What's wrong with: garlic presses?

The garlic press is a classic of redundant-from-birth gadgetry. What's wrong with it?

1. It's pointless. I use the flat of a knife to crush cloves of garlic, followed by a quick bit of chop-chop, to produce more ready-to-cook garlic in less time than finding and fiddling with a press.
2. It's inelegant. I loved being a French neighbour's kitchen while he cooked some supper. He happened to be a professional chef by background, and promptly demonstrated the truly minimalist approach by flattening the garlic with a quick press of his hand.
3. It's slow and yucky. As soon as you take into account the time spent cleaning the garlic press (and the horrors of the incompletely dish-washer-cleaned press) you realise that the manufacturers of this device have stolen your time as well as your money.

I'm never going to live in a state of uncluttered minimalism, but I think I have found a use for my garlic press - as a pungent prophylactic against gadget-buyer's remorse.

Conflicts in quality for a London Man-and-Van Company website

This afternoon I moved half a garage full of books from Hampstead (in North London) to Earlsfield (in South-West London), a process that was made much simpler and less painful by using a prompt and helpful Man and Van company specialising in small moves.

Naturally I got them off the web, and since my work clients are typically rather large banks or building societies and my entrepreneurial friends tend to be in technology or information, I was delighted to find that Leonardo, the nice Brazilian driving me and my books across London, was in fact the founder of the company, and I asked him about his web site design.

From a design perspective their web site is a slightly bizarre mix of truly helpful and innovative stuff, like the fact that you simply book a 3-hour slot (for £40 - where do they get their profit?) from an online calendar, together with somewhat distracting Google-optimised content targeting the different London regions.

For me, as a budding UX designer, this was a bruising encounter with commercial realities. If they kept the site small and focussed, the usability, and indeed the whole user experience, would be improved. But their site has to appear in the first page of search results, and they pay good money to someone to ensure that it continues to do so.

I know very little about SEO, so the only suggestion I was able to make was to suggest they invite satisfied customers to review them online, in order to reduce their dependency on more artificial methods which [a] confuse the site, and [b] might be vulnerable to a Google re-interpretation.

Lesson [1] for some sites, you have to treat the Search Engine as one of your key users.
Lesson [2] even white-hat search optimisation can conflict with other UX goals.

Narrative considered dangerous

An Australian report on responsible reporting of suicides summarises two key findings as

• Reports of suicide deaths can influence copycat acts in some cases;

• The risk of copycat behaviour is increased where the story is prominent, is about a celebrity, details method and/or location or glorifies the death in some way.

Leaving aside for the moment the human implications of all this (and if you and your family have never been touched by suicide or attempted suicide, please accept my congratulations) - from a storytelling perspective, the first point confirms the power of narrative and the second point endorses the methods of narrative.

I'm currently reading Storytelling for User Experience for the London UX Bookclub, which I think is an excellent and useful book (indeed I was one of the early suggesters)

But I've also ordered Storytelling: bewitching the Modern Mind which appears to offer a counterbalance against the misuses of storytelling as a substitute for, or distraction from, concern with truth.

All of our great advances have had fatal consequences. Fire, medicine, electricity and vehicles have all left deaths in their trail as they moved us forward, and have required social and legal regulation as a result. Now, it seems, stories too can kill.

As Spiderman discovers, "With great power comes great responsibility".

Some Reflections on the Mirror Problem

[retrieved from a long-lost backup of a 1998 proto-blog - I think it still makes sense]


Introduction: Reader, meet Problem


If you are human, there is a pretty good chance that you will at some point have looked at people or writing in a mirror and wondered why they are reversed from left to right but not from top to bottom. If you've ever discussed it with friends, you may have come up with ideas ranging from fact that our eyes are side by side to the fact that left and right are relative whereas up and down are absolute.

I recently read an explanation for this phenomenon in an otherwise excellent and best-selling maths popularisation book, and came away with my head hurting and a feeling of dissatisfaction. This wasn't, perhaps, surprising - some years ago a letter about the mirror problem provoked a extraordinary cascade of correspondence in the New Scientist  - everyone appeared to have an answer, but no one had an answer that was so obviously correct that people couldn't help but agree with it.

After reading this book I started thinking about the problem while running. I began to feel that the answer was in some senses rather simple, just terribly counter-intuitive. What a good solution would need was an excellent metaphor, so that you not only ended up knowing the explanation, but knowing that you knew the correct explanation, so clearly that you might even end up wondering why it was ever a problem. I eventually reached such a state - I now clutch the memory of the recent book, of the way-back correspondence, as proof that the problem was ever un-obvious enough to be worth solving.

Here's my solution in three simple steps, with a bit of help from some Friends. And some virtual illustrations. I hope you find it as compelling as I do.

Step 1: Twos and Threes

Width, height, depth. We live in three dimensions. And we have an orientation in each. Picture yourself standing on a giant compass symbol. Your head points up, your face looks North and, should you raise your arms, your right hand would point East and your left West. Turn around, 180 degrees. Your head still points up, but you face South instead of North and your right hand now points West instead of East. Hmmm.. so you've changed your orientation in two out of the three dimensions. OK, back to facing North. Since this is just a thought experiment, let's gently do a cartwheel next, but stop once we're upside down... well, we're still facing North,  but this time our left-right and up-down have been reversed. Back to where we were, and now a simple forward headstand. Now our left-right remains the same, but up-down and front-back have been reversed. So each of the turns involves changing your orientation in two dimensions while you spin round an axis in the third dimension.

The funny thing is, in the real world it doesn't matter how many turns you do, on which axes, in which order, you always end up reversed in exactly two of them, or back where you started and not reversed at all.
Suppose we're chatting at a party and we're standing face to face, and compare our orientation in the three dimensions. Both our bodies are head-up, but my front-back is pointing the opposite way to yours, and my left-right is also reversed compared to yours. It's the same difference as if you had simply turned round in the first of our compass manoeuvres.

In fact, think about anything with a front and a back, a top and a bottom, and a left and a right. A person, a book, even a car. If it's facing you then it will be pointing in the reverse direction to you along not one but precisely two of its dimensions. Front-back (by definition since it's facing you) and either of the two remaining dimensions, up-down or left-right.

Step 2: Ones

Picture yourself in front of a mirror. Compared to you, your image is reversed in just one dimension, front-back. The head still points up, the right hand still points to the East. Right? Mirrors reverseone dimension at a time. It doesn't have to be the front-back dimension, of course, so you can have two mirrors side by side to give an image that looks as if you had just stepped forward and turned around.Is this the answer? It seems simple enough, but why are left with this deep conviction that left and right have been reversed but up and down haven't? Is up-down in some way different from left-right, or is there another explanation?

Step 3: Planet Fussball

Do you know those table-top football (soccer) games that you get in French bars, British student unions and on the US TV series Friends (from where, I must admit, the image popped into my memory in my hour of need)? Where each player stands on one side of the machine spinning the rods with their team's model footballers to score or save goals? Look at the goalie. He is the only figure on his rod, which runs from his right (where you grasp its handle) to his left. We're going to forget about the fact that you can slide him right and left, and just note that the only spin he can do is round his left-right axis, as if he was doing forward or backward somersaults.

