caleb walker

users

In A Small Matter of Programming, Bonnie Nardi talks about how technologists - programmers, interface developers, researchers - tend to visualize users of software like this: They're not smart enough to figure out how to use software products, they're incapable of understanding their underlying structures and models, and they're unwilling to figure things out on their own. That is, users are lazy idiots.

I've seen users referred to like this, both implicitly and explicitly. I've even fallen into that way of thinking myself a bunch of times. In her book, Nardi goes on to refute this view; users are accountants, doctors, teachers, and other hard-working, intelligent people who do not need to be talked down to and insulted by their software. She then describes how interactive systems should be built for real users, and that's really what her book is about.

Last week I was in a day-long meeting to our funding organization. The speakers stood at a podium, some turning away from or walking away from the microphone, all talking over poorly designed Powerpoint presentations projected on the large screen at the front of the room. One speaker, a highly respected researcher in machine learning, showed a set of slides that was as ugly as the others, but not notably uglier. One slide showed a process diagram, pictures and arrows, in which a problem arises, a learning mechanism intervenes and either solves the problem or hands it to an expert, then the process flows on to the user.

On this slide each thing was signified by a chunk of clip art. The learning mechanism was a giant open book smiling down over a bunch of adoring people. The expert was illustrated as a white man in a shirt and tie. The user was shown as a cartoon portrait of a guy with a toothy smile so wide it distorted his face, hair that poked out in most directions, a scruffy beard, and a Hawaiian shirt. He looked like a moron on vacation.

The speaker noted that sometimes in these processes the expert is the end user, but in this case, with this diagram, the user is naive. That's why he used this silly picture, he said. Because, unless the user is an expert, he or she is stupid, functionally unable even to maintain minimal levels of hygiene.

I will reread the relevant sections of Nardi's book and try to commit parts of it to memory for the next time I see this kind of nonsense.

voting experience

I voted first thing this morning. Here are my thoughts on the process from a User Experience point of view.

Our voting place is a public building at the borough pool. There is a sign at the street and a driveway to a parking lot, which is hidden from view from the street. The sign is one of those where you can arrange plastic letters to spell out a message like "VOTE HERE" or "POLLING PLACE." But this one said "HAPPY BIRTHDAY COURTNEY." I'm happy for Courtney and all, but I think they could have made better use of that sign.

There were three or four lawn signs for Rendell and Casey stuck in the grass at the edges of the parking lot, but other than that there was no indication that this was a polling place. We knew where to go from years past: we walked through a little free-standing doorway and around to the side of the cinder-block building to the door. On the door—hidden from view from the parking lot—was a hand-lettered sign saying that this was the place.

Inside three nice women sat at a folding table. I proceeded from one to the next, sidestepping Soup-Nazi style, until another woman led me to an available polling station. This was my first time at an electronic voting machine, so I let her explain things to me. There were three machines, each on a stand, facing away from the middle of the room, but facing the large glass doors at that side of the building.

I stood in front of my station, my back to the doors, and touched the Democrat button on the left side of the screen. Green check marks appeared next to all of the Democratic candidates. But I wanted to give a vote to a Green candidate too, so I unchecked the Democrat in that race and checked the Green. The big all-Democrat button on the left was still checked. The left side of the screen said that all Democrats were picked, but the right side said otherwise.

So I unchecked the Democrat button to start over. The candidate interface went away. I now saw a solid screen that told me something what was going to happen as a result of my actions and I had to touch Continue to make it happen. This alarmed me a bit since I thought I had gotten the terrible Blue Screen of Death for a second.

After making sure I had made my choices correctly I touched Next or Continue or whatever and got to a screen with a list of my selections on it. At this point I had to push the physical button on the frame of the voting machine. It was flashing red at me. This gave me another screen where I had to touch a Confirm button. The end.

If I were designing the thing I would cut down the number of steps and keep the same screen view through the whole process. I would keep all of the interactions on-screen. I would deselect the party-wide button on the left if the voter makes customizations on the right side. I would always keep the candidate picker screen visible, even when asking the voter for confirmation. And, of course, I would create a paper copy of the vote.

I'm trying hard to not feel like my vote was lost in the ether.

more whining: no hand

I am trying to buy a flight to Iowa City for this summer's Iowa Summer Writing Festival. I go to Travelocity.com and plug in my locations and preferred times. I have a Delta frequent flyer account, so I pick one of the few Delta flights that will get me there in time for the Sunday evening welcome dinner. There is only Delta flight out of Iowa City on my departure date, though, and it is in the middle of the afternoon before my final class lets out.

