An interesting conversation about 'users doing other things' starting in Graham Attwell's blog
24-June-2006
[
practice2.0 ,
kind=commentary on other content ]
- A del.icio.us API python script for co-ordinating multiple accounts | KNotations
- Yup! We're always doing 'other' other things - and that context is important
- Graham Attwell, The Wales-Wide Web | Real life experience
Graham Attwell, in the wales-wide-web, notes a point that came out of a phone conversation we had this morning - that in the real-world users are almost always doing 'other things' when they come to use a bit of software. I've added a few more thoughts on the matter in a reply to his blog entry.
Graham notes, in his blog, a point that came up while we were chatting on the phone this morning:
...there is a world of difference between someone sitting down to develop use cases when this is the thing they are doing i.e. installing, testing, using, a service or a piece of software as the task in itself - and using the services and applications as one small part of their everyday working life.Graham Attwell, The Wales-Wide Web | Real life experience Good computer systems should let me keep doing things my way, even if for a few minutes I will be sending things their way.
This is a surprisingly important point, and one which is surprisingly hard to get across. I hope we can illuminate the issue with further discussion - and some examples - over the next months.
I replied at length in his blog, and not being one to use prose once-only, I paste most of it below as well :o) ... see the extended text for this entry.
This is a much more important issue than it sounds, because by enabling casual, connected gestures of content-creation, systems like API-enabled weblogging and del.icio.us bookmarking let us share context to at least some extent. If it isn't *really* easy to post in the context of what I'm doing now - if I cannot make lots of tiny content-connecting/creating/categorising gestures without stopping what I'm doing - the good systems effects that we see in del.icio.us for instance will not emerge.Yup! We're always doing 'other' other things - and that context is important (Mike Malloch in the wales-wide web)
