Worst error message this week

Alison got some bad pillowcases from Garnet Hill, and was very sad because they are cool but fell apart in the first washing. Unusual these days, and we buy from them a lot. So, she fills in, at some length, the return form, and gets this: Let me count the ways this is bad:

• It's not that obvious it's an error message. Alison was frustrated at the page recycling for no clear reason, and had to look about a bit to find the new message.
• On recycle, the pulldown selection is lost. So I have to reselect it each time. Why? Is it secret info I wouldn't want to feed back to the browser unmasked?
• What's broken? She could not figure it out, even basically. I surmised from working with IT guys and fixing (or failing to fix) error messaging that its very literal. "Message" at the front is the field label. So I can disregard the rest of the fields. Highlighting or otherwise clearer labelling would be nice.
• Kanji?!?! In a word, WTF is that? I know, but really, who else does? Okay, I see the switch for "Customers in Japan" in the corner, so who reading the website in EN-US knows this? Not Alison, that's for sure.
• Why do they care? Why can't I use any character encoding I want? There's a Japanese version of the site, so double-byte characters can be stored in their datastore. And if not, just live with "unknown character" spacers. I see this all the time from people with weird emailers.

So, I quiz a little, and find out she typed it in Word to reduce the chance of loosing it, and spell check and so on. I find (pulling the content into a text editor, a few auto-recoded characters, like hree periods turned into ellipsis and so on. Eventually, I get to the heart. Its the apostrophe. On the fourth line, "can't." The one that the browser has rendered as a single quote just fine, somehow cannot be read in by the software as the correct character, or just disregarded as unknown, so I have to meticulously edit the content. We got it sent off, but its infuriating in its pointlessness and waste of code and resources.

Location is not GPS

This entry is also posted at the Little Springs company blog. If you feel compelled to comment, I'd do it over there as its quite a bit better read.

I find two things about location based services these days to be annoying. First, that its new and can now be done due to the technology getting there, and second that its synonymous with GPS. Literally. “Use your GPS-enabled phone to...” This is annoying because location technology has been about for years. I (and others I work with) worked on this stuff in '99-'00. Back then, GPS was not yet in phones, but certainly was on the horizon. Instead, we used:

• Cell
• Sector
• Triangulation

The phone knows some of this stuff, and the network can easily work out the rest. Precision is variable, and pretty large, but pretty reasonable when you are talking about a weather application, or pre-populating a list of cities to choose from, or pre-centering a map with a selection of local restaurants. Sector is at least 800 meter precision, and can be better. Triangulation can be under 100 meters. That's close enough to surmise you are on a particular city block. GPS can give accuracy down to a few feet, but it cannot always or reliably do this. Lots of things get in the way of getting high precision from a constellation of moving satellites when outdoors, not to mention in buildings or driving through cities with many underpasses. Suggesting additional precision, like in the photo above, can get you or your users into trouble. Other networks can present challenges, and opportunities. While WiFi (and WiMax when it comes out) will be more challenging, location can be solved and exploited in interesting ways. Bluetooth can determine relative proximity to known devices, but network awareness without pairing could be used to infer locale based on fixed systems (like mobile payment stations). So, to guide our design and development of location services, remember that:

1. Every phone is location enabled. As long as its on a proprietary network, all this data is available for at least some location finding.
2. All the available location technologies must be addressed when designing your application or service. Precision and accuracy must be understood by designers, and correctly exploited by the product.
3. If you work for a carrier, exploiting the network like this should be a snap. If not, your devices or software may or may not be able to be talk to the phone enough, and you might need to negotiate with the carrier.
4. As in many other areas of your customer's lives, privacy concerns will continue to rise. There are actual regulations around this, but you also need to look useful without acting creepy. No one wants their app to be the next “stalker-ware.”

Man-sized

Sorry for the small photo. Look close at the writing in blue, or just follow the link to buy some. If you are in the UK. Saw a box of these on a TV show this evening, and Alison said they have been sold forever, even in Canada. Apparently, common in all the english-speaking countries except the US. Sure, they also sound useful, in that they are gigantic, but who cares? The name is funny enough.

