When selecting paper on the copier at the office:

I know what’s in trays 1 and 2.  Nobody knows what’s in the final tray and I have a strict don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy with the copier after an altercation years ago, that we’re both working hard to forget.  A simple question mark wasn’t enough to convey the copier’s emotion, so two more were called in.  It could be Gremlins?  Or  Zombies?  More likely some advanced form of paper from the future.

I periodically visit Google Analytics as it has the interesting responsibility of presenting a massive amount of data in a consumable form.  Given the numbers in the screen capture below, I derive more value out of interpreting their design decisions than I do analyzing my “readership” ;)

You’ll find much discussion on the relative merits of pie charts (or lack thereof).  Keeping the discussion focused on this display, the pie chart and area required to display it consume nearly 50% of the available width.  It’s the main draw here – large and full of bright, vivid colors.  It’s labelled with the percentages (kinda what the wedges should already be tellin’ ya, amirite?), forcing you to map between the various colors and labels several inches away.

If relative comparison is important (it is important for platform support decisions), what if we embedded a bar chart inside the table?

This allows easy comparison between the browsers themselves though I’m unsure if, without first looking at a visit percentage, it would be clear the row color consumes 50% of the table cell.  It may also not be as aesthetically pleasing than the tidy compartmentalization on the first image.  There are benefits to this approach, some of which come simply from choosing to use a bar chart in lieu of a pie chart: better area utilization, avoids having to map swatches/browsers to slices, etc.

Contrary to the popular caveat about assumption (making a such and such out of etc. etc.), it’s how much ease of use is brought about.

Let’s take this example from Apple Mail.  Here I am creating a new To Do item.  In the “Date Due” field, watch what happens when I type “Monday” and press ENTER.  Remember that today is Saturday, June 6, 2009.

M-o-n-d-a-y <enter> June 8, 2009 <enter> <committed>.

Would anyone have been surprised if instead, any one of the following occurred?

• A popup chastised me for “Invalid format!”
• A popup chastised me for “Invalid format! Please use DD/MM/YYYY!”
• A date picker appeared, with the next months’ worth of Mondays highlighted, expressing its confusion over my ambiguity.
• A confirmation dialog appeared asking me if I really meant July 8th, 2009.  Yes/No/Cancel?

Probably not.

Now I’m not saying this free-form entry field for dates is a usability needle-mover, just that I was pleasantly surprised that when I said Monday, Apple Mail assumed I meant the following Monday.  By the way, Outlook 2007 makes the same assumption in the Tasks view.

As designers and developers, we need to have this courage of our convictions to say “Yes, this is a reasonable interpretation of that input” (tested, backed by research, etc.!), giving our solutions the same social presence as that had by a helpful assistant.  This means making reasonable assumptions when told what to do, and not harassing our users with needless confirmation.  In 2009, with the availability and power of development frameworks, there’s no excuse for it.

In January of this year, Alan Cooper was interviewed over at Info Queue:

I wrote a book called “About Face” in 1995 and I wrote a book called “The Inmates Are Running the Asylum” in 1999 and both of these books were pluming this idea of how does software get constructed and how can it be designed well from the point of view of how it behaves in the world, as though it were a person with a social presence.

What I’m seeing more of these days is increasingly complex software with more verbose labeling and explanatory passages.  It’s not surprising given Cooper’s impact on design and that others like Luke Wroblewski in Web Form Design suggest something similar:

• Think about how a form can be organized as a conversation instead of an interrogation.
• Clear, conversational language can clear up potential ambiguity.

Take the advanced administrative interface for Netgear’s ReadyNAS Duo network storage device.

Previous iterations of interfaces like these would have made do with the terse, less expository text adjancent the combo box.  With the conversational tone and actionable quality of the additional text, boneheads like myself have all the information they need to know whether or not to enable this feature.  For interfaces like this used once in a blue moon, learning is irrelevant.  Infrequent use means that you re-learn the entire thing from scratch each time you use it and this text is a life saver.

What’s great about Netgear’s decision to bold the label is that advanced users can happily scan on by without reading the additional text.  I’m pleasantly surprised by this level of sophistication from a network hardware company.

To the left are the standings for the NHL’s Eastern Conference.  The teams placing 1st through 8th are ordered by points and when the points are equal, tie-breaking rules are applied.  I’ve highlighted the 1st place (Boston) and 8th place (Montreal) teams.

Why is playoff ranking important?  It determines who has home ice advantage during the playoffs.  During a best-of-seven series games are played as such: home-home-away-away-home-away-home.  The team ranking higher plays 4 home games and 3 away games.

