BLOG by zaiss

I was enjoying a quiet evening at home, thinking about doing work (but not actually doing it), when suddenly the fire alarm went off in my building. I always say that you haven’t really lived in a place until you’ve evacuated because of a fire alarm, and it holds true in this case. It’s always interesting to see who actually responds to fire alarms, what they do when they’re outside, and if people care enough to heed the warnings.

Well, it turned out to be a false alarm (as if you’re surprised). The culprit, it turns out, is this guy right here:

You might notice that the area behind the truck is really too small for it to leave. The bad news is, the area in front of it that you can’t see is much smaller. So how did the truck get in there in the first place?

Well, apparently, he went under the taller roof, scraping along the top of it, but not quite clearing the fire sprinklers. One went off, and apparently all the others did shortly thereafter.

What seems idiotic is that there was plenty of room for the truck to park in the circular drive without pulling in all the way. Yet, somehow, he got past the low overhang and into the inner part of the drive. Last I saw the truck, it was hopelessly stuck – and had to deal with the firemen who had rushed to the scene. Quite alarming.

OK, so I partially felt bad for the anti-Google sentiment in the last post, but I’ve also been thinking about this topic for quite a while. So what better way to handle both issues at once than to talk about what I like about GMail.

While there’s a lot of things that I think they’re doing right (and maybe some things that I’m not a huge fan of), the best element behind GMail is the conversation view. If you aren’t using GMail (seriously? Are there people like that out there? Cuz I have 99 invites), the notion is that each email thread is represented as one email with multiple messages. Here’s an example from a conversation from HCI Methods class…

I got pretty used to this format in grad school, but now that I’m working and using Outlook every day, I really appreciate the notion of a conversation much more. The reasons are numerous:

1. Fewer Emails. As a matter of productivity, you move faster with fewer emails. There are many instances of email threads with 10, 20, or even as much as 50 replies that I get every day. Handling one message is much faster than handling all 50 separately.
2. Faster Reading. If there’s a thread that I really want to follow, I usually want to read the emails in order to make sure that I understand them all. In Outlook, I end up putting them all in a folder, essentially creating a conversation view manually (but with more time and effort).
3. Easier Saving. What if I want to save the thread? Previous messages tend to be listed below the current message (Gmail also does that), so maybe I save the most recent one. But then tomorrow I get a new message on that thread with more good information. So now I have two emails to save, unless I want to take time to find the old one and trash it. Again, a time waster.
4. Fewer Search Results. Hey, someone sent out an email about the great sushi restaurants in Seattle. I’m craving sushi, maybe I’ll search for it. Oh, but there were actually 5 threads, each with 20+ replies. So now I have 100 emails to deal with. In GMail, it would only be 5 results, and you could quickly find the one you want (and ensure all of the information from that thread would be there).
5. Ensures Your Voice! This is a new pet peeve of mine - having a conversation carry on without your input!!! When you send mail to 20 people, suddenly 20 people are vying for attention off of one thread. It seems that whenever I spend time to write my reply, someone inevitably replies to a different message in the thread, and the conversation moves in a different direction. With GMail, all replies are part of the same conversation, so nobody’s opinion is getting left out.

So at this point, I’m a little confused. Did Google copyright the notion of conversations in email? Is that why they’re the only ones who have it? While I was skeptical at first, now it seems like such an obvious productivity benefit that I’m baffled that others haven’t rushed to implement something similar.

In Microsoft’s case, however, I suppose they are currently trying to fix the server error on Windows Live Mail that’s been there for a week now. I would switch over… if it worked.

One of the themes at the Microsoft company meeting was the push to use Microsoft products. “Get rid of that Google search bar, and make Live search your homepage!”

That’s all well and good, but I think people are missing an opportunity when they correct people who say “Just Google it.” Sure it’s recommending a particular brand, but you’re missing the bigger opportunity! While “Google” being added to the dictionary as a term for searching shows Google’s popularity, it also bodes negatively for their brand – exactly why they’re discouraging the use of their name as a synonym for web searching.

In fact, the threat of losing one’s brand in situations like this is quite common. It’s why we tend to call tissues “kleenex,” adhesive bandages “band-aids,” and why photocopies were called “xeroxes” until Xerox launched a campaign to reclaim their brand.

