For those listening to my slot on Radio Australia’s Breakfast Show, here’s what I was talking about:
I’m amazed by how word processing is still in the dark ages, considering it’s what we spend most of our day doing. Case in point is Microsoft Word 2007, which throws all sorts of weirdness—artefacts, I guess we’d call them—in text. Try scrolling through a longish document—anything over 5,000 words—and you get this kind of thing (see above) where three lines repeat themselves. And it’s not just a brief, trick of the eye type thing. It sits there like a dumb duck until you fiddle with it and it goes away.
I’m very surprised that this kind of thing happens, and that it happens on such a regular basis. These are not complicated files that contain big tables or fancy graphics, or imported ones. They’re normal Word files.
It tends to confirm my suspicion that software developers rarely concentrate honing the functions that we actually spend most time in. There’s a tendency to add features, or change interfaces, or in some ways to count value, not in terms of making sure the basics work well, but in the stuff around it. (And no, sadly OpenOffice.org isn’t a whole lot better.
I guess what I’d like to see is someone come up with a real word processor: something that really processes words properly. So far I don’t think we’re there.
More stuff from the observant and thought-provoking Nokia researcher Jan Chipchase: drivers protecting their cars in Beijing from urinating canines:
As Jan points out, lots of issues arise with this: how confused must dogs get that their choice of territory markers move around? (Or maybe that’s exactly what they want—expanding territory without them having to do anything.) But I guess for me is the weird thing that people have over their cars these days. Cars seem to be much clearner than they used to be.
Even in dusty, messy places like Jakarta you knew you could always beat the other guy to a spare corner of road just because you cared less about your car’s bodywork than he did. Here in Singapore people’s cars are so shiny you could eat off them. Apartments may look a mess but the car—the most visible reflection of people’s affluence—is glittering.
Then there’s the thing about hotels, restaurants and clubs allowing the owners of fancy cars to park right outside the lobby. Never quite understood how that works in practice. How do you know whether your car is fancy enough to merit this treatment? Would my Kijang KF42 cut it? It had a chrome trim thing going on which I thought was quite fancy.
I like Evernote but I’ve always found the notes a bit messy: different fonts, lots of weird formatting, and not particularly easy to read and scan through.
That seems to have changed with their latest version, where the notes are decently sized, free of too much extraneous stuff and easily distinguished from each other with elegant gray space.
Amazing how a few user interface tweaks—to make things simpler and more intuitive than to impress and show off-turn a maybe into a must-have.
Gadgets, like software and services, often end up being used in ways the creator didn't intend. But how many companies make the most of this opportunity?
Take the cellphone. More than a third of Brits use their mobile phone as an alarm clock, according to a survey by British hotel chain Travelodge (thanks textually.org):
Budget hotel chain Travelodge quizzed 3,000 respondents on waking up habits and 71% of UK adults claimed that alarm clocks are now obsolete. The faithful bedside companion has been cast off in favour of the modern must-have, a mobile phone. Sixteen million Brits (36%) now prefer using the latest ring tone to rouse them from sleep rather than the shrill bleeping of an alarm clock.
Why? The article doesn't say, but the answers are pretty obvious:
This might even reveal itself in the Alarm Clock Law: if another device can handle the task of a dumber gadget, it will replace it. So does that mean that the alarm clock is dead?
Not exactly. The alarm clock performs a single function: wake the person up. But that has turned out not to be as easy as it looks. While the design of most alarm clocks have been outsourced to the brain-dead, other designers have recognised the potential of alarm clocks that don't merely wake up the owner, but keep them awake long enough to get up.
This list, for example, illustrates the thriving world of alarm clock design (think Clocky, that has wheels and has wheels and . And in this post about Seth Godin last September there was a bunch of responses suggesting that in fact alarm clock designers have tried to add features to make the alarm clock relevant. As one of the commenters pointed out, the problem is that we're just not ready to pay more for those features because alarm clocks have become a commodity.
I suspect it's a bit more complicated than this. There may be other factors:
Perhaps most important, we have developed a comfort level with our cellphone's inner workings, and few of us would like to entrust a morning alarm to something or someone we don't know.
Cellphone manufacturers, to their credit, seem to have acknowledged this new role: I tried to find the alarm function on a Nokia 6120 and did so in five seconds. I bet it would take me longer on any digital alarm clock. The process is quick and painless, and a little bell logo on the home screen reassuringly indicates it's set. The alarm itself is cute and starts out unobtrusively but then gets louder until you're up and about.