Right, now you are a fussball figure. Even weirder, you are in orbit around planet Fussball. (Being moulded from solid plastic, the vacuum fortunately has no ill-affects on you.) You are not alone. The planet is ringed, like Saturn or Jupiter. You are part of a ring, consisting entirely of fellow fussball figures, all of them (like you) born facing in the direction that the ring spins, with their feet towards the planet. Being fussball figures you can, naturally, spin head-over-heels around your waist. Equally naturally you can't spin from left to right, or do cartwheel type spins.

So how do you chat to your friends? You slide up to them and then spin till one of you is upside down (and back to front) relative to the other. In other words the only way you ever see another face is if it is upside-down compared to you, but with the left-right the same as you (unlike this planet where we normally see people's faces  with the top and bottom facing in the same direction as us, but the left-to-right reversed compared to us). Now someone hands you a mirror, and you look at yourself. Being a smart and inquisitive fussball figure you ask yourself "Why is this mirror image reversed top to bottom, but not left to right?". Maybe you wonder if it has anything to do with the fact that up and down are absolutes whereas left and right are relative, or to do with the fact that you have two eyes side by side...

Conclusion: tying it all up

So what does it all prove?

We've established that there's a universal law, that any time you look at something solid face to face, not only is its front-back axis pointing in the opposite direction to yours, but its orientation in one of the other dimensions, either left-right or up-down, will be reversed relative to yours too.

We've noted that on this planet almost anything that turns round, turns round its up-down axis. (Apart from fussball figures, I simply can't think of another example of something with a distinguishable top and bottom, left and right, and back and front that turns, somersault style, around its left-right axis.) So on this planet anything you look at face to face will have its left and right reversed compared to your left and right. In fact this is so common that we don't really think of them as being reversed.

We've noted that we can imagine a planet Fussball where, unlike this planet, it is more common for things and people to turn around their left-right axis than round their up-down axis. We've assumed that people there would take this up-down reversal equally for granted.

We've established that mirror images are only reversed in one dimension, front-back.
Therefore the left-right orientation of your reflection is the same as your left-right orientation, but the opposite of 99% of what you see face to face on this planet, and therefore notable. The up-down orientation is also the same as yours, but being the  same as everything else that you see, not notable.

The simple and complete answer to the mirror problem is that the mirror doesn't mysteriously reverse left and right (or up and down). We reverse left and right on almost everything we see face to face, by spinning it or ourselves round the vertical axis. That's where the mysterious difference between up-down and left-right comes in.

Appealing to my MP to oppose the DE bill

                                        Tuesday 16 March 2010

Dear Sadiq Khan,

I am a published technical author, software developer and interaction
designer with a family - my wife, a freelance accountant, and a four
year old son, Johnny.

I am deeply concerned by the disconnection provisions of the Digital
Economy Bill, which it appears is about to be waved through the house
of commons in a sadly undemocratic "washing up" process.

Both my salaried work and my writings depend critically on having a
full bandwidth internet access, for example when I remotely access my
work desktop from home.

My wife's livelihood as an accountant also depends being able to send
and receive both reports and (occasionally substantial) databases of
financial records.

As an immigrant, she would also suffer a loss of family connection if
she could no longer use video skype to talk to her elderly and
otherwise inaccessible parents.

And Johnny is an enthusiastic on-line follower of the BBC's finest
children's programmes and games, such as "AlphaBlocks" (which is
helping him learn to read) and "Relic: Guardians of the Museum" which
so interested him in the British Museum that I had to take him to see
the Egyptian galleries last Saturday.

The prospect of losing these essential services to an automated process
without judicial appeal is frankly terrifying.

As a software professional, I can tell you that my PCs at home are as
secure as I can make them while staying on-line, but even so I have no
idea if anyone has installed illegal file-sharing software, or if
anyone is making illegal use of legal file-sharing software (such as
the first version of the BBC iPlayer, which I didn't even realise at
the time was a file-sharing server as well as client).

You have a strong record of opposing terrorism. You must be aware that
bad people can be inventive and persistent. It seems to me that the
possibilities that such a process of automated disconnection can raise
are endless.

What is to stop political hackers targeting political opponents? Will
you - as an MP - have any special right to appeal against disconnection
that would be denied to others whose jobs are equally depend on
connection?

Think about the commercial world. We already have well-established
cases of click-fraud (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Click_fraud) being
used to "to harm a competitor who advertises in the same market by
clicking on their ads. The perpetrators do not profit directly but
force the advertiser to pay for irrelevant clicks, thus weakening or
eliminating a source of competition". Will people who are willing to
commit click-fraud hesitate to target the offices of their competitors
with fraudulent copyright fraud allegations?

And finally, consider the implications of legitimising collective
punishment. Other countries believe in bulldozing the houses of people
whose family member are believed to have committed terrorist acts.
Maybe we could take the middle road, and simply disconnect the families
of licence tax dodgers from power, water and sewage?

The music business didn't die from home taping (whatever they said at
the time) and they won't die from on-line copying. Only our liberties
are at serious risk here.

Yours sincerely,

Francis Norton.

Deeply shallow - why Intelligent Design fails the test of Abraham (and Evolution passes)

I was listening to a discussion on the train last week, involving someone talking to his friends about some kind of alternatives to evolution event he'd been to. The people talking obviously had some feel, some care, for truth; and they were clearly inclining towards a view that while Creationism wasn't very convincing, Intelligent Design was at least interesting and maybe it should be given more equal status with Darwinian evolution.

While I kept my mouth shut all the way until they got off at Wimbledon (I am English, after all), I would really like to talk to people like them - reasonable people of faith, who might be considering the pros and cons of Intelligent Design, and offer them a line of argument which may in some ways make more sense to them than to the average evolutionist.

Some years back I was reading a Danish writer who was talking about God's test of Abraham, when he asks him to sacrifice his first-born son Isaac. Now, even as an occasionally resentful second son, I've never liked this episode - in fact I suspect it contributed to my departure from religion. But some - probably misunderstood - memory of his interpretation of the story as a challenge to choice or commitment stuck in my mind, to resurface from time to time.

Another idea that had stuck in my mind was a quotation that had also taken up long term residence there:

"If it could be proved that any part of the structure of any one species had been formed for the exclusive good of another species, it would annihilate my theory, for such could not have been produced through natural selection."

(Charles Darwin - The Origin of Species, 1859, Chapter 6 - Difficulties On Theory, page 201)

Think about how western culture saw nature up to the moment when Origin was published. The general approach was to seek - and find - examples of Divine Providence in the ingeniously helpful disposition of nature. As Darwin continues in the next sentence, "Although many statements may be found in works on natural history to this effect, I cannot find even one which seems to me of any weight."

A few pages earlier, he does something similar:

"If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down"

(ibid, page 189)

This is just as challenging - an entire strand of Natural Theology had been built on the basis that this was simply not true, including William Paley's well known Watchmaker Analogy.

So Darwin is going out of his way to give opponents a chance to "annihilate" or "absolutely break down" his theory - if they cannot, the world must be very different from what they think. And this is not any old "theory", this is his life's work (it is 28 years since his voyage on the Beagle started him on this road) which, he must have realised, could more or less immortalise his family name. This theory is, almost literally, his baby.

