HCI User Advocate

How to merge different Google Docs accounts

2011-04-19T07:57:00.001-05:00

I regularly get requests from people I share Google Docs with to re-share with a different account. That is, I know their primary university email address, so I share with that, and then I get an email asking to share with their gmail account. It turns out that a largely hidden, but very useful feature exists that makes it possible to link multiple email addresses to a single Google Docs account so that which ever of those email addresses a doc is shared with, you will have access to it through your single primary account.

For example, my google acct id is @gmail.com, but I want docs shared with @cs.umd.edu to also be available there (rather than having 2 or more google docs silos). This does not affect your email or anything else - but rather is just a way to consolidate docs.

To set this up, log into google at http://docs.google.com (or google.com, etc.) and select Account Settings:

Then, add an email address by clicking on Edit under Personal Settings.

This will affect all new documents shared with you. If you have existing docs that you want to make available with your gmail account, you can:

Login with your other account and share it with your gmail account
Ask the person that originally shared the doc to re-share it with your gmail account

If you find your self with multiple google docs accounts that you want to merge (because people had shared docs with a university account), then you should:

Save all docs from your extra accounts that you want (by exporting or sharing with your gmail acct)
Delete that account
Go through the process above associating that email address with your gmail acct.

Hopefully that is more helpful than confusing...

QuicKeys - fix bugs, speed things up

2010-09-07T12:16:00.003-05:00

After, literally, years of griping about various annoyances of my beloved Mac, I finally found a way work around for many of them.

QuicKeys is one of the oldest end-user customization tools (for PC and Mac). I've known about it for years, but finally started to put it to use because I was just so annoyed by a few minor things that I kept running into over and over again. Here are a few of the (admittedly minor) Mac annoyances that are now fixed!

iCal: Pressing Shift-Command-T brings up a dialog to go to another date. But there is a bug that makes it impossible to use the keyboard to either activate the dialog (to actually go the date you've specified) or dismiss the dialog. I wrote two simple shortcuts so that pressing return activates the dialog and pressing escape dismisses it. Shame on Apple for making me do this after years of iCal's existence, but anyway now I can use iCal without cursing Apple 5 times a day.

iPhone Simulator: When debugging code with XCode, you press Shift-Command-Return to stop the process. But if the focus happens to be on iPhone Simulator (as it often is when debugging an iPhone app), you have to press Shift-Command-H to stop the process. This is typical Apple keyboard shortcuts. Each one makes some sense on its own, but they don't work together (on iPhone, you pressing the "Home" button, thus the "H"). So I added a shortcut for iPhone so that Shift-Command-Return generates a Shift-Command-H to stop the process. Problem solved.

WriteRoom: The control-A and control-E keys move the cursor to the beginning and end of the paragraph instead of the line, which they do in most other apps. I remapped them.

Mail: Having to use the cursor keys and delete key is adequate, but I do *SO MUCH* cursoring and deleting that moving hands off the home keys turns out to be a significant burden. So, I made Control-N & Control-P move to next and previous emails and Control-D delete the current message. Ahhhh.

Firefox/Instapaper: I like to use Instapaper to read things offline later. The normal way to do this is to put a bookmarklet in your bookmark bar on the top of your browser. But I hate extra bars - especially on my laptop. So I started by making a shortcut to hide/show the bookmark bar so at least I don't have to dig around in the menu for it. Of course, then I realized I should just make a key to run Instapaper (which I'll do as soon as I finish this post).

Finder/Terminal: I regularly want to use Terminal to look at the contents of a directory I am looking at in finder. You can copy a directory from Finder, open Terminal, type "cd ", paste the directory, ... to get there. Instead, I made a single key that does that.

You get the picture. If there is a slow and consistent activity that you do frequently, it takes about 1 minute to write a quickeys shortcut. They can be applied narrowly so they only work for the app in question - and only when, say, a certain dialog is open. So they don't hurt anything else. I haven't observed it slowing down the system. The only issue is that you have to remember the new shortcut. But if the task you are speeding up really is one that you do frequently, then it isn't a problem. If you don't do it frequently, then don't bother speeding it up.

New Windows laptop rant

2010-07-23T11:24:00.002-05:00

From a very experience friend of mine who knows Windows and Mac very well, has worked at Microsoft as a software engineer for several years. He prefers to remain anonymous. Sadly, my experience is about the same, and I am very happy living on a Mac (sometimes using windows in a VM, and sometimes not):

-----------
[Company] bought me an HP Envy 17 windows laptop because I realized that I couldn't take my primary windows development machine (a mac pro) to meetings and demos. It was only $1200, so I figured it was worth it.

The specs were nice -- slightly slower core i7 than I have in my MBP, but 6gb ram built in and a 1920x1080 display. All the reviews I read basically said this was the closest you can get in build quality to a mac without buying something from Apple. A similar MBP 17 starts at $2k.

Holy crap, this thing blows. It _looks_ like a Mac, except it's made of plastic and flexes dangerously when held in one hand. They've shamelessly ripped off the apple packaging experience, except forgot the little things (like having the battery be pre-charged so you can use your computer right away, or designing a power brick that (a) doesn't look and weigh as much as a real brick and (b) plugs into the computer on the right side via a hard plastic connector that sticks out 2-3 inches from the machine and looks terrible).

Then you boot Windows.

The first time through, you get a bunch of HP popups that are a ripoff of the Apple FTUE, except the design is atrocious and in fact the screens don't really match from one to the next. Fine. You get through that, and 14 -- yes 14 -- different preinstalled crapware apps want to update themselves. I have the entire Corel suite on this machine.

You can't connect to an 802.1x wireless network via the HP Wireless network utility. This may be a limitation of the windows home premium that ships on this laptop, but the result is I have no in-office wireless. Fine. I plug in an ethernet cord, BUT THE ETHERNET DOES NOT WORK. It turns out that you need to get a Windows wizard to run that lets you choose if your new connection is a Home, Work, or Public network. I manage to get the wizard to run by Disabling the ethernet port and then Enabling it. I assume at this point that most people would have called HP by now.

I go into the control panel and change the name of the computer on the network, since 'pc-8994892x' wasn't something I could remember. Once I actually find the correct place in the Control Panel for this (don't get me started on the control panel having grown to nearly 100 applets in win 7), the machine wants to reboot. Fine, it's 2010, and Win7 has a brand new networking stack that was developed from the ground up for Vista, but we still haven't solved the problem of changing the hostname requiring a reboot.

So the machine reboots. The SECOND TIME USER EXPERIENCE is that the user DOES NOT BOOT WINDOWS. You boot some kind of crazy HP overlay OS that lets you browse the web or read email, I assume through some kind of Linux-based layer that "boots faster" (not really). I have to dig around to turn this thing off.

I am now convinced that the "Apple Tax" is incredibly worth paying for all computers, even if you intend only to run Windows. At least then you get a Windows without all the crapware.

SIGCHI Social Impact Award for 2010

2010-02-17T08:24:00.002-05:00

Ben Bederson and Allison Druin
from the University of Maryland are awarded

The SIGCHI Social Impact Award for 2010

ACM SIGCHI identifies and honors leaders and shapers of the field of human-computer interaction with annual SIGCHI Awards. The Social Impact Award honors individuals who promote the application of human-computer interaction research for pressing social needs. This year the award was given to Ben Bederson and Allison Druin of the University of Maryland for their joint work in developing the International Children’s Digital Library and their individual work in developing new methods that give children a voice in the development of new technologies, and for their work on electronic voting systems.

Ben Bederson is Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Maryland and past Director of the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory. With his collaborator, Prof. Allison Druin, he led the development of many of the key technologies designed for and by kids, including KidPad and StoryKit for iPhone. He is the Technical Project Director for the International Children's Digital Library, a multilingual free digital library of children's books, currently consisting of over 4,000 books in over 50 languages, with more than three million users from over 160 countries worldwide. He led the library's collaboration with the Government of Mongolia -- bringing access to the library in rural Mongolia. Prof. Bederson also did influential studies of the usability of electronic voting systems, which resulted in scholarly publications, reports aimed at policy makers, and books directed to the general public. This work has served to highlight the challenges in developing usable electronic voting systems and has informed decisions on voting technology adoption.

Allison Druin is Associate Professor in the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland and Director of the Human-Computer Interaction Lab. Prof. Druin is a pioneer in the development of technology for children and the inclusion of children as partners in the design process. Her technology co-design methods have been reported on through scholarly publications, presentations, and books, and have become widely used throughout the CHI community. She founded the CHIKids program for the CHI Conference. This program enabled many CHI community members who were parents to participate in the conference while their children learned about CHI and contributed to the experience of the conference, e.g., by producing daily newsletters, websites, and plenary session videos. With her collaborator, Prof. Ben Bederson, she created the International Children's Digital Library, a multilingual free digital library of children's books, currently consisting of over 4,000 books in over 50 languages, with more than three million users from over 160 countries worldwide.

Another problem with Flash - keyboard focus

2010-02-04T08:27:00.002-05:00

I consider Adobe Flash to be a virus and have been thrilled that Apple continues to fight against it. The reason I dislike Flash so much is because it breaks fundamental user experience standards, such as:

Consistency: The same action should do the same thing in different places. Example: if pressing the down arrow scrolls the web page, then it should always scroll the web page.
Modes: Modes are almost always bad - but when you have to have them, make them clearly visible. I.e., the user should know what mode they are in by looking at the screen. Example: if typing enters text in a specific text box, then that text box should be clearly highlighted so the user knows which textbox will get their text.

My problem with Flash is that it breaks these basic design standards. In order to use a Flash plugin in your web browser (like when you watch most videos), you have to click on the video - and Flash then takes complete control over the keyboard (i.e., it takes your "keyboard focus"). This is bad because you can then no longer use your keyboard to do other browser things - such as scroll with the PageUp and PageDown keys, press Ctrl-T to open a new tab, or Alt-LeftArrow to go back to the previous page.

The fact that Flash breaks standard web behaviors is bad enough - but it is even worse because it does so completely invisibly. I get used to using my keyboard to control my web browser because - um, I am a human and I am using my computer. So, sometimes it stops working for no apparent reason. There is no way to see this problem, and the only solution is to use your mouse to click on some non-Flash component in your browser. I bet most people just think that web browers are sucky and inconsistent. The real problem is that Web plugins for common activities that take over they keyboard just shouldn't exist.

Bravo Apple. Let HTML5 and built-in web standards for common activities take over.

2/4/2010

Collaboration with New Super Mario

2010-01-21T12:44:00.006-05:00

I've been playing Mario for a long, long time (i.e., decades). I've been playing it on Wii with my daughters (now 5 and 10) for a year, and until last month, it was always an exercise in patience. Only one person played at a time, and you we spent more time watching than actually playing. Actually, this is how video game playing has been for 30 years.

So, while collaborative game playing is not new, and I don't even think there is anything in particular here that is new, I was stunned by just how good Nintendo put it all together with New Super Mario. It isn't just that we are all playing at the same time, but that the designers have put together so many modes of game play in a seamless way that is equally attractive to a 5 year old and a 45 year old. It supports exploration, goals, collecting points, collaboration, and competition equally. But the killer thing is that it supports these 5 modes at the same time in the same interface. There aren't 5 different ways to launch the game. There is one, and you just choose how to play. In fact, at any given moment, we are often playing several modes simultaneously, or dynamically switching between modes, or one person is doing one thing and the others are doing another.

Aside from the sheer number of hours we have played (and continue to play), I judge its success based on our volume. The three of us end a game-playing session exhausted, excited, and a bit hoarse - because we have been yelling so much.

There are too many details to go into just why this all works so well, but here are a few examples from the 5 modes:

Exploration: Wander around, poke at things and see what happens.
Goal-driven: Complete as many worlds as possible.
Collecting points: Get as many points, big gold coins, or powers saved up as possible.
Collaboration: Bounce on each others head to bounce higher, do a super ground pound (a synchronous maneuver), or wait for someone to finish before moving forward.
Competition: Push each other off the edge, grab a power rather than share it.

They also nailed the screen sharing issue. The essential problem in collaborative games is that everyone looks at the same screen. The traditional solution is a split screen - where one player sees where they are in the world on one side of the screen and the other players sees something else. This isn't really collaboration - this is competitive, simultaneous separate play.

New Super Mario, on the other hand, places everyone (up to 4 characters) in a single world. You all move and bounce around in the same space. If the characters wander apart from each other, the world automatically zooms out so everyone is still visible - up to a point. There is a maximum zoom out level after which the lead player (right-most player since this is a left-right side scrolling game) implicitly owns the visible area. The last player (left-most character) gets dragged along. If they get dragged into a hole or something else bad, they die.

Actually, they don't die - when someone does something that would normally result in dying, they go in a bubble (i.e. "ahhhh - daddy, I'm in a bubble"). After a few seconds the character floats around the screen in a bubble and they can be revived by one of the other characters bumping into them - up to 5 lives, after which you really die and you have to wait for everyone to die (or bubble), at which point that world starts over. Again, a combination of approaches that brilliantly encourages collaboration without requiring it.

There is a lot of verbal communication going on to support all of these modes - which is part of the reason it is so fun. I'm looking forward to finishing dinner tonight just so we can go play. I haven't heard enjoyed a game this much since Asteroids in 1980 - when we played one at a time, but the social element was in going to a gaming parlor.

1/21/2010

My PIM (Part II)

2010-01-18T09:43:00.007-05:00

I recently posted my approach to managing notes and various bits of my personal information (i.e., Personal Information Management). I had some requests to go a bit deeper, so here's a bit more.

