Electron Hut: Kyle Bedell’s Blog

Katt and I put together a new band in Rock Band for the XBOX 360 tonight called “Cupcake Crisis.” When Katt went to put in a band quote…this is what she entered:

“I ate your freakin’ cupcake!!”

Harmonix, in their infinite sense of humor, put in the following ‘error’ message:

Your band quote is not what most would describe as “classy.” You can still view it locally, but it will not be visible on XBOX Live until you change it.

Awesome.

So I finally finished my undergraduate work at Bentley College! We had our commencement ceremony today were I graduated summa cum laude with my Bachelors of Science in Computer Information Systems. I’m happy to have finished this leg of my acedemic journey. It was a long haul, but I hold the friends I’ve made and the experiences I’ve had along the way close to my heart. Now, off to finish the Masters and retire from academia!

Oh, and as Matt mentioned in his post, the last fellow on stage’s words of wisdom shall always remain in my head:

“Be careful. Don’t fall down the steps.”

As you all have probably seen from Matt’s post and the brand-new blog management UI, we’re running WordPress MU 1.5.1, the multi-user version of WordPress 2.5. It packs a slew of improvements and incorporates all sorts of findings from Happy Cog’s usability testing activities. Note the new headings and task organization in the admin interface.

You’ll notice that the dashboard no longer stinks. There’s substantially less clutter (what was up with the WordPress.com RSS feed taking up the entire page in the old version?) and the dashboard now supports widgets to let you add and remove information clusters as you see fit. There’s a nifty little ‘comment bubble’ that shows how many comments you have sitting in moderation too.

The file uploading interface is also vastly improved, and now supports both multiple uploads (yay) and EXIF exraction from any JPEG files you uploaded, so you can embed that information into your blog templates. Speaking of pictures, you can easily create image galleries by placing a tag in your post after you’ve uploaded a bunch of images. Check out the detailed documentation for some additional tips and tricks.

The search interface now searches through posts and pages (it used to only search through posts). You can also edit your post tags from inside the admin interface (no more management plugins required).

The visual editor is MASSIVELY improved over what it was before. If you’ve been working in ‘code view’, give the new visual editor a shot. You may still not like it, but I think you’ll agree that it’s superior to the old version. There’s a full-screen view option available, embedded ‘add media’ tools, and the interface generally looks cleaner with less clutter. Also, while I doubt this applies to anyone, there’s also concurrent-edit protection in case you get multiple folks editing the same post at once.

The techie administration folks like Matt will enjoy:

• Salted passwords (making brute-force cracking tactics more-or-less useless)
• Secure cookies (they’re encrypted!)
• Inline documentation for the WordPress code
• Database optimizations (some minor speed improvements)
• Expandable ‘Add Media’ buttons on the writing interface
• Automatic plug-in updating

Enjoy, and keep on writing!

I just finished reading over a paper for my Field Methods intensive course (starts Monday!) that I found extremely interesting. Instead of relying on a traditional usability test or interview to get users to talk about their thoughts and feelings on mobile phones, this particular researcher used a more artistic medium: collages. The act of creating an artifact to express one’s thoughts on a project is not entirely new (people have been asked to draw things before), but collage is, by nature, an extremely rich medium for expression. As it turns out, it works extremely well for UX research when you’re trying to find out people’s opinions on products or services they’re already familiar with. The collage remains long after the user has left the session, and they are relatively easy to analyze (especially when you compare them to sifting through heaps of traditional data).

I never thought you could do research with such a creative form of expression! This is all incredibly interesting research.