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By Krishna, January 13, 2010

Phil Haack writes about the lack of confirmation dialogs when deleting an item in the Netflix queue.

I have noticed something similar on the Amazon wish lists. It avoids an unnecessary click, but at the same time, allows you to quickly undo the action if you had accidentally clicked the first time.

This reminds me of one of my pet peeves: people who complain about the Delete confirmation dialog box for files. Generally, the person who makes this complaint “cannot imagine” how stupid the operating system architects and developers are there. The user wants to delete something. You have a Recycle Bin. Why doesn’t the operating system just get out of the way? And who reads the dialog box anyway? One complainer suggested that this was just a way for the developer to shift responsibility onto the user. Since the user clicked Yes, the programmer is no longer responsible if the user accidentally made a mistake. And the implication is that the programmer is lazier and needs to own the responsibility. Or something of the sort.

Obviously, I have no idea what the intention of the programmers were. But let’s assume that there was no confirmation dialog box and the second you clicked Delete, the file is deleted. That is great if you meant to hit the Delete key. But what if you had meant to hit the “End” key (to navigate to the end of a list of files) and your stubby finger pressed down both the Delete and End key. What would probably happen is that the currently selected file gets deleted, you navigate to the end of the file list and you don’t realize that your file has just been zapped.

But what about the Trash can, you say? The problem is that if you don’t know the file has been deleted, you may not bother to check its contents before emptying it, especially if you had been deleting other files. You may not even realize the mistake until days or weeks have passed and then even a disk recovery service may not be able to help you.

I elaborate on this seemingly minor issue because although user interface issues are more complex than they seem at first glance, because they don’t seem so complex, everyone has an opinion. Even those who have no clue about user interaction or the design choices that made a choice necessary, even if it was not the most optimal. This was best illustrated by a recent comic “How a Web Design Goes Straight to Hell” by Oatmeal Comics. As the author notes,

I actually had a client include their mother in the design process so that she could provide feedback and criticism. [...] You are no longer a web designer. You are now a mouse cursor inside a graphics program which the client can control by speaking, emailing and instant messaging.

It is a tough world out there for user interface and user interaction designers.

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By Krishna, October 4, 2009

There are some books (“Peopleware“, “The Innovator’s Dilemma“, “The Halo Effect“)  that you want to hug and never let go. And then there are others that you want to tear apart and dance on its fragments. Alan Cooper’s “The Inmates are Running the Asylum” belongs strongly to the second category.

But first some meta: I am actually a huge fan of Cooper’s “About Face 3“, a great book about user interface and interaction design. Alan Cooper was behind the initial release of Visual Basic and then turned his attention towards interaction design. His company, Cooper Interaction Design, has done work for many of the top technology companies in the United States. Naturally, I expected this book to be a good resource.

Unfortunately, “The Inmates” has more in common with a political screed than a software book. It has some of the most hateful language about programmers that I have ever read. Even the good portions of the book are marked by scorn and viciousness towards software developers who the author blames for all the usability problems created by software.

Cooper devotes 7 (yes, SEVEN!) chapters to explaining why programmers are the scum of the earth. You would think the material gets thinner as he goes, but actually he manages to thicken the abuse culminating in the most mind-blowing and asinine analysis of programmer psychology ever:

[Programmers Act Like Jocks]

The jocks, who were so powerful in high school, find themselves utterly at the mercy of their former victims [ed: nerds]. The humbling process of becoming an adult makes most jocks become decent humans [...] the 5-foot 7-inch former Astronomy Club treasurer finds his mental prowess allows him to weave and jab and punch with unmatched agility. [...]

[T]hey see nothing wrong with humiliating users with dauntingly complex products. They sneer, joke and laugh about the “lusers” who simply are not smart enough to use computers.

All of this vitriol and what for? Apparently, Cooper wants to make the point that programmers practically hold the strings of the software development process in companies, even though executives and product managers are supposedly in charge. Programmers oppose software design. So executives have to put their foot down, grant great power to interaction designers and absolve programmers of any responsibility for the success or failure of the project.