Eventually I made a illuminating connection between these two ideas. Darwin's invitation to his readers to "annihilate" his theory takes similar courage to that of Abraham offering to sacrifice his son - each is offering the destruction of their life's greatest achievement, and of their nearest hope to immortality in this world. And each is driven by a greater love - Abraham's, of God, and Darwin's, of truth.

Now, let's look at Intelligent Design. Whereas Darwin said, in effect, that the natural world we live in is totally different from how we thought it was, proponents of Intelligent Design say that it is almost identical but somewhere, somehow, there is something that will demonstrate Irreducible Complexity or Specified Complexity - but it appears that they do not even seek proposals for actual research.

Frankly, this reminds me an ancient TV sketch where Rowan Atkinson parodies a famous science fiction theme by explaining, over a cup of tea, that he comes from a parallel Earth on precisely the other side of the sun, where everything is just like this earth - except that the gearknob of their Mini Metro has little dimples in it.

Prove me wrong - show me one sentence anywhere in Intelligent Design which shows such courageous love of truth as Darwin's clear and self-imposed tests, and I will revise my views.

But until then, I firmly believe that ID has as much relationship to a brave and beautiful scientific theory as Caligula's horse Incitatus had to democratically elected leadership.

Notes on using WebSort.net

I recently had to design a top-level topic structure for a company-internal wiki. This wiki is intended to replace a predecessor which by now has a poor signal-to-ratio, being cluttered with obsolete articles and hindered by the absence of any kind of lifecycle-management, tagging or rating features. (The new wiki is being implemented using KwizCom's Wiki Plus, but that's not what I'm reviewing here)

But designing a good top-level structure for the mixed bag of topics found in a typical wiki is, like "go forth and sin no more", one of those tasks easier said than done. So I decided to try my first card sort, using 90 page titles from the old wiki as input to an open sort. I initially considered printing the list out and cutting it into physical cards, but this turns out to be alarmingly hard to do productively, especially to any level of quality, so it was time to check automated options. I came to WebSort.net from comments on a great card sort article, and, since it was free, and looked plausibly polished and complete, decided to use it.

Creating the test was simple - I registered for an account, gave the test a name, and simply copied the list of items from a text processor and pasted them into WebSort.

Running the sort was also simple - simply send a URL to your candidate card sorters. (And, if you want to learn from my mistakes, give them a more compelling reason to perform the task than the fact that it's convenient for them and helpful to you). When your users visit the link you've sent them, they get the instructions you left (I stuck with the default wording):

Performing the card sort is slick and sweet. WebSort provides a drag-and-drop interface for sorting the cards, and randomises the card order for each sorter. Unfortunately the slick interface is provided in Flash, and there are some gaps between the safety, transparency and reversibility of direct manipulation and the overall user experience - there was no way for users to print screens, or to save and resume. These are irritations, I'd say that the primary function here has been very well delivered.

Reviewing the results is slightly less polished. You see a list of all completed sorts, keyed by the sorter's email address. You select one or more names and hit "Reload" to load that particular data set. Once loaded the data set can be downloaded as a spreadsheet or in various text formats. The default display is "Category Summaries". This, along with "Categories * Items" is of limited usefulness in an open card sort where users invent their own category names, since each user typically invents different names. WebSort have helpfully provided this view with a "Merge categories" button to merge selected categories, but with no "Undo" or "Save-and-resume" functionality, I found this phase frustrating (of course category merging is only an issue for open sorts, not for closed sorts - WebSort supports both types).

There is also the mandatory tree diagram (aka dendrogram) which I found surprisingly unhelpful - this may have been a consequence of the low number of responses I was dealing with, but I have seen similar reactions from others.

All in all, I'd say that WebSort.Net is an excellent way of conducting and capturing a cardsort, with adequate analysis, but let down by weak category merging.

Learning, understanding and storytelling

An interesting post in Zen Habits on how to ace exams without studying explains and illustrates the difference between learning by rote and learning by "making connections".

While Scott Young includes "storytelling to remember facts and numbers" as one of five connection-making techniques for non-rote learning, I'm interested in a deeper connection, partly in the hope of understanding my own strengths and weaknesses in this area. Metaphor (his first technique) has, after all, some kind of implicit narrative. There has to be some kind of context in which the "stage" and its "players" and their "entrances" and "exits" mean something, before I can add that meaning to my understanding of "men" and "women". The same is more or less obviously true of his other techniques, like "Explain it to a five year old" (how would you do that without telling stories?) - read it, you'll see.

So the way to learn something is to make sense of it, to connect it to the things in our life which already have meaning for us. That's what stories and metaphors do.

This raises an interesting question - can I do this for my life as a whole? Is there some connection between, say, my interest in Metaphors We Live By, and my activities in Impro, does it all fit together?

I don't know yet, but I'll keep wondering.

And wandering.

Open Letter in Support of WIPO treaty for People who are Blind or have other Disabilities

Dear Judit,

I would like to support the open letter in support of the WIPO treaty, without hesitation.

My credentials for signing this petition are as the co-author of three Wrox books

• Professional XML Schemas (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Professional-XML-Schemas-Programmer/dp/1861005474)
• Professional XML Web Services (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Professional-XML-Services-Programmer-programmer/dp/1861005091)
• Professional XML for .Net Developers (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Professional-NET-Developers-Dinar-Dalvi/dp/1861005318)

and have also had magazine articles published, eg http://www.simple-talk.com/dotnet/.net-framework/implementing-real-world-data-input-validation-using-regular-expressions.

Francis Norton.

M364 - lessons learnt

So, I did my M364 Fundamentals of Interaction Design exam yesterday. I've got to the end of the course, and it's a good moment to look back and take stock.

First, I discovered that I can actually study something properly. I remember my academic career as process of scrabbling through tests and exams despite having dreamed my way through classes and prep, until coming a cropper at uni. For this course I sat down and read the scheduled materials and scribbled away in the margins and attended the tutorials and got good marks on the assignments. That was very satisfying (to use a User Experience goal).

Second, I can do something about my wandering attention. I've taken to using the Pomodoro Technique, and I feel I've come a long way, even if I still have a long way to go.

Thirdly, I've developed a good way of organising my notes for something like this - I used the free mindmap option at http://www.mindmeister.com. The good news is that this is a very effective way of reviewing material which forces you to resolve all those niggling little questions (what's the difference between ubiquitous computing and wearable computing?) that you can so easily skate over when merely reading. The bad news is that I didn't take up mindmapping until the revision phase, and didn't complete this activity in time to move on to the next, which would have been to extract hand-written revision cards from the mindmaps. So, next time, mindmap as I go through materials for the first time!

So, what next? I hope to find ways of using what I've learnt about Interaction Design at work, which was supportive about the course. No luck so far, but having made this investment I also hope to find a mentor through, perhaps, the IXDA, or, more informally, through the UX book club. I'm also considering whether I can do some IxD on the side, getting involved with friends or an open source project.

I'd like to build on what I've learned. Now I've finished the course I'd like to use some of the time this releases to do some Google analytics, and also to do some Arduino hacking - very different directions, I know!

