UE/UR/UI

It’s not often that I have a blog title that’s only acronyms (in fact, I think this is a first), and it’s also a first in that I’m post­ing look­ing for someone to join the team and pro­ject I’m on. I can­’t write much about the pro­ject itself here, since we’re still in stealth mode, but I can write quite a bit about who we’re look­ing for. Experts in the above acronyms is the short ver­sion (the mean­ings in this con­text being user exper­i­ence, user research, and user inter­face design); for the longer ver­sion you’ll need to jump past the break.

The pro­ject I’m work­ing on (actu­ally, I’m pro­gram man­ager for it), is a lot of fun. It’s a research pro­ject, so the work we’re doing may or may not end up in one or more of Sun­’s products at some stage. We will be releas­ing the code to open source, how­ever, so your work will even­tu­ally be out in the pub­lic view no mat­ter what. One of the focus points for this pro­ject is usab­il­ity, coupled with rad­ic­ally innov­at­ive design. To com­bine rad­ic­al design with usab­il­ity requires user research, which means talk­ing to real people, con­duct­ing focus groups, ask­ing people what they want, watch­ing them as they use the pro­to­types. In oth­er words, it requires test­ing your design ideas to ensure that being rad­ic­al has­n’t detrac­ted from being usable. You’d be expec­ted to take the lead on writ­ing the screen­ers and run­ning the focus groups, eval­u­at­ing the responses, and chan­ging the UI designs to make them even more usable.

We’re look­ing for design­ers, not developers, although if you can design and code that would be wel­come. The loc­a­tion is flex­ible as long as you can keep the same core work­ing hours as most of the team, roughly 9 am to 2 pm Pacific time. You need to be able to work effi­ciently with oth­er team mem­bers using phone, email, and IM, as we’re spread across four coun­tries and 9 timezones and typ­ic­ally only meet face to face as a team once a year for a couple of days.

For more inform­a­tion, send me an email. This is a fun pro­ject, the most fun in a pro­ject that I’ve had for some years now, and all we need right now is to find the right UI/UE/UR expert to add to the team.

Using Wikis

The idea of wikis, the whole concept of col­lab­or­at­ive author­ing, is so enti­cing that it seems like it should be the default (at least if you don’t need more struc­tured markup behind it), even in the enter­prise. At least, that’s what I thought some years ago. People still like to send around office doc­u­ments with revi­sion mark­ing turned on, how­ever, rather than fully embrace the Brave New World. 

I tweeted that one prob­lem is likely the off­line issues (can­’t read the doc­u­ment on the air­plane unless I’ve saved a copy first); Edd added the “lost doc­u­ment” prob­lem where you can eas­ily lose a doc­u­ment when someone deletes the link to it, and you nev­er find it again. Spam, as Norm poin­ted out, is anoth­er issue on the inter­net, though it should­n’t be on the intranet.

And then there’s the issue of wiki markup, which some people detest. One pro­ject I’m work­ing on for Sun is using Medi­aWiki, for which you can export a doc­u­ment from Open­Of­fice, so that helps with at least get­ting the first draft of the doc­u­ment into the sys­tem. There’s still the update prob­lem; I gath­er that is slated for a future release of the wiki pub­lish­er exten­sion. When that works, I hope it will make it easi­er to talk cer­tain mem­bers of my team at Sun into using the sys­tem will­ingly <grin>.

Meditation by another name?

Every now and then I think I should med­it­ate for a few minutes a day. Some­how I sel­dom do, although I find listen­ing to a med­it­a­tion track when fly­ing is a good way to tune out the stand­ard air­plane unpleas­ant­ness. Hav­ing read When Dis­trac­tion is Good, it seems to me as if med­it­a­tion and “recept­ive dis­trac­tion” are prob­ably related. Maybe you can think of going for a quiet walk, or sit­ting in the garden breath­ing in the fresh air, as some sort of med­it­a­tion. As long as you don’t then start think­ing about the weed­ing, of course.

Maybe I’ll find that easi­er to fit into my day.

