As I mentioned in a previous post, I just recently purchased a Gateway netbook. It’s a Gateway LT 31, which is pricier than your average netbook, but has a 2 GB’s or RAM, and a slightly larger screen. It runs Microsoft Vista (that’s why it has the extra RAM), but that’s more of a luxury than anything else.

For what I use it for, I love it. I have a MacBook Pro, but that I use primarily for work, and it’s really too heavy and big to use on an airplane, which I find myself on about once a month going somewhere. Netbooks are the perfect size for typing up blog posts, surfing the web, and doing light photo editing when I’m on the move. They’re also great devices in that if I lose it, I’m not losing my life’s work because of the price.

We’re reaching a definate tipping point with devices that many manufacturers and software developers are ignoring: that bigger, faster, better is being replaced by devices that match our needs. Not everyone wants to drive an SUV. If you need one, it’s out there, but the needs of everyday computer usage (browsing the web, reading email, occasional word processing), do not match what most of today’s computing SUV’s can do.

With a projected 50 million units sold over last year and this year, these smaller devices are here to stay.

What does all this mean to User Experience designers in the future?

The days of pushing for websites that are 1600 pixels wide are over. We’re back to desigining for devices that are large and small. Most users don’t know this, but this blog serves a different user experience for mobile devices, and we might have to consider the same for the devices that are going to resemble nothing of the current netbooks today. Most user experience professionals will be designing for screens that are 1024 pixels wide for years to come, and maybe coming up with a second or third primary resolution for more mobile devices like the worst kept secret on the planet, the upcoming Apple Tablet, which will provide a new range of gestural interfaces we haven’t even thought of.

It’s less about features, and more about satisfying the exact user needs. Anyone that has used Adobe Photoshop or Microsoft Word admits that they only use 10 to 20 percent of the features contained in the program. Know what a smart object is? Can you insert a cross reference? Can you index a document? Very few of us use these features, and more often than not, many of these software packages have become bloated over the years from feature creep, with publishers giving us features that satisfy many audiences, but not all audiences. Consquently, smaller, faster, better software products that may even be network based will satisfy our needs with these devices. The limited screen footprint of Google Chrome provides such a wonderful experience using my Gateway, I can’t imagine using another browser.

The days of having to by expensive software are over. Microsoft’s approach of pricing doesn’t work at all for Netbooks, and that goes the same for Adobe and many of the other software developers out there. I’m not going to pay $200 for a software package I barely use on the device, like Microsoft Office. These are secondary devices, so I’ll be using Thunderbird, Picasa, Open Office and other packages that do exactly what I want them to do: simple email management, quick image editing, and some word processing. I don’t expect to use Photoshop on this system anytime soon, and that’s okay.

Network computing is here to stay. The cloud will have something to do with it, but sales figures have proven that the way I use my Netbook is the way many users are using the devices: it’s a secondary device that we use in front of the television, on an airplane, or places where bringing the larger laptop is impactical. Notebooks have already surpassed standard tower computers because notebooks have way more power than most of us need, and netbooks may do that as a device someday. If we have multiple devices, this requires files stored in one place, not all over the place. That means designing applications that support this.

Okay, it’s more than that, because I don’t want to write it in the headline. Not safe for work. Still low-tech. Still funny.

If you or someone you know might be a good candidate for this position, please send your resume to jobs@usabilitycounts.com.

Kelley Blue Book is looking for a Director of User Experience to lead the vision, strategy, and execution of the interaction design of Kelley Blue Book’s website, kbb.com. This individual will work closely with other senior level executives to identify effective product strategies and lead a team of interaction designers and information architects to deliver innovative, customer centric design solutions. The ideal candidate has a passion for user centered design and a wide breadth of experience across multiple types of products and design methodologies.

This is a full-time position located in Orange County, CA. Formal training in human computer interaction, a minimum of 5 years experience working on a highly trafficked consumer facing web site and prior management experience required.

I don’t talk about politics too much, because I’m kind of past that point in my life.

However, I found this story curious: Budget cuts put new textbooks on hold. Students are still using textbooks? Are you kidding me? Dead trees? Information and textbooks that are years old for the students?

I realize that the kids have to have learning material, but in the new education world where Wikipedia has turned into a wonderful reference free of local political pressure like teaching “intelligent design”, and we’re trying to save trees, the environment and tax dollars because of the recession, the idea of printing books just seems like an anchronistic idea.

There are a lot of jobs connected with this industry. However, print is heading the way of a quick, painful death in a lot of other places (read: newspapers), and creative destruction is going to change this industry, forever.

Last year alone the State of California spent $633 million buying textbooks. That escalates every year. That’s a lot of coin on  outdated publications before the students put their hands on them.

