Accessible Planet

Michael Surtees and his claimed “knowledge” of “webz and fontz.” (Also! His paranoia.)

Did gay designer Leo Obstbaum “die suddenly,” i.e., kill himself?

IDEA2009 had the world’s foremost thinkers and practitioners converge on Toronto’s MaRS Convention Center to share the big ideas that inspire, along with practical solutions for the ways people’s lives and systems are converging to affect society. Listen and learn from experts in a variety of fields as we all continue the exploration of Social Experience Design.

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Day 1 @idea09 | Day 2 @idea09


Innovation Parkour – Matthew Milan

Insight is one of the most widely used and poorly understood concepts in the creative process. Insight is what drives the big idea, validates the crazy hunch, and frames both problem and solution in one fell swoop. Without the right perspective, knowledge, and grounding, generating insight can be unpredictable, wildly unreliable, and completely inconsistent in application.

Matthew Milan, Principal and Design Director with Normative, helps us understand how to generate, identify, frame and use insight effectively. This poorly understood practice is an increasingly a critical skill to have when working on solving complex problems. As an information architect, insight is one of the best tools you can use to unpack difficult challenges and turn them into effective solutions.

Social experiences online might benefit from an alternative venue, but standard human dynamics, modes of kinship/friendship, etc. still apply. Furthermore, we have a rich history of examination to mine, and a range of metaphors to apply that allow us to shift our perspective and enjoy more innovative thinking. The techo-geeky thing is old news, Lisa applies some human thinking.

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The Art and Science of Seductive Interactions – Stephen Anderson

Remember that “percentage complete” feature that LinkedIn implemented a few years ago, and how quickly this accelerated people filling out their profiles? It wasn’t a clever interface, IA, or technical prowess that made this a successful feature—it was basic human psychology. To be good UX professionals we need to crack open some psych 101 textbooks, learn what motivates people, and then bake these ideas into our designs.

Independent consultant Stephen P. Anderson looks at specific examples of sites who’ve designed serendipity, arousal, rewards and other seductive elements into their application, especially during the post sign-up process when it is so easy to lose people. Regardless of your current project, the principles behind these examples (from disciplines like social sciences, psychology, neuroscience and cognitive science) can be applied universally. Best of all, attendees will receive a special gift that makes it easy to bridge theory with tomorrow’s deadline.

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Social Design Patterns Mini-Workshop – Christian Crumlish & Erin Malone

Principal at Tangible UX Erin Malone, and Curator at Yahoo! Design Patter Library Christian Crumlish present a family of social web design principles and interaction patterns to help user experience designers and strategists grapple with the social dimensions of their products and services. The family of patterns, principles, and practices provides a framework and starting point for the conceptual modeling of any interactive digital social experience.

Erin and Christian have observed and codified 96 patterns thus far, capturing user-experience best practices and emerging social web customs for practitioners; introducing the conceptual clusters of patterns, delve deeply into some of the most interesting patterns, and share fundamental principles and deceptively appealing anti-patterns in context through discussion of illustrative scenarios.

Editors Note: The second half of their presentation involved participants playing the Social Mania card game. I’ve included a few pictures of attendees learning the game the evening before to assist Erin and Christian during their presentation. Thanks to Denise Philipsen (@theguigirl) for posting these and other photos from the conference up on Flickr.

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If You Build It (Using Social Media), They Will Come – Mari Luangrath

Mari Luangrath is currently starting up her third entrepreneurial venture, Foiled Cupcakes. Without a traditional “cupcakery” storefront but choosing instead to focus on online order and personal delivery, Mari has gone completely non-traditional: she’s used Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to build relationships with Chicago’s most active and vocal influencers and more than double sales targets in month 1 and 2. As a result, 90 percent of the word-of-mouth business she’s received since May 2009 can be tied directly to social media.

While social media is constantly evolving from one medium to the next, it’s absolutely one of the most immediate ways to interact with potential consumers, influencers and connectors in your target market. Of course, there’s no one “right way” to do things in this dynamic environment. Mari shares insightful information regarding the real-time challenges she has faced to stay present in the lives of potential consumers amid all of the fluidity. She also discusses her targeted marketing action plan (what worked, what flopped, and how she’s used roadblocks to her advantage); suggest ways to identify which social media applications will work best for the results you desire; how to develop a plan to connect with targeted consumers; and ways to continue that relationship to provide consumers with an enhanced experience, leading to conversion and sales.

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The Dawn of Perfect Products – Tim Queenan

There is a potential upside in social media besides encouraging more dynamic communications and facilitating human networks: the end of bad products. Sure, “bad” is subjective but so is why we buy or don’t buy certain products. Could one of the effects of social media be that we see fewer and fewer inferior products existing in market?

Executive Director of Draftfcb NY’s Digital Practice Tim Queenan, explores what happens when a commodity driven market is regulated by the “crowd” and what types of products and experience start to emerge.

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These podcasts are sponsored by:

Information Architecture Institute: Through education, advocacy, services and social networking, the IAI has 1400 members from 80 countries demonstrating the value of Information Architecture to the world at large.




IDEA brings together the worlds foremost thinkers and practitioners. Sharing the big ideas that inspire, along with practical solutions for the ways peoples lives and systems are converging to affect society.




Visit boxesandarrows.com/about/participate to be a part of your peer written journal.



Axure RP is the leading tool for rapidly creating wireframes, prototypes and specifications for applications and web sites.



Morae is the premier software for deeply understanding customer experiences…and sharing those insights clearly and powerfully.

iRise enterprise visualization solutions give companies a powerful way to fully experience application before development.

Prior to becoming a senior UX designer at Popular Front Interactive, I spent two years as a mobile UX researcher within the Georgia Institute of Technology’s Mobile Technologies Group – a lab tasked with both future-casting and then rapidly prototyping innovative mobile experiences.

As I transitioned from academia to industry, I discovered that while mobile UX was discussed, it wasn’t discussed from the same broad frame of reference that I was used to within the confines of a research-based institution. Although more recent mobile UX conversations I have found myself in have undoubtedly benefited from the ongoing smart phone revolution, overall I still find these conversations to be needlessly driven by tactical adoration and lacking a conscious consensus regarding the fundamental principles of the mobile-user experience.

I do not presume these following principles to be all-inclusive or ultimately authoritative; rather, it is my hope that they are received as an anecdotal summation of my findings that might then spark and contribute to the larger conversation and consensus-building process.

 

PRINCIPLE #1: There is an intimate relationship between a user and their mobile device.

While an intimate relationship between an individual and their mobile device may seem like a given, the depth of that relationship probably goes deeper than most initially realize. In fact, I argue that the relationship extends to a physical level and the exchange of bodily fluids.

Imagine that it is a hot summer day and someone asks if they may borrow your mobile device to make a call. You hand it over. What level of trust does this simple act portray? Consider those around you right now: How many of them would you loan your mobile device to without hesitation? In your social circles, is it acceptable to decline such a request? How does context influence this scenario? What if you are at work? At a bar? How about a family reunion?

