Click to enlarge
Only those who read or ignore history will be surprised at how many Communists made the list
Analysis of the overlapping fields of information design, usability, software quality assurance, infographics, and data visualization by Owen McNally, PhD (ABD)
Oh, this is just a wonderful graphic of various ocean depths, and how zillionaire Richard Branson is building a sci-fi submarine to go the very bottom of the deepest parts! I just love the way depth is conveyed here. Click to get the larger 200 DPI version:
They are going to try to get to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, the lowest place in the world!
Over at Andrew Dillon’s Infomatters blog, an important distinction is made that almost escaped my notice the first time: the crucial distinction between measuring usability and learnability (scroll down to comments):
Distinguish between usability and learnability. Most usability tests are short run tests of people’s initial reactions to a technology. This privileges the earliest phases of human reactions, the making sense of something new. This is important but it is not the full story. I have shown repeatedly in my own work that people’s later reactions take time to emerge and often run counter to their initial ones.
The more I think about it, this strikes me as important on mutliple levels: first, for the stated reasons about what is actually being measured. It is a substantially different thing to make a claim about client experience on a system based on initial exposures vs. after some familiarity has set in and the learning curve mostly overcome.
But I think there is a deeper issue here: this is the sort of distinction academics draw, that can be mystifying and frustrating to busy and deadline-focused development teams. My sense is that when usability is “owned” by the people doing the QA process, as a practical matter whatever metrics and measurements are supplied are coming from the engineering and tech side. QA testers are people with impressive knowledge of technology, coding, severity and urgency of bugs, and so forth, but when a usability evaluator with an advanced degree and a behavioral-science focus joins a team from the outside of an organization, there can easily be a sort of culture clash. The business of getting code developed to a point of reasonable stability and tested for show-stopper-level bugs can be exhausting and stressful, which means there is a tendency to want to proceed at a pace that does not easily pause for the critiques of analytical eggheads. An academic type who makes seemingly subtle points about the difference between testing for usability vs. testing for learnability can come off like a being from another dimension, where there is time and money to measure and analyze everything under the sun. After a few meetings the developers may come to believe, sometimes correctly, that the PhD is cheerfully agnostic about the difficulties of writing and testing code, which is to say, making the products that earn revenue.
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This sort of cultural disconnect makes me recall way that certain organizations that have hired me to do usability work passively resist the recommendations from an evaluation. The story behind the story is that the design team and developers get what they wanted: a checkmarked box for testing for”user centered” design, but the actual matter of getting the design and development process to slow down because of flaws discovered in the UI or evaluations planning is a complicated political matter. Many moons ago, I did an evaluation of the usability of one of the world’s most important websites for software development, IBM Developerworks, and found that getting any changes to the markedly flawed UI (better nowadays) was hopeless. It’s not that I lacked data: I had users telling me about problems with the site clutter and visual infoglut. But were any internal stakeholders were about to give up a little bit of their site real estate for the good of the user navigation? I was gently but firmly disabused of the notion that the overall usability was the true mark of quality. Donald Norman has made a similar point in press at least once or twice:
When I was at Apple, I tried to get them to switch to a two-button mouse. I suggested that by that time, everyone was familiar with the mouse, so the earlier objections would no longer apply. Microsoft had proved the virtue of a two-button mouse by using the right button to provide contextual information: menus and help. But the use of a single button was an important branding symbol for Apple and my efforts to change this went nowhere.
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If the usability or human factors professional is a contractor, they may feel they have nothing to lose by being the bearer of bad news at a meeting…but then what? It is unfortunately all-too-common to have a sort of dead-end, where the data gets discussed at a conference call, noone escalates to upper management, and the result of the work is only that some talk goes around about re-opening the issue “next release”.
Now, I am often very upfront with my students and with industry people to not to be intimidated by people with PhD’s who set the standards for measuring the usability of interaction design. Academics in information design and usability can be like hammers looking for nails: they prefer sample sizes and methods comparable to the standards of academic publishing and experimental psychology or cognitive science, they want to take their time to do it by the book. Moreover, they might very well not want really to be part of the dev team, or feel a need to understand that dev teams often are made to deal with customer requirements, business rules, and staffing that is an invitation to design flaws or worse: one team I was with had a jaundiced older fellow who told me the security holes in the network-and-server monitoring system we were testing were so big “you could drive the whole world through them”. In such an environment, quality assurance or usability can only do what it can, as there isn’t time to slow down such progress as there is to be had, because the continued viability of what is actually a very ramshackle operation is based on the steely nerves of angel investors and VC’s, and their willingness to live by the old adage in for a penny, in for a pound. I don’t regret working for such “crazy” orgs, which made for great teaching experiences in their own way, but I do think the usability pros ought to be willing to adapt their methodological toolkit according to the available resources, and not the other way around.
But…having said that, my sense is, sometimes academics do insist on seemingly subtle distinctions that can have real-world impact on customer satisfaction. Given the need to really get it right, it is better to bring in an outsider, maybe even with a PhD, and give them the time resources and empowerment to focus the team’s attention on precisely such a difference as the one between measuring how easy an application or product is to learn to use, vs. to use once familiarized. Over the long run, our clients and end-users will benefit from this sort of investment in analytical expertise.
