• Papers - SummaryTab Pattern
• Books - latest from Deborah Mayhew
• Books - Web Site Usability
• IMHO - The need for legislation
• Letters - Modal vs. A-Modal
• UML in Color

In June, Bruce Tognazzini, dedicated his e-zine to reviewing the verdict on the death of singer John Denver. The verdict was one of death by misadventure. The conclusion, Pilot Error. Tog discusses whether the cockpit design was really at fault.

This article was timely in a UK context as it coincided with a TV documentary on the death of Chelsea Football Club benefactor, Matthew Harding, who died with several friends in a helicopter crash back in 1997. The verdict was death by misadventure. The conclusion, Pilot Error. The in-depth documentary looked at whether the cockpit design was really at fault and whether lax government legislation for charter helicopters ought to be reviewed.

In the same week, it was revealed that the UK Government had received a settlement from a US manufacturer of helicopter control software. The same software which was in-use in a military helicopter which famously crashed off the west coast of Scotland, killing 25 senior members of the Secret Service. The official line was that the software manufacturer had admitted that their testing procedures were "insufficient". They stopped short of actually admitting that the software was buggy.

This revelation was sufficient to re-open pleas from former RAF Pilots that the conclusion that the crash was due to Pilot Error, be reviewed. Apparently, Pilots believe that the software was faulty and known to be unreliable in similar aircraft.

The champion of this story in the UK has been Channel 4 News, http://www.channel4.co.uk. What it has served to highlight is that it remains unacceptable to governments to risk a loss of public confidence in transportation machinery. The public expect humans to fail and human failure is acceptable. Machines are expected to be infallible. It is likely to be some time before an investigation would be brave enough to report poor design rather than operator error as the route cause of any failure.

In June, it was also revealed that UK doctor's now recognise a new form of occupational stress related illness. Depression caused by poor quality and frustrating software.

This was coupled with a report that "Keyboard Rage" is becoming more common. Likened to cases of "Road Rage" where frustrated drivers often end up in fist fights with others, this new phenomenon manifests itself in the office when something goes wrong at the keyboard.

Many of you may have seen the MPEG of a Dilbert-like keyboard jockey who finally loses it and lobs his monitor over his cubicle into the neighbouring corridor. Well apparently, this is no longer an isolated incident in the UK. Occupational Psychologists and Doctors now recognise it as a common and understandable problem.

In many ways these reports are good news for the industry. They highlight that all is not well and that much needs to improve. With enough reporting of such incidents and problems there may well be the political will for change.

This story has continued to run over the last few weeks. On the 4th of July, the Sunday Herald, one of Scotland's quality broadsheet papers, reported a MORI poll conducted for Compaq. The results are quite staggering. To quote from the article,

" Of the 1250 workers questioned almost half said that they felt frustrated or stressed by the amount of time it takes to solve simple IT problems. Two in every 5 claimed their colleagues swore at their monitors out of frustration. Others said that they had witnessed peers kicking their computers, or pulling out the plug ... when problems arose."

This month, IMHO takes a look at why the industry needs legislation before it will change.

We all know who is to blame for this rising tide. It is "us", the software industry. Only we can actually make the changes necessary to end the User nightmare. Will it need governments to step in, or can the industry sort out these problems for itself? UIDesign.net continues to play its part in attempting to improve the user experience with software.

Regular UIDesign.net reviewer, Jeff de Luca, has a book out. Java Modeling in Color with UML: enterprise components and process, by Peter Coad, Eric Le Febvre and Jeff De Luca, Yourdon Press. You can get it from Amazon.

Jeff's primary contribution was the "process" part of the title, namely Feature Driven Development (FDD). Its not a Lifecycle methodology - not yet. Its a development methodology aimed at providing fine grained planning and tracking of OO projects. Its been tried on a massive Java project and it works. I am currently trying it on a medium sized eCommerce project which is Object-Relational and uses Java and PL/SQL and it works equally well.

This is Jeff thanking Peter Coad, with Cliff Berg looking on, at the end of the first UML in Color modeling session, in September 97, at UOB in Singapore.

The key to FDD is that it is a low overhead method which was designed by developers for development. It scales easily from large to small, in a remarkably linear fashion, whilst providing the finest grained and most accurate project tracking and reporting that I have ever seen in almost 18 years in the business.

With a bit of luck, FDD is a thing of the future and we will be hearing about it again in a full book dedicated to the subject.

The UIDesign.net verdict is 5/5. A must have book for serious medium or large scale OO and Object/Relational systems developers.

This month, we review the new book from Deborah Mayhew and later in the month we take a look at some Web Site usability studies including the latest from Jared Spool of User Interface Engineering.

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I really am not going to make any promises about a next edition, though I do want to publish another edition before August 20th. So check back around then.