Email The biggest trick about managing personal information is to spend more time on frequent tasks, and less time on infrequent tasks (actually, this is a design guideline for all UI). So, what do I do a lot with email? I read incoming stuff and answer it. What do I do infrequently? I search for old email. Simple, but true analysis. So, rule #1: don't spend time filing email. Yes, it must be findable somehow, but it doesn't have to be easy to find. It has to be fast to get rid of so you can go on to the next thing. GMail figured this out with fast searching and making archiving everything the default. But I find that most Outlook users don't do this - they often still laboriously file individual emails into specific folders just in case they want to find it later. What a waste of time! Outlook has fast searching too. So, here's the trick:

Turn off auto-archiving, and then just press the delete key. I store everything in the Deleted Items folders. Then, once a year, I dump it all into a .pst (archive) file. That's it. Sure, towards the end of the year, my Deleted Items folder might have 20,000 messages in it, but who cares. I can search in a second or three, and that's good enough. I've been doing this for 10 years, and have 10 .pst files. But guess what, I almost never open up any but the previous year. And when I do, they are around and easy to open and search (as long as I continue to use Outlook, but that's another story).

Files:
Ok, dumping email into a folder is simple, but that isn't good enough for files - which I actually do manually organize with some attention. Effective hierarchy structures are difficult because research has shown that people don't remember them perfectly. The issue is that the context for storage is often different than the context for retrieval. Thus, there is pretty much guaranteed no perfect solution, but you've got to do something. So, pick something semantically meaningful - and make sure it isn't too big, or you lose stuff. This latter point is key, so let's start there.

At each level of my file hierarchy, I only keep relatively active stuff. Then, when a folder starts getting old, I create a sub folder called "zzz Old Stuff" (so it gets sorted at the bottom), and just move things I haven't used recently in there. This way, I never have to throw things out (just in case...), everything stays in it's semantically coherent place, and I only have active things visible at any given time. This, by the way, was my practical solution to an idea I worked on some years ago with Bongshin Lee (called Favorite Folders) - but that never went any where as a practical UI.

I don't think the actual folder structure I use is likely to be that helpful to others. It is highly idiosyncratic based on my own evaluation of frequency and importance. That being said, here are a few key elements.

Ben - personal stuff, distinguished from work
one directory per major project or collaborator. For some big ones, this becomes the root of a multi-level hierarchy
Dissertations
Papers (brings together final copies of everything I published)
Other's Papers (becoming less important with digital libraries, but where I store important papers from other people)
Proposals (separate from the actual work because proposal writing is a different ask, and I regularly need to refer to other proposals when working here)
Talks (slides, etc. for talks. Again, different than the actual work on a project for the same reason as Proposals)
Conferences (related to service, organizing, etc.)
Reviews (where I store reviews of other's papers, etc., so I have an easy place to go back when a revision comes in, etc.)

Pictures:
Managing pictures used to be a nightmare, but as with the lessons above, there are two key things I've learned. They must be fast to store because otherwise I won't do it. Storage must be in a future-proof manner as operating systems and photo management tools just don't stand the test of time. But folder names, hierarchies, and JPEGs do. So here's my simple solution.

Create one folder per year, and inside each of those, create one folder per month labeled so they get alphabetically sorted (i.e., "01 - January", "02 - February", etc.) Then drop all pictures by the month they were taken into the right folder (which you can easily do in bulk every month or three). If there is an event with a larger number of pictures that feels like it is worth organizing, then create a subfolder for that event, and give it a meaningful name.

Finally, whatever software I am using to look at the photos, I never, ever, ever, use that software's proprietary mechanism to store metadata in the photos. Else, it is pretty much guaranteed to not stand the test of time. Instead, I just put everything in the filename of the photo. So, for the past few years, I've been using Picasa. Rather than storing comments or using tags, I just rename the file (one key). Then, any future search system (including Picasa's) work's great. This doubles as a mechanism for letting me access my photos across all of my computers (synced by Live Sync) without loss of information.

This is why I will never, ever use Apple's iPhoto. It is lock-in of the worst kind. It sucks all of your photos in, ignores the originals, and puts all info in a proprietary database that cant' be shared across folders. Completely worthless to me, no matter how nice the interface is.

Meeting Notes, etc.:
This is the toughest category. I've gone through many iterations from my own NoteLens and other flat systems (such as the Notational Velocity I am now using). But I've found that flat organizational systems just don't scale up for me. And I'm not willing to use my regular file system as it is just too much overhead to find the right place, launch the right app, etc. There are many other tools that people use, but for the past year, I have just been using Microsoft OneNote. I hate it's proprietary file format, but the files do sync across computers fine so I can edit on any of my computers. And the UI can't be beat. It offers a beautiful combination of simple text along with figures, notes, imported docs, and fast global search. Plus, it has a nice two-level hierarchy baked into the UI (see below). I'd be much happier if the data was text-backed and there were other UIs (especially on the Mac!) available to access it, but it works well for me know.

1/18/2010

My Personal Information Management

2010-01-13T13:26:00.011-05:00

Update 1/18/10: This is the first part of a two part post.

Organizing one's personal information can be amazingly complicated, especially if you want fast and light weight access to commonly used information, and you access information across devices and operating systems. It is even trickier if you want to future-proof yourself so you can access all of your information in the future as well. I have tried many solutions including Outlook Notes, OneNote, my own NoteLens, and EverNote. However, I think I have a solution that works for me (based on this solution by dougist) - at least for my basic unstructured stuff. And the solution is both simple (relying on the most basic of storage systems - a folder of text files) and complex (relying on multiple syncing services and end-user UIs). Note that even though I still use Windows a fair amount, I run it in a VM on a mac, so this software is all Mac, but of course since the data is all text files, everything is also accessible on the PC side. Here it goes:

Everything is stored as individual text files in a single folder. Sure, I lose fancy formatting and images, but I get guaranteed future-proofness, I don't waste time formatting, and it turns out that I don't really need images. And tagging is supported if I wanted to add a bit of structure.
I use Microsoft's free peer-to-peer Live Sync cross-computer cross-operating system syncing solution. I've tried the others (SugarSync is unreliable, and DropBox requires all the synced files to be under one directory - ugh!). Live Sync is fast and reliable. I love it. (Although I got mad at Microsoft when they didn't update it for Snow Leopard for 2 months).
I use my buddy Jesse Grosjean's free SimpleText program to sync the text files to a free Google-based web service that he runs. Note that this has one flaw which is that it sends stuff up to the web whenever there is a change, but only pulls stuff down when you sync manually - so one option I am considering is to use it on one computer, and then use my existing Live Sync solution to sync those files across all my desktops (while I wait for Jesse to add auto sync down from the cloud.
I use Jesse's WriteRoom for iPhone app ($5) to sync those files to my iPhone and access them there.
I use Jesse's WriteRoom for Mac app ($25) for full screen, distraction-free text editing.
I use the open source Notational Velocity program on Mac (which is remarkably similar to my earlier NoteLens app)
I was able to export my notes out of EverNote as HTML, and then used the freely available HTMLAsText (for Windows) to convert to text. (I wanted to like EverNote - it has a great feature list, but in practice, it didn't work for me. The UI was too heavyweight, layout changed between operating systems which was a nightmare, the UI was quite different between operating systems which was annoying, and I didn't like the Windows UI which had a weird scrollbar, and made a vertical list of all the notes rather than a notebox that just displayed a single note).

Update 1/15/2010: Some other bits - I use xmarks to sync my bookmarks and passwords across computers (and VMs). This coupled with Firefox's master password to protect passwords is crucial - it means I no longer have to manually save passwords. Coupled with Firefox's fantastic URL bar with one-click bookmarking, my webpage re-finding is dramatically better (direct comparison to Safari and Chrome upcoming - but firefox definitely wins).

I also use Microsoft OneNote for my meeting notes (with the data synced across computers with Live Sync). This makes me uncomfortable because it is Windows only and the data is totally locked in to OneNote. But the UI for note-taking that combines very flexible formatting of notes along with images, embedded files (like PDFs) and ink (when I occasionally use a tablet) make it unmatched - so far.

Notational Velocity UI
(Note: screen capture and annotation with Skitch)

1/13/2010

Making Information Visualization work

2010-01-13T09:13:00.003-05:00

Information Visualization is all about helping users develop insight. It isn't enough to show beautiful and amazing pictures - even interactive ones. The key, as with all interfaces, is to think about specifically what tasks a user will be able to perform with the tool. Yet, all too many visualizations fail on this most important and fundamental test.

Stephen Few (of Perceptual Edge) wrote a beautiful 10 page report on this issue - critically analyzing a visually simple visualization by Ben Fry of healthcare spending (see pie chart above). The key is that it doesn't actually enable you to learn anything. He then goes on to create an interface that actually does enable you to discover all sorts of things. The new interface is not simple. Well, each component is simple, but there are lots of components and it may take a minute to figure them out. But no more than that, and then you discover that it is conceptually simple, and you can actually use it.

Here are the take-home lessons from the article - but go and read it - it is well worth it.

2-D position and the lengths of simple objects such as bars encode quantitative values in ways that are easy to perceive; angles and areas do not, and therefore should be used only when you can’t use better means.
We cannot build a picture in our heads of a pattern that is formed by multiple values (such as the average cost of healthcare for patients of each age from 1 to 79 years old) by looking at one value at a time.
Lines do a good job of showing the pattern formed by a set of values across a continuous range such as patients’ ages, and do so in a way that allows us to compare patterns when multiple data sets are represented at once (such as one line per disease).
Multiple graphs shown together are often a better solution than a single graph, especially when several variables are involved.
Several simultaneous views of the same data set, each showing the data from a different perspective, make it possible to see relationships that can’t be seen from one perspective only or from viewing different perspectives independently.
The ability to easily fi lter out data that doesn’t concern

1/13/2010

Microsoft Live Sync vs. SugarSync (Live Sync wins)

2010-01-06T16:06:00.003-05:00

I've been a long term advocate of file syncing software. It keeps all of my personal files in sync across my 3 computers (2 desktops and a laptop), even going across operating systems (windows and mac). But over the last few months, I have been doing a shootout between Microsoft Live Sync (free) and SugarSync (pay).

I had used, loved and evangelized Live Sync for years - since before it was a Microsoft product (they acquired "FolderShare" from ByteTaxi in 2006, I think). But when Snow Leopard came out for Mac, Sync just didn't work. There was very little response from Microsoft and no ETA for a fix. After waiting a few weeks and growing increasingly desperate, I looked at several other solutions.

One popular one is DropBox, but it has a design showstopper for me. Everything that gets synced has to be in a special folder that gets synced. That isn't the way I work. I want to keep my current file system and choose which subfolders get synced to what, so DropBox was out.

The other major competitor is SugarSync. It lets me control what and where I sync and it has a nice UI. There is one major annoyance which is that it isn't peer-to-peer (like Live Sync). It syncs to the cloud, so all your files sit on their servers. This adds backup and safety, and lets you sync between computers that aren't on at the same time. But you lose privacy, and you eat up their cloud-based disk space - and you have to pay for that. I pay $5/month for 30 GB. Not too bad, but annoying since I am forced to pay for a feature that I don't even want. But I had no choice, so for the last few months, I've been living with SugarSync.

However, that experiment was a failure. I *wanted* to like it, especially since the user experience was quite nice. However, the service was just unreliable. At least a half dozen times over a period of a few months, the synchronization would stop. It would get blocked on some file and I had to go through their technical support to fix it. I'd have to delete some cached files, or they would jiggle something on their server, and in a day or two, we would get it working again. But it kept happening. Sometimes it was a result of me making a configuration change (i.e., reinstalling an operating system), and sometimes it just happened. In addition, when it got into this bad state, it would sometimes replicate files and I would find several versions of a file one machine - ugh.

Fortunately, Microsoft came through and after two months, they posted a solid version of Live Sync for Snow Leopard, and I switched back. It is working beautifully. It is free. It is fast (since it doesn't go through the cloud). And I don't have to give my files to someone else's cloud.

Go Microsoft. In this battle, you are the clear winner.

1/6/2010

Droid Responsiveness and Ergonomics

2009-11-09T20:08:00.003-05:00

Much has been made about Verizon's new Droid phone on Google's Android platform, and I agree with the reviews looking at the myriad details. But it seems that not enough has been made about the Droid's responsiveness and ergonomics.

Everything about actually holding and using the Droid is just a bit uncomfortable and sluggish. There are many examples, but here are a few that popped out in my first experience (in comparison to a long time with iPhone).

To wake up the Droid you have to press the on/off button on the top right. There is no natural grasp that lets you do this. It requires several seconds to regrasp the phone, press the button, and then regrasp again so you can unlock it. Compare with iPhone - press the home button with your thumb with the phone in your natural grasp and then immediately swipe with the same thumb.
Whenever I press any of the buttons on the side of the Droid (power, volume or camera), the keyboard slides open a bit making it harder to press the buttons you were trying to press.
The keyboard is oriented over an inch from the right side of the device, so not only do you have to type with your thumbs off center, but you have actually reach with your right thumb - making the much lambasted keyboard even more unpleasant.
All the graphics are slower, the touch screen is less responsive, and everything is less smooth. Yes, the display is sharper due to the higher resolution screen, but the actual experience of using that display is worse. iPhone is almost magically responsive to a very soft touch. This detail is crucial to people's enfatuation with iPhone. Every single interaction with iPhone is sensually pleasant. Android is, well, just sort of ok.

The Droid is a fine device, and if I didn't have an iPhone, I would be happy to have one. But after my first day of playing with it, I don't think there is any chance I'd trade my iPhone for it. On the other hand, Android is catching up fast, so a year from now it might be a pretty close battle.

Oh, and Droid turn by turn Navigation really is great. Part of the reason it is so good is because it uses a beautifully rendered perspective map view which I haven't seen the equivalent of on any online map - whether it is iPhone, TomTom, Google Maps or Earth.

iPhone StoryKit app - kids write stories on phones

2009-09-14T09:03:00.003-05:00

Children writing books on mobile phones? That certainly seems unlikely - so how did we get to the point where actually built an app to support it?

