M364 Block 1, Unit 1, Activity 3

Think about the system outline in Box 3 [The 1999 UK Passport Agency Fiasco]. Suggest what the consequences of the Passport Agency's computer problems may have been for the following groups of people:

the general public

the workers at the Passport Agency

The increase from 2-3 weeks to 7-10 weeks more than tripled the waiting time for passports. This would have been real problem for people needing to travel abroad on short notice for business or, sadly, for funerals. It would have made the already stressful business of arranging family holidays more so, especially given the changing legal context whereby children would now require their own passports. It is quite conceivable that the threat of having to cancel a holiday (or leave a child behind) due to non-arrival of passports could lead to blame games and even leave relationships under stress.

Passport Agency workers would have had to deal with a surge in enquiries and disputes, where they had to decide what was or wasn't an emergency case. This, along with their identification with an employer that was being ridiculed in the media and by the general public, would have been sapping to their self-esteem. The possibility of radical solutions which might have impacted their working conditions or even employment would have added to their general stress levels.

M364 Block 1, Unit 1, Activity 2

(One personal frustration provoker is signing on to a course and discovering that you're not using the current edition of the book!)

Study Chapter 5, Section 5.4 on page 147 of the Set Book, including the activities. This section is entitled 'User frustration' and provides a list of reason why users often become frustrated when using interactive products and gives examples of what the author refer to as 'classic user-frustration provokers'.

Can you think of any other frustration provokers?

[1] When a system is hard to learn because of unnecessary internal or external inconsistencies - for example, in CP/M (the command-line only predecessor of MS-DOS) file copying and transfer was done using a command called PIP (for Peripheral Interchange Program) which had the (sometimes lethally) unexpected parameter syntax of "PIP target=source".

[2] When there is inadequate or misleading guidance to the relative importance of interface options. I used to consult on a programming product which by default saved programs in a fast but fragile binary format. If you asked its authors to assist a user whose program was no longer loadable, they would inevitably reply "Sorry, users simply have to 'Save as text' regularly". But the safe "Save as text" option was buried in a sub-menu, while the dangerous option was hooked right into the obvious menu location, "File > Save".

[3] When you can't tell in what order you should to use interface options. The same programming product had various sets of functions available for communicating to external systems such as databases, terminal emulators and mainframes. Being a GUI-based, interactive development environment you could paste each function in from a function dictionary, complete with meaningfully named parameter variables, and the online help would expand on what each function did and what the parameters were. But there was nothing to tell you the order in which these function calls should be made, which left our users stuck with a massively frustrating trial-and-error task. (Eventually I wrote up the necessary sequence options, using Syntax diagrams to describe function order rather than parameter order, and this was included in our documentation)

New year, new goals - OU M364 Block 1, Unit 1, Activity 1

So it's a new year, and I spent several months of last year mumbling to myself about finding a new direction at work. So I identified the direction I want to go as Interaction Design and signed up for an Open University course in Fundamentals of interaction design, and now I need to get my head down and get on with the studying.

So, without further ado, here's Block 1 (of 4), Unit 1 (of 4), Activity 1: 

Identify two contrasting interactive products on your person, in your home, or in your workplace. In your opinion, do either of these prodcuts have good ID? If you anser positively, try to identify what, for you, characterises good ID.

Do you have difficulty using either of these products? If so, think about what the problems are and try to identify what, for you, characterises bad ID.

Our coffee machine has excellent interaction design. Every message is succinct, self-explanatory and relevant to purpose - for example (from memory) "Dregs drawer full", "Out of beans", "Out of water" or even "Please descale". User input is pleasingly obvious - you push a button to ask for a coffee, and if you have to empty the dregs drawer, add beans, fill the water tank or descale the machine, the machine automatically senses that the task has been done and responds accordingly.