Why we should stop printing textbooks

They’re out of date the minute their printed. History doesn’t change radically, but Science does. I’m guessing that most children and teachers use the web as a resource for information more than their textbooks today, and a textbook that doesn’t talk about the historical election of 2008 doesn’t have much use for the students that are studying history today. Reprinting a 500-page history book to include two pages about current events is impractical. Why not go to a format that can be changed as times change?

The carbon footprint is huge. Think about the energy process alone that goes into printing textbooks. Someone has to cut down the tree. Someone has mill the paper. Someone has to run the printing press. And most of that process has nothing to do with getting the information into the hands of children. There’s this whole industry built around charging as much as possible for textbooks, and the books themselves weigh more than a Netbook or Kindle. One of those Netbooks could hold a whole semester of information, without having to carry physical books to do it. This is an idea that has Al Gore written all over it: education and the environment. Why not pioneer it?

The profits go to people other than the authors. Most of the research I did showed that for a $100 textbook, the author will see typically $5 to $15 per book in royalties, where as the publisher will see the rest of the profits. What’s worse about this model from an economic standpoint is that the Wikipedia article points out that there’s no real competition because it is a closed market, and even the instructors themselves can’t get the prices for some of the products. Compare that to a service like CD Baby, which keeps less than 10 percent of gross profits. In that model, the textbook author would keep 60 to 70 percent of the revenue through some kind of national clearinghouse.

We need a tech-saavy group of children, and this is the best way to do it. Every child in California should have a laptop, considering we lead the nation (if not the world) in technology jobs, and a good portion of the workers here are from other countries speaks poorly to our state educational system. Why not work with companies that are based here to put a system in the hands of every child? It’s a wonderful opportunity, and the more they learn about the web, the better off I am as a technology professional (and we all are). And this would lead the way for other states to ween themselves off of providing dead tree books. if the largest market goes away, textbook publishers will rethink their business model, right?

Make technology the responsibility of the parents. Most school districts are so far behind with technology, there’s no way for them to catch up with significant outlays of funds. This would be a great way for the students to catch up without a district like the Los Angeles Unified having to spend billions of dollars to do it.

Here’s a way to fix this

Issue a $300 tax credit every year for each child if a family buys their children a computer. Require a receipt, and they get the tax credit. I bought one of those new Netbooks (A Gateway, and it’s a wonderful machine), and for $400, I got a machine that’s prefect for doing word processing, some presentation work, and most of the software I would need for most school needs is open source or free (Picasa, Open Office, and web browsing software, for example). There’s roughly 8 million school age children in the state of California, and that would be up to a $3.2 billion hit on the state revenues. However, half those children today (at least) have access to a computer at home, so it might take a while for some families, but think about an environment where every child had a computer?

Tax printed textbooks. Heavily. If the companies are interested in correcting this, give them incentives to go all digital, and disincentives to deliver a printed product. Release a PDF with Digital Rights Management, or issue a blanket license for a school district where they issue the books and double the royalty for the author? Give them a tax credit. Release a printed product? Add a 25 percent tax that can’t be recovered through increasing prices.

Take away funding from local districts if they don’t go digital. There are many, many reasons why digital is the way to go, but in a place where technology moves slowly, educators have to be given a shove. As the older teachers retire (and they are doing so at a fast clip), this would be a perfect time to introduce a Brave New World into their environment, don’t you think?

What are your thoughts? Would you vote for something like this?

While I’m fighting writer’s block, this is a post from a friend of mine, Stephanie Bergman. She runs a blog that gets the occasional post. Stephanie has a few people in her twitter feed, and we have occasional conversations about social media. Something about meeting her at MySpace, and she’s working at an intriguing startup in SOMA.

Great post.

A couple of weeks ago, I started ranting a little over Twitter about followers and how people see them as friends. The rant began because someone I followed had posted a few messages about only wanting “quality followers” and asking everyone else to please stop following her. So I stopped following her.

To me, that’s a crazy obnoxious egotistical statement. I mean, come on, who do you think you are? Do you really think Matt Lauer tells the Today Show audience that he only wants “quality viewers?”

Either this person didn’t understand what followers really were, or was being a snot. Either way, I didn’t care to see a whole slew of messages about it. I follow enough people that I have a fairly low tolerance before I unfollow people. It doesn’t keep my follow count down like I wish it would, since I keep finding new people to follow, but I do try.

Anyway! Back to followers.

If someone has a public Twitter page, their data is available – to anyone – a number of ways. You can visit the website, you can subscribe to their RSS feed, or you can follow them. Their tweets also appear in the public feed (although there’s a setting to turn that off), and are available through search.

What all of this means, is that you really don’t know who’s reading what you say. The only way to control this is by making your twitter feed private. Once you’re private, you have approval over every person who can read.

