HCI User Advocate

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noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bederson) — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 19:08:00 +0000

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SIGCHI Social Impact Award for 2010

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bederson) — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 13:24:00 +0000

Ben Bederson and Allison Druin
from the University of Maryland are awarded

The SIGCHI Social Impact Award for 2010

ACM SIGCHI identifies and honors leaders and shapers of the field of human-computer interaction with annual SIGCHI Awards. The Social Impact Award honors individuals who promote the application of human-computer interaction research for pressing social needs. This year the award was given to Ben Bederson and Allison Druin of the University of Maryland for their joint work in developing the International Children’s Digital Library and their individual work in developing new methods that give children a voice in the development of new technologies, and for their work on electronic voting systems.

Ben Bederson is Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Maryland and past Director of the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory. With his collaborator, Prof. Allison Druin, he led the development of many of the key technologies designed for and by kids, including KidPad and StoryKit for iPhone. He is the Technical Project Director for the International Children's Digital Library, a multilingual free digital library of children's books, currently consisting of over 4,000 books in over 50 languages, with more than three million users from over 160 countries worldwide. He led the library's collaboration with the Government of Mongolia -- bringing access to the library in rural Mongolia. Prof. Bederson also did influential studies of the usability of electronic voting systems, which resulted in scholarly publications, reports aimed at policy makers, and books directed to the general public. This work has served to highlight the challenges in developing usable electronic voting systems and has informed decisions on voting technology adoption.

Allison Druin is Associate Professor in the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland and Director of the Human-Computer Interaction Lab. Prof. Druin is a pioneer in the development of technology for children and the inclusion of children as partners in the design process. Her technology co-design methods have been reported on through scholarly publications, presentations, and books, and have become widely used throughout the CHI community. She founded the CHIKids program for the CHI Conference. This program enabled many CHI community members who were parents to participate in the conference while their children learned about CHI and contributed to the experience of the conference, e.g., by producing daily newsletters, websites, and plenary session videos. With her collaborator, Prof. Ben Bederson, she created the International Children's Digital Library, a multilingual free digital library of children's books, currently consisting of over 4,000 books in over 50 languages, with more than three million users from over 160 countries worldwide.

Another problem with Flash - keyboard focus

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bederson) — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 13:27:00 +0000

I consider Adobe Flash to be a virus and have been thrilled that Apple continues to fight against it. The reason I dislike Flash so much is because it breaks fundamental user experience standards, such as:

Consistency: The same action should do the same thing in different places. Example: if pressing the down arrow scrolls the web page, then it should always scroll the web page.
Modes: Modes are almost always bad - but when you have to have them, make them clearly visible. I.e., the user should know what mode they are in by looking at the screen. Example: if typing enters text in a specific text box, then that text box should be clearly highlighted so the user knows which textbox will get their text.

My problem with Flash is that it breaks these basic design standards. In order to use a Flash plugin in your web browser (like when you watch most videos), you have to click on the video - and Flash then takes complete control over the keyboard (i.e., it takes your "keyboard focus"). This is bad because you can then no longer use your keyboard to do other browser things - such as scroll with the PageUp and PageDown keys, press Ctrl-T to open a new tab, or Alt-LeftArrow to go back to the previous page.

The fact that Flash breaks standard web behaviors is bad enough - but it is even worse because it does so completely invisibly. I get used to using my keyboard to control my web browser because - um, I am a human and I am using my computer. So, sometimes it stops working for no apparent reason. There is no way to see this problem, and the only solution is to use your mouse to click on some non-Flash component in your browser. I bet most people just think that web browers are sucky and inconsistent. The real problem is that Web plugins for common activities that take over they keyboard just shouldn't exist.

Bravo Apple. Let HTML5 and built-in web standards for common activities take over.

2/4/2010

Collaboration with New Super Mario

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bederson) — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 17:44:00 +0000

I've been playing Mario for a long, long time (i.e., decades). I've been playing it on Wii with my daughters (now 5 and 10) for a year, and until last month, it was always an exercise in patience. Only one person played at a time, and you we spent more time watching than actually playing. Actually, this is how video game playing has been for 30 years.

So, while collaborative game playing is not new, and I don't even think there is anything in particular here that is new, I was stunned by just how good Nintendo put it all together with New Super Mario. It isn't just that we are all playing at the same time, but that the designers have put together so many modes of game play in a seamless way that is equally attractive to a 5 year old and a 45 year old. It supports exploration, goals, collecting points, collaboration, and competition equally. But the killer thing is that it supports these 5 modes at the same time in the same interface. There aren't 5 different ways to launch the game. There is one, and you just choose how to play. In fact, at any given moment, we are often playing several modes simultaneously, or dynamically switching between modes, or one person is doing one thing and the others are doing another.

Aside from the sheer number of hours we have played (and continue to play), I judge its success based on our volume. The three of us end a game-playing session exhausted, excited, and a bit hoarse - because we have been yelling so much.

There are too many details to go into just why this all works so well, but here are a few examples from the 5 modes:

Exploration: Wander around, poke at things and see what happens.
Goal-driven: Complete as many worlds as possible.
Collecting points: Get as many points, big gold coins, or powers saved up as possible.
Collaboration: Bounce on each others head to bounce higher, do a super ground pound (a synchronous maneuver), or wait for someone to finish before moving forward.
Competition: Push each other off the edge, grab a power rather than share it.