A long time ago, my colleagues and I started building the International Children's Digital Library to make a safe and high quality place where kids could go to read books and learn about cultures from around the world.

Then, last year we decided to try and support children reading on mobile devices - we made an iPhone app to let kids read picture books from the ICDL.

Now we went further and decided to build an app that lets kids write books on their iPhones (or iPod Touches). Search for "storykit" in the appstore or get it from iTunes. You can take pictures, create drawings, record sounds, and yes of course - write actual words. Then automatically post it to a website and share with your friends.

Give it a try - especially with your kids - and let me know how it works.

Microsoft disappoints - ignores Live Sync for Snow Leopard

2009-09-10T13:04:00.002-05:00

If this weren't so predictable, it would be funny. But I have loved and raved over Microsoft Live Sync since it was bought (as FolderShare) a few years ago. Now for the second time, Apple has released an OS upgrade, and Live Sync stopped working.

I find this completely intolerable. If Microsoft cared about supporting Live Sync, they could have gotten the developer preview of Snow Leopard, and ensured that their product worked when the final version of snow leopard was released. Instead, they decided to stick their heads in the sand, wait until a major platform upgrade that they "support" was released and *then* decide to look. Now, 2 weeks after the product stopped working, they say that they are aware of the problem and have no ETA for when a solution will be available.

I just uninstalled Live Sync from all of my computers and now pay $5/mo for www.sugarsync.com. There are other solutions out there as well. I'm happy to pay for syncing - but I need it to work. And I need a company to stand by their products.

Looks like Microsoft just does not get customer satisfaction.

Tivo terrible customer service

2009-09-03T16:11:00.003-05:00

This post is hard to write. I love Tivo the product. But now I hate Tivo the company. The hard disk died in my Tivo Series 3 DVR. So, I called them and all they could offer was to replace it with a Tivo HD (a lesser box) for $200. So, I'd keep my outdated small hard disk size and get a lousier box for the price that they sell refurbished Tivos for. But they also suggested that I replace the disk on my own with a third party service. Yes, my box was out of warranty, but I just wanted to replace the hard disk - a pretty standard operation.

So, naturally I replaced the hard disk. I could have gone with a "name brand" (Weaknees), but that would have cost about $250 for a 1TB disk (loaded with the Tivo software). Instead I went with eBay and got the same 1TB disk with Tivo software for $150. But the disk had a problem. The seller graciously sent me a new one before I even sent back the old one, and this had a similar problem - so I suspected it was my Tivo. Here's where it gets interesting.

Tivo said:

They never should have suggested I use a 3rd party to update the disk.
They won't give me any help of any kind to get it to work.
Since I opened the box, my non-warranty was invalidated, and they wouldn't even give me a trade-in box.

After speaking to 3 managers and higher level tech support, they maintained they would do nothing, nor give me any help of any kind. So in other words, my hard disk crashed (a pretty common occurrence for a hard-disk based system), and Tivo effectively said "toss your box in the garbage and buy a new one".

As it turns out, I did a "Clear and Delete" everything on the new disk, and it fixed up the flakiness, and I now have a perfectly functioning 1TB Tivo Series 3 - which I still love, but a bit less now that I know how little Tivo is willing to support their customers.

---

Tech details: The problem I had with both disks was an "error #51", "hardware malfunction". It turns out that this commonly happens when replacing disks because of a mismatch between device and drive ID used for encryption. "Clear and Delete" is the standard procedure to fix this. But for the first disk, it did something bad because the box would never boot again. Thus, I was very reluctant to try it a second time. But when I had no choice, I did - and magically, it worked perfectly. I don't know if there was something wrong with the original disk or if there was a software screwup of some kind.

Hidden iPhone 3.0 OS feature - sync multiple mail folders

2009-06-20T07:16:00.002-05:00

I know I'm not a typical user, but it seems that I often suffer from little details in interfaces that no one else seems to care about. For 2 years, I have been bothered multiple times every day that iPhone doesn't automatically sync multiple folders. Sure, your inbox can get fetched or pushed to your device. But I use filters so I have special folders where some incoming email gets immediately diverted to. The only way I could know if any new mail was waiting for me in those folders was to navigate to those folders and wait for the device to update the folder. Yuck.

Finally, iPhone 3.0 OS lets you select which folders you can manually sync.

Why GMail doesn't let you sort by size

2009-06-07T08:23:00.002-05:00

GMail is awesome in so many ways. The model of not having to worry about deleting stuff because storage is free is exactly right from the user's perspective. So, at first glance, it seems perfectly reasonable that there is no way to see, sort or search for emails by their (or their attachments) size. After all, simple is good, right? Why expose a feature to users that they don't need?

Then consider GMail's business model: They sell storage. Sure, they give me a very generous amount of free storage (7 GB and counting), but with no way to meaningfully delete stuff, it is pretty much guaranteed that any consistent usage will eventually bump into that limit. And when they do, they are obligated to start paying Google for storage.

It isn't cheap either. They offer 10GB for $20/year, but that is a red herring. By the time my GMail account is full, I'll already have used about 8GB from GMail, plus 1GB from Picasa, and probably some more storage from other services. This storage fee covers all of Google's services - so the reality is that the minute I need more storage, I'll have to go directly to the second tier - which conveniently (for Google) is 40GB for $75/year. Keep in mind 40 GB of local personal storage is less than $10 - so you are paying a serious premium for use of the cloud (and don't forget that Google is already making money on advertisements in your GMail).

This is a real issue - people are looking for ways to reduce their GMail storage (i.e., here, here and here). However, I don't believe this is one of those features that Google just hasn't gotten around to - this is surely a very important, strategic and subtle business plan. They give away GMail for years, and then tens of millions of customers start finding themselves owing Google pretty big - forever. And since Google never changed their pricing policy, they can fairly claim that people knew what they were getting in to.

But if Google really wanted to be fair, they would let users control how much of Google's service they used. And for GMail, this means letting people meaningfully control their disk usage.

Over 20 Years of Designing the User Interface

2009-05-08T08:02:00.002-05:00

Impressively, my colleagues Ben Shneiderman and Catherine Plaisant have published the 5th edition of the text Designing the User Interface. There aren’t many focused professional activities that one can pursue for over 20 years, but Ben – and now Catherine – have sustained, and actually increased their energy in this one. This nearly 600 page full-color book is an excellent way to learn about the field of Human-Computer Interaction, and to see the lay of the land from both researcher and practitioner perspectives.

The book explains the core issues in designing usable, useful, efficient and appealing user interfaces. It illustrates the issues with numerous current screenshots of websites, applications, devices, and broad contexts of use. It offers guidelines backed by research, and it explains the theory in lay terms so the guidelines make sense.

Covering just about every major HCI topic, from basic usability and design processes to design for mobile and social environments, this book offers a very broad summary of the field. It also introduces more advanced topics such as search interfaces and information visualization among others – giving readers entry points into important trends.

With deep references, and access to sample quizzes and PowerPoint slides online, I strongly recommend this book to HCI instructors, students, and professionals new to the field. Congratulations to Ben and Catherine for continuing to support this field and educate the next generation of software designers and developers.

Missing content: Kindle for iPhone doesn't have picture books, or support newspapers or magazines

2009-03-04T08:45:00.003-05:00

Ok, the word is out, and the Kindle for iPhone app is out. And it is good. The promised "whispersync" now makes complete sense, knowing where you were on one device and continuing on another - so you can read in line on your phone, and then continue on your Kindle at home. And with a smooth reading interface and control over font size, they did a commendable job on the iPhone.

But, there doesn't appear to be any children's picture books (only chapter books). For that, you'll have to go to the International Children's Digital Library (www.childrenslibrary.org), or ICDL for iPhone for them (yes, this is my project).

And magazines and newspapers which are such a big selling point on Kindle don't appear to be available on iPhone. The Kindlestore doesn't recognize my registered iPhone device when I look at magazines or newspapers (although it does know about it when I look at books).

-----

In related news, the New York Times app for iPhone today released v2.0. The most important user-facing features are control over font size (finally!), the ability to email articles, along with it being faster and less crashy. All features badly needed and a long time coming.

Why is Apple Finder file management so broken?

2009-01-24T16:24:00.007-05:00

I am now pretty ambiOStrous - that is, I go back and forth between OS X (Leopard), Win XP, and Windows 7 fluently between machines and VMs. While a little disorienting sometimes, I am finally over liking one OS over another because of familiarity. I can pretty much choose at any moment which OS to use for a particular task - especially since my files are all shared between OS's (using VMWare to share files across OS's on one computer, and Live Sync to sync files an other computers.)

It turns out that one of the most important and frequent tasks is to access files, and the interfaces for doing so differ dramatically between operating systems - and in this case, OS X is the clear loser - at least for my use. These two screenshots show the best configurations of the same folder on OS X and Win7 (XP is similar to Win7 in the essential issues, so I won't discuss that).

The biggest differences are that:

Win7 shows many more files at once (within a directory) - which means you can do more scanning with your eye, and less with your hands. This is a huge performance win for most searching tasks. There is no view on OS X as dense as this.
Win7 groups folders separately from files (OS X combines folders and files, ordering them alphabetically). Both seem like reasonable approaches theoretically. But once you actually start using it, you quickly realize that navigating among folders and selecting among files are cognitively fairly different tasks - and you typically are doing one or the other. When I am navigating folders, I want to do that. Then, when I am in the right folder, I want to find the file. This decision coupled with the first issue above means that when I navigate folders on OS X, I spend much, much, much longer scrolling through long lists of files in order to get to where I want.
OS X makes common tasks slow and uncommon tasks fast. The most common thing you do with a file is to open it, so there ought to be a single finger, single click way of doing this. On Windows, pressing Enter does the job. But on OS X, it requires two fingers and two clicks to press Command-O. A much less frequent task is to rename a file. Windows, very reasonable, assigns this to the out-of-the-way F2 key. OS X, bizarrely, uses Enter, the single easiest key to press for this uncommon task. WTF?!?
OS X forces you to move your hands between alpha and arrow keys. On Windows, you can navigate the folder hierarchy entirely with your fingers on the alpha keys (i.e., "home row" for touch typists). You press enter on a folder to open the folder and see it's contents and backspace to go up a level. On OS X, you are obligated to move your fingers from the alpha keys to (to type a folder name) to the arrow keys to enter the folder, then back to the alpha keys to type the next folder name, etc. Of course, you could avoid this on OS X by only using the arrow keys - but because of the decision to combine folders and files, that means you must press the down arrow many, many, many times to get to the folder you want before pressing the right arrow to open it. Sigh...
OS X has no concept of focus - only selection. This means you can not use the keyboard to easily control which files are selected. This one is so weird, it took me a while to convince myself it was real. If you have OS X, follow along at home. In Finder with a file or folder selected, hold down the shift key and press the down arrow key two times. You will now have 3 items selected. If you overshot and don't want the bottom item selected, you naturally will press Shift-Up to unselect the 3rd item you just selected. But incredibly, what happens is that the 4th item above the other 3 gets selected. This is because there is no concept in the Finder of the currently focused object. This crucial bit of state isn't kept, and so Finder can't support the most basic interaction techniques.
OS X doesn't remember column widths. HCI 101 teaches "remember what the user does". If it is important enough for a user to do something, then the user interface ought to remember that and use that preference reasonably in the future. But on OS X, if you resize one of the columns, that information is lost as soon as you navigate to a different folder. So if you are moving around a bunch of folders with long filenames, you have to resize the column every single one. This gets pretty darn tiring after about the fifth time.

So, I'm finding that for this, among other reasons, I am spending more and more time on the Windows side of my computer.

How Fog Creek Copilot Saved My Marriage

2009-01-21T15:24:00.006-05:00

Imagine this scenario: The night before your wife leaves for an early morning trip to Japan, you fiddle with her laptop, completely destroying her Windows installation. (WinXP was running in VMWare Fusion on a MacBook). No problem, that is why you love VMs, so you spend a few hours and restore her VM, re-setting up Outlook, and send her on her way.

You then get a frantic email from Japan a day or so later saying that Outlook doesn't work, and for 10 days, she has to resort to web email which is exceedingly painful. The hazards of providing tech support to your spouse become abundently clear, and you hope for something simple. But after a day of (slow) emailing back and forth, and eventually some Skype calls, you are stuck, and your wife is starting to get unhappy.

Then, you remember Copilot, and cross your fingers. Copilot is Fog Creek's product that lets you remotely control a computer ($5 for 24 hours, and free on weekends). The concept is old, but Copilot packages up this feature to work well across a wide variety of computer and network scenarios with super simple setup. And this, of course, was the key since I couldn't install any software or set this up in advance.

Long story short, I got to my wife's laptop's screen, could control her VM, and figured out that somehow a network setting on her VM was screwed up. I changed the setting, and everything started working.

Now, the remote control was unreasonably slow, but Fog Creek just announced a major speedup (which I haven't tested yet). But still, there are times when there is no other solution but remote control, and Copilot is the best solution of this kind I've seen.

Anyway, thank you Fog Creek. You saved my marriage - or at least gave me some points back.

Windows 7 Taskbar - so close ...

2009-01-19T16:06:00.005-05:00

As I said in this Technology Review article, I like the Windows 7 UI. Microsoft really polished the Vista UI and removed most of the gravel. They paid attention to so much detail, even improving the behavior of basic keyboard navigation in Windows Explorer to make it work well again (like it used to XP). So, I was surprised that they flubbed something so basic in the Taskbar, which they generally put so much love into.

Look at this picture (running without Aero, which still isn't supported on VMWare Fusion). One of the key tasks in a toolbar is to be able to determine which applications are running just by looking. It is possible to do so with the above visual representation, but it is really hard.

