What the iPad is not quite doing (yet)

Every designer I work with seems to think that the iPad is ubiquitous. It's not. No one in my neighborhood has one. My doctor does, but they keep it at home, as the living room convenience device. Of course, something like half the people in the department I work in (as well as my previous co-workers, who I still keep in touch with) have an iPad, Galaxy Tab and/or eReader. Traveling through airports and spending time on planes, I see a lot more of them. And I've started seeing trends.
When the iPad was first rumored in it's final guise, there were numerous comparisons to the Star Trek PADD, or Alan Kay's Dynabook for the more learned and differently-nerdy. These comparisons seemed apt at the time, and I still see them. But watching the use of the various tablety devices, Media Tablets and especially the iPad is not a paper notepad replacement. And it's not apparently even about to be.
Earlier last week, I was in an all hands meeting. About 200 people (and seriously at least 50 have tablets of some sort). Those that were even brought, were in bags, or under chairs. They were with the laptops, as something unsuitable to be used in a meeting. And don't think this means that everyone was paying attention. Most people took notes. They just did it by pulling out a paper notebook or notepad, and writing with pen and paper. Over the rest of the week I kept my head up more, and looked for other behaviors. Indeed, tablets are used in spare moments alone, or in small rooms. They are used a bit as ambient devices, are used to consume content or look things up when the main computer is occupied. A few people here use them as their primary email computer when they come to visit our team room. But they are never kept out during a meeting when the laptops go away. I asked a few people why. Frankly, most of these people are /huge/ Apple fanbois. You can't ask them anything about the device and get a useful response. The first good one was from the person on our team with a Galaxy Tab. She was using it in the meeting... and she was just doing email. She said that typing with the virtual keyboard is too slow to take notes. I reluctantly got a few iPad owners to say the same thing. I had been pulled into that meeting with minimal warning, so didn't have my tablet, or even a notepad. So I took notes on my phone. The hardware keyboard was the killer app here; I have failed to use my previous mobile handset, with an on-screen-only keyboard to do this. But in other meetings I have used my clunky tablet PC to great effect. Handwriting recognition is approaching handwriting speeds, and if you don't live-convert, it's even faster. There's no page flipping, etc. and you just write and draw what you want.
Apple might agree with this assessment. Over the weekend, a patent was found for a stylus for iPads and presumably other capacitive devices they come out with. I think the implementation looks dumb, and maybe is just to get the patent fairy on their side; an inductive tablet pickup (from Wacom could be easily fit behind the screen, and add pressure sensitivity to boot. But I digress. Even Apple has, at least in the back of their head, a concern that the iPad can reach a broader customer base, and be a creation tool, not just the oft-argued consumption tool it seems to be, despite arguments to the contrary.
There also seems to be something about the size and glowing-ness of the iPad that discourages use as attention of the outside world goes up. A fun observation I've made is waiting to board the airplane. There are a lot of people for any single flight, and pretty much all of them have computers, and a lot have tablets. What I'm seeing is:

Condition	In use or in-hand
No employees at the gate	Headsets	Laptop	iPad	eReader	Mobile	-
Gate agent arrives	-	Laptop	iPad	eReader	Mobile	-
Gate agent announces boarding soon	-	-	iPad	eReader	Mobile	-
Previous flight is unloading	-	-	-	eReader	Mobile	-
Waiting for your zone	-	-	-	-	Mobile	Boarding pass
Waiting to get your boarding pass scanned	-	-	-	-	-	Boarding pass

No. No one uses paper books or magazines, except on the plane itself. Anyway, there seems to be a general worry that the iPad is too distracting, and too fragile. It gets put away not much after laptops. The relatively fewer Galaxy Tabs and Archos things I see are not much better. They last only another minute and a half. There also /seems/ to be something about the standby nature of eReaders. I never see the idle screens on those; they are pulled out of bags with a page displayed, the people read them, flip pages, continue reading and just shove them away. Not enough data here, but I suspect there's something to be learned with this as well.
So, lest you say I am just anti-Apple (and I do get accused of that when I ask these question), I am not really. I just don't think that any device is perfect, cannot be improved upon, and cannot be competed with. Were I hired to build a media tablet, or software for one, my competition would be Moleskine, and other trendy notebooks. Everything else is converging into mobile devices, one way or another, so I find it hard to believe that paper is not on our near horizon. The iPad, or Playbook or Xoom or anything else that's not just me-too can easily do a lot of this. I eagerly away the near future.