I think most of the whining about “don’t follow me” is over spammers more than real people, but that really makes no sense to me. Spammers rarely talk to you. I’ve gotten a number of @ messages from spammers, but they’re not from people following me. In fact, I think the spammers unsubscribe once I don’t follow back. It also seems like the same people who complain about spammers are those who try to get tons of followers. Spammers artificially inflate follower numbers – shouldn’t they like that? If some person hawking viagra really wants to subscribe to my feed…have at it, I’m not interested anyway.

Most of the follow/unfollow behavior is automated. Mention one thing and suddenly a flood of people are following you. It’s not like an actual dude who sells viagra is sitting at his computer staring at your tweets. But really, if you’re uncomfortable with that idea, you should not have a public twitter feed.

I used the TV comparison above, but Twitter – to me – is best comparable to a blog. Some people read a blog by going to the webpage, others subscribe through RSS readers. Some blogs even end up syndicated to other places, on other blogs, to Facebook, all across the Internet. I don’t know everyone who reads what I write, and there’s no way I ever could. And that’s ok.

I’ve talked before about how the tone of my blog changed when I went public, there’s no denying that it did, significantly. It had to, for exactly the reasons stated here. I don’t know who’s reading what I’m writing. I’m the same with Twitter. No question that there are things I will not say on there.

But even I’ve said some things on there I shouldn’t have. For example, I discovered a guy I follow (and who follows me) on twitter lives above me in my building. He seems to be cool and I’m not concerned, but it is spooky. I should never have said enough so he could figure out where I lived.

Facebook, on the other hand, grew as large as it did specifically because it was locked down to your friends. You did only have “quality” readers (if you’re really going to be as obnoxious as to describe people as “quality”), since nobody could see what you wrote unless they were your friend. That, of course, is changing now, with Facebook making status messages more open. More and more people will now see what you say on Facebook, and you’re going to have less control over that.

So the Internet’s trending…again. We were all open, then we went all private, now we’re all opening up again. It’s easier to go from open to closed than from closed to open. People will be much more likely to make mistakes. Hell, I did, and I thought I was smarter than that.

I’m not sure how this is going to play out, but it will be fun to watch.

You can follow her here on Twitter.

He was the 1,500th Twitter follower. His blog is cool too.

Who will be the 2,000?

View more presentations from Patrick Neeman.

I’m taking a break from doing events for a while, however here’s the Powerpoint from the event. We recorded a video of the presentation, and you’ll be seeing the presentation soon online either on YouTube or some other site.

If you run a company, and want project management consulting on how to integrate UX and Agile, send me a line at pat@usabilitycounts.com.

How important is usability? Even the New York Times talks about it, reviewing a new router, network storage device and digital picture frame (yes, you read that right, digital picture frame):

D-Link’s PR person suggested that the elusive instructions might be on the company’s Web site. (They weren’t.) In the end, it took a D-Link product manager a day to figure out how to work these features himself and supply me with the instructions. He says that he’ll have them posted on D-Link’s Web site by the time the 685 goes on sale. (Caution: They entail mucking around in the router’s advanced HTML-based configuration pages. Technophobes need not apply.)

Seriously — if the product manager can’t figure it out, you have a problem.

This is an event I’ll be speaking where we’ll talk about integrating User Experience with Agile methodologies. This is a reschedule of the canceled event.

Here’s some of the information:

Scrum provides us with a great framework for building our Scrum team, implementing the core agile practices and getting the inspect and adapt process started. But Scrum doesn’t provide much for the specific disciplines like programming, testing and User Experience. That’s where our coaches Patrick Neeman and Michael Vincent come in.

Join us as we explore how User Experience Design integrates with the Scrum process. We’ll see first hand how each type of activity fits into the Scrum cycles, and how our User Experience researchers, designers and artists integrate into a Scrum team.

The address is:

Blankspaces
5405 Wilshire Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA

The event will start at 7:00 p.m.

And Michael Vincent’s bio:

Mike Vincent is a solutions architect based in Orange County, California. He supports clients with application lifecycle management as a senior consultant with Accentient, and provides software architecture and development services focusing on Microsoft .NET technology as principle architect withMVA Software. He has been in the software business for over 20 years in addition to engineering and marketing management positions.  Actively involved in the user group community since the early 90’s, Mike is Vice President of INETA Noram. He founded both the SoCal .Net Architecture group which is now also IASA’s SoCal Chapter and the Orange County C# Developers group, now OC .NET. Mike is a frequent presenter at user groups, regional events, and code camps. He is a Visual Studio Team System MVP. Currently, he is working with the Scrum Alliance on a forthcoming program. mvasoftware.com