BLOG by zaiss

For the benefit of my audience who doesn’t reside in Nebraska, I thought this story would give you a chuckle (I couldn’t find it anywhere on Google News… but there might be a reason for that…).

In the Omaha area there’s a small chain of restaurants (3 or so) called King Kong, a restaurant that sells large burgers and gyros, among other things. Apparently, King Kong has copyrighted any and all use of “King Kong” as it relates to talking about or promoting a restaurant, so they’re suing Burger King over their new “Kong-Sized whopper.”

Maybe I should trademark using King Kong to promote my website. Then I could say you’d get some Kong-sized design skills if you hire me… but that’s pretty scary. The only thing scarier, in fact, is waking up next to the King.

Alternate Title: How Everyone in the World is Better Than Me.

We had a lazy day in the Zaiss household on the 24th, and my mom suggested I try one of these sudoku puzzles (the ones where you place 1 - 9 inclusive in each row, column, and square). So I tried them. Addictive, but I got the first one wrong. What a shame.

Well, it turns out that I received a Sudoku calendar for Christmas. And it’s daily. That means a daily sudoku for the next 365 days starting in one week. Thinking I need much practice, I took my friend KC’s advice to explore some sudoku on the web. I did one tonight (easy), and did it casually while talking to friends online. It took me 37 minutes. For fun, I asked “How did I do?” I got this graph back:

with big, red text underneath that said “Below Average: 100% are faster.” Apparently the graph ends at 30 minutes, and NOBODY (except me) takes longer. Ouch. Thanks Web Sudoku, for trampling my aspirations of future Sudoku problem solving.

Another semester is done, and I’m embarking on what I realized recently would be my last school-type winter break, at least for a few years.

My friend Laura asked what I was doing to celebrate being back in Omaha, commenting that most of our friends had celebrated their return home by getting food not available in Pittsburgh. It hadn’t occurred to me until she brought it up, but there were a bunch of good places that I need to be sure to swing by…

• Runza: Describing it as a homemade hot pocket doesn’t do it justice (but you can think about it that way).
• Zio’s Pizza: Vince’s dad Otis XII used to advertise for them, but that’s not the only reason… good pizza!
• Hong Kong Cafe: There is no good cheap chinese in Pittsburgh! Hong Kong Cafe is awesome and cheap.
• Blue Sushi: I love that Sushi Too delivers, but the atmosphere is nothing compared to Blue. I feel so cultured there.

Oh yeah, I should probably also make a point of seeing family and friends, celebrating holidays, doing my Google design challenge, and finishing a bunch of work that I put off until break. Laura, quit distracting me with food!

If you aren’t a frequent comment reader, this post is prompted by Chaia tagging me off an earlier post. You can read her blog to discover her random habits of nudism (Note: I can’t link to a specific post so just look around for a post from Dec. 13).

Anyway, I’m not going to state the rules, nor am I going to tag other people (if my friends really want to do this, just write five weird habits on your blog), but I will share my inane habits with you for some interesting reading.

1. I brush my teeth with a separate toothbrush in the morning than in the evening. I’ve been doing this ever since Eric told me that his mom (a biologist) mentioned that the bacteria in your mouth lives on the toothbrush for about 12 hours, which means you’d be brushing the bacteria back into your mouth. Technically, I heard on the Today show that said bacteria die after the toothbrush dries… but still… ew. I’ll stick with two toothbrushes.
2. The temperature settings in my car and on weather.com are both set to celsius. It took some adjustment at first, but I like it better… mostly because I have a hard time remembering what the freezing point in farenheit is (36? 32? 34? It’s so arbitrary). Remembering 0 is so much easier. As a side note, I’ve known one person who reset my car’s temperature reading to farenheit multiple times thinking it was a mistake. It’s not. If you do that, I will kick you out of my car.
3. I’m one of those weird people who washes the dishes before putting them in the dishwasher. To me, the dishwasher is only good for soaping them and drying them… I feel like if I don’t get all the food particles off then I’m not doing a good job. In fairness, this is how I was brought up to do the dishes… but I’m pretty particular about it now.
4. I don’t listen to, rate, or sort iTunes songs that I get from the iTunes music store until I burn them onto a CD and re-rip them in mp3 format. It’s not that I’m trying to enable sharing of the songs I download… I just have a hard time listening to the songs knowing that they are in a different format than the others. This usually results in me not wanting to waste a CD until I’ve downloaded at least 8 - 10 songs… so I may go 2 months after downloading a song without listening to it much, if at all.
5. The fans in my apartment are on 24/7, year-round. I actually do this because my apartment is perpetually hotter than my comfort level allows (no AC in the summer, everyone else’s heat rises in the winter)… so it’s good to keep the air circulating. But now, I have a hard time sleeping without the noise. It’s weird.