My Mobile Mantra: People First

Mobile is not iPhone or iPad or N8. It's not Bada or Symbian or WebOS. Mobile is not Opera Mini, or Skyfire or Netfront. Mobile is not sliders or clamshells, QWERTY or 12-key. Mobile is not touch, or multi-touch. Mobile is not Foursquare, or Facebook, or MySpace. Mobile is not Twitter. Mobile is not MMS, or BBM, or SMS. Mobile is not resolution or GPS, or front-facing-cameras. Mobile is not CDMA or GMRS, WiMax or LTE.

Mobile is not successful due to amazing marketing, or great pricing, or because it's fashionable. It's not even successful because it offers new capabilities to everyone, although it also does that.

Mobile is an unspeakable success because it lets people be people. As obvious as it seems, we're no longer tethered to wireline phones, or movie theaters and TVs, or pinball arcades, or typewriters, photocopiers and desktop computers.

Mobile works because it lets people work the way they want to, and the way they always have. Mobile lets people be mobile, and read what they want, and watch what they want, and take photos of their vacation, and share their thoughts with their friends, their family or no one in particular.

Designing for mobile – and I say now designing for anything – is an exercise in designing for people. Sure, it's always been a great idea to consider users; but not just how they interact with a machine, or a website. If you step back and look at the way people really work, and want to work (or play, or share, or create...) then you are on the right track.

Whether the product that comes out of this is (or works on) a large chunk of iron, a wheeled vehicle, a desktop computer, a website or a mobile handset – or many of the above all at once, is of no particular significance. When you consider people, and their context, and address it right, that is what I consider designing with a mobile mindset.

Certainly do not get locked in and decide before anything else to design a desktop website, but also don't design for mobile first. Design for people first.

I think this will be my position at 5pm on 21 September when I talk about "Why and when to design for mobile first" with Scott Jenson, Barbara Ballard, Luke Wroblewski, and Alan Tifford at Design for Mobile 2010. Come see us and join in.

Why are aircards so hard to use?

Aircards is my vernacular at least for a "cellular modem." A data connection device that uses a mobile phone network to connect to. Usually, you plug them into laptops. For a long time, they were in the PCMCIA format, and some are now in Express Card or whatever that is called, but increasing numbers of cardless laptops (like mine) mean people are using lots of USB aircards now. But despite the cable nightmare, that's not the issue. Hell, I used one that required a dongle to go from USB to serial, and the adapter cable was 6 ft long! That was sub-optimal, but it's not the problem. The problem is drivers. They are harrowing. Terribly difficult to install, often requiring multiple restarts. Arbitrary support of different platforms. Setup is basically impossible unless you already know what you are doing. They are too feature packed, so try to take over your WiFi and other connections that work fine. And often, they just don't work. Is it the driver, the hardware, the account? No one can tell. And the best part is that I have a solution. I cannot implement it as I do not have a giant electronics factory. But anyone who does is free to fix it. Here it is: make it an ethernet bridge. I might have used the wrong term. What I mean is, you plug the card into an ethernet port. No drivers at all. It says "I am an ethernet cable attached to a DHCP server, attached to the internet. Anyone care?" The computer sees... a wired ethernet connection. These exist in some forms; I use a wifi ethernet bridge to get an iMac Rev D (driver issues, with WiFi this time) onto the network from the second floor. Yes, you'd need to be able to set it up. Easy. Just make it like your router, and talk to it on a specific IP address. And it cannot charge over ethernet. So? Put a battery in it, which some aircards already have, and charge over USB. Leave it plugged into USB if you want. Cannot be a lot more expensive, if ANY more expensive, than the current hardware, plus driver development costs run to zero. Fire 90% of those guys tomorrow (gotta keep supporting old products). The issues I pointed out above are killing this market. There is no one I know who has seen it (even "I'll never carry a cellphone" types) who is not totally impressed. At least a dozen people I don't know at all have approached me to ask what it is (on the bus, in airports) and apparently are so interested they might have bought one. Etc. Embedding, which they are working on, is plausible but the driver and setup issues make them so hard to use that I cannot see them going really mass market till that's fixed.

