Highlights

• Web MVC Engine - Part 2
• Books- Everett McKay
• IMHO - Online Bureaucracy

This is the 2nd edition of UIDesign.net to come from Texas. My wife and I have settled into our little condo apartment on the prairie and are getting used to living once again without all the little extras in life such as my library of books. The family's worldly possessions are once again on a ship - this time somewhere in the Atlantic.

In the meantime we've been getting used to the culture in Texas. It didn't take long to realise that people here love metaphorical language. One of my colleagues doesn't convene meetings he "circles up the compadres". In fact this extreme use of metaphor has a term. It's called Texas Talk!

I promise not to let this affect my Interaction Design thinking.

Some other aspects of life, here in Texas are worth considering. The preferred form of local navigation is the automobile. In fact its almost impossible to get anywhere without one. We had to buy two - one each - otherwise life would be impossible. Navigation routes around the DFW Metroplex are also conveniently east-west or north-south. Any road which deviates from this pattern is quickly straightened out. The locals claim this makes getting around easy and you can never get lost. True! However, it doesn't take a Greek philosopher to point out that two sides of triangle are never the quickest way to get from A to B. Both the Anderson' cars have been fitted with a compass!

As Dallas city planners vex themselves over how to expand the inadequate DART (Dallas Area Rapid Transit) system of light rail and buses, it is all to easy to realise that the User Experience with the Dallas - Fort Worth Metroplex could be so much better. The disciplines required to design and improve a city are very similar to Interaction Design. Determine the User Profiles, then the Goals for those profiles. Determine what is required to achieve those goals and then make navigating to complete those goals as easy as possible. Easy means fast, with minimum interfence or delay, intuitive and easy to recognise. In a city full of homogenous blocks with endless look-a-like grocery stores, malls, condos and housing estates, its essential to sign post things clearly and communicate the goal directed messages efficiently.

So this is the 10th edition. A whole year of UIDesign.net is complete. Overall I'm very pleased with the development of the site. For me its been a learning experience, in both publishing and HTML / Website design. There have been a few subtle changes to the design, content and navigation over the year. I wish that I had more time to do more. Writing the content takes up much of my free time.

What's Popular

It is obvious that people mostly come here for "how to" advice. The White Papers are by far the most popular. Of them, the "User Interface Analysis" paper from February is most popular.

Growth of subscribers to the mailing list has been steady as has the number of hits to the site. For those of you who have been regular visitors, I thank you and hope you will keep coming back. Please spread the word.

The site has proven popular in the academic community and I would guess that half of you are students. The site is also popular with 2 large aircraft manufacturers and at least one well known GUI Widget company. By far the most visitors are American. This reflects the fact that the whole discipline of Interaction and User Interface Design is far better understood there.

There are, of course many regular readers from the UK, Germany, Ireland, Scandinavia, Singapore, Malaysia, Australia and most other countries in the world. In fact the reach of the website continues to amaze me.

2000

This coming year I anticipate staying put in Texas. My wife is filling up my free time with activities such as learning Japanese and I want to take up mountain bike racing again. Naturally this will use a lot of my time.

You can expect to see some changes at uidesign.net . Probably more frequent updates of considerably smaller articles. I want to move away from the formal e-zine - once a month format, and more towards a weblog format. White Papers will still appear at least once per month, other articles, commentary, news, reviews and off-site links will come more often.

You can expect to see the site design change to accommodate this.

I will also be phasing out the PartsBin which I never had time to develop, and book reviews will necessarily become less frequent as my time to read is reduced.

Expect to see a marked shift in the content towards web related Interaction Design and perhaps even some wireless device material creeping around Spring time.

The mailing list will be strictly for the announcement of updates. It is all too obvious that people are far too busy to participate in a discussion group.

Feedback

Its impossible to grow this site adequately without your feedback. Write and tell me what you'd like to see, what you do, how the site has helped you. Producing the site takes a very considerable amount of time and a little money. I need your encouragement to keep up the effort. Write to me at david@uidesign.net

Thanks

Finally, some considerable thanks are in order. Thanks to Alan Laird at likk.net for hosting the site. Thanks to regular reviewers: Jeff De Luca, Stephen Palmer, Phil Bradley and all the other reviewers who helped this last year. Thanks to Larry Constantine for his timely words of encouragement. And finally, thanks to all of you who have written in with questions, stories and encouragement .

I've reviewed quite a few books this year. I often get asked, if I could pick only one what would it be? Gee that's hard. I have no clear answer to this. My usual answer is GUI Design for Dummies, by Laura Arlov. However, this isn't really suitable if you are doing web design. For that I would have to say, Web Navigation by Jennifer Fleming.

If however, you are from an OO programming background then my 5/5 scoring book, Software for Use, by Larry Constantine and Lucy Lockwood would have to be the choice.

Scoring

I have also tightened up the scoring system. Looking back over a year, one or two books would probably score differently now. GUI Design for Dummies would probably get 4/5 because its aging content is less relevant to web site design. David Ruble's book which I liked a lot should really only be a 3/5. Its leading edge UI content is diluted by the aging 2-tier nature of the rest of the content. No one is really building client/server systems anymore.

Reviewed the same month was Murray Cantor's book on OO Project management. Murray was unhappy with my review and I understand why. Looking back my language was overly harsh, and I would probably do it differently were I looking at it fresh. However, how would it score? Hmmm. I really believe it is only a middle of the road book on OO project management which is heavily dependant on Rational Unified Process. If you try to score the book on how much it will contribute to improving the User Experience, then it does badly, perhaps only 2/5 . This is primarily the fault of UML and the Unified Development Process initiative. If Murray were to re-write the same book based say on Constantine's Usage Centered Design approach, then it may do considerably better in the UIDesign.net ratings.

Book of the Year

This is a tough one. No one book stands out. The two which have advanced the state-of-the-art and affected how I do my job are Alan Cooper's "The inmates are running the Asylum" and Constantine and Lockwood's "Software for Use". Both have their relative merits. On balance, "Software For Use" is the winner!

In a second category might be Teaching Book of the Year, which has to go to this month's reviewed book by Everett McKay, "Developing User Interfaces for Microsoft Windows".

An honourary mention has to go also to Ian Horrock's, "Constructing the User Interface with Statecharts", which appeared in 1998. When I first reviewed this book it was ranked around 180,000 at Amazon. For much of this year, it rated around 20,000. Maybe, my reviews do make a difference.

Worst Book of the Year

For 1999 I haven't been unlucky enough to come across one. Its been a good year for Interaction Design as a discipline. My vote for the worst book I reviewed has to be "Designing for the User with OVID". Its the Texas Talk UIDesign.net Christmas Turkey of 1999. Sorry guys! I used to be an OS2 fan, too!

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