Just today my domain name transfer went through, so all of my materials are now in slightly new homes.

My Technical Portfolio page is here: http://portfolio.seanzehnder.com
My Blog is here: http://blog.seanzehnder.com

and my CV will soon be posted as well....

Today was day 1 of my trip to the SigCHI 2007 conference in San Jose. This is my first time attending this conference, and so far I've been pleasantly surprised. The conference organizers are doing a good job of balancing Academic, Design, and Business interests at the show.

Usability & Product Development: an Introductory Usability Course for Management

A few interesting stats:

• 63% of projects exceed cost estimates


• the average project is 189% over budget


• the average project is 222% behind schedule


• the average project has only 61% of specified features


• 50% of the development time and money is spent in user interfacec design and development


• most flaws originate in product definition


• 80% of software costs occur after the release

Top reasons for cancelling projects:

• incomplete user requirements
  
• lack of user involvement

Top reasons for exceeding cost estimates:

• user requests for changes


• overlooked user tasks


• users' lack of understanding of own requirements, etc.

Who Killed Design

• There are no tech companies that have a track record for new product development
• ”The only designers worth studying are the repeat offenders.” (This one is less impressive as a quote, but extremely compelling as an idea… more later…)
• ”Designers suck at understanding themselves.” (and especially the process of design)
• ”The era of the Renaissance Man is dead. But the Renaissance itself has forever changed the process of Design.”

There were many more, but I’ll have to have some time to pull them from my notes…

A few other provocative tid-bits (not sure who said them, but they’re worth recording)…

• Design - moving from an existing circumstance to a preferred one.


• How many designers can recognize that the problem they are addressing has no “solution?” How many of those who can know what to do in that circumstance?


• If you’re interested in sustainability, you want the fur coat and not the Mac.

I also attended some paper sessions on Navigation and Expert/Novice studies (separate talks). Not much to new to report.

More tomorrow…

SigCHI 2007 – day 2

The first session I attended today was a talk about “Programming by Professionals.” The first paper, presented by Cherubini, was about how developers use whiteboards to communicate. Although one audience member rightly pointed out that this study was somewhat limited in that is only utilized employees of Microsoft, some of the conclusions by the author are interesting.

For example, the author suggests that there are 9 primary types of use of whiteboard diagrams by developers:

1. understanding existing code
2. ad-hoc meeting
3. design / re-factoring
4. design review
5. onboarding – or bringing a new person up-to-speed
6. explaining to a secondary stakeholder
7. explaining to customers
8. hallway art
9. technical documentation

A few other general observations from this talk:

• Each type of use had different levels of formality and need for accuracy/precision.
• They also suggested that the diagrams were less important than the conversations around them – which makes sense.
• Developers did not follow any graphical standard in their diagrams (such as UML)
• Many design decisions are made in 1-to-1 meetings
• Engineers need microscopic and macroscopic views of the code. Zooming between these levels happens extremely fluidly in these whiteboard discussions
• Some plasticity in the drawing tool is required (to support the flexibility of the conversation)
• Architects tend to keep many versions of drawings/plans even as they evolve. The metamorphosis of a plan or design is important to capture both so that everyone understands “how we got here” and because it can be used post-hoc to help the designer better understand and improve their own process. Programmers, however, can express themselves in code – a process which in-and-of itself does not lend itself to plastic “redrawing.” This suggests that having a rapid prototyping process in an organization can capture alternate approaches early, as well as allow designers/engineers to express themselves in a manner appropriate to their work.

Usable Tools to Support Code Refactoring

• Error messages are often used to help a developer systematically review affected spots in the code after a refactoring gesture is made. In other words, developers don’t seem to sit around and think… I wonder where all this change might cascade or how many instances of this wildcard I have used in the application. Instead, they make the change, and then use the error messages to get a feel for the reach of the change. In Eclipse this is relatively efficient, since you can get code errors and warnings without the need for a full re-compile.
• End programmers are not compiler experts; they don’t see their programs as abstract syntax trees. Tools to support their refactoring have to support the way they visualize their code/application

…. Games Panel writeup forthcoming ….

There was a Games panel on Tuesday that had some interesting and solid papers. The first was a paper from the Project Massive (of projectmassive.com) researcher, regarding they motivations for game play in the context of the "gaming addiction" debate. The talk started poorly, by quoting gaming industry statistics on the demographics of game players -- "look... it's not just 15 year-old boys anymore....blah blah blah." For the record, there is NO good reason to trust these numbers, especially since the methods AND actual detailed stats are proprietary. I once tried to buy data or reports (or any information) from NPD Funworld as an academic, and they wouldn't even talk to me about the possibility for the very reason that I was an academic.

Can we please, as a Games Research community, stop regurgitating these numbers as if they are scientific fact?

Anyway -- I got sidetracked -- despite touching a nerve with me in the first few slides, this talk had a lot of interesting numbers and a rather solid experimental approach. The N in this study was VERY large (something like 500 subjects from an original sample of nearly 5000 participated in multiple waves), and the battery of survey questions given to each participant was impressive. I would LOVE to dig into this amount and quality of data -- kudos to project massive on this front.

