Encountered during a hardware beta survey… is this question really necessary?

In his Microsoft blog, Todd Bishop highlights a 2003 email from Bill Gates detailing the frustration felt when attempting to update Movie Maker (c/o Compete On Usability).

Gates recently commented on this during a farewell event,

“One of the newspapers had some e-mail that I sent about how maybe Windows could have been better at something, and they said, ‘This is a shocking e-mail. Shocking!’ And I said, ‘What do you think I do all day? Sending an e-mail like that, that is my job. That’s what it’s all about. We’re here to make things better.”

My own comment on his response has nothing to do with usability, but everything to do with a comment made by Ledwell in regards to Gates’ email:

“…it takes a lot more than one-off emails to inculcate the cultural and corporate values needed to ship products with superior usability.”

I’ve nearly completed Adrenaline Junkies and Template Zombies: Understanding Patterns of Project Behavior, a terrific read from the team that brought us Peopleware.  One of those patterns is the “Film Critic”:

Film Critic: Team members or corporate spectators who have determined that the value they add to the project lies in pointing out what has gone wrong or is going wrong, but who take no personal accountability to ensure that things go right.

What really makes a Film Critic however, is the belief that one’s success can be separated from the success of the project in question.  Gates may be an exception, but for many of us whose entire office buildings can be cleaned by a single person each night, the luxury of purely spectating does not exist.

Film critics rarely have a positive effect on a project, and often a negative one.  A good friend once told me that you don’t have to reply to every email, and I took that to heart – emails from critics should get a quick scan and end up in the bin.

If you’d like to reply, here are some suggestions:

• Would they like to donate time to test new features?
• Can they provide resources (either $ or people or both)?
• Do they have any specific input from customers that would help?
• How about unique insight that their position affords them?

Do you have any film critics in your organization?  The next time someone berates the usability of your project, challenge them to constructively contribute.

During E3, what used to be a massive entertainment software convention, I tend to search for a fair number of games over at Gamespot.  Usually I get it right, only searching for games I know are released.  Sometimes, though, I get it wrong.

Here’s the screen that appears when I search for “rob is cool”, a phrase I’m sure is at the top of Gamespot’s analytics ;)

My eyes shot down to the orange and white text below, which appear to be search results… until I read one.

“Robert Free?  Reduce De-… oh…  eww.”

The very first bit of information on the page is “Search results for…”, only to be followed by “No Results Found”, which because I know there are results, read as “X Results Found” and start scanning.

Percentage wise, let’s look at the amount of space dedicated this key bit of information.  In this tiny cutout featuring 237,500 pixels, a modest 850 (0.3%) are reserved for the word “No”.

Instead of using a Google-like “did you mean…?” to match text with games, you’re effectively searching for  advertising.  Type in “final fintasy” or “super marip brothers” and, although Google handles these quite effectively, a site dedicated to gaming does not.

I know of no better way to devalue your visitor’s time than to show them what amounts to junk mail after they make a typo.

How do they do it?  Volume, volume, volume!

I’m a few chapters into Luke Wroblewskis’ Web Form Design and as with all good books, the first thing it does is change the way you look at the world.  While the book is about forms on the web, component layout and interaction is valid on the desktop as well.

Today, I happened to give the OS X Spaces app a second shot.  Have a look at the configuration screeen:

The number and layout of virtual desktops is specified graphically via interaction with what I would refer to as “non-standard” components.  They aren’t part of the shipping widget library, but I figured out how to use them immediately.  This is likely due to their similarity (in size and shape) with radio buttons.

The key design component is that it relies on pre-attentive variables to speed perception.  Arranged figures are of appropriate size and shape such that I immediately perceive them to represent desktops.  Before I parse a single word or component on the page, I know what I’m looking it.

On the other hand, this too would have been a perfectly acceptable way to prompt for Space configuration:

Among these, which presents a more compelling (and to be honest, “fun”) way to configure your desktop?

Of the two, it’s clear which would have taken much longer to develop.  This level of polish however, has come to typify the Apple experience.

Back in January of this year, I documented Adobe’s wild succes with their attempt to prevent people from downloading Acrobat Reader by utilizing getPlus(tm) from NOS Microsystems.

Today, I downloaded Acrobat Reader and much to my surprise, getPlus is no longer front-and-center.  I simply downloaded the executable and installed it.

What happened to getPlus?  My interest was piqued, so I had a look around the NOS Microsystems site to see what they offer.  As it turns out, some pretty cool technology.

“We offer the only simultaneous download, extraction and installation platform available.”

Sounds pretty cool, right?  Unfortunately, it has the side effect of modifying the all-too-familiar download and installation experience from Next -> Next -> Next -> Finish into something that looks like this:

You’ll find plenty of diagrams and literature on the NOS site about their technology, how easy it is to customize and how it increases customer satisifaction through ease of use and simplicity (this, I strongly doubt).  What you won’t find is screenshots.

Countless companies employ “Download Managers”, as though the Save File functionality in Internet Explorer or Firefox is insufficient for the task at hand.  Typically these serve as advertising shells or simply an excuse to get more software on your machine.  They all miss the mark; additional software downloaded and installed under the assumption a download will be interrupted or some marginal increase in download and installation time will make up for the additional complexity.

If Adobe has indeed continued to utilize getPlus, they’ve done a terrific job of hiding the complexity so that we reap the rewards without paying the price.

Scammers just aren’t swinging for the fences like they used to…

I don’t write a lot about tech stuff in this space, but I do have one rule: if something takes longer than it should (or that I’d like) and involves much experimentation, I’ll share.

I’ve been using Google Webmaster Tools to track site statistics. Surprisingly, there were many incoming links to invalid URLs, all to my old images:

From my experience with WordPress I knew that URL rewriting could fix this. I want to replace “photos” with “galleries” and I’m all set. Seemed simple enough!

