Chad Lundgren, Userati

Chris McEvoy of the mildly-worded Usability Must Die site has put together a interesting userati list on his other site, Usability Views, using Google as his arbiter. Unless I'm mistaken, he's un-Heisenberged it and removed the userati page itself from consideration in the userati score.

Yours truly ranks a lofty 165. The top userati Jakob Nielsen has 11,420. Christina Wodtke of Elegant Hack has 1,673 and John (S.) Rhodes of WebWord 1,548. (As of December 9th, 2002).

I had fun looking through the list and discovering people whose work I have been using, but was vague or blank on who they are. Stuart Card invented the useful GOMS ( Goals, Operators, Method, and Selection Rules) system.

The GOMS executive summary : it's a way of calculating the average time a user takes with an interface to actually DO something like convert Celsius to Fahrenheit or buy collectibles they don't need on Ebay. I've run interfaces through GOMS and been suitably horrified. Sites that let you type years into a form instead of using an enormous dropdown menu may have designers who read Stuart Card.

Ben Shneiderman's Leonardo's Laptop sounds very interesting: what if Leonardo da Vinci had a laptop: what would he demand of it?

There's other userati I'm checking out, and others I already have. I hope userati becomes an accepted coinage: userati has a nice next-to-the-last-syllable lilt.

Posted by Chad Lundgren on Sunday, December 8, 2002 (Link)

Comments

Posted by Chris McEvoy Wednesday, December 11, 2002 at 01:56 AM

Chad,

I have not adjusted the results for the 'Observer Effect' and google will skew all of my results when I next update them (tonight).

I thought long and hard about this, and decided that when I observe that there is not a link between two people, I am actually creating a link between them and that link should be counted.

Another interesting 'Observer Effect' can be found in the google results for 'Alertbox'. Since I started publishing my alertbox analysis last year my site comes up as the 3rd one for 'Alertbox', after useit.com and the japanese version of alertbox.

Regarding Userati: I am going to look at adding links between people in usenet groups as well as the straightforward google links.

Posted by dan Wednesday, December 11, 2002 at 05:15 PM

Hmmph...bottom of the list.

mental note: link more usability peers.