Not a straight flush

I participate in a couple of online communities having to do with usability and design for people, and in one of them a current topic is affordances for bathroom fixtures. This reminded me of when I first started going to Italy and found the vast number of different ways of mechanisms for flushing toilets there. There's the pull chain, from above, the pushbutton on top of the tank, the lever in the wall above the WC, the foot-activated button on the floor, the button in the wall, etc. etc., and last (but not least, because there are twenty-gazillion types) the lever on the tank. This inspired me to write the following:

How do I flush thee? Let me count the ways.
I flush thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight...

That's as far as I got... maybe someday I'll finish it.

(It comes accompanied, of course, with a visual — a demonstration of an arm reaching out of sight.)

Partial poem copyright © 2007, Elizabeth Buie, with apologies to a much earlier Elizabeth

A Web designer survey, by A List Apart

Google Reader — what not to send me

So I've been using Google Reader for a couple of weeks now, and on the whole I like it a lot. Just today, for example, I learned that archeologists have recently found, about five miles from Stonehenge, a large settlement used by the the builders of that ancient monument ("Stonehenge builders' houses found"). I'll be in that part of the world two months from now and have already planned to visit Stonehenge (again), so with this timely piece of news I'll just add a swingby to Durrington.

HOWEVER — I would like to be able to tell Google Reader not to show me certain types of things. Specifically, sports. (I couldn't care less who's playing for what team or in what bowl, or who's making how many gobzillion dollars.) Also, entertainment. (Except maybe for the Britney Spears Guide to Semiconductor Physics, which has a wee bit of redeeming social value.) But it seems that all I can do is subscribe or unsubscribe to specific feeds. And I couldn't figure out how to ask them directly.

Now let's just hope that Google indexes this entry and finds out it's about their product. :-)

Paper on integrating HCI engineering and software engineering

About ten years ago I coauthored a paper called "Integrating HCI Engineering and Software Engineering: A Call to a Larger Vision", which I presented at the HCI '97 conference in San Francisco. My coauthor and I discussed a problem that was then plaguing the HCI community — namely, its relationship with software engineering and how to integrate the two. We encouraged both disciplines to take a larger view, and we presented system engineering as a structure for achieving such an integration.

This problem still arises in the interaction design community, underscoring the paper's continued validity, so I have posted it in my webspace. You'll find it at "Integrating HCI Engineering and Software Engineering: A Call to a Larger Vision".

The hair of the...

A couple of weeks ago I went to Chicago for the first time in more than a decade. It was a business trip and I had only a little over an hour the last day for exploring... but I had heard of the pavilion in Millennium Park, and I was curious. On the way in from the airport, the shuttle driver had pointed it out and said it looked "like something attacked by a bad can opener." An architect friend in Chicago dismissed that, so I decided I need to see it up close.

The Jay Pritzker Pavilion is made of stainless steel ribbons and connects to a network of steel pipes that criss-cross over the lawn that sits beyond the amphitheater seats. It's interesting, and up close its details can be quite beautiful. But as a whole I find it a mess.

I disagree with the shuttle driver, though: It doesn't look like something attacked by a bad can opener.

It looks like the head of a robot on a bad hair day.

P.S. After I wrote this, I noticed that the park's own web site (see above) describes it as a "headdress". Guess Gehry achieved what he wanted, anyhow.

Treo 600 --> 650

Well, I fried my Treo 600 (don't ask), and I now have a 650. The 650 has a few features I like better than the 600's:

• It operates more like a cell phone:
  • It has a clear "hang up" button (the usual phone symbol in red).
  • This same button serves (when pressed and held) to connect or disconnect the handset from the wireless network. (The 600 uses a button at the top of the handset, which is more easily pressed by accident.)
• The "To do" function has been renamed to "Tasks".
• The keyboard buttons are larger (a teeny bit, but it helps), arranged better (the rows are slightly curved), and easier to read (better text/background contrast). Evidently, someone did some human factors on this thing.
• The "Home" and "Menu" buttons have been taken out of the keyboard and moved to a position just above the function buttons. This makes good sense, because these buttons invoke specific functions and are not text keys.
• The Alt button has been moved to the right side of the space bar. This helps prevent it from being accidentally pressed when the Shift button is intended.
• Supposedly it will support voice dialing if I download the right app. Haven't looked yet, though.

The 650 has one feature I don't like as well as the 600's:

• The USB connection accessory is just a cord and no longer has a holder that sits on the desk. The sales guy told me it was because people travel with them and Palm wanted to make them smaller. But I find it to be less convenient. And really, the desktop thingie isn't that big.

The Treo 600 as a phone

One word: Phooey!

I don't like the Treo as a phone. Here's why:

• It doesn't have voice-activated calling, as far as I can tell. With my old phone, I could push a button and say "Dan" -- and presto! my SO's phone would be ringing.
• I have to take too many actions to do anything. To make a call I have to do the following:
  1. Press the "phone" button
  2. Press the "center" button to take it off "hold"
  3. Either (a) type in the number using those teenincey keys or sorta-small on-screen buttons, or (b) type the shortcut key I reserved for one of my "favorites" (dontcha just hate the ubiquitous Windows terminology? sheesh) or press the "up" key to go to favorites and then press the key associated with my "favorite" (and if that favorite is not on the first page of favorites, take out the stylus and touch the number for the page I think it's on).
• The sound quality and the signal are not as good. This may be due to the shorter antenna. My old phone had a longer antenna inside, that I could pull out to get a better signal (and to get it farther away from my head, although I have no idea whether it was far enough to make any difference).

