“Oh, come on,” Richard said quietly to himself.
“Sorry?” Bill, or Bob, or whatever lifted his head from behind Richard’s monitor.
“Sorry, not you,” Richard said. “It’s this stupid magazine. Everyone’s blaming the financial industry for the subprime mess, but what about the home buyers? Why doesn’t anyone make them take responsibility for signing up for loans they couldn’t repay?”
“Good point, sir.” Bob or Bill put his head back down and tapped some more keys.
“How much longer, anyway?” said Richard.
“It’ll be another hour or so. Um, did you change any of the settings on your anti-spyware utility?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe. It was running real slow so I changed a bunch of settings in various places until it sped up. Why?”
Bill or Bob sighed. “Well, you’ve got a major spyware infestation, including several stealth keyloggers installed by Trojans. They’ve probably captured all your passwords and account settings. Do you access the company trading accounts from this machine?”
“Sure, I have to. So, what do you have to do?”
“Well, sir, you should probably make sure there haven’t been any unauthorized transactions from your account. In the short term, I can get you up and running but I’ll have to reformat your drive and reinstall Windows. You’ll lose all your files, but your computer will be up again. I may be able to restore your files from backup but I’ll have to make sure they’re clean.”
“OK. Whatever.” Richard went back to his reading while his computer made the Windows shutdown and startup noises several times in a row. Finally, he folded the magazine and hurled it across the room, neatly hitting the rim of his wastebasket and knocking it over. “Damn. You’d think people would know better than to sign false income statements. I just don’t get it.”
He pondered for a few more minutes. Then, “If people aren’t going to be responsible, how do you keep it from happening again?”
Bob or Bill looked up and hesitated for a moment. “Well, sir, if it were up to me, I wouldn’t let anyone use a computer unless they knew what they were doing.”
Showing posts with label user centered design. Show all posts
Showing posts with label user centered design. Show all posts
Sunday, September 23, 2007
Wednesday, February 21, 2007
New Human Factors Blog
Welcome to my human factors and user-centered design blog. I am a human factors consultant with 25 years of experience in human factors research and design, and I want to use this blog to share thoughts, lessons learned, tools, and best practices with anyone grappling with usability questions and challenges. Some of the topics I intend to cover include the following:
- Many product designers and researchers are looking for convenient, easy-to-use, flexible, and inexpensive rapid prototyping tools. If you have Microsoft Office, you already have the basic tools you need to set up your own portable prototyping environment and usability lab. Did you know that PowerPoint can serve as a very capable rapid prototyping platform, and that with a little Visual Basic for Applications code, you can capture user selections along with time tags and send them to Excel for automated recording of user performance data? I'll describe how to do this in a series of posts.
- I believe that most usability problems associated with electronic products are not due to poor user interface designs, but rather to poor functional logic. In other words, the problem is not typically how the product looks and feels, but rather how it works underneath the interface. If the functional logic is hard to learn and remember, the best UI in the world isn't going to make the product easy to use. I'll discuss some of the usability issues related to functional logic and how to address them.
- The design is only as good as the requirements, and the requirements are only as good as the analysis. I'll present a number of analysis methodologies I've developed and found useful on various projects. Furthermore, the requirements themselves may have an optimal structure in a human-centered process. Using a hierarchy of mission requirements, operational requirements, functional requirements, information requirements, and display/control requirements, along with the appropriate analysis methods for each stage, can help resolve many, if not most, design problems and issues before the design itself is even begun.
- Usability practitioners often debate the merits of expert design reviews vs. formal usability testing, and there's been some research on which is better, or at least more appropriate, for different problems and stages of design. There's a third option: design analysis tools. These can range from checklist-like forms to computer-based tools that apply heuristic reasoning to diagnose interface design problems that may lead to specific kinds of error. This is particularly useful because errors are often hard to produce and observe in the lab. Structured usability analysis tools are a particular interest of mine, and I intend to devote a lot of attention to them.
If any of these topics is of particular interest to you, please let me know and I'll delve into it/them first. I always welcome comments and questions. You can post comments here, or email me at vic@uird.com. If you'd like to learn more about me and our services, please visit my (very simple) web site at www.uird.com.
Thanks for reading -
Vic Riley
- Many product designers and researchers are looking for convenient, easy-to-use, flexible, and inexpensive rapid prototyping tools. If you have Microsoft Office, you already have the basic tools you need to set up your own portable prototyping environment and usability lab. Did you know that PowerPoint can serve as a very capable rapid prototyping platform, and that with a little Visual Basic for Applications code, you can capture user selections along with time tags and send them to Excel for automated recording of user performance data? I'll describe how to do this in a series of posts.
- I believe that most usability problems associated with electronic products are not due to poor user interface designs, but rather to poor functional logic. In other words, the problem is not typically how the product looks and feels, but rather how it works underneath the interface. If the functional logic is hard to learn and remember, the best UI in the world isn't going to make the product easy to use. I'll discuss some of the usability issues related to functional logic and how to address them.
- The design is only as good as the requirements, and the requirements are only as good as the analysis. I'll present a number of analysis methodologies I've developed and found useful on various projects. Furthermore, the requirements themselves may have an optimal structure in a human-centered process. Using a hierarchy of mission requirements, operational requirements, functional requirements, information requirements, and display/control requirements, along with the appropriate analysis methods for each stage, can help resolve many, if not most, design problems and issues before the design itself is even begun.
- Usability practitioners often debate the merits of expert design reviews vs. formal usability testing, and there's been some research on which is better, or at least more appropriate, for different problems and stages of design. There's a third option: design analysis tools. These can range from checklist-like forms to computer-based tools that apply heuristic reasoning to diagnose interface design problems that may lead to specific kinds of error. This is particularly useful because errors are often hard to produce and observe in the lab. Structured usability analysis tools are a particular interest of mine, and I intend to devote a lot of attention to them.
If any of these topics is of particular interest to you, please let me know and I'll delve into it/them first. I always welcome comments and questions. You can post comments here, or email me at vic@uird.com. If you'd like to learn more about me and our services, please visit my (very simple) web site at www.uird.com.
Thanks for reading -
Vic Riley
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