90 percent of everything : Usability Blog

Written by Harry Brignull

Proponents of various abuses of Flash and Ajax cleverness have a frequent defence of their sins: “I’m allowed to break the back button, bookmarking and ‘open in new window’ and all that other stuff people take for granted because that stuff only applies to websites. This isn’t a website - it’s a web application!”

Well I am prepared to accept this argument if we agree on a proper definition of ‘web application’. I’m tempted to be snarky and state that a web application is a web site where I would never deam of bookmarking or using my back button but for the sake of making my argument in good faith I will endevour to present a slightly more useful definition.

Websites have pages. Web Applications have states. An application can be spread over several pages of a website in which case the back button and bookmarking should work between pages. It’s OK for them not to work between states.

How do we differentiate between ’states’ and ‘pages’? Here’s my not very well thought out rule of thumb. GET’s are pages and POST’s are states. For the less HTTP involved among you then here’s it put another way. If you’re changing data on the server then that’s a POST and I don’t need to bookmark or go back. (However you’re welcome to implement an ‘undo’). If, however I’m just moving to a different view of the data then I will probably want to be able to bookmark that view, send the URL in an email, open it in a new window and all that other stuff a normal website gives me for free.

Adobe have uncharacteristically released a public beta of the new version of Photoshop - mainly so those people with shiny new Intel Macs don’t have to put up with running Photoshop under emulation any longer.

Everyone’s very excited. There’s a improved UI (no more floating palettes. yay!) and they’ve finally added a feature I’ve wanted for a long time - the ability to add filters to images non-destructively. To put it another way you can add an effect to an image and if you go back later and change the settings Photoshop will reapply the effect using the original image as a source. Previously you would have permanently changed the image when you applied a filter.

Now actually Photoshop already had a limited version of this already in the form of ‘Adjustment Layers’ which did pretty much what I just described but only work with a limited subset of effects - mainly those that do colour correction and adjustment.

Also there is a feature that has been around for ages called ‘layer effects’ which again let you apply effects to a layer non-destructively. But these are a different kind of effect again - effects that use just the perimeter of the image layer to create an effect.

Now I’ve used Photoshop for a fair while (since version 2.51 which didn’t have layers and only had one undo if you can believe such a thing. It was also made of copper and ran entirely on coal) so these subtle distinctions make a weird kind of sense to me. I know what the difference is between filters, adjustments and layer effects and have enough of a feel for Photoshop’s internal workings to see why there is a technical basis the these categories.

However I also teach Photoshop and am not looking forward to trying to explain this stuff. It’s really not going to make much sense. You’ve got three different categories of non-destructive effects all with their own means of being applied and with three different sets of limitations. Whatever the technical reason for this, it’s definitely something that could be fixed with some clever coding (After Effects and Fireworks both manage to avoid the problem with their own implementation of non-destructive effects).

This is part of the Photoshop interface. Not so much in the sense of buttons and on-screen widgets but in terms of the conceptual surface that you encounter when you learn the program.

You really notice this when you try and teach software to other people. It might make sense to you as you’ve learnt the creases and wrinkles over time but when you have to detour into non-obvious distinctions and internal workings to explain to someone why blur can’t be an adjustment layer and posterize can’t be a smart filter then you start to wish that a bit more consistency had been enforced when the features were added.

UPDATE - A great explanation from John Nack (The Photoshop product manager) on the reasons for the way smart filters have been implemented. They had some tough decisions to make to maintain a good user experience and I can understand why things are the way they are. Also see my comments and John’s response.

SitePen Blog » Blog Archive » why splitpane views suck..

He’s got a point and Gmail is a marvel in it’s range of subtle usability tweaks.

But on the desktop splitpane views are pretty much becoming the norm. And as I’ve said before they suck a whole lot less than floating palettes and overlapping windows.

But they still leave too much of the decision making about use of screen space to the user. Jesse Kuhnert praises Gmail for removing those decisions from you and I must say I’ve never wished I could resize bits of the Gmail UI. Could this strategy work for a wider range of desktop apps too?

I’ve read several pieces from Adobe listing the new features due in Photoshop CS3. One of the new features is the ability to “design, preview, and test compelling mobile content”.

Whilst I understand the need to cater to those who want to create compelling content I would like to ask whether Adobe will support those of us who want to produce moderately distracting content or sort-of-OK content?

Surely the new version of Photoshop will not be abandoning a large part of it’s traditional user base?

Update: Here’s another one. From the release notes.

“Adobe Device Central software …[is designed for]… creative professionals and mobile developers who design engaging content for mobile phones and consumer electronic devices.

Is ‘compelling’ the same as ‘engaging’? Does it do both? I’m confused.

Seriously folks. If your marketing department is incapable of sounding like a normal human being when they write then don’t let them near your release notes, help files or even your website. Just let them write marketing material - that’s the stuff that no-one reads and throws straight in the bin. They can’t do as much damage that way…

It’s almost like the old curmudgeon is getting whimsical in his old age. I especially like number 3.

