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Lies, damn lies, and usability metrics

I like Jakob Nielsen. I like his drive and passion for great usability. But he does produce some severely dodgy statistics from time to time. This week, in his Alertbox column, he headlines with the quote:

“Software has great potential for getting better, as shown by an under-appreciated feature in Windows XP that can save users $2,000 per year.”

In the article he explains how he gets at this figure. I won’t duplicate the calculation here, but the heart of it is the assertion that a 10% increase in reading speed (by using Cleartype) results in a 10% increase in productivity.

Sorry Jakob; doesn’t follow. A 10% increase in reading speed means that you’ve got 10% more time to spend nattering with your colleagues over coffee.

A 50% increase in reading speed, now that would be useful. But I doubt very much if the productivity gain would be anywhere near that. Probably closer to 10-20%. The main reason for this is that hardly anyone spends all their time reading continuously. Most of the time you read a short chunk, then do something else. And the time it takes to go from reading to something else will swallow up 10% with ease. Joel Spolsky writes about exactly this in his article on task switching.

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New year, etc.

Wow, it’s been a while since I wrote anything here. Well, it’s been a busy time over Christmas and New Year. We had a wonderful time up in Murthly, lots of presents, etc. Abi’s back at work (3 days a week), and I’ve now gone part-time as well (4 days a week), so we’re both taking care of Mr Bobo when he’s not at Nursery.

And my Playstation2 broke down 🙁 On the other hand, Sainsbury’s gave me a full refund for it. And the refund was for the price I’d paid for it a week before Sony dropped their prices 🙂 On yet another hand, there is currently a nationwide shortage of PS2s, and hardly anyone has any idea when they’ll get them back in stock. I’m down on the local Game store’s pre-order list. They say they may have some in over the weekend, but it’ll be strictly limited stock. And judging by the pile of pre-order cards they had stacked up behind the counter, I doubt if I’ll be far enough forward in line. Oh well.

A few years ago, I got thoroughly burned out on role-playing. It was too much Amber that did it. Amber’s a great game, and it really broke diceless playing through into the mainstream. But despite having infinite Shadow to play around in, I found that it got a bit stale after a while. And going back to another system after Amber seemed, at the time, like a step backwards on the evolutionary ladder of gaming. So I didn’t. I just took a complete break.

But just before Christmas, I had an idea… And it slowly wormed its way through my consciousness to the point where it became ripe for a game. (Seeing The Lord of the Rings over the holidays whetted my enthusiasm even more.) It’s a fantasy kind of thing. Not true Middle Earth, not true AD&D…just a blend of worlds and mythologies.

I’m still building the maps and a lot of the background, but the world has already taken quite a firm shape in my mind. And the stories, characters and plot lines seem to be flowing quite freely right now. In fact, I’m having a hard time remembering them all for long enough to get back home and write them all down. (I suppose I should use my old Psion 5 to record them on the bus, but ever since that incident with the backup battery failure and the de-spooled tape drive back in 1997, I just haven’t found myself able to trust it completely. And my handwriting is bad enough without travel jiggles making it completely unreadable even to myself.)

When we go down South to visit Jules in February, I’m going to give it a spin–assuming that Mr Bobo will co-operate long enough to let us play a bit. I think I’ll probably put the background & stuff up here on the Sunpig web site, so it’s easily available both for myself and anyone who’s going to be playing. (Somehow the web makes it seems so much easier than the last time I created background info for a game. Cool.)

(Note to self: must also get around to uploading more photos on Alex’s site. We’ve got stack of them! And one of the main points of using Movable Type was so that we could more easily update the photos on his pages.)

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Bundle o’ stuff

James and Katriona McGregor are now offering their house in Islay for holiday rentals. Their web site gives full details. The photos of the house, and of Islay itself, look stunningly beautiful.

We’re definitely planning to have a week in Rome next year, but Islay is starting to look very attractive for another break.

EmotionEric.com. A simple idea: Eric takes requests for emotions, then acts them out and photographs himself doing so. The simple ones, like “Suave” and “Perturbed” are amusing, but some of the later ones, like “Realizing that Dan Quayle is your father” and “Answering the ‘does this make me look fat’ question” are bizarrely funny.

