Jill's musings

A friend of mine, let's call her O, is starting a new blog on being a new mom with her two sisters. With this new venture, the three sisters hope to share their stories and experiences as a way of supporting each others as well as any new moms or mom-to-be's out there. As a busy career mom of an adorable one-year-old boy, O is new to blogging and had asked me to help her set up her blog. We had a fun time on FaceTime yesterday, chatting about pregnancy, babies, and things she ran into using Blogger as a first-time user. I couldn't help but put my UX hat on. Here are the things I learned from our conversation from a UX lense. What is ... Blogging introduces plenty new concepts for a new user to digest. The exact meaning and implications of some of the terms aren't crystal clear to myself as someone who has blogged on and off for a number of years.   What is a Domain? The very first concept we talked about was Domain. O had the sense that a domain name is the...

Summary: A user experience a selection barrier when he/she is faced with multiple choices for accomplishing a task but is unsure of which one to select [1]. I recently experienced this as I was beginning to do text analytics in MATLAB. In this blog, I document my trip through a land of many choices trying to figure out a single file reading function to use and how I wish the experience had gone better. Finally, I Text  analytics is a hot topic these days. I came across John Laudun's Text Analytics 101 when browsing for an intro article. The article walked the reader through an example that involved revealing language usage patterns in a short story based on the frequency of words. A light bulb lit up in my head: why don't I do the same thing with my Toastmaster speeches? That would help me understand, quantitatively, what words I "rely on" the most and help me think about how I might vary my language to make my speeches more accurately express the meanings I int...

As the weather in the New England gets colder, we've been spending more week nights at the town's library. My favorite section of the library is the northeast side of the second floor filled with books on homemaking, art, and career. As a frequent visitor, I'm hardly surprised by the surroundings here. But I was the other night. As I was walking down the aisle, I noticed a couple of unusual signs on the side of one book shelve (Figure 1). They were eye-catching because  they had pictures in them in addition to the expected book section numbers. (First time in my life had ever noticed a picture on the side of a library book shelve!  Anyone else in the same boat?) One picture had a puppy and a cat in it pointing out the Pets Section. Another showed a pot of boiling spaghetti for Cooking, obviously. And finally, the last one was a clipart with a man and a woman in power suits hinting at the Career & Business Section.  Figure 1. A couple unusual signs at the Mors...

Finally, I got myself what I had been wanting for a lifetime, a sewing machine! It is not an exaggeration when I say "a lifetime" considering how long I've known to sew and mend things, by hand of course, and for how long I've wanted to automate the process, or at least partially. This habit of mine, or an essential life skill for women in my grandparents' generation and a good part of those in my mom's, is finally turning into a serious hobby for me by this cute investment - white with blue floral design. As an end user who wants to get things done rather than to learn, I made what I considered to be a smart buy. I bought the simplest model (and the cheapest!), thinking it would be easier to use than an advanced model because there would be less features to confuse me. In addition, based on the general belief that roughly 70% of the job can be performed using 30% of the features in software applications, and that these percentages are applicable to househo...

I experience this frustration at least once a day. My favorite routine leaving my office in the afternoon is to start the Youtube App on my phone to listen to my favorite shows -- lately, these have been VOA. I have my phone set up so that it automatically logs onto the university wireless to stream the videos because the wireless signal is far better than my 3G reception in this engineering building with strange sturctures where my office is located. My daily frustration begins as I get out of the building and contiue to walk to the edge of the campus near the verge of the wireless coverage. The Youtube app has paused mid-video. Not surprising since the wireless signal strength indicator reads 1 out of 3 bars. But 3G is back with 5 full bars!!! Obviously, it's time to switch back to 3G but unfortunately, my phone doesn't know to do that on its own. So, as usual, I stop mid-track, exit out of the Youtube app, go to the settings to log off the wireless by hand, then retar...

4:57pm... more than six hours after I had a light sweet potato porridge and some skimpy fried vegetables, my body and mind are being taken over by an uncontrollable urge for food. I tried to convince myself that I could still hold on to this "mind numbing" task without replenishing my body, then the next second, I discovered yet another perfect task for CoScripter ! So the task I've been working on for the past 20 something minutes is "mind numbing" -- yes, the exact phrase one of Allen Cypher's customers used to describe his/her job of data entry. Though mine task is not a complete data entry task, it does involve quite a bit of manual repetition with minimal things that are of interest to any intelligent minds. To give a big picture of my work (and life if I have one : p), I'm a PhD. candidate in computer science with a concentration in HCI. This is my final year, a.k.a., the job-hunting year, and the fall career fair is less than two days away. I...