This product is a better user experience than reading a physical book. But it’s also a prime example of identifying a neat technology, and then finding a reason to use it in school, which is ass backwards.

Educators need to figure out what they want students to learn, and then find a technology that helps them learn it. Students could play forever with this book, but all they would learn is Al Gore’s view of how we solve our environmental problems. They would not learn contrary views, and they would not be taught to think critically about whose views they accept.

The successors to textbooks surely will be digital, but they won’t be a textbook at all.

They won’t be created by an education company that bends to politically driven agendas, a phenomenon that has been around long before last year’s Texas controversy;

“chapters” won’t reflect the perspective of just a few writers and editors, but rather the voices of thousands of scholars and educators;

in subjective areas, they won’t require students to memorize particular “facts” and viewpoints, but rather will encourage them to think for themselves, and form their own perspectives; and

they won’t impose a “one size fits all” approach to learning on a diverse group of students, with different interests, abilities and needs.

The successor to textbooks will be created by a group of passionate educators who collectively decide that no one should have “ownership” over what is taught in schools. It will leverage a curated collection of the best free content online, supplemented by some traditional textbook content in the sciences and math.

I was just thinking that there are already names for this sort of thing. We call them applications, interactive multimedia presentations, even websites. If someone put that in front of me and asked, “Do you know what this is?” I would confidently have several names for it, and book wouldn’t make the list. And I’m a huge fan of ebooks, I have two Kindles, so I don’t think it’s just that I’m biased towards bound material.

I’d really like to see some reading comprehension statistics on things like this versus more linear presentations of information too. I’m not just being critical, I’m genuinely curious about whether being able to interactively explore presented information leads to better, worse or the same retention as reading through it in the more traditional linear, guided way.

There are good reasons to believe that usability and Agile development methods can work together and improve user experience quality:

Agile offers many opportunities for overcoming problems with traditional development methods that have long impeded usability.

Approaching Agile narrowly, as a programming methodology rather than a system development methodology, threatens to destroy the last decade’s progress in integrating usability and development. But, as outlined above, there are ways around each of these threats. So long as teams recognize the threats as explicit issues, they need not harm product quality.

Finally, we know from our research that many companies have made things work swimmingly — once they adapted the Agile methodology to suit quality-focused system development.
For user experience practitioners who support Agile teams, the main change is in mindset. Having good, general user experience knowledge will help you understand how to change traditional design and evaluation methods to meet your Agile team’s different focus. Ultimately, however, you must both believe in yourself and embrace Agile development concepts if you want to succeed.

If you’re prepared to change your practices and take on the responsibility, there are great opportunities to improve your effectiveness and your impact on the teams you support.

Users want to follow the path of least resistance. Why can’t the path of least resistance be secured? Why does a user have to accept complications with security?

In the past, tougher and stricter the security is, the less usability there is. However, there have been plenty of cases where both computer security and computer usability went hand in hand with each other and actually improved together. Can the two continue growing together?

In order to begin to try to answer this question, it is important to first define the terms computer security and computer usability so we know exactly what each refers to and there’s no ambiguity.

Computer security is defined as technological and managerial procedures applied to computer systems to ensure the availability, integrity and confidentiality of information managed by the computer system.

Usability is the measure of the quality of a user’s experience when interacting with a product or system – whether a Web site, a software application, mobile technology, or any user-operated device. Usability is a combination of factors that affect the user’s experience with the product or system, including ease of learning, efficiency of use, Memorability, error frequency and severity, and subjective satisfaction.

Examples of How Security and Usability Are Inversely Proportional
P2P networks Good Usability – No Security: Everything from credit card numbers and family photos to bank records and personal letters can be and has been unintentionally shared through P2P networks.

Basic UNIX file permissions – Great security – not so usable: Then we can change the permissions of this file to be only readable and writable by the user nobody, as such:
-rw——- 1 nobody nobody 1242 Aug 14 01:56 data.txt

Examples of How Security and Usability Go Hand In Hand
Xbox Live constantly monitors for users attempting to bypass security measures and gain unfair advantages over other players, and will take additional action as needed. So with newly-added security mechanisms and policies, the Xbox Live service has increased its usability by preventing cheating and improving their service.

Another example of where security and usability grew together is the adware/spyware and pop-up arena. We believe pop-up blockers and anti-spyware applications are one of the most useful recent developments in computing. They have improved usability countless times for countless users.

At the end, I think usability is been added to the security by doing a few simple things really well, instead of a lot of different things poorly. Even though there are really bad but secure solutions, I think eventually designers are thinking of redoing it with a better design.

