90 percent of everything : Usability Blog

Written by Harry Brignull

It’s quite interesting to watch the FOWD 08 conference tweets as they happen. I’m quite surprised at how much bitching is going on. Check out the flash widget below - come on guys, play nice!

Can’t see the flash widget? Maybe your RSS reader doesn’t support it.

Get the FOWD twitter RSS feed here via summize.com

Quite a few slide decks from IA Summit 2008 are finding their way onto slideshare.

They all look great. As a taster, here’s Peter Morville’s Search Patterns presentation:

| View | Upload your own

I’ve just been doing a spot of reading about oAuth and thought I’d do a quick post on it. This was a hot topic back in October, so I seem to be rather late to the discussion - if you are too, read on…

“Giving your email account password to a social network site so they can look up your friends is the same thing as going to dinner and giving your atm card and pin code to the waiter when it’s time to pay. Any restaurant asking for your pin code will go out of business, but when it comes to the web, users put themselves at risk sharing the same private information. OAuth to the rescue.” [Excerpt from An end-user overview of oAuth by Eran Hammer-Lahav (Oct 2007)]

So, you might trust Facebook or Linked-in enough to give them your email username & password for their “friend finder” service, but would you trust absolutely anyone? Back in October, Shelfari (A social network site for books) got a lot of stick for doing something dodgy along these lines.

I’ve recently rediscovered the IxDA.org discussion forum, and I feel compelled to do a post on it - not only is the actual content great, but the web-interface is really nice, keeping the posts tidy and making them a easy read (unlike email digest mode which is a mess).

If you want to be a lurker like me, try subscribing to the Threads RSS feed. This gives you an overview of the discussion topics, and links you through to the web interface if you want to read more.

I was flipping through Allan Cooper’s classic “The Inmates are Running the Asylum” just the other day, and I noticed how in one section he has a little rant about how calendaring software is broken.

“Many calendar programs are available […], yet every one of them ignores the most simple and obvious ways that people want to use calendars. Simply put, a calendar should reflect how people use time to manage their lives.” (Allan Cooper, 1998; longer excerpt here. )

Calendar software (like Google calendar & 30 boxes) has come a long way since he wrote that back in ‘98, but the event scheduling features seem to be focussed entirely on your work life. Also, although there’s lot of dedicated event promotion tools available (eventful, meetup, etc), they are very rigid and autocratic. The organizer says “The event’s on this date. Come, or don’t come”.

This works perfectly for big events, but what about small get-togethers? When a group of friends try and arrange a mutually suitable time and date for a get-together, the activity tends to involve a process of discussion and negotiation. This can require quite a lot of email / SMS/ phone call to-ing and fro-ing. What’s notable here is:

• Availability in your calendar is not the same as being free. Many people don’t want to keep their personal calendars up to date in the anally retentive manner we do at work.
• If you have a family, you often need to speak to them, and refer to their calendars first.
• We often need to be able to give “white lies” to get out of things. Tools that are too transparent will causes problems here.
• And above all, most people don’t want to run their personal social lives like they would their Outlook calendar at work.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but there seems to be a gap in the market here. I’m sure it could make a great Facebook app…

Has anyone else noticed how great Facebook image tagging is?

Granted, it is only for putting names to faces, but it’s incredibly quick to use (say 5 seconds per photo), and it’s really satisfying. Your friends see you’ve tagged them (the images appear in their news feed on their facebook homepage), and usually respond with a comment or by tagging some of your photos in return.

Compare this to Flickr where image tagging feels heavyweight, tiring and you get no quick payback for your effort.

Come on Flickr - you’ve dropped the ball on tagging. It should be a rapid, social and fun activity!

I was in Blockbuster yesterday, and started chatting to the staff. I asked them why Pan’s Labyrinth (good film) only has 2 copies shown, while Shadowboxer (worst film of all time) has 2 entire shelves worth of boxes on display.

They explained to me that they are not entitled to make choices. Head office sends them a certain number of display boxes. They have to put them up on the shelves.

Because of the location of the store, their customers tend to ask for a lot more niche and arty films than the national average. And the staff get really frustrated, because they want to do something about it - to please the customers. But they aren’t allowed.

Online video services go to such efforts to build and leverage contextual information. And they’d dream of having an untapped local community ‘ready to go’.

But what do Blockbuster do? They ignore it, and plod on.

Microsoft Surface is a pretty amazing piece of research: tabletop touchscreen computing done really well. But, the “origins” section on the Surface website strongly implies that the whole concept of tabletop computing originated from Microsoft. It didn’t. If you find this stuff exciting, you should check out some of the prior research in this area.

MERL’s diamond touch : one of the first multi-touch technologies (works by running an electronic signal to your finger via your chair to identify each user).

IPSI’s roomware: this is an entire room decked out as touchscreen surfaces that are all linked together.

Stanford’s Tabletop groupware: they’ve done tons of stuff in the area. You may recognise some of the gestural stuff that also appears in the MS video.

Jun Rekimoto’s work (Sony) this includes “holotable”, “smart skin” and “augmented surfaces”. Jun is a genius- in my opinion, his research is genre defining.

I’m not saying that it’s a bad thing that Microsoft are building on top of prior research - this is, after all, what research is all about. I’m just trying to say that there are some talented people and research groups out there that also deserve recognition for the state of the art today.

This is Luis von Ahn giving a Google TechTalk presentation about “human computation”.

He talks about Capatchas and the ESP game among other things. He’s particularly qualified to talk about them because he basically invented them.

Really interesting stuff. It’s been online for about year so this isn’t a very timely post, but it’s so worth watching if you haven’t seen it already. Enjoy!

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.