If you look carefully, you will notice that the 1st, 3rd, and 5th applications are currently active (Firefox, Word, and Snip). But it is so hard to tell because the visual representation of running applications is a simple rectangle around the edge of the icon. In this situation, this just doesn't work for a few reasons:

The top and bottom edges of the rectangle are lost because they run up against the edges of the toolbar
The left and right edges of the rectangle are exactly midway between the icon they intend to indicate, and the neighboring icon. Thus, you can't tell which icon is being highlighted.
In general, rectangular outlines are a poor way to highlight objects because when a person's eye is focused on an icon, it is a "global" cognitive task to integrate lines around the edge and determine that they surround an object. Alternatively, a much simpler "local" cognitive task is to determine the background color, or if a simple visual indicator is present. (Umm, see a competing operating system to see how well a little glowing triangle under the active application works for this task).

Overall, this is actually good news. I have to look pretty closely to find stuff to criticize, and admittedly, knowing which applications are currently running is not the most important task, so this is definitely not a dealbreaker, and overall, Windows 7 looks pretty good.

But this is pretty straightforward stuff, and it should really be perfect.

Viking Dishwasher Problems

2008-12-04T11:17:00.005-05:00

My colleague, Ben Shneiderman, recently moved into a new apartment with a fancy dishwasher (that had been installed before he had any say) with a real interface blooper.

The Viking Design Series dishwasher has a feature to emit a short beeping signal to indicate that the washing is done. You might think it logical to have a toggle switch or button to set this signal on/off as well as indicate its current state. However, the complex steps and lack of feedback of state are described in the user manual:

Activating the End-of-Program Signal

The unit can be programmed to emit a short signal when the program is finished. To program this feature, follow the steps below:

1. Turn off the power to the machine.
2. Press and hold down the Delay Start button as you turn on the power of the machine. The Delay Start button will flash.
3. Release the button.
4. Press the Program button. The Pots/Pans button will glow to indicate the end-of-program signal is activated.
5. Press the start/stop button to store the settings.

To deactivate the signal, repeat the steps above. The Pots/Pans button will go out to indicate the signal is off.

Incredibly enough, to activate the program done signal, you have to deal with five buttons: Power, Delay Start, Program, Pots/Pans, and Start/Stop in a manner that completely overrides the buttons labeled usage. This is an expensive dishwasher so saving manufacturing costs was not a serious concern for the designers, but obviously neither was their concern for users.

The fight for usability continues...

International Children's Digital Library now available on iPhone

2008-11-25T06:17:00.004-05:00

One of my largest research efforts at the Human-Computer Interaction Lab is the International Children's Digital Library (www.childrenslibrary.org), which continues to grow in stature and global recognition. We have recently added several hundred books and deployed two HCIL innovations that taken together allow book text to be clearly displayed even when surrounded by deep colors and lush illustrations, which we find so often in the ICDL's children's picture books. And this is not all. This work also allows us to manipulate the text to varying degrees, which in turn allows us to offer beautiful, well placed translations, on the page. The exemplary books of the ICDL have never been more readable.

And now, we have taken the ICDL mobile.

In support of the library's vision of making as many books available to as many children as possible, the ICDL is now open on a variety of mobile devices. You can already visit the Library from the small and wondrous devices made available to children around the world by the One Laptop Per Child organization and on Intel's ClassmatePC educational laptop. And now, as of this week, you can tap your Apple iPhone or iPod Touch to get the free ICDL for iPhone app and read all about the six Mongolia brothers in search of knowledge, the gray peacemaker cat that does something most unusual to the other cat's ears, or a version of the Three Little Pigs that you surely have never heard before. The initial four books will be updated over time as we offer more books from our much larger collection.

FolderShare, Live Sync, Live Mesh???

2008-11-20T12:07:00.006-05:00

Ok, it is has been two years since Microsoft bought ByteTaxi's FolderShare and rebranded it as Microsoft FolderShare. Aside from keeping it running, putting the Mac version on life support, and killing off the fee-based "pro" version, they haven't done much. But today I received the email below from their team.

WTF? How could MS be pushing Live Sync and Live Mesh at the same time when the products are nearly indistinguishable??? And with each not mentioning the other and without any indication of how users should decide which product to use. Does Microsoft know that they are investing in two very similar and competing products?

And to abandon their existing customers with no automatic transition path, and to warn them they will probably not even be able to get in, and that they should manually copy the names of their folders and sharers onto what, paper? Plus, I'll make a bet that the reason for this is so that they can abandon mac support without ever saying so.

FolderShare runs on the mac - but the encryption is totally broken so you have to run it without encryption, and it is an old pre-Intel binary so it runs only in the emulator and hogs a huge amount of processor time.

Live Mesh, which theoretically runs on the mac has a bug so it works great - as long as you only want to share folders on your desktop. I can't get it to share any other folders. (Yes, I have reported this, but to no avail).

And there still is no paid "pro" service - which is probably the one MS service I *would* pay for.

Oh, and it is still "beta" after two years of buying ByteTaxi and being version 2.0.

Sigh...

Change

2008-11-07T11:28:00.002-05:00

Sometimes the most obvious ideas are the hardest ones to have. Who could imagine in our recent political climate that the executive branch of our government would open the floodgates to ask the entire world for their advise on how to set up the government? The thinking of the status quo might think that is a sign of weakness - but of course the "new" model interprets this as a sign of strength. To ask for other's opinions shows that you are sure in what you know, and that you don't know everything. Yesterday, the Obama office of the President-Elect announced www.change.gov, a site asking for advise and ideas on every policy issue.

That is, interestingly enough, the essence of the approach of interface designers. Designers are experts. They are confident in balancing the many conflicting requirements of what it takes to solve hard problems. They also know that they don't know everything - and thus the work with their users through particpatory design and a million other approaches for learning from the broadest set of stakeholders.

It looks like our new government is thinking the same way that us HCI'ers have for decades.

Design for Democracy

2008-11-04T17:40:00.002-05:00

For election day, I want to point to some fantastic work exploring how to improve the design of voting ballots and other material related to elections. Marcia Lausen's book, "Design for Democracy: Ballot + Election Design", part of the related AIGA Design for Democracy project does the job. She presents case studies, showing problematic designs and very clear and simple redesigns that addresses their problems. The lead example is to look at the infamous butterfly ballot of 2000, and she makes the case very clearly that while the constraints inherent in these problems make for a hard design problem, it is still possible to have a clear solution. She then goes further to express general design principles that can be applied to a broad range of specific situations. And she goes beyond just ballots, looking at voter registration, election administration, and more general election design issues.

Unfortunately, the reality of our voting landscape makes it so that the vendors don't act like they care much about these issues, and the politicians that manage elections don't seem to have the skills or resources to implement good solutions. But hopefully, the clear direction and advice that comes with this book will help.

Why I returned my Apple TV

2008-10-31T07:58:00.002-05:00

In my continuing quest to make my life easier, I thought I'd try Apple TV to avoid driving to the video store (which is long past being tolerable to me), and to get some actual HD content for my year-old HDTV.

Like many things Apple, it is brilliant in so many ways, while falling flat in others. In this case, the problems, interestingly, are interface and content. They nailed the core issues (which is why I bought it in the first place), which are ease of access and integration. You can browse the store on your TV (without having to use your computer), download stuff - and automatically sync with your computer and iPhone so all your stuff is wherever you want it, and all automatically backed up. But this is where the magic ends.

The interface, while glossy, lush and beautiful, is hugely harmed by that puny little remote control. After using the Tivo for a year, and enjoying the world's best remote control, Apple's was just too pathetic to use. It is so small that it was at huge risk of being lost, and we had to institute strict family rules about its placement. The buttons are so hard to press, that I actually started to get AppleTV-thumb and had to switch fingers to press it. And the interface is totally image based - there is no way to link through metadata. You can't find an interesting movie, and look for others with the same actor, etc.

As for content, well at first glance it looks good, but it just isn't very deep. I knew the numbers were low compared to other options, but I didn't realize that the HD content is almost nonexistent. And given that my tastes don't seem to run in the same direction as Apple's very mainstream content, I could only find a handful of HD movies that I actually wanted to watch.

Then, just as I began to realize that these were going to be very high priced movies for which I would also have to endure a pained thumb, Netflix announced their upcoming distribution for 12,000 shows on Tivo. I had one day left to return my Apple TV, and so I did.

Steve Jobs has been calling Apple TV his "hobby", to avoid the criticism about it's lackluster performance. I should have listened to him.

PPTPlex - Zoomable presentations not quite yet for the masses

2008-10-29T09:00:00.002-05:00

Figuring out the clearest and most engaging way to communicate ideas is fundamentally important. The world seems to have settled on just a few key approaches: Text, video, and computer presentations along the lines of PowerPoint (or Keynote). The latter, as we all know, are valuable for their ease of creation, and ubiquity of authoring tools. However, they also tend to be boring, and in presentations of any length, the audience can get lost and not know where they are.

I created a PowerPoint plugin called CounterPoint back in 2001 with then grad student Lance Good. It offered a pretty sophisticated mechanism to create zoomable presentations consisting of PowerPoint slides. But the authoring tool was pretty clunky, and its dependency on Java made deployment pretty difficult.

So, I was delighted to see that Microsoft Labs recently put out PPTPlex, which is remarkably similar in spirit to CounterPoint. They created a plugin for PowerPoint which makes a reasonable trade-off of much, much more accessible and simpler authoring tools - and much less creative flexibilty. Still, this is probably the right move to consider commercializing this kind of approach. I was delighted to try it out, and sure enough, the authoring was simple enough that I was able to create a 70 slide "vision" talk on the future of HCI (with Allison Druin) using it quite readily.

Sadly, I wasn't able to use PPTPlex for my presentation because the technology was just not up to it. It seems to rasterize every slide - which not only takes a long time, but uses a *huge* amount of memory. My presentation actually used over a Gigabyte of RAM! And then PowerPoint (with PPTPlex) crashed. So, instead, I tried something else.

I was able to duplicate most of the visual feel that PPTPlex offered entirely with plain vanilla PowerPoint animations. I suffered by performing unnatural acts with PowerPoint to build the animations I wanted - but my PowerPoint ninja buddy John SanGiovanni had taught me the art, so I created the following presentation which I presented with Allison Druin at CMU last month. Take a look - and be sure to look at the PowerPoint presentation (15 MB) in Show mode to see the full transitions.

What do you think?

The wonder of single tasking

2008-10-27T08:09:00.002-05:00

The NY Times has yet another article on the inherent human limitations of multitasking (some previous ones here, here, and here). While we all love to do several things at once, the reality is that we can't do so effectively, and there is more and more research that supports this.

This is one of those issues where we all know this essential truth, but just don't follow it. And the nature of innovation means that we will have more and more communication and information technologies (think historically: phone, email, web, IM, texting, social networks, etc.) And there are plenty of researchers trying to figure how the best way to interrupt you to deliver more information.

So, at the moment, this means people actually have to take responsibility for themselves while we interface designers figure out how to bring these disparate information sources together in a way that increases, not decreases focus. I've discussed this before and just wrote a new essay relating these issues to how children read online.

AT&T still nasty about service plans

2008-10-01T08:25:00.002-05:00

So, you thought you remembered reading about how the cell phone carriers were going to be getting friendlier to their customers about their service contract cancellation policies? Ha!

I am as loyal an AT&T customer as you are likely to find. I have a $200 monthly bill with three lines. My 3rd line is for software development, and I brought my own phone to the plan - that is, I did not use a carrier subsidy to discount the price of the phone. So, imagine my suprise (ok, not really) when I called to cancel this third line. I was told that not only would they charge me a cancellation fee of $175, but that despite the news recently of them prorating these cancellation fees, they would not prorate my cancellation fee. Why? Because I had a pre-existing contract, and they were only pro-rating new contracts. (And how can they justify a two-year contract when they didn't provide a subsidy? Because they can.)

To make matters worse, when I asked to speak with a manager, they said that "no manager was available", and that they had a policy of not calling customers back - but I was free to try to call again later.

Boy is AT&T lucky they have an exclusive deal with Apple. I sure hope that Google's efforts to make a more competitive marketplace for communications services gets some traction.

For the record, here are the details of my call:

"no manager available" - Wed at 9:30am EST. Wouldn't call back when one was available.
My service is for 3 lines, $200/month, 3rd line for 1 yr 4 mo
The line I was trying to cancel was with my own phone and had no carrier subsidy
They still would charge a $175 cancellation charge that wasn't pro-rated - this policy started in last three months and isn't applied retroactively.
I spoke with "Hela"

A Tale of 2 Dead Disks - Why Macs Make People Happy

2008-09-27T06:50:00.006-05:00

I got back last night from a week in Seattle to see that my MacPro was dead - wouldn't boot, and I could hear the disk doing a repetitive not-happy-kind-of noise. I had another disk in the computer I had used for random backups, and a remote Time Capsule disk that theoretically had been making continuous backups - so this is what I did:

Rebooted off Leopard DVD
Selected restore from Time Capsule to restore to that second disk
Went to bed

Total time: 10 minutes
This morning I have a Happy Mac.

Holy crap - when my wife's disk died on her laptop last month, I had the worst possible combination of all eventualities, and it took me about 10 hours to fix!

If only Macs had good office software, they would so rule.

Google owns your name with Picasa name tagging

2008-09-06T08:33:00.003-05:00

The new Picasa Web Albums have initial support for a fantastic name-tagging feature. The idea is to ease the process of identifying who is in each picture by combining human and computer efforts. It is very well done, and makes tagging fun and accurate in a way never done before commercially (but see SAPHARI for a surprisingly similar earlier research effort by my grad student).

