Compete on Usability

The default book link

Just a quickie post, but have you ever realized that Amazon.com is the default book link of the web?  The vast majority of instances when anyone links a book title online, they're pointing to Amazon.  Two fairly obvious reasons why:

1.  Their selection is so broad, they almost certainly have a page for the book you're referring to.

2.  Meta-info and community book reviews make their pages feel useful for readers.  It's almost like it's not even an online store.  Almost!

Wouldn't it be amazing to become the default music link (iTunes)?  The default reference link (Wikipedia)?  Are there other content-type or general category defaults like these?

Thinking visually

One reason I haven't been blogging often is the graduate course I'm taking in information visualization.  Not only does it consume most of my free time, it's raised my mental bar for blog posts. There are several reasons I want to have better visuals to encompass my posted thoughts.

Usable information visuals break you out of text's serial tyranny.  It's the nature of verbal information to be linear, but visual encourage divergent, nonlinear thinking. As a consequence of this, techniques like mind mapping are great visualizations for creativity, even if they're composed of pure words. On the other hand, linear outlines are fine for organizing one's thoughts when writing a paper, but they're a poor way to take notes or categorize information for learning.

Unfortunately, one thing holding me back is poor drawing and sketching skills. Multiple books I've read claim that you don't need drawing skills to communicate and persuade with sketches. But I've endured one too many patronizing smiles from peers over my stick figures, spindly lines, and lack of perspective. There's nothing for this except a little guidance and learning, and a lot of practice. Perhaps over the summer, I'll convert this blog to documenting some self-assigned drawing work.  I hope I still have readers left by September!

There's nothing wrong with pencil and paper, but if you want to share sketches with your work team, it's helpful to create them directly on a computer. Some of my coworkers use slick tablet PCs for this, but I need a more conventional, powerful PC laptop that can run Visio and Photoshop at the same time without bogging down.  (As an aside, why isn't there a multitouch tablet Mac?)

Your keyboard and mouse are going away. Will usability go with them?

I had one of those blogosphere epiphanies last night, where different people opining about different stuff all came together for me.  It started with the new report I have to read from Bill Buxton's Microsoft research group about what computing interfaces will be like in 2020.

Add recent posts from Oz about eye tracking replacing mice, combined with other notes about the decline in personal computing, and even some near sci-fi news about operating computers with brainwaves, and the trend crystallizes.

Hey, take a good look at your computer, and compare it to machines you used ten years ago.  CRT monitors are mostly gone. Disk drives and ports have changed, shrank, and started to disappear in favor of wireless.  The oldest parts of your PC are the forty-five year old mouse and of course the two-hundred year old keyboard.  These venerable peripherals are on the way out now.

When I entered the workforce, people were beginning to accept as inevitable that everyone would change jobs many times in their lifetimes.  I think the next great trend will be people in technology changing careers completely, several times in a lifetime. If within twenty years everyone is communicating with everyday devices by touch, eye tracking, or brainwaves, the concept of an interface will be radically different.  Usability as we know it today could become obsolete.

Even within ten years, as people use next-gen iPhones and Google Android devices to accomplish everything they once had to sit and type to do, usability professionals can expect many of their skills to become dated.

We can be reasonably confident that cognitive psychology will remain relevant, at least, since ten, twenty, or a hundred years are not enough to evolve us into bigger brains.  But think again -- with chips in our brains enhancing working memory, grabbing any needed information instantly from a ubiquitous Net, and performing complex calculations trivially, many of the tasks we need a computer interface for today will become easy as thought. Humans will not have the same cognitive limitations we're used to working within.

I used to think all this stuff was either science fiction, or maybe for future generations to worry about. But I think everything in this post will be happening in my lifetime.  And I wonder what I'll be doing for work as a result.  Check out those links and let me know what you think.