They also nailed the screen sharing issue. The essential problem in collaborative games is that everyone looks at the same screen. The traditional solution is a split screen - where one player sees where they are in the world on one side of the screen and the other players sees something else. This isn't really collaboration - this is competitive, simultaneous separate play.

New Super Mario, on the other hand, places everyone (up to 4 characters) in a single world. You all move and bounce around in the same space. If the characters wander apart from each other, the world automatically zooms out so everyone is still visible - up to a point. There is a maximum zoom out level after which the lead player (right-most player since this is a left-right side scrolling game) implicitly owns the visible area. The last player (left-most character) gets dragged along. If they get dragged into a hole or something else bad, they die.

Actually, they don't die - when someone does something that would normally result in dying, they go in a bubble (i.e. "ahhhh - daddy, I'm in a bubble"). After a few seconds the character floats around the screen in a bubble and they can be revived by one of the other characters bumping into them - up to 5 lives, after which you really die and you have to wait for everyone to die (or bubble), at which point that world starts over. Again, a combination of approaches that brilliantly encourages collaboration without requiring it.

There is a lot of verbal communication going on to support all of these modes - which is part of the reason it is so fun. I'm looking forward to finishing dinner tonight just so we can go play. I haven't heard enjoyed a game this much since Asteroids in 1980 - when we played one at a time, but the social element was in going to a gaming parlor.

1/21/2010

My PIM (Part II)

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bederson) — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 14:43:00 +0000

I recently posted my approach to managing notes and various bits of my personal information (i.e., Personal Information Management). I had some requests to go a bit deeper, so here's a bit more.

Email The biggest trick about managing personal information is to spend more time on frequent tasks, and less time on infrequent tasks (actually, this is a design guideline for all UI). So, what do I do a lot with email? I read incoming stuff and answer it. What do I do infrequently? I search for old email. Simple, but true analysis. So, rule #1: don't spend time filing email. Yes, it must be findable somehow, but it doesn't have to be easy to find. It has to be fast to get rid of so you can go on to the next thing. GMail figured this out with fast searching and making archiving everything the default. But I find that most Outlook users don't do this - they often still laboriously file individual emails into specific folders just in case they want to find it later. What a waste of time! Outlook has fast searching too. So, here's the trick:

Turn off auto-archiving, and then just press the delete key. I store everything in the Deleted Items folders. Then, once a year, I dump it all into a .pst (archive) file. That's it. Sure, towards the end of the year, my Deleted Items folder might have 20,000 messages in it, but who cares. I can search in a second or three, and that's good enough. I've been doing this for 10 years, and have 10 .pst files. But guess what, I almost never open up any but the previous year. And when I do, they are around and easy to open and search (as long as I continue to use Outlook, but that's another story).

Files:
Ok, dumping email into a folder is simple, but that isn't good enough for files - which I actually do manually organize with some attention. Effective hierarchy structures are difficult because research has shown that people don't remember them perfectly. The issue is that the context for storage is often different than the context for retrieval. Thus, there is pretty much guaranteed no perfect solution, but you've got to do something. So, pick something semantically meaningful - and make sure it isn't too big, or you lose stuff. This latter point is key, so let's start there.

At each level of my file hierarchy, I only keep relatively active stuff. Then, when a folder starts getting old, I create a sub folder called "zzz Old Stuff" (so it gets sorted at the bottom), and just move things I haven't used recently in there. This way, I never have to throw things out (just in case...), everything stays in it's semantically coherent place, and I only have active things visible at any given time. This, by the way, was my practical solution to an idea I worked on some years ago with Bongshin Lee (called Favorite Folders) - but that never went any where as a practical UI.

I don't think the actual folder structure I use is likely to be that helpful to others. It is highly idiosyncratic based on my own evaluation of frequency and importance. That being said, here are a few key elements.

Ben - personal stuff, distinguished from work
one directory per major project or collaborator. For some big ones, this becomes the root of a multi-level hierarchy
Dissertations
Papers (brings together final copies of everything I published)
Other's Papers (becoming less important with digital libraries, but where I store important papers from other people)
Proposals (separate from the actual work because proposal writing is a different ask, and I regularly need to refer to other proposals when working here)
Talks (slides, etc. for talks. Again, different than the actual work on a project for the same reason as Proposals)
Conferences (related to service, organizing, etc.)
Reviews (where I store reviews of other's papers, etc., so I have an easy place to go back when a revision comes in, etc.)

Pictures:
Managing pictures used to be a nightmare, but as with the lessons above, there are two key things I've learned. They must be fast to store because otherwise I won't do it. Storage must be in a future-proof manner as operating systems and photo management tools just don't stand the test of time. But folder names, hierarchies, and JPEGs do. So here's my simple solution.

Create one folder per year, and inside each of those, create one folder per month labeled so they get alphabetically sorted (i.e., "01 - January", "02 - February", etc.) Then drop all pictures by the month they were taken into the right folder (which you can easily do in bulk every month or three). If there is an event with a larger number of pictures that feels like it is worth organizing, then create a subfolder for that event, and give it a meaningful name.

Finally, whatever software I am using to look at the photos, I never, ever, ever, use that software's proprietary mechanism to store metadata in the photos. Else, it is pretty much guaranteed to not stand the test of time. Instead, I just put everything in the filename of the photo. So, for the past few years, I've been using Picasa. Rather than storing comments or using tags, I just rename the file (one key). Then, any future search system (including Picasa's) work's great. This doubles as a mechanism for letting me access my photos across all of my computers (synced by Live Sync) without loss of information.