Let’s assume that this person is noticeably respectful of your device and the personal data it contains while making their call. At the call’s completion, the individual immediately and graciously returns it, whereupon you notice that it has accumulated an amount of … goo (perspiration, humidity, etc.) that is typical of mobile device use on a hot, sticky summer day…but then again, it isn’t your goo.

From a gooey physical level to a level of data privacy and security, there is an intimate bond between an individual and their mobile device, the strength of which often elevates the mobile device to the status of iconic personification. I am my phone. My phone is I.

In order to meet user expectations, mobile experiences should assume a semi-guarded state of primary usership; however, we must also responsibly protect our users. As the trend of embedding ourselves into our mobile devices increases, so does the cost of our devices being compromised. Assume primary ownership, allow for secondary usership, and plan for what might happen should we lose ourselves.

In a worst-case scenario, a compromised mobile device containing a significant amount of personal data would become the networked equivalent of a voodoo doll, where actions performed via the mobile device could cause actual harm to the individual personified by the device. In cases such as this, a remote wiping of all data on the device may be a user’s only recourse. 

 

PRINCIPLE #2: Screen size implies a user’s state. The user’s state infers their commitment to what is on the screen.

Imagine that you have been looking forward to seeing a particular blockbuster movie since the day it was green lit, and now that the day of its release has finally come you are going to get the most out of the experience by going to see the movie on the largest IMAX screen in the tri-state area.

Let’s say that when you finally take your seat in the sold-out theatre, you notice the person sitting next to you has a very annoying laugh. There is nowhere else to sit in the theatre, and you’ve been dying to see this movie for more than a year. What are the chances you abandon the experience and walk out? Probably fairly slim to none.

Now let’s say that you were backpacking through Europe when the above blockbuster was released, and that you have been equally anticipating the movie’s Blu-Ray release. To celebrate the release, you and your friends are gathering at the home of the friend who has an impressive home theater featuring a 52-inch HD screen, and again you find yourself seated next to the guy with the annoying laugh. Now how likely are you to abandon the experience? Probably more so than above, but still not likely.

What if this scenario played out in a college dorm room and the movie was being viewed on a 22-inch computer monitor? What if you were sitting next to the guy with the annoying laugh? The chances that you might abandon the experience are probably increasing.

What about a mobile device’s 3.5-inch screen? Is there any way you would sit next to some random person with an annoying laugh for 90 minutes to watch that movie? Probably not.

Although there are any number of social and environmental factors that would affect the user abandonment rate in the experiences described above, it is consistently possible to estimate a user’s level of commitment to an experience based upon the size of the screen through which they are engaging it.

Since mobile devices are likely to be the smallest screens in a user’s experience, the design of mobile experiences must accommodate the user’s varying commitment and distributed attention. How an experience accommodates these conditions will change depending on experience type — game, banking application, or the like — but the underlying impetus remains the same.

 

PRINCIPLE #3: Mobile interfaces are truncated. Other interfaces are not.

A dreaded task that usually accompanies getting a new mobile device is the act of transferring your data from the old device to the new. In years past, this meant arduously re-entering all of your contacts via the device’s, most likely E.161 (12 key), keypad.

There were a few early, notable attempts to ease this burden. GSM service providers pushed device manufacturers to save all user data to the devices SIM card by default, but the card’s limited storage capacity produced a poor user experience. On the other hand, CDMA service providers began automatically transferring address books between devices as a customer service. Even early on it was widely acknowledged that although an individual wanted to use information on their mobile device, they would go to great lengths to avoid having to manually enter that information.

Palm, and later Research in Motion, sought to improve this fact of mobile user experience by introducing and then proliferating the practice of syncing. This concept paired the truncated mobile interface with a full-sized desktop interface, allowing the user to easily and reasonably efficiently enter their address book data via a familiar QUERTY keyboard. Although this feature was initially limited to smart phones, it has since been incorporated into a wide swatch of consumer-grade devices. In fact, the notion of syncing has become so ubiquitous in mobile computing that the syncing of one’s entire networked identity is a core plank of Google’s Android operating system.

Even as miniaturized QUERTY became and becomes a more standard feature for all mobile devices, the truth remains that mobile interfaces are truncated and better used for manipulating data rather than entering it. One might conclude that as mobile devices continue to incorporate increasingly impressive sensor arrays, even standard, consumer-grade devices will provide powerful data collection capabilities. Regardless, data collection is not data entry, and data entry is not likely to become a mobile-appropriate activity. 

 

PRINCIPLE #4: Design for mobile platforms — the real ones.

There is a prevailing tendency is to discuss mobile platforms in terms of device manufacturers and service providers. This is understandable. It is fun and easy to get caught up in the moment of the latest tech demo, press release, or rumor. However, in needlessly binding the dialogue to the news of the day, we create unnecessary segmentation across an already complex landscape. The overall conversation is better served by focusing on the mobile platforms that have emerged as constants over time. Those four platforms are voice, messaging, the internet, and applications.

 

Voice

Voice was the original mobile platform, but it is also the platform with the most nebulous future. Don’t get me wrong: People will always need to make an occasional phone call. However, the frequency with which we are doing so is declining. Why? Mobility is as much about efficiency as anything else, and telephony (vocal communication and vocal response interfaces) has proven more difficult to optimize compared to other methods of interactivity.

For example, let’s say that you wanted to verify that your paycheck had been deposited. Most banks offer both tele-banking and online account access. Which interface are you likely to use, and why? How about if you wanted to order a pizza? Would you rather call, be placed on hold for five minutes, and then dictate your order to a multi-tasking teenager, or would you rather just use a GUI to do it?

 

Messaging

Friedhelm Hillebrand, the architect of the messaging (SMS) specification, described the platform’s limit of 160 characters as “perfectly sufficient.” The question we must ask ourselves in considering this mobile platform is, “Perfectly sufficient for what?” Although Hillebrand can provide several reasons for how he arrived at the 160-character limit, the one that I have always found the most interesting is that his team discovered that most postcards typically contain 150 characters or fewer.

Have you received or sent any postcards recently? If you have, they were likely either brief social communications (“Having a great time. Wish you were here!”) or they were simply task-oriented such as RSVP-ing for a wedding or canceling a subscription.

Messaging trends today continue to affirm Hillebrand’s postcard comparison. The vast majority of SMS traffic consists of social interactions within small groups of individuals. The second tier of usage is comprised of simple task-based transactions such as voting, entering contests, and receiving notifications.

In both cases, SMS and postcards, content-heavy experiences are a minority occurrence as the media is not designed to accommodate such a level of engagement. Furthermore one could argue that due to the designed efficiency of the messaging platform, that a content-heavy experience would be far from appropriate. 

