Tom Stewart's Blog

The study of the relationship between people and technology has been called a variety of names over the years - from computer ergonomics, human computer interaction and usability to, more recently, human-centred design and user experience.

Two news stories caught my attention recently – the UK launch of the iPhone and the scandal at the BBC over naming Blue Peter’s kitten. 

You might not think they are related, or related to usability - but I beg to differ.

I have just given my annual lectures to some postgraduate students about what it’s like doing usability in the real world (i.e. the world where you can’t spend three months redesigning the perfect interface to a toaster). 

And one of the issues I cover is why it seems to be so difficult to design usable products. It must be difficult - there are lots of clever designers and few really usable products.

Once again, Apple has started a new year by announcing a plethora of exciting goodies for technophiles, with the long anticipated iPhone taking centre stage.

As a fairly committed early adopter (I have not used a paper diary since 21st December 1996 – yes I do know the date exactly, because my latest Palm based PDA has all my diary entries since then), I am already drooling.

Last November, I sounded off about two things – one was that I did not like the tag line for World Usability Day 2005 – Making IT easy - and the other was that I didn’t think we had much good usability to celebrate.

I have recently returned from an international standards meeting in Washington (and that is a story in itself – I nearly had to fly without my laptop and Treo – aargh!) where we were discussing the revision of the human centred design standard ISO 13407.

So I am now officially a blogger.  Indeed, I am an expert blogger.  At this point, I’d like to forget that ex- means ‘has been’ and ‘spurt’ is a ‘drip under pressure’.  But back to the point, once again my capacity for inaccurate prediction has struck gold. 

In my mind, blogging was always for other people – people with nothing better to do than fill the ether with their ramblings.  Not for people like me with valuable contributions to make to the digital world.  And yet here I am blogging away (on a late train home from work, in fact).