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Monday, June 17, 2002 |
A day in the life ... SWAGs and maintenance programming
Crash priority this morning, helping a person round up estimates by noon for moving a group of twenty to an off-campus office building. They'd need DSL service, a local file server, contractors to redo the space for power, telephone and network drops, tear down and set up labor for their workstations, etc. Because they're going for a last minute pot of money, they needed their estimate by noon. The estimates were complete guesses but they looked good to me; everyone involved was able to compare the situation to other moves they'd helped on. This technique is sometimes called SWAG: scientific wild-assed guessing.Later on, some maintenance programming. Last year, our HR folks asked me to help them edit some Excel workbooks they use to help staff keep timesheets in. There are four (for classified, limited term, exempt and student employees) and each contains 26 tabs, so making a change is a bear. The workbooks had been created the previous year by a student employee. I grabbed some old VB code I'd written for a different project and mashed it to read a list of changes and make a new set of workbooks from templates they could edit.
When code is run only once a year, it often gets a fairly poor interface (after all, how much time can you justify on an interface that gets used 10 minutes a year). Yet, because it is so rarely used, it needs a good interface to prevent mistakes caused by lack of familiarity. Last year, I sat at her computer as I adapted the code I had lying around, and the only interface was a set of "fill-in-the-blank" message boxes. This is very error prone; any typo makes the macro fail. This year, I had a running code engine that I knew produced the correct output, so I was able to rethink the startup phase and reduce it to a single question (which one of the four books do you want to produce next?) and just derive the rest of the information.
This is what getting a undergraduate CS degree should include - every year, you're handed some code you wrote a year ago, and required to make changes to it in order to retain your grade in that course. As it is, most people never face maintaining their own code until after a year or more on the job.
One approach to accessibility is to start by listing all the standards and laws the designer may have to comply with. This is an important issue, because in some cases legal liability is the only way to get enough attention to an issue to get a change. But it's not a very motivating approach. Who feels motivated to do extraordinary work so that an automated web-checker will give you a "pass"?
Most people would find it much easier to design for Bill, who has trouble using a mouse, and for Michael, who is color-blind. These are people, not standards, and if you can code a site that these people can use, you should be doing a good job of coding a site that will pass the automated checkers as well.
I first learned this technique of designing from character sketches in Alan Cooper's The Inmates are running the Asylum; it's not just a technique for doing accessibility studies.
Home Depot Discriminates Against the US (that is, against us)
[Via Vicki Rosenzweig's Yet Another Web Log]Home Depot stops doing business with federal government : Home Depot has instructed its stores to stop selling to the Federal Government. I called my local Home Depot. It's true. They have started refusing to sell, for example, to people from the Department of Defense. They've issued a memo that uses as an example a delivery of light bulbs to a military base -- the memo says the store should refuse to process this sale.
I was unable to get a justification for this policy from my local store, but the justification cited by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch is that Home Depot is trying to avoid responsibility for complying with three laws that prohibit discrimination and that require affirmative action for veterans.
In the combined post-Enron, post-911 environment, this seems like a contender for Dumbest Corporate Move of the Year. I'm contacting my US Representative and my Senators and asking them to look into this.
Dave Winer - thanks and good thoughts
Dave Winer is in the hospital. This sucks. I've met him at MacWorld San Francisco a number of times, standing in his booth, and I was always impressed by the way he tried to remember who I was. Not that he did; anyone who can remember everyone who walked into their booth a year ago has Too Many Neurons storing trivia. But he would see my UW name tag, smile, and do his best to pry out where we had last met. as though he felt that he
Thanks, and my thoughts are with you.