 

The Internet

The Internet is the most awkward of the mobile platforms in that it is the one that is the least natively mobile. Currently almost 95% of all Internet users experience the web via displays with resolutions of 1024×768 or greater. As such, 1024×768 is observed as a fairly universal standard and is what a significant portion of Internet-based experiences are designed to. Given that mobile displays typically range between resolutions of 60×120 and 480×320, it is fairly obvious that most Internet-based experiences aren’t designed with mobile users as a primary consideration.

As a means of making Internet-based experiences more accessible to mobile users, most mobile web browsers have been designed to include adaptive methodologies for displaying larger experiences on smaller screens. While these adaptive tactics, which typically employ pan and zoom-esque interactions, have undoubtedly made more of the Internet accessible to mobile user, one could hardly argue that it has resulted in a desirable user experience. In fact, if browsing the Internet from a desktop is regarded as a scanning activity, than browsing the Internet through the adaptive lens of a mobile browser might best be described as a squinting activity.

As mobile web usage has continued to emerge as a somewhat common activity, the assumption that Internet-based experiences are to be automatically adapted for mobile users has given way to the design of alternative experiences specifically for mobile users. While this trend has provided mobile users with more efficient and scannable web experiences, it also has the potential of overplaying the users’ expectations for Internet-based mobile experiences.

As Internet-based mobile experiences have become more device-centric and sophisticated, they have begun to resemble mobile applications, thus creating a scenario where users might expect the Internet-based experience to function as a mobile application would. The distinction between desktop applications and Internet-based experiences may be rapidly evaporating, but it remains germane in the mobile experience. Although there are several differences between the platforms, the primary point of contrast I will draw here is that applications are able to use device-level services such as sensors, ad-hoc networking, and optics, whereas Internet-based experiences cannot. While mobile browsers are beginning to make some of these services available to Internet-based experiences, each platform will always have affordances the other doesn’t. As such, and to manage user expectations, if an experience looks like an application and attempts to behave as an application would, then it should be an application — and vice-versa.

 

Applications

From a technical standpoint, applications represent executables that are native to a specific mobile environment, have been selectively installed, and have access to the device’s full array of available functionality. However from a UX standpoint, they represent a specialized interaction design that caters to an affluent, sophisticated, and targeted mobile user base.

As few as 24 months ago, the seemingly basic task of locating and installing an application on a mobile device required a fairly developed skill set. With the recent proliferation of “app stores,” this task has become more user friendly; however the percentage of users who are able to install an application on their mobile device nowhere near approaches that of those who know how to make a phone call or send a text message. So, regardless of recent improvements to the overall process of acquiring and installing a mobile application, the user who can perform this task would still be considered sophisticated compared to the overall segment.

All things considered, mobile applications might best be described as the boutique mobile platform. As is the case with most boutique experiences, a comparatively small audience will compensate for itself through fervor and zealotry. However, since the success of an application-based mobile experience is based almost entirely upon acceptance within that small audience, extraordinary attention must be paid to the particulars of the target audience’s needs and behaviors. What existing need is the application attempting to mobilize? What efficiencies can a focused interface bring to that workflow? How can the specific affordances of a mobile device augment and improve upon that experience in contrast to using one of the other mobile platforms?

Mobile applications are powerful tools…for a relatively small segment of individuals who want them and know how to use them.

 

Conclusion

Someone tweeting on behalf of Punchcut once wrote, “In mobile UX, don’t confuse precedence with standard.” I couldn’t agree more, but as I hope that I’ve successfully illustrated, this statement is well ahead of where the conversation should be. Both standards and precedence are both tactical perspectives. Within our context, they both represent distinct libraries of interactions and are either redefined as the landscape evolves or simply replaced as more elegant solutions are brought to market.

The variable nature of each of these categorizations only further demonstrates why it is best for the current mobile UX conversation to focus on higher-level principles rather than tactical particulars.

As mobile UX designers, we have both opportunity and choice in front of us. The opportunity is to establish the foundation principles of a stable, yet still emerging, experiential space. The choice lies between getting caught up in the excitement of the fad du jour or asking ourselves the difficult question of what foundational principles am I following, or establishing, with the work that I am currently doing.

The only unfortunate part is that the time we have to make this decision is quickly running out.

The release of Thunderbird 3 is just around the corner. Aside from all the great new features Thunderbird 3 has in general, its accessibility story is also one which should be celebrated once the release has happened.

Thunderbird 3 is based on the Gecko 1.9.1 platform, which is the same version that Firefox 3.5 is based on. As such, Thunderbird 3 has learned all the great new features of the platform, many of which have a significant impact on users with disabilities. Please allow me to highlight the major improvements and new features.

Support for new accessibility APIs

Thunderbird 3 supports the IAccessible2 standard on Windows. IAccessible2 is a major enhancement to Microsoft Active Accessibility (MSAA), which allows assistive technologies to directly interact with the rich content an HTML e-mail message can have, through a defined set of APIs. Screen readers for the blind, for example, no longer need to rely on old-school screen-scraping methods to try and guess what the application is showing. Instead, headings, block quotes (such as in quoted messages) etc. are all identifiable without question. Font and styling information is available as well. NVDA 2009.1, Window-Eyes 7.1 and JAWS 10 and above take advantage of these technologies already and offer a hugely improved experience for their user bases over what Thunderbird 2.0 had to offer.

This also includes support for in-line spell checking. If enabled, screen readers can identify misspelled words just like in Firefox, and users can go and correct their mistakes on the fly without having to invoke the extra spell checking dialog.

Accessibility on the GNOME Desktop

Thunderbird 3 is accessible to Orca users on the GNOME desktop in Linux. While Thunderbird 2 offered close to no accessibility support, Thunderbird 3 offers a wide range of accessibility to visually impaired users.

Also, the support for ATK/AT-SPI allows other assistive technologies such as GOK (GNOME On-screen Keyboard) to interface with Thunderbird and allow the use by people with motor impairments.

Tabbable and properly labelled message headers

When reading messages, most of the header fields of a message are now reachable via the tab key. This is a huge improvement for any keyboard user. Access includes the “star” that allows to quickly add a contact to the address book or to edit a previously added contact.

All these fields and controls also have proper accessibility labels so that screen reader users immediately know what they’re interacting with.

One known problem is that the multi-functional “reply” control currently isn’t part of the tab order.

Better support when composing messages

Aside from the above mentioned API improvements, the UI also received some love to better communicate the happenings when filling out the from:, to: etc. fields while composing a message. Selecting a different field type now also does not throw newer versions of screen readers into limbo or confused states any longer. Working with the Contacts side bar is also supported.

Over-all UI improvements

Over-all, the various dialogs in Thunderbird such as Tools/Options, Tools/Account Settings and others have received a major accessibility overhaul esp with regards to properly labeling textboxes, radio groups and other XUL widgets so screen reader users get accurate information while tabbing through. Infact, a Thunderbird XUL UI fix was my very first patch when I started contributing to Mozilla.