This is why I will never, ever use Apple's iPhoto. It is lock-in of the worst kind. It sucks all of your photos in, ignores the originals, and puts all info in a proprietary database that cant' be shared across folders. Completely worthless to me, no matter how nice the interface is.

Meeting Notes, etc.:
This is the toughest category. I've gone through many iterations from my own NoteLens and other flat systems (such as the Notational Velocity I am now using). But I've found that flat organizational systems just don't scale up for me. And I'm not willing to use my regular file system as it is just too much overhead to find the right place, launch the right app, etc. There are many other tools that people use, but for the past year, I have just been using Microsoft OneNote. I hate it's proprietary file format, but the files do sync across computers fine so I can edit on any of my computers. And the UI can't be beat. It offers a beautiful combination of simple text along with figures, notes, imported docs, and fast global search. Plus, it has a nice two-level hierarchy baked into the UI (see below). I'd be much happier if the data was text-backed and there were other UIs (especially on the Mac!) available to access it, but it works well for me know.

1/18/2010

My Personal Information Management

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bederson) — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 18:26:00 +0000

Update 1/18/10: This is the first part of a two part post.

Organizing one's personal information can be amazingly complicated, especially if you want fast and light weight access to commonly used information, and you access information across devices and operating systems. It is even trickier if you want to future-proof yourself so you can access all of your information in the future as well. I have tried many solutions including Outlook Notes, OneNote, my own NoteLens, and EverNote. However, I think I have a solution that works for me (based on this solution by dougist) - at least for my basic unstructured stuff. And the solution is both simple (relying on the most basic of storage systems - a folder of text files) and complex (relying on multiple syncing services and end-user UIs). Note that even though I still use Windows a fair amount, I run it in a VM on a mac, so this software is all Mac, but of course since the data is all text files, everything is also accessible on the PC side. Here it goes:

Everything is stored as individual text files in a single folder. Sure, I lose fancy formatting and images, but I get guaranteed future-proofness, I don't waste time formatting, and it turns out that I don't really need images. And tagging is supported if I wanted to add a bit of structure.
I use Microsoft's free peer-to-peer Live Sync cross-computer cross-operating system syncing solution. I've tried the others (SugarSync is unreliable, and DropBox requires all the synced files to be under one directory - ugh!). Live Sync is fast and reliable. I love it. (Although I got mad at Microsoft when they didn't update it for Snow Leopard for 2 months).
I use my buddy Jesse Grosjean's free SimpleText program to sync the text files to a free Google-based web service that he runs. Note that this has one flaw which is that it sends stuff up to the web whenever there is a change, but only pulls stuff down when you sync manually - so one option I am considering is to use it on one computer, and then use my existing Live Sync solution to sync those files across all my desktops (while I wait for Jesse to add auto sync down from the cloud.
I use Jesse's WriteRoom for iPhone app ($5) to sync those files to my iPhone and access them there.
I use Jesse's WriteRoom for Mac app ($25) for full screen, distraction-free text editing.
I use the open source Notational Velocity program on Mac (which is remarkably similar to my earlier NoteLens app)
I was able to export my notes out of EverNote as HTML, and then used the freely available HTMLAsText (for Windows) to convert to text. (I wanted to like EverNote - it has a great feature list, but in practice, it didn't work for me. The UI was too heavyweight, layout changed between operating systems which was a nightmare, the UI was quite different between operating systems which was annoying, and I didn't like the Windows UI which had a weird scrollbar, and made a vertical list of all the notes rather than a notebox that just displayed a single note).

Update 1/15/2010: Some other bits - I use xmarks to sync my bookmarks and passwords across computers (and VMs). This coupled with Firefox's master password to protect passwords is crucial - it means I no longer have to manually save passwords. Coupled with Firefox's fantastic URL bar with one-click bookmarking, my webpage re-finding is dramatically better (direct comparison to Safari and Chrome upcoming - but firefox definitely wins).

I also use Microsoft OneNote for my meeting notes (with the data synced across computers with Live Sync). This makes me uncomfortable because it is Windows only and the data is totally locked in to OneNote. But the UI for note-taking that combines very flexible formatting of notes along with images, embedded files (like PDFs) and ink (when I occasionally use a tablet) make it unmatched - so far.

Notational Velocity UI
(Note: screen capture and annotation with Skitch)

1/13/2010

Making Information Visualization work

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bederson) — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 14:13:00 +0000

Information Visualization is all about helping users develop insight. It isn't enough to show beautiful and amazing pictures - even interactive ones. The key, as with all interfaces, is to think about specifically what tasks a user will be able to perform with the tool. Yet, all too many visualizations fail on this most important and fundamental test.

Stephen Few (of Perceptual Edge) wrote a beautiful 10 page report on this issue - critically analyzing a visually simple visualization by Ben Fry of healthcare spending (see pie chart above). The key is that it doesn't actually enable you to learn anything. He then goes on to create an interface that actually does enable you to discover all sorts of things. The new interface is not simple. Well, each component is simple, but there are lots of components and it may take a minute to figure them out. But no more than that, and then you discover that it is conceptually simple, and you can actually use it.

Here are the take-home lessons from the article - but go and read it - it is well worth it.