Tick tock… 12:30am turned to 1:30am… turned to 3am. In the world of technology, mod_rewrite and regular expressions are just about the two last things you’d want to mess with after midnight :)

The first part is easy – match all URLs that aren’t files or directories (in case these documents do actually exist) and contain the word “photos”:

                RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
                RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
                RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} photos

I could have a blog post containing the word “photos” (I don’t) but I didn’t worry about that.

Next, through the use of a RewriteRule, I need to figure out how to turn this:

http://www.allaboutbalance.com/photos/creatures/slides/Rallying%20Cry.html

Into this:

http://www.allaboutbalance.com/galleries/creatures/slides/Rallying%20Cry.html

Not only that, I want the search engine crawlers to record it as a permanent redirect (HTTP 301) and stop perpetuating these old URLs.

                RewriteRule  photos(.*) /galleries$1 [R=301,L]

The tricky bits are the $1 and [flags]. The $1 refers back to the Pattern, photos(.*), and basically writes a new URL that starts with /galleries and appends everything that matches after the word photos.

The [flags] tell the browser this was an HTTP 301 Permanent Redirect, and that for the preceding conditions, this should be the Last rule (i.e. stop processing).

References:

Apache mod_rewrite Reference @ apache.org
Regular Expressions Tutorial @ regular-expressions.info

Much of this site is dedicated to identifying and improving usability gaffes, but there are some terrific companies and products out there that deserve mention for Getting It Right ™. Panic is one of them. The contributors to WordPress are another.

Now is the Time to Panic! – If you own a Mac but haven’t experienced any of the applications from Panic, you’re missing out on something phenomenal. Hell even if you don’t own a Mac, take a trip over to their site and revel in the aesthetics. All of my web work these days is done in Coda, one of the handful of programs you’ll find at the Panic website. Combining terrific usability with best-of-breed graphical and visual design, it’s a must-buy.

As mentioned before, I’m a huge fan of modeless feedback. Coda has an integrated FTP client which allows you to edit files on the server and download those updates once complete. Yes I realize I should be working the other way around, but it’s a pain to setup a local dev environment ;) Watch what appears when I download several files:

So much conveyed in so little space:

• Current filename.
• Current file count.
• Number of files in total.
• Progress indicator.

Absolutely terrific.

When Coda was first released, I found it a little rough around the edges, but picked it up anyway. Even if it wasn’t going to be in daily use (as it is now), supporting developers who Get it Right just Makes Sense(tm). Each application like Coda serves as an example to others and the more of them, the better.

Presstacular – As I type this post in my recently upgraded WordPress 2.5 blogging software, modeless feedback is occuring in the form of auto-saving. The folks at WordPress have this one about 95% correct. WordPress in general gets most things 90-95% right which is well above the open source community whose usability track record is abysmal.

The “Save” and “Publish” button colors change during an auto save. The color change is not drastic, however it is a considerable amount of area which draws my attention from the task at hand. I take it the buttons disable so as not to interrupt AJAX during the auto save? There’s a simple solution – just ignore the button click if an auto save is in progress and report success. If, when the auto save returns the content has changed, run another auto save. It happens so quickly (<1s), you’ll barely notice.

It’s great to see developers and designers getting it right. Is there room for improvement? Sure there is, but they so frequently get so much of it right that the little glitches don’t seem to matter. For all of the great design successes, this holds true. Every iPod and iPhone iteration has a few glitches, but nobody seems to care (some people care, but Apple’s ridiculous success shows to what extent).

Where does your application land? Did you get it mostly right? 5%? 70%?

How do you know?

(In which I, Rob S., a man of relative experience with the personal computer, failed to install a program.)

It begins with a desire to communicate.

As I had recently re-imaged my machine at the office, I realized I was yet to install Windows Messenger.  A quick trip over to MSN and I’m ready to roll.

The process begins with this dialog, which is also where it ends.

Confronted with a confusing array of check boxes, progress bars, buttons and links, I simply froze.  This was unlike any installer I’ve ever seen, and I’ve used every computer from the Atari 800XL, Apple IIe, various PCs and Macs for 20+ years.

I sat there, perplexed, until the top half of the dialog sprang to life and changed to this:

The installation had already begun and subsequently failed, all before I could understand what I was looking at.  I clicked the “Get help with this” links but they presented me with the software installer equivalent of a brick wall – a general help page at the Messenger site.

Having failed the installation with no idea what to do next, my only remaining course of action was to quit the installer, so I did.  This web page appeared:

As some sort of cruel parting gift, Microsoft drops me at the Sign In page.  Or is it the Sign Up page (see top left)?  Where I would have loved to sign in with my new Messenger ID had Messenger finished installing.

Let’s look at went could have gone better:

• The installer dialog, in and of itself, is far from the most complicated dialog out there.  In context however, it is amazingly complex.  When an installer appears, I expect to repeatedly click “Next” until either (1) the installation completes or (2) the installer tells me to close Firefox and Microsoft Office.
• The word “waiting” adjacent the Messenger and Sign-In Assistant components should be relabeled “installing.”  Just a few pixels above, the dialog refers to its own action as “You’re installing these programs.”  Why the confusing terminology?  Who or what is the installer waiting for?
• “As each item finishes, you can start using it while the others install” – I would just be happy to get something installed, let alone begin using my installed programs while the others are being installed.  In my entire history of using computers, I’ve never met an installer that’s allowed me to begin using parts of the applications it was installing…

…which brings us back to the title of this post.

While the installer allows you to continue installing and running in parallel, this new installer presents an interface and interactions completely unfamiliar to anyone who’s installed 100 other programs.

Don’t buck the trend.  Your users have already learned how to install a program – play to their strengths.