90 percent of everything : Usability Blog

Written by Harry Brignull

Check out the full size version of this sceen grab. Imagine you are planning on buying a new contract for your mobile phone. This deal looks good doesn’t it? 2000 minutes & 1000 SMS for only £25 a month, with a monthly not yearly contract - by UK standards that’s a truly amazing deal! So what’s the catch? In the small print it says these minutes can only be used at off peak times.

I don’t understand how anyone could see this as a good strategy. Sure, you may get a good sign up rate, but when the customers see their bills at the end of the month they are going to be seriously angry. I can only hope that this is a design mistake, not purposeful deceit.

Esther Dyson, a well known and very successful venture capitalist (think flickr, del.icio.us & more), gave a short speech at Minibar in london on friday.

It was great to hear her talking passionately about User Experience. Basically her message was that if you want to give your service a lead over your competitors, make it easier to use. And that it worked for Flickr.

Seeing a VC spreading the User Experience message makes me feel a bit less worried about bubble 2.0.

>> Read more about Minibar events in London

Maybe I should stop ranting about this but it really gets me going. The OLPC UI specs seem to have been revised slightly and it’s got some people saying things like “Wow!” “Genius!” “How Adventurous!” and that sort of thing.

I agree it is exciting stuff in terms of UI design research, but is it right to gamble with Kids’ educations? And with the little money that developing nations are able to spare?

We seem to be forgetting history here. It’s very naive to assume that OLPCS + Kids = Education.

In the past, technology-centric initiatives have a well documented history of not solving the problems they were intended to, when introduced into schools. Conversely, pouring money into teacher training is well known to be hugely effective.

Look at some of these quotes from Jane Healy’s book “Failure to Connect”. Note that she is talking about the introduction of computers into US schools the 80s and 90s. She isn’t talking about the OLPC - but she might as well be!

“‘Technology! I feel as if we’re being swept down this enormous river — we don’t know where we’re going, or why, but we’re caught in the current. I think we should stop and take a look before it’s too late. Assistant Superintendent of Schools, Long Island, New York”

“Technology shapes the growing mind. The younger the mind, the more malleable it is. The younger the technology, the more unproven it is. […] Today’s children are the subjects of a vast and optimistic experiment. It is well financed and enthusiastically supported by major corporations, the public at large, and government officials around the world. If it is successful, our youngsters’ minds and lives will be enriched, society will benefit, and education will be permanently changed for the better. But there is no proof — or even convincing evidence — that it will work.”

“The experiment, of course, involves getting kids “on computers” at school and at home in hopes that technology will improve the quality of learning and prepare our young for the future. But will it? Are the new technologies a magic bullet aimed straight at success and power? Or are we simply grasping at a technocentric “quick fix” for a multitude of problems we have failed to address?“

“Why do we so desperately need to believe in computers? After surveying current attitudes for the nonprofit organization Learning in the Real World, William Ruckeyser told me, “The nearest thing I can draw a parallel to is a theological discussion. There’s so much an element of faith here that demanding evidence is almost a sign of heresy.”

IntelliAdmin.com: The 5 sins of Vista

This is depressing reading. Basic bread and butter stuff which I’d hoped was going to get better in Vista. I had assumed that stuff like this had been sorted out but simply wasn’t being trumpeted around.
I’m struggling to figure out what they’ve spent the last umpteen years actually doing on Vista? Do translucent windows take that long to implement?

Joel Veitch is a minor media celebrity. He’s behind rathergood.com,a major contributer to the rather wonderful b3ta.com.

If you’ve seen the rather popular punk kittens clips - that’s him - and he’s done commercial work for Virgin, Channel 4, Switch, VH1 and others. He recently got ripped off and not credited for a Coke campaign in Argentina and there’s been a fair amount of publicity about it:

• BBC report
• Sky news clip

I’m glad he won but what I did find interesting is that the media failed to mention that he is fairly well known in certain circles and instead merely mentioned that he was the singer of an unsigned band and produced the relevant video at home on his PC. While this might be true it doesn’t paint the whole picture.

It doesn’t change the fact that he was ripped off and uncredited but ‘unsigned band ripped off by Coca-Cola’ isn’t as quite as good a story as ‘commercial video artist’s work ripped off by Coca-Cola’. I can see why a journalist prefers the first story and Joel himself might but it irks me that he didn’t get the publicity he deserves for the work that will probably turn out to be more influential than his band (sorry Joel - I might be wrong about that!).
I do wonder whether the Sky and BBC journalists were too lazy to google his name or whether they just didn’t want to spoil a good David and Goliath story.

postscript: Language Log has a bit of a vendetta going on about the BBC’s appalling standards of science journalism. I particularly hate bad science journalism because there’s rarely any good science journalism so I think this story needs a bit of a boost. I’d love to see the Beeb have to justify some of the crud they’ve been spreading.