New UI features were also made accessible

New UI features such as the all-new facetted search were also made largely accessible. The new Search, for example, makes heavy use of WAI-ARIA to allow both an appearance that’s visually appealing and keyboard and assistive technology communication that’s accessible. The one exception in this new piece of the product is the graph that shows the search results over time. This is based on SVG, which is totally inaccessible at the moment.

A call-out to Thunderbird extension developers

With the above improvements now being in place, it is equally important for Thunderbird extension developers to follow these simple rules to make their extensions accessible, as it is for developers of extensions for Firefox. DOM Inspector offers an accessibility view which allows you to check whether your XUL has proper labels for textboxes and other good markup! Also, don’t be shy to ask questions! The accessibility team hangs out on the #accessibility channel on irc.mozilla.org and will be happy to assist!

A few known problems remain

As always, nothing can be perfect, but we’re striving to be as perfect as possible. Having said that, there are a few issues that remain, but for which fixes are already visible on the horizon:

• When viewing messages as threads, the fact whether a thread is expanded or collapsed is not yet communicated to screen readers. This will be different once a new version of Thunderbird switches to using Gecko 1.9.2 or later, which includes the all-new tables support.
• The same is true for the “subscribe” dialog for newsgroups and IMAP folders. Right now, screen readers do not yet get the state whether a certain folder is checked or not. This will also change with a switch to the new Gecko platform.
• Folders in the folder pane cannot be navigated to using first-letter navigation. I’m hoping we’ll find a solution to this often voiced request in the future.
• The picker for rearranging the columns in the message list isn’t accessible via the keyboard yet. You can use the mouse emulation of your screen reader to get to that button to the right of the column headers to access options.

Thanks!

I’d like to thank everyone who has been writing to me over the past two years pointing out Thunderbird accessibility issues. As was expected, these actually made up a higher volume than Firefox since there were more UI-related issues. Keep the feedback coming!

I’d also like to extend a huge thank you to the team at Mozilla Messaging and the voluntary contributors who all helped with implementations, reviews, suggestions and advice while improvements for Thunderbird 3 were requested, triaged and acted upon. I really feel that accessibility is being taken seriously, and I honestly hope that a lot of users worldwide will show their appreciation by downloading and using Thunderbird 3 when it comes out! I’ve been using it for over 2 years now while it was being developed and haven’t regretted making the switch!

Keep up the good work!

Because DesignNotes.info has them. (Isn’t the type on your Web page like Trajan’s Column?)

The strong growth of open source in IT will be demonstrated with its prominent placement at the world's largest computer event, CeBIT 2010.

That's the news coming out of Hannover, Germany the permanent home for the CeBIT show, where the CeBIT Open Source 2010 event will be taking center stage at one of the largest expo halls according to show organizers Deutsche Messe. According to Britta Wülfing, CeBIT Event Manager, the shift of the Open Source exhibition to the more prominent Hall 2 is a direct response to the huge popularity this segment of the show enjoyed in 2009.

read more

You can’t act all surprised when people show up to shit in your pool. But what exactly can you do?

Because Joe·My·God has them

The AIR 2 beta went live on Adobe Labs yesterday, and it includes support for MSAA to allow assistive technologies on the Windows platform to access Flash-based content within AIR applications.

We are still doing testing and addressing issues, but encourage you to try it out. The beta runtime installer is available at http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/air2/.

For any readers who aren't familiar with AIR, what you are installing is not a developer tool but the runtime that is used to run AIR applications that developers create. There are many applications that are developed as AIR applications and this is underlying technology that allows those applications to be displayed on your system. So what does the addition of accessibility support mean for users with disabilities? For blind or low-vision users, this means that content that is developed with accessibility in mind will be able to interact with the applications using assistive technologies that they already use.

Will all AIR applications now be accessible? No, no more than all HTML websites or all C++ or Java applications are - but what this does mean is that developers now have the capability to address accessibility in their applications. With previous versions of AIR a developer could ignore accessibility for blind and some low-vision users because the information wouldn't reach the assistive technologies, but now with AIR 2 it does.

My colleague Daniel Koestler published a post on AIR accessibility yesterday, and he includes a link to an application that he developed with accessibility in mind that you can download and try.

Please give AIR 2 a try and let us know about your experiences.

In support of bloggers uniting to Fight for Preemies, I’d like to introduce the one preemie who has stolen my heart:

Fifty years ago, an impatient baby boy entered the world seven weeks early. Much to everyone’s surprised, a second baby boy also joined the party. Sadly, one twin brother lived only a few short days before being called home.

The remaining twin, weighing 3lbs 3oz at birth, struggled to survive. He was a sick little boy, prone to catching every bug that crossed his path. His development was delayed and he was diagnosis with cerebral palsy some time prior to his second birthday.

Because of his frequent and lengthy illnesses, he missed much of Grade 1, forcing him to repeat the grade. The same fate occurred in Grade 2, further dashing his self-esteem and his love for school. He went through the motions of doing his school work, without being fully engaged by his teachers or fully accepted by his fellow classmates.

That was until Grade 11 when he discovered computers that changed the trajectory of his life. He discovered a world that he understood, that he could control and manipulate as he liked; a world where he belonged and could immerse himself for hours and days at a time, a world where only his geeky friends could follow him.

Computers became a part of him, literally; he lives and breathes computers. Computers and what he can make them do are his passion. The guy with no spatial ability is able to see any computer screen in his mind’s eyes. Watching him solve a friend’s or client’s technical issue is amazing – and inspiring!

Initially, this guy may seem slow in thought. But, if people are patient and allow him to talk at his own pace, they realize he is wise beyond his years. Once his words and thoughts start flowing, his ideas, insights and dreams come shining through. He says the sweetest thing with such sincerity that he melts your heart and bring a tear to your eyes – or, at least, that is what he does to mine.

Who is the preemie who has captured my heart? The man I am proud to call my husband Darrell Hyatt.

Borrowing the thought-provoking question from my friend Liz, I asked Darrell, “If you could tell the whole world something once, have them believe you and understand, what would you tell them?”

Darrell responded with:

When asked to answer this question, what came to mind was "believe in yourself". I know that is not necessarily an easy thing to do when others around you don’t believe you or say things which make you doubt yourself. You are the best judge of what you are capable of and can do.

When you are faced with the challenge look inside yourself and find that inner strength and belief in yourself; it will guide you to the solution. You may not have all the answers along the way but the answers will be there at the correct time. The more you believe in yourself, the stronger that belief will become and will carry you to greater heights.

With such insight, such wisdom, can you understand why this guy, who began life so small, has captured my heart?

Darrell, I love you.

If you enjoyed this post, consider buying me a coffee. Thanks kindly.

Over the next ten years, tens, and possibly hundreds of millions, of new platforms are going to be put into place in the United States as part of a new national infrastructure; an equal number will be installed in Europe (many are already being installed). The same may happen in other parts of the world as well.

