Understanding what makes a good User Experience (UX)

Posted on 14/02/2012 by Mike McNamara

There is an interesting discussion taking place over on Brian O’Leary’s Magellan Media website about Phenomenology resulting from an original post about User Interfaces.

User Interface (UI) design and the User Experience (UX) play an important role in today’s information delivery ‘pipeline’ and making sure that the information is easy to follow and fully understood when it arrives is vitally important.

Here’s my contribution to the conversation. Why not join in with yours?

“I came across some resources which may be of interest after talking with two recently retired UK Primary level school teachers who were involved with lesson design and delivery.

A paper published back in May 2011 looked at some studies about “The phenomenology of on-screen reading:” using interviews/feedback with students – It’s paid content and unfortunately I don’t have an account.

However, there is an interview with its author here.

There is no doubt that a good UX benefits the learning process and as previously stated, there are a number of ‘building blocks’ that can help with this. A recent project I worked on involved research into the presentation of European History content that ‘understood’ the age level of the reader once a ‘profile’ was ‘attached’ to the content. Metadata also played an important part of that work (which is not completed as yet) guiding and tracking the reader through the relevant stream of content.

Needless to say, UI design was also another important part of delivering an optimum UX to the reader. The project is still ongoing for potential delivery later this year.”

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Metadata – The importance of being found.

Posted on 31/01/2012 by Mike McNamara

Catching up with my reading backlog over the weekend revealed yet more evidence of the growing importance of Metadata in today’s on-line world.

Deep Dive as the New York Times’ experimental context engine and story explorer has been christened, provides another excellent example of the power of Metadata.

Derived from the editorial input of ‘Tags’ (which are also used in their Topics listing) that follow an in-house developed algorithm, the Metadata helps drive users deeper into story connections increasing and improving findability of relevant content, unearthing ‘unknowns’ that were perhaps not thought of during the initial search request.

What does Twitter think about Metadata? When Metadata Comes to Twitter is an interesting article proposing the use of Metadata around Tweets that could be used to ‘fine tune’ which Tweets one might want to follow from a particularly ‘noisy’ Twitterer/Tweeter. I liked the articles’ analogy of  Signal to Noise ratio, in a past background in Radar engineering, ensuring the receiver could find those real return ‘blips’ amongst all the surrounding ‘mush’ was always a high priority.

The use of ‘Hash Tags’ in Twitter is one of its fundamental features and  with any good Twitter client, it is possible to isolate and follow an individual ‘Hash Tag’.  Adding a Metadata layer to Twitter would certainly add extra value to an already powerful tool.

David Warlock writes another interesting post about the value of Metadata and its growing importance in today’s information world and makes an interesting prediction.

“… one day, the only thing worth owning – because it is the only thing people search and it produces most of the answers that people want – will be the metadata itself . When that sort of sophisticated metadata becomes plugged into commercial workflow and most discovery is machine to machine and not person to machine we shall have entered a new information age…”

With the arrival of more ‘Big Data’, finding that relevant content within an organisation could become even harder than ever; yet be even more important than ever.

Well thought out Metadata strategies are important part to solving that problem and the organisation that puts off that decision risks losing out in the Findability rush to the top of the search table.

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Where have all the Hard Disc Drive manufacturers gone?

Posted on 20/12/2011 by Mike McNamara

As the major Hard Disc Drive (HDD) manufacturers move towards even further consolidation, two – Seagate and Western Digital  – have announced with very short notice that they will be reducing the warranties on a number of their HDD’s; in some cases from five years to one year!

The new warranty periods offered will come into force at the turn of the year and whilst ‘Enterprise’ designated HDD’s will keep most of their exiting warranty levels, it is likely that many of the new computing devices that the average buyer (you and me) purchase in 2012 will contain the reduced warranty HDD’s.

Some reports suspect that the recent flooding has caused this move, but Seagate – one of the big players – has said that they want to reduce the cash tied up in their 5 year warranty plans for new internal development funding.

Should we as consumers be worried about this move? On the price front, perhaps. Prices had already marginally increased due to the flooding in Thailand and one would think that reducing the warranty on HDD’s by 80% in some cases that this might have been reflected in a drop in the price of the affected HDD’s. However, there is unlikely to be any reduction in prices any time soon.

From a technical point of view, should we be worried that HDD’s will be of lesser quality? One hopes not and in fact all of the HDD’s will continue to be manufactured in the same controlled environment that they have always been made in. In my many years of using, installing, and sometimes recovering data from them, I have only ever experienced one complete mechanical failure of an HDD. They seem to be one of the most reliable moving pieces of computing technology in use today.