Reworking the network

Up till now I’ve been run­ning the home fire­wall and a couple of minor web­sites from an old (1996 or there­abouts) Pen­ti­um 3 box in the base­ment, that uses Debi­an. It seems to work reas­on­ably well, and has been fend­ing off bots and oth­er threats with adequate fero­city. There seems no reas­on, how­ever, to think that the num­ber of attacks will decrease in the next little while, and every reas­on to sus­pect that one of these days the hard disk will fail, leav­ing me without a fire­wall. The web­sites are backed up and eas­ily restor­able, the time to set up a fire­wall and get it work­ing with a PPPoE con­nec­tion to an ISP that does­n’t under­stand Linux is what will take the time.

So I’ve been won­der­ing about rejig­ging the whole net­work, get­ting an off-the-shelf hard­ware firewall/router that can feed into the wire­less router. I’m a little para­noid about get­ting some­thing that is secure but not intend­ing to spend thou­sands. We’ve blocked all ports except the neces­sary ones on the sys­tem right now, except for allow­ing SSH access in and out, and, of course, port 80 for the web sites. Secur­ity will be par­tic­u­larly import­ant as the kids move into the teen­age years and start want­ing to down­load stuff.

I’m look­ing for some advice here. Do I need any­thing more than NAT, DMZ, and for­ward­ing appro­pri­ate ports to intern­al serv­ers, which I can get from stand­ard con­sumer-level router/firewalls? Any par­tic­u­larly good brands and mod­els I should look for?

Copyright for Canada

There’s been a lot of dis­cus­sion in the papers about the newly-tabled Bill on Cana­dian Copy­right; suf­fice to say there are lots of issues with it and it needs to be sent back and turned into some­thing that meets the needs of the cit­izens and res­id­ents of this coun­try. If you’re liv­ing in Canada, I’d recom­mend you read some of Michael Geist’s blog, par­tic­u­larly the sum­mary of last week, and then email your MP about the issues that con­cern you the most. For me, it’s the poten­tial that play­ing DVDs from a region oth­er than Canada could viol­ate the law. If I’ve bought the DVDs leg­ally, or had them giv­en to me, why should play­ing them viol­ate the law? Why should get­ting a cell phone unlocked viol­ate the law? Why should back­ing up my CDs viol­ate the law? This is one of the few issues I can remem­ber where it seems that every news­pa­per has the same tone to the edit­or­i­al — and it isn’t com­pli­ment­ary to the government.

Mind you, my loc­al MP isn’t exactly known for listen­ing to his con­stitu­ents (there’s still a lot of loc­al anger at his cross­ing the floor after being elec­ted), so who knows how much good my email (a heav­ily edited ver­sion of the one at that used to be found at http://www.copyrightforcanadians.ca/action/firstlook) will do.

Update: it looks like the Min­is­ter sup­posedly in charge, isn’t — Cana­dian Industry Min­is­ter lies about his Cana­dian DMCA on nation­al radio, then hangs up — Boing Boing.

Spreading the Word

I’m not the first per­son to notice the duplic­a­tion of posts, as people post what’s hap­pen­ing to Twit­ter and Face­book and Plurk, and blog about it if they feel like writ­ing some­thing a little longer. Which means that when you really want to keep up with what someone is up to, you sub­scribe to them on all those chan­nels, and Friend­Feed as well, and put up with the duplic­a­tion (spiced up by the time lag between things appear­ing on one chan­nel and when they appear on the oth­er; ain’t latency fun?). 

The prob­lem comes when you want to respond, or join in the con­ver­sa­tion. Do you reply to the tweet? Or com­ment on the blog post­ing? Or respond to the per­son indi­vidu­ally by email or chat? Or all of the above? 

In the con­crete case that made me think about this, I sent off a chat mes­sage, and now I’m going to also blog it: con­grat­u­la­tions to Edd and fam­ily on the new arrival; may he sleep peace­fully and grow vig­or­ously, and not fight too much with his older siblings.

And maybe that’s the answer: take each case as it comes, depend­ing on which audi­ence you think might (or should) be involved, and how eph­em­er­al the con­ver­sa­tion should be.