Process, procedure & methodology

This entry is also posted at the Little Springs company blog. If you feel compelled to comment, I'd do it over there as its quite a bit better read. Interactive design is exactly like making a pizza No, its not. At all. Its also not at all like building a house. Or changing the tires on a car at 60 mph. Or any other favorite analogy your leadership has used to describe the situation. Sometimes, this analogy work goes quite a bit too far. Inappropriate analogy – or blindly inherited process – encourages inappropriate process and methodology. Houses need blueprints, then foundations. Do websites? I think that considering design and code to be “construction” leads to incremental approaches and a misunderstanding or misapplication of iterative design, for one example. Its time that interaction design (and software development) comes into its own, and can be understood without arbitrary analogies. To that end, what is a design process and how can it be applied to design work? Process – Making the business work Process is about business practices. How to get business, how to account for time spent, how to assign people and so on. Some of these will be performed by the design team. You are likely to have internal staffing processes, for example. However, since they are about internal functions, not design, they are business-oriented, and are process. Processes are also enterprise- or product-wide. Everyone has to abide by the same process or it won't work. If a strict set of rules can be applied, but the result will change over time, or as internal conditions change, it's a process. Think of scheduling new work; any designer (ideally) should be able to do the job as well as any other. Which one is assigned is dependent entirely on workload, scheduling, and generally internal and transient conditions. The conditions of the designed produce have little or nothing to do with it. Procedure – Working with others Collaboration requires everyone be on the same page. The quickest way to this is to make sure everyone does their job, and communicates, in the same way. The difference between process and procedure is that “doing stuff the same way” part. Procedure is needed for any workgroup large enough to warrant a process. Not only does the process need procedures like paperwork and meeting times, but each functional team will have them. The process for design teams will include artifact creation styles, storage, sharing and other collaboration-related functions, within the team, with clients and with consumers of your design work. Other departments will have their own procedures, by the way. Work within yours, and be aware of others' but try not to confuse them with process. Methodology – How you design The manner in which you work is a method. When this is repeated and codified and applied uniformly it's a methodology. Since we're talking about design, methodology is about activities and artifacts directly related to the design work. Good methodology is about designing well. Since this is our field, I can go on for weeks about design methodology , so I won't do that. Yet. Your next steps Internal process, procedure and methodology are easy. Everyone in the design organization should believe the same things. The hard work will be with the other groups, the clients and the developers. Build your relationships and sell them on the right process. Keep in mind:

1. There are good processes and bad ones. Push for recognition of which process is being used, and for using the right one.
2. Get the terms right. Know what you mean, know that everyone understands you, and make sure they know it well enough to explain it later. Likewise, if there's any question about others' terminology, ask for clarification.
3. See what happens. Once a product has launched, did the right thing come out the other end? Either way, why? Find root causes and implement fixes. Don't let everyone skip this step because they don't want to be confrontational or just want to move on. Otherwise, nothing will get better.

Finally, a fear of mobiles that is reasonably well-founded

I hate the random banishment of, well anything really, but mobile phones specifically. Because its so often for some unfounded reason. This was on a gas pump I used just the other day (hence, the awful quality from the KRZR): Its demonstrably untrue that mobile phones blow up gas pumps. Yet, I still see these, sometimes. And don't get me started on the misunderstanding of the danger of talking in cars, and the dumb laws resulting. But, finally, a useful and apparently rigorous study on interference in hospitals.

More than half the hospital ventilators tested by Dutch researchers stopped working properly when a mobile was switched on nearby. The [UK] government has said current bans on the use of mobile phones in hospitals can be relaxed. But the Critical Care journal study suggests it would be folly to do this in high dependency areas.

They do go on to mention that most interference was with 2G devices, and mostly at very, very close range. So, the polite measure of going into hallways for your talking seems like a good guideline, and worth doing. If you just banish them from hospital buildings entirely people will hide them and use them in rooms more often, I'd think. Okay, so that's interesting, but indeed its still dumb to me. Why? Because there are stacks of devices in hospitals, some of which probably emit radiation themselves. Some on purpose. Ever see WiFi in a hospital? Or other wireless networks? I do. Wireless tablets abound. Even the finance people have them. Seems to me the recommendation should be that medical equipment start being made to accept RF interference to a much higher degree than other devices. With the amazing ubiquity of mobile phones, and many more devices on many more networks on the horizon, its time for this sort of planning for any life, health and safety device.