During the playoffs, it’s typical for a new interface to be used to display playoff matchups.  For the 2009 Stanley Cup Playoffs, here is that UI, with the Eastern Conference selected (notice the word “EAST” in white).

Before we get started, sports fans will recall how games are listed in box scores.  It’s always “away team – home team – eastern time zone time”.  For example if Vancouver was playing at San Jose at 7pm PST, you would see a listing for “VAN-SJ, 10pm EST”.  This is the same across all sports, not just hockey.

Now, notice the areas indicated in green and remember: Boston is the #1 team in the playoff seeding, and Montreal is #8.

“Well Boston is the home team for the first game, so I’ll put their icon second”, choosing to use box score game description to denote the brackets.

The problem is that when displaying playoff brackets you always display the higher-seeded team first from which any sports fan is able to instantly derive where the games are played / who has home ice advantage.  Otherwise this picture is interpreted as “#1 Montreal versus #8 Boston”.

Yahoo! even confused itself.  By the time the next person started working on the bottom of the UI, they must have understood playoff rankings and used the position of the bracket icons to draw the seeds – listing Montreal as #1 and Boston as #8 (3rd green box above the photographs).  Oops!

There is no standard to be found for how to display playoff brackets, it’s a format that’s been around as long as I can remember – not in the rulebooks though.  If you have a look at NHL.com or ESPN.com you’ll see what I mean.  This is How It’s Done(tm).

This underscores the need for domain knowledge when working on a UI and beyond that, a basic level of understanding contemporary design patterns that you won’t find in books.  I would characterize this as a very soft, advanced skill because unless you understand the basics you can find yourself “off the reservation” doing something that’s done on a couple of sites / applications / devices you personally prefer.

This past Friday I unboxed and setup the BlackBerry Bold ordered via Amazon.  Since then I’ve been iPhone-free, emailing on the shiny new Bold.

This isn’t meant to be a comprehensive feature comparison – only what I’ve noticed over the last two days.

Where the BlackBerry Bold is Superior

• Typing, by a longshot.  Old Rob would kid himself into thinking the iPhone was fine until I stopped sending emails because of typing accuracy.  Lightning fast on the Bold with far fewer mistakes – a few minutes after using it, versus a few weeks / months / years / never on the iPhone.
• The unified inbox and calendar are amazing.  I have 4 email accounts and busy home/work calendars.  No clumsy hierarchical iPhone Mail.app account navigation (read messages – back – back – down – down – read messages – back – back – …) and the iPhone only lets you use one calendar at a time.
• Navigability (speed, not ease).  Berries are for Getting.  Things.  Done(tm).  Screen swipes, transitions, big button prompts (click the Reply icon on the iPhone when reading mail) all look terrific and make the phone much easier to use and without any accelerators for the accustomed user, they slow you down.
• The screen is brilliant.  Same iPhone res crammed into half the size, of course!

Where the iPhone is Superior

• Software support.  iTunes as the control center was a terrific idea on Apple’s part.  The Berry has no such thing.  Mac users get 3rd party software (PocketMac) which allows to you sync data from different apps (Address Book, iCal, iTunes) though the software itself is a shambles.  It took several attempts to perform a sync of only Address Book contacts, many of which hung or crashed PocketMac entirely.  In the end, only a small number of my contacts made it over and I have no idea how to get them all across.  I’m shocked RIM provides this as the default support mechanism for Mac users.
• Two-way sync on all mail providers.  All IMAP accounts have two-way sync (e.g. read a message in Gmail, appears read in the iPhone).  The BlackBerry only supports this on BES accounts only (corporate email) and on ISP accounts it supports 1-way sync (read message on device, marks it read on Gmail).  If you only read these in your BB, it’s not a problem.  If you routinely swap between your web browser and the device, it’s a major annoyance.
• Web browsing.  The world has already implemented crippled sites for BlackBerry browser detection and you need to change your User Agent in the browser settings to get the full web experience.  Changing your agent to Firefox or IE means you get to experience the web as though you were using the IE5 renderer.  Things work… mostly.
• Google Maps.  The killer app on the iPhone for me.  The BB has maps as an app download from Google, though it’s much slower and clunkier than the iPhone even over WiFi and 3G.
• Mail account setup: you use the browser on the phone to access the BIS (BlackBerry Internet Service) and setting up an account is circa 1999.  The only way to get IMAP is to leave your password empty, get an error, choose to set your settings manually and then specify an IMAP mail server.  Is your IMAP server also listening on a POP port?  OOPS!  The BIS looks for POP first and won’t let you set it to IMAP.
• Overall organization of apps and options – settings on the Bold are in a few different places.  There’s a “Setup” icon and a “Settings” icon…?  Want to change your ring tone?  Use the Media app and select ring tones.  Want to play music?  Not under “AT&T Music”, under “Media”.  The saving grace here is that you can get rid of the noise by hiding half of the useless icons that ship with the phone.

