EPA shows Air Quality on Google Earth

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has just unveiled their Google Earth version of air quality emissions sources on Google Earth.

The KMZ file from the EPA shows different colored markers for different sources of air pollution:

• Cement Facilities
  
• Chemical Manufacturing
  
• Electric Generating Units
  
• Natural Gas Pipelines
  
• Oil and Gas Production
  
• Petroleum Refineries
  
• Pulp & Paper Industries
  

Clicking on any of the multitude of colored markers on the globe brings up an info balloon that shows a graph of the carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxide, particulate matter, sulfur dioxide, and volatile organic compounds for that facility.

This is a great step forwards in making air quality data more usable because it provides the geographic context, but you have to be an air quality expert or a pretty determined researcher to interpret the data. The questions that pop into my mind looking at it are:

1. What does a high level of volatile organic compounds (or particulate matter or ...) mean to my health? There is information on these topics on the EPA web site, but it's provided separately. A more usable approach would pull in the relevant information right in the balloon (or at least as links from the info balloon).
   
2. How far from the facility location would the effect be felt? What is the potential coverage area impacted? I'm sure it varies by weather conditions, but polygons or circles showing the potential impacted area would be more helpful. Even more helpful would be a calculator that would allow you to enter wind speed and direction and see the affected area as an overlaid polygon on the earth.
   

It's nice to see the EPA taking steps to make their information more accessible. Some simple usability enhancements would make the information much more relevant to the average public.

The Usability of my Tent

So much is written about the usability of web sites that people forget that usability isn't just about web sites. Usability engineering applies to anything and everything that people use. It's a science of understanding humans and how they interact with things, a way of measuring how effective of a tool we've given the user, and a way of designing products and engineering improvements to benefit the users.

Take my tent, for example. I've been camping since I was a tyke and setting up a tent used to be a pretty arduous job. Something a kid could handle, but it quite a bit of time and some assistance from the parent-units. Then someone thought of those magic snap-together, bendable poles with elastic ropes in the middle to hold them together--that made setting up your tent much, much easier. Tents became almost an instant popup, and once you got your snapping, bendy poles in place, you could pick up your tent and move it anywhere you want it.

Problem was, you had to string those poles through these long, fabric tunnels on top of the tent and most of the time they would come apart. Kinda frustrating. There are still a lot of tents out there like that--my son got one for Christmas last year. He can set it up, but he needs a little help.

My parents gave me a tent, though, that eliminated that problem entirely. You snap together the frame, then hook the tent onto it. The rainfly drapes over the frame, hooks to the front and the back of the tent, and you snap in the corners like you would a seatbelt. It's amazingly simple--one of the most intuitive user interfaces I've ever met! The tent itself is a pretty plain vanilla, one room/4-person tent, but I love it. It's got a little hanging pocket right by my pillow to put little things like my glasses and my flashlight in at night, and it's so incredibly simple to set up! Who wants to spend your vacation time setting up tents? Tent users want to get that part over with as quickly as possible and move onto the FUN.

The people who designed that tent took usability into account. They thought of a better way to meet the user's goals of spending more of her limited vacation time having fun (and less time setting up camp)--and believe me, the users really appreciate that.

My point here is not to think of usability engineers as "web designers". Usability is important in web design, but it is much farther-reaching than that, and it's a lot more involved. Usability is a blend of human psychology, scientific research, and systems engineering. It's often called human-computer interaction (HCI), or human factors engineering.

Interview with a Usability Engineer

Sun Usability Labs: What is Usability Engineering?

Can developers be usability people too?

I'm in the unfortunate situation of being de-scoped at the moment (that is, part of my job just got cut, so now I get the joy of going out and searching for more work), so I went up on our company web site looking for openings and I found a couple positions that were looking for usability.

However, what they want is one person who can both develop software and do usability. That's not what I am, and for good reason. While I love computers and what they can do for me, I am at heart a people person. I thrive on trying to understand people better so that I can make tools that will better serve the person using them. I have a strong sense of empathy, which I think is a requirement for a good usability engineer.

This is not typically true of software developers. I've got loads of them as friends and I adore them. They are intelligent and usually have fantastic senses of humor, but they would prefer a computer over in-person interaction anyday. I have noticed they occasionally actually even take pleasure in making things difficult for the user (usually as some form of joke).

So what am I saying here? I'm saying (and this is a generalization, but ...) that developers are not people people. They thrive on making electronic devices do new things, but they don't particularly rejoice in studying human behavior. Human behavior is what drives usability of any product or interface. Human cognitive abilities, reactions, preferences, limitations--these are the determining factors that effective user interfaces must take into account. (Most) software developers don't excel at those factors, but usability professionals do. (Of course, there are exceptions--I know a few developers who are also excellent at user interfaces.)

