BLOG by zaiss

I’ve been semi-addicted to Scrabulous lately - basically, it’s a Facebook application that allows you to play Scrabble with your Facebook friends. While I’m trying to limit the games I play, it’s a great chance to play games with people I don’t see every day. I’m not into MMOs, and Scrabble can be a casual game - check when you want, play a word, come back in a couple days.

I had been playing a game with Vince (Japan), Eric (Lincoln, NE) and Jason (Omaha, NE). Vince and I were neck and neck for most of the game, and at the end it looked like he was going to win. In fact, the word-by-word score showed Vince winning, yet somehow the win went to me:

Vince, determined to have an untarnished Scrabble record, encouraged me to investigate the discrepancy. I’m nice, so I did. I opened the “Contact Us” page on Scrabulous, and found there was an FAQ about scoring already:

Now, it turns out that the rules do, in fact, explain the discrepancy: The player to run out of tiles first ends the game and gets the point value of everyone else’s remaining tiles, while the other players lose the value of their own tiles. So, indeed, the scoring seems to be accurate.

But I have a hard time believing the tone that these guys are taking with their users. Saying “please” a couple times doesn’t take away from the fact that the FAQ question is essentially saying, “We’re perfect, you’re wrong, go away.” Furthermore, this particular case had very little to do with word scoring; rather, it had to do with an end-of-game rule that nobody was familiar with - the end score clearly conflicts with the word-by-word totals. Instead of getting me straight to the rules, the tone of the FAQ makes me want to email them out of spite since they’re treating me like a stupid user.

Early on in the MHCI curriculum, professors emphasized that Help is one of the four pillars of UI development. (Unfortunately, they didn’t emphasize the other 3 so I can’t remember them to save my life.) It’s clear that scoring is difficult for people to figure out, and it would improve users’ experience to add a little something to help them understand scoring inside the game.

In this case, the tone is just inappropriate. Users aren’t being mean, or attacking the developers’ ability to program when they have scoring questions. They’re trying to figure out how the game is played. A contextual link next to the scores (”How are my scores calculated?”) might fix the issue all together, and obviate the need for rude FAQs.

Adobe, Adobe, Adobe…

A couple years ago, I wrote about Windows XP’s habit of updating overnight and restarting the computer without user input. This caused its share of problems, but today Adobe topped it.

Back story: Apparently it was a big update day for Adobe, because I had almost 200 MB of updates to download and install. This process was taking a couple hours, so I went into a meeting with my coworkers. The meeting ends and I return to my computer. After a couple minutes, an unnerving dialog appears:

And here I am with Visual Studio open, an unsaved mock-up in Illustrator, two functional specs, and a half-written email. Freaking out, I desperately try to decide what to save first (meanwhile my boss is asking me what’s wrong since I’m making such a spectacle). After 15 seconds (much less than a minute!), my applications start closing. Despite my best efforts, the applications shut down before I could save any of them, losing a fair chunk of code and design in the process.

How did we go backwards in restart usability? The tradition from the 90s tended to be, “Your computer will restart now. Please close all open applications and click OK.” I have my gripes with that, but at least that didn’t give you a time limit!! I’ve watched a lot of web designers and developers work, and the one common thread is that they have many applications open at once. No matter how critical the restart is to the updating process, the decision to put a timer on the restart was an awful one.

Complaints abound over the… enthusiastic nature with which some Facebook applications try to get you to sign up. I guess it’s all about the numbers. But as I watched my notifications over the course of a week, I was intrigued by what I saw. At the start of the week, I was being notified about these items:

The items under “Other Applications” aren’t applications that I added to my profile. In fact, I don’t know where they came from at all, or why Live Blog is checked but others aren’t.

Two days later, and Entourage gets the boot, though the Neighborhoods app is lingering and unchecked:

Three more days go by, and I’m suddenly no longer getting Photo notifications:

Now, hang on a second! I actually wanted those (hence the fact that they were checked earlier). As if sensing my dissatisfaction, Facebook offers a replacement by the end of the week:

I suppose Notes are better than Photos anyway.

All I did over the course of the week was take screen shots – I didn’t adjust any settings (nor did I find anywhere that I could adjust them). So what’s with the revolving notifications?

Digg’s buzzing today about a prototype for disappearing car doors; basically, doors that slide into the car instead of opening up like normal car doors.

Neat idea. And it may even be adopted by a car company or two. But it’s wasted money for an unusable idea.

When I was little, my mom and I used to give an elderly woman a ride home from church. She had a hard time getting around, and needed help getting into and out of the car. She’d grab on to my arm with her one hand and the passenger door with the other. This invention neglects a secondary function that car doors have - they support people as they get into and out of the car. Watch the video… do you get out of the car that smoothly? Turn, stand, and go? Car seats are designed to hold people comfortably and securely so they can focus on driving, but for some people, getting in and out isn’t as simple as that.