So if you really want to promote your non-Google search engine of choice, here’s my recommendation. Keep saying “Google it” – just use your preferred search engine instead. That way, you’re promoting your own search engine while hurting the Google brand. Plus you don’t sound as obnoxious when you say “You mean Windows Live it!”

Man oh man, so many interesting stories from the conference, I feel bad leaving the geography post up front and center for so long. Big big study at work next week, but I should get back to some stories soon. In the meantime, waxing poetic on features.

What matters to the software consumer today? Pine and Gilmore published a book on the Experience Economy, which was scripture for Dr. Wagner’s students back at UNO. Applying the notion of an experience economy to software is a big part of the reason why job titles in usability are changing from “Usability Engineer” and “Interaction Designer” to “User Experience Researcher” and “User Experience Designer.” OK, so that’s the case at Microsoft, but I see it happening elsewhere too.

Of course marketing isn’t far behind, with more experiences being marketed than individual features. What still shocks me is that a website for buying and selling cars was the first to widely market the notion of user experience. Have you seen the commercials?

Yesterday was Microsoft’s company meeting, where they encouraged us to use Windows Live, which is pretty actually pretty cool. I stumbled across Office Live, which has tools that enable individuals and businesses to publish websites. But look at how it’s being marketed (check the tabs): Overview, Features, and Common Questions. The same with a recent marketing campaign where Microsoft pits Visual Studio against Dreamweaver. A comparison of 101 features. I dare you to watch them all.

I hesitate to insist that “experience” is any better than “feature” (unless you’re a User Experience advocate who can actually define “User Experience” in 15 seconds or less). Trading buzzwords gets us nowhere. But as the workers who are customer-facing, it makes sense to ask: What matters to the software consumer today? Is it really features?

The concept of eurocentrism is well established as the notion that the white, European way of life, culture, etc. is central to consideration, and an inability or unwillingness to look at other cultures or viewpoints. Sadly, that idea can’t even begin to hold a torch to what I call US-centrism, which consists of the narrow understanding (rather, awareness) of other countries held by US citizens. Eddie Izzard said it best: “Do you know there are other countries?”

Quick. Name the Northern European countries in the picture below, from left to right. Here’s a hint: I just spent a week at one of them.

I’m not saying every US citizen needs to know every country by location around the globe. I certainly don’t. But weren’t these three pretty easy to recognize in elementary geography? In my case, I remembered them really easily (Norway, Sweden, Finland), but had difficulty with the countries in the middle of Europe. Just like a lot of people on the east and west coast might have difficulty with states in the middle of the US, but that’s another matter.

I was talking with a professor from the Technology University of Tampere during the conference. She told me about how, when she comes to the United States, nobody is familiar with Finland. “But it’s OK,” she explained. “We are such a small country to the north, it is easy for people to not know about us.” Really? To not even have heard of Finland? I think that’s a bit extreme. I might not be able to recognize where the countries are in Europe, but I’ve at least heard of them.

The worst offender came later in the conference though. A Scottish woman who works in Austria was talking about her experience with an American:

Can we at least name the actual country / continent with the kangaroos?

At the Mobile HCI conference this week, the poster that Samantha and I worked on won the Best Poster award. If you didn’t get to see it yet, here it is zoomed way out. The file is large, so you’ll have to take my word for it that it’s really nice. =P

The Best Poster judging was an impromptu competition, announced Thursday morning in the session before the formal poster session. “Please take time to look at the posters over lunch. You can then vote for your favorite poster as part of the Best Poster competition.”

The voting box sat on a table across from the posters. There was not much indication of what it was from afar, you had to really be looking for it. I forgot about it since I was busy explaining my posters to passersby. I even forgot to vote myself. However, a friend I made at the conference swung by during the poster session. We didn’t talk much about my poster, but I told him to go vote for it.

Throughout the poster session, I kept an eye on the voting box, but never really saw anyone over there. My poster was right across from it, so I had a pretty good view… which makes me wonder, who actually voted for the best poster, besides the guy I told to vote? Nobody I talked to actually voted, so it makes me wonder what the Best Poster award actually means at this conference. But nonetheless, the honor will adorn my academic vita going forward.