There is a distinct conflict of interest here given that Cooper runs an interaction design firm. A more sincere approach would be to explain how someone could learn interaction design (“About Face” did a better job of this). But Cooper mostly promotes the theory that programmers are genetically incapable of doing that, going so far to call them “Homo logicus” as opposed to “Homo sapiens”. And he doesn’t mean that as a compliment.

There are times in the book where Cooper discusses why many software products have poor usability, but instead of taking his analysis to proper conclusions, he reverts back to his main thesis that programmers are to blame. He fails to look at processes, individual capabilities, knowledge, awareness, experience, incentives and other aspects of software development that contribute to poor products.

Finally, keeping in the spirit of the book, he takes a Goebbelsian preemptive strike at critics by calling them “apologists”. Incredible and despicable!

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By Krishna, June 3, 2009

While eating, I sometimes use Google Reader. While a book would do as well, each blog entry is only a few paragraphs long and you don’t have to quit in between. Google Reader handles the eating situation well because you can handle most of the actions using a single finger. “j” is Next, “m” is Toggle Read, “g” & “a” means Read All Items, “s” is Star (to read later) and so on.

Reader also has a feature to email a story you like to someone else. You press “e” and you get a few fields to type in the name of your friend and a note explaining what it is all about. Once you get those email fields, the keys I was talking about (‘j’, ‘m’, ‘g’, etc.) stop performing actions, so that you can use them to type email addresses and words. Once you send the email, those keys revert back to action keys.

I was reminded of the old Unix text editing program “vi” which has a similar way of operation. It has two modes called “Normal” and “Insert” modes. When you launch “vi”, unlike a text editor like Notepad, it does not allow you to start typing text. It launches in the “Normal” mode where all the keys have a special meaning. To start typing, you have to get yourself into “Insert” mode by pressing “i” (insert), “a” (append) or “r” (replace).

Once you are in Insert mode, you can keep typing until you are done. To get back to the Normal mode, you press ESC. Then in Normal mode, you can quit the program by pressing “ZZ” or some combination involving !q to save or cancel. Now, you might wonder why in the world would you want a Normal mode, when you are doing all your editing in the Insert mode?

Well, the thing is that the Normal mode has a host of very convenient editing functions. You can easily search and replace text. You can delete words and lines. If your job is copyediting, you will find yourself working most of the time in Normal mode. The downside is that you have to remember several different key combinations to be proficient in using “vi”. With the advent of modern text editors where you can perform many edit actions using mouse operations, the dual-mode behavior is less user-friendly, even though many Unix lovers still swear by it.

But in Google Reader, which is not a text editor, that behavior is very useful. You want to use the normal keys (instead of combining them with Alt, Ctrl or Shift) so that you can use a single finger for various actions. And when necessary, you can go into an editing mode for rare text-heavy operations. Nice!

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By Krishna, March 10, 2009

The rise of social networks like Facebook and Orkut allow you to easily follow the happenings of your friends. Twitter allows you to keep track of what they are doing on a real-time basis. But how many people can you truly follow? The Economist has an article which spreads some light on this:

Robin Dunbar, an anthropologist who now works at Oxford University, concluded that the cognitive power of the brain limits the size of the social network that an individual of any given species can develop. Extrapolating from the brain sizes and social networks of apes, Dr Dunbar suggested that the size of the human brain allows stable networks of about 148. Rounded to 150, this has become famous as “the Dunbar number”. […]

Many institutions, from Neolithic villages to the maniples of the Roman army, seem to be organised around the Dunbar number. Because everybody knows everybody else, such groups can run with a minimum of bureaucracy. […]

[A]n average man—one with 120 friends—generally responds to the postings of only seven of those friends by leaving comments on the posting individual’s photos, status messages or “wall”. An average woman is slightly more sociable, responding to ten. When it comes to two-way communication such as e-mails or chats, the average man interacts with only four people and the average woman with six. Among those Facebook users with 500 friends, these numbers are somewhat higher, but not hugely so. Men leave comments for 17 friends, women for 26. Men communicate with ten, women with 16.