Or, more ominously, have thrown the phone across the room where it now sits in pieces. Maybe there is something to be said for keeping the alarm clock separate.
Business writer and entrepreneur Seth Godin throws out product ideas like other people throw out orange juice cartons:
For twenty cents or so, alarm clock manufacturers can add a chip that not only knows the time (via a radio signal) but knows what day it is too. Which means that they can add a switch that says "weekends." Which means that the 98% of the population that doesn't want to wake up on the same time on weekends as they do on weekdays will be happier (and better rested.)
But he's not touting a new alarm clock, he's making a point: "So why doesn't every alarm clock have this feature?" he asks. "Because most people in that business are busy doing their jobs (distribution, promotion, pricing, etc.), not busy making products that people actually want to buy--and talk about."
Indeed, companies are always far too busy doing what they're doing to think about what they're doing and wonder whether they can do it better. And, as Seth points out, this is because companies are compartmentalized into responsibilities, and brave is the person who tries to straddle departments.
The weekend alarm clock won't be made by a big alarm clock company, it'll be designed by someone like Gauri Nanda, who I mentioned a few weeks back as the inventor of Clocky, the alarm clock that goes walkabout. Gauri, needless to say, was working on her own.
Actually what I suspect happens in companies is that they just ignore the user entirely. This is partly because technical products are built (and much of them designed) by programmers and engineers. I hate to generalize, but these people thrive on complexity, not on usability. For them creating and mastering the opaque is an achievement, not a symptom of failure.
What usually happens is that there are two sides to product development: the people in the company who think it's a good idea and the people who have to build it. But in my limited experience there's no one in between who speaks both languages, and, most importantly, can see what the customer might expect and want.
This is the hardest bit: it's called usability and it seems to be the last thing people think about. If you've ever grappled with an alarm clock, to continue Seth's example, you'll know what I mean.
My favorite is the alarm clock that makes a beep every time you press a button: not so useful if you're trying to quietly set the alarm but not wake your loved one. One clock I have, despite being sophisticated enough to tell me the temperature, the time in Lima and how many thous in a furlong, even makes a beep when I hit the backlight button. And no, it can't be switched off without a PhD in molecular biophysics.
I wish I could say that this is confined to alarm clocks, but it's not. Nearly every device or program is dumb in its own way. But there are bright spots. One of the things I love about Web 2.0 is that the people designing the tools really seem to understand usability.
Of course, given the fact that Web 2.0 is one big feedback loop, where new versions pop up like mushroom after rain, it's inevitable. But the result is websites that are easy to navigate and to figure out.
Apple, of course, figured this out long ago, But everyone else seems to be having problems understanding it. I tried out a website the other day which was supposed to help me find the best form of transportation between two places. The search engine was not smart enough to know a building's earlier name, or even to recommend alternatives if I got the name slightly wrong.
The internal calculator was not smart enough to get the distances right (one walk I was asked to make between bus-stops would have taken me into the sea and halfway to the next country); neither was it smart enough to realize that was an error. All should have been spotted by any usability tests. All undermine the whole point of the website, which is to make it easy to figure out a way to get from A to B.
I won't bore you with more examples: You are users, and you come across this stuff all the time. What worries me more is that we're not listened to, at least in a way in that makes sense.
I was sitting in a seminar the other day listening to an employee of a global cellphone operator talking about she and her colleagues have been canvassing opinions about how consumers use cellphones. This is good, and what should be done, but I was surprised by how she went about it: Getting users together and asking them to make collages about how they use technology.
Frankly, I don't think making collages is the right way to go about things. We need to get out on the streets, into the offices, bars and clubs, into the villages and factories, and observe how people actually use technology. Don't expect people to fill in forms or do collages for you: Follow them around. Spy on them. I do.
One of the side-effects of the cellphone revolution is that it's taken technology out of the usual places (office, den) and into every other room in the house (texting in the bath, watching mobile TV in bed) and beyond, into the bus stops, the subways, the village gazebo. Technology is now a seamless part of our lives. Researchers need to get out more.
The sad truth is that we've moved on and the geeks need to catch up. Because, lame as the alarm clock that beeps all the time and doesn't know it's the weekend is, nearly all our devices are no better: They're too smart in the sense of feature density and too stupid in the interface that lets us use those features.
So, companies: Hire a usability consultant to tell you about your products and how they might be better. Or just try your own products: sleep in on a weekend or let your spouse try to find the alarm light button in the middle of the night and see how you like being woken up.