Of all the different car design elements, how the car door opens seems to be the least compelling as a candidate for redesign. Yet I’m sure plenty of money was spent to develop the prototype. I’m going to be one unhappy consumer if my next car has disappearing doors and the same gas mileage.

When MoveOn.org created a Facebook petition group to protest Facebook’s Beacon, I joined because I agreed with the principle. Like I said the last time Facebook rolled out a feature that disregarded users’ privacy, what user’s want and what they’ll react negatively to isn’t intuitive. Last time, users rallied together of their own accord to get privacy enhancements ushered in. This time, MoveOn.org led the charge. I’m just glad that Facebook left out the “Awesome!” button this time. -shudder-

Fast forward 3 weeks. Facebook Beacon has been completely overhauled with privacy features, and for most people, Beacon isn’t broadcasting any information for them. In fact, the owners of the petition group declared victory over a week ago:

Yet MoveOn.org’s Facebook Privacy group is at 77,000+ members and climbing, by over 1,000 people each day!

So what does this mean to MoveOn.org? Apparently, they have a new means of petitioning…

…both in the last week. It will be interesting to see which facebook groups will take off, and which will see minimal interest. The protest against war in Iran has only seen 5,200 members in a week, whereas a petition to bring back the Daily Show and end the Writers’ Strike has drawn 1,000 interested members within an hour of the email being sent out.

Are Facebook petitions a gold mine for MoveOn? Sure, getting 77,000 supporters to petition Facebook’s Beacon is nothing to sneeze at: It worked, after all. But compare it to Stephen Colbert getting over 1 million supporters for his Presidential campaign in one week, and it’s a drop in the bucket (and only 1/10 of 1% of Facebookers, given estimates that Facebook is approaching 60 million users).

Is it just that there are more people interested in seeing Stephen Colbert in the White House than in protecting their privacy? Or is it an awareness issue - do people simply not know about everything that’s out there on Facebook? The folks at Facebook probably have access to all of the adoption rates of various groups and applications. I wonder if they have information about critcial Facebook networks - groups of users who, if they adopt something, will cause an explosion of interest. Even if they do, we’ll probably never see it. MoveOn would probably petition that privacy violation with another Facebook group.

It may have taken a couple months, but I can finally say I’ve settled in on the east coast. I’m down to two boxes (OK, I’ve been down to two boxes for a month now… which makes me wonder if I actually need whatever is in those two boxes), and I’ve got my apartment arranged more or less the way I want it.

Settling in has come with it’s share of interesting moments. My apartment is half of a 2-story duplex that used to be occupied by the landlords for the complex. The benefit is that they completely repainted and remodeled everything before I moved in! The downside is that nobody got the memo that the landlords moved out.

Comcast was probably the most frustrating to deal with. I called to order service, and of course the salespeople were very happy to help me out. But, wait… they showed the address I gave them as commercial, not a residence. “Is there an apartment number?” “Nope… just me here. It used to be the landlord, but they moved down the street.” The first representative assured me that it was no big deal. They just needed to flip the “commercial-residence” toggle button (much easier than in SimCity, where you had to bulldoze the commercial building to make room for the residence).

Two days later, I hadn’t heard from the representative, and he was dodging my calls. So I called again. “Is there an apartment number?” “Nope… just me here. It used to be the landlord, but they moved down the street.” “Well, it’s trivial to have it changed. I’ll set it up in the system and call you back.” “…Are you sure? That’s what the last guy said, and he seems to have fallen off the map.” He assured me that it was no big deal and said he’d call me back.

Two days pass, and representative two is MIA. So I called Comcast a third time. “Is there an apartment number?” “YES. It’s apartment 1. I live above the commercial property.”

OK, so I didn’t come out swinging with that line. I explained the situation to him, offered to be listed as apartment 1 if it meant I could get service faster, but he assured me not only that it was a trivial process, but that he’d done it before and had instantaneous results. And indeed - he called me back two minutes later saying it had been done. I can only assume that the first two representatives trembled in fear at the sight of some massive “Commercial — Residence” toggle button and ran crying from their posts.

Fast forward a week, and the Comcast guy is at my apartment to set up my service. I’m walking him through my apartment to show him my TV (downstairs) and my computer (upstairs). As we’re coming downstairs… there’s a woman standing in my apartment, looking quite confused.

It turns out that it wasn’t just Comcast who had missed the memo: It was everyone in the 500-unit community. Swell. Nothing left to do but use my experience in Designing for Service to create a touch point for the landlord’s office:

Apparently the landlord saw it (or heard about it), and a memo did go out to residents, because I haven’t had any strangers wander into my apartment for a few weeks. That leaves me more time to head to the nearby shopping center to try some of Boston’s yummy fare. Everyone recommended JP Licks, so I wandered over there with my boss after he helped me move in. My eyes drifted immediately to one of their specials.

“Um… is the Pad Thai ice cream any good?”
“Ha. No. They actually put peanuts, green onions, and noodles in there. You don’t want that.”

Noodles in ice cream? Apparently JP Licks didn’t get the memo that nobody would go for that.