But I'm going to continue with it for a while. I paid Verizon $20 to activate it (because I didn't buy it from them) and at least I don't have to carry two devices. Stay tuned.

Some thoughts about Treo and PalmOS

I recently bought a used Treo 600. I had done some investigation and had learned that the PalmOS has fared better in usability tests than the Windows Mobile OS (no surprise there!), so I chose one with Palm. I didn't want to spend $400 on something that I wasn't sure I was going to go with in the long term, so I bought a used one on eBay. Its screen has a couple of light-ish areas on it, but I can read it and for $89 it was a good compromise. I still have to take it to Verizon Wireless to have them make it my cell phone, but I plan to do that tomorrow. (I don't much like the feel of it for a cell phone, but I don't want to carry around two devices.)

I'll have more to say as I become more familiar with using it, and especially as I use it for my phone. Stay tuned.

Squeezing and releasing

I went with some friends yesterday to the Pope-Leighey House, a very small house designed in 1940 by Frank Lloyd Wright. Now, I am not particularly enamored of Wright, but my SO the architect is... so I went for the company, but I learned a few things and gained some amount of appreciation for him. Even though I still wouldn't want to live in one of his houses, LOL.

Prudence, our tour guide, was outstanding. Friendly and knowledgeable and willing to answer any questions, she gave us a good feel for both the history and the design of the house. What struck me most was her explanation of the low ceiling/roof of the entranceway. At Fallingwater (which I visited a few years ago), I felt cramped in the bedrooms and disliked the house for that reason. Walking up to the Pope-Leighey House, I saw the same low ceiling and felt the same crampedness. But Prudence explained that Wright did it on purpose, with the aim of giving people a "protected" feeling to start with and then expanding the space once they stepped inside. He called it "compression release," she told us.

Although I still don't care for the cramped feeling of the low ceilings (and I'm not particularly tall, being of average height for my age), I can appreciate the concept and can recognize its value.

In someone else's house.

I hate IE.

It's putting a gap between the tab buttons and the thick line that ties them all together. Damn box model.

My friend Ed tells me that they're working on a new version of IE that will be more standards compliant. I wonder how long that will take...

Facelifted and fancy-free

I've just spent a weekend doing something I've been promising myself for over a year that I'd do — I've redesigned my personal webspace. The original design is almost nine years old (it was my first site, which should surprise no one) and its design had become downright embarrassing. It was usable enough, I think (those principles don't really change much), but it was waaaay out of style and I had gotten to the point of cringing whenever I looked at it (or even thought about how it looked, truth be told). I considered redoing the information structure, and eventually decided not to, concluding that it wasn't really so bad and that redoing it would have been too much work for too little gain. So I redesigned the main navigation, converted all the pages to XHTML, removed most of the use of tables for layout, and drastically increased my use of CSS — all good things. I may continue to play with it some, but at least now I can relax and stop cringing.

Unfortunately, this was a weekend when I'd rather have been outside. The weather was glorious, and in the spring there are almost no bugs. But I've been down with something and had to stay inside anyhow. So at least I felt well enough to spend two days glued to my Mac. (And at least it's a Mac. <grin>)

"Hold the elevator!"

Go to a conference on human factors or human-computer interaction, and I bet you'll find that the most common elevator topic is the design of the button panel in the conference hotel's elevators.

This post has been moved to Done Bright! The Luminanze Blog

What I learned about art shows two days later

If the art is good, people like it anyhow. Even if the differently colored mats make the show as a whole less coherent.

After church this morning, several people raved about my work and asked me how I did the digital manipulation. (All of my images but one are manipulated in some way, using a combination of Photoshop filters and layers, with transparency and blending mode set to get the look I wanted.) One woman ordered a larger print of one of my images.

This does not invalidate what I learned on Friday, of course... but it helps to put it into perspective.

Here's the notice about the show. (The image in the lower right is mine.)

What I learned about art shows today

Went to the church at lunchtime today to hang some photographs. The church is about to start a remodeling project, in preparation for which the Fine Arts Committee did not schedule any of our usual juried Art Shows. However, we found out late last fall that delays in starting the construction would have the Fellowship Room available through the summer — and the room looked so bare with no art — so we decided that Fine Arts Committee members ourselves would provide the art for the next few months.

During the past two months, pieces by the four painters on the Committee have hung in the Fellowship Room. From today through mid-June, pieces by the three photographers will hang there.

The other two photographers have shows. I have a mixture of pieces. Each of my pieces works alone, but I have discovered that they don't form a cohesive whole. It's partly print size and partly mat color (too much variation in each). The Committee chair was there to help us hang the work, and she made some suggestions that I will take to heart and keep in mind for future efforts. (She's great, and I could tell she was disappointed at the lack of cohesion, because she likes many of my pieces for themselves.)

Next time.

Introducing Design Musings

Design constitutes a big part of my life. My professional life focuses on the design of things (mainly web sites and software applications) for effective, efficient, and satisfying use by people. My paraprofessional life involves photography and digital imaging. My personal life involves architecture — my significant other is an architect who has designed an addition to my house and is in the process of building it, and as he is always (always!) talking about architecture and what makes a building good, I have learned a lot about it since we've been together. So I thought I'd build a little place where I can express thoughts and ideas as they occur to me — some random, some not-so — about all of these design-related topics. And maybe foster some interesting conversations.