There they are. Some of my random habits that may leave you with that feeling of “… huh.” So good night.

I recently returned from Seattle interviewing for a Usability Engineer position in the Visual Studio group at Microsoft. It was an interesting time, but I won’t explain too many details here (ask me one on one for those). But there were a couple of interesting questions / points from the interview that I wanted to share, along with my two cents. For the HCI folks embarking on interviews, I think it will be interesting food for thought.

1. Having background in your user’s expertise is necessary for the job.

One of my favorite things about HCI is that it enables people to design usable interfaces in a variety of disciplines. But as an outsider / novice to the discipline, are the designs really going to be as relevant as an expert who really understands the ins and outs of the field?

At CMU, we are taught to repeat the mantra: “The user is not like me.” On the one hand, having expertise in what your user does will help you to understand his/her work better. On the other hand, it seems like our mantra is what it is to avoid HCI practitioners from substituting their own judgment in lieu of what they actually observes users doing.

Let me say, however, that at Microsoft some prior familiarity with the user is probably necessary, since you are dealing with developers. It would be hard to walk in with little prior familiarity and succeed. The challenge, then, becomes perceiving the line between understanding the user’s work and filling in the data for yourself. I think most HCI practitioners can tell the line, but it’s not something we’re confronted with everyday at CMU. Instead, we just say “The user is not like me” and the issue seems to be dropped.

2. Why not skip modelling all together and go from contextual interviews to prototyping?

We joked about this notion during Project, but one of my interviewers was the former mentor of one of the authors of Contextual Design. His take was that Contextual Interviews were important, but that in the business world, taking the time to model the user’s work is simply delaying the creation of a legitimate prototype. (For the record, I didn’t sit idly by during this discussion. I threw all of the Methods points (and a few of my own) back in response: shared language for the design team, a way to abstract the minute points of the users work, etc. - he wasn’t going for it though).

Looking back, there’s a strong correlation between the two points that I missed. I think part of the purpose of modelling a user’s work is to overcome the knowledge gap in a new discipline. At Microsoft, this may not be as necessary if their user research folks already understand enough to interpret what they see. But, in the case of a tough discipline like education research, modelling helped the group gain a lot of understanding in a short amount of time.

I think that both ways of thinking are necessary. On the one hand, when you’re job is designing for code developers, day in and day out, having little to no prior experience will make you batty in short order. On the other hand, there are a lot of disciplines out there, and I think it’s unreasonable to expect that there are enough double experts (experts in a discipline and HCI) to go around. So, to quote the classic CMU professor answer… It all depends.

Braden’s been busy at Google – with our short videos from IID (and other things, I’m sure). Since the blowpop server has been decomissioned, I thought I’d link up the videos so you can check them out if you missed them on the last round. Doing a Google Video search for “CMU Interface Interaction Design” yields most of them, but my project (SonicBand) isn’t listed with them… you can find it here.

My former hair salon recently disowned me. It’s a very tragic story that I still cry about to this day, but this entry focuses on what happened next. I needed to find a place to get my haircut, and I remembered hearing something about Philip Pelusi, but I couldn’t remember what it was. Regardless, I decided to make an appointment.