My (rather basic) Nokia mobile phone has, on the whole, good ID. It is generally compatible with all the previous Nokias that I have owned, and when I've used new features for the first time - for example, the alarm clock function - it has taken patience rather than genius to navigate the limited set of menus and set the alarm to go off every weekday morning. On the other hand, the choice of the green "call" button to switch off the alarm is counter-intuitive (both of us pushed the red "hang-up" button at first) and the unnecessary object / subject ambiguity of "Send business card" as an option on a contact (am I being invited to send this contact as a card to someone, or to send this contact someone else's card?) make me feel this could have done with some more usability testing.

I would characterise good ID as being that part of a product's design which minimises the gap (that space filled with effort, friction and frustration) between what I want to do and what the product can do, or can be made to do. Bad ID makes me make mistakes - sending the alarm into snooze rather than switching it off, send my friend's phone number to a builder rather than vice-versa; or it makes me look elsewhere for functionality that should be part of the product's value, as when I briefly considered buying an otherwise redundant alarm clock. 

On getting the results of my 11-plus

There's a scary scaled-down 11-plus test on the BBC today. I did common entrance in my day, but I'd heard of the 11-plus and the brutal way in which an 11-year old's future in the state education system - and possibly their livelihood and life - was determined by a single childhood exam.

So I took the mini-version and found it harder than I expected in the time. To my surprise I received 11 out of 15 marks - a pass, which would have qualified me for grammar school. Looking at the answers and explanations, I'm sure I could do much better with a little practice in this kind of problem - but then it's a long time since I was 11, so there's not much comfort in that! 

Dear reader, how would you have done?

All I saw of Mumbai was the airport!

Just to let people know, yes I did travel to Pune via Mumbai and yes, the trouble did happen while I was out there, but as I've explained to many kind questioners - when you're over there you realise exactly how far away from the trouble you are.

In the event I had two long stopovers in the airport and in neither case did I actually leave it, except in a large Boeing of  Jet Airlines.

I have visited Mumbai as a tourist, a few years back. I had a good time, and I was really sorry, this time, to see the harm and hatred that had come to town. But from what I've seen of this city and its inhabitants they will rise up, not roll over, rise up to life and business and all the rubbing-along cosmopolitan attitudes and activities that those who attacked Mumbai probably hated most about it.

Traffic in India

It takes about 25 minutes to drive back from our temporary office in the Eon Free Zone to the Central Park Hotel in downtown Pune, and as far as I can tell there isn't a second when I'm not hearing car horns in action.

Back in London I'd be distressed - horns there generally mean anger or imminent collision. Here it feels more that they are simply a way of gently nudging your fellow road users. Nobody follows the rules much, there's no lane discipline, yet curiously no visible anger or discourtesy, no audible screeching of brakes, and the bikes keep weaving through the road with their one, two, three or even four helmet-less passengers chatting away cheerfully.

It seems to me that it's a kind of non-aggressive anarchy. You don't follow the written rules much, but you have a lot of respect for the unwritten ones, of keeping people alive and property undamaged and tempers cool. 

I wonder if Gandhi ever talked about the traffic?

Music matters

Just been listening to my friend Jessica Duchen on radio 4's Music Matters. (You can catch it for the rest of the week here, starting just after 20 minutes in).

I may end up tied to a stake by hooded culturati, the first wisps of smoke emerging from the Enid Blytons piled up by my feet, for this comment, but I really think that Jessica writes about music far better than Ian McEwan does. If I sound surprised or defensive about this, it's only because I have such high respect for Ian McEwan in general (but my all time favourite is in fact The Daydreamer, which probably marks me as the childish Philistine that I am) and because he takes such a serious interest in writing about music.

Anyway, the prospect of nice warm feet starts to feel appealing as the wind and rain wail round our extension on this Bank Holiday Monday.

from beans to mug - brewing up envy and pleasure

We've just got a lovely Italian coffee machine - not something I'd been planning, an impulse buy when I spotted it on sale, ex-demo at half-price, at my local Ringtons.

It quietly grinds the beans to make a truly delicious cup of coffee with luxurious layer of crema, and I am now an overnight convert to espresso.

Apart from the pleasure of drinking the coffee, there's also the secondary pleasure to be had from other people's enjoyment of their coffee.

One of our friends last night quietly asked me how much it cost. Will they get one too? There's a potential third pleasure, given that we don't normally think of ourselves as trend-setters.