The other problem with having software developers make user interfaces is they develop for people like themselves. What percentage of our population is like a developer? Approximately 20%. Software developers are the type of people who want to know how it works. When they see a cool web application, they try to figure out how it was built. The other 80% of us just want it to work and couldn't care less how it works.

Perhaps we need to get out of the old mold of believing that our software developers should develop interfaces and try a new approach. One that includes someone who lives and breathes user experience, but maybe doesn't know (or care) so much about the inner workings of the code behind the interface. This approach also saves precious developer time (which is usually very expensive). Let's stop wasting our developers' time by asking them to do something that is against their nature.

Paraverse Meanderings

I stumbled across a new term the other day: paraverse. Perhaps it's not so new, but it's new to me. Have you heard of it? The paraverse is where avatar extensions of ourselves would hang out in a virtual representation of our physical earth (vs. an imaginary virtual world like Second Life, which is a metaverse). So the paraverse is another name for the virtual worlds (like Google Earth or Virtual Earth) with social networking added, something like what the New York Times described last month. (There is, apparently, some disagreement about the term metaverse, though, because the Wikipedia definition of metaverse talks both Second Life and "Second Earth"-type ideas.) At first I was kinda curious how this relates to Google's OpenSocial, but from what I've read about it so far, it's not like that.



The blog I stumbled upon was discussing what the paraverse could learn from the metaverse--simply put, the lesson is "don't be boring". Some metaverse dwellers appear to be afraid that information from the paraverse might infiltrate their environment and spoil all the fun.

I think information about the real world represented via a paraverse we can explore and interact in is exactly what makes the idea exciting, not boring. The idea that we could wander about this virtual world and learn more about the real world around us--that's exactly why Google Earth is so popular. As Michael Jones of Google said in a keynote address I saw at one of those geo-conferences,

"It's not Google Earth that's exciting--it's our Earth that's exciting."

The more we can learn about our earth in a direct, visual, interactive way, the better. Direct interaction makes for a better user experience. Google Earth is fantastic for that already.

But now imagine we can do that exploration together. I work alongside earth scientists and engineers, so I envision crazy stuff like flying around the globe side by side with geologists to learn about rocks and volcanoes or with fire scientists to review the burn history of the world and being able to ask them in real time "how is that pattern changing recently with the trends in global warming?" What a fantastic teaching tool--what if you could get guest scientists to host sessions for students (and earth-geeks like me)?

damaging earth

My daughter wanted me to write something about how we are damaging our earth with our home cleaners. We are very "green" here at my house and very concerned about our impact on the environment. We talk a lot about global warming and the toxic chemicals us humans dump in our waterways. It takes just a little investigation to find non-toxic chemicals and ways we can all help reduce our impact on the environment.

How's that, daughter of mine?

World Usability Day is November 8

Tomorrow is World Usability Day, so it's a perfect time to start a blog about Usability and Usable Technology, right?



World Usability Day is dedicated to making all the man-made things in this world more usable for the people that use them. All the web sites, products, software, toys, electronic devices, phones, cars--everything we use. There's a science behind making that happen, and it's based on the way humans perceive and interact with things. This year World Usability Day is focused on healthcare--wouldn't it be nice if that was more usable?

The Google Blog mentions WUD and talks about "User Experience Professionals" (like me!) Google is one of those companies that embraces usability and puts the user at the center of everything they do, as it should be in my humble opinion. Unfortunately, many companies don't see it that way (or haven't in the past)--it's becoming more and more commonplace, though, but, depending on the corporate culture, the change can be slow. It's not natural to see things from a user's perspective because you have to step outside of yourself--and you may have to change the entire process your company uses to develop the product. That takes some doing, but it's well worth it. Being user-centric can increase profits, decrease development time, increase customer satisfaction (and retention), and so much more.

There are Usability Day events happening all over the world--check their site to find one in your area.

My other purpose for this blog is to talk about geo-technology and Web 2.0 and how it could change our lives. Notice on the World Usability Day web site how they have a Google Map embedded? That's the kind of stuff I thrive on. Google has taken maps and made them interactive, easy to use, and easy to add to any web site. It's advanced the usability of the web and the usefulness of web applications. It's made the lives of web developers so much easier. No longer do they have to go build the map--they've got one ready-made, all they have to do is add to it. And the lives of users are enhanced, too; users get a comfortable, consistent experience on many different web sites because the map on one site works the same way as the map on so many others. They don't have to relearn the map every time they go to a new site.

Some of my favorite geo-sites are:

• The Google Earth Blog: have you checked out the defense spending earmarks in Google Earth yet?
• AnyGeo
• High Earth Orbit: Andrew Turner always has interesting things to say.
• James Fee's GIS Blog

More geo-usability stuff coming!