Categories
Innovation

My two bob’s worth on the Don Norman simplicity debate

Don Norman, respected usability guru, wrote an article on the demise of simplicity as a selling point, and it’s caused reverberations all around the world. In fact, his article has been so controversial that he’s found it necessary to write a clarifying addendum for the essay (added to the bottom of the article), fearing that many of his readers interpreted his article as concluding that simplicity should no longer be a design goal. Norman’s point is that a product with a greater number of features is more appealing than a similar product with fewer features. The “more complicated” product is therefore more likely to sell. In other words, feature creep is driven by the knowledge that consumers will be suckered in to paying for a product that looks more complicated, even though, in many cases, they might complain about the difficulty of using the product when they get home.

I think there’s a difference between giving a user too many choices and too many features. Confusion and frustration arises when the user is presented with an array of subtly different choices. Joel Spolsky provides an excellent example: the Windows Vista shutdown menu. Windows Vista provides the user with umpteen slightly different ways of shutting down the computer. Why? On the other hand, providing lots of features that do different things need not result in frustrating the user, because, well, they are for accomplishing distinct tasks, and the user can clearly separate them in their mind. Take those Japanese toilets, for instance. These toilets have an integrated bidet, dryer, seat warmer, massage options, automatic flushing and so on and so forth. The existence of these features does not mean that the toilet isn’t simple to use, per se. If however, each of those features had a confusing list of subtly different settings, then that could be a problem!

Norman’s essay could have been made easier to read and resulted in less confusion if it had been written more clearly and more carefully. The following is just the most confusing of a number of errors that can be found in his article:

Notice the question: “pay more money for a washing machine with less controls.” An early reviewer of this paper flagged the sentence as an error: “Didn’t you mean ‘more money’?” the reviewer asked?

But it already says “more money”. Somehow Norman and his reviewer have conspired to introduce an error that is similar to the one they were seeking to avoid. If that’s not irony, I don’t know what is.

Categories
Random observations

More books

Karen and I went to Sunnybank to watch Charlotte’s Web today. I was glad to find we weren’t the only adults in the cinema. Not a bad movie at all. Hearing Steve Buscemi do the voice of Templeton the rat was worth it alone. After the movie we had lunch at the impressive Landmark Chinese restuarant which is just outside the shopping complex. It does yum cha every day. It has a very nice interior, and it seems extremely popular, particularly with the local Chinese community.

While we were at Sunnybank, I used the voucher my brother gave me for Christmas to buy Animal Farm and a book called How to Get Things Done, by David Allen. The second book was recommended by my friend Rhys, whom I saw at our annual UQIT2K Christmas gathering (UQIT2K being the name of the mailing list we set up after we graduated from ITEE at UQ in 2000). I figure I need to get a bit more organised. After taking an official Myers-Briggs test at the NICTA retreat, I found out that I’m an ENTP. I’m only marginally ‘E’. I used to be an ‘I’, and my personality is only E-like at work. I’m definitely ‘N’, ‘T’ and ‘P’. The ‘P’ means I’m laissez faire, disorganised and a bit chaotic. While the laid back thing is good, I’d like to organise some aspects of my life a bit better, which will hopefully give me more time to do more stuff, such as reading all those books I still have to read!

Categories
Random observations

Saddam hanged

Saddam Hussein was an incredibly evil man; however, he should not have been hanged. The death penalty is a relic of times past and it is wrong in every instance. Might it have been better for Iraq’s future to show Saddam the mercy that he never showed anyone?