Skipping, Time-Shifting and the Status Quo

My semi-casual observations of opinions on usage of PVRs/DVRs sets them into three camps:
1) Industry analysts who group all PVRs together
2) Pundits and bloggers who insist that PVR=TiVo
3) Those who like to look at these devices by interface class

The last one seems to be shared by maybe a dozen folks in the world. I am the only one who writes about it I know of (tell me different and I'll link and subscribe to them).

See, TiVo &mdash and all of the Dish PVRs &mdash have a commercial skip feature. In general, they are pretty much immediately reactive, and make sense. Lots, and lots and lots of others (like most given away by CableCos) are not. They are sorta terrible, slow to react, and provide a jumpy fast-forward feature, at best. These are more like using a VCR than anything.

The results of this study seem possiby skewed by this misunderstanding. Or maybe because the study organizers have never seen a PVR (having worked with researchers, not that big a stretch). They claim that most users don't skip commercials (except older folks). This bears out other studies where PVRs aren't scary (to ad-revenue based broadcast businesses) because commercials are still watched.

But I see usage, in my anecdotal experiences, as almost entirely divided along device functionality (or interface class) lines. People with terrible DVRs watch TV like always (static). They periodically watch like they have a VCR (turn on a recorded show and watch it without much pausing or fast-forwarding). People with good PVRs watch TV with almost complete time-shifting, skip intros and title sequences unless they are very engaging, and watch very few commercials (but go back to watch good ones on purpose).


As an aside, I think this is a typical trend of a certain kind of research:

Male, female, age. Demographics can only serve so much. This is where marketing and usability/UX diverge.

A guide to exception messaging

I am a huge believer in making systems just work. I have never been more proud of my design than when it gets all the way to production without a help system of any sort. There's just nothing to say! Still, there are almost always error messages, of one sort or another. Ideally, these are assistive, and actually preempt errors. I am tending lately to call these "exception messages." Some good ones have been messages shortly before Christmas on e-commerce sites stating whether products can be expected to get there in time (sorry, I forgot to take a screenshot) and some bad ones have been inappropriate use of orange road signs. Like the street signs, its sometimes helpful to look to machine-world examples of such things. Its winter here, and for some reason a lot of places like to lock one of their two entry doors, all winter. I think they believe that they think it cuts down on the draft, but its pretty dumb to me. Pretend, though, that its just broken. If you wanted one door forever, the right answer would be to board it up; that's a way to avoid anyone trying to use it, so no errors occur. But if its temporary, how do you message it? Well, not like this: This is actually one of the better signs I have seen on doors in my neighborhood. (Also note its at the front of an airlock. Any draft is already caught by the second set of doors, so its extra inexplicable). Its not very clear, so I end up tugging on lots of locked doors, which just a few weeks before I had been able to use. On the other hand, take Taco Bell. Our local one (I don't go there, but its right at the end of the street) has been abandoned, and its moved across the street. But you know how fast food joints have an iconic nature; they look like that same place years later. Old Taco Bells still look like you can get tacos, even if they serve Chinese, or are pawn shops. What to do? How about that? VERY large signs, make sure they are places that matter (e.g. the drive thru menu which is already attracting attention, and an expectation of reading), leave the lights on so the signs can be read, and make the message very, very clear. Its not /exactly/ across the street, but its so close you literally cannot miss it if you pull back out and look. No address, no diagrams, no arrows (typical for moved businesses). "Across the street." I find this to be a wonderful solution. How else can exception messages matter? How's life and death? This A310 crash is, partly, the result of not having any useful warning of disengagement of a part of the autopilot. A small light, and unusual operation compared to older aircraft (you can manually control only the roll channel but everything else is on autopilot still) is all that notifies. As this is considered a feature (not a bug) by Airbus, it makes some sense that there are not horns or anything, but perhaps something more clear would have been helpful. When things go really bad, certain elements simply disappear from the MFDs. There's still no actual message that something is wrong, much less /what/ is wrong. The solution, of course, was to just add more procedures and training.

