Currently Reading: Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior.
by Indi Young

This is a book from a series from Rosenfeld Media. The series includes Design is the Problem:The Future of Design must be Sustainable, Prototyping: A Practitioner’s Guide and Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks.

What I’m enjoying most about this book is the practical advice for integrating UCD into less formal design processes. I’m only part way through, and there’s a lot of “real” information.

Designing for the Digital Age: How to Create Human-Centered Products and Services
Kim Goodwin

This 740 page book is phenomenal! An excellent reference with lots of sensible advice and insight.

Later: The Research section of this book alone is phenomenal! And no where is the process of conducting interviews, modeling data and developing personas outlined in such detail. Proof – if proof were needed – that personas are based on research, not pulled from thin air.

For as long as I have been using OS X – when you tried to eject a disk that had an application running or a document open you would see the following ambiguous error. If you happened to have a lot of different applications running or documents open, finding which was preventing you from ejecting the disk was a guessing game.

I upgrade to Snow Leopard this past week… I was pleasantly surprised to discover that one of the many tweaks that made it’s way into 10.6 was this clarification as which application or document was culprit. And if there is more than one cause, both are listed.

I’ll be honest – I have never liked Taleo’s so called Talent Management platform. Over the years I have encountered Taleo a number of times when considering career opportunities with medium size companies. After the first couple of (negative) experiences I have more or less avoided using their interface whenever possible.

As a one of the talented being managed, I can see that the system is designed primarily for HR users, with little regard to the talent’s user experience. Today I was about to ignore my own better judgement (the position looked pretty good) when I was reminded anew why I avoided Taleo:

Huh?

I guess it’s better to be stopped in your tracks at the beginning, rather than to find out much later that the system crashes your browser (as it did mine) or otherwise fails to make your life the least little bit easier.

I’ve had a LinkedIn profile for a few years now. I first created my account at the request of a former co-worker who “invited” me to join. I found the information gathering process as invasive as the worst HR portal (Taleo comes to mind) and I didn’t like not having control over how that information was used. As a result I’ve left the majority of my profile incomplete, and if anyone is so interested they can come here and look at my resume. I’m also highly suspicious of the whole reputation concept, with it’s recommendations.

I have to think that in some ways facebook got their privacy features (and their business model) right, and that LinkedIn could have learned a thing or two.

Oh and another thing – I hate that they send me an unwanted “Network Update” email each week. The email claims in the fine print: “Don’t want to receive email notifications? Adjust your message setting.” Only there’s nothing in my message settings that allows me to stop said email.

I had a similar experience with Plaxo, which is why I eventually deleted my profile there… Every time I made the least change to my profile an email was sent to everyone of my contacts alerting them to the fact, unbeknownst to me.

“Some users have discovered that it is nearly impossible to remove themselves entirely from Facebook, setting off a fresh round of concern over the popular social network’s use of personal data.”
How Sticky Is Membership on Facebook? Just Try Breaking Free

It’s tempting to think of the situations facebook finds itself in as being an indication of some darker intent… What occurred to me when I read the above article is how immature facebook is as a platform and a company – they fumble their way from one User Experience faux pas to another.

Then, a few days later…

“We’re always working to improve the user experience,” Katie Geminder, director for user experience and design at Facebook, said in a statement sent by e-mail.
Quitting Facebook Gets Easier

Oh “it’s a feature!”

Apparently facebook needs to do it become more proactive about their User Experience.