90 percent of everything : Usability Blog

Written by Harry Brignull

So, according to Jared Spool’s Keynote at IA Summit 08, “User-Centred Design is dead”. There’s a good write up by Mia Northrop of Avenue A | Razorfish here, and another by Molly Anglin of NLC here.

I usually love challenging the status quo and making bold claims to stimulate discussion. But in this case, I think it wasn’t particularly constructive. Why? Because for many people, UCD is a wooly philosophy that sits somewhere between the concepts of “putting users first”, Usability and, perhaps the vaguest of all terms, User Experience. To say UCD is dead raises the question, what exactly do you mean by UCD?

Let’s take a look at some excepts from Jared’s slides:

To say that “UCD never worked” implies that it’s a single thing. It’s not: it’s a container term. It’s a bit like the term ‘Web 2.0′: what goes inside depends on who’s holding it. Generally, though, the agreed constituents look a bit like this:

There are many different flavours, sizes and scales of UCD - different organisations tend to implement it differently in their design processes. So, unsurprisingly, those that love red tape and strict process will implement it in that way, while those that at the other end of the scale will use it as a flexible, lightweight approach.

So, should we really be throwing out a perfectly good container, or should be trying to hone and improve the recipe of things that go inside? Although Jared has overcooked his arguments, he’s done us all a service by stimulating a useful discussion about the recipe of effective design, regardless of what we call it.

Photo credits: Balakov on Flickr

I’ve spent the last couple weeks choosing a high definition LCD TV, and in doing so I’ve been chatting to a lot of sales staff in different stores. Interestingly, a few have admitted to me that returns of HDTVs are quite common due to the picture quality.

Why? It’s because in most shops they demonstrate the TVs using high definition video. Most HDTVs look great when displaying HD video. The thing is, when you get the TV home, you are probably going to be watching standard definition most of the time. So for a normal person, the real test for an HDTV is to see how well it copes with standard definition.

Good HDTVs actively compensate for the poor resolution and video compression artefacts you get with standard definition content and make standard definition look a lot better than it really is (Digital freeview in the UK is particularly overcompressed). Bad HDTVs don’t do any of this, and can actually emphasise the shortcomings of standard definition.

Moral of the story: when choosing an HDTV, ask the sales assistant to switch the video feed to standard definition content, and look closely and the differences in quality between TVs. You’ll notice that on some of the cheaper sets the picture quality will become shockingly bad, while on the pricier sets, the picture quality is passable at standard definition.

There was a very funny tongue-in-cheek article on technorage by Charlie Brooker in Monday’s Guardian (21/01/08). Here’s an excerpt:

Recently, I was on a plane, sitting beside an 80-year-old woman who couldn’t comprehend how the in-flight entertainment system worked. It had a touch-screen monitor and an additional set of controls in the armrest. Thing is, she didn’t understand the difference between my armrest and hers. There I was, watching a movie in a bid to distract myself from the terror of being 30,000ft up in the sky, when she patted cluelessly at my controls and switched it off. I started it again. Then she hit my fast-forward button.

At this point, I politely explained what was going on and attempted to help her operate her system. She nodded and went “ooh” and “ahh”, but try as I might, she just didn’t get it. Ten minutes later, she stopped my film again, and kept doing so intermittently throughout the flight, sometimes switching my overhead light on for good measure, just to annoy me. Her screen, meanwhile, displayed nothing but the synopsis for an episode of Everybody Hates Chris, which she’d selected by accident but never played. She just sat there, staring at the synopsis for about three hours. I think she thought that was the entertainment.

Shamefully, I found myself starting to genuinely hate her - her doddering incompetence somehow rendered her less than human. Reverse the situation - put me in a 1940s household, say, and ask me to operate a mangle, and the chances are I’d earn her contempt with an equal display of ineptitude. But it isn’t the 1940s. It’s now. So snap out of it. Hit the right buttons or get left behind, you medieval dunce. Do you want the robots to take over? Because that’s what’ll happen if we don’t all keep up. How dare you jeopardise the human race like that. How dare you.

Read full article on Guardian Unlimited

Some passing thoughts:

Wouldn’t it be so useful if you could have group SMS conversations via a “reply to all” feature, just like you can with email? Imagine how much more profit the mobile operators could be making. What a lost opportunity!

By the way, if you like mulling over half-baked ideas, you should check out halfbakery.com. It used to be a favourite of mine a few years ago. Ideas on it tend to be quite fun in a brainstormy outside-the-box kind of way. Good for creative thinking.

Oh, and another thing about SMS. Did you know how ridiculously easy it is to send a spoofed SMS these days? It’s scary.

Some stunningly awful usage of the evil asterisk by three.co.uk for their X-series package (The UK mobile operator) -

Actually, if you dig into the Ts & Cs, the limit is 1GB a month. This is a big difference from unlimited, but not unreasonable since it’s an ok price. Why not just be honest and say it?