The one caveat I'll point out was raised by a commenter during Q&A, namely that the study or followups would benefit from using more than self-report measures of amount of game play and its effect on quality of life, work, social life, etc. Surveys and/or digests from family and friends might have revealed a slightly more nuanced picture about the "appropriateness" of the amount of game playing on the subject in question.

The Life and Death of Online Gaming Communities
Bravo. This was another fascinating study of World of Warcraft players from Duchenault et al. at PARC and Stanford. I highly recommend taking at look at this paper. The approach they use if technically not all that difficult -- extending the WoW client software (which has an open API) to dump simple /who data is just elegant. I'm curious about if this type of automated data mining is actually allowed by the eula of the client API, as I know that some open client software (like Second Life's, I believe) has clauses disallowing the use of customized client software for mining of data that is considered proprietary.

My main concern with this presentation was that the authors wanted to generalize their findings about the average size and characteristics of successful (meaning long-lasting) guilds to other types of organizations. There are MANY formal factors influencing the scale of coordination in WoW that may or may not translate to different interfaces, organizations, and most importantly -- different TASKS. It is reasonable to assume that a task that does not require or favor a team/group coordination would not elicit group clustering, loyalty, etc. like an RPG game does. For comparison's-sake it would be useful to look at something like Second Life social networks in order to try and infer guild-like clustering of communication and behavior.

This treemap is truly remarkable. Changed my understanding of the casualties of this war -- I won't soon forget it.

I'm not sure where I found this image, but I suspect it is from something I read while in grad school. I just ran across it on an old hard drive and had to post it.

How great would it be to have a home computer like THAT!

Must be something super-top-secret from Microsoft...

I'm still salvaging photos and other files from my recent hard drive failure....

Literally the day the latest war in Iraq began, my friend Jason Gallo and I arrived in Paris for a week-long trip with a group from the School of Communication at Northwestern. It was a trip I'll not soon forget: lots of protests, meetings with publishers of various major papers at the height of one of the biggest stories in years, and lots and lots of conversation over beer.

Emily and I went to Peru last summer for our belated honeymoon. This is one of a handful of Alpacas hanging out at Machu Picchu.

Sadly, the place was overrun with tourists, and we weren't even there during "high season." I left with a weird mix of happiness that I'd seen it, and also anxiety at how rapidly it is deteriorating under the strain of so many visitors. It was definitely an incredible place. It's a shame that the Peruvian government isn't taking better care of one of their most important and impressive historic sites.

No good reason. Just threw it together one night a few years ago because I found all these hat model images. I had thought I would make it into some sort of abstract play, but decided I had better things to do.

Still, there's something about it....

[part of my hard drive file recovery]

In tribute to John Romond who is getting married next weekend.... a photo I took of Galway, Ireland, where we began a trip around Europe a handful of years ago.

Went to the Dodgers v. Braves game last night with some coworkers.

From left to right starting on the bottom, we have Michael Paglione, Ben Hoyt, Stephen Peacock, Varun Nayak, Randy Spong, and I'm the good looking one in the Venice t-shirt.

It was particularly fun because three of them have never been to a baseball game before. Two are more familiar with Cricket and I don't know what the third guy's excuse is... but it was definitely good eating and a fast-paced ballgame.

Braves won 7-6.

I'm very proud of my little sister Jess for winning the Best Student Hairstylist of the Year award at the North American Hairstyling Awards (NAHA).

She's quite the iconoclast: honor's student in Philosophy from Xavier University who decided to go to beauty school. Now she's tops in that arena as well. I couldn't be prouder!

While I've been rather neglectful of this, my little corner of the internet, I have a good excuse....

E and I are re-settled in Chicago-area, have almost unpacked our new home, and all-in-all life is good.

I am enjoying a 1 year appointment as a Research Associate at Northwester University, which is granting me a lot of uninterrupted time to make progress on my dissertation. Things are moving along at an incredible clip... especially considering how slow it was while I was trying to do it part time for the last two years.

I will be posting updates on the software and findings as I have them...

Current tasks:
- prepare a submission for GDC '08
- run stats on my player nav data and write up results
- begin to circulate chapters of the paper to my committee
- begin design and planning for a new wave of subjects in my game player behavior study

Announcing the re-birth of the Media Revolutions Project!

http://www.mediarevolutions.org

My friend Dave tipped me off to a great series on ITunes U -- the Stanford Technology Ventures Program. It has a wonderful set of lectures by various high-tech entrepreneurs mostly from Silicon Valley.

As I'm in the process of launching a company, I'm amazed by how relevant the insight of these repeat entrepreneurs can be. I'm recalling how this type of lecture used to sound trite and self-important back in school when I had no notion about what it takes to run a business. Now, however, it feels urgent and relevant because so much of starting a business seems to be about trusting yourself and others -- about escalating commitment while managing risk.

It's not the type of knowledge that you cite, since just as soon as you cite it you're reminded of exceptions to the rule. It's the type of knowledge that helps to build judgment, patience, and prudence. No wonder so much of it feels like a parable -- professors telling stories meant to teach a lesson and to serve as a strong reminder of what *could* happen.

I highly recommend the series (and thanks to Dave for pointing it out!).

Link via ITunes U