Most of these platforms will be invisible in every day life, but together they are intended to play a major role in limiting green house gasses, lowering national dependencies on foreign oil, and capping, or even lowering, our otherwise perpetually growing demand for electricity. Many of these platforms, and perhaps most, will run Linux.

That is, if everything goes according to plan - and that plan relies in large part on whether we can develop, integrate, and implement an unprecedented number of standards in record time. Happily, that goal took a major step forward today in Denver, Colorado.

Read the rest here

This is a text version (more or less) of the talk I gave at BarCampLondon 7, because I don't think the slides will be of use to anyone who wasn't there. It isn't exactly what I said, because that was then, this is now, the talk wasn't recorded and I can't remember exactly what words I used. There were 34 slides and I did the talk in around 20 minutes (although writing it up has taken exponentially longer, weirdly), so feel free to grab yourself a cup of tea (or other beverage of choice) before you start reading.

The Consumer Expert Group (CEG) was asked in the Digital Britain Report to report on the specific issues facing people with disabilities using the Internet. This report responds to that request. We urge that this report is used to inform the government's long-term strategy, as well as the immediate work that is being done by both the Consortium for the Promotion of Digital Participation and by the Champion for Digital Inclusion, Martha Lane Fox, in their work to get people online. In the course of research for this report it became clear that there are a number of issues which specifically affect people with disabilities and discourage them from using the Internet. The research also shows that people with certain disabilities face issues that are very specific to their disability.

Few businesses in the modern world do not make use of digital technology. But how does this affect the half a million people with disabilities running their own businesses in the UK? This was the question posed earlier this month by the Information Technologists' Company (ITC) as they debated the motion: "This House believes that it is harder for entrepreneurs who are disabled to compete in the fast-moving digital age." Speaking in support of the motion was Penny Melville-Brown, senior consultant at Disability Dynamics, an organisation offering equality training and consultancy. She argued that as well as poor access to technology, the technology itself was also holding back people with disabilities in business. Citing a study from the Office for Disability Issues, Melville-Brown said internet use by people with disabilities is around 25% lower than the rest of the population. Additionally, she said, people with disabilities have generally lower skills than the rest of the population, with 50% of those with disabilities having no qualifications at all, meaning that IT skills will also be lower. "There is very little... accessible training and accessible learning around IT", she said.

Broadcasters and the web still have a long way to go. When England played Ukraine earlier this month it was an historic moment - not because it was web-only, but because it excluded footie fans who are deaf and disabled. As Alison Smith blogged a few days before the game, the match wouldn't be subtitled or audio described. It's not a deliberate exclusion, of course. It's just that FIFA, UEFA and the broadcasters simply didn't think about accessibility at all. And they don't have to. The EU Audio Media Services Directive, which comes into force this year, brings video on demand under the umbrella of existing broadcasting regulation - and that means that the government must "encourage media service providers... to ensure that their services are gradually made accessible to people with a visual or hearing difficulty."

Search engine giant and Net neutrality cheerleader Google wants everyone to be able to enjoy all the wonders of the Internet, and in between all its other thousands of projects, it's making a serious commitment to making the Internet as accessible as possible. Advanced Web designs and tools and browser add-ons can pose irksome challenges to Internet users who are disabled, whether they're dealing with poor eyesight, finger dexterity issues or deafness. Just consider, for a moment, how much Internet use requires typing, decent eyesight and capable mouse use, and not every site or online operation is taking the needs of whose who are disabled into account. Google has been working for years on enabling development kits and software so programs can be more accessible and just launched a formal Web site to house news and information on what's up when it comes to information access efforts.

Hot off the presses of many major gaming and technical news outlets is a story about a gamer who is visually impaired who is suing Sony Online Entertainment (Everquest 2) for game accommodations in massively multiplayer online games. Alexander Stern, a gamer who is disabled from California, filed suit against multiple Sony publishing entities alleging that many gaming titles do not offer the proper accessibility as demanded by the Americans with disabilities act (ADA). The ADA was created to ensure equality for all disabled people across America. The document states that reasonable accommodations must be made for all disabled patriots to be able to access goods and services provided to the public. Stern alleges many games make accessibility accommodations such as color options for those who are colorblind, voiceover dialogue for those who are visually impaired, close caption for those who are deaf, and content assistance (i.e. giant arrows pointing which way to go) for gamer with cognitive disabilities, but allegedly none of these enhancements enable him to play SOE titles. He also claims that Sony has hindered his financial situation because Sony allows the player base to sell in game items legally on their sanctioned website. The items he could have been gathering for himself, if the game was more designed for his specific disability, would have helped aid his income stream.

Ironically, it was located in one of the least-accessible areas of the Games for Health conference held a few months ago in Boston. Up a set of stairs and around a corner from the large conference halls and breakout rooms was the AbleGamers Accessibility Arcade. Here, many in the gaming community got a chance to see and to experience what gaming is like for those with disabilities. As a game journalist, I can't think how many times I've trashed on a game's controller scheme for being illogical, unintuitive or just plain bad. But as lousy as those controller setups were, they were at least playable. To a huge number of gamers and would-be gamers, though, even the most sensible and well-laid-out controller scheme is unplayable. For them, accessibility and interface issues make gaming at best an incomplete experience and at worst a total impossibility.

This house believes that technology makes it harder for disabled entrepreneurs. The motion was narrowly defeated when debated at the event organised by WCIT on the 7th October. During the debate some fairly strong views were expressed.

Some 30 million Americans potentially rely on software accessibility features to access library materials, according to the Reading Rights Coalition (RRC). So last spring, when text-to-speech (TTS) stopped working on OverDrive ebooks because of a software change from Adobe, millions of print-disabled patrons found themselves with fewer options for accessing digital library materials. In response, the RRC, a group of 32 organizations representing those with print disabilities, asked the Los Angeles Public Library (LAPL) in July to take action. In the letter, the RRC cited the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 and the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, saying that "[b]oth of these laws require libraries to ensure that their communications with people with disabilities are as effective as their communications with nondisabled people."

Each school year, Andrea Brueckner receives $300 to purchase supplies for her special-needs class at Belleview-Santos Elementary. But every two weeks for the rest of the school year, she is going to bring in four new toys. Through the Marion County Public Library system, she can now check them out like books and use them in her classroom. Using a $92,000 Library Services and Technology Act grant, the library purchased a collection of toys and books designed for children with disabilities.

Finding the right assistive technology (AT) to help students with special needs can be a daunting task - but two leading AT trainers say the simplest tools often are best. During an Oct. 21 webinar hosted by the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE), titled "The Building Blocks of a Successful Assistive Technology Team," Sally Norton-Darr and Chris Bugaj, both AT trainers for Virginia's Loudoun County Public Schools, offered their expert advice on how to evaluate assistive technology products for use in schools.

From WebAIM - Web Accessibility in Mind: In October 2009, WebAIM conducted a survey of preferences of screen reader users. This was a follow-up survey to a previous survey. We received 665 valid responses to the screen reader user survey. More in-depth analysis and documentation on the free-form responses will be available in the future.