So I start over and pick a United flight that gets me to Iowa City in plenty of time, and a return flight that leaves a couple hours after my last class (arriving in Pittsburgh at 11:20pm; KR won't be happy about that). I click to buy it and I get a notice that United does not offer e-tickets through Travelocity. So I need to have them send me the tickets via FedEx. The cheapest option costs me $20. I close that browser window without going any further.

I visit United.com. I plug in my dates and places and hit submit. I get a page that asks me to pick my destination city from the list below. (Planes don't fly into Iowa City, so my destination is really somewhere else, a place I can never remember the name of.) However, that is all the page says. There is no list to pick from. A poorly programmed web page, I assume.

I try again. I make no changes to my request; I just press Submit again. This time I get a list of flights into Cedar Rapids, the city whose name I can never remember. I see none of the flights I saw at Travelocity, and none of the fares. There is a "more flights" link, and I click it. The next page shows a long list of flights, with the flight I want, the one I picked through Travelocity, at the top. I cheer, and click to select it. The following page says, "We're sorry. We're unable to process your request as submitted. The flight that you've selected has either very recently sold out or is no longer available." This is a flight three months from now.

I run the search again. The flight now costs 160 dollars more. I can't fucking believe this. (Sorry, Dad.) I decide to fucking drive to Iowa City. (Sorry again.)

This is why I hate to fly. It has little to do with falling out of the sky, eating bad food, and breathing bad air. It has to do with consistently inconsistent service. It has to do with paying hundreds of dollars to jump through hoops. It has to do with having no understanding of how they price or schedule their flights. I have no control over the relationship I enter into with this company. I have no hand, as George Costanza once said.

Happy ending: I go back to Travelocity and change my return date to the next day. I get e-tickets on Delta. I notice that the FedEx charge to deliver tickets is now $40.

my special purpose

When I started this job back in August I was unhappy to be seated at a big black plastic computer box with a Dell insignia on it. I had wanted a Mac PowerBook, but my boss had a reason for me to use this thing. My feeling is that for the most part doing something in Windows is always more involved than doing it in Mac OS. Always. And by that I mean ALWAYS.

So I was quite pleased to find that I could simply yank my USB thumbdrive out of the computer when I was done with it. On the Mac I had to drag the icon to the trash (or eject it in some other way, by clicking its little eject icon, or ctl-clicking and selecting Eject, or typing cmd-E). But in Windows, it seemed, there was no way to do any of those things, so I just yanked it. Simple.

If you're a Windows user you know where I'm going with this. One should not, it turns out, just yank one's thumbdrive out of one's USB port. Here is the correct way to eject a drive:

1. Find the appropriate little icon in the little taskbar thing at the bottom of the screen. It looks like a grey blob with a green blob on top of it. Most times this icon is hidden, so click the "<" button to show it.
2. Right-click on that and select "Safely Remove Hardware." That is the only option you are given.
3. In the window that appears, select the appropriate drive (In my case it's the drive called "USB Mass Storage Device") and click "Stop." (Stop what? Why not Eject?)
4. In the next window that appears, select the device (in my case it's the device called "USB Mass Storage Device") and click "OK." (Do not select "Generic volume - (G:)" or "LEXAR DIGITAL FILM USB Device.")
5. In the remaining window click "Close."
6. Pull the drive out of the USB port.
7. Try to remember what you were doing before you started this process.

This is exactly the sort of thing I have devoted my life to killing.

shopping

I'm doing some last-minute Christmas shopping this morning (I like to call it "starting my Christmas shopping"). I ran into this little holiday greeting on a very popular Large Retailer's site (whose name begins with "The" and ends with "Gap"). I browse with the latest version of Safari.

It has been a rough week for me professionally. The project I work on was tested a couple months ago and it was found to work not as well as off-the-shelf products. So this week the whole team met to discuss how to fix it, in order to get our funding renewed.

It was a frustrating meeting for the Interaction Designers in the room. For me, it was a meeting typical of every failed project I have worked on. The system was built before the Interaction Design team was consulted. After that consultation (six months ago) the ID team never saw the project again until after it was tested. So now everyone knows it's broken, and everyone expects the ID team to fix it, but it's not built in a way that allows our suggestions to be implemented. So it's easy to blame the ID team for ithe project's ultimate failure. I've seen this same script a half dozen times.

