It Was The Best Of Forms, It Was The Worst Of Forms

Years ago, I remember an article on computer usability. They had an example of an online form where you had to choose the city you were from. This form was used by people from all over the US, so when you type in the city name, if there was more than one city by that name in the country, it would have to ask which state before proceeding. The usability experts suggested that this was poor design, since the vast majority of people who type, "Boston" will be from the famous Boston in Massachusetts, but they will have to select it from a list of all the pokey little Bostons around the US.

This article suggested that web site should just send you to the page for Boston, Massachusetts, and make the citizens of other Bostons have to click a link to go to another Boston. (That's sort of how Wikipedia works: If you search for Boston, it sends you to the Boston MA page, and forces you to choose the "Disambiguation Page" to choose a different Boston.) At the time, I - being from a small town - thought that was an unfair approach. Yes, I know, I'm forcing the 4.6 million people in the greater Boston area to pick their city our of a list, just for the sake of a few hundred people from other Bostons. But hey, equality and all that. If Vermont gets as many senators as California, then Bostonians can make an extra click.

Well, after another decade or so of filling in forms online, I take that back. Kitchener, British Columbia, I hate you. You may only be a few streets in the Kootenays, but some people seem to think you deserve to be listed in online forms, instead of rolling you in with Cranbrook. If it was, say, Kitchener, Saskatchewan, then we'd at least be at the top of the list by alphabetical order and we wouldn't have to scroll down. But no, we have to key down to miss the few hundred of you or whatever; I don't even know the population, because you don't even get your own Wikipedia page.

Look, "Kitchener" isn't a great name. It sounds weird, and it honours a really despicable man. So you'd think we could at least have it to ourselves. And unlike Ontarians, British Columbians are great at naming things. I mean, Kamloops, Nanaimo, Chilliwack, Kelowna. So please, leave us to our strange name.

Sticking Around

Here's something I've always wondered:

When they were making the first video game consoles in the 1970's, they needed a device that could be a generic control for any type of game.  So they borrowed the concept of the "joystick" from the world of aviation, where it had been used for close to seventy years.

Once the video game industry got its hands on the concept, it took about 25 years to mutate into this:

Meanwhile, aviation still uses this:

detail from "Airbus A380 cockpit" by Naddsy - http://www.flickr.com/photos/83823904@N00/64156219/. Licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Commons.

That picture is from the Airbus A380, the super-jumbo flagship from one of the world's biggest aerospace companies, and yet it's being controlled by something that looks like it plugged in to my old Commodore 64. 

So one industry must know something the other doesn't. We'll have to see if over time gaming's innovations leak back to aviation, and pilots of the future will be hunched over grasping a controller with both hands, hoping they don't drop it during a landing.

Dyson's Fear

There's a classic book on making things usable called, The Design of Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman. It's a useful book for understanding how to make the devices around us easier to use.

One thing Norman rails against is arbitrarily changing standardized designs. There are a lot of things that aren't obvious, but don't cause problems because there are accepted layouts. You don't need instruction on how to drive a new car, because the controls are standard. This in spite of the fact that the standard steering wheel and pedals is not exactly obvious in its use.

Because of this principle, Norman doesn’t like faucets that have the one control that you turn to change the temperature and pull or push to control the amount of water. He figures the standard of two controls with the hot on the left is well known world-wide and should be maintained. I have to disagree with him here; the one-control kind is easier to use, since the two qualities of the water (temperature and volume) can easily be adjusted independently of one another. And that type of control has become popular enough that it is now a well-known standard of its own.

But there’s something we can all agree on: The new Dyson Tap design sucks. It is a sensor-driven, no-touch tap like many in today’s public washrooms, but being a Dyson product, it has to involve moving air. Sure enough, it has a built-in hand drier, so you can do all your hand-washing business without moving.

The trouble is, it’s far from obvious how it should be used. It looks like handlebars, so I assumed you have to do something with the bits sticking out the side. But no, you just hold your hands under them. More or less - the sensors seemed to be misaligned on the one I used. There are instructions etched on the tap itself, but the vague pictures of hands and arrows didn’t explain much.

I could have taken a picture of it, but you can just look that up at the link. Instead, I’ll include a picture of the instructions they had to print out to explain the new taps.