2-D position and the lengths of simple objects such as bars encode quantitative values in ways that are easy to perceive; angles and areas do not, and therefore should be used only when you can’t use better means.
We cannot build a picture in our heads of a pattern that is formed by multiple values (such as the average cost of healthcare for patients of each age from 1 to 79 years old) by looking at one value at a time.
Lines do a good job of showing the pattern formed by a set of values across a continuous range such as patients’ ages, and do so in a way that allows us to compare patterns when multiple data sets are represented at once (such as one line per disease).
Multiple graphs shown together are often a better solution than a single graph, especially when several variables are involved.
Several simultaneous views of the same data set, each showing the data from a different perspective, make it possible to see relationships that can’t be seen from one perspective only or from viewing different perspectives independently.
The ability to easily fi lter out data that doesn’t concern

1/13/2010

Microsoft Live Sync vs. SugarSync (Live Sync wins)

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bederson) — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 21:06:00 +0000

I've been a long term advocate of file syncing software. It keeps all of my personal files in sync across my 3 computers (2 desktops and a laptop), even going across operating systems (windows and mac). But over the last few months, I have been doing a shootout between Microsoft Live Sync (free) and SugarSync (pay).

I had used, loved and evangelized Live Sync for years - since before it was a Microsoft product (they acquired "FolderShare" from ByteTaxi in 2006, I think). But when Snow Leopard came out for Mac, Sync just didn't work. There was very little response from Microsoft and no ETA for a fix. After waiting a few weeks and growing increasingly desperate, I looked at several other solutions.

One popular one is DropBox, but it has a design showstopper for me. Everything that gets synced has to be in a special folder that gets synced. That isn't the way I work. I want to keep my current file system and choose which subfolders get synced to what, so DropBox was out.

The other major competitor is SugarSync. It lets me control what and where I sync and it has a nice UI. There is one major annoyance which is that it isn't peer-to-peer (like Live Sync). It syncs to the cloud, so all your files sit on their servers. This adds backup and safety, and lets you sync between computers that aren't on at the same time. But you lose privacy, and you eat up their cloud-based disk space - and you have to pay for that. I pay $5/month for 30 GB. Not too bad, but annoying since I am forced to pay for a feature that I don't even want. But I had no choice, so for the last few months, I've been living with SugarSync.

However, that experiment was a failure. I *wanted* to like it, especially since the user experience was quite nice. However, the service was just unreliable. At least a half dozen times over a period of a few months, the synchronization would stop. It would get blocked on some file and I had to go through their technical support to fix it. I'd have to delete some cached files, or they would jiggle something on their server, and in a day or two, we would get it working again. But it kept happening. Sometimes it was a result of me making a configuration change (i.e., reinstalling an operating system), and sometimes it just happened. In addition, when it got into this bad state, it would sometimes replicate files and I would find several versions of a file one machine - ugh.

Fortunately, Microsoft came through and after two months, they posted a solid version of Live Sync for Snow Leopard, and I switched back. It is working beautifully. It is free. It is fast (since it doesn't go through the cloud). And I don't have to give my files to someone else's cloud.

Go Microsoft. In this battle, you are the clear winner.

1/6/2010

Droid Responsiveness and Ergonomics

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bederson) — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 01:08:00 +0000

Much has been made about Verizon's new Droid phone on Google's Android platform, and I agree with the reviews looking at the myriad details. But it seems that not enough has been made about the Droid's responsiveness and ergonomics.

Everything about actually holding and using the Droid is just a bit uncomfortable and sluggish. There are many examples, but here are a few that popped out in my first experience (in comparison to a long time with iPhone).

To wake up the Droid you have to press the on/off button on the top right. There is no natural grasp that lets you do this. It requires several seconds to regrasp the phone, press the button, and then regrasp again so you can unlock it. Compare with iPhone - press the home button with your thumb with the phone in your natural grasp and then immediately swipe with the same thumb.
Whenever I press any of the buttons on the side of the Droid (power, volume or camera), the keyboard slides open a bit making it harder to press the buttons you were trying to press.
The keyboard is oriented over an inch from the right side of the device, so not only do you have to type with your thumbs off center, but you have actually reach with your right thumb - making the much lambasted keyboard even more unpleasant.
All the graphics are slower, the touch screen is less responsive, and everything is less smooth. Yes, the display is sharper due to the higher resolution screen, but the actual experience of using that display is worse. iPhone is almost magically responsive to a very soft touch. This detail is crucial to people's enfatuation with iPhone. Every single interaction with iPhone is sensually pleasant. Android is, well, just sort of ok.

The Droid is a fine device, and if I didn't have an iPhone, I would be happy to have one. But after my first day of playing with it, I don't think there is any chance I'd trade my iPhone for it. On the other hand, Android is catching up fast, so a year from now it might be a pretty close battle.

Oh, and Droid turn by turn Navigation really is great. Part of the reason it is so good is because it uses a beautifully rendered perspective map view which I haven't seen the equivalent of on any online map - whether it is iPhone, TomTom, Google Maps or Earth.

iPhone StoryKit app - kids write stories on phones

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bederson) — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 14:03:00 +0000

Children writing books on mobile phones? That certainly seems unlikely - so how did we get to the point where actually built an app to support it?

A long time ago, my colleagues and I started building the International Children's Digital Library to make a safe and high quality place where kids could go to read books and learn about cultures from around the world.

Then, last year we decided to try and support children reading on mobile devices - we made an iPhone app to let kids read picture books from the ICDL.

Now we went further and decided to build an app that lets kids write books on their iPhones (or iPod Touches). Search for "storykit" in the appstore or get it from iTunes. You can take pictures, create drawings, record sounds, and yes of course - write actual words. Then automatically post it to a website and share with your friends.

Give it a try - especially with your kids - and let me know how it works.

