HCI User Advocate

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.

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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.

PPTPlex - Zoomable presentations not quite yet for the masses

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bederson) — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 14:00:00 +0000

Figuring out the clearest and most engaging way to communicate ideas is fundamentally important. The world seems to have settled on just a few key approaches: Text, video, and computer presentations along the lines of PowerPoint (or Keynote). The latter, as we all know, are valuable for their ease of creation, and ubiquity of authoring tools. However, they also tend to be boring, and in presentations of any length, the audience can get lost and not know where they are.

I created a PowerPoint plugin called CounterPoint back in 2001 with then grad student Lance Good. It offered a pretty sophisticated mechanism to create zoomable presentations consisting of PowerPoint slides. But the authoring tool was pretty clunky, and its dependency on Java made deployment pretty difficult.

So, I was delighted to see that Microsoft Labs recently put out PPTPlex, which is remarkably similar in spirit to CounterPoint. They created a plugin for PowerPoint which makes a reasonable trade-off of much, much more accessible and simpler authoring tools - and much less creative flexibilty. Still, this is probably the right move to consider commercializing this kind of approach. I was delighted to try it out, and sure enough, the authoring was simple enough that I was able to create a 70 slide "vision" talk on the future of HCI (with Allison Druin) using it quite readily.

Sadly, I wasn't able to use PPTPlex for my presentation because the technology was just not up to it. It seems to rasterize every slide - which not only takes a long time, but uses a *huge* amount of memory. My presentation actually used over a Gigabyte of RAM! And then PowerPoint (with PPTPlex) crashed. So, instead, I tried something else.

I was able to duplicate most of the visual feel that PPTPlex offered entirely with plain vanilla PowerPoint animations. I suffered by performing unnatural acts with PowerPoint to build the animations I wanted - but my PowerPoint ninja buddy John SanGiovanni had taught me the art, so I created the following presentation which I presented with Allison Druin at CMU last month. Take a look - and be sure to look at the PowerPoint presentation (15 MB) in Show mode to see the full transitions.

What do you think?

The wonder of single tasking

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bederson) — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 13:09:00 +0000

The NY Times has yet another article on the inherent human limitations of multitasking (some previous ones here, here, and here). While we all love to do several things at once, the reality is that we can't do so effectively, and there is more and more research that supports this.

This is one of those issues where we all know this essential truth, but just don't follow it. And the nature of innovation means that we will have more and more communication and information technologies (think historically: phone, email, web, IM, texting, social networks, etc.) And there are plenty of researchers trying to figure how the best way to interrupt you to deliver more information.

So, at the moment, this means people actually have to take responsibility for themselves while we interface designers figure out how to bring these disparate information sources together in a way that increases, not decreases focus. I've discussed this before and just wrote a new essay relating these issues to how children read online.

AT&T still nasty about service plans

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bederson) — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 13:25:00 +0000

So, you thought you remembered reading about how the cell phone carriers were going to be getting friendlier to their customers about their service contract cancellation policies? Ha!

I am as loyal an AT&T customer as you are likely to find. I have a $200 monthly bill with three lines. My 3rd line is for software development, and I brought my own phone to the plan - that is, I did not use a carrier subsidy to discount the price of the phone. So, imagine my suprise (ok, not really) when I called to cancel this third line. I was told that not only would they charge me a cancellation fee of $175, but that despite the news recently of them prorating these cancellation fees, they would not prorate my cancellation fee. Why? Because I had a pre-existing contract, and they were only pro-rating new contracts. (And how can they justify a two-year contract when they didn't provide a subsidy? Because they can.)

To make matters worse, when I asked to speak with a manager, they said that "no manager was available", and that they had a policy of not calling customers back - but I was free to try to call again later.

Boy is AT&T lucky they have an exclusive deal with Apple. I sure hope that Google's efforts to make a more competitive marketplace for communications services gets some traction.