Of course he has to go and spoil it at the end by tacking on a moral. But in British pub discussions of US writers that is commonly recognised as a national weakness.

When people normally think about accessibility they normally think about standards compliance, automated tests, and box ticking. This is really important stuff, but it isn’t user-facing. In other words, you don’t get to find out what it is really like for people with accessibility issues to use and experience your product.

Accessibility field testing is a good method to address this. Basically, you recruit a range of users with accessibility issues, visit them in their homes (you have to do this since accessibility set-ups are very bespoke), then you interview them and carry out some user testing.

Locating these users has traditionally been quite difficult, but its great to see some services springing up to fill the gap (in the UK at least): The Shaw Trust offers recruitment and testing services, and so does the RNIB (although only for vision impaired users).

Accessibility field testing is important because there is a difference between ‘looking good on paper’ (standards compliance), and what it is like in practice, i.e. whether your product is joy to use. Bear this in mind next time you are scoping a project with an accessibility component.

[ Source: Boagworld.com ]

Craig Barrack had a great article in the NMA last week explaining why Three aren’t scared of offering unlimited Skype and Instant Messenger … on their top end “X-Series” contracts, for now.

Conventional wisdom on the future of mobile operators has two important axioms. The first is that mobile voice-over-IP (VoIP) is a massive threat to the approximate 75% of revenue they earn from voice services. The second is that mobile instant messaging could cannibalise SMS revenues, which make up a large proportion of the remaining 25% of revenues attributed to data. So there has been great interest in Hutchison 3G’s release of X-Series this month.

… This could be the first seismic shift within the industry since the launch of 3G. […] At the forefront of the capabilities of X-Series are clients for Skype and Windows Live Messenger. Heavens above, that’s VoIP and IM in one handset - surely this can’t be 3 committing commercial seppuku?

I don’t think 3 created this offer without some careful arithmetic. Within higher value contracts, as X-Series is positioned, operators already offer minutes of cross-network calls in the hundreds. For those, they have to pay a termination fee with the network being called, slightly over 5p a minute. Calling web Skype users, there will be no such charge, so 3 will be better off if its customers spend their time calling Skype users rather than other mobile networks.

By offering Skype on a fairly high-value tariff, I think that 3 has negated the traditional worry, especially if this offer increases its monthly contract subscriber base. If Skype clients become more widespread on lower-end handsets so users can call each other without affecting their monthly call allocation, that may not be the case.

A similar case can be made for the inclusion of Windows Live Messenger. Text bundles are usually included within high-end contracts anyway, so I can’t see that 3 will lose significant income.

Read the full article on NMA.co.uk

Another thing also to bear in mind is that I suspect Three only offer you an internet connection if you are in an area that has 3G coverage. If you happen to be in a blackspot, then you wont get GPRS connection. Instead you are just refused an internet connection. Depending on where you live & work, this alone could put you off signing up.

Note: if you follow diggnation you will have seen this before (its two weeks old).

“Using an “eating your own dog’s food” approach, the UbiComp2007 Challenge is seeking for submissions of how to implement an audience voting system to finally determine the winner of the “Best Presentation Award” [Read more here]

I’ve seen so much Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp) research that looks at supporting social interaction at conferences (including my own). Why? Are conferences the best scenario for UbiComp? Well, they do seem like a good scenario. Conferences exhibit lots of interesting issues to do with providing technological support to people who are mobile, in unfamiliar territory, and hoping to learn new stuff and socialize. However, I expect the main reason it was chosen was because it was very practical. “Er, we need a social setting to investigate for our UbiComp conference… Oh I know, why don’t we choose the conference as the setting? - problem solved!”

On the positive side, it will be a great way of getting researchers to get together and genuinely experience each others’ designs, and get that serious level of enthusiasm that you can only get from hands-on activity. However, my main reservation is not the target scenario, but it’s the target user group: designing UbiComp for UbiComp researchers. It seems a bit too in-turned, like a snake eating its own tail. If you design any system for enthusiasts of that system, then you are very likely to end up with a particular, specialist style. For example, if you design a home automation system for home automation enthusiasts you end up with something a normal person would perceive to be weird and crazy.

I’m sure some really interesting stuff will come out of this conference, but I can’t help wondering about the limitations of this method. Maybe it’s OK for a new field. Eric Raymond said in The Cathedral and the Bazaar “Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer’s personal itch.” So maybe it is OK to start off by designing for yourself. The risk is, though, that if you go too far down that road you might suddenly find out that after all that work, you find you’ve made something that nobody else wants to use.

People at the UbiComp conference will be, basically, quite nerdy gadget lovers. Because of their love of the subject matter, they will be probably be willing to forgo a bit of privacy and take on “odd” social behaviors for the purposes of a cool new UbiComp concept. And they are definitely going to go to some effort to use the systems deployed at the conference that might simply get ignored if deployed at a normal conference.

What do you think- should today’s UbiComp research be aimed at satisfying the needs of normal people?