But there's one more problem.  I couldn't find the soap.  There were no soap containers in the washroom where I found these taps, and soap is not mentioned at the Dyson site, or any of the news stories I found about the tap.  So credit to Britain's Daily Mail, the only people who noticed the lack of soap.  This makes me wonder if people have really been washing their hands all these years.  Forgive me if I don't shake your hand.

Somebody Call Dick Tracy

Apple released its latest iPhones, and they come with improvements in... who cares, they've finally got a watch!  It's still months away though, so we don't know all the details, and so far, it seems a little disappointing.  It looks like... a watch.  It's not as clunky as earlier smart watches, but it still does look like a digital watch, with a big rectangle on a much-thinner strap.

They even kept the little wheel at the side - not to wind it, but as an input device for when the tiny screen would be obscured by using on-screen controls.  Which makes me think: 1. haven't they noticed that those wheels aren't easy to use? Ask me in the middle of the daylight-saving shift if I wouldn't give up the wheel for setting the time with a touch screen.  And 2.  The original Blackberry (the one that looked like a pager) also had a wheel to navigate its functions: just one more reason for them to curse fate.

It sounds like they've got the right idea usability-wise by not just making it a mini-iPhone, and instead giving it a new paradigm.  But stylisticly it's not even as good as Samsung's smartwatches. I guess the disappointment is that the iPhone didn't look like previous phones, mobile or otherwise: it created its own, cleaner style.  That's kind of what the Pebble did with watches.  The iWatch barely even looks better than this fake Windows watch.

Calculating Dog

One thing I discovered in software development is that you have to distinguish between the user's problems and the user's solutions to those problems. A great example of this concept is Henry Ford's quote that of he had asked customers at the start of his career what he could do to improve their transportation problems, they would have asked for faster horses.  Instead, he concentrated on the customer's problem (transportation) but created his own situation.  Okay, it turns out he probably never said that, but you get the point.

That sounds obvious when we're looking at a situation a century in the past, but today it's not so easy to ignore the user's suggestions. The computer biz has a bad history of ignoring the customer's needs all together, so ignoring user suggestions, even in the name of innovation, will be frowned upon.

One thing users will always ask for is a simple button.  That is, they'll ask why they have to dig through menus and dialog boxes to accomplish something, why can't they just hit a button.  The problem with that is that with much modern software, if there is a button for each task it's capable of, the screen will be covered with buttons.  It will be impossible to find the button you're looking for, and it will be even harder to use.

A good example is here on my laptop, which has a number of dedicated keys for launching programs such as e-mail and the web browser.  Personally, I find that a waste of the precious real estate of a laptop keyboard.  I launch the browser once and then leave it open, and I get email through the web, so I don't need a special key to make it easier to get to either.

But the big fury-inducer on this keyboard is the button to launch the calculator.  How often does a person use the calculator on a computer anyway?  It's only needed for that little gap between math that's faster to do in your head, and math that's part of a more sophisticated program like a spreadsheet or an accounting application.  And yet, I can launch it with one stroke of a pinky.  I have to admit, I have used the key.  But the number of times I've intentionally use it is infinitesimal compared to the number of times I've accidentally hit it.  What's worse, it's right beside the Control Key, so if I do hit it by accident, I'm usually holding it down while hitting another key.  On a few occasions I have completely filled the screen with calculator windows.

Get The Cyber-Grout

Just wondering, who decided that the best way to arrange things on a computer screen is through a bunch of barely organized tiles.  It used to be that everything was organized in a simple list.  But that's passé, apparently.  Google+ used to be a list, but now it has the tiles too.  Facebook is probably like that by now, I should log in again and check.

What worries me about this is that as far as I can tell, the trend started with Microsoft.  They introduced the tiles for Windows Phone, and the new interface for Windows 8 that everyone hates.  Flickr just adopted it for it's relaunch, and it's slowly spreading.  

That's just not how this is supposed to work.  Apple is the one you copy user interfaces from.  Maybe everyone assumed that with Microsoft so boldly adopting the new paradigm, they must have copied it from Apple.  But is Apple using tiles?  No, their products still use nice elegant grids and lists of things.

Worse, when I just looked it up at Wikipedia, I find out that the whole thing comes from the Zune!  Why not copy Windows Vista while you're at it?