BUT - it is a crime that this feature not does not offer a way to sync the tags you create online with the full resolution photos you own on your own computer. That's right. The only way to use this feature is to upload your photos to Google's servers, tag them via their website, and then lose that data forever. You can search your photos on Google's servers, but you can't export that tagged information. And the Picasa 3 "syncing" feature doesn't sync the name tags back down to the original photo. And the face-based annotation feature doesn't exist on the desktop version.

And even if the data does eventually come back down to your source photos (which I pray it eventually does), it still is not very friendly of Google to force you to upload your thousands of photos to the web for this extremely important feature. Of course, this is very likely Picasa's business model. Give away the free desktop version, offer a teaser bit of free storage on the web, and then charge a huge amount ($75 a year for the 40 GB of storage I would need to store all my photos online). I would much rather just pay a reasonable price for the desktop version to unlock crucial features - such as face-based annotation.

Web apps are fine - but people should own their data - not Google. And people should get to choose when they want to do something on the computers and disks they own, and when they choose to use someone elses on the web. Anything less is no better than the desktop-based lock-in that Google and others have complained about for so long.

Missing Chrome keyboard shortcuts

2008-09-03T07:48:00.004-05:00

Chrome (Google's browser that was released yesterday) is all the rage, and as I've said for years (i.e., flow [pdf], notelens), user interface speed and responsiveness is crucial and a fundamental part of not getting in the way of tasks users are trying to do.

So, I hope it is an oversight and not design that led Google to leave out two crucial keyboard.

Their "omnibar" works fine - except for a one thing. When you start typing and the list of suggestions pops up underneath, you have to move your fingers off the home position of the keyboard to the arrow keys in order to select them. This may be the "standard" way of doing things, but Firefox already showed it isn't the best. In this special case, override the tab key to move focus to the popup list. Fingers stay in the home position, and a touch typist can do a search and execute it in a fraction of a second.
It is great that chrome supports incremental search - but considering that they learned from Firefox, I wish they had gotten it right. Instead of a single key to start search ('/' in Firefox), you need two (Ctrl-F). And if you search to a link and want to follow that link, there is no way to do so with the keyboard. Pressing the 'Enter' key in Firefox while search has highlighted a link follows that link. Chrome should do the same thing.

These issues may seem minor, but they are activities that people, literally, do hundreds of times per day. Multiple a hundred million people by a hundred annoyances a day, and that is a lot of distraction, and slowing people down. Considering that there is also no cost for doing so (i.e., it doesn't hurt the user experience in any way), let's hope Google continues to polish their chrome, and adds these shortcuts.

While they're at it, they should be thinking about the next (lower priority) feature which is to add a rich mechanism for people to customize chrome to speed up their own idiosyncratic tasks. How many times do I do repetitive tasks on websites that I can't automate or shortcut for various reasons? A lot. Example: one website requires three clicks to get where I'm going *after* I log in - meaning I can't shortcut to that page. I could use third party software such as Quickkeys to automate this, but the browser should have a built-in mechanism to do so.

Anyway, Chrome looks promising - let's just hope they go from great to perfect.

Good customer service

2008-08-17T20:54:00.003-05:00

My 3 year old was happy to be in the car the other day with her older sister's MacBook watching a DVD. Then, unbeknownst to us, she decided to watch another one and inserted a DVD by herself. The only problem is that she didn't take the first one out first. I immediately knew where this was heading.

A trip to the Apple store showed how clever I was to predict that we very likely lost both DVDs and the drive. At least they were very friendly and apologetic that it wasn't covered under warranty - which I could hardly complain about. So I agreed to the $300 estimated repair cost, and was told it would be ready in about 2 days. And here is where it gets interesting.

After 7 days, I called the store to find that they still hadn't fixed it. They were super friendly, and promised to call right back when they could tell me more. I figured it would be another week before I even got through to them. But 10 minutes later, they called me back, apologized again, and promised it would be ready later that afternoon. Again, I figured that meant I might see it in a week. But an hour later, they called me back saying it was done and I could pick it up. I was already pretty happy that they recognized the mistake in their delayed repair and bumped it to the top of the queue so easily.

So, imagine my surprise when they called me back a *third* time, not 10 minutes later. They said they hadn't realized this wasn't under warranty and that I was paying for it. Given the extent of their delay, they said they wouldn't charge me, and have a nice day.

I was flabbergasted. I am a completely regular customer. I didn't pull rank (as if I had any), or promise to expose them. In fact, I wasn't even that concerned by the delay in the first place. And completely on their own, they not only took complete responsibility and gave an actual apology (rather than the all-too-common non-apology), and gave me a $361.56 credit without my asking for it.

I am already about 60% switched from Windows, but if using Apple means I can get customer service like that instead of Dell's or Lenovo's, I'm up to 70%.

on Randy Pausch

2008-07-27T11:29:00.004-05:00

Allison Druin wrote her thoughts about Randy Pausch's death better than I ever could, so here they are:

-----------------------

Last night I tried to write this email, but the words never came. All I could do was spend time with YouTube and Google, watching, reading, and thinking about Randy Pausch who died that day. As most of the world now knows, Randy was much more than a computer science/HCI/VR professor at CMU. He gave a talk last Fall, something most of us academics do day-in-and-day-out. But instead of enjoying the moment with a few students and perhaps some interested colleagues, the moment ultimately was shared with the world.

The video

Randy did something few of us could do-- he shared his thoughts, energies, and talents even as he was dying of cancer.

Ben B. and I were blessed with knowing Randy as a colleague and early mentor. Our first year at the HCIL, Randy attended the Annual Symposium

-- and it was then we first spent time with him, giving us advice that was a wonderful mix of dry wit, bold honesty, and endless energy. This may be the only way I can describe Randy last Fall in Pittsburgh, as we sat in the audience listening to Randy's last lecture. We cried, we laughed, we learned, and we felt honored to be there. After the lecture we were able to give Randy a big hug and tell him that he was our hero.

So after a long week at the HCIL filled with police, frustration, and sadness-- two bits of advice from Randy seem good to remember:

"Experience is what you get when you didn't get what you wanted."

"We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand."

For more words about Randy and his passing:

Oh yes, and my favorite Randy-isms: "... remember, the brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. Because the brick walls are there to stop the people who don't want it badly enough. They're there to stop the other people...Don't bail. The best of the gold's at the bottom of barrels..."

"...be prepared. Luck is truly where preparation meets opportunity."

Allison

==========================================

Dr. Allison Druin
Director, Human-Computer Interaction Lab
Associate Professor University of Maryland College of Information Studies and
Institute for Advanced Computer Studies

Cell phones: Technology User Frustrations

2008-01-22T10:17:00.000-05:00

We all know that computers and technology can be frustrating. But we also know that it can be exciting, and not only enhance our productivity, but significantly increase what we are capable of doing. Just as with other good tools, when technology works well, it can expand human capabilities. That is why I spend my life dealing with the reality of what sometimes seems like endless frustration – in an effort to make our lives with technology better. So, this is a time to look at what works and what doesn’t with technology. Let’s understand where your frustrations lie, and let’s also be sure to talk about what works well. Together, we can send a message to technology creators about the importance of addressing the “user experience”. This isn’t a helpdesk to solve particular problems, nor an advocacy center to get that vendor to deal with your lost data. But by bringing together our heads on where the problems lie, we can bring our voices together and push the industry forward.

Today's Topic: Cell Phones
What simple tasks on cell phones are harder than they should be?

Comment here, and I'll also post the concerns raised on today's Tech Tuesday radio show on WAMU.

FreeRice - charity or profit center?

2007-11-26T08:52:00.000-05:00

Many people have discovered FreeRice, the fun little website where you test your vocabulary, see some advertising, and have some rice donated to the world's hungry - paid for with a fraction of the funds taken from the advertising revenue.

It is definitely innovative, and at first cut, sounds like a good idea. But is it legitimate? I'm not talking about whether the rice actually gets donated. There is no proof given, but even assuming that it does get donated as promised, is this site moral - or is it a personal profit center based on deceit and greedy taking of the public's good will and time? There has been a bit of discussion on this topic, but not very much considering how much traffic this site is seeing (10's of million's of pageviews per day).

So what is the issue? The problem is that the actual value of the daily donation is tiny and the potential revenue is huge. I've seen estimates on the web that show profits ranging from about $10K to $150K. Mine put it at about $100K (see below). But the main point here is not legal, it is ethical and social.

If the sole premise of a site's existence is to do charitable work, then it must do so honestly. As with other charities and organizations that manage other people's resources, it should disclose what percentage of income is actually given as charity, how much is administrative overhead, and how much is profit. It doesn't matter that the source of the funds doesn't come from the customer's cash. It still comes from the customers - just through their time and attention rather than their dollars. And the ethical requirements of charitable work are different than pure business.

The standard bar for understanding ethical behavior is full disclosure. If the site said what was really going on, and people continue to choose to participate, then the site has cleared the bar and will reap the world's good will. But without saying what is really going on, we have to assume there are nefarious purposes, and significant personal benefit taken from the charity of others. That kind of behavior may thrive for a while, but can't last as charitable work that is honest will take over - and it can't happen soon enough.

My estimate:
200,000,000 approx donated grains (Nov 15, 2007)
25,000 grains per pound
8,000 donated pounds
$5,600 donated dollars (assuming $0.70 per pound)

$5 assumed CPM (thousand ad impressions)
20,000,000 Impressions
20,000 thousands of impressions
$100,000 revenue

ICDL Going to Mongolia

2007-10-24T11:55:00.000-05:00

I'm going back to Mongolia next week to finish the job I started last year. The International Children's Digital Library (ICDL - www.childrenslibrary.org), which I am the technical director of, is working with the Mongolia Ministry of Education, Culture and Science on a World Bank-funded project to help improve literacy, and a culture of reading for pleasure.

While the larger project is centered around traditional paper books, there is a surprisingly foresightful effort looking at digital technology. Last trip, I set up an ICDL server in Ulaan Baatar - available at www.read.mn. This time, I'm going to set up some servers in rural schools and to do teacher training (with graduate student Sheri Massey) to explore how technology can be used in places far off the grid.

While Mongolia is slowly wiring up the country, a significant number of soums (i.e., towns) may have electricity, but have no internet. We decided that since we know the internet is coming (eventually), and they were buying computers anyway, we would set up the ICDL on a server in each school, and use the local network to provide access to the 200 new books (plus many of the existing ICDL books) to the children in these schools.

I'm afraid that as crazy as it seems, the only way to set this kind of thing up is to go out there with software (and many, many backups) in hand, and set things up myself. We've got our system configured to now also run on Windows servers with standard distributions of Apache, Tomcat and MySQL. And we've got things set up so it all starts up nicely when the computer starts. And we can even update the library by sending a disk out there, and having someone press a special button (or so we hope).

Installing this software without recurse to help if things go wrong is a bit daunting. Especially because these schools are all 1-2 days drive on cold dirt roads from the Capital and each other. I'm really, really hoping I don't have a bad technology week.

And, of course, I won't be able to blog about the trip until afterwards since I'll have no connectivity - but I'll be sure to have lots of stories when I come back on November 12th.

A Great Computer Scientist - Randy Pausch

2007-09-20T21:00:00.000-05:00

You may not know Randy Pausch, but you should. He is truly a great computer scientist - but unfortunately, one who is dying. He was scheduled to give a CS Distinguished Seminar at UMD last year, but had to cancel on account of his illness.

On Tuesday, he gave his "last lecture" at CMU which Allison & I attended. Given that he is brilliant, a wonderful showman, and forthright - and expecting to die before long with advanced pancreatic cancer, it was a talk that is hard to describe the gravitas of - whether you know Randy or not.

While the audience (an overflowing room of 500 or so), was obviously distraught - Randy focused on the lessons of his life. What he was proud of, what was difficult - focusing on what it took to achieve his childhood dreams. And he talked a lot about the satisfaction he has taken in focusing on undergraduate education and broadening the students interested in computer science (through Alice, his very popular 3D system that offers an introduction to programming) among other things.

You may not have the pleasure of getting to know Randy in person, but I promise that you will not be disappointed if you spend the 1.5 hours to watch his talk. Here is a wall street journal article about it.. The weird thing is that the hyperbole in this article is actually understated. The talk was far beyond anything I've heard before.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119024238402033039.html

The full video of his talk is here:
http://www.etc.cmu.edu/global_news/?q=node/42

Randy's personal page and treatment blog is here:
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~pausch/

FolderShare in slow motion

2007-08-17T12:31:00.000-05:00

More than any other software in recent history, FolderShare has changed my work habits, dramatically improving my mobility and the reliability of my data. It is simple file synchronization software that makes all the files (and subfolders) in a folder stay the same across machines across the internet. Adding, removing, moving, or changing a file in one machine results in a near-instantaneous matching change on all synced computers. And it even works on Macintosh (sort of).

FolderShare is amazing because it enables me to go back and forth between my desktop computer at work, my laptop, and desktop at home. (I also use it to collaborate on important shared projects with other people). And by replicating my files across multiple computers, it is a free and simple backup solution. It even gives me the ability to remotely delete files were my laptop to get stolen.

FolderShare was created by ByteTaxi, a startup a few years back, and acquired by Microsoft November 2005. And sadly, Microsoft has not done one single thing since then. The website has not changed. The product has not changed. Actually, that's not true - it got a bit worse. When Apple upgraded their OS some months back, encryption to Mac stopped working, and now the only way you can sync to Macs is to completely disable encryption on all synced computers - pathetic.

Well, they did add a newsgroup, but they don't respond to users. Has Microsoft learned anything about Web 2.0? About the speed of the Web? About being innovative? They acquired an awesome product, and are slowly smothering it to death. Yes, there are rumors that it will re-emerge as a new Live service, but when I saw how pathetic Live's new SkyDrive service is, I came close to losing my last bit of hope. If FolderShare wasn't the best solution of this kind out there, I would have given up on it (and probably Microsoft) long ago, but it is still great (modulo the Mac encryption problem).