Ubiquity may never get here

And its not the technology. Really, 1980s computing and networks could get halfway there. Its us. The people who specify, design and develop software and systems. To be clear, ubicomp -- to me -- is not just the state (which we're already in) of computers embedded in every device, or the almost-there step of them talking to each other all the time and being aware of their surroundings, but when the communication and awareness with which each device or process is endowed can work to actively help us out. Us, as in "the humans." Lets take the dead-simple, totally mobile-free example that spurred this post. I copy a link from Safari (apple product). I immediately go into Mail.app (apple product), type a short message, maybe even with the word "link" in it, then fail to activate the "paste" function before I send it. Why, oh why doesn't the system ask me if I forgot something? It doesn't even have to be interruptive, just disruptive; a status message blinks next to the send button, reminding me. Or, maybe a prominent paste button conditionally appears next to the send button. Or... whatever. This is the core of my issue. Software from all one vendor, one one machine, cannot work together to solve (much less /prevent/) something that has happened to everyone I know, dozens of times. What hope is there for a sea of mobiles, or PAN-connected peripherals to help you accomplish your daily tasks? Unless we all apply ourselves to the problem, and think of users, usefulness and usability, instead of making users bend to the will of the systems.

Error message of the week

The more I pay attention to ATMs, the more I am suprised at how tenuously the software is aware of the hardware. Entirely aside from the odd physical design (e.g. all the slots look the same) the software is often unaware what you have done, what peripheral hardware has done, or when its obviously broken. The other week, when depositing into one of those new-fangled ones the reader kept spitting my check out. Apparently, something made the reader unhappy. But, it never told the actual software that runs the ATM. So the GUI kept asking if I wanted more time. The sign above is similarly dumb. The cash acceptor device should probably be able to say its not working. But if not, why can't someone remotely load a message to the idle screen (and remove the ability to select "deposit cash" from the options menu) instead of forcing the branch to tape a hand-written note to the machine? It probably looks like I am picking on ATMs. And I guess I am a little. But I think they deserve it for being very common devices (economies of scale should negate "its too expensive" arguments), used by everyone (so the usability bar should be low) and with inherent trust and security issues. But mostly, I pick on them becuase their faults are nicely symbolic of the faults of many other systems.

I. Want. This.

Of course, everyone in the room with me assumes it means "drug users." Just like they don't find the Jacob Nielsen drinking game f!@#$ing funny as hell either.

A few days with an iPhone

Yes, I don't own this, so I might have a different opinion after a month. I have used the device a dozen times, so was pretty familiar with it, and just spent the whole weekend using it. I used it as much as I could for all my weekend tasks, legitimately taking notes, mapping stuff to get to it, timing things, browsing when I would otherwise have to haul out a laptop, etc.

Except that no one had the number so I received no calls on it, I feel I worked it out pretty well. The iPhone is one of those products that has a visceral, emotional response. Its so pretty that using it tends to make you happy. There are quite enough glowing reviews from fanboys of all stripes, that I won't proceed further. Oh, its better shaped than I thought. Maybe mostly the thin-ness, but it was a snap to carry, even with a wallet, knife, flashlight, KRZR and so on already in my pockets. Miles better than the Treo 650 I previously borrowed from work for a few weeks.

 Its got at least its share of flaws. Now, I'm gonna disregard all those I've already read, and focus on things I alone think are lame, or which I was surprised to find to be true all these weeks later. You are, as always, free to disagree.