For the record, here are the details of my call:

"no manager available" - Wed at 9:30am EST. Wouldn't call back when one was available.
My service is for 3 lines, $200/month, 3rd line for 1 yr 4 mo
The line I was trying to cancel was with my own phone and had no carrier subsidy
They still would charge a $175 cancellation charge that wasn't pro-rated - this policy started in last three months and isn't applied retroactively.
I spoke with "Hela"

A Tale of 2 Dead Disks - Why Macs Make People Happy

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bederson) — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 11:50:00 +0000

I got back last night from a week in Seattle to see that my MacPro was dead - wouldn't boot, and I could hear the disk doing a repetitive not-happy-kind-of noise. I had another disk in the computer I had used for random backups, and a remote Time Capsule disk that theoretically had been making continuous backups - so this is what I did:

Rebooted off Leopard DVD
Selected restore from Time Capsule to restore to that second disk
Went to bed

Total time: 10 minutes
This morning I have a Happy Mac.

Holy crap - when my wife's disk died on her laptop last month, I had the worst possible combination of all eventualities, and it took me about 10 hours to fix!

If only Macs had good office software, they would so rule.

Google owns your name with Picasa name tagging

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bederson) — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 13:33:00 +0000

The new Picasa Web Albums have initial support for a fantastic name-tagging feature. The idea is to ease the process of identifying who is in each picture by combining human and computer efforts. It is very well done, and makes tagging fun and accurate in a way never done before commercially (but see SAPHARI for a surprisingly similar earlier research effort by my grad student).

BUT - it is a crime that this feature not does not offer a way to sync the tags you create online with the full resolution photos you own on your own computer. That's right. The only way to use this feature is to upload your photos to Google's servers, tag them via their website, and then lose that data forever. You can search your photos on Google's servers, but you can't export that tagged information. And the Picasa 3 "syncing" feature doesn't sync the name tags back down to the original photo. And the face-based annotation feature doesn't exist on the desktop version.

And even if the data does eventually come back down to your source photos (which I pray it eventually does), it still is not very friendly of Google to force you to upload your thousands of photos to the web for this extremely important feature. Of course, this is very likely Picasa's business model. Give away the free desktop version, offer a teaser bit of free storage on the web, and then charge a huge amount ($75 a year for the 40 GB of storage I would need to store all my photos online). I would much rather just pay a reasonable price for the desktop version to unlock crucial features - such as face-based annotation.

Web apps are fine - but people should own their data - not Google. And people should get to choose when they want to do something on the computers and disks they own, and when they choose to use someone elses on the web. Anything less is no better than the desktop-based lock-in that Google and others have complained about for so long.

Missing Chrome keyboard shortcuts

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bederson) — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 12:48:00 +0000

Chrome (Google's browser that was released yesterday) is all the rage, and as I've said for years (i.e., flow [pdf], notelens), user interface speed and responsiveness is crucial and a fundamental part of not getting in the way of tasks users are trying to do.

So, I hope it is an oversight and not design that led Google to leave out two crucial keyboard.

Their "omnibar" works fine - except for a one thing. When you start typing and the list of suggestions pops up underneath, you have to move your fingers off the home position of the keyboard to the arrow keys in order to select them. This may be the "standard" way of doing things, but Firefox already showed it isn't the best. In this special case, override the tab key to move focus to the popup list. Fingers stay in the home position, and a touch typist can do a search and execute it in a fraction of a second.
It is great that chrome supports incremental search - but considering that they learned from Firefox, I wish they had gotten it right. Instead of a single key to start search ('/' in Firefox), you need two (Ctrl-F). And if you search to a link and want to follow that link, there is no way to do so with the keyboard. Pressing the 'Enter' key in Firefox while search has highlighted a link follows that link. Chrome should do the same thing.

These issues may seem minor, but they are activities that people, literally, do hundreds of times per day. Multiple a hundred million people by a hundred annoyances a day, and that is a lot of distraction, and slowing people down. Considering that there is also no cost for doing so (i.e., it doesn't hurt the user experience in any way), let's hope Google continues to polish their chrome, and adds these shortcuts.

