obso1337.org

Last weekend, the crew from Le Maison Bleu reunited once again in Las Vegas!

Justin and I hopped on a plane after work on Friday for a long weekend bender of drinking and gambling. There are too many crazy stories to tell, but we all had a great time. The good news is that no one got arrested or went to the hospital. The bad news is I came back with less money than I left with, but its all good. I got some good poker in and tried my hand at craps for the first time. I don’t think I really understand the game yet (craps) but its a lot of fun with a good crowd.

Saturday night Justin, Morgan, Mark, and I went to see the Cirque du Soleil production of KA at the MGM Grand. It was an amazing production with awesome music and dance. The most impressive and unique feature of this show was the moving stage which rotated while the actors were performing. This is the second Cirque show I have seen, last summer Justin and I saw Varekai in Baltimore.

One of my highlights was going to the Forum Shops in Caesar’s Palace to visit Vosges chocolatier. They are a couture specialty shop who fuse interesting ingredients to create a wonderful chocolate experience. I purchased a few truffles for my friends as well as three interesting bars: the Barcelona bar (smoke almonds, gray sea salt, milk chocolate), the Woolloomooloo bar (roasted & salted macadamia nuts, Indonesian coconut, hemp seed, milk chocolate) and the Black Pearl bar (ginger, wasabi, black sesame seeds, dark chocolate). This stuff doesn’t come cheap, truffles ranged from $2 to $8 for a single piece and 100g bars which started at $6.

Also, on recommendation from my parents, we tried out one of Wolfgang Puck’s (many) restaurants in Vegas. Spagos, which is in Caesar’s, is their favorite and our little crew had a good time. Its no trip to Vegas without a buffet which we took care of with the rest of the group on Monday morning. Monday night Justin and I also stopped over at Mon Ami, Gabi for some food before our flight.

As you can tell I love food :)

The weather was unseasonably cold; the last time Justin and I went it was in the mid to high 80s (F) and this time around it was in the 50s with rain here and there. Walking around was a bit cold, but most of the buildings have interconnected walkways which made travel much easier.

When yinz get your pictures up, drop the link so we can share. I put some of my favorites up from Justin’s camera here and I imagine he will be putting all of them up on his website sometime soon.

seele :: Mar.21.2006 :: General, Life, Parties :: 1 Comment »

Recently I went to Ohio to interview young students and their parent about a client’s home schooling education system. They were surprised (although I wasn’t) how the students were actually using the system (software, materials, teachers, etc.). It just reminded me of how important it is to identify your audience in order to have success. Here are a few things I took away from my trip which could be applied to KDE-Edu (grades K through 6)…

Make it fun

If possible, make anything and everything a game. Anything which takes score, counts levels, or gives you a report of success works the best. Children are very reward-oriented and are more interested in completing a task if there is some kind of incentive (special animation, possibility of recorded high score, printable certificate of achievement).

Make it pretty

Most adults appreciate a nice looking design, but are almost always annoyed by blinking, flashy, colourful items in an interface (this is a learned aversion to online Ads and spyware). Children on the other hand enjoy these decorations especially while engaged in play. You as an adult may find it annoying to have a *bleep* and *flash* every time you clicked a button, but in a way that is a form of positive feedback and reward for a child. Make it pretty and engaging to hold attention and make it memorable.

Make it challenging but not too difficult

Children like to be challenged, but they are easily frustrated. If a puzzle or problem is consistently difficult without success, they will quickly become frustrated and uninterested with the game. Often it is better to repeat moderately difficult puzzles than solve a single challenge.

Make it short and sweet

Unless the user has ADD (attention deficit disorder), they’re going to get bored, fast. Games for younger children should have shorter sessions (levels, problems, etc.) with many problems/puzzles than several large problems/puzzles which take up most of the time. They want instant gratification and are only willing to dedicate a few minutes before expecting to see some kind of progress before giving up or getting bored.

Kids are smarter than and not as smart as you think

Children are a very interesting user. They can be clever and inventive, but keep in mind they haven’t developed the same affordances or metaphors we have over our much longer lives. They may be able to identify and quickly grasp the concept of a certain icon, but be completely confused by another. Just as seniors, children have certain interaction and accessibility needs you need to consider when designing your application.

A lot of this might seem like ‘no duh’, but you would be surprised how often it is overlooked or dismissed. For example, the client I was working with was under the assumption that most of the students required constant supervision from their parent (or whoever is the ‘teacher’), wasn’t capable of completing assignments or being responsible for themselves, and spent most of their time with books than the interactive assignments provided by the software.

In reality, the students were quite the opposite. The majority of students (however I didn’t experience the norm; all of the students I interviewed were doing well) were completely independent with their studies other than the ‘teaching’ sessions with their parent. They often repeated the interactive portions because they liked them more than studying from a book and had no problems completing assignments and turning them in on time.

I think it would be very beneficial to the KDE-Edu apps to define the scope of their application and come up with realistic user groups (eg: students learning French in 3rd to 6th grade rather than anyone who wants to learn French) and do some user-research backfilling. This will help a lot when it comes to writing content material and designing the interface and increase the usage and success of the app.

seele :: Mar.13.2006 :: General :: No Comments »

Sometimes its hard to find something everyone wants to do, so you just have to throw a party!

