4ourth Mobile is a Thing Now

Long before I had a day job, I freelanced. I did design work when I was in Junior High. Actually, I recall that first paid job (sure, my dad worked there) they weren't happy with the results. Probably worth thinking about more and writing a whole post about how early failures made me the type of conscientious designer I am today. Later. I've made over half my income some years from freelance or contact work, and while it petered out in the past few years, when we all lost our jobs a year ago, making a virtual agency seemed a natural. I've been sorta calling the freelance work I do since then part of the 4ourth Mobile brand, and the Designing Mobile Interfaces book Eric and I are writing has a strong online presence at a wiki under that same site. But I haven't really marketed it in any particular way. Well, now I probably should get on that. Yeah, maybe this is old hat for everyone else, but I've never actually bothered to incorporate anything before. I just faked it, filed a Schedule C and made do. Accountant friends forced my hand here for tax reasons, but really it's a good idea. So, consider this the official announcement: 4ourth Mobile is a thing. Call it a virtual mobile design agency. If you think well of one of our tweets, or blog post, or The Big Book of Mobile Design, contact us. We can do training, or design, or user research, or just chat about your needs and see if our concept of a mobile strategy is the same as yours. We're even multi-national, and can travel, so whatever your needs, ask and we'll talk about it.

That comfort is important

“ ... The iPad bursts into life, its backlight on, the blinking “slide to unlock” label hinting at the direction of the motion it wants you to make. That rich, vibrant screen craves attention... It’s glowing rectangles all the way down: those backlit screens that suck your attention...
Perhaps the Kindle’s comfort is down to its single-use nature. After all, it knows it already has your attention – when you come to it, you pick it up with the act of reading already in mind.
That comfort is important to the Kindle’s intended purpose, though. This is a device that always seems content with itself. Just sitting there, not caring if you pick it up or not. Like a book. ”

Tom Armitage of Berg, on the difference between the iPad and the Kindle and their Asleep & Awake performance. This is Ubicomp to me.

Synchronize your watches

Remember all those WW2 commando epics, and right before the big mission they all synchronize their watches? Well, I dare you to do that in a digital world. The machine era guys tried to make things easy to work. Watches were great. Assuming you wound it up and kept it attached to your wrist, it's a snap. Setting it is the easiest thing in the world. Find the approximate time. Pull the dial out and twist everything to the right time. Push in when Captain Mallory says "mark." The BBC World Service even still has their tones for setting your watch at the top and bottom of every hour. "Bip,bip, bip, bip, bip, bip, BEEP" and push in the knob. You are on to the second.
There is, however, no way to do this in the digital era. Just among devices I have at hand:

• Entry into edit modes:
• Changing the time could be forward-only, or forward and backwards; it could go on its own speed (maybe with two speeds) or each increment is a button push; the whole time could be as one, or hours and minutes could each have their own buttons; most have key repeat, but how much and how fast?

But none of them have an explicit exit mode. They time out, eventually, sometime. When does the time entered take effect? It depends. And you can't tell. So there's no good way to set time to the second. This makes me sad.

Why should I be the expert?

Tax prep software, I am told by folks who build it, is an expert system. It knows all about it's domain area, and solves problems for me based on this knowledge, and likely information and outcomes. So why am I the expert? I regularly have no idea, at all, what it's asking me but the assumption seems to be that I understand the jargon perfectly. As 2008 tax paperwork begins trickling in, I start thinking of the great idea I came up with last year. How about I don't fill out forms the way the government, or any tax-expert does, and instead I just gather my documents, and enter those. So, right now, I can go to the TaxCut site and say I got a form. They guide me through obvious choices, and I pick "its from a bank or investment management company" (of course, they offer last year's forms and companies as an option) and tell me it's probably a 1099-INT, then I enter that info. Weeks later, as it determines I have probably got everything entered, it asks to make sure, and then goes through all the questions about if I have any farm income, or am blind, or dead or whatever. But why not look at the actual use case, of everyday folks, frustrated by taxes and the piles of paperwork, and use that to solve problems instead of creating more.