If this is how human beings behave in an informal setting such as a social network, imagine how difficult it is on the mental functions when dealing with several different people at work. Even a big extrovert (shall we dare say “people person”?) only communicates regularly with 10-16 people. I read somewhere that the maximum people one person can manage is seven people at a time. Perhaps that number has something to do with these brain limits.

[Photo licensed from GustavoG]

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By Krishna, February 21, 2009

Most of software development favors left brained thinking. Programming, in particular, is all about logic and being objective. For the most part, it is a learnable skill, even if the time requirements for being an expert can vary from the industry for which you are programming. Testing, too, is largely an analytical process of identifying the main and alternate workflows of the system. Crash testing, while allowing for more creativity, can also be turned into a boring process through codification of steps to find common errors.

These ways of managing software development fail when it comes to graphics design for web projects. I am not necessarily talking about every aspect of user interfaces, because many elements of user interfaces can be distilled into general principles. In the case of desktop products, adhering to the UI standards of the particular operating system can avoid most usability problems.

But when it comes to web applications, the user interface has many different aspects to it. Color combinations, fonts, font sizes, heading sizes, text alignment, dynamic styles, animation, 3-D effects, images/photos, ad placement, and a million other things. On top of this, the designer has to consider the changes in people’s tastes over time. So a design that was cutting edge 2 years ago is probably bland or, worse, outdated today.

When it comes to building web user interfaces, programmers are at a loss. Having a good eye for graphics design requires a different type of mental approach, i.e., using more of the right brain. Here is an interesting test to check if you are left-brained or right-brained. As the article explains, here are some of the differences between the 2 brain functions:

LEFT BRAIN FUNCTIONS uses logic detail oriented facts rule words and language can comprehend order/pattern perception reality based

RIGHT BRAIN FUNCTIONS uses feeling “big picture” oriented imagination rules symbols and images can “get it” (i.e. meaning) spatial perception fantasy based

This fundamental difference in thinking makes it very difficult for programmers to come up with good graphics layouts. They may even find it hard to distinguish between a good and bad design, often using comparisons with other popular designs to justify their reasoning instead of having an absolute taste for good design. In addition, programmers have little experience with the tools used by graphics designers, such as Photoshop or Flash, nor are they aware of the latest trends through reading graphics-related material and news.

What can a programmer do if they cannot or do not want to pay for a graphics designer? One strategy is to use a minimalist design. No graphics at all, a principle which is in harmony with low-bandwidth requirements of websites. Many popular websites, like Wikipedia, Google, Facebook, etc. are graphics-light. Yahoo, for a long time, was very sparse in using images during its initial success as an Internet directory.

Facebook does not even have a proper logo. The application name is imposed as plain white text on a blue background. When you consider how many companies spend thousands or tens of thousands of dollars for creating brand names and images, this is astonishing for a website that is now a household name.

So, one answer for programmers without graphics helpers is to eschew graphics as much as possible, and instead organize and present text using user interface principles such as those espoused by practitioners such as Jakob Nielsen who has deliberately used few graphics on his site since he started it in 1995, even though it serves 250 thousand visitors a month.

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By Krishna, February 9, 2009

What would you expect if you typed the wrong password into a login screen such as the following?

Most of you would suppose that Google Adwords would bring up a screen telling you that your username or password is incorrect. Here is what I got:

This is a very subtle problem. I typed in an older password that was used before I updated the login to a Google account. If I had used a completely different (and wrong) password, I would see the standard login error message. I would have thought that once the update was done, they would have got rid of the older password and forced me to use the new password with the same error message. It is apparent that for some reason, they don’t do that. Anyway, incredibly confusing.