• No LBS - I went out and googled this one; with maps on the home deck I was sure I had just missed some setting, but indeed, there is absolutely no location service at all. Even sector would have been enough to make me happy. This changed my opinion of the whole thing as a network device. It felt like a big iPod after this.
• Browser crashing - Safari likes to crash, sometimes 5 times in an hour. And when it crashes, it takes you back to the home deck. Maybe, it saves your window list, maybe not, but in all cases they are all empty. So I've waited forever to load up info into 5 tabs, and they are all blank. Even if the device is gonna crash, better state preservation would be nice. Also, note there are no error messages. It took a while to make sure it wasn't me hitting something wrong.
• Safari zoom in weird - Its a pure zoom. By the time I have zoomed enough to comfortably read most text that needs a zoom, line lengths are too long to fit on screen. Either I pan constantly (difficult to track) or have to carefully scale and peer at the slightly-too-small text.
• Many not finger-based selectors - My favorite of this is the "odometer-style" rolling number selector for changing time on the alarms. Changing the number involves putting your finger on the number directly. This might work fine for a pen or mouse, but I can't see anything past my finger. Many other functions are like this.
• Many dumbed-down, phone-like interfaces - Again, lets talk about alarms. You get an alarm. And you can dismiss it. That's it. Large, empty screen without extra functions, or even a way into extras. 5 clicks and some dragging can get you into the appointment itself, and set a different alarm time, but why can't I snooze, or reset the reminder time directly? The wife's cheap LG phone has more, perfectly easy to use, features than this for its alarm modes. I expect more than a button or two from a device like this.
• Inconsistent interface - A few interface elements are beautifully designed. The pulldown or combo-box (or whatever you want to call it) in Safari is clearly designed to be worked on a tiny screen and is a snap to use. Many other places have the same basic selector need, and use something else, or, essentially nothing and rely on desktop metaphors. Sometimes, within the same process. Some elements (e.g. settings) have a clickable breadcrumb, others do not, and none give you a way back to the home deck. I know there's a big home-deck button, but I feel (and felt when clicking the device) this broke the breadcrumb paradigm for no great reason.
• Network connection unreliable - I don't mean the "EDGE sucks" part, which is true, but that all my network sockets kept... expiring. Even at home, with full EDGE and full WiFi, it would loose connection. The only way around this seemed to be to cycle the WiFi. Whether using WiFi or not, this action caused the network to wake up and I could continue. I can live with slowness if I have to, just not no connection at all.
• Very poor map searchbase - And, most of all, senselessly so. After a while I started actually doing searches on both the iPhone and the desktop, thru googlemaps directly. Simple searches, like houses in Lenexa could not be found on the iPhone, at all, when using precisely the same search string.
• General lack of affordance - Many items, like the zoom by doubleclick or zoom by multi-touch, are reasonably learnable, but there is no way to discover them except by reading the manual (or deciphering a commercial, or googling "how to..."). I was disappointed in the lack of backup modes and how stripped-down GUI won the day every time.

Think Design - Live Design

The Adaptive Path folks are in the process of interviewing everyone who is presenting at UX week this year. Good stuff in general, but today it was Bill DeRouchey of Ziba Design and the History of the Button blog. Lots of good stuff, but he made one great point that is so obvious to me I never really formalized it, much less said it:

Interaction designers, of course, should be trying to deconstruct everything around them to better train themselves as interaction designers. And the fun thing about that is we’re completely surrounded by examples, it’s all the devices in our daily lives. It’s the cell phones, microwaves, ATM machines, computers, printers, and so on. We’re surrounded by buttons and icons and little blinky lights that can give us examples of how people think about devices and interaction design because there’s one thing that’s definitely true, people don’t approach the product from a void.