Microsoft disappoints - ignores Live Sync for Snow Leopard

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bederson) — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 18:04:00 +0000

If this weren't so predictable, it would be funny. But I have loved and raved over Microsoft Live Sync since it was bought (as FolderShare) a few years ago. Now for the second time, Apple has released an OS upgrade, and Live Sync stopped working.

I find this completely intolerable. If Microsoft cared about supporting Live Sync, they could have gotten the developer preview of Snow Leopard, and ensured that their product worked when the final version of snow leopard was released. Instead, they decided to stick their heads in the sand, wait until a major platform upgrade that they "support" was released and *then* decide to look. Now, 2 weeks after the product stopped working, they say that they are aware of the problem and have no ETA for when a solution will be available.

I just uninstalled Live Sync from all of my computers and now pay $5/mo for www.sugarsync.com. There are other solutions out there as well. I'm happy to pay for syncing - but I need it to work. And I need a company to stand by their products.

Looks like Microsoft just does not get customer satisfaction.

Tivo terrible customer service

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bederson) — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 21:11:00 +0000

This post is hard to write. I love Tivo the product. But now I hate Tivo the company. The hard disk died in my Tivo Series 3 DVR. So, I called them and all they could offer was to replace it with a Tivo HD (a lesser box) for $200. So, I'd keep my outdated small hard disk size and get a lousier box for the price that they sell refurbished Tivos for. But they also suggested that I replace the disk on my own with a third party service. Yes, my box was out of warranty, but I just wanted to replace the hard disk - a pretty standard operation.

So, naturally I replaced the hard disk. I could have gone with a "name brand" (Weaknees), but that would have cost about $250 for a 1TB disk (loaded with the Tivo software). Instead I went with eBay and got the same 1TB disk with Tivo software for $150. But the disk had a problem. The seller graciously sent me a new one before I even sent back the old one, and this had a similar problem - so I suspected it was my Tivo. Here's where it gets interesting.

Tivo said:

They never should have suggested I use a 3rd party to update the disk.
They won't give me any help of any kind to get it to work.
Since I opened the box, my non-warranty was invalidated, and they wouldn't even give me a trade-in box.

After speaking to 3 managers and higher level tech support, they maintained they would do nothing, nor give me any help of any kind. So in other words, my hard disk crashed (a pretty common occurrence for a hard-disk based system), and Tivo effectively said "toss your box in the garbage and buy a new one".

As it turns out, I did a "Clear and Delete" everything on the new disk, and it fixed up the flakiness, and I now have a perfectly functioning 1TB Tivo Series 3 - which I still love, but a bit less now that I know how little Tivo is willing to support their customers.

---

Tech details: The problem I had with both disks was an "error #51", "hardware malfunction". It turns out that this commonly happens when replacing disks because of a mismatch between device and drive ID used for encryption. "Clear and Delete" is the standard procedure to fix this. But for the first disk, it did something bad because the box would never boot again. Thus, I was very reluctant to try it a second time. But when I had no choice, I did - and magically, it worked perfectly. I don't know if there was something wrong with the original disk or if there was a software screwup of some kind.

Hidden iPhone 3.0 OS feature - sync multiple mail folders

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bederson) — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 12:16:00 +0000

I know I'm not a typical user, but it seems that I often suffer from little details in interfaces that no one else seems to care about. For 2 years, I have been bothered multiple times every day that iPhone doesn't automatically sync multiple folders. Sure, your inbox can get fetched or pushed to your device. But I use filters so I have special folders where some incoming email gets immediately diverted to. The only way I could know if any new mail was waiting for me in those folders was to navigate to those folders and wait for the device to update the folder. Yuck.

Finally, iPhone 3.0 OS lets you select which folders you can manually sync.

Why GMail doesn't let you sort by size

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bederson) — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 13:23:00 +0000

GMail is awesome in so many ways. The model of not having to worry about deleting stuff because storage is free is exactly right from the user's perspective. So, at first glance, it seems perfectly reasonable that there is no way to see, sort or search for emails by their (or their attachments) size. After all, simple is good, right? Why expose a feature to users that they don't need?

Then consider GMail's business model: They sell storage. Sure, they give me a very generous amount of free storage (7 GB and counting), but with no way to meaningfully delete stuff, it is pretty much guaranteed that any consistent usage will eventually bump into that limit. And when they do, they are obligated to start paying Google for storage.

It isn't cheap either. They offer 10GB for $20/year, but that is a red herring. By the time my GMail account is full, I'll already have used about 8GB from GMail, plus 1GB from Picasa, and probably some more storage from other services. This storage fee covers all of Google's services - so the reality is that the minute I need more storage, I'll have to go directly to the second tier - which conveniently (for Google) is 40GB for $75/year. Keep in mind 40 GB of local personal storage is less than $10 - so you are paying a serious premium for use of the cloud (and don't forget that Google is already making money on advertisements in your GMail).

This is a real issue - people are looking for ways to reduce their GMail storage (i.e., here, here and here). However, I don't believe this is one of those features that Google just hasn't gotten around to - this is surely a very important, strategic and subtle business plan. They give away GMail for years, and then tens of millions of customers start finding themselves owing Google pretty big - forever. And since Google never changed their pricing policy, they can fairly claim that people knew what they were getting in to.

But if Google really wanted to be fair, they would let users control how much of Google's service they used. And for GMail, this means letting people meaningfully control their disk usage.

