BLOG by zaiss

I got a lot of messages on my Facebook wall today (thanks for the birthday wishes, everyone!), but one time when I went to check out what was on my wall, I got a strange message back from Facebook:

There’s been a lot in the news recently about the danger of children under 18 being on social networks, especially since MySpace has over 29,000 known sex offenders registered with pages. I fully support measures to keep children safe (which Facebook has to push for since they stopped being a college-only site), but I have a couple issues with this particular message:

1. Even though my coworkers seem to think so, I’m not actually under 18. Today was my birthday, after all.
2. I am registered with a school network, so I’m not really sure what action to take here. If belonging to networks makes you less shady on Facebook, I’m 3x less shady than someone without any networks!

Silly points aside, I’m not sure if this measure alone will make a difference. So sex offenders on Facebook is OK, as long as they aren’t registering as younger than 18? Are we really OK with that? I’m sure this is just one step in solving a complex problem, but I’m wondering how many people will feel better because of it.

And while I haven’t seen the message pop up a second time, it seems like narrowing out young professionals with 3 established networks would be step one in rolling out this change. I doubt everyone who encounters this message in error will respond with a light-hearted blog entry.

The other day, this article got sent around Microsoft. Then I saw it on Digg. And then again on Ajaxian. And I couldn’t let this article have such a surge of popularity without a response, because the conclusion is flawed.

I encourage you to read the article for yourself. Basically it discusses the “Submit” and “Cancel” buttons at the end of web forms. Wroblewski classifies “Submit” as the primary action and “Cancel” as the secondary action, and argues that the secondary action should be absent from forms all together, or at least differentiated so that the secondary action receives less prominence on the page. He claims this makes the user experience “better,” which, according to the article, is measured by fewer errors (i.e., hitting “Cancel” when you mean to hit “Submit”).

So let’s look at the study. He looked at 6 submit/cancel varieties. If you want to see visuals of the 6 choices, check his article or the Ajaxian article, but I’ve whipped up basic examples of what he tested below:

1. Choice A: Size/Style Distinction
   
2. Choice B: Standard-Left
   
3. Choice C: Color Distinction
   
4. Choice D: Standard-Right
   
5. Choice E: Mac-Style + Large Space
   
6. Choice F: Standard-Center
   

Ultimately, it’s Wroblewski’s goal to prove to you that Choice A and Choice C were “better” than Choice B, which is apparent in his summary: “When choosing between primary and secondary actions, visual distinctions are a useful method for helping people make good choices.” But look at what his study actually said:

1. Choice A and Choice C each had exactly the same error rate as Choice B (0%).
2. Choice B was actually faster than either Choice A or Choice C because people didn’t have to sit and think about why there were two different-looking things at the bottom of the form.
   (And did you catch the last line of the article? “The less time people have to spend on your forms, the happier they will be.”)

Yes, it’s true that people said they felt more comfortable with being forced to stop and think about which selection they made, since they could “quite easily have selected the wrong one,” but remember: Humans are inherently bad at introspection. So asking, “Hey, can you go back and tell me about why you took longer?” won’t result in meaningful data.

And for that matter, what does that quote even mean? Of course you could have easily selected the wrong one, it’s a button right next to the other one! It’s true for all menus and buttons in the world of UI Design!!

But did you select the wrong button? According to the research, it wasn’t even an issue.

So even if, upon being forced to think about submitting the information on a form, users feel better about pausing, the pause is simply unnecessary. In the grand scheme of things, Option B was the better choice according to the study, which undermines Wroblewski’s conclusion (and in my mind, his upcoming book).

The designer side of me dislikes this conclusion, to be honest. I really like the color distinction model in Option C quite a bit. I think it’s stylish, and it reflects the underlying actions quite well. In fact, I may still use it in future designs despite these usability findings, because I’m willing to trade off the speed that comes with similarity in button design.

But Wroblewski has focused on the inaccurate, subjective accounts of the participants and ignored his own data in coming to his conclusion. Take it to heart as an important lesson: Despite usability’s recent upswing in popularity in the public sphere, not all usability is accurate. Read with critical eyes.

