‘Caring for a person with Alzheimer’s can feel like a prison term spent in solitary confinement.’ Gran & Grandad (circa 1975) Carers for people with Alzhimer’s are faced with five key problems: - **Technological Disenfranchisement** carers of people with Alzheimer’s are normally their spouse or partner and are therefore of the same approximate age as the cared-for. This means that the carer has the associated disenfranchisement with: technology, computers, the Web, and digital-life in general, as would be expected of any senior citizen; - **Isolation** people with Alzheimer’s become increasingly dependent on their carer.

Regular readers will have noticed a lack of posts in February. February was a crazy busy month because I was trying to get my new final year module up and running. The module is titled ‘User Experience from 30,000ft’ and the materials are presented as Open Courseware. Here’s the third lecture which is a guest lecture from the BBC R & D detailing UX in the real world. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOgV8EN6NNs&w=640&h=360] You can get access to all the lectures on YouTube; and you can also get all the material, slides, notes, videos, etc at: http://ocw.

One of my ‘A History of HCI in 15 Papers’* “ The Star system (circa 1980, and as described in Byte**[1]**) gave rise to five principles, which in my opinion, are so important and timeless that their formulation and practical application as part of the Xerox Star user interface was without doubt revolutionary.” The Xerox ‘Star’ was a commercial version of the prototypical Xerox Alto – if one thousand fully working systems, used internally at ‘PARC’ day-in-day-out over seven years, can be said to be prototypical.

So, I’ve been working on my UX notes for the new unit, and as part of this I’ve been collating some principles. As it’s Christmas, I’m adding those for usability just in case they may be of interest. You will notice in the table below that the left column describes the principle, guideline, or rule (these are sometimes used interchangeably between the different experts); while on the right side the experts are listed along with a footnote pointing to the text from which the principle is derived.

‘I find the sentiment within this book to be important in that the experience of the user, their enjoyment, their delight, and thedeliciousness (the Umami) of the software or application are often forgotten or ignored in a headlong rush to implement accessibility, usability, and inclusion. Indeed this enjoyment aspect goes into my current thinking on the practice of interface and interaction engineering within the software engineering domain.’ Funology, is a difficult book to read because the majority of chapters are so very certain over the theories and frameworks they present, seemingly without any direct scientific support.