Cindy Chastain took some great photos from last night’s NYC edition of the UX Book Club.

The book we were discussing was Subject to Change, and it was really great to have one of the co-authors, Brandon Schauer available via skype to take questions and talk about the book.

Looking forward to the next book club event!

I’ve done a lot of usability testing in my day, but today I participated in one that was different from anything I’ve done before. Rather than testing the usability of a website, we were testing the usability of a book. This, by the way, was a test conducted by Liz Danzico, the editor of Rosenfeld Media, and it all came about because of her post about the test on her blog.

What was most interesting about participating in this was that I found myself looking at something—a book—that I’ve used for pretty much long as I’ve been around (after all, before I even knew what the word ‘Book’ meant or what a book was, my mother was probably, surely, reading bedtime stories to me – Mom? You are of course reading my blog, yes? Could you maybe post a comment to confirm?), and yet here I was looking at it as if I’d never seen it before, as if this were a completely new website somebody placed before me on a monitor and asked ‘so, what do you think?’ I handled the ‘prototype book’ that Liz carefully presented to me, leafing through it a bit, looking at the table of contents, the index, the back cover.

In a nutshell, I found myself feeling very strongly that contemporary book designers can learn a thing or two from information architects, the people who organize information on websites. Seems weird doesn’t it? After all, book designers have been designing books for hundreds and hundreds of years, so you’d think they’ve pretty much got it all down pat. Not so, at least in my opinion. Similarly to how the web is transforming the music industry, it appears that books are equally susceptible to the impact of the web. No, no, I’m not talking about the paperless office or some futuristic hoopla about how the web spells the end of the book. I’m talking about how the way that we use the web, the way that we move from one page to another, the way that we have come to expect information to be organized on a web page, or in a website as whole, consciously or otherwise, is affecting how we think about and read books.

As a case in point, I mentioned to Liz that I would expect something akin to a ‘Getting Started’ section in the book, and the reason I wanted that, of course, is because it’s something I’ve come to expect in online help documentation (as well as in product-specific websites.) This, of course, would be for how-to books, and not for a more theoretical text.

Additionally, I’d expect a very tight integration between the book (keeping in mind that this is a book for computer professionals) and a companion website for the book. I would assume that I could go to the companion site and find additional content, similarly to what one might find on a DVD in addition to the movie, and of course things like errata (which already is quite common.)

Taking this a bit further, I would like to see a discussion forum, where the book essentially is the hub of a community that can congregate online to share their thoughts. And what would really bring the book-web connection home would be the presence of a wiki, where maybe the author sort of continues writing their book, possibly in response to comments made on the discussion board, or maybe uses the wiki as a live beta of a forthcoming future edition of the book. I guess the overall idea is that the web would function as an organic, living extension of the original work.

I’m about half-way through Bill Buxton’s Sketching User Experiences and, even though this book definitely is a tome (if not in size, then definitely in weight – the paper quality is very high – the book must weigh in at 5-10 lbs), it’s a fantastic read. First off, this book is about *a lot* more than sketching. In fact, Buxton doesn’t even get to actually talking about this (at least in practical terms) until around p. 250 or so(!), which is approximately where I am now. Instead, he lays the groundwork with multiple sweeps across a range of disciplines, from ‘designing for the wild’ (an incredible story of a close friend’s encounter with an avalanche and the testament to the power of good design in the face of a life or death situation) to a (I think) completely unique take on the story of the iPod and why it has become such a huge success (it’s probably not what you think) to a section on the history of industrial design, placing the actual meat of the book – methodologies and best practices for nitty-gritty everyday design – into powerful perspective. The part I’m on right now talks about the value, nay critical importance, of learning and understanding the practices of other team members in a design team, as in programmers developing an understanding of visual design and vice versa. Maybe what’s most weird about the book is that while it is incredibly dense, as in a 10pt serif font, because Buxton’s writing style is so fluid, and he is so passionate and knowledgeable about design (in the absolutely broadest sense of the word), reading this 5lb (10lb?) tome feels more like another equally great but much lighter read.

I just finished reading Peter Morville’s new book Ambient Findability. The book is exquisitely written, with innumerable tidbits about information retrieval curiosities, such as the obscure, but as Peter nicely points out, very significant Mooers Law (not to be confused with Moore’s Law, the one about microprocessors doubling in speed every few years), which describes the relationship between the use of an info retrieval system in relationship to the pain a user must endure to use it. Three chapters into the book, Morville makes a brilliant connection between Moor’s and Mooer’s laws:

Fast, cheap processors powered a personal computer revolution and enabled the information explosion we call the Internet. Five exabytes of information. Half a million new libraries the size of the Library of Congress. That’s how much information we create in a year, 92% of it stored in magnetic media. It’s time we shifted our focus from creating a wealth of information to addressing the ensuing poverty of attention.

Hear! Hear! The siren song of the war against information overload! Or is it? Upon reading this, I was expecting to read about how we are pumping unfettered volumes of content (such as this gratuitous blog entry) down the throat of the poor Internet, drowning it with endless streams of folksonomized info ooze. And, yes, Peter does deliver on that front, but not in the way I expected. Rather than pointing a finger at the easy target of Bad Technology, he chooses to explore that nebulous space between human quirkiness and technological stodginess, and the unending friction between the two.

Yes, the amount of information being amassed is mind-bending, and yes trying to retain any notion of findability within that seemingly horizon-less sea of increasingly ambient (as in anywhere anytime access) information seems insurmountable (except for Google, of course, but back to planet Earth…). Instead of getting caught in that ever-tempting desire of the infonaut to provide Solutions to Problems, to say “read this book and you too can be an Organizer of Content,” Morville takes us on a journey through his ambivalent musings (well-researched musing at that) of this intertwinglingly complexificated place which is all at once our own technological creation and continuing source of mystery, beauty, frustration and fear, a world of McGoogle information dysliteracy and what Morville calls “Graffiti Theory” (Google Hawkins and neocortex for more on that), information that flows through us changes our minds, physically, Peter claims.

In some ways, his book is no more than a Faberge Egg of exquisite gems about the latest and greatest in technological tres cool (reminding me somewhat unfortunately of Nicholas Negroponte’s crowd-pleasing doozy, “Being Digital”), but toward the end, it seems that was just beef for the stew, and the work seems to take on a more somber tone, intertwining politics, economics (er, Levitt Freakonomics, actually) to mold what in my view is less a book that belongs in the technology section (where you will inevitably find it, after all it’s an O’Reilly with obscure animal on the cover and all), but might be better placed in the sociology section, or maybe anthropology section, or possibly the ethnography section, no, maybe the…