I got an interesting email last week:

Wow… it really took Nintendo over 8 months to come to the conclusion that some sort of Virtual Console update would be a good thing? As a Wii owner, I’ve got to say, I’m a fan of the Virutal Console. However, after 3 weeks of checking every Monday, just to be let down because random games from TurboGraphx got added to the mix, checking Virtual Console updates manually became my least favorite part about the whole system.

So what’s a lazy technophile to do? Find a blog feed that showcases the Virtual Console additions every Monday so they’re easy to check.

Nintendo should have been on top of this from day 1, but after being convinced that they didn’t have any location to browse VC releases, I gave up and went feed hunting. It turns out that the email above had a link to all currently-available VC releases, each one with a link telling more about the game. That’s pretty cool, but still pretty obscure. Not to mention the fact that these update emails (which seem to be happening weekly now) come three days after the console updates. Nice, but still not a step up from the immediacy you get from a feed like N-Philes.

Nintendo, I say you’ve gotta step it up with your VC messaging. Shout it from the rooftops! Be your customers’ number one source for all things Virtual Console! And… release Dragon Warriors I-IV to the VC while you’re at it.

Update 12/17/07: I’ve been getting these emails for a couple months now, and I’m reversing my position. Their timing is variable – sometimes they arrive at the start of the week, sometimes at the end, and other times in between. But they are a great deal more visual than the other sources, and they link to a pretty stellar site that maintains a full list.

Using one of these emails, I realized that Ghost & Goblins was a game I had in my childhood, after repressing it for my Toolbox assignment in Game Design. After buying it and playing for 5 minutes I realized why – It. Is. Extremely. Hard.

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?

1. Lock on to the text box and click on it.
2. Type your search query.
3. Hit Enter

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.”

So I was surfing the internet today, learning all the intricacies of Windows Movie Maker (don’t ask), when I came across a particularly disturbing ad:

First thought: Eww, gross. Second thought: Wait a second. Haven’t I been asked that question before? Sure enough, almost two years ago, I was horrified at the same ad, only that time the culprit was Yahoo.

There must be billions of possible search queries out there… are we really hurting for original ideas so much that we need to reuse them? And even if we are… do we have to use spiders as the ad to copy? Why can’t we use a less scary query… like “Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens,” or “Why do birds suddenly appear every time you are near?”

In the meantime, my conclusion remains the same – only now, I’m avoiding two search engines for fear of spiders popping up out of nowhere.

What a good time it was to see the Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie in the theaters. Now that the DVD has been released, Facebook has an ad encouraging me to buy it, which says the following:

I’ve heard of alternate endings, but alternate movies? Isn’t that just an additional feature film? Or could this be the next wave of DVD releases?

Autumn pointed out to me that the Acropolis Meet the Team video has been posted to Channel 9. For those who don’t know, Acropolis is the team inside Visual Studio that I work with every day - and I even make an appearance in the video!

Scroll ahead to to 7:30 to see that section. You also get to see my office mate Kathy, who is the videographer’s guide for the segment.

Unfortunately, the video is really large, and even if you take time to download it, playing it on a Mac isn’t straight forward, even with Windows Media Player. You’ll just have to take my word for it that, for a brief moment, I was a star.

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?

I like to play Sudoku at work I’m aware of a sidebar gadget on Vista that lets you play Sudoku. (Gotta be careful, my manager reads this. :)) One day when experimenting with this gadget (I was testing it, really…), I discovered a potential solution that, while technically correct, was counted as incorrect:

You see the incorrect values in red. You can go through the row / column / square checking or you can take my word for it – that solution is correct. However, the sidebar gadget seemed to think that this alternative, similar solution was the right one:

In fact, they’re both correct. Which brings up an interesting question to ponder: Under what circumstances are Sudoku solutions unique? When can multiple solutions exist?

Continuing on the train of deep Sudoku thinking, I noticed that the Sudoku games in this gadget don’t start off symmetrically (if you look at Sudoku puzzles in the books or newspaper, the starting values are symmetric along the diagonal). Is there something important about this symmetry? Is the symmetry at all correlated with unique solutions?

I call on some really smart math whiz (Eric) to solve this problem immediately.

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.”