Monday, August 28, 2006

More good reading As follow-up to last month's good read, Jared interviews Barry Schwartz about The Paradox of Choice: Article: The Paradox of Choice: An Interview with Barry Schwartz. UIEtips 8/28/06: The Paradox of Choice: An Interview with Barry Schwartz As designers, we really need to understand how choice affects our users. We can make designs that give users all the options, or we can create designs that limit choices and guide users to success. What will work best for our users? . . .[UIE Brain Sparks] It's a good long interview with many tidbits that serve to confirm Schwartz's observations. Also recommended. 9:13:02 PM    Questions? Comments? Flames? []

Redux redux And. . . I'm back from vacation, back to work, and I don't expect to go anywhere for a while. Probably not until the January SIGCHI EC meeting. I failed to live up to my own expectations, only completing one book during the week at Tahoe. But it was a good one: James Surowiecki's The Wisdom of Crowds. It was much better than I expected, and took extra time to read because I was focused on absorbing all the nuances and variety of crowds and their differing wisdoms. It's not a simple message: the reality is that, for a crowd to be indeed "wise" it has to meet certain criteria, in certain circumstances, with certain preconditions. Surowiecki does a good job of describing the differences, and acknowledging that groups can and do make egregious mistakes (think mobs and riots). And then he goes back to describing how and when they get things right. The best take-away for me is the repeated demonstration of how experts really aren't and how groups of non-experts with a diversity of knowledge, views, and experience can be smarter than so-called experts. A good, fascinating, and useful read, highly recommended and worthy of best-seller status. Aside from The Wisdom of Crowds, I made it half way through John Thackara's In the Bubble. It's also rather dense reading, thoroughly researched and annotated. Thackara's driving thesis is that whatever we're desiging, for whatever purpose, the human element must be front and center, that the technology serves people, not the other way around. Instead of breathlessly prognosticating about the future, Thackara makes his points over and over by referencing real projects that have already demonstrated their utility. I'm a Thackara fan, so I am motivated to finish In the Bubble (the title refers to how air traffic controllers describe the state of "flow" in their job). 8:48:47 PM    Questions? Comments? Flames? []

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