So, Microsoft, please, please - be more responsive. Yes, you're a big company - but do you really think sitting on a great innovation for coming on 2 years without any communication to your users is the caring for your users? Has your confidence eroded all awareness of the impact of your actions on people's perceptions and feelings about Microsoft as an entity?

I won't be that surprised if Live does come out with something good here eventually, but I'm afraid that even if the product is revived, my opinion of Microsoft has suffered.

iPhone design trade-offs

2007-07-01T15:54:00.001-05:00

There is plenty to like about iPhone - and we all already know about that. And there are some obvious challenges (i.e., slow network, lack of physical keyboard, no OTA syncing of calendar & contacts). But a lot of important, yet more subtle challenges have not yet been reported widely yet. These are largely due to trade-offs given the lack of not only the keyboard, but also D-Pad, Home and Back buttons, and soft keys that are so common on just about every other phone. So, how does this impact usability? Let's take a look by comparing to some other comparable devices for a variety of tasks.

Make a call to a contact:
- BlackBerry 8800 (~2 secs): Start typing from the home screen, scroll down to filtered item and press action. I have 992 contacts. I can get to just about anyone in 4 or 5 keys, a scroll, and a click. Windows Mobile is also about the same as this, but it responds a lot more slowly.
- iPhone (~4 secs): Press Phone. Press Contacts. Press the first letter of the last name on the right side of the contacts. But since these letters are tiny, you usually have to drag up or down a few times to get to the right letter. Now flick up or down to visually search for the person you are looking for. Press the person. Press the # you want to call. iPhone is not only slow, but painfully distracting.
Look at photos:
- iPod: Flipping through a lot of full-screen photos is unbelievably fast. As you spin the wheel, photos fly by. I can probably scan 20 per second. It is also physically easy and doesn't require much attention. Just fling you finger around the wheel. I can do this to look at tons of photos.
- iPhone: Looking at photos on the iPhone is undeniably beautiful and pleasing - but to flip between full-screen photos requires a flick for each one. The fastest I could manager was about 4 per second, and that required a lot of finger movement. I wouldn't want to do this for more than about 20 photos.
Read text on the web: Much has been made of reading web pages on the iPhone. Everything that is advertised is true - but they forget to mention one thing. If your eyesight isn't terrific, you'll have to take advantage of the beautiful two-finger zooming-in feature - even after you've zoomed in to an article. But if you do that, then you'll have to horizontally scroll back and forth to read each line. This is an unimaginably bad experience. In other mobile browses, content is laid out vertically. They certainly have their own problems, but once you get to reading an article, you can set the font size, and just press the space bar or down arrow to scroll down one page at a time. On the iPhone, if you can't read the natural size, you are just going to have a really lousy experience.
Things to do: Part of the fun of computing is that there is just so much darned stuff to do - from little flash games, to java downloads, to rich apps that you pay to download. And the wonder of "widgets" is that the public makes them, so there are lots of options to choose among (i.e., see what's coming soon from ZenZui). But with the iPhone's closed platform, no Flash and no Java - you're pretty much stuck with what Apple gives you. Sure you can watch a few YouTube videos. But there are about half dozen I know of and actually searched for - whoops, those weren't available. They nicely give you a bunch of Web bookmarks to all kinds of sites – so I visited some kids sites with my 8 year old daughter. Whoops, all the ones she cares about use Flash, and they don't work. So I can read on the Web, and do iTunesy stuff. Don't get me wrong, that's pretty great - but not great enough. For the iPhone to be truly great, they have to open the platform.
Finding an email: Amazingly enough, there is no way to search for email.
Finding some music: Amazingly enough, there is no way to search for music. Hierarchies and tags are great - but sometimes you know what you are looking for, and the fastest and cognitively easiest way to get it is just to type a unique word in the title. Oh well, you're out of luck.

Now if it weren't for the fact that Apple has Spotlight on the desktop, I might think they hadn't learned about search yet. Instead, it's almost as if Apple has tacitly agreed that typing on the iPhone really is so bad that they don't want to frustrate users by having them search for stuff. Or maybe they really want you to think of this as an entertainment device, so efficiency shouldn't be that important - and the act of forced browsing will help you discover stuff you didn't know you had on your device. Or maybe they just didn't get to that yet, and we'll see it in an update before long. Cross your fingers.

Plaxo Makes Me Scared

2007-06-25T10:32:00.001-05:00

Web services that offload the burdon of tedious repetitive tasks offer a wonderful promise. And things like having to update your address book every time any one of your contacts changes something just seems like one of those things that the modern Web ought to solve. And in fact, it does. Plaxo offloads this burdon to each individual to maintain their own contact information – rather than the hundreds of individuals that know that person.

Seems like a good thing, right? Well, almost – except for the details:

It puts the burdon of maintaining your understanding of someone else's address on that other person. Plaxo sends me a reminder email to "check" if I've updated my information every now and then – even if I never change anything, and even if I don't use Plaxo. This looks like a convenience feature for you, but I see it as actually being Plaxo's excuse to send advertising to everyone in your address book at your request with your credibility and (literally) your face. Do you really want to be supporting their advertising?
Plaxo says they will maintain great privacy of my contact information, but should I believe that? From their privacy policy, "Plaxo will not sell, exchange, or otherwise share Your Information with third parties, unless required by law or in accordance with your instructions." In other words, because you want to maintain a personal database of information about me, the government now has instant access to all of my personal information immediately.
If Plaxo's servers get broken into, all of my contact information is available to the world.
You should be aware that Plaxo explicitly maintains the right to spam you. From their privacy policy, they maintain the right: "To provide you with information about Plaxo products, services, news and events through the Software, the Site or e-mail;"
Plaxo can change their policy at any time – and instantly start selling all of everyone's information at will. If they are sold, for example, there is no reason to expect that a buyer wouldn't do so if it was profitable.

Plaxo is not unique – there are lots of places that centralize personal information (think Google). But this one worries more than others because they focus on personal information, and the relationship between individuals, and have an explicit business model and policy of actively and repeatedly soliciting non-customers. They also are unique in shifting the burdon from the user of information to someone else – without their permission.

In defense of Challenge-Response spam detection systems

2007-01-03T16:04:00.000-05:00

Like a lot of people, I get a lot of spam. And in the past months, it has gotten a lot worse. On average, I get well over 1,000 spam a day, and that is after spamassassin has already processed it and deleted what it detects without me ever even seeing that. Of those that get through, Outlook puts most in the Junk E-email folder, leaving me about 100 a day to delete - intermixed with my 50 or so legitimate emails a day.

In terms of actual time lost, it is not great. Maybe 2 seconds per email to delete or 2*100=~3 minutes plus a couple of minutes to look through the junked email to salvage good ones (of which I typically find about 1 per day) for a total of maybe 5 minutes a day.

But in terms of mind share and detraction, this is huge. It means that I am continuously distracted all day long by the dregs of society - pornography, rampant commercialism, and fraud. This is the worst kind of distraction, not only taking my mind away from my flow of concentration, but doing so in a way that I do my best to avoid in every other aspect of my life, and that I would not even consider letting my 7 year old daughter have access to.

So, after giving up on all the standard solutions to spam, I signed up for SpamArrest, a commercial "challenge-response" spam detection system. This works by requiring everyone that wants to send you email to first follow a link to a website and prove they are human by reading a word in a warped image and typing it (i.e., a CAPTCHA). The reason this approach works is that:

Each sender only has to do this once for me. The system remembers that person for the future.
I can preload the system with all of my contacts and anyone I've sent email to in the past so that everyone I already communicate with won't have to validate themselves, and won't know I am using this system.
New people that send me email have to use this system once, and legitmate senders are usually willing to go through this step.
I can authenticate senders unlikely to do this (like various large e-commerce sites).
I can let email lists through by setting them up indivdually.
Spammers that send me email are almost never willing to go through this step, and so I never see their email. The reason that spammers aren't willing to do that is because they are computer software and can't, or because they are human and don't want to spend the time. In fact, most spam is sent by "spambots" which are other people's computers hijacked for the sole purpose of sending spam. This email is sent with forged email return addresses, so they never even receive the request for validation.

So, if this is such a panacea, why isn't everyone using it? Well for one thing, you have to pay for it (about $3/month). But lots of people think this approach is a bad idea in principle, and have been arguing against it. However, while I agree that it does have problems, it is better than any current alternative, and I'm not going to wait around suffering while I wait for better solutions. So, let me respond to one complaint about challenge-response systems. I'll summarize the complaints and respond here.

Concern #1. Spammers will forge mail to me with someone else's return address thus sending my challenge to the poor forgee's email box.

Looking at the actual spam I receive, the vast, vast majority has false return addresses. And of the legitimate ones, most of those very likely come from spambots running on machines that have been infected. The owner of those machines have a lot more serious problems than deleting my challenge to them. In fact, it may tip them off to the fact that they are infected. And of the few third party legitimate emailers who get my unwanted challenges, I apologize. But that is still a tiny, tiny fraction of the total spam in the world. I'll gladly stop when there are better solutions. And I won't get mad if I occasionally get unwanted challenges from others (which I do, and which is a tiny, tiny minority of the total spam I receive).

Concern #2. If a challenge-response person emails me, then both our systems will challenge each other, generating even more email traffic.

So what. We each accept each other's challenges and we're done. We only have to do this once per person. And again, this one-time extra 2 emails is so tiny in the wide world of spam, that it is a totally irrelevant argument.

Concern #3. Challenge-response systems are easy to defeat since all someone has to do is forge the From address as someone that I already trust.

This is the easiest to respond to. Yes, in theory this is true, but in practice, spammers don't know who I trust. And in the past 4 days, I have received 4,491 emails of which 165 have been classified as good. Of those, about 30 were spam, but all of those spam were sent through mailing lists that I trust, not from forged From addresses. This does bring up a legitimate problem which is that popular mailing lists may become targetted as spoofed return addresses. But again, in practice, this has not happened yet. So I'm not going to avoid using a system because it theoretically might not work at some point in the future.

The bottom line is that challenge-response systems are not perfect, and probably won't work as well if everyone uses them. But for now, they work much, much better than anything else short of a human spam deleter (now there's a good business opportunity!). And if they stop working better than alternatives, then I'll switch to whatever works better.

Kojo Nnamdi "Computer Guy" answers questions

2006-12-05T11:06:00.000-05:00

I had the pleasure of being a "Computer Guy" on WAMU's Kojo Nnamdi show along with Allison Druin and John Gilroy. We got to answer a number of email questions on the air, but here are some other ones with my answers.

It is of course, good to see answers, but I do this also to point out the sorry state of affairs of the computer industry as this is just way too many problems for every day computer users to have.

How do I print a listing of the files in a directory?

Alternatively, you can still do it from the command line with the following steps. Run the command shell by pressing Windows-R, and entering "cmd" in the popup dialog and click ok. Change to the directory you want to list with the "cd" command (i.e., do something like "cd c:\video"). List the directory and send the output to a text file with the command "dir > listing.txt". This runs the "dir" command and sends the output to the specified text file. Then go back to Windows Explorer, open the newly created "listing.txt" file in notepad or Word or any other text editing program and print from there.

Subject: question for the Computer Guys

I have Verizon DSL service. When I open Internet Explorer to my home page washingtonpost.com, I get all of these popup boxes saying "Runtime Error." The boxes contain information such as "Object Expected" or "Null Object." and asks if I want to want to debug. Three questions - what causes Runtime Errors? Does debugging fill your computer with spyware? And why is only IE affected by such errors?

If this happens occasionally, it could be due to a temporary problem with the website in question. But if it happens frequently, then it is probably due to some broken plugin for Internet Explorer. That is, you may have installed some software that modified Internet Explorer and did so in a bad way. For IE 7, try Tools->Manage Add-ons->Enable or Disable add-ons, and try disabling stuff. If you are using IE6, try updating to IE7 with Microsoft Update.

Subject: Vista

Hi Guys!

I am one of the few people left on the planet who is still running Windows ME, and have been looking forward to getting a new computer when Vista comes out. Should I buy it right away, or wait to see how it performs?

Thanks,

In general, unless you enjoy living on the "bleeding edge", and the excitement and inevitable problems that go along with it, I recommend waiting a few months after any major technical product is launched. In this case, it probably means waiting until after SP1 (Service Pack 1) comes out to fix the first round of bugs, probably late spring.

Subject: wireless internet security

My home wireless router indicates that I have "security-enabled wireless network (WPA). What's the difference between WPA and WEP wireless security? Is one better/stronger? Is it safe to buy and bank on-line with WPA? Thanks.

WPA is the newer one, and I recommend it over WEP whenever you have the chance.

Subject: Shared Outlook Contact and Calendar Files

Hi, I've paid for a Dell server to be set up running Microsoft Small Business Server software for my small, home-based business. Despite many calls (and lots of paid invoices), cannot share either Contacts or Calendar files from within Outlook. They tried to set up a separate outlook folder, but the server won't default to it, they say, unless we wipe the server and I pay to set the whole thing up all over again. Any advice on how to get these programs to share over a small network of 2-3 desktops, please?

Many thanks,

I'm afraid I don't know how to help you here - but it sounds like whoever you paid to set up the system for you did not do their job properly. If you've tried to get them finish the job and can't get them to do so, then don't pay them and pay someone else to start over. If you already have paid them, then ask for your money back. If they won't, then you've learned a hard lesson about not paying for services before they are completed. Sorry.

Subject: Computer Guys Question

I got a virus on my desktop PC. It was cleaned out but in the process it lost its IP address and now I cant get onto the internet without that, is there a way to restore it? Thanks

I'd start by turning off your cable modem and computer and any other hardware and then turning it all on again (starting with the modem and router and powering up your computer last). If you still can't get it to work, try calling your internet service provider.