Introducing… the TV-out cable!

So some people are excited about living room “Media center PCs” (AppleTV, Windows MCE, etc) and some people are ridiculing the idea. I get this feeling that when making this judgement, people tend to think of their own homes, and then generalise to the whole world.

If you have a big home, then having a living room media-center “PC” seems like a useful device. After all your living room is the place you want to relax and enjoy all the media you’ve collected.

But if you have a small home, and you don’t have space for a room specially for your PC, guess where it ends up? Chances are it ends up in the living room. And from there, how hard is it to hook it up to your TV? er… not hard at all. And if you have a really small home, chances are you might just have a laptop. When it’s movie time you probably just balance it on the coffee table.

My point is, a dedicated living room media center PC (what a mouthful!) is a solution to a problem that not all of us have.

Because thats wha your users are going to do.

A few times I’ve briefly used a product and then discarded it because of it’s failings and considered writing up the experience on this site.

What stopped me was the feeling that it was a little bit unfair on the product to not try and investigate further - was there a solution to the problems I found? Maybe it was my error - I might have been using the product in the wrong way.

It just occurred to me that I was completely wrong about this. The initial reaction I had was the one that should have been used to review the product in question. I as a user had already given up on the product and so probably would many, many other users.

If ne as a reviewer persevered then the only insight gained would be a ‘oh - look what might have been’ insight.

So I will now give in to every whim to complain and dismiss safe in the knowledge that I am performing a realistic simulation of the typical customer…

History of the Button » Blog Archive » What’s a Navi button?

Kerpow! Nice take-down.

Product design is often even worse than web design which is fairly strange considering the fact that products typically cost a lot more to develop than websites and are a hell of a lot harder to fix after release…

If you haven’t already seen the Reuters news article about this, check out this table showing ipod Nano (2GB) prices across the world:

Note: prices are shown in £5 bands (to make the table smaller).

Here’s a little walkthrough of the Linked-in user experience:

1. When you register, it encourages you to add weak links to your network.
It does this by trying to get you to add your entire address book to join your network (as shown below). I don’t know about you, but many of the people I have in my address book are “weak links” – people I only sort-of-know.

2. Even if you dont fall for the trap, people you sort-of-know will.
So you end up with a mix of strong links (close friends and colleagues) and weak links (people you have met a couple of times, or have only ever had email contact with).

3. One of your contacts requests an introduction with someone you don’t know, but one of your weak links does.
Linked-in allows your contacts to request “an introduction” with not just people on your network, but people they know. So if you’ve never met Bill Gates, but one of your weak links knows him, another of your contacts could ask you to ask your weak link to introduce them.

4. You are given two options: “forward” or “decline”
This chain of vague association would probably make you feel a little awkward at this point. If you go ahead with it, you’d could find yourself saying “I know you don’t know me that well, but this other person I don’t know that well wants me to introduce you to someone you are linked to”. What if you don’t want to do this? Is there a polite way of getting out of this situation?

Basically linked-in shows you two buttons (as above), which force you to make a choice. The problem is that this is so black and white. You are either actively helping, or you are actively blocking. In a face-to-face conversation, you might change the subject, or be non-committal - “I’ll see what I can do”. The requester might then realise you don’t feel hugely comfortable about it and drop the subject. Also, with voicemail or email, one of your options is inaction. You can postpone indefinitely. Basically, in the “real world”, there are many shades of grey, and both parties have many options to avoid socially awkward interactions.

But in the Linked-in world, their system forces you into a direct confrontation. You can end up saying to yourself “I feel awkward about forwarding, I feel awkward about declining”

5. If you ignore the email, linked-in keeps hassling you
So Linked-in now sends you a reminder email again, and again, and again. How very, very annoying.

Here’s what Linked in should do to sort this mess out:

• Don’t allow people to add their entire Outlook contact list. If they must offer this feature, they should add a step where the user is encouraged to remove the weak links. Weak links dilute your network.
• Allow users to set their chain length. I personally would only want chains of 3 (a friend asks me to introduce them to another friend). Other users might be happy with 4.
• Don’t force direct confrontations: Allow people to gracefully ignore or “sidestep” thorny requests.
• One reminder email is enough. Two is nagging. three is ridiculous.