I look forward to hearing what you have to say!

I put in a comment via the form at whitehouse.gov. Here’s essentially^* what I said:

The problem is not so much the number of Federal domains (although I agree that it’s probably too large), but the wide variation in information archecture and navigation for similar types of content. I’d like to see some standardization in information structure and navigation for overlapping content, and (even more importantly) in user-centered design processes.

I plan to “tune in” to the live chat this afternoon.

^*I say “essentially” because I copied my comment to the clipboard before submitting it, planning to paste it here… but then I absentmindedly copied something else there while logging into my blog. So I had to re-create my comment from memory. Some of the words differ, but the sense is the same.

I clicked “Mobile” and had it sent to my phone via email. I then retrieved the email on my phone and tapped the link. The boarding pass opened just fine in the phone’s browser (see image at right).

The mobile boarding pass worked without a hitch. After saying he hadn’t done one before, the TSA agent led me to the machine, and I put my iPhone to the scanner. I probably held it there too long because I was expecting the scanner to beep, but he told me to remove the phone, and then he said “You pass!”

Using the mobile pass to board was even more straightforward. United’s gate agent was clearly used to them, and everything went smoothly.

So why is it not for me? Well, consider what I had to do to use it:

1. Get my phone out of my pocketbook or pocket, wherever I’ve been keeping it. This is more trouble than getting out a piece of paper, because my phone is in a case with a high coefficient of friction and does not slide smoothly. (I do this to help prevent a thief from lightfingering it.)
2. Wake up the phone.
3. Enter my security passcode.
4. If the browser is not the current app (e.g., if I’ve been checking my email), bring it to the front.
5. Ensure that the screen doesn’t go blank before I have to scan the code, or I’ll have to do steps 2 & 3 again.

For me, it’s just more trouble than it’s worth. It’s cool and all that, but there are too many steps. I can tuck the paper pass into my passport (which I use for ID whenever I travel, even domestically) and it’s always right there in front.

Paper is very lightweight. It doesn’t need to be awakened or given a security code. I can check my email without sending it to the background. I can keep it in the same place and bring it out whenever it’s needed, without worrying about what else I might need it for. And I can even write things on it if I need to.

I’ll use mobile again if I am someplace where I can’t print the boarding pass. But when I can use paper, I will.

Do you use mobile boarding passes? What do you think of them?

The concept of user experience (UX) is widely used but understood in many different ways. The multidisciplinary nature of UX has provoked several definitions and perspectives to UX, each approaching the concept from a different viewpoint.

UX is seen as a holistic concept covering all aspects of experiencing a phenomenon, but we are facing the point where UX has become a concept too broad to be useful in practice. Practitioners have difficulties to understand the concept and to improve UX in their work, and researchers rather use some other term to make their research scope clear.

So our job was to “demarcate” UX.

Most of the group was from academia, so I set myself the goal of keeping some level of focus on practitioners’ needs, to maintain a balance. Each participant had to prepare a poster to present at the beginning of the seminar; mine is at http://www.luminanze.com/writings/DagstuhlPosterBuie.pdf (note: PDF). My main point was this:

UX already has a thriving practitioner community.
We must address their needs.

After the introductions were complete, we spent the next few days discussing UX — what it is, how it’s measured, how long it lasts, how to design for it — until finally our time ran out. (We could have gone on a lot longer, I suspect.) Fortunately, I wasn’t the only one urging that we consider design, and we ended up adding to the outline of the white paper a section on design for user experience.

At the end, we talked about next steps, in particular how we could publicize the seminar’s results. Among other things, we decided to submit a panel proposal to the CHI2011 conference. Jofish Kaye agreed to recruit the panelists and prepare the proposal; and two days ago when I asked him how it was going — surprise! — he added me to the panelists. This meant I had to write a position statement.

Now, I’m pretty good at writing short, pithy comments, such as tweets and Facebook statuses. A statement of two paragraphs, however, was much more daunting. But I managed, and here’s what I wrote:

“User experience” abounds and thrives in the practitioner community. Events and organizations identify themselves with the “UX” label — from “UX Magazine” (http://uxmag.com), to Adaptive Path’s “UX Week” conference (http://www.uxweek.com), to the various “UX Book Clubs” (http://uxbookclub.org), to the titles of numerous practitioner books. Nowhere is the label more evident than on Twitter: People and organizations use “ux” in their handles (@lynneux, @uxmike, @inspire_ux, @ux_jobs, @uxfactory, @ux_dc, etc. etc.), in content-related hashtags (#ux, #uxdesignjobs), and even in social hashtags related to the community (#uxsters, #uxlovelies, #uxboots). Even the Usability Professionals Association titles its magazine “User Experience”.

As practitioners, we generally agree that we are not designing experiences per se; “UX design” is just shorthand for designing for experience. We do lack a rigorous definition for “user experience” (we often refer to “DTDT” — “defining the damn thing” — to express the difficulty of agreeing on it), but I suspect we don’t actually need one. To design for experience, we don’t have to decide whether “experience” is immediate (e.g., three seconds) or it lasts from anticipation through memory of use; we need only recognize that it occurs throughout these phases and consider them all as we design. To create products that give users experiences along the lines of what we have in mind, we conduct user research and employ other time-honored as well as innovative design and evaluation techniques. We treat user experience as a focus in everything we do in our practice (see http://explainux.com), and most of us are passionate about giving our users good experiences. Academic research can help by paying attention to the issues of practice and by making sure we know when it has discovered something that can make us more effective in realizing these goals.

Unfortunately, space limitations meant that only a very small part of each panelist’s statement made it into the submitted proposal. I think the proposal turned out well, though, and I’m optimistic that the panel will happen. Stay tuned.

(I will write more about the seminar in a later post. For now you can see our photos on Flickr.)

Unfortunately, it seems that no one thought much about what information ATAC passengers would need and how they would use it.

The buses have two displays. One is at the front, with the line number and final destination scrolling across it (see image at right). About six inches high, this sign spans the aisle and is visible and legible from everywhere in the bus.

Problem is, it tells passengers something they already know. Once you get on the bus, you know which one it is and which direction it’s headed. Instead, what you need to know when you’re on the bus is how soon you will reach your stop.

But wait — there’s good news. These buses do list the next few stops. This information appears on a monitor in the middle of the bus. Unfortunately, there’s also bad news — the monitor’s screen is occupied mostly with advertising, which makes the names of the stops illegible from any reasonable distance. (See photo below, from mobytv.it.)

I suppose the advertising pays for the monitor and the information display — and in this sense it’s valuable — but it shouldn’t make the actual information hard to read. The obvious solution would be to replace the line/destination on the large dot-matrix display at the front with the name of the next stop. I’ve seen other bus systems do this, and it works very well.

I commend ATAC for their efforts to improve customer service by using IT to provide more information, and I’m not necessarily suggesting that they get rid of the mid-bus monitors,. They do, however, need to make the information legible to the majority of passengers.