The University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh's College of Business is creating a new type of e-textbook that will give professors more control of their content while also saving students hundreds of dollars in the process. The program, a result of a nearly $300,000 grant from U.S. Department of Education's Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education, will commission professors to create texts personalized for specific classes and put them in a digital format that will bring textbook prices down from their average cost of $100 to a much more moderate $15. While the idea of money-saving digital textbooks is not new, M. Ryan Haley, an associate professor of economics at the university, sees this program as an opportunity to alter just how these textbooks are created and utilized. Using a "core concepts" paradigm, Mr. Haley will write 80 percent of the first e-textbook in the program, a statistics book, leaving room for each professor to customize the book with his or her own appendices. e books can be a boon for students and faculty with disabilities, allowing them to access the materials in a format that best suits their needs. However, if they are not developed to be accessible, they can make access next to impossible.

We recently did an audit of a website where probably close to 99% of all the information it contained was in downloadable documents, mostly PDFs. These documents contained a lot of the stuff you'd usually find on a website, structured text, data tables, application forms, complex diagrams, graphs and other images. None of those we looked at were accessible. We wondered what we should advise the client to do about it. The PDFs weren't structured or tagged, so a user of assistive technologies would find them problematic. For a screen reader user, the structure would be difficult to make out, data tables difficult to understand, information in diagrams and graphs completely unavailable and application forms impossible to fill in. So even if the HTML pages were made fully accessible, or if the PDFs could be acquired by some other means, 99% of the information and functionality on the website would still be unavailable to those users. In this case, it could be argued that the PDFs are more important for accessibility than the 'web accessibility'.

With a little bit of work, some free online tools, and code and utilities available from this web page, you can provide your students, staff, and other users within and outside the university access to web video that is usable by everyone, including people with disabilities.

As the week began, I had the fortune to come across an excellent article in the Wall Street Journal that addressed the problem employees face all-too-often in the workplace: the hardware and software workers are required to use based on their company's IT policies is often out of date with the technology they can purchase and use at home as consumers.

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With the tail end of the swine flu hopefully departing, I am eager to get back into my groove, doing what I do. Yesterday my desk received a thorough de-papering and cleaning and is ready to go.  Now the left thumb needs engaging to get this office up to its full earning potential. After all, any office with a chandelier is destined for greatness!

On this week’s to-do list:

• Write my Fight for Preemies post for Tuesday. This event now has 383 bloggers uniting to raise awareness of our more fragile babies. Awesome!
• Get going on creating the website for a non-profit organization.
• Conduct an accessibility review on a lawyer’s newly redesigned blog.
• Finalize the details for this year’s ebook for raising funds to feed Christmas dinner to 100 people in need. This year, readers will choose which posts to include in “The Best of the Left Thumb Blogger…”. Stay tuned for details!

What is on tap for your week?

Make it an awesome week!

If you enjoyed this post, consider buying me a coffee. Thanks kindly.

Steven Holcomb had no trouble driving a bobsleigh while half-blind. So what’s everybody else’s problem?

IDEA2009 had the world’s foremost thinkers and practitioners converge on Toronto’s MaRS Convention Center to share the big ideas that inspire, along with practical solutions for the ways people’s lives and systems are converging to affect society. Listen and learn from experts in a variety of fields as we all continue the exploration of Social Experience Design.

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The Impact of Social Models – Luke Wroblewski

As Richard Farson’s truism “no one smokes in church no matter how addicted” points out, context informs almost everything that happens in an environment. Online social experiences are no exception.

How a product’s social model is set up can impact not only who contributes, but how much, and why. From permission-based subscriptions to one-click follows, Luke will discuss the attributes and implications of several popular social models by looking at data and behavior in the Web’s most popular social applications.

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Social Spaces Online: Lessons from Radical Architects – Christina Wodtke

While Information Architecture took its name from architecture, it took very little else. This is not surprising, as the early days of the web were about making sites that supported the interaction between people and data. The obvious model back then was a library; a library is a space for humans to receive knowledge. But with the rise of social networks, and the integration of community into almost all online experiences, more architecture practices are directly transferable to design. Online spaces are no longer just about findability, but about falling in love, getting your work done, goofing around, reconnecting with old friends, staving off loneliness… humans doing human things.

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Making Virtual Worlds: Games and the Human for a Digital Age – Thomas Malaby

The rise of virtual worlds (World of Warcraft, Everquest) has prompted new questions about the status of games in a digital age. Thomas Malaby’s research at Linden Lab, makers of Second Life, suggests that game design and game development practice are becoming a key part of how some high tech companies operate. Instead of relying on top-down and procedural decision-making, these organizations contrive complex and game-like systems that promise to generate legitimate decisions from the ground up.

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User Experience as a Crucial Driver of Social Business Design – Jeff Dachis

Everything that can be digital will be. Why? Because it’s faster, better, and cheaper. UX in the digital world will be the key definer of value. UX design now means to embrace a whole new set of behaviors and characteristics. Social Business Design is a framework to understand and think about the multi-faceted users and the way they participates inside a business ecosystem in meaningful ways.

Co-founder of Razorfish, Inc., and current CEO of the Dachis Group, Jeff Dachis suggests that Experience design has started to evolve into Business Design – a fully connected ecosystem of suppliers, shareholders, employees, products, and supply chains. But don’t get too comfortable, b/c the future is about to change…again!

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Bare Naked Design: Reflections on Designing with an Open Source Community – Leisa Reichelt

For the past 12 months Leisa has been working, with Mark Boulton on a series of projects with the Drupal community – firstly to redesign Drupal.org, and then following the success of that project, to work with the Drupal community to try to address some significant user experience issues in the interface of Drupal itself.

In this presentation, Leisa shares war wounds and learnings from their work with the Drupal community as well as some questions and challenges for both designers and open source communities. She examines what it is like to design openly with communities and whether good design can ever flourish in a meritocracy like the Drupal community.

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Does Designing a Social Experience Affect How We Party? Of Course It Does! – Maya Kalman

What makes an event whether social or corporate a true success? What makes you want to go to a party or networking event? And what makes you want to stay!

That premise, of what should or could have been done to make that event a success is the core of the concept behind “Social Experience Design” and what we’ll be discussing in this session. Maya will explore what goes into planning the perfect event. How do we approach the task at hand? How do we insure success? What has changed in the last year and what are next year’s trends? And how have events and the art of event design changed now that “social networking” is part of almost everyone’s daily life.

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The Information Superhighway: Urban Renewal or Neighborhood Destruction? – Mary Newsom

As a long-time practitioner of daily newspaper journalism who sees the economic model of the newspaper industry sinking (and broadcast journalism isn’t in much better shape), Mary looks into what will happen to cities if/when the mass media splinter.

With all of the “new media” journalism: the emerging trends of crowd-sourcing, blogging, YouTube, Twitter and the general explosion of information available to people, this makes virtually anyone, a potential journalist. What are the implications for information, and for the dependability of that information?

