My Dad used to say that he had an unparalleled skill at creating errors on “those Web forms” which he didn’t even realize were called forms.

Cliff and I used to produce a bunch of securities trading applications for clients – first at Wells Fargo (an early, heck, maybe the first “Wells Trade site) then later a couple for WRH+Co. People were always tempted by “wireless solutions”, that is, transporting all those fields and buttons onto a screen the size of a match book. Cliff was fond of saying “our customers already have a wireless interface, and it works quite well; It’s called a Cel Phone and their human voice. When they want to make a trade, they call their broker and make a trade”.

Now, blogs, or micro-content distribution systems are getting into the voice game. Utterz let’s you call in a plog cast by phone… you dial the phone, you speak your mind, your voice shows up on their site – for now, without wanting to investigate their version of an interface, I’m going to assume these files can be accessed, syndicated and sliced and diced at will, like any well behaved pile of web content.

What could be really interesting out of this is to be able to post-facto reassemble a conversation, perhaps including multiple people. To be able to follow the train of thought that get’s spread out over time… perhaps months, and follow an articulate thread… from your iPod, from your networked audio player as you drive across country.

Return to English (or, insert your preferred native language here).

/Joe

The plan is to make it so computer programs can make logical assumptions and relationships between resources on the Web based on the semantics of their content. It is referred to as the Semantic Web.

The links that follow provide a gentle, if not brief, introduction to this initiative.

EXECUTIVE GUIDE

First, there’s an audio interview with Tim Berners-Lee which isn’t strictly about the Semantic Web, but it’s an easy listen and gets some key concepts across:
Interview with Tim Berner-Lee

Next, Scientific American has a somewhat long but engaging piece explaining the Semantic Web in lay terms:
NPR: Scientific American: The Semantic Web

The incomparable Peter Moreville has a very readable account of his peering into the bubble of Social Network Analysis which has a set of “See Also” links which are enough to keep the average person busy into the next millennia.
Semantic Studios: Social Network Analysis

and Discover Mag Online has a lay persons look at software which makes similar inferences based on your Email inbox:
Discover: Emerging Technology: Who Loves Ya, Baby?

On the software front, a company called Creo has a product called “Six Degrees” which promises to semantically link files on your desktop in a meaningful way.

Finally, Big Blue has a couple article on using this stuff to unite and network your chain of friends – kind of “six degrees of separation” concept.

IBM: XML Watch: Finding friends with XML and RDF

and

IBM: XML Watch: Support online communities with FOAF

There’s got to be something after that, but I’m not sure what. FOAF-Naut is about the graphically coolest thing I’ve seen. Requires the Adobe SVG plug-in though. Might be fun to improve in Flash.
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DEVELOPERS GUIDE

After that it leaves the ground rather abruptly, so if you want to dive in the deep end (if that’s not a train wreck of metaphors) then pop over to:

The WWW Consortium is the holder of the official Semantic Web torch:
W3C: The Semantic Web

RDF Web
is the home of lots of Friend of a Friend (FOAF) information

This guy
has many interesting links around this stuff

The validity of Usability Testing, thought by many to be infallible at detecting a products defects, is called into question by industry leaders.

In a panel discussion at CHI2003 it was discussed whether a) the majority of defects in an application are found in the first 5 subjects as espoused by many Usability pundits, and 2) Does the same test run with a different sample reveal the same defects. The answer seems to be no.

A strong case was made for the “Usability By Design” concept where testing fine tunes and validates design and is not used to shore up poor design. If a system was well researched in the beginning and created through iterative design with user participation, then there are less likely to be these surprises later on.

Jared Spool shared his experience where new problems continued turning up even after the 16 participants were run through the test. Similarly, Rolf Molich ran a set of tests in replication where 310 usability problems unearthed, 75% of which were not overlapping.

What could be going on here?

First off, one could say that if there were 300+ problems in a system than it wasn’t ready for testing. It should have still been in the iterative design cycle or at most undergoing expert review.

Second, it would be important to know the methodology of the tests in question. Many times I’ve seen tests being run in the guise of “Usability Tests” which were little more than a direct observation session with a vague set of tasks to fulfill. Deborah Mayhew covered thus problem in Usability Testing: You Get What You Pay For, though I’m sure this was not the problem with the studies quoted in this panel.

The primary responsibility of a researcher is to conduct a study which has both internal and external validity. Internal validity is created be controlling all aspects of the study and manipulating the independent variable to see what turns up in the dependent variable. Let too many slips happen in your control and the studies validity falls apart.
Usability News: CHI 2003 Feature: Testing… 1 2 3 4 5 … Testing…

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