Another aspect these announcements have thrown up, is just how few HDD manufacturers there now are. This diagram shows how much consolidation has happened over the past 20 years with just three major players (Seagate, Western Digital & Toshiba) now left in the market. Perhaps Toshiba will be making similar announcements soon?

Slowly consumer choice is without doubt being eroded in this area and regulators need to keep a watchful eye on this market otherwise we could all soon be paying much more for our HDD’s with perhaps even less warranty.

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It’s all about the vocabulary.

Posted on 06/12/2011 by Mike McNamara

I came across an interesting #ePrdctn Twitter conversation the other day about the need to use a common language or vocabulary when discussing various publishing technical production issues.

In these #ePrdctn (there’s also a Wiki page) discussions the topics can cover a wide number of subjects including XML markup (just what do you call a person that does that task), JavaScript programming (is that about writing scripts or code),  data conversion for ePub and InDesign operations; in fact any topic that is involved in today’s publishing production environment.

Clearly a common word list or vocabulary is a benefit to any organisation when trying to define and describe its own workings.

Most common definitions of ‘Vocabulary’ today describe it as being about:

  1. The body of words used in a particular language
  2. A part of such a body of words used on a particular occasion or in a particular sphere: i.e. “the vocabulary of law” or “the vocabulary of nursing”.

It’s very clear that one person’s definition of a word may not always meet with wide scale acceptance by everyone else. For example, when writing some JavaScript, is the creator writing a Script or creating programming code that performs an action? Are they a ‘scripter’ or a ‘coder’? When marking up XML content, is the person that does that job called a ‘mark-upperer’ or a ‘mark-upper’?

Looking back over some recent projects, the discussions around well thought out vocabularies along with the building of Taxonomies to form the basis for Metadata, can dramatically enhance the value of most Publishers content. Particularly when offering up that content to end users for searching, resulting in an increased Findability factor for specifically targeted content.

It is all about the vocabulary, but clearly there has to be a common agreement on the definitions so as to have the same meaning to everyone. So as I wrote this, does that make me a writer, an author or a creator, or perhaps all three? Some may say, none of them!

#eprdctn – Vocabulary definitions, some suggestions

  • Scripter – Someone who creates a JavaScript
  • Programmer – Someone who writes computer programme code
  • XML Element – Everything from (including) the element’s start tag to (including) the element’s end tag. More examples here
  • XML Attribute – An XML attribute provides additional information about an XML element. Another source of XML examples.

All comments welcome.

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XML Editors – Another poll result

Posted on 29/11/2011 by Mike McNamara

Back in the middle of 2011 and as part of an ongoing survey of XML Editing tools, we thought it would be interesting to run a poll to find out if people would tell us which XML editing tool they were using.

The results of this first poll showed us that out of 231 page views only 14 votes were cast with Oxygen coming out top with 7 votes followed by Altova XMLSpy & XML Mind’s XML-Editor getting 2 votes each and Arbortext Editor, FrameMaker & XMetaL receiving 1 vote each.

As we thought this was a pretty low response we decided to run a second poll which ends tomorrow (30th November). So far from another 228 views we have seen 3 more votes for Oxygen, 1 vote for the Pollo’s XML Editor, 1 vote for Notepad++ and 1 vote for Vim.

Bringing those two results together we see totals of…

  • Oxygen – 10
  • Altova XMLSpy – 2
  • XML Mind’s XML-Editor – 2
  • Arbortext Editor – 1
  • FrameMaker – 1
  • Notepad++ – 1
  • Pollo’s XML Editor – 1
  • Vim – 1
  • XMetaL – 1

Clearly Oxygen is the winner in this poll out of 20 votes cast from over 400 page views. But what else does this poll tell us about the use of XML tools in Publishing?

Initial tweeting & posting about the poll seems not to have brought out the sorts of voting results that we thought there would be. So who is using the estimated 500,000 plus installed XML editing tools? This number is from an aggregation of figures from direct conversations we’ve had with some of the 70 plus XML editing tool vendors & developers that we discovered during our current survey.

We also know from our own direct conversations with various publishers about XML workflows & production environments that many more than 20 XML editing tools are in use today. Of course many publishers are somewhat reticent to discuss their own production environments openly, therefore we thought a ‘blind’ poll would have drawn out many more examples of the use and variety of XML editing Tools. That said, these are the results so far.

With regards to the XML Editing Tools survey, we have unearthed a wide variety of tools available (70 plus as mentioned above), ranging from the very well-known commercial products through various ‘Freeware’ offerings that are available to a number of very interesting Open-Source products. We expect to be able to begin publishing some of the findings of our survey soon and will post another update in due course.

In the meantime, if you have any comments about the XML Editing tool that you are using, then feel free to add your comments to this post to join the conversation.

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Posted in Editing Tools, Workflow, XML | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments