Nancy’s Blog

I’ve recently been introduced to Sophie, software for creating “books” that incorporate text, images, video, and audio:

Sophie is software for writing and reading rich media documents in a networked environment. Sophie’s goal is to open up the world of multimedia authoring to a wide range of people and institutions and in so doing to redefine the notion of a book or “academic paper” to include both rich media and mechanisms for reader feedback and conversation in dynamic margins….Funded by grants from the Mellon and Macarthur foundations and the University of Southern California, Sophie is free and entirely open-source.

So far, I’ve only played with it a little. Friday I’m going to see the products of an archeology class that has used it — will write more then. The most serious limitation is that it requires its own reader, so it cannot (at this point, anyway) be used to produce “papers” on the web. But it looks intriguing. Well worth checking out.

Why is it that computer technology manufacturers get away with a level of incompetence and callousness that we would not tolerate from other participants in the marketplace? The only answer I can think of is that they ALL do it. Which means it’s easy for someone to have a competitive edge: be usable!

[Yes, I'm thinking about switching to Mac. I have so much invested in hardware, software, and especially in learning how to do things in Windows...But...If switching means not having these problems...]

I currently have open trouble tickets with 3 different hard/software manufacturers:

• I upgraded Reference Manager fro 10 to 11 and now a crucial function doesn’t work
• I upgraded Atlas ti from 5 to 5.2+ and it failed completely. After much back and forth, including several uninstalls/reinstalls, they sent me a file that seems to have solved the problem. I’m waiting to see if it keeps working.
  • Tech support chided me for not installing the additional updates — but when I installed the first update it failed completely, barring me from further upgrades.
  • My Netgear wifi router, which I bought in October and which worked for a while, has more or less failed. The signal strength, even with my laptop literally right next to the router, shows 2 out or 5 bars, and neither laptop nor cellphone can connect to it (so it’s not the laptop that’s failing, it’s the router).
    • To get tech support from Netgear, I had to register the device. Several times, I put in the serial # and it told me that the number was a dupe (had I already registered it?), but it didn’t recognize any of my three email addresses (so no, I wasn’t in the system). I had to put in several variations on the serial #, capitalizing the letters and alternating between zeros and ohs, and with and without the asterisk at the end of the number. Now I’m not sure which combination of these finally worked. Same thing happened with the password they sent me. How hard can it be to create unambiguous serial numbers and passwords?
    • Ironically, the form that asked me how hard the device was to install offered a dropdown list of several 4 digit numbers — something like 1046, 1047, and 1048. So their usability questionnaire was unusable.

  And I’m actually more technically able than most of my friends and relatives outside of the iSchool. And I have built-in tech support from the iSchool staff and our students. I can’t imagine what most of my friends would do with this level of failure.

  As it is, I’ve spent much of my time over break troubleshooting and working around these problems. I suspect I’ve spent almost as much time on the technical problems as on the work this technology is supposed to support: analyzing my data (Atlas ti) and writing several articles (Ref Mgr).

  And that’s not counting the effort that went into connecting a new 2nd monitor — which worked, but it took a while to get the resolution right. At least I knew that the problem was the resolution — again, what would someone with no tech skills do when they brought home a new monitor and found the image was wonky? Again, I’m not that technically sophisticated, but more so than most of my non-iSchool friends.

  As long as there continue to be such usability problems with hardware and software — including those as completely pointless and unnecessary as the serial number problem — computer technology will come nowhere near the level of adoption that it could have. Not to mention the amount of annoyance and frustration that it generates.

From Pew:

The Pew Internet & American Life Project has released their Broadband Adoption 2007 report.

The report finds that nearly half (47%) of all adult Americans now have a high-speed internet connection at home, according to a February 2007 survey conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. The percentage of Americans with broadband at home has grown from 42% in early 2006 and 30% in early 2005. Among individuals who use the internet at home, 70% have a high-speed connection while 23% use dialup.

