This week, I merged universalusability.org (which got its start as a student project for the 2000 Conference on Universal Usability) and uuslash.org (which was created in May, 2003, as a community news site). What you see here is the new community site for universal usability. It contains information about what we mean by "universal usability" and news contributions (in blog style) about the topic.

News entries from the previous sites were migrated here, which is why we have news going back to 2000.

I was not able to save most of the accounts - we got hit hard by spammers - so if you had an account on uuslash.org, please create a new one here. Sorry for the inconvenience.

不管我们是否愿意，“外包项目”都是一个不得不说的话题。“是不是要外包、什么时间开始”已经不再是关注的焦点，人们谈论的中心变成了“多少钱”——我们可以为外包项目付出多少，更确切地说，我们能坚持外包多久？UX（User Experience用户体验）从业者已经走了很长一段路来使自己与软件设计和已知的UX设计不同。当外包项目到来的时候，我们还能够继续坚持这种不同吗？

Story telling has been going on for millennium; it is a wonderful way to entertain and to engage others. Stories are not direct or personal, but they convey a message that can be interpreted by other world views. Various story-telling devices, such as films, novels and plays have become part of a vast entertainment industry that often reflects cultural ideals. Religions often use a book of stories, such as the bible, to convey moral beliefs. So it is perhaps not surprising that HCI has developed forms of narrative to convey stories and messages about people?s lives that it wants other world views to hear.

Usability through storytelling, the theme for the UPA 2006 conference, was examined from many angles. Presenters looked at how stories fit into our work, throughout the entire user-centered design process.

The homepages of three leading Chinese retail banks are assessed for their usability.

Jared's article Innovation is the new black struck home for me. Not just because he quotes IBMer Eric Tsou from the @issue conference, but because "innovation" has quickly permeated many things within IBM.

For me personally, I have worked on The Innovation Value and won an "Innovation clients can feel" award for a different project. If you have been watching ibm.com, you will notice a lot on innovation. I cannot count all of the messages tied to innovation any more.

I'd say "Innovation is the new blue". (^:

My first glimpse into the business world's obsession with innovation was last year's International Workshop on Accelerated Radical Innovation. There I started to pick up the innovation lingo and, like Jared, saw how important experience design was going to be. None of this user experience work is new, it is just becoming a lot more valuable. If this is because CEO's are obsessed with innovation, then I am quite happy to share my background and experience to help them innovate.

Innovation: "It's the user experience, stupid".

Karl Fast's The Confluence of Research and Practice in Information Architecture is a recap of IA and research from the summit. If you were at the panel discussion you will remember Karl as the guy in the audience who had more / better stuff to say than those of us on the panel.

I like his point about the difference between researchers and academics, and I look forward to the 2007 Summit.

This paper draws inspiration from diverse media to understand what constitutes experience. In doing so, it seeks directions for building experience into design of elearning products.

Leave it to Ohio to apply the term "Blue Collar" to information technology. The Ohio Supercomputer Center has a program called Blue Collar Computing. Some quotes about it:

The complexity of current HPC [High Performance Computing] hardware and software creates a substantial "barrier to entry" for both scientists and engineers. Without proper HPC tools many of our modern research problems range from extremely difficult to impossible to solve. In short, we are losing opportunities for innovation due to an incomplete national HPC infrastructure.

The most formidable barrier of HPC adoption is the lack of simple and cost-effective tools available for use. Just as the graphical user interface (GUI) made desktop computing accessible, and web browsers made networking popular, the right tools are needed to make HPC widely effective.

That is, supercomputers are too hard to use for most businesses.

OSC lists some good next steps to make Blue Collar Computing happen, like public-private collaborations, training and better tools, but one focus is clearly missing in my view: focus on the total user experience by utilizing user-centered design methods. A focus on reducing complexity, usability, understanding user needs, iterative design, etc. is what has made the GUI and the web what they are today. It is long overdue for supercomputers to catch up.

Writing at Clustermonkey, Stanley Ahalt and Kathryn Kelley (from OSC) sum it up well in their article HPC for the Rest of Us. The biggest barrier is: "Hard to use means hardly used – at least by the broader community".

The other news is that this may be going national. USACM reports that legislation for a similar effort has been introduced. About the bill:

• OSC press release
• Blue Collar Computing and Business Assistance Act of 2006 (the bill, from the Library of Congress)
• DeWine press release

We shall see if this catches on at the federal level. And if "blue collar" joins "user friendly" as another way to say "easy to use".