Over 20 Years of Designing the User Interface

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bederson) — Fri, 08 May 2009 13:02:00 +0000

Impressively, my colleagues Ben Shneiderman and Catherine Plaisant have published the 5th edition of the text Designing the User Interface. There aren’t many focused professional activities that one can pursue for over 20 years, but Ben – and now Catherine – have sustained, and actually increased their energy in this one. This nearly 600 page full-color book is an excellent way to learn about the field of Human-Computer Interaction, and to see the lay of the land from both researcher and practitioner perspectives.

The book explains the core issues in designing usable, useful, efficient and appealing user interfaces. It illustrates the issues with numerous current screenshots of websites, applications, devices, and broad contexts of use. It offers guidelines backed by research, and it explains the theory in lay terms so the guidelines make sense.

Covering just about every major HCI topic, from basic usability and design processes to design for mobile and social environments, this book offers a very broad summary of the field. It also introduces more advanced topics such as search interfaces and information visualization among others – giving readers entry points into important trends.

With deep references, and access to sample quizzes and PowerPoint slides online, I strongly recommend this book to HCI instructors, students, and professionals new to the field. Congratulations to Ben and Catherine for continuing to support this field and educate the next generation of software designers and developers.

Missing content: Kindle for iPhone doesn't have picture books, or support newspapers or magazines

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bederson) — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 13:45:00 +0000

Ok, the word is out, and the Kindle for iPhone app is out. And it is good. The promised "whispersync" now makes complete sense, knowing where you were on one device and continuing on another - so you can read in line on your phone, and then continue on your Kindle at home. And with a smooth reading interface and control over font size, they did a commendable job on the iPhone.

But, there doesn't appear to be any children's picture books (only chapter books). For that, you'll have to go to the International Children's Digital Library (www.childrenslibrary.org), or ICDL for iPhone for them (yes, this is my project).

And magazines and newspapers which are such a big selling point on Kindle don't appear to be available on iPhone. The Kindlestore doesn't recognize my registered iPhone device when I look at magazines or newspapers (although it does know about it when I look at books).

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In related news, the New York Times app for iPhone today released v2.0. The most important user-facing features are control over font size (finally!), the ability to email articles, along with it being faster and less crashy. All features badly needed and a long time coming.

Why is Apple Finder file management so broken?

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bederson) — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 21:24:00 +0000

I am now pretty ambiOStrous - that is, I go back and forth between OS X (Leopard), Win XP, and Windows 7 fluently between machines and VMs. While a little disorienting sometimes, I am finally over liking one OS over another because of familiarity. I can pretty much choose at any moment which OS to use for a particular task - especially since my files are all shared between OS's (using VMWare to share files across OS's on one computer, and Live Sync to sync files an other computers.)

It turns out that one of the most important and frequent tasks is to access files, and the interfaces for doing so differ dramatically between operating systems - and in this case, OS X is the clear loser - at least for my use. These two screenshots show the best configurations of the same folder on OS X and Win7 (XP is similar to Win7 in the essential issues, so I won't discuss that).

The biggest differences are that:

Win7 shows many more files at once (within a directory) - which means you can do more scanning with your eye, and less with your hands. This is a huge performance win for most searching tasks. There is no view on OS X as dense as this.
Win7 groups folders separately from files (OS X combines folders and files, ordering them alphabetically). Both seem like reasonable approaches theoretically. But once you actually start using it, you quickly realize that navigating among folders and selecting among files are cognitively fairly different tasks - and you typically are doing one or the other. When I am navigating folders, I want to do that. Then, when I am in the right folder, I want to find the file. This decision coupled with the first issue above means that when I navigate folders on OS X, I spend much, much, much longer scrolling through long lists of files in order to get to where I want.
OS X makes common tasks slow and uncommon tasks fast. The most common thing you do with a file is to open it, so there ought to be a single finger, single click way of doing this. On Windows, pressing Enter does the job. But on OS X, it requires two fingers and two clicks to press Command-O. A much less frequent task is to rename a file. Windows, very reasonable, assigns this to the out-of-the-way F2 key. OS X, bizarrely, uses Enter, the single easiest key to press for this uncommon task. WTF?!?
OS X forces you to move your hands between alpha and arrow keys. On Windows, you can navigate the folder hierarchy entirely with your fingers on the alpha keys (i.e., "home row" for touch typists). You press enter on a folder to open the folder and see it's contents and backspace to go up a level. On OS X, you are obligated to move your fingers from the alpha keys to (to type a folder name) to the arrow keys to enter the folder, then back to the alpha keys to type the next folder name, etc. Of course, you could avoid this on OS X by only using the arrow keys - but because of the decision to combine folders and files, that means you must press the down arrow many, many, many times to get to the folder you want before pressing the right arrow to open it. Sigh...
OS X has no concept of focus - only selection. This means you can not use the keyboard to easily control which files are selected. This one is so weird, it took me a while to convince myself it was real. If you have OS X, follow along at home. In Finder with a file or folder selected, hold down the shift key and press the down arrow key two times. You will now have 3 items selected. If you overshot and don't want the bottom item selected, you naturally will press Shift-Up to unselect the 3rd item you just selected. But incredibly, what happens is that the 4th item above the other 3 gets selected. This is because there is no concept in the Finder of the currently focused object. This crucial bit of state isn't kept, and so Finder can't support the most basic interaction techniques.
OS X doesn't remember column widths. HCI 101 teaches "remember what the user does". If it is important enough for a user to do something, then the user interface ought to remember that and use that preference reasonably in the future. But on OS X, if you resize one of the columns, that information is lost as soon as you navigate to a different folder. So if you are moving around a bunch of folders with long filenames, you have to resize the column every single one. This gets pretty darn tiring after about the fifth time.

