I think this blog should not be about me or about how and when I write it. I think you're here to read about consumer product usability, not about me. However, today is different. Today is a day to look back and reminisce and I hope you'll forgive me.

Exactly four years ago, on February 16 2005, I wrote my first post on uselog. This is the 367th.

The spark
I had just started as a PhD candidate at IDE on usability in product development of electronic consumer products when I read an article about Philips' new brand position 'Sense and Simplicity', something that was very much related to the PhD research project I had just started. I realized that considering the practice-oriented nature of my research I was bound to run into a lot of news, events and insights that would be relevant to my research.

My public diary of insights
I decided to start a weblog, to capture my ramblings about products, research and events in the domain of consumer product usability. On February 16 2005 I claimed a blog and wrote a first post about Philips' new brand position: sense and simplicity (a subject that has triggered many posts since and continues to fascinate me). I guess you can say that uselog serves as my 'usability-thoughts safety valve', enabling me to empty my head now and then, without losing the ideas.

Communicating with my 'end-users': product developers
There was one other reason for me to start a weblog. I was going to study product development practice, and I believed (and still do) that in the end the results of my research should be fed back into the product development community. The only problem was: designers, (product) managers, and usability specialists are usually not that keen on reading scientific journals or conference papers. I was looking for a way to communicate my findings to my 'target group' or 'end-users'. And maybe even establish a dialogue with them. I assumed that in order to build up an audience, blogging about my life as a PhD candidate would not do the trick. I think only very few people can pull life-blogging off in an interesting way and I am not one of them. Instead I decided to focus on the subject of consumer product usability, and mix my own insights, referrals to other blogs and posts about the findings of my research.

Starting a blog
I started out on www.uselog.blogspot.com with a basic Blogger template, that I customized over time and that evolved into what you see in the picture below. However, at some point I ran into the limits of the standard template, and decided that uselog deserved its own face and domain. This led to a redesign that went live on www.uselog.com last year (thanks to rené). As for the post frequency: in the beginning I was writing about one post per week, but I'm now pretty steady at two posts every week and that's about the max I can pull off besides my research.

The old site design, based on a blogger template.

Results
So what do I have to show for it? Well, for me personally, I've collected lots of examples that I can use in my thesis. But did my writings have any impact on the world around me? Lets look at uselog in numbers:

• Google search: number one hit when searching on product usability or consumer product usability
• Google page rank: 5
• Pageviews per day: 300+
• 600+ RSS feed subscriptions (and growing)
• 66 e-mail subscriptions
• 191 delicious bookmarks

All in all, not very extreme numbers I think, but considering the narrow scope of the weblog and my posting frequency I'm pretty satisfied.

And then for some non-quantitative results. Uselog got included in the top 100 user-centred blogs and mentioned on the user interface page of Alltop. When I co-authored a paper on user-centred design for sustainable behavior I wrote a post about it, which got picked up by several blogs, amongst which putting people first. This generated a lot of traffic towards the blog, where people could download a pre-print pdf of the paper. This seems to support the idea of using a blog to disseminate research results in the design community.

Next steps
As for my research: I've collected and analyzed most of the data from my case studies. In the coming months I'll be taking the final steps in my research project and start writing my thesis, so in the near future I hope to start using uselog more intensely to share the findings of my studies with you.

Thanks for reading.
Jasper