Author: tiphane

50 ans d’informatique: #2 – méfiez-vous de l’autorité

Published by

numéro 2 de ma série 50 ans d’informatique Dès les premiers jours du MacIntosh de Apple, il y avait un engoument autour de cette machine de la même façon qu’auourd’hui il y a un certain engoument pour le iPhone en comparaison des autres. À l’époque, l’enthousiasme était lié à la facilité d’utilisation, ce qui était indéniable en comparaison aux complications d’installer différents logiciels sur un PC, en plus des équipements, mais après quelques années les arguments des adeptes du Mac perdaient de leur sens, et ressemblaient plus à de la religion. Je travaillais sur des produits pour le PC et Windows, et je me souviens avoir discuté les mérites de mettre du texte en dessous des icônes pour accélérer la reconnaissance et l’efficacité du travail de l’usager. Je trouvais personnellement de la difficulté à distinguer certains icônes des autres, et la culture du département d’engineering disait que j’étais un minable usager. Sauf que quelques années plus tard, une nouvelle version de Windows (je crois que c’était 95) montrait les icônes avec un nom en dessous …

50 Ans d’Informatique: Se Centrer sur l’Usager

Published by

Il y a 50 ans déjà, je commençais au département d’informatique de l’université de Montréal… Il y a 42 ans, j’écrivais un document préliminaire au projet qui allait financer les activités fondatrices de Logitech. Depuis longtemps à la retraite, j’ai passé à d’autres choses (par exemple, j’ai fait un M.A. en litérature anglaise), mais j’ai toujours gardé l’oeil pour un domaine qui n’est toujours pas enseigné en informatique: la usability et le user-centered design. Je voudrais simplement montrer des exemples, dans cet article et ceux qui suivront, de comment nous devrions, en tant qu’auteurs, designers, développeurs, et membres d’équipes de développement de produits, aller voir comment le vrai monde utilise nos produits, ou les produits des autres, ou travaille dans le domaine d’une application que l’on voudrait qu’elles adoptent. Idée #1: Vous ne savez pas tout, et votre équipe non plus Je me souviens de mon mémoire de maîtrise qui était centré autour d’un logiciel que j’avais écrit pour transformer des textes afin de les envoyer à un appareil de photocomposition. J’avais inventé un langage …

More Thoughts about Creativity and Human-Centered Design

Published by

I wrote last week about Richard I. Anderson‘s class on User-Centered Design and Usability, and more thoughts occurred to me about how I found myself advocating for more user involvement in all phases of design and engineering while in fact I wanted to free my creative spirit. I am retired, and I have happily tried various creative endeavors: writing short stories and poetry, playing the piano, taking photos, sewing, dancing, etc. I remember my best moments in my early days at work were when I could write a piece of code that was, mostly, a beautiful piece of code, or finding my way out of someone else’s spaghetti code… Talking to people – users or others with alternative ideas – was hard, because they were challenging my creation. Of course, that doesn’t work well in product development, but everyone was doing it, from marketers to designers to the facility manager who had chosen the color of the walls. It has gotten worse recently with random commenters on the web. I have stopped altogether looking at …

In Memoriam: Richard I Anderson

Published by

Recently I was showing a usability issue of the institutional kind to a friend, and mentioned I had learned so much about human-centered design from taking Richard I. Anderson’s class, oh some 30 years ago maybe? So I wanted to check on Richard and stumbled upon the announcement of his passing and a memorial at BayCHI, an organization he gave so much of his time and energy. I retired early, and learned about Richard’s sickness and times of homelessness, contributed to “Friends of Richard,” and I think last time I met him at a cafe in Berkeley he was going to shelter at a friend’s house (I learned at the memorial it did happen). There was no reason for me to not believe his story and discovery of the sickness he had been afflicted with, but I was so sorry that he had relied on friends who sent him on a spiraling downfall by having him committed to a mental ward. I read his now deleted blog telling how after he had recovered (thanks to …

1978-1981: from Sherbrooke to Switzerland

Published by

I found this job at the computer centre of the Université de Sherbrooke, having responded to an ad in the newspaper La Presse. It wasn’t quite “in my field” if there was such a thing after the experience of developing COMPO and the map-making software, and I found that the best part of it was the few hours a week I had to be at the “consulting desk” solving people’s problems. This was an IBM 360 installation, and even that was relatively new to me, but in a sense it was all about trying to figure out what they were trying to do, and find in the manuals the description of their instructions. I even learned basic computer operations, mounting magnetic tapes and disk packs, so it was fun to be around. In the late spring, the director of the Math department came to ask if I could teach a summer class to substitute a professor suddenly unable to do it. I had given them a seminar on the Pascal language, and the class was …

1978: COMPO, a Phototypesetting System

Published by

That was the title of my Master’s Thesis. It was written in French, at the Université de Montréal. It’s on microfilm at the University’s library (I’m not sure if I kept a copy, in all my moves!). Here’s a paper I wrote in French about it, in which you can see examples of what it did: My advisor hadn’t been too pushy or specific about what to do, and he was going to spend the year away on sabbatical… I guess that was a good way to let me be creative, even though I didn’t know that word at the time. Self-expression, self-determination, and even self-esteem weren’t part of my upbringing, and I had been told to be quiet early on as a child. But I had chosen this advisor, Paul Bratley, at first because in a presentation of the department’s professors, he had the most interesting field of interest. I shyly knocked on his door, intimidated by his look (what was it? His facial expression said I could be boring), and said I found …