Then rub your eyes, get out of bed and head for the design table.
I first wrote about Scoble, then the Microsoft Blogger Enfant Terrible back in 2004 or something. Maybe even earlier. But he was the breath of fresh air the company needed at the time. Now the 'markets are naked conversations' thing is the main meme, the conventional wisdom the smart people (smugly) get. Now Scoble's on his own doing podcasts, still famous for being, well, Scoble, and just posted something that made me realize the game may already have changed:
Steve Jobs is MANUFACTURING great PR by keeping everyone’s mouth shut. Heck, I’ve met some people I KNEW had an iPhone and they were so scared of retribution or consequences that they wouldn’t answer a single question.
It's an interesting possibility: That the real lesson from the iPhone episode is that companies will throw their levers into reverse and batten down the hatches (and mix a few metaphors on the way.) Corporate secrecy rules again. What is the point of opening all your windows at the behest of bloggers if great publicity is possible by controlling the flow of information so it is not a trickle?
Let's face it: Jobs has perfected a form of self-censorship that is the antithesis of everything Web 2.0, social media, the blogging revolution and the instincts of every decent, right-thinking person. And it works. And we love him for it. Who isn't going to draw a lesson from that?
Empty vodka bottles used for selling petrol, Bali
Tools often serve purposes the designers didn’t necessarily intend — increasing their stickiness for users but in a way not clearly understood by the creator.
Take the System Tray in Windows for example (and in the bar, whatever it’s called, in Macs.) And this array currently sitting in my overburdened laptop:
These icons usually either notify the user if something happens, by changing color, animating itself or popping up some balloon message, or they will be quick launch icons: double click or right click to launch the program, or some function within it. Or they can be both. Or, sometimes neither, sitting there like lame ducks taking up screen real estate. (These ones should, like all lame ducks, be shot.)
But the thing is that for users these icons actually sometimes do something else, acting as useful sources of more important information. I’ve noticed, for example, a lot of people — including myself — use the Skype icon (left) as the best, most visible way of telling whether their computer is connected.
First off, Skype is better and quicker at establishing a connection than most other connection-based programs with icons in the system tray. Secondly, the icon is a uncomplicated but appealing green, with tick in it — an obvious and intuitive signal to even the most untutored user. (It helps that the Skype icon is a dull gray when there’s no connection — once again, intuitive to most users.) When the Skype button turns green, users know they’re good to go.
Another good example of this is the Zone Alarm icon which alternates between the Zone Alarm logo and a gauge, red on the left and green on the right, to indicate traffic going in and out (see left). Another useful tool to see whether your computer is actually connected, and like the Skype icon, much more visible and obvious than the regular Windows connectivity icon — with the two computer screens flashing blue. I’ve gotten so used to having the Zone Alarm icon tell me what’s going on I have not been able to switch to other firewall programs, or Windows own, because they don’t have the same abundance of visual information to offer.
I’m not convinced that Zone Alarm’s new owners CheckPoint get this: They have dropped the disctinctive yellow and red ZA logo in the system tray for a bland and easily missable Z (left). The ZA icon was an easy and prominent way to know your firewall was working and they’d be smart to resurrect it.
What does all this mean? Well, Skype have been smart to create a simple icon that not only does things like tell you your online status (available, away) but has also become a tool to help folk know whether they’re online or not — not always clear in this world of WiFi and 3G connectivity. In fact, for many users I’m guessing the green tick is more recognisable a Skype logo than the blue S Skype logo itself.
I don’t know whether Skype knows this, or whether the Zone Alarm guys realise their icon and gauge are much more useful to users as a data transfer measure than Windows’ own. But it’s a lesson to other software developers that the system tray icon could do a whole lot more than it presently does, with a bit of forethought. And if it can’t justify its existence, just sitting there saying, then maybe it shouldn’t be there?
Beyond that, we’d be smart to keep an eye out for how folk use our products, and to build on the opportunities that offers.
Once we create all that attention data, think of the whacky things we can do with it.
I’ve been banging on about attention data for a while now, and I apologise. (For an explanation and a bit of background, go here.) But I can’t help seeing stuff through that prism nowadays. Like this camera called Buttons that doesn’t take pictures but times, and then searches the Internet for photographs taken at that second:
It is a camera that will capture a moment at the press of a button. However, unlike a conventional analog or digital camera, this one doesn't have any optical parts. It allows you to capture your moment but in doing so, it effectively seperates it from the subject. Instead, as you will memorize the moment, the camera memorizes only the time and starts to continuously search on the net for other photos that have been taken in the very same moment.