Actually, you have 5000 minutes of skype-to-skype calls. This isn’t bad, but they don’t make it clear that they mean skype calls only (no skype out, i.e. no calls to real phones included).

Actually, you have a hard limit of 10,000 messages a month. This is plenty, but by this point, you are likely to feel very suspicious of the asterisk. What’s silly here is that the X-Series package is a pretty nice deal by UK standards. There’s no need for all this cloak and dagger stuff. Good, honest simplicity would get them a lot further.

Imagine it’s 4.30pm on a weekday. Are you allowed to park here? if so, how long for?

This is a great example of disinformation design from Haringey council in North London. Because the council profits from poor information design, this sign is unlikely to ever get fixed.

Poor readability > parking mistake > £100 ticket > profit for council

I’m sure we’d all love to be in a position where bad design makes you MORE money. But of course that never happens on the web, does it? Or does it?

“The Kindle will be to traditional books as the Segway is to walking.” (via slashdot)

“The Kindle’s so ugly, Speak-and-Spells run away crying when it comes in the room” (overheard)

“Amazon is touting this as the iPod of e-book readers … it’s actually the Zune of e-book readers.” (via slashdot)

“Is it just me, or is there something a bit weird about naming a product for reading books with a word which means “to set on fire”? Now, maybe as a name for Dell laptop…” (via slashdot)

The current discussion about the Amazon Kindle suggests that its feature list and capabilities far outstrip anything that traditional paper could ever manage:

Amazon Kindle:

• Fragile & intrinsically breakable.
• Supplier lock-in.
• Spies on you.
• Will probably be useless in a few years time.
• Limited battery life.
• Content cannot be traded second hand.
• Content cannot be annotated easily.
• Looks like it was made by Tandy in the ’80s.
• Uninspired attempt by a corporation to jump onto the walled-shopping-garden bandwagon a la iTunes.
• Makes you look like a dork.

Book:

• None of the above

I was looking at the packaging of my Arm & Hammer toothpaste this morning. It has metallic inks, embossed card, and plastic lamination. The box probably cost more than the contents. It’s kind of pointless given that everyone chucks the box away as soon as they open it.

When I got into work, I stared at the UI on my Mac and noticed some similarities. Nowadays we’ve got translucent windows, genie effects, and all kinds of hardware accelerated eye candy. It got me thinking - what’s the environmental impact?

Take your average drop-down menu in Os X or Vista. You click on it, and you’re treated to a drop-shadow and maybe a blur and a translucence effect. To achieve this, you’re computer is hammering the graphics card, and as a result it’s using more electricity and chucking out more heat. OK, it’s probably a tiny amount even if you multiply this up by global usage over time, but the point is, it’s needless and avoidable.

So, every time you click on a dropdown, you are increasing your carbon footprint. Gradually bringing about the next ice-age, one click at a time.

The OLPC (aka the ‘hundred dollar laptop’) has a ‘View Source’ button on the keyboard. See if you can guess which one it is in this image here.

The motivation for this is to let kids ‘under the bonnet’ and learn to program (Python, specifically). Is it really a good idea?

Blogger Mike Hearn made some interesting comments on this a few days ago:

• Could source code be confusing for people who hit the button by mistake?
• Is the source code up to scratch? One example Mike looked at (BlockParty) was completely uncommented.
• Is a fully-fledged program containing advanced code (e.g. sound servers, graphics libraries, etc) really a good place to start learning about programming?

When I was a kid, my school had a computer lab containing on BBC Micros. They were used for teaching maths, using LOGO and that sort of thing. They didn’t even start teaching us programming until we had a good grasp of maths and ‘procedural thinking’. Then when they did, they introduced it very slowly, so not to leave anyone behind. On BBC micros, you could get to the source code (BBC BASIC) at any time by hitting the Escape key. And you know what? Teachers would shout at us for doing this. When you teach kids, lessons are highly structured, and you drip feed them concepts one-at-a-time. You don’t throw them in the deep end.

To give an analogy, if you were teaching 10 year old kids literature, you wouldn’t do it by reading them random chunks of Macbeth. That would just turn them off. It would be overwhelming and, more to the point, boring.

But isn’t this exactly what the View Source button does? Take a quick look below at the source code of BlockParty (A Tetris-style game), and put yourself in the shoes of a 10 year old kid.

I’m sure it’s a neat feature if you’re already up-to-speed on Python, but there’s a fairly tough learning curve you’d have to get past first. So, like the OLPC itself, the View-Source button is just an adjunct to traditional teaching, rather than a learning solution in itself.

I’d find it so much more reassuring if there was some well planned open source teaching and teacher-training materials coming out of this project in addition to the OLPC hardware/software bundle.