Categories
Random observations

My Christmas haul

I already mentioned that I was given the book Nineteen Eighty-Four for Christmas (by my parents-in-law). I’m enjoying it much more this time around than when I read it for the first time sometime during my teens. Karen bought me the new U2 CD, U218 Singles. It’s a compilation of U2’s greatest hits, plus two new singles. She also got me a nice pair of Jensen headphones to replace the dodgy ones I have at work. Mum got me some clothes (I was hanging out for a new pair of shorts – I’m utterly hopeless at buying new clothes when I need to, though my Mum and Karen are trying to correct that flaw), Dad got me a 2007-2008 calendar of Italy, which I’ll hang in my office space at work, and Nigel got me some chocolates and an Angus and Robertson book voucher. I’ll probably spend the book voucher on The Road to Serfdom, Capitalism and Freedom or Animal Farm. Karen and I also bought ourselves some goodies, such as the Canon MVX430 video camera.

Categories
Random observations

What’s Ricky reading?

I’ve spent the last year or so working my way through Don Quixote, and I’m still nowhere near completing it. It’s not that it’s a bad book, it’s more that I’ve been reading multiple other things at the same time. At the moment I’m reading Nineteen Eighty-Four, which I was given for Christmas, and a micro-economics text book (I don’t know why). I’ve also just started reading Einstein’s Relativity – The Special and the General Theory which I found on Karen’s bookshelf. I’ve also become and avid reader of the The Economist, which NICTA QRL has a subscription of. That newspaper (yes, I know it looks like a magazine, but it’s a newspaper, okay) invariably makes for interesting reading. It has become my primary source for keeping abreast of what’s happening in the world. The writing is excellent, and whenever an argument is made in favour or against a policy etc., it is always well reasoned. It also has good coverage of the most important or interesting scientific news of the week, and each quarter it has a special section on technology, which is often very cool.

So much to read, so little time…

Categories
Random observations

Canon MVX430

Yesterday, in the post-Christmas sales, Karen and I bought a Canon MVX430 video camera. We’d been saying for a while that we should invest in a video camera to take on holidays etc. After reading all the reviews, deciding we didn’t need an absolute top-of-the-line camera and agreeing that we didn’t want to spend more than $1000, we came to the conclusion that the Canon Elura 100 would be perfect for us. The respected camcorder.info website rated the Elura 100 the best video camera in any class for 2006. But it turns out that the Elura is not sold in Australia, at least not under that name. After doing some specification comparisons, I realised that the MVX430 and the Elura 100 were the same, except that the Elura 100 has 20x optical zoom as compared to 18x for the MVX430. The digital zoom also differs between the two. And of course, the MVX430 is PAL-based whereas the Elura 100 is NTSC-based. My suspicions were confirmed by a discussion on the camcorder.info bulletin board. There is a camera being sold in the UK called the MVX460 which is more-or-less an exact match of the Elura. For some reason it isn’t being sold in Australia. Anyway, we ended up getting the MVX430 for $679 from JB-HiFi, who were good enough to match Myer’s sale price. That’s more than $100 less than the RRP. I’ll be getting a further $75 back from Canon when I claim the Christmas cashback offer.

My poor computer has begun its decline towards the scrapheap (or recycling heap, that is). One of the fans has gone, and it isn’t a part that can be replaced any more, such is the pace of change these days. Furthermore, neither Karen’s nor my own computer supports firewire (or USB 2.0 for that matter) meaning we can’t transfer any video footage from our new camera to the computer. My ancient computer monitor, which predates my current computer, died a couple of months ago. That has since been replaced with a sexy Dell 20-inch widescreen LCD monitor. No sooner had I replaced my monitor than the trouble with the fan began. Anyway, it looks like you can put together a very decent box for little cost these days. Another alternative might be to buy a PCI firewire card for my current computer, but that depends on how long my PC is likely to last without the deceased fan (which I believe is for the onboard video). We’ll see.

Categories
Eco-philo-pol

Misconceptions of research collaboration

NOTE: A clarification of this article has been posted here.