Further down the line, I'm considering taking the Open University's Design Diploma. It seems pretty practical, and I suspect that the various digital design labels (Interaction Design, User Experience and Information Architecture) are going to end up merging with an updated version of Product Design, many of whose wheels we are probably re-inventing. And, above all, I like designing things. This is probably what took me into software development, and as the process became more and more productionised, and involved less and less design, it may be what took me out of it too.

Enough reflection, now for action...

A thin line between triumph and tribulation

Johnny needed a bath yesterday morning - but he wasn't in the mood. At all. So I (ready to catch my train) got called in, and found him sitting on the sofa, uninterested in either persuasion or authority.

My efforts simply make him whine and wave his fists, but he holds off from hitting me (good start). I resist the probably futile and counterproductive temptation to drag him upstairs and offer him a hand to thump instead, providing some helpful martial arts grunts to add to the action. Several thwacks later and I see a smile, then hear a little "OK", so light I almost miss it.

Parenting, eh? Memo to self - rule 1: be there. Autopilot won't hack it.

And let's celebrate the occasional triumph - the tribulations can look after themselves...

M364 Block 1, Unit 4, Activity 1

[Please complete the assignment on page 337 of the Set Book]

1. Reconsider the HutchWorld design and evaluation case study and note what was evaluated, why and when, and what was learned at each stage?
2. How was the design advanced after each round of evaluation?
3. What were the main constraints that influenced the evaluation?
4. How did the stages and choice of techniques build on and complement each other (ie triangulate)?
5. Which parts of the evaluation were directed at usability goals and which at user experience goals? Which additional goals not mentioned in the study could the evaluations have focussed on?

Reconsider the HutchWorld design and evaluation case study and note what was evaluated, why and when, and what was learned at each stage?

There were several rounds of evaluation. The design was evaluated in terms of usability and scope. Evaluation of the first two prototypes, including the first series of usability tests, led the team to learn that there were problems with the initial scope of the project, so they changed the scope, limiting the 3D virtual world to just Reception, but adding support for asynchronous messaging, games, and locating approved medical sites. When the application was redesigned as a portal it was re-tested and further refined, allowing the team to learn about more specific usability issues. One goal of the new testing was to ensure that the system supported multi-user interactions. 

In general evaluation seems to have started with requirements and scope, then moved on to usability and user experience, in other words from whether the project had the right aims and goals to whether these goals were being reached.

How was design advanced after each round of testing?

There were two main rounds of testing. The first round of testing led to a fairly radical advancement of the scope of the design, from an intensively 3D virtual reality experience to a portal with support for email. games, medical queries and rather limited 3D functionality. The second round was  more focussed on detailed usability testing and led to incremental improvements in the design.

What were the main constraints that influenced the evaluation?

The team found it difficult to arrange testers rapidly for reasons inherent in their choice of user group - the potential users were sick and had limited energy and availability.

How did the stages and choice of techniques build on and complement each other (ie triangulate)?

The evaluation techniques ranged in nature from quite open and general (interviews, focus groups) to very specific (scripted usability tests). The more open evaluation techniques provided aims and scenarios which provided the context and goals of the more specific evaluation techniques

Which parts of the evaluation were directed at usability goals and which at user experience goals? Which additional goals, not mentioned in the study, could the evaluations have focussed on?

The initial interviews and resulting scope analysis were largely expressed in terms of user experience - one over-arching requirement, for example, being to reduce the social isolation of patients and care-givers. The formal tests were more focussed on usability, but some of the results are again best described in terms of user experience - for example, the problem with the purely synchronous early prototype never reaching critical mass is most simply explained by the fact that it is no fun being in a chat room on your own. Similarly there are UX explanations for the patients' preference for online games (fun), the search for recommended medical sites (helpful) and email (emotionally fulfilling). In addition to the carefully scripted usability tests in each round, there was a short questionnaire which asked both usability and user-experience type questions.

I think that the project could have focussed on the user-experience goals of motivating and satisfying, since these would highly relevent to socially isolated users suffering from energy-sapping conditions.

M364 Block 1, Unit 3, Activity 9

How user-centred was the approach taken by Tokairo? Start by listing the main stakeholders - beneficiaries, decision makers, gatekeepers and workers - and discussing their roles in the development process.

Then analyse Tokairo's approach against each of the five principles of user-centered development given on page 286 of the Set Book

The main stakeholders in the project were, at a corporate level, Excel plc as parent of Tankfreight and Shell, the project's client. Shell were responsible for allowing Tankfreight and Tokairo access to their depot. Tankfreight were probably the main beneficiary since they commissioned the project, and automating the delivery reporting process should reduce costs and increase accuracy.

The more immediate stakeholders were Tankfreight project management (Hugh Rowntree and Rachel Darley), Tankfreight's account manager for Shell, the driver foremen, trade union representative and the drivers themselves.

Hugh and Rachel were gatekeepers to the drivers and Hugh was presumably a decision maker in commissioning the project, and, together with Rachel, signing-off design options and prototypes.

Tankfreight's account manager may have been a gatekeeper for access to the Shell depot, and would have had some involvement in high-level project decisions.

The driver foremen and union representatives are not only gatekeepers to the drivers but possibly themselves users of the system, as workers, and possibly beneficiaries, either as users or because it makes the drivers happier.  

The drivers themselves are the primary users of the system, possible beneficiaries (if the forms are more accurate and they get fewer forms being returned to them) and are involved as workers.

Presumably others are also involved, either as workers or beneficiaries - those who used to enter the drivers' forms manually, those who manufacture and sell the kiosks, and those who service them.

Now let's evaluate Tokairo's approach to the five principles of user-centered development.

Users' tasks and goals are the driving force behind the development

Tokairo's initial input comes from Hugh Rowntree and Rachel Darley, who know the drivers, their tasks and their environment well, and Tokairo had already had access to the users before the project even started. They appear to have a good understanding of users' tasks and goals. But satisfying the drivers' tasks and goals is probably a necessary rather than a sufficient condition for the project's success, the final criterion presumably being that the system reduces costs and increases accuracy. 

Users' behaviour and context of use are studied and the system is designed to support them

As part of the system audit, "Treve actually went initially to the oil terminals and depots. Treve met the drivers and the driver foremen". The team appear to have a detailed understanding of what the drivers do, and of where they do it, in the cab and at depot reception, and it is clear that design decisions directly reflect these factors.

Users' characteristics are captured and designed for

Once again the team appear to have a detailed picture of their user group, of what they have in common (being literate, non-academic males, short of time, primarily interested in earning a living and going home) and where they diverge (level of interest in computers). And again, this is clearly reflected in the team's account of how they made design decisions. 

Users are consulted throughout development from earliest phases to the latest, and their input is seriously taken into account

This principle was defintely observed during the requirements phase of this project. It is clear that Tokairo would normally prefer to consult users during the design and implementation phases but felt that there were specific reasons they shouldn't do so in this case, although the form did get some early testing, which is a kind of user-consultation.

All design decision are taken within the context of the users, their work, and their environment

This principle seems to have been observed very thoroughly. In fact it seems that the team ascribe the success of the project to this factor.

Given that the project followed at least four of the five principles, and that the remaining principle was partially missed for specific reasons rather than lack of interest or lack of user focus, I would say that the approach to this project was quite highly user-centered.