But what if they do - will the fact that our coffee machine no longer surprises and delights them reduce our secondary pleasure? What if their machine makes even better coffee than ours - will our beautiful espressos turn to ashes in our mouths?

Ah well - time for our nice leisurely Sunday morning coffee, I think. Oh, the comforting power of little rituals to crystallise and replicate emotions.

Gin and Soap-operas

Brilliant essay by Clay Shirky, I like the fact that someone can combine history, a few key numbers and a four-year old's hunt to give you a radical and persuasive perspective on why our recent decades of exclusively passive media consumption may soon come to look as archaic as rotten boroughs and the gin-wagon.

I can confidently say that this is the first time I've heard (and now used) the phrase "Cognitive Surplus" - and I don't think it will be the last.

Art, science and meaning

As Jimmy Gutterman says:

Jill Bolte Taylor, a Harvard neuroanatomist, eavesdropped on her own stroke. As I wrote the day of her talk, she walked us through what she felt and thought while her brain was going wild, from the borderline-metaphysical ("I can't define where I begin and where I end") to the borderline-hilarious ("I'm a busy woman. I don't have time for a stoke"). Her description of her time in that strange state, caught between two worlds, the rare researcher who has been able to chronicle a brain-changing event from the inside, was astonishing.

Eighteen minutes of purest drama. For me it crystallised something I've long felt but haven't quite been able to articulate - that art and science are, at one level, in the same business, which is making sense of our lives. See it for yourself.

note for a friend

Anyone with no principles is a cynic.

The person with one principle is either a simpleton or a fanatic.

Someone with any two good principles is a nut - because at some point in their life the two principles will come into conflict like the two arms of a nutcracker, with him or her feeling the pain in the middle.

Opting out off organ donation - a helpful proposal?

So our Prime Minister thinks it should be assumed that we are all willing to donate our organs to medicine unless we explicitly opt-out or our families object.

Though I'm not a great fan of yet another state intrusion into a pretty damn personal realm, on consideration I think I'm coming round to this idea.

After all, symmetry and reciprocity are always good ingredients for any ethical recipe. And it seems to me that there is an implicit assumption that we would be willing organ recipients, though of course some have principled objections to that, too.

So perhaps it would be helpful, in more ways than one, to include on the opt-out form this second question:

Would you be willing to accept a donated organ if it was determined that you needed one but, due to unconsciousness or other problems, you were not in a position to give your consent?

Personally, I'm willing to donate. It's right there, in writing. So I feel free to accept. And to indulge myself with perhaps odiously smug comments on the matter.

In praise of sleep

Much as Johnny is good-natured and agreeable, we still haven't mastered the business of getting him to bed promptly. (This is more important than it may sound to those who haven't experienced it - the parental partnership needs time spent together before parental exhaustion sets in.)

I read somewhere that childrens' reluctance to sleep was a form of separation anxiety - something that had never occurred to me, but made intuitive sense.

So now, when he's had his (at least) three stories, this is what I tell him:

If you shut your eyes tight
and look very carefully
you just might see
the moon and the stars

It seems to help - in fact he's prompted me for it a couple of times recently when I forgot.

What little spells have helped you with your children?

And did your parents have any for you?

Turning the screw

I saw "The Turn of the Screw" last night at the ENO, courtesy of some nice cousins who had spare tickets. Now, I'm not a great opera goer, and don't listen to much classical music beyond some of the easier-drinking works of Bach, Sibelius and Philip Glass, and I wondered how much I would really enjoy an evening's excursion into the atonal.

All I can say is that Britten's use of disturbing disharmonies to convey Henry James' disturbing tale is a marriage made in Heaven (or possibly the other place, given the story line). I literally felt a tingle of fear down my spine at one moment in the unfolding of the last scene of Act 1, as the ghosts (Timothy Robinson's Quint and Cheryl Barker's Miss Jessel) tempted the sleeping children (Nazam Fikret as Flora and Jacob Moriarty as Miles) .

