second to MIT's new provost. Both, though different in content, were about the Stellar Course Management System, and both were for about 5 minutes to allow room for more speakers.
Later this week I'll be discussing Stellar Images at the Small Tools/Big Ideas conference in New York. And it's the big one - I'll have a whopping 10 minutes after sharing a 20 minute time slot with Carl Jones from the MIT Libraries. Carl and I are last on 90 minute panel with thee other 20 minute presentations -- I hope our moderator is strict with the time limits or I'll be talking to people on their way to lunch!
It is much harder to give a 5-10 minute presentation than 30 minute presentation. You can only hope to make you point well enough that the listener may be motivated to learn more later.
Tags: Stellar