I made it to Denver this morning (6th airport in the last 5 days) and am looking forward to the UPA conference.

First, I will be learning more about World Usability Day 2006 - November 14th - check out the new website for it. For those of you in northwest Ohio - start thinking about what you want to do for World Usability Day this year. Last year I was in San Francisco - this year I will be home and looking for help to organize something locally.

Second, I will get to hang out with more IBMers - lunch on Wednesday if nothing else. Often the easiest way to find out what my colleagues are doing is to spot them "on the outside". IBM is too big.

Of course, I will also be attending a few days of the conference. My two must-sees: interaction design / agile and the panel on the state of web site usability (I was on a MIUPA / local version of this panel a few years ago). Other sessions: too hard to decide.

Finally, look for me up on stage. I get 15 seconds of "fame" this time, which will be related to something I am very proud of: serving my profession.

通过讲故事进行可用性研究是UPA2006年会议的主题，这一主题经过了多角度的考量。与会者研究了故事是怎样融入我们的工作并贯穿于整个的以用户为中心的设计进程中的。

Yee-ha! Flamenco, the leading faceted browsing research platform, has officially gone open source. See also: Flamenco section at SourceForge.

I was lucky enough to get a preview copy of the code to test out a few months ago. It was easy to install and within a few hours I had learned just enough Python to make changes. I plan on using it for some of my personal sites - perhaps reviving Usable Web on Flamenco, if I ever get the time.

The article by David Twiddy, AP Business Writer, about cell phone simplicity is getting good distribution (Google search on "Some Cell Phone Owners Spurn Gadgetry").

I did not notice the article until I was reading my Sunday morning paper. The bagels taste better when you are reading things like:

If you bring somebody in and they have problems, it's not because they're dumb, but we were dumb with the design.

We believe there's a strong correlation between our standard of success and how usable the products are.

I am sure most of you reading this found the article long before I waited a week for my local paper to publish it. WebWord covered this article already and there are a few more blog entries about the article and usability.

With a name like The good, the bad and the irrelevant, how could you not want to attend this conference?

"The user and the future of information and communications technology," September 3-5, Helsinki. Organized by COST Action 269.

The goal is to bring together technology developers, designers, policy makers, social scientists (and others) to talk about a human-centric point of view to technology.

The programme lists topics such as diversity, design for communities, democracy, users as designers, and usability studies.

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".

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".

Links to items from the CUU 2003 proceedings are now available on the CUU 2003 program page.

Links go to the ACM Digital Library. You will have to log in to get to the PDF files. My SIGCHI membership gave me access, but if you have a general membership in the ACM DL, you should probably be able to get to them as well. Also, you can buy 1 item at a time if you wish.