M364 Block 1, Unit 3, Activity 8

Describe the approaches taken to user involvement in the Tokairo case study and discuss these using the issues you identified in Review Question 5 [List the (eight) issues you need to consider when deciding on the appropriate level of user involvement]. What alternative approaches might they have taken? You should refer to the case studies in Section 9.2.1 of the Set Book as examples.

What advantages and disadvantages might these approaches have had?

The set book lists the following issues that needed to be considered when deciding the appropriate level of user involvement:

Can you identify the users, or are they the open market?

In this case the users were already identified, as being the drivers.

How many users are there? Tens or Thousands?

We don't know exactly how many users there are, though common sense suggests it might be tens or maybe low hundreds. In any case, given that the users are, by the nature of their job, never in the same place at the same time, it's too many people for them all to be consulted easily or cheaply.

How long is the project expected to take?

Again, we don't know how long the project was estimated to take or how long it actually took, but in terms of user involvement the answer is probably that it was going to take too long to consider co-opting a real user for the duration, but not so long that any significent user practices or requirements would change before the project was completed.

Do you want a major contribution from users, or just advice and guidance?

There seems to have been a clear assumption, initially from the client but accepted by Tokairo, that the real users' main contribution should be to the requirements process, to alpha-testing the form and to beta-testing the entire system. Rachel, the systems analyst, acted as a proxy user for reviewing the design, but her contribution (apart from suggesting that the buttons be colour-coded) seems to have been mainly evaluation. 

How many users do you want involved with the project?

The team didn't want all users to be involved but consulted user and stakeholder representatives widely during the requirements phase. For the main design options, design and evaluation activities they mainly used Rachel, the user proxy. The notable exception is that they tested the form design on one driver area before beta-testing the entire solution, presumably having identified this as being at higher risk of failure (eg due to the driver's environment when filling in the forms) than the kiosk design.

Is consistency of user input important?

There was no continuous user involvement apart from that of Rachel, the user proxy, so consistency of user input does not seem to have arisen as a question involving the drivers. The consistency of Rachel's involvement is likely to have been helpful to the design process.

How important is familiarity with the system?

Given the general non-involvement of the drivers, familiarity with the system under development does not seem to have been a significent issue. Rachel, as the sole proxy user, was familiar with the system as it was designed, and this would have helped her contribution.

How important is it for involved users to be in contact with the user group they represent?

As there does not seem to have been any change in the drivers' environment or practices during the project, this was probably not an issue for Rachel with respect to the drivers. 

Comparing this approach with the Microsoft or OU case studies in the Set book, Tokairo could have co-opted a driver to work with the team, presumably part time. This would have been useful if the team had worries about the correctness of their scope and requirements (as the Open University appears to have had) but would have involved disrupting the availability and working practices of the driver in question, and would have risked inappropriate feedback due to lack of appropriate user motivation. In fact the team seem to have regarded this as tightly scoped exercise with well-understood requirements (especially given the comprehensive requirements phase), so the advantages of this step would have been low. 

They could also have conducted workshops and prototyping sessions, as the OU did. This would have had the advantage of reducing the risk of "requiring more changes during the prototype ... and even [the] pre-live stage", but it would have been disruptive to operations, the drivers and their management, and premature exposure would have risked "destructive feedback".

They could also have performed lab-based usability testing, as Microsoft does. This would have reduced the risk of the overall system proving unacceptable during beta-testing but the team seem to have felt that the risk of this failure was not sufficiently high to warrant the required level of disruption and expense. 

M364 Block 1, Unit 3, activity 7

Look back through the previous sections. Describe Tokairo's approach to design. How these map  onto the ID activities and characteristics of the ID process?

Having established the user requirements, Tokairo bought their own experience into the design process. Some of the major decisions - such as the choice of touch-screen input and the choice of a "big lottery ticket" form - were made rapidly, after consideration of alternatives, but not necessarily after much iteration. In the case of the basic form design, rather than the ID activity of "Developing alternative designs" they evaluated alternative existing designs, to similar effect but presumably at rather lower cost. The use of the team's professional experience seems to have provided a similar short-cut for the kiosk design, and might be seen as a greater difference from the ID method. 

The form design was tested in the wild (in "the most militant driver area they could find") and maps to the ID activity "Building interactive versions of the design".

There was explicit evaluation of both the Kiosk and Form designs and this corresponds to the ID "Evaluating designs" activity.

The ID characteristic "focus on users" can be seen in the whole requirements stage, and in thepre-beta  field testing of the form, though less so in the implementation of the kiosk design where the client preferred to provide a user proxy.

The "Specific usability and user-experience goals" ID characteristic is arguable "absent but unnecessary" due to the short lines of communication and clear implicit focus in this area.

And the ID characteristic of "Iteration" can be seen in mainly within activities, in the refinement of the kiosk and form designs based on the feedback from users, user proxies and field testing.

M364 Block 1, Unit 3, Activity 6

Look back through the previous section and list the characteristics of the approach that Tokairo took to the requirement activity. How do these map onto the ID activities and the characteristics of the ID process (as discussed in Section 6.2.1 starting on page 168 of the Set Book)? 

What is their attitude to stakeholders?

Tokairo have a methodology with a first stage being the Site and System Audit. They try to identify "logical group[s]" of users by business function, who have characteristic concerns and requirements. Having already talked to the drivers and driver foremen, they went on to talk to the systems manager and systems analyst, and union representatives. This maps to the ID "needs and requirements" activity, and the ID characteristic of being "focussed on users".

The ID method has the characteristic of being "iterative". The Tokairo approach in this case appears to involve more iteration within the requirements activity than between activities when compared to the ID method, but they describe this as being due to the success of the requirements activity, and both are in fact present.

The results of the initial requirements activity were communicated verbally rather than as written deliverables, and the usability or user experience goals were probably set implicitly, in terms specific to the project (eg "suitable for well-motivated, literate drivers with big fingers who are in a bit of a hurry") rather than in the more general terms of the ID method, which may represent a departure from the ID characteristic of "Specific usability and User Experience goals".

The Tokairo attitude to stakeholders is open and respectful - because "if you just talk to the managers ... you will have a whole lot of surprises".

M364 Block 1, Unit 3, Activity 5

This activity builds upon Activity 6.4 on page 182 of the Set Book. Compare the two electronic calendar designs using the following usability and user experience goals:

• Efficiency: In particular, which design enables the user to find a given date most quickly?
• Learnability: which design will be easiest to learn?
• Aesthetically pleasing.
• Enjoyable.

Which design do you prefer, and why?

Efficiency: The desktop design appears to be very inefficient for finding dates since you have to "leaf through" the diary, so the time required to locate a date page is proportional to its distance from the currently opened date. The phone version requires keystrokes instead of mouse clicks but since you're entering a date the number of keystrokes is not large, and does not increase with calendar distance. The desktop diary is probably more efficient for viewing dates within the same week, the phone diary is probably more efficient for navigating to more distant dates.

Learnability: The desktop diary is probably easier to learn, especially given its limited date navigation and graphical rendering, but the simplicity of the phone diary makes it no harder to learn than necessary.