I've always had a certain fondness for Lear upon the blasted heath, possibly due to a still-vivid dream from Farleigh House (where I boarded from about seven to twelve) which involved me in the crowded school chapel, "walking down the aisle, reciting random numbers with a fixed, courageous smile". Anyway, Rebecca Evan's governess, sadly singing "Malo, malo" as the opera closed, did it for me, if you'll forgive the technical phrase.

And the visuals - wonderfully gothic, black and white (mainly black), not a scrap of colour that I can recall, just one sinister tableau fading into another, and all so buttoned-up that it made Whistler's Mother look like a sixties flower child.

Any moans? Without wishing to be mean, I thought the signer was an unnecessary visual distraction, especially with surtitles overhead. And on a seriously trivial note, could they have done anything about Timothy Robinson's slightly worrying resemblence to Gryff Rhys Jones?

And not a moan, but a question - is the tail slightly wagging the dog here? Part of me feels that the "ceremony of innocence is drowned" theme should be the engine powering the story of the governess' crisis - either she has failed the total responsibility she accepted for two innocent children, or she is slowly going mad. That's a good story, isn't it? Good enough for Rosemary's Baby, at least? But this production, at least, got so much mileage from the first theme that it was not until those final notes that I, at least, could feel equally involved by her fate. Maybe it's just one of those "life's unfair" things - it's easier to care about children than about governesses, even if the latter were once the former.

Seriously, it was an eye-opening experience for this non-opera goer, and I would certainly recommend it for anyone who ever feared being bored at a night at the opera.

Getting things done (part II)

Well, turns out it's a year and a half since I unwisely announced that I was going to adopt the Getting Things Done system.

It didn't stick, but the situation didn't get any better. So now I'm having another go, concentrating just on my Gmail account, using the approach described in this article.

I've made a couple of changes - the filters don't depend on me being the sender, so I can send myself reminders from my work account, or Eva can send stuff straight into my action folders by using the right extended gmail addresses.

And I've set up a "Done" folder and filter so I can give myself a little pat on the back at the end of the day or of the week.

Will this work out any better than last time? Let's prepare for the worst and hope for the best...

Update: Just got a Zero Email Bounce on my gmail inbox, after bobbing along at 995+ for a week or more. Scott Hanselman refers to the "psychic weight" of having 1000 or more emails in your inbox - maybe the only way to understand what that phrase means is to feel it suddenly lifted from your shoulders - aaaaah!

Have to think about aiming for ZEB on Outlook at work - but Outlook 2003 isn't quite so helpful to this process as Gmail.

What was that?

I've been taking an interest in Erlang and wondering how suitable it would be for anyone launching a non-telecoms web project, so I was quite impressed by this strong endorsement yesterday from the co-founder of a start-up called MochiAds.

Naturally the next question you ask ourself is "how real is this company?" - so I did a double-take when I spotted this techcrunch post today, which seems to show them getting real traction even in private beta.

Nice to think that my technology hunches haven't gone totally rusty...

The other view

Well, after the somewhat negative tone of an earlier post commenting on a TechCrunch item, here's something to get your eyes on the horizon, your foot on the accelerator and your heart in gear.

To hear the following Teddy Roosevelt quote from someone with the entrepreneurial credentials of Yossi Vardi really adds something special:

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

Churchillian, I'd call that, except that Churchill was always better on matters of war than more subtle and pervasive issues like citizenship.

Johnny and Jake rock out

Improvement on a certain video - the "Dad-dancing" has been replaced with something cooler. Behold: Johnny on the deck, best friend Jake on the sofa!

Update: 2007-10-17 - got video link working
(video shareable under this CC licence)

Web 2.0 infrastructure and the start-up day-dreamer

I see that Powerset have just started publishing their business models, and "This first set helps a company that intends to index the web whether it is better to purchase, lease or create virtual servers on Amazon EC2."

Thinking of Amazon, they've announced FPS (Flexible Payment Services) to go with their S3 (Simple Storage Service) and EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud ). There's less and less excuse for the intrepid developer with a dream not to have a go.

