I wrote a report today. A big, long, complicated report. I sat at my desk for a long time writing it. By 3pm, I couldn’t figure out whether this phrase was correct: “Issues to consider includes:”

So why did my brain do this – why is it that I stopped being able to do something that I usually do easily. Is it just tiredness, or do our brains actually ‘fill up’ (to use a silly metaphor)? The reason I think it is more than tiredness is because I had a 10 minute telephone conversation and afterwards could immediately tell that my phrase was wrong. It was like the act of talking ‘reset’ my writing abilities.

I’ve encountered this before. After a day of usability testing or doing contextual interviews, I’m completely shattered – I feel like I’m somewhere else. But having a conversation or tutoring (rather than concentrating on listening) ‘resets’ me and I’m fine for the rest of the evening.

OK, this is probably basic cognitive psychology and something I should know. But hey – even though I’m a HCI girl, there’s still an awful lot I don’t know about the H, the C and the I

I got my university results for this semester. For ‘Web Design and Delivery’, I got a HD.

Usually I’m pretty excited by a HD (as you can imagine). This time it just reinforces that I should be changing degree – I put in little real effort and learned nothing getting that mark.

I’ve mentioned before that doing user research (usually contextual interviews) is very tiring – after a day of it, I’m completely brain dead and not up to doing anything.

I realised today that listening to tapes of contextual interviews is almost as tiring. I had previously thought that it was not only the concentration but the emotional energy of empathising with someone and drawing them out during the discussion. Now I think it’s just the concentration that makes me tired.

So how do I get better at concentrating – I vaguely remember reading something about practicing ‘bare attention’. I’m too tired to even google it tonight

I’ve been using my laptop a lot lately without using a mouse. It does have a touchpad but I’ve been starting to use the keyboard a lot more again, and on my desk computer as well.

I’ve only just noticed how poor keyboard support is getting (you probably know this already, but…). Today alone I noticed:

• a dialog box with 4 buttons where using the left and right arrows didn’t just cycle through the buttons in the expected direction, it followed some strange pattern
• dialog boxes with no focus
• dialog boxes with inconsistent focus within an application (eg some boxes with the focus on cancel, some with OK)

And how on earth do I log into Windows XP without using the mouse???

I recieved my copy of Peter’s IA book today.

This book is sooooo attractive. Nice hard cover, thick paper, attractive graphics and well-balanced pages.

But what about the content, you say? Content? I haven’t read the book yet – just skimmed through looking for my own name against quotes (it’s there 3 times – go look!)…

I always keep my eye out for funny error messages. Today Eudora told me:

“Error writing to network. Eudora got tired of waiting for the server”.

Perhaps that’s why it’s been asleep all day!