Aesthetically pleasing: The desktop diary is able to use a clean, helpful graphical rendering which offers hints about its further functionality (tabs for the notes and address book sections). The phone diary is written for a visually restricted environment, which means that any comparison is almost as much a comparison of the environments as of the designs. So I would say that the desktop design is more aesthetically pleasing, while noting that this more helpfully addresses the question "Which design would a user prefer?" than "Could the phone design be made more pleasing?"

Enjoyable: The cross-referencing possibilities of the desktop design might generate some enjoyment. Assuming we can click on "John" in an appointment, get taken to his address page, and then see all his appointments (in the same way that we can see all people listed for an appointment), this cross-referencing, together with the ability to read notes from previous meetings, might give a certain bookish enjoyment. The phone design offers less prospect of discovery, so I think scores even closer to a neutral zero.

Assuming that both designs are equally available (for example, that I have gone out and bought an iPhone) I would prefer the desktop design for its greater efficiency when dealing with nearby dates, its slightly greater enjoyability and its better aesthetics,  though I might find its lower efficiency for distant dates frustrating.

M364 Block 1, Unit 3, Activity 4

I now want you to draw a design for an electronic calendar system that is radically different to the outline sketch in Figure 6.1. [which shows a page and book model] You only need to draw a single sketch in order to illustrate your design. Try asking yourself questions such as: how could a mobile telephone, with a small sceen, be used to access an electronic calendar? What are the characteristics of a magnifying glass, and how might these characteristics be of benefit when designing an electronic calendar?

[click on thumbnail for fullsize illustration - with apologies to Scott McCloud whose Understanding Comics I've just been reading for UX Bookclub London]

M364 Block 1, Unit 3, Activity 3

Draw a stakeholder diagram for the supermarket check-out system from Activity 6.2 on page 172 of the Set Book.

Without further ado...

M364 Block 1, Unit 3, Activity 2

Who are the stakeholders in the At Home website project?

All groups shown in the associated organisation chart have some kind of stake in the project. The front-line, logistics and support, and customer support staff will all be affected by changes in the way the company communicates with customers, and the training group will be affected by changes in the job-description and turnover of front-line staff. Development will be judged by its success or failure, as will, to some extent, Head Office.

Obviously customers are the other major stakeholders - possibly the most important group, and the hardest to communicate with.

M364 Block 1, Unit 3, Activity 1

You are being employed as a novice interaction designer on a project to develop a public kiosk providing information about the exhibits available in a science museum (this is one of the examples used in Activity 1.2 on Page 10 of the Set Book).

Consider how you might implement each of the four ID activities. For example, you might observe users as a part of establishing requirements. As it is still early in the course you will need to use your imagination and experience when answering this question, because we have not yet covered the various approaches in any detail.

Stage 1 - Identify Needs

To identify needs I would start with the relevant stakeholders. I might end  up with a list like this:

• Visitors
• Visitor-facing staff - around the displays and at the shop
• Curators / educators - whoever determines the purpose and manner of museum communications
• Display builders / designers - a museum probably has permanent staff for this
• Management - line management and, if possible, the project sponsor
  

I would start by reviewing the business goals of the project with the project manager. As a novice I probably won't have access to the project sponsor but a smart PM should be able to answer success-criteria questions like: does the museum need more visitors (eg if funding is related to number of visitors), more satisfied visitors (if funding is related to visitor satisfaction ratings), more families (perhaps to compensate for spending cuts on sports fields and leisure centres), more research visitors (to compete for academic funding), more out-of-town or foreign visitors (to increase municipal tourism) or maybe higher-spending visitors (if the museum is self-funding)? 

Some of these have mutually exclusive implications - maybe the way to raise average visitor satisfaction is to reduce the number of visitors, along with the volume of noise and the length of queues. I would also like to have some idea of the human and technical resources available for the project.

I would ask the museum staff to help me draw up an informal profile of typical visitors, broken down into about a dozen types by (for instance) age, group composition (families, couples, schools?), educational or social background, and distance travelled. I would then select perhaps the five most important types and interview some visitors from each, on arrival and on departure, to see why they came and what they thought about the museum. I would then identify any common themes and factors.

I would then talk to the customer facing staff about what they have to help visitors with, and their observations over time of what pleases and displeases visitors (some of this information may relate to times when the museum was different, allowing us to learn from the past).

I would ask the curators / educators about their goals for the kiosk - what they wanted to display, how they wanted to explain things, and what they wanted to draw to the attention of the various kinds of visitors.

I would talk to the display designers and builders about the physical and technical communication options, including any means for visitors to interact with the kiosk. I would try to build a particularly good relationship with them because as a junior interaction designer there is a significient risk that they will simply ignore me, thus hindering my ambitions to become a senior interaction designer.

Stage 2 Create alternative designs

I would develop and sketch different kiosk designs, showing how they related to policy, pedagogical and practical goals identified in Stage 1, any differences in the resources required for each design, and what other trade-offs the options involved. I would present the designs to representative members of each group of stakeholders to get feedback on the goals related to that group, leaving management to last in order to prevent premature option selection.

Stage 3 Build alternative designs

Depending on the time available I would build one or more interactive prototypes, using further testing and consultation to determine the final choice. The interactive prototype might be acceptible as a design specification for the this option, if not I would add whatever documentation or visual design details were required by the rest of the delivery team.

Stage 4 Evaluate designs

We will evaluate designs at all stages since some problems and issues will invariably become visible to the affected stakeholders only at later stages.

M364 Block 1, Unit 2, Activity 2

Complete the assignment on page 28 of the Set Book. [...]

Find a handheld device and examine how it has been designed, paying careful attention to how the user is meant to interact with it.

(a) from your first impressions, write down what first comes to mind as to what is good and bad about how it has been designed, paying particular attention to how the user is meant to interact with it.. Then list (i) its functionality and (ii) the range of tasks a typical user would want to do using it. Is the functionality greater than, equal to or less than what the user wants to do?

(b) Based on your reading of this chapter and any other materual you have cine across, compile your own set of usability and user experience goals that your think will be most useful in evaluating the device. Decide which are the most important ones and explain why.

(c) Translate the core usability and user experience goals you have selected in two or three questions. Then use them to assess how well your device fares (e.g, Usability goals: What specific mechanisms have been used to ensure safety? How easy is it to learn? User experience goals: Is it fun to use? Does the user get frustrated easily? If so, why?)

(d) Repeat (b) and (c) for design principles and usability principles (again, choose a relevant set)

(e) Finally, discuss possible improvements to the interface based on your usability evaluation.

I recently bought a Livescribe Pulse smart pen. With no previous experience of smart pens, my ability to use this device is highly dependent on the quality of its design, so I have chosen this as my subject.

[Since smart pens may be less familiar to others than remote controls and mobile phones, it might be helpful to explain the basic functionality here: 

• You can set it to record sounds, then start taking notes - words, diagrams, doodles, whatever - at a lecture or meeting, and later play back what was recorded at the time you wrote or drew anything.
  
• You can then upload both sound and image to a computer where you can browse the page images and continue to use anything written there as an index into the sound recording.
  

There's more, but this is the core functionality]

[a] The first good thing about the way the device works is the power and simplicity of its core functions. Indexing sound (or video) recordings so that relevant content is immediately and intuitively available is a hard task, and this device solves it brilliantly.