Subject: computer guys question

Is there a side-by-side comparison of processors available ... a chart, etc? How do AMD, Pentium HT, and dual processors stack-up? What direction do I go with my next purchase keeping Vista in mind, and knowing that I am now doing more photo and home video work.

There are loads of comparisons out there, but I'm not familiar with any one that I can suggest. Try googling "processor comparison" to get started.

Subject: Transfer audio tape cassette music to PC

Is there an easy way to transfer my old audio tapes to my Windows XP PC so I can hear my music on CD's?

David Pogue discussed this very issue recently, so I suggest reading his description.

Subject: older computers and external hard drives

Help! We have a 6-year old Sony Vaio PC, 60 GB, Pentium 4 processor. We use it for basic applications like word processing, Internet surfing and email. Since we began storing picture and music files the computer has slowed dramatically and now constantly tells us it has no room left on the C drive. I say we need to just buy a new computer so that we can store and manipulate all our digital images and music. Thrifty Hubby says we just need to buy an external hard drive and move our picture and music files there. Please help advise! Our happy marriage may depend on it!

You are both right (how's that for marriage counseling). Buying a new hard drive probably will delay the inevitable, and improve the situation. But using a 6 year old computer for today's pictures and music probably just isn't up to the task. I sure hope you are backing up those valuable pictures and music. Every day. Automatically.

Subject: Firefox

I switched to Firefox because of a corrupted IE6, that wouldn't even start. Tried any number of fixes, including the oxymoronic "Microsoft Help". Downloaded IE7 but the problem lives on. I love Firefox, however now I can't get Windows updates, because surprise, surprise, Updates
will only download thru Internet Explorer. Am I missing a tool feature or preference in Firefox, that will allow a it to talk to Microsoft?

This sounds bad. Your only solution may be to reinstall Windows (and then reinstall your applications). You can do so without affecting your personal data. But definitely back up first to be safe.

Wii @ Home

2006-12-05T00:37:00.000-05:00

After all the hype and violence surrounding XBox 360 and PS3 with graphics to die for and matching games, I was thrilled to finally get my hands on the family friendly Wii.

And impressively, it is essentially all it is cracked up to be. The easy-to-learn controller really is easy to learn. Some games, like tennis don't use any buttons at all. The full body motion really does get kids moving and interacting like never before with a video game. But most importantly, it engages the whole family. I can promise you I have never before heard the words "maybe we should get one" from wife before anywhere near the words "video game".

But it isn't all roses. The games seem to use very limited information about body movement. So, in tennis, you can't move the player from side to side - and there seems to be only a single bit of speed. I'm afraid this just won't stay fun for that long. But that's ok as the free intro game - as long as others go deeper.

And the family friendliness is sometimes pretty superficial. "Rayman Raving Rabbids", for instance, is a first-person shooter that trains kids for the worst in videogames - dressed up as cute rabbits with shooting plungers.

And the risk of whacking your sister in the head with a wiimote is real. I caught it happen on video in the first 10 minutes of use. (Fortunately, no one was hurt.)

(Thanks to colleague Bill Pugh and family for hosting the wiiParty.)

Adobe and Apple give me no respect

2006-11-10T08:46:00.000-05:00

Somehow I would have thought it would be obvious by now, but major software vendors still abuse their privileges when installing their software on my machine. This comes in various forms, but often includes adding buttons in the top part of my Start menu, in my quick launch area, system tray, on my desktop, and even embedding themselves in other applications - all without warning, and sometimes without the ability to undo their actions. Two recent offenders are Adobe and Apple.

Adobe Acrobat Professional 7 on Windows XP is the worst offender. Given the nature of the product, it is reasonable to integrate with some other programs, and I am happy to be able to generate PDFs directly from Word. And the fact that they chose to offer that capability by adding a button to my Outlook toolbar is reasonable. However what is not reasonable is that there is no way to disable that feature. They configured their button to be always on, no matter what. When you try to configure the toolbar to remove the button, it is the only one greyed out - meaning that they think converting to PDF is more important than actually sending an email!

The reason I care so much is that because it is an always-on button, if you make the toolbar small (like I do to avoid having toolbars take over my screen), then it is the one that stays visible, and the buttons I actually want (Send and Accounts) disappear. The only solution I found is to edit the registry to disable the PDF plugin to Outlook. So Adobe has forced me to disable their product so it doesn't drive me crazy. Nice job Adobe - now I can be mad at you every single time I send an email.

The second offender is Apple. They nicely make it easy to offer an update to QuickTime and iTunes, but every time they update, they re-add buttons to my desktop and to my QuickLaunch bar. Do they really think that since I removed them the first time, I'll want them the second time? And do they really think that a minor security update should give them the opportunity to get in my face? Nice job Apple - now I can be mad at you too every time you offer me an update.

Google Picasa screensaver a little bit evil

2006-10-21T22:02:00.000-05:00

I love Picasa, and was delighted to try out the new version 2.5 that just came out. They did an incredible job in addressing just about every one of my concerns (such as not being able to see photos based on where they are on disk, and not being able to save changes to photos back to the photo that was edited). And they even added a very nice pan & zoom screen saver that integrates into Windows, much like OS X's nice one.

However, they must have been feeling a little too proud of themselves. Because they have gone wild in forcing the Google logo on you. The screensaver starts with a *4* second full-screen Google-only logo display. I thought that was a bit much, but hey, I figured - it is a free product and it is reasonable that they take some advertising attention from their users. But the issue is how much. I thought that 4 seconds was a lot (half a second would have been plenty for me to remember that it was a Google screensaver without being annoying).

And then it starts to get a little bit evil. Every so often, during a photo transition, a fairly large bright colorful Google logo is displayed on top of the photo. I couldn't bear to watch it too long, but it appeared after the 3rd photo, and then after 8 more.

Does Google really think I don't know where Picasa came from? Do they really think that by presenting their corporate logo on top of my personal pictures while I sit and look at them with my family that I am going to think - oh what a nice little company to give me this free software. No, I'm going to think - what a greedy multi-billion dollar corporation that would never have done this a couple of years ago. Google, you apparently haven't the learned the lessons of Real, AOL and other companies that making your customers mad at you by being pushy is never a good idea.

Simplicity and trust goes infinitely further. And I fear that this is the beginning of a corporate shift away from their users and trust - which could spell big trouble for Google if they're not careful. Proove me wrong. Remove this ridiculous feature in version 2.5.1 and I'll look at this as a short misguided fit of hysteria.

-------------

Also, despite Google's great success with this software and its continued improvements, I was puzzled that the screensaver was missing one simple but crucial feature - which is to have an easy way of including all your photos in the screensaver. There is just no way to do this. You can include all "starred" photos, but I want all of them. The only way to do that is to look at one folder of photos at a time, and for each one, select all the photos and then add those photos to the screensaver "album". But then every time you add a new photo, you'd have to remember to add it to the screensaver album, or it wouldn't appear.

There's also a way to include photos from disk via the Windows Screensaver Settings. However, I was flabbergasted when I manually added the photos in question, and Picasa explicitly excluded all the photos that Picasa manages. So, not only do they not make it easy to do this - but they purposely stop you from doing this. Do they actually think that no one ever wants to just see all their photos? This is our family's favorite thing to do - precisely because you never know what you're going to get, and that gives something to talk about. Looking at only your few favorites gets boring pretty quick.

Switchback: Horrors of a Windows Power-user Trying to Switch to Apple OS X

2006-09-25T21:44:00.000-05:00

I have been a dedicated Windows developer and user for over 10 years. I am a nut about efficiency and ease of use (and also a professional in this area). While Windows has worked well for me, it is regularly frustrating in it's lack of "pleasingness". I wanted to experience Apple's OS X and take advantage of Apple's attention to fit and finish that has appeared more and more compelling - from their advertising and my casual observation of Mac users, not to mention users' general gushing adoration of their Apples. Plus, their new line of hardware is compelling - and now provides a safety net of being able to fall back to Windows if OS X didn't satisfy me or there were things I needed Windows for.

So, on September 6th, I went to my local Apple store and bought a Mac Pro, once of those nice gleaming high-end desktops w/ two dual-core Intel chips, and a 30" cinema display. My frustration started with my experience at the store and has not yet ended. The problems run the gamut from availability and stability to features and design. Many of the problems are with Apple's software, but they extend to 3rd party software.

Availability

The Apple store did have three Mac Pro's in stock - but with no ability to change disk size or memory. Since I could buy those less expensively from third parties anway and I didn't want to wait for shipping, I took home the base configuration (two 2.66 GHz processors, 1 GB RAM, 250 GB disk) and a 30" display. However, I also wanted bluetooth and wifi, and it turns out they weren't available at all. Seems that they haven't shipped yet by Apple for the Mac Pro's. And the nice iSight camera I wanted for video conferencing is backordered until the end of October. So much for Apple's promise of "available today".

Plus, the 3rd party children's typing software I bought from the store didn't completely load - some of it seemed to be only for Windows. When I tried to return it to the store, they said they don't accept software returns but would give me a store credit since there was a problem with the software. After *much* complaining to the manager and a wasted hour of my time, I convinced them to give me a refund since it wasn't a matter of my changing my mind - it was a matter of them selling me a defective product. The manager never asked for any details about the product, didn't investigate it, or ever apologize for selling a product which didn't work on their machines. Nor would he commit to removing the product from the store's shelves. So much for Apple's promise of "it just works", or their store's "genius bar" helping users with their problems.

A major reason for my trying Apple now the ability to run Windows at near-native speed within the OS X environment using Parallels. I knew that Parallels had not yet released a version that worked on the Mac Pro, but that it was expected "any day", and in fact it became available at just about the time I bought the MacPro. However, it turns out that it doesn't run at all and in fact causes an immediate Kernel Panic upon installation. So that option doesn't really exist (more later). And Boot Camp, Apple's solution to running Windows separately on reboot is also available only in Beta and has its own problems.

So, when Apple says Mac Pro is shipping today, what that apparently means is that part of the system is shipping today and you can use it if you stick to certain basic features.

Features & Stability

My intention was live in OS X at home, and Windows XP at work and on my laptop. Through the magic of file synchronization with FolderShare which does run reliably on Windows and Mac, I could keep my files in sync across machines and keep all my personal information (email, calendar, contacts, tasks and notes) on my university's exchange server. As long as common file formats were readily usable on OS X and I had good exchange server access, I figured I'd be home free.

Well, common file formats are generally usable on OS X. Acrobat reading works well and fast. Apple Pages reads Word documents, Apple KeyNote reads PowerPoint documents - and well, there's always Microsoft Excel for Apple to read Excel documents.

But it wasn't that easy. My first set of problems came from an inability to really work with an Exchange server. There were several potential solutions, but it turns out that none of them actually works well. First I tried using Apple's products. Apple mail was the one success story syncing my email. However, that was not very useful without my contacts, and calendar, notes and tasks are also important. Apple's iCal and Address Book do not have built-in exchange synchronization. Fortunately, iSync is supposed to sync contacts and calendar. However, despite many attempts, I was never able to actually get it to work.

I then turned to a third-party solution, snerdware - which did sucessfully sync iCal and my exchange server. However, their product for contacts only syncs the exchange Global address book, and not personal contacts. Finally, I gave up on a native Apple solution and tried Microsoft Entourage - Microsoft's equivalent of Outlook. This connected right up to my exchange server and nicely synced email, contacts and calendar. However, it turns out that Entourage doesn't sync notes or tasks - which I found only upon significant web search. So, with no complete exchange solution available, I turned to running Windows virtually.

I started with Parallels which had just released an update for Mac Pro. I installed it and to my delight, it initially worked just fine. I had started to set up my virtual Windows machine when iTunes 7 became available from Apple. So I installed it using Apple's Software Update – which immediately resulted in a Kernel Panic and a pretty gray shade that came over my display (Apple's equivalent to Microsoft's Blue Screen of Death - BSOD). It turns out that I now got BSOD on boot and was totally hosed. A 30 minute call to Apple taught me how to boot in Safe Mode, clean out my "startupitems" folder - which removed Parallels, and I could now get OS X running again. However, whenever I tried installing Parallels, I got a BSOD on installation!

Searching Parallel's website, I found no indication whatsoever of any problems, so I submitted a tech support request by email. They offer no phone support, and when I tried calling their offices they refused tech support by email. Their website promised 3 day response (however, after a week, I still have not gotten a response). Searching Google for problems, I discovered that Parallels runs an open discussion forum - which it neglects to link to from its website. Here I discovered literally thousands of posts of miserable users that get BSOD’s on a variety of hardware in a variety of situations. There is one unlucky Parallels employee that responds every few days always promising that their engineers are working 24 hours a day, and that a solution is imminent. In fact, his latest post says that the current version is stable on all platforms except Mac Pro's with more than 2GB of RAM (at the time I had these problems, I had only 1 GB).

So, giving up on Parallels, I tried Apple's Bootcamp to boot Windows and skip OS X. This had the most promise as I had not heard of significant problems, the software has been around for a while, and Apple was up to version 1.1.1 (beta). Bootcamp consists of 2 components: 1) some software that runs on OS X that lets you configure your disks and repartition them for Windows and set the default boot disk; and 2) Windows drivers that get installed within Windows XP to emulate the BIOS and to work with Apple hardware. I had a few BSOD's at various points of initial setup which scared the bejeebers out of me, but happily, they seem to have gone away and Windows is running with reasonable stability. This seems like a tenable solution, however, I still have several significant problems:

Disk access seems incredibly slow, but in a weird way. If I am only doing one thing, everything is fine. However, when I attempt to do two disk-intensive tasks, the system thrashes and grinds to a halt. Task Manager shows all 4 CPUs active at about the same rate, so I am highly suspicious that the OS is not multi-tasking properly.
Device Manager still shows a few unrecognized hardware devices. I don't even know what the devices are and thus can't even attempt to get the drivers for them.
OS X can see and read the Windows disks just fine, so that gives me nice OS X access to all my Windows files - but I can not modify those disks. The entire Windows disks are read-only, so I don't really have the option of using OS X for my regular work based on my Windows files.
Despite bootcamp's promise, my borrowed iSight camera is not recognized by Windows.
Despite Apple's Mighty Mouse theoretical two-button design (it looks like one button, but the right half can be configured as a second button), the hardware is flaky. Most of the time, the right side of the mouse generates a left button, but sometimes it generates a right button. I guess I'll have to go buy an actual two-button mouse.