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These podcasts are sponsored by:

Information Architecture Institute: Through education, advocacy, services, and social networking, the IAI has 1400 members from 80 countries demonstrating the value of Information Architecture to the world at large.




IDEA brings together the worlds foremost thinkers and practitioners. Sharing the big ideas that inspire, along with practical solutions for the ways peoples lives and systems are converging to affect society.




Visit boxesandarrows.com/about/participate to be a part of your peer written journal.



Axure RP is the leading tool for rapidly creating wireframes, prototypes and specifications for applications and web sites.



Morae is the premier software for deeply understanding customer experiences…and sharing those insights clearly and powerfully.

iRise enterprise visualization solutions give companies a powerful way to fully experience application before development.

It’s 2 a.m., and a call comes across the radio that a young man with a gun has barricaded himself and his mother in his home. No shots have been fired, and little communication has been established between the man and police officers outside. The officers on the scene report that the young man has been struggling with the loss of his job and feels like there’s no reason to live. The crisis response team has been called, and hostage negotiators are en route. It’s the negotiator’s job to ensure that the young man does not harm himself or others during this crisis.

What would you do? How would you handle this situation?

Throughout the past six years, the founders of ActiveComm Labs have not only been performing design research but also assisting the law enforcement community by conducting research on the communication patterns of hostage negotiators. Specifically, we have been analyzing the communication between the hostage negotiator and hostage taker to locate patterns that could introduce new strategies to help resolve crisis situations peacefully.

We’ve come to realize that the techniques used by hostage negotiators to resolve crises are also extremely valuable to user experience researchers. In essence, both parties are attempting to establish a relationship, both are trying to keep the communication flowing, and most importantly, both are trying to extract valuable data.

There are certain myths about hostage takers. Most of them are not bank robbers or terrorists demanding millions of dollars and a plane to Cuba. The vast majority of hostage situations are a result of domestic violence, psychological disorder, or barricade situations in which a person is threatening to commit suicide, possibly with a child in the next room. Hostage takers are usually confused, upset, and very scared. It’s also pretty rare for them to be outright hostile toward the negotiator. Hostage negotiators are trained to gather important data about the situation. Who’s in there? Is anyone hurt? What kind of weapons does the hostage taker have? How much ammo does he have? To do this, negotiators have to master a variety of communication techniques.

Have you ever worked with a research participant who will only give you “yes and no” answers? How about a participant who tells you exactly what you want to hear? These situations can be frustrating, especially when you invest so much time and energy in recruiting candidates. But these experiences don’t necessarily mean that these people can’t provide valuable data, it means that you need a different approach to extract that information.

A research session isn’t usually an emotionally charged situation and research participants aren’t typically in crisis, but the fundamentals of communication tend to hold true across different types of people and contexts. Our negotiation instructor told us that we should approach a hostage negotiation in much the same way as going on a first date; it’s important to bring a certain level of calm into the situation and put the hostage taker at ease. It is also extremely important to connect with the hostage taker on a personal level. Negotiation provides a great example of how to perform this kind of communication because it demonstrates these fundamental communication elements under the most difficult of conditions. Ultimately, negotiation is about two strangers coming together to work toward a common goal built on an understanding of each other, much like design research.

Application to Design Research

There are two types of behavior that we try to extract when conducting research:

What the participant does (physical interaction with product)

What he or she says (communication about the product)

Our goal is then to study the interaction between these behaviors in order to tell a story about the user’s experience of the product.

One of the most difficult parts of research is getting the participants to tell us their story about the product. Some researchers only focus on physical interaction data, but we think too much valuable content is lost. We’ve found that the communication piece of the equation provides the emotional and logical connection that participants make with products and how it relates to their lives.

With that said, one of the most common issues with communication-related data is how to gather accurate information. What a participant says is not always what he or she believes, and what a participant does is not always what the participant reports.

Much like a hostage negotiator, who must build trust in order to successfully resolve the crisis, a user experience researcher must establish a relationship with the participant in order to extract useful and accurate information. So, the fundamental element of becoming a better communicator, and also researcher, is to establish a relationship. Hostage negotiators focus on establishing relationships in order to save lives, there’s much we can learn from the methods that they have established.

Learning from Negotiators

Dominick J. Misino is a retired NYPD crisis negotiator who has been involved in more than 200 hostage and barricade incidents. He is recognized for his successful resolution of the Lufthansa hijacking in 1993 and numerous other successful negotiations. When it comes to communicating, Dominick knows what he’s doing. Since retiring, Dominick began training other hostage negotiators. To date, he’s trained thousands of negotiators across the country and around the world. A few years ago, we had the privilege to attend all three phases of Dominick’s negotiator training and certification program, which included hands-on practice as a negotiator and hostage taker. We learned communication techniques that we currently employ when interacting with research participants. These techniques include building rapport, building alliances, and using a team approach.

Building Rapport

Rapport is established through trust, open communication and empathy. Negotiators know that rapport is essential in their job. They use rapport to influence the hostage taker and gather information. If you can effectively build rapport with the participant, there is a higher likelihood he or she will trust you and disclose more information.

The following techniques used by hostage negotiators can help you build rapport with research participants:

Go slow – Engage in small talk at first. If you dive right into business, the situation can become uncomfortable.

Communicate openly – While you can’t disclose everything, it’s important to encourage an atmosphere of open communication. Tell the participant that there are certain aspects of the study that you can’t reveal, but he or she shouldn’t feel that you’re hiding something.

Actively listen – When you are listening to a participant’s story, listen for the emotions behind the words. Ask open-ended questions that dig for the source of those emotions.

Discuss personal topics – In a hostage situation, some of the most valuable topics that lead to a peaceful resolution are personal ones. The more a person feels that you accept them, the more comfortable they will feel with you.

Share your experiences – Building rapport is as much about sharing your experiences as it is about listening to the other person’s. Negotiators know that the more you reveal about yourself, the more the participant feels like he or she knows you and therefore trusts you.

Show you care – Hostage negotiators build rapport through empathy. Empathy is extremely important because it shows that you care about the other person and that you have their best interests in mind. As a researcher, you should do this also. If you show that you care, the participant will appreciate it and respond with more openness.

Alliances

In a hostage situation, the negotiator works for the police department but he has to show the hostage taker that he’s on his side. In order to do this, the negotiator can never be the one in charge; it cripples his or her ability to negotiate. Anytime the negotiator has to tell the hostage taker “no” it’s because his boss is being a jerk. Anytime the negotiator says “yes,” whether it’s a pack of cigarettes or just some extra time, it’s because the negotiator fought hard to get it for him. The negotiator intentionally shifts the blame for anything negative and takes credit for anything positive. It convinces the hostage taker that the negotiator is on his side.

