Thanks for being patient everyone… the time has finally arrived. The new blog design is done, and is ready for the unveiling. Without further ado, I’m pleased to present Zaissian Logic. Check out the first post on the new blog today and let me know what you think. Oh, and don’t forget to subscribe to the RSS feed!
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.
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.
A few years ago, I was listening to a Google talk where they were talking about a usability study they had been running on their homepage at the time. “What do you see here?” they would ask. “A text box for search,” came the reply. “Anything else?” “Nope.”
People had become so fixated on Google’s functionality for searching that other features on the homepage (different kinds of search, the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button, etc) were going unnoticed. People just had tunnel vision for searching.
Google Reader was recently redesigned, and something in the redesign got me thinking about that talk, and wondering why really interesting, compelling new features go unnoticed. Specifically, I caught a glimpse of their new Loading message (with the animated wheel thingie), but for some reason I missed the much-anticipated new feature right underneath it!
How strange is it that, despite noticing a new loading message, I didn’t notice the new search functionality? In fact, it wasn’t until I read a recent TechCrunch article on the Google Reader redesign (that I read inside Google Reader, coincidentally) that I knew search had been added. So what’s going on here?
This issue seems to come up with products that are used frequently for a consistent task. Think about the Google homepage: What’s your process?
That’s your task flow. Same thing with Google Reader: I start on the left with the list of new Feed items to read, I click on one and browse the list. My eyes never go clear to the top where that Search bar is living. The one time they did - very briefly - was to check out the new loading message and confirm that it was, in fact, redesigned. My eyes didn’t stay up there long enough to explore the surroundings.
With all the buzz that Nielsen has had around eye tracking (1, 2, 3, 4), I’m surprised to have not heard about anything documenting this result in a general way. It seems like a general problem for people who design for the web: Without a large product rollout (and with the capability for design to change on a dime), getting new features noticed that lie outside of an established task flow is really difficult.
This is why designers get such a kick out of comics and songs that address their eternal struggle against managers (and occasionally, against users) who think, “If we make the feature bigger, people will be sure to notice it.” Ultimately, it’s a trade-off, and I’d argue that in order to get the new feature noticed, you’d need to make it distracting, which starts to lose its desirability (did you read the first comic?).
So what can be done? Given the higher level of interactivity on the web, if you know that you’ve got a highly desired feature (and yes, search is right up there for Google Reader!), I’d opt for a temporary distraction. If it’s the user’s first time with the new feature, give it a soft pulsing highlight for a couple seconds, and then leave it alone.
I do want to emphasize the word temporary. If you’ve used Office 2007 you’ll notice that the big round Office button in the upper left-hand corner of the window pulsates until you use it. I’ve been in many offices where the button just sits there and pulsates because, yes, the user knows that there’s a menu there. He or she just hasn’t had reason to pull it down. And it’s annoying to third parties trying to focus on the content of the document. Really.
But ultimately, who knows. Maybe this isn’t the best approach, and with design nothing is absolute. In the words of the User Experience Guru, “It depends.”
A handy bit of feedback on the back of a letter I sent in a while back - if you put it in the envelope wrong, you get a nice message through the window:
But I wonder: Will people check for the presence of text (and call it good), or will they read “Wrong Way” and fix the error?
Windows Vista has a new feature. While it’s always been possible to remove your Recycle Bin from the desktop, Vista saw fit to bubble up the command into the context menu, shown here:
I circled a couple commands in that shot, because they consistently confound me (even though I’ve been using Vista for well over 8 months now). One removes items from the Recycle Bin, and the other removes the Recycle Bin itself.
I know what you’re thinking – the commands are pretty straight forward semantically. No confusion there. But take a look at the dialogs that follow each command. If you say “Empty Recycle Bin” with one item inside, here’s the confirmation:
And with multiple items:
Did you notice the title of both of those dialogs? “Delete File” and “Delete Multiple Items.” So is it any wonder that my mental model associates the word “Delete” with the process of emptying my recycle bin?
It doesn’t help matters that the dialog for removing the recycle bin looks somewhat similar to one of the empty dialogs:
Take a second to associate the context menu commands with the dialog titles. You’ll learn that you Empty Recycle Bin to Delete and Delete to Remove Recycle Bin. Not straight forward anymore, is it?
So it should come as no surprise that I blazed through that last dialog one day and suddenly found my desktop to be without Recycle Bin. The only way I could figure out how to restore it – ask my office mate to delete hers so I could read the dialog that told me how to restore it.
Her response? “No way! I like my Recycle Bin.”
I know that a lot of people dislike math, but are we in such a sad state that something like this is really necessary?
Is this a case of having too much space to say something and not knowing what to say? Or do they really think that the majority of their audience will get confused in interpreting the difference between single, double, and triple?
I feel that most fast food restaurants have conditioned us well enough to know the difference by now. However, if we were talking about “quadruple,” the explanation might be warranted. Burger King, for example, had to shorten it to “quad” for their Stacker promotion.
Clearly, quintuple is right out.
My favorite part of that image, though, is the decision to include communication back to the company as part of the overall message. Is this in case the Roll Size Guide confuses us to the point of feeling helpless? I think everyone should call 1-800-553-3639 to communicate their confusion and frustration.
I got an interesting email today about a new customer portal that Verizon Wireless is setting up. Front and center was a screen shot of the new, sexy interface along with a list of compelling features. What are they? Your guess is as good as mine…
That’s exactly how they showed up when I checked my mail in both Firefox and Safari. Nothing like white text on a white background to get across the critical part of your message!
Looking back at my last post, you may think that those are just two pictures that I painlessly added as part of my standard blogging routine. Indeed I do try to add pictures as often as I can to break up the message, but last time it was anything but painless.
I got the image of the turkey from my mom in email. I downloaded it and looked at it. Mac Preview opened it without difficulty. I opened it in Photoshop to retouch it slightly, crop and scale it so it fit in the blog post. No problems there. Then I went to upload it to my blog, and this:
Ah, bad design, how do I loathe thee? Let me count the ways…
It turns out that the image had something wrong with it - I uploaded it manually, but still wasn’t able to get it to show. When I went to delete it off of the web server, it said, “I can’t find the file you want to delete!” Yet, sure enough, a 136kb file is still sitting on my web server. What a strange little image file.
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