BLOG by zaiss

Looking back, I was somewhat surprised to find that a year had passed since I first started blogging. Happy Birthday to my blog.

I took this opportunity to look back at some of the reasons I started blogging. I felt this was especially appropriate after a talk at CHI that had an apathetic, if not negative, approach toward blogging (and an audience member who “detests” blogs and is convinced that they’ll be all gone in 2 years).

I hold to my original opinion from last year’s Online Deliberation conference – saying you don’t read blogs is like saying you don’t read books. There are tons of crap blogs out there, but there are also tons of crap books. But that doesn’t mean that blogs will fall by the wayside all together.

In the end, I think it traces back to the blogger’s motivation. Like I originally said, this blog is primarily for me. And having a writing outlet for whatever crosses my mind isn’t likely to go away in 2 years, even if blogs become less popular in the mainstream. So let’s all raise our glasses to many more years of blogging – or, at least 2 more years to prove a point to the crabby guy from the CHI conference.

A handful of the MHCI students went to a steakhouse / sushi restaurant over lunch today called Vargas. It was quite amazing, and in a word, delicious.

Most of the sushi rolls were standard, but there were a couple of interesting rolls that deserve mentioning. One was the Golden Dragon roll, which combined a myriad of different flavors (eel tempura, goat cheese, avacado, caviar, crab, shiso, and tuna). It was definitely unique, but I enjoyed it.

The hands down favorite at the table, however, was the sushi pizza: A tempura rice crust with spicy tuna, smoked salmon, crab, and caviar. Talk about delicious. We had a hard time taking a break from eating it to take a picture, but here’s a shot of the last two slices. Delicious!

There was an article in the New York Times a couple days ago discussing new uses for wikis – namely, using them in the context of product reviews, as Amazon.com has started to do.

For those unfamiliar with the technology, a wiki essentially allows multiple people to edit one webpage. A well-known application is Wikipedia, which attempts to be an encyclopedia that is editable by all users. The idea is that, if everyone builds on each other’s knowledge, we can compile a well-informed encyclopedia on the web.

One issue that Wikipedia reports is that sometimes inaccurate information is added, or worse, something malicious happens to a page (erasing content or writing inappropriate content). So to keep the content appropriate and accurate, a fair amount of moderation is needed.

It seems like with product reviews, this problem can only get worse. While a cursory look at Amazon’s recently-edited wiki entries didn’t reveal any issues, I would imagine that you would have issues with product advocates trying to spin the entry to be in favor of the product.

In the case of Amazon, there are about five different types of reviews – editorials, discussion boards, user reviews, etc. – so I’m not as worried that customers would receive a biased review. But is the expansion of this idea worthwhile, or more trouble than its worth?

Frequent blog readers have probably checked out some of Vince’s games that I’ve written up. Well, I’m through blogging about them. Why? Because Vince has created his own blog to chronicle his games!

Check it out!

On a related note, I’ve been writing essays for my Game Design class, and Vince suggested that I post them on his site. It was an offer I couldn’t refuse. My first essay is already up, and more will be posted over the coming months. Check it as often as you check mine!

That’s the number of hours that people played solitaire around the world last year. Yikes.

One of the presenters from Carnegie Mellon has been doing work to try and tap into that manpower for tasks that humans do better than computers. By creating games that have meaningful output, suddenly those hours are being better spent, even though the people are still playing games and having fun.

So, next time you want to mix up your solitaire game playing (or if you need some new games for your toolbox), check out The ESP Game or Peekaboom. Not only did they seem fun, but they also are helping to categorize the images on the web in a meaningful way. Very cool.

I took my first CHI course today, and it was on the politics of usability - not to be confused with the usability of politics, which could always use improvement:

Anyway, right, politics of usability, Rolf Molich. I liked this session, but at the same time, I think I was hoping for something a little extra. The format was cool - we were presented with a business case, and we worked individually to come up with some recommendations for Mary, our hypothetical usability professional.

Without discussing the hypothetical at length, let’s just say that Mary is ambitious, and wants developers at her company to embrace usability. She thinks a full day, mandatory conference about generic usability is the way to accomplish it.

What was interesting, and also disappointing, was that a majority of the recommendations that Molich gave involved Mary incorporating usability practices in every aspect of her job, including this seminar. Suggestions included pilot testing the seminar, evaluating its usability, etc. Ok, as usability professionals, it definitely sets a good example if we promote usability in our daily lives beyond just the user testing that we do with whatever software we work with.

But how is that at political, even in the corporate sense?

Nielsen came out with an Alertbox today describing attitudes that various companies have toward usability, and grouping them on a scale. If you are at a company on the lower end (discussed by Nielsen today and also by Molich in this seminar), there needs to be something oriented toward the dissenters to really try to sway them. Speaking in concrete business terms with a clear cost-benefit scenario is a good way to start.

But what I really wanted to see was something that would shake things up: Sometimes, you need to make concessions in the short term to win out in the long term. It stops being about usability at this point, but about how you manage change in an organization and how you approach a group in general. I think this angle is just as important. I’ve always been a firm believer that winning someone over involves starting from their point of view and moving gradually over to yours - not stomping your foot where you are until they begrudgingly come to you (or worse, harden their resolve to the point that you lose them entirely).

But that’s probably not as easy to fit into a 90 minute course at the CHI conference. Plus, it’s easy to pass on the idea of bringing usability into everything you do. It’s something different all together to teach someone to be solid as a change agent. But that’s the course I’m looking for next year!

I arrived at Montreal with most of the HCI Institute at CMU, and it’s shaping up to be a fun time. In celebration, I’m going to be doing usability-related posts this week! Exciting! Stay tuned, I’ll have a post or two each day, starting today!

I got an email from Progressive today. I have my car insurance through them, and they sent me an email six months ago offering me $50 if I chose to install a TripSense in my car. The idea was that the data would help them conduct some research, and every six months, they would email me and request the data.

Well, the time has come, but I’m starting to have second thoughts. In my Service Design course on Monday, we had a guest lecturer from a company called Peer Insights. I can’t find a website for them, but they were written up in Business Week. Peer Insights specializes in trying to create services that result in good experiences for the customer.

An example that they gave was car insurance - the experience is mostly a negative one, because your rate can always go up, but it can never really go down (unless an accident leaves your record, or you turn 25, etc). It’s a punishment model, really: If something bad happens, customers are punished, but they are never rewarded for good driving.

The folks at Peer Insights offered Progressive’s TripSense as an example of fixing the punishment model - by studying how individuals drive, Progressive can adjust the rates accordingly.

Hooooold the phone. I went back and found a little excerpt from my offer letter to start using the TripSense. It goes a little something like this:

So which is it? If Progressive really is trying to move toward a more accurate model, which Peer Insights seemed relatively sure of, then I’m suddenly not feeling a lot of trust for my insurance company. But on the other hand, I’m getting an immediate reward of $50, which is always nice. Should I just take the money, or should I be a little more skeptical?

Nothing like brunch with friends to celerate Easter. I made a Chicken Dijon Strata, and was surprised at how it came out! Experiments in cooking that go well always make me want to cook more. Maybe in Seattle.

In case you forgot what Easter was about, here is a little reminder. (The saddest part is I’ve been waiting 11 months for Easter just so I could link to that). Did you leave cheeseburgers on your lawn this morning?

Meghan sent me a link to a moving jigsaw puzzle today, and I thought it was a cool use of Flash. It takes a bit to get the hang of it, but in general I felt pretty accomplished compared to playing A Tale in the Desert.