Basically the camera is a phone inside a sort of camera case. Press the button and the phone searches Flickr for photos taken at that moment. (Of course, this may take a little time.)
A lovely idea and a fascinating one. I seem to recall a photography project here where individuals were given cameras and told to take photos at the exact same moment around the city. Danged if I can remember what it was called. But as Tim O’Reilly points out in the comments on a post by Nikolaj Nyholm, it has even greater potential beyond the variable of time:
I imagine that with geolocation, you could potentially go one better. Imagine a camera that does take a picture, but also initiates a search for all other pictures taken at that same location (and optionally at the same time of day/year.)
Less poetic a vision than that of Sascha Pohflepp, creator of Buttons, but possibly more relevant to many users. I’d certainly love to see Google Earth etc use time more in their layers, so that it’s possible to get historical changes in a place (say 3D models of old buildings that no longer exist, or photos like those extraordinary collections created by the UNEP which depict changes in the environment.)
But the main idea here is to use the metadata embedded in attention streams (in this case, when or where a photo was taken) and match it with metadata from other streams. A bit like Last.fm, et al, where similarities are found between what music two quite separate people are listening to. The goal is as Sascha puts it, to subordinate the device to the bigger purpose of connecting people:
Even more so, it reduces the cameras to their networked buttons in order to create a link between two individuals.
The possibilities are endless, but it’s too early in the morning for me to think of any.
The Microsoft Office Ribbon is really starting to take off. I’ve seen it in three applications in the past two days: a mindmapping program (I’m under embargo so can’t say which one), SmartDraw 2007, and even something like Mindomo (tenminut.es review here), an online mindmapping program. Here is a bunch of other programs using the Ribbon: Essential Studio, Radius, SandRibbon, etc.
I was positive about the ribbon in a recent WSJ.com column (subscription only) which has led to death threats and old friends no longer talking to me. But I felt, and still feel, the ribbon is a big step forward in interface design. But I’m not sure that it will last. Here’s why.
Limits: The ribbon only makes sense for some programs. But which? The obvious distinction is between navigation and creativity/productivity. A browser doesn’t make sense, for example. But why not something like Visio? I have to assume it’s not laziness or lack of time that has meant that quite a few programs in the Office 2007 stable don’t actually use the ribbon (besides Visio, Outlook and Publisher don’t) so presumably it was decided the ribbon didn’t suit those programs. So we’re stuck now with two competing interface approaches — menus and ribbons. Is that making things simpler?
Licensing: Microsoft will only license it to non-competing programs. So, don’t expect to see it in all programs that might most benefit from it. Instead, expect to see OpenOffice et al develop something like a ribbon which is similar enough to look, well, similar, but not similar enough to flatten the learning curve. It may already have happened, since one or two of the ribbons I’ve seen don’t exactly feel very similar to Microsoft’s design. (How many of these Ribbon look alikes are actually licensees?)
Poor design: The ribbon is designed, among other things, to increase the amount of space available for you to do stuff. Some programmers don’t seem to get this: the new SmartDraw, for example, has no way I can see of minimizing the Ribbon, severely reducing the amount of space to actually draw in. Ditto with Mindomo. (And as several readers of the column pointed out, why can’t we move the Ribbon around the screen or customize it? What is this? 1992?)
Standards: The ribbon is supposed to be intuitive, and it is. Once you get it, there are very few commands that are elusive. The commands are grouped together well — more intuitively than the old menu system. But inevitably, as more programs adopt the ribbon approach users will get confused and mis-remember placement of functions. Mindomo, for example, doesn’t really follow the logic of other ribbon interfaces (‘Topic’ is the second ribbon name, and ‘Task Info’ the third. No logic for me there, and I’m a seasoned mindmapper.) SmartDraw has just one main ribbon and then smaller sub-ribbons on the right which makes some sense but requires a whole new attitude, not to mention weird mouse movements to get there:
Opting out: The big complaint about the Ribbon Revolution is that there’s no opting out of it. In none of the programs I have looked at is there a way to say “Ribbon? No thanks, give me back my menus. It took me 15 years to learn them and I want to stick with them.” I think this is a mistake not to give people that option.
I’m not saying the Ribbon is a bad idea. I think it’s great in Word and Excel. But it’s already beginning to feel that it should have been more flexible in its design. If Microsoft is serious about making this the new user interface, then it needs to take a long hard look at how it’s used beyond the narrow Office cubicle cluster.
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