So this morning I am shunned by The Large Retailer and I flash back to meetings I have been in. "This has to be an eye-catching site," the client will say (he's the one wearing a suit). "Absolutely," the account exec will say. "We can do it," the art director will say. "I've been working on some great stuff using the Beelzebub technology. It will let the user try on the clothes in their own home before buying," the designer will say. "Sounds great," everyone will say. "What are the browser requirements?" the Interaction Designer will ask. Everyone will glare. The ID is such a downer. "Oh, IE version 12," the developer will say. "But what about the users who don't use IE?" the ID will ask. "That's only 1.5% of all users," the designer will say. "Where did you get that number?" the ID will ask. "It's common knowledge," the designer will say. "So are you willing to block some percent of your customers?" the ID will ask the client. "I don't know what you're talking about," the client will say. "Okay then, we're done here," the account exec will say. "We'll have a prototype to you by the end of the week," the art director will say. The ID will think yet again about getting a job in a lighthouse.

go see some art

My colleague and buddy Paul is in an exhibit. By Design, in the Three Rivers Arts Festival Gallery in downtown Pittsburgh.

id again

My Masters degree is in Interaction Design. Nobody knows what that means. I cringe when someone asks what I do because it means I'll spend the next few minutes explaining it and watching the other person's eyes glaze over. Maybe I'll start telling people I sell life insurance. That way I can get the lousy first impression out of the way a lot quicker.

Interaction Design, though, is really cool, humanitarian stuff. The ID is the user's advocate on the software development team. The developers and designers (and everyone else) have other issues to focus on; the ID's role is to worry about the users' experience with the system. The user's experience is usually the first thing to be ignored unless there is someone there every day speaking up for it.

So that's what my degree is in. Most of you know that I have not been an Interaction Designer for a few years. ID jobs are scarce in Pittsburgh, so when the agency I worked for when the World Trade Center came down (I associate that event with that company because they had tvs mounted up and down the hallways—they are an ad agency—and I was the first one in the office to notice that something awful was happening on the news.) dissolved their entire ID team in a fit of short sightedness, I looked for ID work in Pittsburgh for a year. It took a career switch to technical writing to land myself a job.

For the first time I puffed out my chest a little when I told people what I did—"I'm a writer"—and they understood. Or they thought I was something more impressive than I really was. Writing, though, uses the same principles as Interaction Design. Both are concerned with clarity, simplicity, and accessibility. Both begin with the question, "Who is the audience/reader/user?"

So now I am an Interaction Designer again. I started this job a month before a big deadline, so on my first day, yesterday, I felt completely overwhelmed. Half of my to-do list is made up of things I'm not completely sure I know how to do. I have a pretty good knowledge about usability testing, but I have little real-life experience. So I'm learning as I go, depending on the help of others. KR, though, reminded me that I am in this situation in every job I begin. Oddly, that improved my outlook enough that I was able to come to work on day two.

alphabet critique

Here's a great design critique of the alphabet. In case you haven't considered the design qualities of the letters, some are good:

This [Yy] is, quite possibly, the best pair in the alphabet. Each, on its own is good… the uppercase based, obviously, on a tree; the lower case a rooted bush, with that most elegant of all descenders. But look at them together! Are they not made for each other? This is design that thinks and understands relationships: I guess it to be the later work of the designer of the Bb and the Mm.

...and some are bad:

I have nothing good to say about this lazy piece of rocking shit [Uu]. Both of them. Probably designed by whoever did the C.

designing for the sandbox

If you design stuff, read the latest over at peterme.com: Designing for the Sandbox. He talks about why Flickr succeeds and Ofoto doesn't in terms of control. Very zen-y, that peterme. (Or is it yoda-y?)

ipod's affordances

Over at Mind Hacks there is a nice article about, well, a bunch of stuff. It mentions affordances, though, and the way that the designers of the iPod built its affordances right.

So that's what the designers have done: The scrollwheel is a dirty grey. It looks like it has been touched a lot. It looks rubbery (although it's not). It communicates the affordance of doing something when touched and dragged. And so, as a first-time user, that affordance gets encoded in your brain, and you have the bright idea of touching the iPod there, and: ta-da, you've done the right thing.