World Usability Day 2009 is Thursday this week. The topic in 2009 is Designing for a Sustainable World. Hence check worldusabilityday.org for an event nearby – easy and CO₂-friendly to reach.

Editor's picks (that's me):

• WUD Prague with the Sun NetBeans UX team and the special guest Mr. Sun A11y Peter Korn.
• WUD Hamburg with a special session on sustainability.
  

Do you notice the difference? No? Good. Good design is when you do not notice it. You probably haven't recognized that the prompt icon has changed compared to the icon that was used for nearly a decade.

The former icon still had the original Sun purple on a beveled button (the latter a usability issue in its own, because there is nothing to click). And even though the Sun Ray 1 is still on duty at many sites, it has long been replaced by a couple of successor models. Hence the icon of the tilted thin client device is not appropriate anymore.

The new set of status icons will be part of the upcoming SRSS 4.2 release. The entire set is presented and explained at SRSS Troubleshooting Wiki.

Thanks to Jörg for the good cooperation, and welcome to the blogosphere.

Get ready for the World Usability Day 2009. Although there is some time left until Nov-12, the CfP for the event in Hamburg is out (submission deadline is July-31). What I really like this year is the attempt to have a variety of session formats and the common theme of sustainability. As Bill Buxton said in his wonderful closing keynote at CHI08, there is no contradiction between design and green. Now I should count the Watts that Sun VDI is saving with the current paradigm shift from PCs to desktop virtualization.

> Call for Participation

When Peter approached me a few weeks ago to work on the UI design for the next release of Sweet, I had just started on twitter in order to understand what all the fuzz is about. Well, I cannot say I get it, but at least I got some interesting links that I had missed otherwise.

Now Sweet is our internal microblogging service, based on open source laconi.ca. You can try out laconica at identi.ca or take a look at the before state_

It is not possible to significantly change a project in mid air – but this is exactly what I did by tweaking the CSS and a few images to create a pleasant and inviting design for Sweet. Note the logo (done with creatr.cc), the color scheme, the layout, the text counter, the tabs, the font changes, and the tag cloud in the after image. BTW_ the bird in the tree indicates that a tweet is also visible to the public on twitter.

Paying attention to the 'design details' can even improve the usability of such a project. A professional design increases the perceived quality and therewith the user experience. Since the relaunch we have more users and we even figured out that there was another installation of laconica running inside Sun -- they are now planing the migration to Sweet.

All this took me less than a week. I learned a lot about dirty CSS hacks, and got in touch with 2 nice colleagues at Sun whom I never met in person. Peter was a kind of project lead, and Olof the engineer behind the curtain. And guess what, our main communication tool was... Sweet!

> internal URL: http://do.sfbay.sun.com/sweet/

Some time ago I've created a planet of all design, usability and accessibility blogs at Sun. That makes it easy to check and subscribe what's going on in this area. Now it was a snap to add Oracle's Usable Apps and Luke Kowalski's Blog as well.

Sun & Oracle User Experience Design

enjoy
Matthias

I spent some time exploring and experimenting with wikis.sun.com. First of all, it is a wiki that is open to people inside Sun as well as outside. Second, it is divided into spaces on various topics. Each space is created by a Sun employee, has its own set of permissions that control the access level for the users. Everything is possible -- from anybody can do everything, down to just the space owner can see and edit the pages of her wiki space.

The notation guide reveals some nice features. It is definitely worth to take a look. My personal highlight is the capability to include some external content to wiki pages. For example, the wiki page for the Sun Ray Conenctor for VMware View Manger lists all of Sun's blog postings that are tagged with 'srvc'. The wiki macro that does the trick is:

{rss:url=http://blogs.sun.com/main/feed/entries/atom?tags=srvc}

The other feature I like to discuss in brief is the page layout and a navbar with macros. Therefore, all my wiki pages are based on the same skeleton:

{section}
{column:width=70%}

main content goes here

{column}

{column:width=5%}
{column}

{column:width=25%}
{include:navbar}
{column}
{section}

This divides the page into 3 columns: 70% width for the main content, 5% white space, 25% for the navigation bar on the right. The latter contains the same elements for all pages by including another wiki page 'navbar'. Here is my navbar:

{panel:bgColor=#eef|borderColor=#ccc}
h6. Pages
[A Social Software Pattern Language]
{pagetree:startDepth=2}
\\
{pagetreesearch}
\\
{recently-updated-dashboard:showProfilePic=true} 
\\
{panel}

A light blue box with a tree view of all pages in the wiki space, a search element, and a log of recent changes in the wiki space to stimulate participation. '\\' is a forced empty line. Here is an example: A Social Software Pattern Language

BTW_ I strongly recommend to put such recurring elements to the right, in order not to break the visual connection between the page heading and the content.

enjoy,
mmprove

1. Keep it simple.
2. But not simpler.
3. Keep scalability in mind.
4. End users are not dumb.
5. Sysadmins are human beings, too.

this blog will be revived because I have decided to join Sun's Desktop Virtualization team in Hamburg. As an User Experience Architect I will collect user requirements in this area and design a system for companies who want to replace their PCs with thin clients -- like eg. Sun Ray -- and use the computational power of the server room. You can argue that the desktop is virtual anyway - at least I like to argue that way. The desktop is a collection of metaphors, more or less consistent since the 1980s. To that extent the current development should be better called "remote desktop" -- but sooner or later both "remote" and "virtual" will become obsolete concepts for the end user.

Until then, best
Matthias

This blog comes to an end because I have decided to leave Sun after 5, nearly 6 great years at the StarOffice/OpenOffice.org User Experience team. It has been a fun ride with you.

My special thanks go to Christian, Stella, Frank, Bettina, Lutz, and Götz for the surprising and beautiful coffeepot à la Don Norman. That's magnificent!

5 new blogs on the block. I'd be happy if you stop by from time to time for some inspiration.

• OpenOffice.org User Experience - about improving the open source office suite
• User Experience & HCI Design - about delightful software and web applications
• User Experience Management - about product management and innovation processes
• Interface Culture - about computers as new media
• metascript - everything else is miscellaneous

Take care and all the best
Matthias

Usability Verbände, Verteiler und Netzwerke. Kurzvorstellungen und Diskussionen über UPA, GI, ACM, etc. pp. Welche Organisationen und Communities gibt es im Bereich Usability? Und was bringen sie?

So das Thema des gestrigen Abends. Die gesammelten Links finden sich im Archiv von uxHH.

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