Since my poster was about using mobile phones to enable citizenship and participatory democracy, this situation got me thinking. Maybe this is the new wave of democracy. Announce elections very quietly, so people don’t realize that they are happening. Then, ask people who support you to specifically go to the polls at the right day. I can see this happening in 2 years in some red states, where the only people on the ballot will be GWB and Mickey Mouse. What slicker way to get a third term?

Today is my birthday (yay!) and if you’ve been reading, I’m celebrating over in Finland. Yay!

September birthdays seem to be eerily common, and I was shocked to find out that another MHCIer shared my birthday once I got to Pittsburgh two years ago (Happy Birthday Hari!). It makes you wonder, just how common is that? Well, if you haven’t done this exercise in statistics class, you should do it at your next party.

Apparently, with 23 people or so, you have better-than-chance odds of having a duplicate birthday. With 65ish people, it’s pretty much a guarantee. So, for those of you who have 70+ friends on your social networking site of choice, you should check the birthday calendar - you probably have friends that share a birthday.

However, the odds of people sharing your birthday are much lower per person, which makes me pretty special. Aside from two friends who share a birthday on the 8th, and two more on the 18th, Marcie, Hari and I are all turning a year older today – a pretty low probability event given the number of people I know on Facebook.

Read all about the birthday odds. And if you’re Vince, Eric, Chaia, or anyone else who took that stats class with me… I know this isn’t new to you. But it’s my birthday and I’ll repeat meaningless trivia if I want to.

Everyone has been freaking out today (seriously) about the new Mini-Feed feature on Facebook… so much so that less than 24 hours after the release, the Facebook staff had to write a retraction to try and compensate for all of the bad feedback they were getting.

I’d like to go on my soap box for just a moment. When I was getting ready to go to CMU to get my Masters degree in Human-Computer Interaction, my uncle told me that he didn’t see the need for the field, saying it was “obvious.” I heard the same sentiment from a developer at Microsoft when I first dropped off my resume last September.

This is why usability is not obvious. If you don’t take time to study what people actually want in a product, it will come back to bite you in the ass! And people will complain! And the feature you rolled out with glamour and glitz in the morning will be the feature you’re apologizing for later that night!

The worst part of it, though, has to be the nice little message that I saw on my profile today:

I’m sorry… Awesome? That’s my only choice? “Awesome?” Not “Bullshit!” or “What the hell were you thinking?” or “You’re kidding, right?” Aside from the fact that there’s a basic usability problem of not providing an option in cases like this… Awesome was just such a bad word to choose. (To quote Rob Corddry) I mean, COME ON!

I was walking down a stairwell at work today, and there were two employees who I didn’t know standing at the foot of the stairs, looking at a laptop screen. When they saw me walking down the stairs (like ya do), they started whispering and closed the laptop screen so I couldn’t see.

Like it was on my agenda?

I’m not saying they aren’t allowed to have private data, but you would think a public stairwell might not be the most appropriate place to share it. Maybe an office, or a conference room, or some place out of the way that wouldn’t be heavily trafficked.

When I was at UNO and I had a desk in the tech building with my back to a window, the head Computer Privacy professor came in to chat with me. “You need to keep the blinds closed. Anyone standing outside can just look right in and see what is on your computer screen.” He would probably freak out at the notion of sharing private data in the stairwell.

Prepare to be underwhelmed. The desktop of the future (short vid, medium vid, full vid) looks a lot like Mac OS X. By the desktop of the “future,” they must mean the next year or so, because the one interesting, functional new feature that I can find is the concept of putting multiple desktops on the face of a cube, so you can have windows on multiple, identical desktops. I say the “future” is coming in the next year or so because that feature is exactly what Mac is striving for in OS X.5 with Spaces.

As a Mac user (don’t tell my employer), I think the desktop shown in the videos is cool. But is that really all we can do in the future? One cool new idea (spaces) and a bunch of meaningless aesthetic improvements (a physics engine for moving windows and “wrapping” windows around multiple desktops)? What can we do to account for larger screen sizes? What about a new device to interact with the computer instead of a mouse and keyboard?