The second good thing thing is the simplicity of the device's mechanical user interface. The pen exposes the following features:

• The ballpoint or stylus; then, running along the top,
• A small speaker grille
• A small microphone
• A small rectangular OLED display strip
• A flush on/off button
  
• At the blunt end, a 2.5mm socket for stereo headphones which double as a stereo microphone; then, running along the bottom,
• Some flush electrical contact strips for docking with the device's USB cradle / recharger
• And, returning to the writing end, a small infra-red camera which can see where the pen is writing.

Of these, only two (the on/off button and the ballpoint) are a direct part of the user interface. This simplicity has been achieved by moving much of the interface that might normally be found on a device on to specially printed paper.

Each page in the pre-printed pads has a set of record / playback / volume "control" icons printed along the bottom edge. The pen uses its camera to recognise these controls, so that if you tap the "Record" icon, it starts recording. 

Each page is printed with a fine set of microdots, using the proprietory Anoto dot pattern, which uniquely identifies every location on every page. This pattern is also picked up by the camera, allowing it to record and locate every usage on every page. So if you wrote a note while recording, you can come back and tap on that note and the pen will start to playback the recording, starting from 5 seconds before you started the note.

Similarly, the inside front page of the notebook has a more extensive set of controls allowing you to use the pen as a calculator, change its settings, or view its status.

The single most frustrating thing about the way it works is that it requires the specially printed paper for its core functions.  There is a menu function viewable through the built-in OLED display which can be operated using a navigation cross (referred to as "NavPlus") with four arrowheads and a central location, but the most useful thing you can do with this and no pre-printed paper is to start and stop sound recording, totally unconnected to what you write or draw.

(i) Functionality provided

1. Write (by which I include drawing)
2. Record (sound)
3. Link recording to writing, so that you can
4. Tap on anything you wrote earlier and playback what was being said at the time
5. Copy witing and sound up to a computer
6. View saved pages, and click with a mouse on any part of the writing to hear what was being said at the time
7. Play back micro-movies on the tiny display
8. Use the pen to play the piano given a hand-drawn keyboard
9. Translate a short list of words between various languages

(ii) What a user might expect

1. Write
2. Record
3. Link recording to writing
4. "Tap" playback
5. Upload
6. "Click" playback
7. Handwriting recognition

I think the first six provided functions are those that a user would hope for, the remainder are basically gimmicks which are good for entertainment or showing the device off. 

As the Pulse smart pen is likely to be the first smart pen that most users come across, they may not have very clear expectations. My experience when explaining it to others is that the core funcitonality is more than they expect, but given that functionality they then ask eagerly whether it can also read the user's handwriting (to make it clear - it can't, it stores text and graphics alike as lines on pages), so in that respect it may do less than users want.

[b] I think the most important usability goals for this product would be

• Utility
  
• Effectiveness
• Ease of Learning

The Livescribe Pulse offers functionality that will be new to most users. In order to maximise take-up, its designers need to ensure that users can easily see (in prospect) and feel (in practice) the benefits of this functionality. This means the functions must be valuable to the user (utility), they must be well-executed (effectiveness) and they must be easily available to the new user (ease of learning).

Take-up will also be influenced by the achievement of user experience goals. I would suggest that the most relevant UX goals are:

• Satisfying
• Aesthetically pleasing
• Motivating

Potential users are unlikely to buy this device unless reviewers and/or word of mouth suggests that they will find it satisfying. The iPod generation of consumers will also expect an iPod-priced smart pen to look good, especially since it will primarily be used in a public context (lectures and meetings) and possibly in a high-profile way if the user has to ask permission to start recording. Finally, the experience has to be motivating - taking notes is not an inherently exciting activity, and if users rapidly lose their initial enthusiasm this will limit the viral word-of-mouth so necessary for such a new product from a start-up company.

[c] How can we express the usability goals as questions that would apply to a real Pulse user?

• Utility - Do its note-taking and recording functions add up? Is there anything missing that I need in order to achieve my personal goals?
• Effectiveness - Is the Pulse good at what it's supposed to do?
• Ease of learning - Are there functions or features which are important to me which I have difficulty executing because it's not obvious how, or even that they're supported?

Utility "do its note-taking and recording functions add up? Is there anything missing that I need in order to achieve my personal goals?"

My experience with the Pulse is that the core note-taking and recording functions are well chosen and well-integrated for the purposes of someone attending lectures or business meetings. 

This seems to be shared almost unanimously by the reviewers that I found on the web - I ascribed some of the enthusiasm to the fact that it would also make a good tool for journalists and broadcasters, which was, naturally, the profession of most of the non-"geek" reviewers.

So I give it a high rating on basic utility, apart from the lack of handwriting recognition (which is in any case available as a third-party extra).

Effectiveness "Is the Pulse good at what it's supposed to do?"

The Pulse is designed to record its own writing, record sound, and index the sound recording using the writing recording, both on the orginal paper page and, once saved to a PC, on screen. It does all these functions simply and effectively. 

Some of this effectiveness comes from hidden functionality - I have heard attempts at recording presentations (university debates) using an ordinary cassette recorder, and voices were normally too loud or too quiet, but the Pulse, presumably using digital processing, quietly sorts out the voice volume and clarity. So I rate it high on effectiveness.

Ease of learning "Are there functions or features which are important to me which I have difficulty executing because it's not obvious how, or even that they're supported?"

A new purchaser can demonstrate the on-paper functionality to a curious family members within minutes and, given a short break for installing the software, the basic on-screen functionality too. This is despite the fact that several features of the user interface are novel, namely tapping on controls to control the pen, and tapping on writing (on the page or on the screen) to replay the associated sound recording. So I would say that it rates very high on ease of learning.

Let's translate the user experience goals into specific questions that would apply to a Pulse user.

• Satisfying - Does the user feel that the pen allows her to take better notes as simply and unobtrusively as possible?
• Aesthetically pleasing - Does it give pleasure to look at, and pride of ownership?
• Motivating - Does using my Pulse make me want to keep on using it?
  

Satisfying "Does the user feel that the pen has allows her to take better notes as simply and unobtrusively as possible?"

Taking better notes is not necessarily a matter with a simple technical fix. Looking at some of my saved pages I can see that I will get more out of this device by interspersing my occasional summary paragraphs and diagrams with short notes that will act as bookmarks into the sound recording. 

I also find it frustrating that I have to take special notebooks with me to make the most of it - after all, one key benefit of the pen as a recording device is its extreme portability and ability to work with any writable medium

But, even without making adjustments in my technique, I still get a great deal of added "note-taking value" out of it, so I say that it is quite satisfying.

Aesthetically Pleasing "Does it give me pleasure to look at, and pride of ownership?"

The design is fairly minimalist, the Pulse has a body shell in the by now standard high-tech anodised black with a discreet logo. The body is about 1.5cm wide, presumably to allow for the inner technology. This is at the limits of visual acceptability. So I would rate it as medium-high - not below expectations, but not in itself reason for showing off the device to all and sundry.

Motivating "does using my Pulse make me want to keep on using it?"

