Human Factors

I’ve just arrived back from Wellington’s first Girl Geek Dinner ever at Long Xiang, the Chinese Restaurant in Dixon Street. It was a pretty cool event, a nice mixture of eating, chatting and listening to successful women in geeky jobs – a very useful opportunity to get in contact with others working in similar areas. Unfortunately the food was not very good, even the dessert (ice cream) tasted funny, but the event itself was definitely worth going. On my way there I was wondering if women today really need a guy-free environment to talk – usually I’m not a great fan of too much feminism. But I don’t think that the meeting was focussed only on the feminine side of our geekyness, it was more a nice way of meeting new people, who just happen to be female. A few males were there as well, and I think it’s a bit weird that a boy won the main prize in the raffle, but apart from that Brenda and her helpers can be very proud of the event they organised…

GoodGAze is a tool to predict human visual attention. At CeBIT in Hanover, Germany, the development team is currently showing how it works. Based on neuroscientific algorithms the software can tell you where people will look at on your website, a fast and easy way to optimise it. This could replace resource- and time-consuming eye tracking studies in the future…

screenshot:goodgaze.com

I can’t believe I haven’t come across retrievr before! It’s a great little application that allows you to draw a rough sketch and delivers flickr pictures that match your drawing. I wonder how long I will have to keep on sketching until one of my own flickr photos shows up? ;-)

New World is currently introducing a new way of self-check out at their supermarkets on South Island and in Auckland. After testing one of the first stations in Nelson during the Christmas break, I can’t wait until they implement this system in Wellington. In earlier days (and as it still is common practice at Pack’n'Save) you had to pick up a hand-held scanner when entering the supermarket, scan your items during your way along the aisles and pay with a human, who could randomly check if you didn’t put more stuff in your bags than you scanned. It’s all different now! ;-)

You do your shopping as usual, and only when you approach the check out area, you have to decide if you want to use the self-check out or rather communicate with a human being.

If you feel like showing off your independence, you turn towards the check out machine and let it guide you through the process of turning the things in your basket from New Word property into your own belongings.

You scan your items, place them in a bag attached to some kind of scales (that’s how they know that you weren’t cheating) and chose the method of payment.

Finally you take away your bag. And that’s the only crucial point in the whole process – the machine definitely does expect you to take your bag. Just taking away your belongings and leave the plastic bag behind causes an error message. We chose to ignore it and got away with it. On the one hand it’s a nice way of stress-free shopping, but on the other hand it will most definitely cost some jobs. Why is there so often a down side on inventions like this?

Just two weeks ago Virtual Hosting created a list of the Top 100 User-Centered Blogs. Divided into seven different categories from Accessibility, to Web Standards, to User-Centered Design and Writing, there’s a blog for everyone interested in User Experience and a user-focussed approach. Some of my favorite reads are in there and I’m sure that I’ll add a couple of more blogs to my daily routine, once I had the time to have a closer look at the ones that are mentioned. This list seems to be something like the yellow pages of UI blogs.

WebDU 2008 will be held from 7th to 9th May at Starcity in Sydney, Australia.

If you’re living on this part of the hemisphere you should definitely go, but even if you’re living in other parts of the world it’s worth a trip (just combine it with a holiday trip around Australia or New Zealand).

German laws are quite tough when it comes to access to pornography for juveniles. While every porn provider needs to prove that teenagers can’t access their contents, internet amateur video platform YouPorn doesn’t have any access control mechanism at all. A German porn provider went to court on this matter and reached an injunction that internet provider Arcor has to block YouPorn for all 2.4 Million customers.

This is the first time in Germany that a carrier is made liable for content someone else generated. Where will this lead to?
(via e-commerce-blog.de).