My Choice

In the end I decided to go with… the iPhone.

• Lack of two-way sync on non-BES accounts played a major part in the decision.  Picking up my device at the end of the day, full of messages that I’ve already read from my desktop, did not work well for me this weekend.
• Amidst a myriad of crashes and hangs, PocketMac did not earn my trust and I won’t be depending on it to manage “my digital life”.  Who knows what havoc it could wreak on my data?
• Apple hosts major updates to their firmware at least once a year and one gets the feeling that while they’re lagging behind in copy-and-paste, MMS, etc. that these are just around the corner.  For example, if iPhone 3.0 adds a landscape keyboard, will that do the trick on typing mistakes?

Thus ends my weekend of using the Bold.

From my Amazon.com Visa January credit card statement.  Anyone know any loan sharks?  They’re bound to have better rates…

My company recently switched (back) to WebEx for our web conferencing needs.  To begin the signup process, you complete an “email answer-back”, meaning that WebEx sends you an email which verifies that you have access to your email account.

The first step is to assign you a password.

There are a few things that have me concerned:

1. The new password is displayed on my screen, “in the clear”.  Rather than assigning me a made-up password, how about allowing me to change the password right now?  Certainly WebEx doesn’t expect me to remember this randomly generated password.  If the next reasonable step is to change it, allow me to do that right from this screen rather than require me to search through the WebEx plug-ins or website.
2. The password is so complex, I have to write it down.
3. There’s no indication that I’m able to change it, and quite the contrary – a strongly worded message instructing me to remember it.  I darn well better write it down! (I took a screenshot – it was easier than writing)

I’d prefer not to write it down (I don’t have to write down any other passwords – why start now?).  My first order of business will be to figure out how to change my password.

Before getting started, I’ll quickly peruse the receipt WebEx sent out:

I have a dream… That one day, WebEx will refrain from displaying my password.  At this point, I’m assuming the worst WebEx is doing is storing my password in the clear in their own internal databases, though with their propensity to flaunt my secrets willy-nilly, let’s just assume they have a monthly newsletter containing the passwords for all new accounts, distributed to local newspapers and radio stations.

Well, I’m going to give WebEx a piece of my mind.  By sending a carefully crafted letter to customer service, I hope to achieve real results!

WebEx, digging deep into their bag of tricks, surprises me yet again!

Not only is WebEx putting my password in Christmas cards to all of their customers, they don’t want to hear about what I think of such things.

WebEx, you’ve won.  I’ve given up.  I’m walking away, with my tail between my legs.  I’m quietly changing my password and moving on.

Well, not before WebEx sends me a few parting shots.

Is the password “invalid”?  Or does it not meet WebEx’s security requirements?  More than one “letters”?  More than one “numbers”?  With examples of what letters and numbers are?  The “host name” is an “easy-to-guess characters”?

To be clear, I’m not picking on the individual responsible for this dialog and error message, I’m picking on WebEx for choosing to assign work in a sensitive area (enforcement and communication of password strength requirements) to a non-native speaker.

How about something like this?

Here is a dialog:

• That does the work of both dialogs above.
• Indicates which of the criteria have been met (although I should incorporate display of the company and host names just so you’re sure).
• Allows you to proceed while alerting you to your password strength.

Taking this further:

• Distinguish between “required” and “optional” criteria (perhaps with horizontal rule and some labeling).
• Indicate password strength along a spectrum or use of grading.  “Your password is of MEDIUM strength.”

If your password requirements are too stringent, people have to change the way they work with your system, and that’s never a good thing.

Stepping back, if WebEx were to run a survey on their brand after the first 15 minutes, what do you think the results would be?

• “insecure” – passwords in the clear both in the browser and via email
• “sloppy” – customer service email address incorrect, confusing wording/grammar in the password dialogs
• “annoying” – requiring me to remember difficult passwords, not immediately apparent how to change them, excessive password requirements (if it’s stronger than my bank and doesn’t have my money, it’s excessive)

What baffles me about all of this is that this process is undertaken by all of WebEx’s users.  Anyone hosting a conference signs up for an account like this.  The password requirements are so strict that a majority of them will experience at least one, if not both password error dialogs.

After recently finishing The Designful Company and going through the WebEx provisioning process, you realize that it’s not just the product itself…  We’re a world away from the WebEx conferencing software (which works quite well) though we’re still solidly in the realm of an experience that would benefit greatly from design.

At a checkup for a small break on my left index finger…

“Is your blood pressure always this low?”

I’m not sure, maybe I have a case of the Spanish Handouts?