The 12% growth rate from 2006 to 2007 represents trails the 40% increase in the 2005 to 2006 timeframe, when many people in the middle-income and older age groups acquired home broadband connections. Those groups continued to show increases in home broadband adoption into early 2007, but at lower rates than in the past.

For the full report, please visit:
http://www.pewinternet.org/report_display.asp?r=217

Today’s NY Times has an article about how tech designers are figuring out that (gasp) women buy technology.

Don’t get excited. Wait till you see what they think women want:

Energizer, the battery maker, went so far as to create a charger for each sex. The Dock & Go, at $33, is aimed at men. Black and gray with shiny trim, the two pods hold up to four batteries each (AA or AAA). A light glows red when it is charging, yellow when it is charged.

The second device, the $20 Easy Charger [pictured], is aimed at women, who usually end up managing the household’s batteries. This charger is flat, round and sold with interchangeable faceplates in silver, black and eggshell that help it blend in with kitchen appliances. Large light-emitting-diode readouts spell out what the countertop charger is doing at every phase of the charging cycle. Focus-group testing indicated that men were turned off by the Easy Charger, especially in how its readouts appeared to tell them what they thought they already knew…“’We found that how people use chargers is very different,” she said. “For her, she wants it to be instantly understandable.”

Geez, and all these years I’ve been using a (unisex?) Radio Shack charger instead of one for women. But then my charger doesn’t match my kitchen: a decorating faux pas! How nice that the women’s charger costs less - did the men in their focus groups prefer to pay more?

Besides a general level of cluelessness, this reveals the misuse of qualitative research methods, in this case, focus groups: sit down a bunch of people, ask them some questions, and, voila, make proclamations about “women” and “men.”

The article does indicate one area where this research is valid - sometimes: size. Smaller and lighter objects for carrying around, such as for cameras. However, they come to some odd conclusions in this domain, too:

….the wider spacing of the keys on a new Sony ultraportable computer notebook …accommodates the longer fingernails that women tend to have.

Quick, look around: how many women who would buy an expensive Sony ultraportable actually have long fingernails? Of course there’s also the issue of smaller keys with lesser spacing for women’s smaller hands. What’s a poor tech company to do?

Here’s an idea: offer a range of options, not for women and men, but for people with different needs and preferences. Oh, but then they wouldn’t know which to make in black and silver, and which to match the kitchen appliances.

Panel at International Visual Studies Association Conference, New York, Aug. 10-12:

New image-making and sharing technologies

Chair: Nancy Van House (School of Information, University of California, Berkeley)

New image-making and sharing technologies are transforming personal photography: digital cameras, cameraphones, and internet-based image sharing have rapidly permeated the world of personal photography. The ways in which non-expert users take up, re-interpret, and adapt new technologies (or fail to adopt them) are of interest in many fields of research: with new photography-related technologies, we have a case of widely-successful innovation. Personal photographers are using these new technologies in ways both continuous with prior purposes and practices, and in new ways. The changing technological and material bases of personal photography serve both to make visible previously taken-for-granted practices and uses of images, and to enable new ones.

On this panel, we will discuss these new technologies and such issues as: emerging uses of images; the changing (and persistent) place of personal photography in construction of identity and social relationships; the division between public and private, as private images become more public, intentionally or otherwise; the shift from individual to collective image making and use; the uses of cameraphone images; the changing nature of memory via image-making and archiving; and images in social networking, including on sites like MySpace.com and Flickr.com.

For further information or to send abstracts or completed papers please contact: Nancy Van House (School of Information, University of California, Berkeley) Email: vanhouse@sims.berkeley.edu

IVSA meets in New York City, Aug 10-12. For the complete call and list of panels, see http://www.visualsociology.org/proposals.html

Just ran across this — IAI runs a mentoring program:

The Mentoring Program matches experienced IA professionals (”mentors”) with practitioners, newcomers to the field, students, and anyone interested in being mentored (”protégés”).

This program is provided as a service to IAI members only. Mentors do not need to be members, but protégés do. If you are not already a member, you can join the Information Architecture Institute to participate as a protégé..