18 Dec 2006 0738H

Weekend learnings in information architecture (and other things)

I really like the user interface for the electronic payment system at Trader Joe’s, just beats the pants off Ikea’s — a lot of good things happening with it, explicit options, progressive disclosure — but the cashier let me in on some user observation, which is that the system does not reflect state. So apparently, the message just under the logo, “Swipe your card at any time,” does not go away on each screen, which prompts users to continually swipe the card. Arf.

So, about 10, 11 years ago, I was sitting in Jan Reiff’s class on hypermedia and history and somehow the issue arose about social security numbers being used as unique IDs in the UCLA student information database, and how I didn’t like to give that information as a UID. Well, I received a letter from UCLA this weekend, and learned that that use of our SSNs as UIDs has come back to haunt us, all of us, all 800,000 of us who had our identities compromised last week because UCLA insisted on using this information and did not take adequate measures to safeguard it. By the way, I have a mountain of debt from UCLA and would not be, frankly, a good target for identity theft. Useless, frankly.

We did some A/B testing on XBox 360 #3 which got sent back to me last week or round abouts, and it’s broken. The drive doesn’t recognize its own games; it thinks they’re DVDs. So this means XBox #4, a new XBox, is in-bound. We were able to ascertain that the problem with no in-game communications in multiplayer Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter (GRAW) on XBox Live, is in fact due to something wrong with the hard drive, which somehow we missed last time, although I was pretty sure we tested both hard drives along with all the other possible breakpoints.

I’m looking at reviewing existing or creating a criteria for user testing of new applications that covers most of the major usability principles. I’m unhappy with the 10 point system which seems, frankly arbitrary and unnecessarily big; I’m thinking something along a two or three point system, maybe no point, half-point, full point or point/no point. . .

Congrats to my old pal, Paul W., on his forthcoming marriage! Seems like everyone’s getting married these days. . . I may be in Hong Kong next month, then, which is a little sooner than I expected to be there, but. . .

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