Oh yes, the rest of Apple's software isn't that stable either. On my first use of iPhoto in OS X, it hung the entire computer when importing my photos from disk. What happened to OS X's Unix promise of keeping naughty applications from crashing the computer? Apple is supposed to "just work", but the reality is that Windows is much more stable. Dead applications do not kill the operating system, Microsoft applications almost never die in the first place these days, and except for this week on Apple hardware, I haven't seen a Windows BSOD in quite some time.

Similarly, even printing doesn't work. I have an HP OfficeJet d145, a standard multi-function inkjet printer. Setup with OS X was fine, but unfortunately, printing is not reliable. For some documents, it works great, and for some documents, the print queue just stops and I have to restart it. It then stops again, and I can not get it to successfully print that job. There is no error message or explanation of why it stops. It just doesn't work. The only solution at this point is to uninstall and reinstall the printer drivers. It just doesn't work.

Design

Ok, you might think my problems are all because I'm trying to live a Windows life in an Apple world, and that is neither the point of Apple's life nor it's responsibility. First off, I disagree with those objections. Apple regularly advertises how compatible it is with the Windows world, and heavily recruits the concept of switching by saying how easy it is to work with your stuff. And I'm using Apple hardware and software to run Windows with bootcamp. All of this stuff *is* Apple's responsibility, and it doesn't work.

But it turns out that even when I try to live an Apple life, that is a pretty lousy experience too. How could that be, you say? The apparent point of Apple's existence is to create a beautiful and polished user experience. Well, it turns out that what Apple does is beautiful and polished *graphic design*. Actually interacting with the system is something else.

The essential problem is that using OS X is slow, slow, slow. It seems as if Apple has never heard of Fitts' Law - the essential human performance concept that it takes longer to move the mouse farther, or to click on small things. There is a related human perfomance issue which is that it takes a huge amount of time to switch between mouse and keyboard (roughly 2 seconds). This may not seem like much, but it is crucial - not only in terms of time, but also in terms of human concentration. (Important digression: to understand why these kinds of small interruptions are important, read my essays about "Flow" and the importance of supporting human concentation).

So, why is OS X slow? Because it is fundamentally designed for mouse access to all functions. Yes, there is keyboard access for much of the interface, but appears as somewhat of an afterthought. Not everything is keyboard accessible, and the keyboard shortcuts that do exist are often inefficient and inconsistent. It wouldn’t be obvious that there was a problem if I wasn’t familiar with how consistently and efficiently Windows supports keyboard access to just about every function in the operating system. For example, in the Finder file browser, there is a special keyboard shortcut to switch between views. In windows, you would either use the menu shortcuts which are mnemonic and easy to remember (i.e., Alt-V D for View->Details), or use the standard UI keyboard navigation using tab, control, and page up/dn to access any part of the interface.

The single biggest issue is how hard it is to explore menus through the keyboard. While there are keyboard shortcuts for common function, it takes a long time to learn those shortcuts, and many people never do. Instead, on Windows, people commonly use the keyboard to navigate the pull-down menu by pressing the Alt key, and then selecting the first letter of the menu item (or faster yet, pressing the Alt key and the first letter of the menu item at the same time). Because it is efficient, and easy to explore, people often start doing things like pressing Alt-F, A for File->Save As without even realizing they are doing it.

With Apple on the other hand, a few seemingly subtle design differences make keyboard menu access so slow as to hardly provide any advantage over a mouse. To access the menu, you press Control-F2. Now, unless you are an orangutan, there is no way that a touch typist can press this key combination with their hands in their natural position. Instead, it requires a significant posture change which is nearly as time-consuming and disruptive as moving your hands to a mouse. (Yes, I have swapped Caps Lock for Control which makes it easier, but still not really touch-typable.)

The other major slow-down issue is that there is a single menu on the top of the screen at all times. I know this approach has been debated for years (decades, really), and there is some good justification for it. I always viewed it as a trade-off between the Windows approach of having a menu at the top of each window rather than a clear negative. However, actually having used it for a couple of weeks, and doing so on a 30" display, I am entirely convinced that it is much slower than the Windows approach. Because of Apple's mouse-based design, you are obligated to use the mouse to access the menu more than you ever do on Windows. And when you do on a big screen, the fact that the menu is so far from many of the windows means that you have to move the mouse several times to even get to the menu (and yes, I have configured the mouse to move as fast as Apple will let it). And what if I had a two-monitor setup - yikes! Apple defenders say that the single-menu design is fast because since it is against the edge of the screen, you don't have to move the mouse carefully to target those small little text labels. This argument may have made some sense back in the days of small screens. But now moving the mouse pointer two and half feet relegates that argument to the dustbin of history.

And of course there are numerous other design details that slow users down as well. For example, while there is keyboard support for navigating the folder hierarchy in Finder, if you are in the middle of a long list of children and you want to move up to the parent folder, you are obligated to press the up arrow key many times until you reach the parent. On Windows, you just press the left key. Why Apple didn't do this is anybody's guess. Yes, the multi-column view supports the left arrow, but why not the other views?

I think the real problem is Apple's narrow view of their users as novice home users that don't care about compatibility with the big player. They can ignore the reality of the world, but that won't serve their user's day-to-day needs. Worse, they seem to disregard their user's time - offering a design that continually gets in between a user's thoughts and the ability to execute them on their computer. Apple has thrived in their role as the underdog. But I'm afraid with the attitude they have taken in the development of their products, they are destined to never get past it.

Postscript - September 25, 2006

Potential Mac Pro buyers will be happy to know that a combination of Apple's firmware update and a new version of Parallels made Parallels work. However, the only way I could get past the BSOD problems was to format the Apple disk and start over. A complete install of the OS did not fix the problems. And because of the three week delay, I'm now committed to a Bootcamp installation which means I don't see OS X unless I reboot. Maybe I'll try again when Leopard comes out...

So what have I learned from this experience? Is Apple really much worse than Windows? Absolutely not. I am aware of many of the benefits of the Apple approach which is why I wanted to try it. And I agree that many of my problems come from: 1) trying to keep a windows life on a mac; and 2) using hardware that is new. Apple does do many things extremely well, but they communicate that pretty clearly. My aim here is to point out that Apple life isn't all roses. Technology remains hard and that there is almost always a set of trade-offs associated with the choice of any platform. I would recommend an Apple for many users, and in fact I plan on buying one for my 7 year old daughter for her birthday (sshhhhh - don't tell). But I would not recommend one for someone that also has to continue working in a Windows-oriented environment, or for someone that is a real Windows expert and an efficiency nut, like me.

Call for "User Advocate" Position

2006-09-21T09:28:00.000-05:00

Microsoft's Windows Media Center 2005 woke me up at night by making two sounds and turning on the screen. Presumably this was a result of an auto update and reboot. But whatever the cause, having a product targeted for home and bedroom use that can ever wake the user up by its "normal" behavior is totally unacceptable.

I set the alarm on my Palm Treo 650 to wake me up for a morning appointment and was frustrated that I overslept because the alarm never went off. Despite the beautifully clear interface for setting the alarm, and the clear hardware switch that silences all sounds, I didn't see that the hardware switch had silenced the alarm. The interface that lets you set the alarm doesn't tell you that all sounds are turned off.

Adobe Reader 7.0 displays an annoying advertisement in the upper right corner of the window that changes every once in a while and thus continually distracts me, interrupting me from my reading. It turns out that you can turn this purposeful annoyance off through the “Edit->Preferences->Startup->Show Messages and automatically update” menu. This was clearly done to make it very difficult to find while giving Adobe plausable deniability if customers complained. I want to let them know that I am aware of their anti-consumer tricks.

Google's Picasa photo-management software politely saves edits to photos separately from the original photo so the original photo is not damaged. But many times I want to modify the original photo and there is no way to do this. Even if you export the edited photo back into the original directory, it gives the photo a new name rather than overwriting the original. And if you manually delete the original and replace it with the exported one, then the edits are mistakenly applied a second time to the edited photo. Surely I am not the only person that wants to crop their photos and see those crops reflected in other photo browsers? Yet there is no way to do this.

The User Advocate

All too often, users of software find themselves frustrated by the user interface of a company's product because of decisions the designers made that may not have taken into account the customer's particular use scenario. Perhaps because of how the customer integrates the product into their work flow involving other tools or perhaps because the user is not part of the product's targetted demographic, things just don't work right. And sometimes these problems occur day after day, and there is a clear solution waiting to be implemented – if only the company would realize it. The challenge is that even for loyal customers that want to help the company, there is often no way for them to give this feedback. And there is no way for users to know that there are masses of other users out there that feel the same way.

I thus call for a new "User Advocate" position within all end-user software companies, similar to "Ombudsman" or "Public Editor" in other contexts. The User Advocate's role would be to cross product lines and business units and communicate directly with the public to understand their concerns, and to communicate them within corporation.

The User Advocate position should have the following characteristics:

Reports directly to upper-level executive, and must not be affiliated with any business unit, product team, or organizational structure.
Has vocal executive support, with encouragement to all in company to be responsive to his/her requests for information.
Has ability to receive input directly from the public - probably through a website that could process, cluster, and tag comments. This would require technical development and some special mechanisms to limit volume. I.e., could require a human entry using a CAPTCHA (human detector), and a valid email address or mobile telephone # that limits suggestions to, say, one per month. Or make these valuable in a way that encourages a market for them, and limit to just a few per year.
Has a dedicated team to support above-mentioned technology and communication.
Has public venue to communicate to the public on corporate property (i.e., company webpage or blog).

Of course most companies already have a significant focus on usability and have dedicated tremendous resources to understanding user requests and usability problems through each group's product management team, but based on what I hear about user's feelings about just about every company's products, it is not enough. I believe that this failure is partly due to a focus on usability within the business units that create the products, and thus are somewhat blinded to real user experiences. This can come from many things, including different products interacting with each other, from real-world use environments that differ from those that are tested, and from differing expectations among product teams and users. It is for all these reasons that I advocate a new executive role focused specifically on the user. As a cross-divisional role, such a person could oversee and manage a company-wide user-focused strategy.

The primary goals of this call are to: 1) improve the products by having a direct mechanism to learn from the public and influence products outside of the normal command chain; and 2) improve public perception of the company by providing an outlet for user concerns, and proof that those concerns are being listened to.

There is a lot of frustration out there in the world of computing. My favorite current analyses of the situation comes from two current studies. The first study is of people's feelings of rage towards computers, separated by Windows and Apple. The second study, led by my colleague Ben Shneiderman, looks at user frustration, and finds that of 111 students and 50 professionals; more than 40% of the time using the computer is wasted in one way or another.

Other models
There are other models for positions similar to a user advocate in other industries. The most notable of which is the Public Editor introduced at the New York Times a few years ago who has had significant success in effecting culture change to improve the newspaper in difficult, but important ways. The public editor is employed by the NY Times, and is given a prominent place to publish his independent views in the Week in Review section about two Sundays a month. He is independent of all departments and presumably reports to executives directly. He communicates with and represents the public's interests. He has direct access to all employees. Most impressively, he writes openly about trends, policies and individual articles in the Times. His existence makes it abundantly clear to every reader that while not every action of the Times may be perfect, they are making an honest attempt to do a good a job as possible, and they are open to public comment and to change.

Many other institutions have an ombuds office (ombudsman) whose role is to provide an impartial, independent and confidential resource for employees, students, etc. This role has been in use since the 19th century when it was initially used to investigate citizens' complaints against governmental agencies.

Challenges

As with any ambitious project, there will be challenges. Some issues I foresee are:

There is a potential for friction between the user advocate and the individual product management teams. This position only has the potential of working if it comes with real power for the advocate and strong backing from the highest levels of the company. The goal of the user advocate is to convince the product managers of problems so they want to change their products to reduce user frustration.
There is likely to be a fear of publicly admitting fault. This is wrongheaded. Politicians and the public have shown over and over that people much prefer the admission of honest mistakes over hiding the obvious. Furthermore, by exposing problems that everyone knows to be true, it will put internal pressure to fix them, and this pressure is apparently needed since the problems are not getting fixed well enough without it.
This could be perceived as an attempt to replicate or renounce the excellent internal design and usability work done within product groups. The user advocate would not be concerned with day to day design characteristics and feature sets that were decided on by sound business analyses. Rather, the user advocate would focus on show stopping user experiences that product groups may be unaware of, or are outside the control of the product group because the experience is a result of feature interaction between multiple products or happen in real life outside the scope of internal testing.
There is the potential for increased legal exposure when faults are admitted. The larger point is that this is a strategy to improve products and improve public perception of the company which in the long run will reduce legal attacks. In the short term, there is no reason that the user advocate can not work with legal counsel to minimize legal exposure without abrogating his/her core responsibilities to the public.

Many companies produce incredibly sophisticated software that is wonderful in many ways - and yet fall flat in a few key ways that continuously irritate their customers. As software becomes more and more competitive, especially in the home markets, companies must focus on "delighting the user" in order to be successful in a landscape of growing competition.