Form Submissions

Aaron Barker was just IMing me with some questions about form submission standards (such as they were) when I was at Sprint. We won't get into those, as they are muddied, and full of politics as well as design issues. He's got a similar issue, though, working in a big group, for a huge organization, trying to settle standards for it all. But one bit of info informing his question was a post by Luke Wroblewski on buttons. Its interesting, but I think flawed in some ways. Check out the heatmap. That must imply rigor. Well, its nice, but I'd rather have seen the numbers for speed to complete. Its mentioned in the text, but the article is overburdened with these graphics. Which, since they are what you'd expect, aren't that interesting. Overall, I am most disappointed with the dataset tested. I have always said that the primary design principles you can mess with are:

1. Position
2. Size
3. Shape
4. Contrast
5. Color
6. Form

(Form is like type weight, and other minor changes, but to familiar elements so its relevant. Still last though.) Many others have their own ideas. I am sorta enamoured of the time-based ones, and will have to ponder that a bit more. But working off my theory, items D, E & F changed position, but did not address the shape, contrast (minimally) or color aspects under test in A, B & C. Were it me, I'd have tested A-C, then re-tested with those results to make a set that tries out position changes independently. (Also, the use of that faded gray background under the buttons is way too specific an element for anything I'd test in this sort of research; I wouldn't go past space and an HR). But still, I have a problem with the A-C set. Gray is never a good secondary color. Gray is perceived (for real, in front of users) as unavailable. Grayed out. Users can work it out, but its not great. And, there was no consideration of shape (aside from the text vs. button) or size. Size doesn't have to mean there are two button standards; "submit" and "cancel" are basically identically long. I (and content people I have worked with) always tried to make the cancel action shorter, much shorter if possible, than the submit action. More like "Save changes" and "Back." This does help. Shape and color can be pursued really interestingly if you want to. Bank of America used to have these neat color/shape items accompanying their buttons. From memory, they were something like this. Sprint uses these little GT symbols for some buttons, and I occasionally tried to use the GT version on the submit, and nothing for cancel, but am not sure if it matters with the lack of much implication for the symbol, its frequent use as a bullet point across the site, and its relatively low contrast as a while element on a colored button. Additionally, forms are hardly ever as neat at those he's got in there. There's lots of discussion of forms going right down the left side, then you arrive at the buttons. But even this over-simplified version the country selector immediately above the buttons requires the user to jog over to the right. While there is mention of form F being least efficient due to fixation times, I see bounces left and right in all the tested cases. How much change? How much impact on total time? Could a different visual treatment of the page itself have changed how this worked? Overall, I've had very good results with the purportedly failed version E. Submit/continue on the right works well, especially for multi-step processes. But it does need to be consistently used, the graphic design of the page needs to support it, and secondary buttons need to be differentiable even without positional changes. Of course, I don't have access to Sprint's research, couldn't share it in detail if I did, and don't have a laser to shine in people's eyes to prove this, so what do I know?

Popcorn worker's lung

I've always hated the fake pseudo-buttery stuff on microwave popcorn. It gives me a fairly splitting headache, and this happens a lot in a large office. Someone always seems to live off the cheapest microwave popcorn they can get. Don't get me wrong. I like popcorn, and even fairly buttery stuff, just not the synthetic butter stuff. Anyway, for years its been a known lung disease causing agent in factory workers. Oddly, no one I have mentioned this to cares at all. Even those who are wildly paranoid about other food safety issues. But, finally, a manufacturer is giving up on adding it to their product at all! Yea! http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/81568.php

ConAgra has decided to drop diacetyl, a flavoring it adds to its microwave popcorn, as doctors have indicated there may be a raised risk of developing bronchiolitis obliterans, a type of lung disease. ConAgra is the largest microwave popcorn supplier in the world... ...Diacetyl gives popcorn its butter taste. The US National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health has long advised that when used as an artificial butter flavoring one should avoid inhaling it over a long period. Bronchiolitis obliterans, an uncommon and serious lung disease, has been found in workers of several factories that produce artificial butter flavorings. Experts say that young, healthy, non-smoking male workers are the most susceptible. In medical circles bronchiolitis obliterans is often termed "popcorn worker's lung". However, any worker who works with diacetyl has a higher risk of developing the disease, compared to the rest of the population. A popcorn worker in Missouri, USA, was awarded $2.7 million in July 2005, as a result of developing bronchiolitis obliterans from inhaling diacetyl at work. There are two bills in the California Legislature to ban the use of diacetyl.