Usability definitely seems to be one of those expanding possibilities.  Having resolved the most serious glitches in their software engineering processes, teams seem to have more energy to spend with their users.  Innovators in the Agile community are focusing on usability

Kathy Sierra recently envisioned software that’s not just usable, but SO usable it’s transparent.  Its users becomes immersed in the task at hand, as the software empowers them to handle the challenges of their work, without intrusive distractions, workarounds and constraints.  She describes this user experience as “flow”, a term coined by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi to describe complete and energized focus in an activity, with a high level of enjoyment and fulfillment.

Alistair Cockburn, in his recently revised “Agile Software Development: The Cooperative Game” specifically commented on the difficulties some are encountering with usability:
In some organizations, would-be agile programmers drive the timeline and insist that the UX design be done incrementally in two-week iterations, simultaneously with programming. The UX [user experience] designers complain that there is insufficient time to research their users, create a design, and program it within the two-week window.

Cockburn’s recommendation: adaptation. Teams must address these realities: all stakeholders must collaborate to examine this tension between overall consistency and incremental development.  In the end, it’s the familiar prescription for process problems: experiment, reflect and adjust.

More information: http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2007/01/what_comes_afte.html

Eye tracking is the process of measuring either the point of gaze (”where we are looking”) or the motion of an eye relative to the head. An eye tracker is a device for measuring eye positions and eye movements.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbWu7GC5w3k

The most widely used current designs are video-based eye trackers. A camera focuses on one or both eyes and records their movement as the viewer looks at some kind of stimulus. Most modern eye-trackers use contrast to locate the center of the pupil and use infrared and near-infrared non-collimated light to create a corneal reflection (CR).

Since 2005 Eye tracking is used in Communication systems for disabled allowing the user to speak, mail, surf the web and so with only the eyes as tool. Eye control works even when the user has involuntary movement as a result of CP or other disability, those who wear glasses or many other characteristics that limit the effectiveness of older eye control systems.

More Information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_tracking

Principles and strategies for practitioners designing universally usable sites

The goal of universal usability is to enable the widest range of users to benefit from web services. These links contains recommendations and information resources for web developers who wish to accommodate users with slow modems, small screens, text-only, and wireless devices. It deals with content design issues such as translation to other languages, plus access for novice, low educated and low motivated users, children and elders. The website also covers design guidance for blind, deaf, cognitively impaired, and physically disabled users. Each article has practical guidelines, web site examples, links to organizations, and a bibliography.

Users with Disabilities

• Blind and low vision users
• Color vision confusion
• Cognitively disabled
• Deaf & hearing impaired
• Mobility impaired

Special User Groups

• Children
• Elderly
• Users with low education, low motivation
• Users of other languages than English
• Users from other cultures than the US
• Cross language information retrieval

Technology

• Users with slow connections
• Users with screens less than 640 x 480
• Telephone based access to the web (WAP)
• Telephone based access to the web (speech recognition)
• Textual equivalents for audio/video representations of content

Tutorial methods

• Designs to help novice web users
• Online help design, email help methods and customer service guidelines

The information is a class project for Human Factors in Computer and Information Systems (Computer Science 838S) ( Spring of 2001). It is a continuation of the UUGuide project started by graduate students in the Spring 2000 class. The courses were led by Prof. Ben Shneiderman Founding Director of the University of Maryland Human-Computer Interaction Lab.

The Google Web Toolkit (GWT) is a new technology from Google that automatically translates Java into JavaScript, making Ajax applications easier to code and deploy.

As you might have guessed, it emphasizes end-user experience, GWT usability features, and several of the big improvements made in GWT 1.4 RC.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMsL9fN-rXk

Usability = Great Application + Happy Users

The Web is experiencing a new growth with an emphasis on rich, web-based applications. These applications can be difficult to build because they rely on JavaScript, which lacks the sophisticated object-oriented structures and static typing of Java, they are tricky to debug, and they require you to manage numerous browser inconsistencies.

In May of 2006 Google released the Google Web Toolkit. GWT enables developers to create Ajax applications in Java. With GWT, you can build your applications using a real object-oriented language and take advantage of Java tools like Eclipse that are already available. Instead of trying to bring tool support to Ajax, Google brought Ajax to a place where the tools already existed.

Eric Schaffer explains why usability is no longer enough.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bminUlAu47Q

Traditional usability practices focus on creating efficient sites that are simple and easy to use. Thus, usability deals with the “can do” aspect of design (i.e., can users find information, understand content, or complete a task?). But just because a site is easy to use doesn’t mean it will engage consumers and meet business goals.

http://beyondusability.humanfactors.com/