In the latest edition of The Australian’s Higher Education Supplement, Julian Cribb (Adjunct Professor of Science Communication, UTS) voices his dissatisfaction with current scientific research policy in this country (The Australian, HES, page 23, 20/12/2006) by drawing on the findings of a Productivity Commission report. He has written what hundreds, if not thousands, of researchers must surely be thinking: Australian science policy is a failure. Rather than simply reiterate the arguments of Professor Cribb and the Productivity Commission, in this article I wish to highlight what I believe to be an unjustified emphasis on research collaboration, particularly in the formative stages of a research project.History shows, emphatically, that the most important scientific discoveries and theories and the greatest inventions have come about, not through intense collaboration between organisations, but rather as a result of the ingenuity of one or two (often brilliant) minds. It is in the application of these discoveries, theories and inventions that collaboration is of most benefit, not in the forming of the ideas in the first place. History is littered with hundreds of examples where this is the case, and very few in which close collaboration between teams of researchers yielded a scientific breakthrough. Certainly, loosely coupled forms of cooperation are a mainstay of scientific advancement; afterall, isn’t academic communication via peer-review and publishing a form of cooperation whereby ideas are circulated throughout particular research communities? But this kind of cooperation is clearly different from the kinds of collaboration that researchers in Australia and other parts of the world are being forced to engage in by (government) funding bodies. Where successful research collaboration does occur, it happens in a bottom-up fashion whereby the benefits of collaboration are immediately obvious to the individual researchers involved.

The movement of the Earth around the Sun, the model of the structure of an atom, evolution, DNA and relativity – these are all theories or discoveries which have had a profound effect on the way we see the world we live in. None of them were the result of collaboration between research organisations, and they certainly were not conceived of a collaboration between researchers and industry. Even if we consider a less fundamental breakthrough of the modern day, such as Google’s PageRankTM algorithm which signalled a substantial leap forward in terms of how the World Wide Web is searched, we can see that the algorithm was a result of a convergence of the ideas of two university students who happened to meet more or less by chance.

Why, then, do so many Australian government funded research organisations emphasize the need for research collaboration, when all the evidence shows that few significant scientific breakthroughs have come through such collaboration? Granted, there needs to be some kind of collaboration between research institutions and industry when it comes to exploiting the results of research, but this is a completely different thing, and it comes at a later stage in the development of a research idea. In the technology sector, for instance, the mean time between the conception of a new technology and the formation of a billion dollar industry is twenty years [1]. Take the computer mouse, conceived by Douglas Engelbart in 1963 and refined by researchers at the fabled Xerox PARC lab through the 1970s. Although the first commercial computer mice were shipped with Xerox workstations from 1981, it wasn’t until the Apple Macintosh came onto the scene in 1984 that the point-and-click paradigm really took off. Similar experiences were had by other computer and communications technologies, from relational databases to local area networks [2]. I include this information only to show that research-industry collaboration might be important for commercialisation of research, but it has not been shown that this sort of collaboration is important for coming up with good ideas in the first place. In order to maintain consistency with Professor Cribb’s article and the findings of the Productivity Commission, I need to add that the current trend towards requiring researchers to seek out commercial support for their research in order to keep their projects afloat for longer than the typical three year funding term is counter-productive. It means that either the research being conducted in our government funded research organisations is not as cutting edge as it should be (and that, in effect, tax payers are subsidising incremental industry research), or that the government is flushing tax payers’ money down the toilet because researchers can’t see their cutting edge research through to a mature state. The government must account for and value the massive positive externalities generated by fundamental research, and, if anything, the onus ought to be on the Australian industry sector to seek out research that they can exploit commercially. Afterall, it seems that the technology underlying the billion dollar industry of ten years from now was conceived ten years ago. In other words, the next commercial success stemming from fundamental research is already here; industry just needs to find it.

As alluded to earlier, loosely coupled interaction, as it naturally exists in academia, is probably a much better model for research cooperation. Schemes that tie funding to certain levels of collaboration do a disservice to research in this country. Such funding arrangements do nothing but compel researchers to enter into meaningless, time- and money-wasting relationships, and distract them from their core task of doing good research. Where it is beneficial to do so, researchers will enter into collaborative arrangements of their own accord (unless they are masochistic, which is a possibility that we can disregard in most cases), without the need for funding incentives that only serve to distract researchers from the main game.

