501 Verbs in English

I went down to browse the public library annual book sale. Supporters of the library donate their extras and have a festive annual sale with thousands of book. I bought one. Because I’m cheap and because I borrow books from the library mostly. The books I keep on my shelves are reference books and the odd title I don’t expect to find easily in the library (‘Modern Primitives’ and ‘The Tears of Eros’ come to mind). But what caught my eye was the book “501 English Verbs”. Now I often see 501 Whuzzu Verbs in the foreign language section in bookstores and I’m tempted to buy one for whatever language I happen to want to know at the time, but for English! Well, why not?

I’m learning Portuguese at the moment. I adore Brazilian music. It has the sophistication and virtuosity reminiscent of the best of American Tin Pan Alley. Though I know that even if I learn the basics of Portuguese, the poetry of the songs will still elude me. But it’s fascinating to see the language continues to use the subjunctive mood. English has gotten much simpler over the years (or people like me are just beating it to death). The subjunctive in English sounds quaint and Masterpiece Theater-ish. Still, it would interesting to study a whole book of English verbs. The copy at the book sale was water damaged so I passed on it. But there will be other copies around…

Sticky notes

I like Post-It Notes(tm) and I wish someone would invent some kind of sticky string to make it easier to draw links between them.

Usability Design

Usability Design versus User Interface Design

Back just a few years ago, computers weren’t powerful enough to waste time with graphics. Screens weren’t capacious enough to waste space with blank areas. Times have changed.

Where before programmers could concentrate on providing raw functionality, now we have the resources to worry about how to present that functionality to make it easier to use and make it more pleasant to use.

However, making it easier to use and making it more pleasant to use are two different disciplines, one is usability, or user, design and the other is user interface design. And there is room for confusion on this terminology. Usability design tries to make the presentation suitable for the work and the workers. UI design is often an exercise in making screens more attractive, but not necessarily easier to work with. To make it easier to discuss the differences, I’ll write “usability” for the usability design work and “UI” for the presentation work.

UI designers are relatively common because, I’m being sarcastic here, they’re artists who are slumming. Usability designers are a breed of industrial designers and are much rarer, and more expensive. Usability designers have to work closely with the users and the programmers to get the flow of screens and procedures right.

Programmers sometimes dismiss UI designers as adding ‘eye candy’ that looks nice but has no substance. And indeed, some UI designers do little more than take an existing web page, adjust the field layouts, add some color and graphics and call it a day.

Now, you want UI designers. Making your product attractive is desirable, just don’t think that UI design is usability design or that a UI designer is a usability designer.

Examples of Usability Issues:

– Does the user need to scan the system for large amounts of information at once? Eg stock market brokers, call center operators, emergency dispatchers.  They do not have time to go scrolling around a bunch of screens, or even taking hands off whatever else they’re doing to punch a keyboard or scroll a mouse.

– Is the computer system central to their work, or peripheral?  That is, are they sitting there foresquare to the computer, or is the computer off to the side?

– Is the user intensely familar with the system or just a casual, or even a novice user? (Example: programmers tend to spend most of their time using their IDE—Integrated Development Environment, one piece of software of managing the project and coding code).

– Is the user interrupt driven (e.g. they take phone calls all day) or process driven (e.g. they have specific jobs they do.)

– Does the user work with one application or do they have to switch among several and draw from each to get a task done.

– Is the user a heads-down worker (they don’t even look at the screen to enter data) or a heads-up worker (they can see the prompts).

– Is the user better off not using a computer? Is a scanner or cell phone or ??? a better input/output device?

Maps

Overheard in Bird and Beckett, a great local bookstore in San Francisco, a woman looking for maps, nobody sells them anymore. The sales person commiserates, there are no map stores anymore (I’m thinking, Rand Mcnalley in North Beach is long gone). And what of it? Don’t I just use Google maps myself? Except maps aren’t just for finding your way from here to there. In writing the question is whether you should have an outline before you start writing and if so, how detailed. One author counseled that you want a map of the territory ahead, not the exact path. Because writing isn’t that straight forward, but you still need to have a sense of where you’re going and the territory ahead. But also maps are needful for what isn’t there. At one extreme, those ancient maps that ‘here be monsters’ or closer to our own eras, with helpful cartoon illustrations of wonderous things along the way. Bill Buxton in his book on design wrote “You have to leave big enough holes to let imagination come into play.” Google maps look too complete, too stolid. Now, I am not adventurous by nature, I’m just a bookworm, maybe Google maps are still enough to stir the blood and quicken the heart of adventurous souls—Samarkand and Uttar Predesh, Istanbul, Prague, Budapesh, the Escalante. I always expect that software hidden behind the Google maps will keep it updated, fill in the mysterious. A paper map is different, somehow they beckon, ask me to fill in the blanks.