Since I am not sure everyone else does this, here's just six things I have done recently that inform my understanding of our world as an environment someone designed:

• Note everything bad about the ATM interface. Is there any reason its bad? Are there any security flaws? Is a warning sticker the best way to inform users of a feature (envelopeless deposits)?
• Compare and contrast pinpads. You know, the payment interfaces at stores. Why does the hardware store have one, but you cannot swipe? Why does Target think its a good idea to suck you card in? Why do almost none of the softkey devices use them, and none use them consistently? Why are they all so different?
• Replace the mirror on my car, with a similar but not identical one from a junk yard. Figure out how the relevant pieces come apart. Figure out how to modify it without destroying the base object to fit the new part. Think about how the design is optimized for ease of factory assembly. Note the construction, materials, structure, wiring and assembly method and try to determine how much this influenced the layout of buttons and lights. Does there seem to be anything sub-optimal in the control placement that seems to arise from these considerations?
• Build a birdhouse from materials on hand. Find the specifications (hole size, position, interior dimensions) for the type of bird. Consider environmental issues (outdoor use will be hard on the materials and construction). Make provisions for repair, ventilation, mounting.
• Compare the manner in which the quick-start options work on the two microwaves at work, vs. the one I have at home. Why are they different? Which is better to me? Is it a result of habituation or is it truly easier to use?
• Look at the way barricades and signage are placed for a construction zone. Is there a better way to route traffic? Is there a better way to label the change? Is it more confusing at night, or less?

What have you observed lately?

Ha! CC numbers can be linked to issuer!

Back when I started with this whole web design thing I was able to find some scripts to take advantage of some of the check encoding built into credit card numbers. I think we even had a little checksum so we could tell if it was a validly formatted number, but most of all there was a system to the numbering, so we could tell issuer networks apart.

We had to provide this tag for whether the card is Visa, MC, AMEX or whatever to the processing bank, but we could determine that based on looking at the number. I knew this to be true from earlier in my life, so went looking and it was great.

Now, a few years after I get to Sprint I am told this no longer works. Though no one can show me proof, and I don't believe it fully, I'm told that due to the large number of cards issued, that scheme doesn't work so we'll need to ask the customer which card they are using. Its always lame to provide an extra step, but everyone else seems to have done it, so who am I to argue.

Well, its demonstrably not true:


I just recently bought something thru this store with a PayPal checkout scheme. On the left, you see they accept the usual assortment of cards. On the right, after entering my valid card number (that is not it!) it shows which one you have. No user input required. Neat.

I suppose its possible they are using Ajax to actually pre-process the card number, but for a bunch of reasons, I doubt that. I think its parsing the CC number itself on the client side.



Some other time I'll rant about how amazingly poorly the CVV2 code is implemented from a design, usability, comprehension and mostly security point of view. Note that mine was auto-filled by the browser. That's secure.

Off Scale High

I've finished the overwhelming stack of magazines I was behind on, and now I'm into the overwhelming pile of books I am behind on reading. Right now, its Inviting Disaster. I love disaster books. Especially when they get into engineering or design failures. Why Buildings Fall Down is a must read if this appeals to you also.

Anyway, its covering the usual. Challenger O-rings, the Ocean Ranger capsize, etc. Well, I just finished the TMI2 part. There are plenty of lessons about procedure, training, usability, human behavior, control room design, etc. (the best of course being a light to indicate you asked a valve to close, not whether its actually closed!) But there was one I didn't recall before.

When the morning shift arrived, someone noticed the overflow cooling tank temperature was high. They see something like this:


Which means its 280°, which is not too bad. Too hot, so they start figuring out its a loss-of-coolant accident, instead of a danger of going-solid accident, but no one noticed before because its not all /that/ hot.

Well, that's because the water is not really 280°. Seems some programmer decided that all values over 280 should be discarded, so the top of the scale is...280. No standard way to know that on a digital readout, though. And certainly it was not indicated on the meter, or in any obvious place in the

Consider if that gauge was displayed like this:


Not necessarily bad that someone makes the decision no reading over 280 is important, but the classic dial gives us other information. Lots of it, really. But here, you can detect the top end, and understand that the reading is not a specific value, but an unknown above a certain value, off scale high.


This is something I particularly hate about digital display of anything. My GPS (actually, all of them) is similar. It will happily give your position down to at least 1 meter. But if you look somewhere else, it will also inform you that it only knows its position within a certain accuracy, usually between 11 and 70 feet. There's even a handy circle around your location marker if you look at the map; somewhere in this circle is where you actually are.