As a follow-up to my entry from November 30th (“Bait-and-switch War”), I found an article in The Guardian (“Fighting the wring war” by Jonathan Steele) that talks about the same issues:

“The toppling of the Taliban may eventually prove to be the best thing to have happened in Afghanistan for a decade. But it was not an initial aim of the US-led war.”

I found this article through the web site The Smirking Chimp, a site dedicated to collecting news about George W. Bush that shows him in the worst possible light. A worthy cause. (The title of the site is a nod to the Bush or Chimp? web site, which points out how much Bush looks like a chimpanzee.)

Abi today writes about how she–as an American–feels about the atmosphere we found when we were on holiday there in November. I’m so glad we’re so much in agreement on these issues. (But then that’s probably why we’ve been married for over eight years now: because fundamentally, we think very much alike, and hold very similar social and moral values. And this despite Abi being Catholic, and me being an atheist! I suppose this bodes well for consistency when it comes to raising Alex.)

The Media Workers Against War web site features an article by the brother of one of the people killed on September 11th. He is thinking along the same lines, too:

The United States should try to examine economic, military and political policies to understand how they bring about anti-American sentiment. The U.S. should change these policies in order to ensure peace and justice for America and the world. The current reliance on military force does not confront the conditions that foster terrorism.

This may be a crucial conceptual barrier for the collective American consciousness to break through: not everyone likes America, and what it (now) stands for.

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Opera 6

Opera 6 is out!Althought, to be honest, I haven’t found any major improvements over version 5.12 yet. It seems to be more of a collection of small improvements, and little extra features. The ability to double-click on any word or sentence, and then translate it, do a search, or look it up in a dictionary is quite nice, but not exactly revolutionary.

John Lettice writes about this new release in The Register

Oh, and have a look at the campaign to ban screwdrivers.

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Bait-and-switch War

“Where were you, and your civilisation, when my friend became depressed? When people began to die 20 years ago, in the war that you supported. Where was your civilisation when women were raped and tortured, when kids were kept from school, when libraries were burned down?”

(Quote from an interesting and powerfully emotive interview with Nelofer Pazira, star of the film Kandahar.)

This is why I call this a “bait-and-switch” war. We sent forces there to hunt down alleged criminals. This was in itself a bad idea. What’s worse, though, is trying to retro-fit this new motivation for being there: that we must “liberate” the Afghani people.

In my more cynical moments, I can’t help wondering if this was the real original reason for attacking Afganistan. Before September 11, President Bush surely must have known about the state of the Taliban government in Afghanistan. He must have known that they were relatively weak. This is information the CIA and allied intelligence agencies collect and collate as a matter of course. However, he had no immediate reason to use this knowledge.

Then, when September 11 happened. Bush needed to do something. He knew that he’d not easily find the masterminds behind the attacks. But suddenly his knowledge of the Taliban’s position is useful. He can move in his forces under the guise of tracking down Osama Bin Laden, but with the hidden purpose of toppling the Taliban. What a glorious media victory that could be! What right-thinking Westerner does not want to see such an oppresive regime being overthrown?

Never mind the fact that the terrorists still haven’t been found. And there is enough righteous anger in America to blind the masses to the bombing of innocents. With this war, President Bush will gain two fantastically useful political goals: he will gain massive public support for acting so “decisively”, and he can choose a more US-friendly government for Afghanistan when he’s done.

And if the rest of the world is unhappy about his actions, why should he care? He hasn’t shown any consideration in the past (Kyoto, Strategic Missile Defense, Bioweapons), and see how well he’s doing now!

This is exactly why the attacks of September 11 happened in the first place.

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Planet of the Jellies

Me, B, and a bunch of jellies (at the Monterey Bay Aquarium).Me, B, and a bunch of jellies.

I haven’t been doing any updates to this web log (or Alex’s) during our holiday. We’ve been having a great time, though, and taking lots of pictures! We’ll get the best ones up soon after we get back home.