Right away I felt pretty disappointed. After discussing my preferred hair style (shorter is better), the lady asked, “Do you want me to use scissors or an electric razor in the back?” C’mon now. There is clearly a preferred answer to that question. It’s like a Web Designer asking whether the client wants a giant image for a webpage that takes 5 minutes to load, or a nice streamlined page that makes good use of CSS and JavaScript. There’s the easy way, and there’s the right way.

That might have been a bit esoteric, so in simpler terms, imagine this reply: “Well… do you want me to pay with money or bits of string?” It’s one thing if they have a particular policy - but if you need the client to tell you how to do your job, then you aren’t doing it well.

On that note, I remembered what I heard about Philip Pelusi a while back when I was leaving. “Overpriced SuperCuts.” And it’s true.

I was walking by Tank, the new Newell-Simon Roboceptionist, and I caught a few words of what he was saying to the people who were typing to him:

Nothing sums up my current profession better.

For a contentious debate, that is.

A week ago, while I was at student health, the physician’s assistant asked what I thought about pornography being shown at the student center. “Excuse me?” I hadn’t heard it was happening. I guess that goes to show the box that grad students shove themselves into – according to a local news article, there were posters advertising the XXX movie for a couple weeks prior. I guess I need to pay more attention.

Anyway, it’s been sort of a hot topic for the past couple weeks here on campus, culminating with an email from the Student Body President this morning announcing a forum to discuss the issue and come to some conclusion about whether or not pornography can be shown on campus.

So let’s be clear about a few facts before we get into the issue of public showings of pornography. The campus Activities Board shows a variety of movies Thursday through Sunday evenings throughout the school year for $1. There are generally 3 showings each night, and student activity fees are used for some basic needs (security, screening fees, food, etc). On this particular night, the Activities Board was showing the movie The Pirates (you can click the link without being offended). They sold out each of the 3 showings and netted a profit.

Would I have gone to watch this movie? Probably not, despite the fact that it is apparently the biggest budget pornographic film ever. But am I curious what the biggest budget porn movie ever looks like? A little bit. Would I rather see it for $1 than pay $70 to buy it? You bet.

I can understand that people have objections to showing XXX movies on campus, with support from an organization that is supported by our Activities Fee (even if the amount of Activities Fees applied is nominal at best). And if this were happening every week, or even every month, just for the virtue of showing a pornographic film, I’d probably be up in arms too.

But in general, it seems that the films selected by the Activities Board are not arbitrarily pornographic. Last year, for example, there was a showing of The Dreamers, an NC-17 film that had quite a bit of sexual content in it. Did I know it was NC-17 before I went? No… so I was little surprised at the content when I got there. But the reviews linked to above all say that it’s more artistic than pornographic, and I agree with that assessment.

If we start to regulate these showings, a line will have to be drawn, and it’s highly unlikely that we will be able to differentiate between pornography and artistic movies with pornographic content. While I probably wouldn’t miss these once-a-year showings, shouldn’t we just err on the side of caution? In the end, if you don’t want to see a movie… don’t go. That’s the decision I make for practically any movie anyway.

Over the past two days, the New York Times has been featuring an article on Glide Effortless, a web application to allow managing and sharing of different types of content online. I haven’t played around with it, but I’m planning to when I have free time (ha) and will post my thoughts then.

But in reading the NYT article, I found an interesting reference to pie menus (context menus - or menus that appear when you right / ctrl click for the non-HCI heads in the audience - that are circular instead of lists).

The article states:

We’ve actually been talking about pie menus quite a bit in my programming class this semester. The point that the NYT article makes is valid (I’m not one of many people implementing a pie menu for my final project, so I can’t comment too extensively on that critique). Still, there is a benefit to using pie menus. Without getting into the technical aspects of Fitts’ Law, I’ll just say this: With pie menus, each option is equally close to your cursor, which means that you can access everything quickly. With increasingly-long lists, it’s not so. Don’t believe me? Just right-click. Go on. Right here. You’ll see what I mean.

But as I hinted above, I did not choose to take on the pie menu challenge in my programming class. Maybe I should have, because it sounds like lots of fun. I’ll update with what I find out from the pie menu presentations in a couple weeks.