I have warned about this but I still think there is a fundamental design flaw in most of these sorts of display mechanisms. Excessive implied precision, and implied accuracy. Everyone I work with seems to understand its true, yet hardly anything seems to actually happen about it.

In the disaster book, Chiles talks about how the control room is oddly isolated from the boiler functions, much more so than any boiler operator from a century before would let himself be. Not just in proximity, so he can observe it, but in the type and value of his instruments. Those instruments were developed carefully, over time, to meet specific needs and avoid dangers. Since digital display is not going anywhere, I wonder when will universal digital standards start to emerge to prevent these sorts of issues?

Design Responsibility

This article brings up some interesting topics regarding branding, design and usability:

After months of investigation, the state of Connecticut sued Best Buy on May 24 and accused the chain of tricking customers with two identical-looking Web sites in its stores, with the only difference being that one had higher prices... ...Initially, Best Buy said the identical design was used for both sites to save on design and programming costs. On May 24, Best Buy added that it designed to comfort—not confuse—their customers. "We used the same Web site platform for these in-store kiosks as we did for our national Web site to ensure that customers familiar with the national Web site could easily navigate the in-store kiosk," Busch said, in a prepared statement.

I can see how I might have fallen for this also. "Lets just use the existing web eStore. Its all done and it works fine, so we can save time and money." Especially from a branding, approvals, and content maintenance perspective, its something I can really see myself falling into. However, as we see here, its not the same thing at all.

 The various accounting scandals really pushed all big companies to put up lots of posters and send out lots of emails around ethics. Being a lowly UI designer I like to say "unethical behavior is above my pay grade." There's really hardly anything bad I could do if I even tried.

 But now I am thinking maybe I missed an opportunity, or risk, in that thinking. Maybe we have a responsibility of some sort around truth in information. I have always thought of contextual appropriateness in the narrow sense of comprehension, but perhaps understanding is broader.

Hmm... not sure yet how to say it, but its definitely worth thinking about more. Of course, we cannot do it alone, so sales and marketing (and everyone else) has to be on the same page, but maybe simply pointing out court actions can help persuade everyone.

Powerpoint

Yeah, everyone likes to rip into powerpoint. Its trendy since Tufte's scathing analysis, and I normally don't rant about it because everyone else has it covered. In fact, this post is entirely to post other people's posts, since I ran across two good ones just today. First up, the generally excellent Presentation Zen blog, that often talks about powerpoint anyway, asks Who says we need our logo on every slide?

A lot of the presentations I attend feature a person from a specialized field giving a talk — usually with the help of PowerPoint — to an audience of business people and creatives, etc. who are not at all specialists in the presenter’s technical field. This is not an uncommon type of situation, of course. For example, an expert in the area of, say, biofuel technology may be invited to give a presentation to a local chamber of commerce about the topic and about what their company does, what the average person can do, etc. Recently I attended such an event, and after the hour talk was over I realized that the presentation was a miracle of sorts: Until that day I didn’t think it was possible to actually listen to someone make a PowerPoint presentation in my native language of English and for me to genuinely not understand a single point that was made. Not one. Nada. I understood the individual words, the pronunciation and diction were perfect, but between ubiquitous acronyms — and the darting laser pointer used to underline those acronyms — bulleted lists, and colourfully decorated charts and diagrams, after it was all said and done, I realized that I hadn’t comprehended a single idea. I wanted my hour back. The wasted hour was not the fault of PowerPoint or even bad slides, however. While I was suffering through this, doing the best that I could to understand, it occurred to me that this presentation would have been greatly improved if the presenter would have kept two good pieces of advice in mind in preparing for the talk. These two bits of advice which I discovered recently have nothing to do with PowerPoint or the art of slide presentations per se, yet they apply well... read the rest of it

And, from the fun but spotty Information Aesthetics an amusing, but all too true, video by comedian Don McMillan on what not to do with Powerpoint.

The award for the least web 2.0 company goes to...