In user experience research, the researcher is on the side of the user. In our work, we establish this by telling the participant that we are not the people who designed the product and that their comments, whether good or bad, will not offend us. This establishes objectivity and allows a certain freedom in the research session. In most cases, participants open up when they hear that you have nothing at stake. Also, if the participant can see that you share his or her common goal of improving the product, the participant is more likely to be truthful in his or her evaluation.

Team Approach

Hostage negotiators always work in teams, and so should you. In the event of a hostage situation, a negotiation team is called to manage the situation. Each person in that team holds a different but critical role in the event. One of the most important positions on that team is the coach. As the negotiator acts as the primary point of contact with the hostage taker, the coach sits with the negotiator and functions as another pair of ears. The communication can move very quickly during a negotiation, and the negotiator can have a hard time catching all of it. The coach specializes in listening, controlling access to the negotiator, generating questions and helping guide the communication process by passing notes to the hostage negotiator. Through crisis negotiation training, my partner and I have learned that the ability to gather useful and accurate information dramatically increases when you work in teams. For example, when conducting an expert interview we have one person ask the questions and another person as a secondary moderator. Like the coach in negotiation, the secondary moderator listens closely, takes detailed notes and chimes in when he feels that something is being missed. This type of setup will reap maximum data in the shortest amount of time. We can’t always work in teams for logistic or financial reasons, but it is our preferred method.

Training

For hostage negotiators, training is a crucial part of the job and they understand that the more you train, the more comfortable you will feel in the situation and in turn the better the outcome.

From what I have seen in the user experience community, little or no time is spent training on the best practices of communicating with participants. Every so often a workshop is attended but that only happens a few times a year. If we take a page from the book of negotiating, we would learn that just a little bit of training on a regular basis will take us to a whole new level of success. Here are some modified exercises that we can use to polish our communication skills as researchers:

Communicate with new people all the time – every time you have a chance to meet someone new and learn about their life, do it. Ask questions about who they are, where they come from and what they’re like. When you start to feel more comfortable doing this, start pushing yourself and asking more intimate questions about their life such as “What keeps you up at night?” Play a little game with yourself where you try to learn as much as you can about a person in a short amount of time. Three things will happen when you do this. First, you will learn about boundaries and what you can ask and you should not ask. This doesn’t mean that you’ll necessarily insult people and then learn not to do it; it means that you will see what topics are challenging to people and how to pull that information out of them without upsetting them. You’ll also learn more about people in general and how they function in the world. You’ll get a better sense of behavior and start to see trends in people. Finally, you will make more friends in the process and that is always a nice outcome.

Learn to listen – A well-known question asks, “When someone is speaking to you, do you think about what they are saying or do you think about what you are going to say next?” This is a very important question when learning to communicate more effectively with others. When you are communicating with participants or friends, really listen to what they are saying. Listen to the emotions behind the words, look at body language, and ask questions about their responses if they are unclear. There are sometimes differences between what a user will answer and what they believe. Ask yourself what those statements say about the speaker as a person; it will enable you to discover the areas where people are most passionate.

Learn how to disclose – When talking with friends and new people, start disclosing about your life and observe how people respond. Most people will feel more comfortable sharing information if you share information also. You’ll be amazed at how quickly people will open up.

Learn to trust your gut – When working with a participant or talking with a friend, learn to listen to your instincts. There are times when you need to speak up, times when you need to bring the communication back on track and times when you need to let the other person just open up and talk about whatever they feel is important. Different types of communication are needed for different situations. If you train frequently, you will notice that your gut tells you what you need to do.

Conclusion

This article began with a scenario of a hostage situation. After the first 30 minutes, the hostage taker and negotiator were talking like old friends about food, sports, and pets. At two hours, the hostage taker confided in the negotiator about his relationship problems and issues that led to him losing his job. At two and a half hours, the young man sent his mother out of the house, despite her protests that she wanted to stay with her son. At four hours, the young man placed his empty gun in a bucket attached to a rope outside an open window, where it was retrieved by the police tactical team. At 7:50am, after five hours and fifty minutes of negotiation, the young man peacefully exited his home and surrendered to police. The negotiator followed up on all of his promises. He rode with the young man to the police station, allowed his mother to visit so that he could apologize and even made a statement on the young man’s behalf at his trial, resulting in a reduced sentence.

This process should be mirrored in a research session in a condensed period of time. After the first ten or fifteen minutes, the participant should feel like you know each other and feel pretty comfortable talking with you about your product or service. After about twenty minutes, the participant should understand the product and its goals. After thirty minutes, the participant should be discussing how the product would fit into his or her life. In order to achieve this, some form of communication training should be implemented. Researchers typically receive a great deal of training in research methods, statistics, human factors and elements of design, but little training on advanced communication. Researchers who really want to invest into their skills as a researcher should think about spending time and energy to learn effective communication methods.

In a ground-breaking victory in a David vs. Goliath courtroom setting (it appeared that Verizon had no fewer than 15 attorneys from around the country at the trial), our client Gerard DePascale, his wife, and Liam Neville were awarded $12million today by a jury against Verizon in federal District Court in Central Islip, New York. Specifically, both Mr. Depascale and Mr. Neville were awarded $5 million, while Mrs. DePascale was awarded $2 million.

Gerard DePascale came down with a rare cancer, Stage 4 extra-skeletal myxoid chondrosarcoma, as a result of being exposed, without his knowledge, to various cancer causing toxins on Verizon property while working for a company called Magazine Distributors. The cancer spread to his lungs and he has endured numerous surgeries. Liam Neville also worked for Magazine Distributors in the same location and developed severe kidney disease as a result of the unknown exposure.

The evidence presented at trial showed that Verizon knew about the toxic waste dump on its land in Hicksville as early as 1986 and had an opportunity to investigate and clean-up the site.  However, Verizon never notified the workers of the potential danger on the site and it was only after years of exposure to the workers that they began to do a belated clean-up.

In a related case, Turley, Redmond, Rosasco & Rosasco along with attorney Mitchell Breit, has a pending class action in federal court against Verizon for exposure of these toxins to all workers (which could be well over 1000) in a "medical monitoring" class action lawsuit.  We seek to establish a "9/11 type fund" where Verizon will have to pay for all future medical expenses to monitor the health of the innocent workers. We seek to have the "medical monitoring to be done at Mt. Sinai Medical Center, just like the 9/11 victims.  In another related case, Verizon has already settled with residents in the surrounding area in a multi-million dollar settlement to compensate them for their increased risk of cancer.

Turley, Redmond, Rosasco & Rosasco, LLP has already won Mr. Depascale's workers' compensation claim before a trial judge at the New York State Workers Compensation Board, but the case is still unresolved as a result of the employer's appeal.

Congratulations are due the plaintiff's lead lawyers, Gonzalez & Robinson, from California. Finally, we wish both the DePascale and Neville families the best of luck. Verizon is sure to appeal, so their fight is not over yet. But the verdict today still is a prime example of how a jury of your peers can level the playing field against giant corporations with unlimited resources such as Verizon.