So, I'm finding that for this, among other reasons, I am spending more and more time on the Windows side of my computer.

How Fog Creek Copilot Saved My Marriage

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bederson) — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 20:24:00 +0000

Imagine this scenario: The night before your wife leaves for an early morning trip to Japan, you fiddle with her laptop, completely destroying her Windows installation. (WinXP was running in VMWare Fusion on a MacBook). No problem, that is why you love VMs, so you spend a few hours and restore her VM, re-setting up Outlook, and send her on her way.

You then get a frantic email from Japan a day or so later saying that Outlook doesn't work, and for 10 days, she has to resort to web email which is exceedingly painful. The hazards of providing tech support to your spouse become abundently clear, and you hope for something simple. But after a day of (slow) emailing back and forth, and eventually some Skype calls, you are stuck, and your wife is starting to get unhappy.

Then, you remember Copilot, and cross your fingers. Copilot is Fog Creek's product that lets you remotely control a computer ($5 for 24 hours, and free on weekends). The concept is old, but Copilot packages up this feature to work well across a wide variety of computer and network scenarios with super simple setup. And this, of course, was the key since I couldn't install any software or set this up in advance.

Long story short, I got to my wife's laptop's screen, could control her VM, and figured out that somehow a network setting on her VM was screwed up. I changed the setting, and everything started working.

Now, the remote control was unreasonably slow, but Fog Creek just announced a major speedup (which I haven't tested yet). But still, there are times when there is no other solution but remote control, and Copilot is the best solution of this kind I've seen.

Anyway, thank you Fog Creek. You saved my marriage - or at least gave me some points back.

Windows 7 Taskbar - so close ...

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bederson) — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 21:06:00 +0000

As I said in this Technology Review article, I like the Windows 7 UI. Microsoft really polished the Vista UI and removed most of the gravel. They paid attention to so much detail, even improving the behavior of basic keyboard navigation in Windows Explorer to make it work well again (like it used to XP). So, I was surprised that they flubbed something so basic in the Taskbar, which they generally put so much love into.

Look at this picture (running without Aero, which still isn't supported on VMWare Fusion). One of the key tasks in a toolbar is to be able to determine which applications are running just by looking. It is possible to do so with the above visual representation, but it is really hard.

If you look carefully, you will notice that the 1st, 3rd, and 5th applications are currently active (Firefox, Word, and Snip). But it is so hard to tell because the visual representation of running applications is a simple rectangle around the edge of the icon. In this situation, this just doesn't work for a few reasons:

The top and bottom edges of the rectangle are lost because they run up against the edges of the toolbar
The left and right edges of the rectangle are exactly midway between the icon they intend to indicate, and the neighboring icon. Thus, you can't tell which icon is being highlighted.
In general, rectangular outlines are a poor way to highlight objects because when a person's eye is focused on an icon, it is a "global" cognitive task to integrate lines around the edge and determine that they surround an object. Alternatively, a much simpler "local" cognitive task is to determine the background color, or if a simple visual indicator is present. (Umm, see a competing operating system to see how well a little glowing triangle under the active application works for this task).

Overall, this is actually good news. I have to look pretty closely to find stuff to criticize, and admittedly, knowing which applications are currently running is not the most important task, so this is definitely not a dealbreaker, and overall, Windows 7 looks pretty good.

But this is pretty straightforward stuff, and it should really be perfect.

Viking Dishwasher Problems

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bederson) — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 16:17:00 +0000

My colleague, Ben Shneiderman, recently moved into a new apartment with a fancy dishwasher (that had been installed before he had any say) with a real interface blooper.

The Viking Design Series dishwasher has a feature to emit a short beeping signal to indicate that the washing is done. You might think it logical to have a toggle switch or button to set this signal on/off as well as indicate its current state. However, the complex steps and lack of feedback of state are described in the user manual:

Activating the End-of-Program Signal

The unit can be programmed to emit a short signal when the program is finished. To program this feature, follow the steps below:

1. Turn off the power to the machine.
2. Press and hold down the Delay Start button as you turn on the power of the machine. The Delay Start button will flash.
3. Release the button.
4. Press the Program button. The Pots/Pans button will glow to indicate the end-of-program signal is activated.
5. Press the start/stop button to store the settings.

To deactivate the signal, repeat the steps above. The Pots/Pans button will go out to indicate the signal is off.

Incredibly enough, to activate the program done signal, you have to deal with five buttons: Power, Delay Start, Program, Pots/Pans, and Start/Stop in a manner that completely overrides the buttons labeled usage. This is an expensive dishwasher so saving manufacturing costs was not a serious concern for the designers, but obviously neither was their concern for users.

The fight for usability continues...

International Children's Digital Library now available on iPhone

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bederson) — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 11:17:00 +0000

One of my largest research efforts at the Human-Computer Interaction Lab is the International Children's Digital Library (www.childrenslibrary.org), which continues to grow in stature and global recognition. We have recently added several hundred books and deployed two HCIL innovations that taken together allow book text to be clearly displayed even when surrounded by deep colors and lush illustrations, which we find so often in the ICDL's children's picture books. And this is not all. This work also allows us to manipulate the text to varying degrees, which in turn allows us to offer beautiful, well placed translations, on the page. The exemplary books of the ICDL have never been more readable.

And now, we have taken the ICDL mobile.