Categories
Random observations

Middleware 2006

The week before last, Karen and I attended Middleware 2006 along with Jaga and a couple of our students. I attended the Middleware for Sensor Networks conference (MidSens 2006) to present a paper that Karen and wrote, and Karen was running the Middleware Doctoral Symposium (MDS 2006). MidSens and MDS were on the same day, which is why we both got to go to Melbourne to attend the conference. We spent the first day at the Advanced Data Processing in Ubiquitous Computing (ADPUC 2006) workshop.

From all accounts, MDS was a real success, and I’m a little disappointed that I couldn’t attend. Karen was able to get some pretty well-known people, including Maarten van Steen and Michi Henning, to play the role of mentors/panelists for the day. I think MidSens was also successful. It had a kind of buzz around it. ADPUC could have done with a few controversial papers to get some discussions going. The Middleware conference itself, which ran for the last three days of the week, was a mixed bag. The papers, in general, were of high quality (apparently many high quality papers were rejected), but as would be expected of a conference with such a broad theme, not all the papers appealed to my interests. One thing I did learn is that the Middleware conference might not be a bad place to try to submit my own papers, since there were a couple of papers in the area of pervasive computing.

Categories
Eco-philo-pol

Opposition leader Kevin Rudd

Well, it’s been almost a week since the Labor caucus ousted Kim Beazley and elected Kevin Rudd as their new leader and Julia Gillard as his deputy. In my last post, I made the comment that it might have been in Labor’s best interests for Kevin to wait until after the next election before contesting the leadership. I also made that comment in the wake of Mark Latham’s resignation. However, Mr Rudd has made a really good start. It began with a confident interview on the 7.30 Report, continued with his staring down of the internal Labor factions so he could install the front bench that he wanted, and now he’s talking about overhauling the education system. More to the point, I already get the feeling that Labor will, for once, be constructing a strong party platform from which to launch their election campaign. This is something that neither Kim Beazley nor his recent predecessors were willing or able to achieve as Labor leaders. My frustration with Mr Beazley’s incoherrent policies are already well documented in this blog.

Maybe Mr Rudd does have enough time to make an impact before the next election after all. He won’t be able to fix Labor’s internal organisational problems, but he may be able to do enough to get everybody focused on the one message. He’s given Labor a good chance by choosing his preferred front bench (I understand the final places on the bench will be decided this weekend) rather than bowing to factional and union pressure. It’s still early days. Kevin Rudd is no Mark Latham, but I remember that Mr Latham was fairly impressive when he first began as Labor leader, and look what came of that!

Categories
Eco-philo-pol

Kim or Kev?

Whether it’s Kim Beazley or Kevin Rudd who emerges victorious from the Labor caucus this morning, Mr Rudd has made a big mistake by challenging for the leadership at this point in time, so close to the next federal election. Labor looks just as divided as ever, and Kevin Rudd and his “running mate”, Julia Gillard, look immature and impatient. Kevin would have done well to stand firmly behind Kim Beazley, bide his time, wait for Labor to lose the next election, and then step into the leadership role looking far less blood-thirsty. Mr Rudd would appear more mature, and the Labor party less fractured. This more patient approach would also have allowed him to give the federal Labor party the big shake-up that it so badly needs. There is not enough time between now and the election to begin that kind of operation. Sure Mr Rudd and Ms Gillard can choose a new-look front bench, but everyone knows that Labor’s problems run far deeper than that.

I’m not sure I dig this “new style of leadership” that Mr Rudd and Ms Gillard seem to be proposing. Since they announced that they’ll be challenging Mr Beazley and Ms Macklin, the pair have not appeared on TV as individuals (at least, not that I’ve seen); it’s like they’re joined at the hip. It’s quite unnatural and it’s beginning to freak me out!