“The super-boom got out of hand when the new products became so complicated that the authorities could no longer calculate the risks…”-George Soros
I have a sense that we need to be making and examining diagrams like this, to see what they reveal and conceal. Truly, visualizing where the money is going in a way that non-CFO’s and non-financial analysts can make sense of is a mighty task for the information design community. Click on the chart below, does it make sense?
A couple of years ago the New York Times ran an excellent piece about changing views of the gene. They went so far as to characterize the gene as having an “identity crisis”:
new large-scale studies of DNA are causing her and many of her colleagues to rethink the very nature of genes. They no longer conceive of a typical gene as a single chunk of DNA encoding a single protein. “It cannot work that way,” Dr. Prohaska said. There are simply too many exceptions to the conventional rules for genes.
It turns out, for example, that several different proteins may be produced from a single stretch of DNA. Most of the molecules produced from DNA may not even be proteins, but another chemical known as RNA. The familiar double helix of DNA no longer has a monopoly on heredity. Other molecules clinging to DNA can produce striking differences between two organisms with the same genes. And those molecules can be inherited along with DNA.
The gene, in other words, is in an identity crisis.
There was a reference to a fascinating paper: “Genomics Counfounds Gene Classification” by Gerstein and Seringhaus (2008). The upshot is that the classical view of the gene/DNA relationship, where sections of DNA that is transcribed by RNA and translated into a protein, doesn’t account for data about noncoding DNA,noncoding RNA, and alternative spllcing:
This iterative one-gene, one-protein, one-function relationship paints a relatively straightforward picture of subcellular life. When describing the function of a given gene in a cell, biologists can conceive an individual protein as a single indivisible unit or node within the larger cellular network. In turn, when mapping genes across species using sequence similarity, they can assume a protein is either fully preserved in various organisms or entirely absent. Thus, related proteins in different organisms can easily be grouped together into consistent families, which can be given simple, unitary descriptions of their function. Thus, the extended dogma expands the central dogma to include regultion, function and conservation
Complex Reality
To the modern genomics scientist, the classical image of a gene and the ex- tended dogma associated with it are quaint. High-throughput experiments that simultaneously probe the activity of millions of bases in the genome deliver a far less tidy view. First, the process of creating an RNA transcript from a DNA region is more complex than once was imagined. Genes make up only a small fraction of the human genome. But RNA expression studies on human DNA suggest that a substantial amount of the genome outside the boundaries of known or predicted genes is transcribed.
In the quest to accurately describe biological systems, defining basic units is only part of the job. Scientists ultimately want to understand biological function. Function in the genetic sense initially was inferred from the phenotypic effects of genes. A person might have green or blue eyes and a gene related to this characteristic could then be assigned the “eye color” function. Phenotypic function of this sort is most directly shown by deleting or disrupting, or “knocking out,” a particular gene. Disrupting a gene in this way might cause an organism to develop cancer, to change color or to die early. Disabling the yeast mitochondrial gene FZO1, for instance, causes mutant strains to display slow growth and a petite phenotype. But a phenotypic effect doesn’t capture function on the molecular level. To really elucidate the importance of a gene, it’s vital to understand the detailed biochemistry of its products.
Figure 4. Multiple methods exist for capturing gene functions. In a simple hierarchy, at left, a gene is described in single relationships. One unit descends from one “parent”. Directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) capture more complexity. Above the hierarchy captures that FZO1 plays a role in the biogenesis of cellular parts but the DAG gives a wider view of the scope of those roles. (Data contributed by QuickGO: ebi.ac.uk/ego/)
from mythbusters
I went to a lecture many years ago about the protein folding problem (trying to predict the 3-D structure of proteins from the linear chain of amino acids that can be known through gene sequencing) and was hooked. Proteins make the world go ’round, or at least your body. They are the molecular basis of life, the machines that run our cells, and the product of DNA. For a period I became pretty fascinated with their role in cells, and still love to teach my students about how cells use proteins to affect each other.
The pictures only get better every year:
http://pharmacy.ucsd.edu/faculty/tlabimgs/Pascals-rainbow-web.gif
from http://www.nigms.nih.gov/NR/rdonlyres/2486A0A6-ACD3-4B8B-BA1B-EA917000EF12/1758/pseudomonasstructure.jpg
from http://www.themovingpixel.com/modelling/images/facetedmolecule.jpg
from http://jvi.asm.org/content/vol76/issue19/cover.dtl
from http://www.vimm.it/research/images/zanotti_fig1_1.jpg
from http://img.medscape.com/fullsize/migrated/575/924/eci575924.fig1.gif
from http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/file.php/4238/!via/oucontent/course/482/s377book1chapter3_f042hi.jpg
Some of these really give you an intuitive sense of how complicated nature is!
From http://www.bioc.cam.ac.uk/uto/images/luisi2.jpg
Evidently the author of the schematic below, David Nolan, died this week. He was considered the founder of the Libertarian Party. I like the simplicity of the design and how it prompts re-thinking of political assumptions. With the current ”left” vs. “right” continuum, it is hard to say whether Ron Paul or George W. Bush is more “conservative”, but the Nolan chart allows for another axis:
from 
from http://www.kristen-mcclure-therapist.com/images/panicattack2.jpg
from http://www.fi.edu/learn/heart/enrichment/gallery.html
from http://amwa-doc.org/images/heart.jpg
http://www.joelertola.com/tutorials/heart/img/heart.jpg
from http://www.roshanpakistan.com/web-magzine/Health/imgs/artificial-heart-abiocor-hand.jpg