Justin and I had people over Friday night to hang out and socialize. The evening started out pretty interesting when Katie showed up with her ham radio. I’m not too familiar with amateur radio (Katie has a transmitter license), but it was still pretty excited. Apparently there was broadcast that night and as soon as she got to our place. So as soon as she got here we all grabbed beers and went out to her car to try to set up her gear before it closed. Putting the thing together was almost as fun as listening to the broadcast, Justin wouldn’t let me post the picture of him holding his ‘rod’ (even tho *I* took it), so you’ll have to wait until he puts it up on his blog to see it. It was my first experience with such a high altitude broadcast, there was even a reply from the International Space Station.

Tailgate party for a broadcast, hells yeah. We had a few neighbors stare at us on passing or through open windows, it probably was a bit strange looking for a bunch of kids (well, I guess were not really kids) to be hanging out in a parking lot drinking beer and putting a giant antenna together.

More people began to show up a bit later for a good night of hanging out, snacking, and playing some weird card game I think Brian just made up and isn’t really real. Justin also got people in to playing a dice game called Three Man. Overall it was a great time with some people I haven’t seen in a bit.

A party Friday night may not have been the smartest thing to do for wanting to wake up and drive to Pittsburgh early the next morning. Needless to say we didn’t leave first thing in the morning, and got up to Justin’s parent’s place a little after noon. Luckily the family party we were going to wasn’t early that evening, so his dad helped him work on his taxes while I watched (I’ve never done my own taxes before and I think I messed them up when I tried to do them myself). Let me just say that without the aid of software (that is fairly usable, but it still had its moments) I don’t know how normal people do them right. They’re so ambiguous and unless you know about a certain thing, you would never be able to figure it out yourself.

Afterwards we headed to his family’s party for a bunch of cousins who are having birthdays in March. I did a good job of hurting myself after slipping down some carpeted stairs, that night my tailbone hurt and now I have a painful knot in my side under my ribs (I have no idea how I even hurt my side, I landed on my ass!). The Penguins game made up for it thought, we won 6 to 3 (New Jersey) with 2 of the goals in the first two minutes of the game! It was also a nice way to start the night out on the town as we met up with some friends at the bar (some of which are going to Vegas with us next weekend).

Today on our way home we stopped home at my parents for lunch. We had some great chicken and stuffing along with my mom’s famous apple pie. My dad was in story telling mode (when is he not?) and told us some old stories about the crazy time he had in Venezuela a while back. They like to travel a lot and are going to Puerto Rico this weekend. They have friends they wanted to ship wine to there, but after shipping and taxes it would be over $100 to do so. What do they do instead? Book a flight and decide to just take it to them. I don’t know how cost effective that is but it sure sounds like fun.

Finally after our long trek back, I had a great suprise in the mailbox. My copy of Interfaces from the British HCI group had arrived with the article Jan and I wrote. I have to say I’m a bit excited about this, I haven’t had an article published in such a well known magazine.

Alas, now it is time for homework. I have a midterm due Tuesday as well as some other things I must catch up on for school and work before I leave for the west coast. Buzzy, busey :)

seele :: Mar.12.2006 :: Geek, General, Life, Open Source, Parties :: 4 Comments »

I’ve been a buzzy little bee for the past few weeks. I would have posted a few days ago, but it ended up turning in to a DOT article.

I started my new job a few weeks ago. Yay for working at home, but I’m having trouble leaving work at work and actually “going” home. Last night I came home from class at 2300 to make phone calls and write emails until Justin reminded me I was “home”. Its easy to roll out of bed and go to work, but hard to leave the keyboard at a certain time and stop being a IxD for the rest of the night.

Its possible I am flying to Ohio for a day trip tomorrow. I was supposed to go last week but the interviews wern’t scheduled soon enough, and so far there is only one lined up for tomorrow. I can’t say I’m excited about the day trip to Cleveland (being from Pittsburgh and all), but hey, it could be somewhere in Idaho or someplace. The trip will give me an opportunity to interview users of my client’s software and get a better idea of how their product is actually being used rather than how its supposed to be used.

The Vegas countdown has begun and we leave in 15 days. As most of you know, I am from Pittsburgh. Many of the friends I had in college and beyond have moved on to different parts of the country and a big group of us (12 or so people) are going to meet up in Vegas.

El and Jan are coming to visit me in D.C. before we head to Atlanta for the printing meeting in April. I’m pretty excited for their visit, especially since El hasn’t been to the U.S. yet. I’m also going to be in Atlanta for Monday and Tuesday (instead of just Monday) so I’ll have the chance to catch up with other people too.

The kde-usability and kde-usability-devel lists have been pretty active lately with random threads here and there as well as preparation for the meeting in Berlin as well as future planning for the project. I have to say I’m happy about how well people are communicating lately rather than the normal troll and rat-hole sessions.

School has been suprisingly tame, but I have been very good about scheduling my time (I hope I can keep it up, I am notorious for ‘putting things off’). Now that I got the usability reports up on the site, I can continue with my ‘resolutions’ list from the beginning of the year. Jan and I have an article forthcoming, and I am in the process of writing another for an industry newsletter. I would like to get moving on some KDE-Edu work as well (time and sanity permitting).

But first I must worry about Ohio. I dont even have a plane ticket yet!

seele :: Mar.02.2006 :: General :: No Comments »