In support of the library's vision of making as many books available to as many children as possible, the ICDL is now open on a variety of mobile devices. You can already visit the Library from the small and wondrous devices made available to children around the world by the One Laptop Per Child organization and on Intel's ClassmatePC educational laptop. And now, as of this week, you can tap your Apple iPhone or iPod Touch to get the free ICDL for iPhone app and read all about the six Mongolia brothers in search of knowledge, the gray peacemaker cat that does something most unusual to the other cat's ears, or a version of the Three Little Pigs that you surely have never heard before. The initial four books will be updated over time as we offer more books from our much larger collection.

FolderShare, Live Sync, Live Mesh???

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bederson) — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 17:07:00 +0000

Ok, it is has been two years since Microsoft bought ByteTaxi's FolderShare and rebranded it as Microsoft FolderShare. Aside from keeping it running, putting the Mac version on life support, and killing off the fee-based "pro" version, they haven't done much. But today I received the email below from their team.

WTF? How could MS be pushing Live Sync and Live Mesh at the same time when the products are nearly indistinguishable??? And with each not mentioning the other and without any indication of how users should decide which product to use. Does Microsoft know that they are investing in two very similar and competing products?

And to abandon their existing customers with no automatic transition path, and to warn them they will probably not even be able to get in, and that they should manually copy the names of their folders and sharers onto what, paper? Plus, I'll make a bet that the reason for this is so that they can abandon mac support without ever saying so.

FolderShare runs on the mac - but the encryption is totally broken so you have to run it without encryption, and it is an old pre-Intel binary so it runs only in the emulator and hogs a huge amount of processor time.

Live Mesh, which theoretically runs on the mac has a bug so it works great - as long as you only want to share folders on your desktop. I can't get it to share any other folders. (Yes, I have reported this, but to no avail).

And there still is no paid "pro" service - which is probably the one MS service I *would* pay for.

Oh, and it is still "beta" after two years of buying ByteTaxi and being version 2.0.

Sigh...

Change

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bederson) — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 16:28:00 +0000

Sometimes the most obvious ideas are the hardest ones to have. Who could imagine in our recent political climate that the executive branch of our government would open the floodgates to ask the entire world for their advise on how to set up the government? The thinking of the status quo might think that is a sign of weakness - but of course the "new" model interprets this as a sign of strength. To ask for other's opinions shows that you are sure in what you know, and that you don't know everything. Yesterday, the Obama office of the President-Elect announced www.change.gov, a site asking for advise and ideas on every policy issue.

That is, interestingly enough, the essence of the approach of interface designers. Designers are experts. They are confident in balancing the many conflicting requirements of what it takes to solve hard problems. They also know that they don't know everything - and thus the work with their users through particpatory design and a million other approaches for learning from the broadest set of stakeholders.

It looks like our new government is thinking the same way that us HCI'ers have for decades.

Design for Democracy

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bederson) — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 22:40:00 +0000

For election day, I want to point to some fantastic work exploring how to improve the design of voting ballots and other material related to elections. Marcia Lausen's book, "Design for Democracy: Ballot + Election Design", part of the related AIGA Design for Democracy project does the job. She presents case studies, showing problematic designs and very clear and simple redesigns that addresses their problems. The lead example is to look at the infamous butterfly ballot of 2000, and she makes the case very clearly that while the constraints inherent in these problems make for a hard design problem, it is still possible to have a clear solution. She then goes further to express general design principles that can be applied to a broad range of specific situations. And she goes beyond just ballots, looking at voter registration, election administration, and more general election design issues.

Unfortunately, the reality of our voting landscape makes it so that the vendors don't act like they care much about these issues, and the politicians that manage elections don't seem to have the skills or resources to implement good solutions. But hopefully, the clear direction and advice that comes with this book will help.

Why I returned my Apple TV

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bederson) — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 12:58:00 +0000

In my continuing quest to make my life easier, I thought I'd try Apple TV to avoid driving to the video store (which is long past being tolerable to me), and to get some actual HD content for my year-old HDTV.

Like many things Apple, it is brilliant in so many ways, while falling flat in others. In this case, the problems, interestingly, are interface and content. They nailed the core issues (which is why I bought it in the first place), which are ease of access and integration. You can browse the store on your TV (without having to use your computer), download stuff - and automatically sync with your computer and iPhone so all your stuff is wherever you want it, and all automatically backed up. But this is where the magic ends.

The interface, while glossy, lush and beautiful, is hugely harmed by that puny little remote control. After using the Tivo for a year, and enjoying the world's best remote control, Apple's was just too pathetic to use. It is so small that it was at huge risk of being lost, and we had to institute strict family rules about its placement. The buttons are so hard to press, that I actually started to get AppleTV-thumb and had to switch fingers to press it. And the interface is totally image based - there is no way to link through metadata. You can't find an interesting movie, and look for others with the same actor, etc.

As for content, well at first glance it looks good, but it just isn't very deep. I knew the numbers were low compared to other options, but I didn't realize that the HD content is almost nonexistent. And given that my tastes don't seem to run in the same direction as Apple's very mainstream content, I could only find a handful of HD movies that I actually wanted to watch.

Then, just as I began to realize that these were going to be very high priced movies for which I would also have to endure a pained thumb, Netflix announced their upcoming distribution for 12,000 shows on Tivo. I had one day left to return my Apple TV, and so I did.

Steve Jobs has been calling Apple TV his "hobby", to avoid the criticism about it's lackluster performance. I should have listened to him.