While they're at it, they should be thinking about the next (lower priority) feature which is to add a rich mechanism for people to customize chrome to speed up their own idiosyncratic tasks. How many times do I do repetitive tasks on websites that I can't automate or shortcut for various reasons? A lot. Example: one website requires three clicks to get where I'm going *after* I log in - meaning I can't shortcut to that page. I could use third party software such as Quickkeys to automate this, but the browser should have a built-in mechanism to do so.

Anyway, Chrome looks promising - let's just hope they go from great to perfect.

Good customer service

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bederson) — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 01:54:00 +0000

My 3 year old was happy to be in the car the other day with her older sister's MacBook watching a DVD. Then, unbeknownst to us, she decided to watch another one and inserted a DVD by herself. The only problem is that she didn't take the first one out first. I immediately knew where this was heading.

A trip to the Apple store showed how clever I was to predict that we very likely lost both DVDs and the drive. At least they were very friendly and apologetic that it wasn't covered under warranty - which I could hardly complain about. So I agreed to the $300 estimated repair cost, and was told it would be ready in about 2 days. And here is where it gets interesting.

After 7 days, I called the store to find that they still hadn't fixed it. They were super friendly, and promised to call right back when they could tell me more. I figured it would be another week before I even got through to them. But 10 minutes later, they called me back, apologized again, and promised it would be ready later that afternoon. Again, I figured that meant I might see it in a week. But an hour later, they called me back saying it was done and I could pick it up. I was already pretty happy that they recognized the mistake in their delayed repair and bumped it to the top of the queue so easily.

So, imagine my surprise when they called me back a *third* time, not 10 minutes later. They said they hadn't realized this wasn't under warranty and that I was paying for it. Given the extent of their delay, they said they wouldn't charge me, and have a nice day.

I was flabbergasted. I am a completely regular customer. I didn't pull rank (as if I had any), or promise to expose them. In fact, I wasn't even that concerned by the delay in the first place. And completely on their own, they not only took complete responsibility and gave an actual apology (rather than the all-too-common non-apology), and gave me a $361.56 credit without my asking for it.

I am already about 60% switched from Windows, but if using Apple means I can get customer service like that instead of Dell's or Lenovo's, I'm up to 70%.

on Randy Pausch

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bederson) — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 16:29:00 +0000

Allison Druin wrote her thoughts about Randy Pausch's death better than I ever could, so here they are:

-----------------------

Last night I tried to write this email, but the words never came. All I could do was spend time with YouTube and Google, watching, reading, and thinking about Randy Pausch who died that day. As most of the world now knows, Randy was much more than a computer science/HCI/VR professor at CMU. He gave a talk last Fall, something most of us academics do day-in-and-day-out. But instead of enjoying the moment with a few students and perhaps some interested colleagues, the moment ultimately was shared with the world.

The video

Randy did something few of us could do-- he shared his thoughts, energies, and talents even as he was dying of cancer.

Ben B. and I were blessed with knowing Randy as a colleague and early mentor. Our first year at the HCIL, Randy attended the Annual Symposium

-- and it was then we first spent time with him, giving us advice that was a wonderful mix of dry wit, bold honesty, and endless energy. This may be the only way I can describe Randy last Fall in Pittsburgh, as we sat in the audience listening to Randy's last lecture. We cried, we laughed, we learned, and we felt honored to be there. After the lecture we were able to give Randy a big hug and tell him that he was our hero.

So after a long week at the HCIL filled with police, frustration, and sadness-- two bits of advice from Randy seem good to remember:

"Experience is what you get when you didn't get what you wanted."

"We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand."

For more words about Randy and his passing:

Oh yes, and my favorite Randy-isms: "... remember, the brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. Because the brick walls are there to stop the people who don't want it badly enough. They're there to stop the other people...Don't bail. The best of the gold's at the bottom of barrels..."

"...be prepared. Luck is truly where preparation meets opportunity."

Allison

==========================================

Dr. Allison Druin
Director, Human-Computer Interaction Lab
Associate Professor University of Maryland College of Information Studies and
Institute for Advanced Computer Studies