Until you read this by the founder of hireahelper.com, in which he describes how he designed the entire site and spent $3,700 getting a friend of his in Pakistan to code it all.

So being a developer is now probably a handicap to anyone thinking of starting something up. Ruby Tuesday was right: "catch your dreams before they slip away".

parallel futures?

Great blog on What would you do with 80 cores? by Sean Koehl, an Intel researcher. This is one of my longer-lasting hobby-horses - I find the argument that we will eventually run out of steam on single processor architectures quite persuasive, and I would love to have a go at programming the 80-core teraflops research chip (is it as similar to the transputer in spirit as it appears to be?).

My hunch is that when and if explicitly parallel processing has taken off, the wave of change that this generates will open a window for optical computing, which has enormous potential for analogue and digital parallel processing.

In the mean time I'm learning Erlang as a background recreation - it's always good to give the grey-cells a work-out.

Republican virtues

I may not believe in God, but I can understand and respect the urge, in those who do, to seek his forgiveness for a serious sin. A touch of humility from those in power is always refreshing to the rest of us.

But passing on the news that you have in fact received not only your wife's but also God's forgiveness seems to me to reflect a slightly different virtue.

A stopped clock is right twice a day

I know a stopped clock is be right twice a day, and even my clothes may start looking fashionable about once a decade, but I've pretty well given up hope on my economic forecasting being proved right.

But if I'm going to get it wrong, I might as well get it wrong on the record and go down with all flags flying.

Evan Davis is worried about first quarter figures for UK real household incomes and savings.

And the boys have told us that they are planning to go back to Poland (once they've finished painting our new place, we trust) because Poland has is co-hosting the Euro 2012 football championship and no longer has enough workers to build the stadiums.

I think the property boom will be seriously over within six months. I've thought this for at least three years, and the market has made a liar of me for at least two and a half years, but let's make a prediction and see.

Waiting for the PRT wave, part II

An interesting Wired article on future engines - it seems that a surprising amount is happening here in the UK.

I've written before about my hunch that Personal Rapid Transport is a technology that may yet transform our worlds - my interest in this article is that some of the future engine technologies mentioned, such as the PMLFlightlink Wheelmotors in Hampshire, would appear to be highly suitable for PRT components such as ATS Ltd's Pod.

I suppose we also have to consider the possibility that electronic cars may be so successful that they kill the demand for PRT, thus leaving us with a second-best solution. Actually I could live with that, if the roads really were cleaned up and quietened down. But I don't think I will have to. Big developments like town centres, out-of-town shopping malls, airports and campuses are built using scarce resources, for specific purposes. Wasting money and space on road surface and parking has only ever been the price paid for efficient and flexible access. If and when a better alternative can be demonstrated to exist, then I believe it will be adopted - and rapidly.

On Ian McEwan

The advantage of a sleepless toddler is perhaps the unexpected reading opportunity - so started and finished On Chesil Beach between 4-something and almost-7 this morning.

It's a short book (166 pages) and given the apparently small focus of the narrative - a young couple on their wedding night in 1962, both virgins, both nervous - it's surprisingly gripping. This is perhaps a measure (perhaps intended) of the author's accomplishment, as is a hinted-at matter in her background which he confidently leaves un-explicated.

I can't help wondering if the title is also intended to be a reminder of the poem that lies, un-named, like the subject of a riddle, at the heart of the both the plot and themes of his last work, Saturday.

Is this kind of business a compliment to the reader's intelligence, or just a smug re-working of Mornington Crescent? I don't know, but I can see how tempting it is.

Revenge of the Zimmers

A band of OAPs with a combined age of over 3,000 have recorded The Who's "My Generation" for BBC 2's Power to the People programme, which I look forward to watching tonight at 9 o'clock.

The video is amusing and moving, and has created a massive stir. And if you feel that a 90-year old singing "hope I die before I get old" is in dodgy taste, try and remember how you felt the first time you heard Bono's "tonight thank God it's them instead of you". There are more important things to feel uncomfortable about - that's the point of this exercise.

It makes me proud to be a BBC licence payer. If not so proud of being part of a society that regards our elderly as an embarrassing expense.