Why does this switch exist?

Wal-Mart has by far the best price on propane, so I'm there with the rest of the fearful masses buying stuff to survive the impending storm. Across from my lane one of the cashiers is closing down, and keeps having to tell people to move along. At once point I hear: "Lanes 9, 10 and 11 are all open... though John hasn't turned on his light yet." And my cashier hits this switch: And it occurs to me that I have always wondered "why?" The register is already a piece of powered equipment, has been for well-nigh a century. Generally, the operator has to enable the device; now by signing on with their own credentials, but in the past at least with a key. So, why a separate switch? Why not just have the light come on when the register is in "ready to accept transactions" mode? Sure, I can come up with cases where the register is being used for administrative tasks, but that's an exception, and an over-ride can be provided I guess. But the primary case by far is being missed, badly. Now, off to brave the ice weasels.

Why do we have to wait for receipts?

Leaving the house this morning, I notice the car is almost out of gas. Not "glowing light" bad, but Lawrence is a long ways off, so we aren't gonna make it. So, I stop at Quik Trip. And when I am done and the hose is hung up, and the fuel port is all sealed, I am still waiting for the receipt to print... Though I have done this thousands of times, I just realized, this is a friction point. If I had the choice, I wouldn't put up with a wait in the cold here. I feel this is yet another case of modern technology being implemented in a way reminiscent of the past, yet missing enough of the point that it makes everything harder. Think of a receipt in a simple (or old-time) cash register, or adding machine. Its a record of what you /just/ typed. A couple lines get printed automatically when you press the button to say the transaction or calculation is complete. Then about 1 second later, you can rip it off and look at it. Why don't receipts on computerized registering systems (at the grocery store, at the gas pump) work like this? A transaction starts: print the header, date time. Pick a product, print it on the receipt. Total it, and it prints a couple lines. Etc. By the time you get to the end, Of course, in many stores, its even worse: You have to wait for the itemized receipt, then wait for the credit card receipt the store keeps, THEN they print the receipt you sign. And you sign it while the system and cashier is idle. Great planning. So, I have no faith anyone is actually working on improving this. Get used to the wait.

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.

Violating Communications Paradigms is Not Just for the Internet

Take the much misused button. On the web its really for submitting data. At Sprint we even made standards to this effect some time back. We had to because it was so often misused as a "more important" link. Its big and (at the time) red, so it must be more important than a simple colored, underlined word. The current Sprint home page has a button for "all phones" that does nothing more than the links above it, except be big and yellow. Other prominent examples abound.

I've always given particular grief to interactive systems due to their immaturity about such issues. Newspapers don't mess up this sort of thing. Road signs, regardless of country, are often another good one. In the US orange, for example, means construction.



And nothing else. Reserving it for construction means that any driver can pay special attention to such signs and know there is an exception message contained therein. If you've never been here, there's a temporary, probably dangerous situation. If you are used to this place, disregard all you know and start looking at the signs again because something probably changed (like, the road is closed). This is all well reinforced by using the same orange for pylons, with white stripes for barricades, etc. I even saw a team of guys paving on the way to work this morning, everyone one of them wearing construction-orange T-shirts.

Which makes this annoying:



This is near my house, but I saw scads of them throughout extreme northern California. Something the highway department thinks is just "really important" at the time gets a sign. Often, its just not that important. Like, 6% grade ahead. Which is perfectly well served with a yellow sign everywhere else in the world. Yellow is a fine color for warning signs.

What I think of this is pretty much what I think of over-using buttons. If there is a problem that legitimately is solved by using an orange sign, you need to solve it some other way instead. Aside from misleading everyone, eventually the value of the orange sign will be diluted, and comprehension or urgency failures will occur. In traffic signage, this could have much more dire consequences than any website.

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.