I didn't get the whole web 2.0 thing in time to be cool about it. Luckily I'm not a guru who led my consultancy down the tubes as a result. I only really got it around the time I first saw this movie summarizing it rather cutely. I still find it easier to describe most things in the negative, what they are not, than what they are. Call it a character flaw, but it works for me. In that vein, IMDb is by far the least web 2.0 site I have used lately. Sure, lots of others are worse in absolute terms, but it suffers so much due to what it is. A huge relational data store (its got "Db" in the address!). The one, best one in the world for its data type. Traditionally, I have hated it for not being mobile enabled, for being bloated, for generally poor UI. I especially like the lack of deep-linking after signon. Oh, and the periodic intrusive advertising. And, none of this improved after their recent purportedly well researched redesign. But the big ah-ha moment came the other day. I add stuff to IMDb occasionally. Its not an encyclopedia with enough permanent staff to update it all, but more of a wiki, so needs user input. Of course, woe be unto you who think it should /act/ like a wiki. Lets walk thru it. I finish Alphaville and am wandering the page looking at interesting bits. A friend recalls a reference to it, which is not listed, and I remember one that I am sure about, so want to add. I remember in this one Homicide (life on the street!) episode there was a villain who used the screen name of Lemmy Caution. Bayliss even mentioned that it was from Alphaville. Great. Good reference that should be in there. So, lets update the Alphaville page. Um... how? Seriously, this took me five minutes to find. You cannot call users dumb, but as a designer, I'll admit I am dumb, so maybe its my fault. Anyway, look for yourself. Its the "update" button at the bottom of the page. Okay, so you click it. And... well, its not worth giving them crap about every bit of the interface. Its not clear right away (the most obvious part to me is the "forgot something" function, which I STILL do not understand) but eventually you see the pulldown. Its also weird, but you get there. And its reasonably contextual. At least its about the "movie links" page as opposed to having you drill thru everything. So, you get to the ability to add items by line. Its a bad sign that it needs to have four paragraphs of text in front of it. Probably hard to use. And way too many categories, but my issue is around the "other title" field. So, I want to add a link to Homicide. I go to the correct page for it, and add the title straight out of their search results ("Homicide: Life on the Street" (1993)) and get this: Hmm. Okay. Its not obvious there even /are/ episode pages to me before this. For example, I went to another site to confirm the episode name, because its so unclear. So, we go to find that. Which is hard. A search for the episode title leads nowhere. Eventually I see the "seasons" links at the top of the series page leads me to a huge list of all episodes in all seasons. I find the right one, and it even has a link. Click it and what do ya know, there's a whole page about that episode. Not super-clear that there's a superordinate series or anything, but there it is. So, I grab that title removing the carriage return, so it looks like ""Homicide: Life on the Street" Homicide.com (1999)" and try it. I even remember to remove the episode info from the description. Not even close: In fact, we're getting further away. Now it doesn't even know what that means! I sigh. I watch more TV. I eventually try again. Maybe its web-centric. Try the URI "http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0604379/" Nope. Even worse (I won't show any more screenshots). Okay, maybe its all using codes. How about the value for the title "tt0604379." Again, not a finger. So I think, maybe they are as bad as some of the developers I have to work with, and stare blankly when you say "parse out irrelevant characters." Because its a title field, maybe it never occurred to them to accept anything but numbers. Yup, that's it. It works. I submit it. But by the time you are entering secret code numbers, not available anywhere ON the page, we might as well be using command line interfaces. Now that I know, its not that bad at all (like command line interfaces, really). But who would be able to get thru this process otherwise? I only finished out of a sense of self-sacrifice as an interface designer. I feel the post needs to end in some great, or at least witty, big conclusion. But there's not much to say. Its bad, in a way that's so bad it points to a cultural issue. And its easy to blame IMDb but my company has dozens of customer-facing web applications at least this obtuse. I suspect I'll write about it more, but clearly its beyond the scope of just designers. There needs to be a cultural change for developers, and business stakeholders. I'm just not sure when that might filter down to this level.