It's hard to get enthusiastic about taking notes as a general activity. Livescribe have tried to address this in many ways, some of them part of the Pulse's context and infrastructure rather than relating directly to the device as such - for example, having saved notes and recordings to your computer, you can then upload them to a central catalogued location on the web, and view other people's notes and pictures by category. 

When viewing a saved document you can have it play back the pen strokes along with the sound, giving it similar presentational functionality to a webcast - thus LiveScribe call it a pencast.

Along with pencasts, sketching is a more creative activity than note-taking, and if you combine the natural motivation for these two activities with the ease of using the Pulse as a self-scanning drawing device, I would say it does make me want to keep on using it.

[d] I would choose the following Design Principles as particularly relevant to the Pulse pen:

• Visibility - are the controls and the state of the device easily visible to the user?
• Feedback - does the Pulse pen give feedback on what the user is doing and has done?
• Affordance - do the controls of the device give the user a clue about how they should be used?

This device is typically used in situations like lectures and meetings where the user can't ask everybody to stop talking while they look for a control or check the device status (or at least not without severe loss of face), so visibility is clearly key. 

These same usages scenarios (lectures and meetings) also dictate that a user cannot easily ask speakers to repeat their last however-many minutes of talk, so feedback on whether the user has succesfully set the Pulse recording or not recording is essential.

Finally, good affordance is important both for making the pen easy to learn and for making it harder to make operational mistakes while using it, which ties in with unforgiving requirement to record things which, if missed, my be unrepeatable. 

Visibility "are the controls and the state of the device easily visible to the user?"

The main controls for the Pulse pen are the set of icons across the bottom of every page of pre-printed Pulse notepaper. These are highly visible, as long as you have some pre-printed Pulse paper at hand. 

The state of the device is visible through the built-in OLED display. When switched on, the display shows the current time and a battery level graphic. When recording, this changes to a an incrementing timer display. After the recording, when the pen is docked with its USB cradle, this changes to an animated upload graphic while any unsaved sessions get copied over to the PC.

Other system status levels can be seen on the Pulse desktop application, or on the OLED display by tapping on specific icons printed on the inside front cover of each pre-printed Pulse notebook. 

I would say that design principle of visibility has been well implemented and prioritised, given the constraints of the device. The market that has grown used to the luxurious visibility options of the PDA or mobile phone is largely the same market that buys - or is at least familiar with -the iPod shuffle. So this level of visibility is probably acceptable.

Feedback "does the Pulse pen give feedback on what the user is doing and has done?"

The primary feedback mechanism for this device is sound. In particular it play different beeps to indicate the start and end of recording. However there's no feedback on whether penstrokes are being recorded, which would be useful both in the case of very light penstrokes, which it sometimes misses, and as a reminder whether the pen is or is not recording. 

The mouse pointer turns from an arrow to a finger when, using the desktop application, you move over part of the image that is clickable, ie you have something written there that will trigger sound playback.

I would rate feedback on this device as good.

Affordance "do the controls of the device give the user a clue about how they should be used?"

The main mechanical inputs are the on/off button and the pen itself. The on/off button could have been implemented with greater affordance, as it is "D"-shaped and visually integrated as one rounded end of the OLED display, but this was clearly a trade-off with the user experience goal of achieving an aesthetically, minimalist design. The fact that the device is at one level obviously a pen, and that is how it should be used, seems to me to count as successful affordance for something this novel. 

This leaves the pre-printed control icons - do they invite one to click on them with the pen? The answer to this question varies so rapidly along the first few seconds of familiarisation that it's hard to provide a globally valid answer, but I would say that once users have any idea at all of how the Pulse pen works, these controls provide good perceived affordance.

I would choose the following Usability Principles as appropriate to this device:

• Recognition rather than recall - does it force the user to remember things to use it instead of allowing users to remember them?
• Match between system and real world - does the pen speak the user's language and concepts or does it force them to learn new terms and meanings? 
• Error prevention - does it prevent errors occurring?

As an innovative device offering unfamiliar functionality, failing to follow either the "Recognition rather than Recall" or the "Match between system and real world" usability principles would pose a particular challenge to new and potential users that could have a serious impact on the device's take-up.

As mentioned above, in most cases that the pen is being used errors would cause a probably irretrievable loss of (spoken) data, so this is also an particularly important usability principle. 

Recognition rather than recall "does it force the user to remember things to use it instead of allowing users to remember them?"

The device is almost entirely compliant with this usability principle. The only thing the user has to remember is how to operate it, which is a skill ("savoir") rather than a datum ("connaitre").

In fact it embodies this design principle for its primary function. The ability to replay sound keyed by what you were writing or drawing at time allows the user to recognise either the physical page of the notebook, or a thumbnail in the desktop application in order to replay a recording, rather than having to recall the date or any other index by which recordings would otherwise be filed.

Match between system and real world "does the pen speak the user's language and concepts or does it force them to learn new terms and meanings?" 

When a device offers new and unfamiliar functionality there will have to be some new terms or meanings, but I feel that this has been kept to a minimum in this case.  The printed control icons acquire new meaning as being executable, but this is an extension of their their existing meaning (as images of controls) rather than a contradiction. 

There is some breakdown of the pen / notebook metaphor when it comes to buying new notebooks - these are sold with volume numbers, for example a "Black unlined journals Numbers 1 and 2" and all instances of "Black unlined journal Number 1" have the same micro-dot pattern, which would cause the pen to get confused if they were in use at the same time. This means that two physically distinct journals might be identical from a Pulse pen's perspective - definitely a mismatch between the system and the real world. 

Error prevention "does it prevent errors occurring?"

The Pulse pen offers very little scope for creating errors. Immediate operation is done by tapping printed icons with audible feedback. Transfer from the pen to the desktop is done by simply placing the pen in its USB cradle. There is no opportunity for syntax errors. 

There are opportunities for error in other aspects, however. A simple case is drawing or writing over the control icons, which can trigger them. But on the whole the Pulse pen implements this usability principle quite comprehensively.

(e) I feel that the core functionality scores well against most relevent usability and user-experience goals as far as its core functionality goes, so my three suggestions for improvement are extensions of the design rather than corrections.

First, I would suggest that the pen give a haptonic click when the user taps a printed control. This would give better feedback than the beep (more appropriate and less obtrusive) and would also add a more relevant element of "fun" than, for example, the tacked-on micro-movie.

Secondly, I would have the pen recognise that if the user draws a box and then double-taps the top-left and bottom right corner, it should treat this rectangle and its contents as an "Item", for example:

would be an item on Pulse Pen Usability. These Items would then act as a third dimension of organisation (after Pages and Sessions) once uploaded to the PC - I would be able to annotate Items with tags or other metadata, view them as thumbnails, and add content from any page or pages to a single Item, thus providing greater flexibility by employing one of the device's primary design values, namely recognition over recall.

Thirdly, I would offer a notebook-size pen holder, which would unfold to create a wipe-clean pre-printed Pulse pen writing surface, complete with controls.

In order to avoid the difficulties associated with writing on the same surface multiple times (mentioned above in discussion of the hazard of buying duplicate Pulse pen notebooks) I would add a "New Page" control to be tapped whenever the existing page content was wiped. 

The Pulse would then store interpret the microdot pattern of the single wipe-clean page as belonging to a new page.