Kilobytes in a hurricane

Popping up out of retirement to celebrate Grove's newly-launched support for text-only news sites for member stations, as reported by Joshua Benton for Nieman Lab.

Mini-rant

Looking forward to the day when I no longer hear, without definition, the phrase "on prem." Ugly, jargony, and unecessarily obscure.

Worth it

Janice Keihanaikukauakahihuliheekahaunaele, a name for database schema and user experience designers to reckon with.

Circling the sqare

C. Y. Gopinath redesigns the keypad for a calculator.

Click click

Cameron how-to page meets reality.

Leave no rider behind

Two very different solutions to the user experience problem of vending a card for riding the subway, from New York's MTA and the Bay Area's BART. I love the hand-drawn flow charts by Aaron Reiss.

When Antenna Design came in, commuters were having a hard time adjusting to a pay-first interface, a system much like BART’s current ticket machines. “I saw immediately that wasn’t going to work,” said [Masamichi] Udagawa, “the interface was a big problem.”

New Yorkers simply didn’t trust the machines.

Embrace change, and design for it

Laura Sydell profiles Barbara Beskind: retired Army occupational therapist, holder of six patents, 90-year-old designer for IDEO.

"Everybody who ages is going to be their own problem-solver," she says.

Survey design 101

Back when I worked at Vovici, I saw my share of badly designed online surveys. Great sweeping masses of matrix questions were always popular, alas. One of the services we provided was consulting with our customers to make their surveys more sensible and thereby to improve completion rates.

Because I once had this professional interest, and because I actually have a graduate degree with a concentration in marketing and market research, I try to respond to solicitations to take a survey. And if I see that it's poorly designed, I have no compunction about bailing out after the first page. Forcing an answer to a question where my response is really "don't know/don't care" especially peeves me.

DCist's 2011 readership survey, therefore, comes as a pleasant surprise. It's short and to the effing point (three pages plus the thank-you page), that is, it's focused on getting business intelligence in just a few areas. All the intrusive (for some people) demographic questions are on the last page, where they should be, so the respondent can skip them if he chooses to. This is not the sort of survey you usually see hosted by the free service SurveyMonkey. The only quibble I have is that the demographic questions are required-response.

But it's this sequence of "don't care" response alternatives that tickles me.

8. What device(s) do you use to get your TV programming? Check all that apply.

• Computer


• A television


• Apple TV/Google TV/Boxee


• Game Console


• Smartphone


• Tablet (iPad, Playbook, etc.)


• I don't watch TV


• Other (please specify)

9. What service(s) do you use to access your TV shows? Check all that apply.

• Local network TV


• Cable/Satellite/FIOS TV


• Network sites (NBC.com, ABC.com)


• Free streaming video sites (Hulu, Veoh)


• Premium streaming video sites (Hulu, Netflix)


• Subscriber exclusive apps (HBO Go, TWCable App, etc.)


• I don't watch TV


• Other (please specify)

10. What kind of TV programming do you enjoy? Check all that apply.

• Drama


• News


• Sci-fi


• Sports


• Movies


• Educational


• Reality


• Comedy


• Food & Home


• I told you I don't watch TV, dammit!


• Other (please specify)

Finally

I don't know whether I'll participate much in Atwood and Spolsky's new collaboration site for software developers, Stack Overflow, but I'll say this much for it: it's the first site that I've walked up to and all I needed was an OpenID to register.

A directory: 1

Via wood s lot, Jessica Hupp lists her top 100 blogs in user-centered web design.

Touch me

Eric Burke explains simplicity in three sketches. I've recently worked with a scary app that makes Burke's #3 look crystalline, by comparison.

How not to do it

Mark Liberman points to his own irreverent guide to using the web interface to FacilityFocus, an automated system for submitting and tracking building maintenance requests on the University of Pennsylvania campus. The irreverence is necessary, because the interface is appallingly bad. Consider Step 2 in Liberman's guide, which helps you get past a search page that also gateways the "add new work request" page:

You may be tempted to fill out some of the 23 temptingly-empty text boxes on this screen, with information like e-Mail (that's easy) and "Desired Date" (that one's a little personal, don't you think?) -- BUT DON'T! This is a search screen, and you've got nothing to search for yet, since you haven't actually gotten your work request into the system.

Yes, I know that it says "Search Criteria Required!" at the top of the screen, in red letters, with an exclamation point. But that's just to fool you into thinking that search criteria are required. In fact, the only thing that's required (or even permitted!) for you to do at this point is to click on the large button labelled "Insert" at the top of the page...

It only gets worse. The popups for specifying what the problem is, and in what building, are populated with pages and pages of codes, and apparently these can't be sorted (it's a little hard to tell from the screen shots). A column labelled PROBLEM DESC has unhelpful entries like "HVAC" (Liberman glosses this abbreviation for the users), "HOT," and "COLD." Does "HOT" mean "it's too hot" or "I need more heat"?

Liberman, who wrote the guide as if it were a handbook for an adventure/role-playing game, comments:

But adventure-game interaction is really the wrong metaphor. The designers of good adventure games have a excellent idea of what their target users are like, and they've carefully planned and tested for their users' reactions to each display and each event in the game. The obscurity and difficulty of the interaction is carefully crafted to be suspenseful, entertaining -- and eventually overcome. In contrast, an interface like FacilityFocus seems to be "mind blind". The obscurity and difficulty of the interaction is a random result of an apparent failure to try to model user reactions at all.

Don't Make Me Think

Here's a couple of snippets from Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability. He makes some points that are pretty obvious, but easy to overlook.

Pulldowns are most effective for alphabetized lists of items with known names, like countries, states, or products, because there's no thought involved. If I'm looking for VCRs, for instance, I can just scroll down to the V's.

But they're much less effective for lists where I don't lnow the name of the thing I'm looking for, especially if the list isn't alphabetized or is long enough to require scrolling. (p. 110)

...the Web experience is missing many of the cues we've relied on all our lives to negotiate spaces. Consider these oddities of Web space:

No sense of scale. Even after we've used a Web site extensively, unless it's a very small site we tend to have very little sense of how big it is (50 pages? 1,000? 17,000?). For all we know, there could be huge corners we've never explored. Compare this to a magazine, a museum, or a department store, where you always have at least a rough sense of the seen/unseen ratio.

The practical result if that it's very hard to know whether you've seen everything of interest in a site, which means it's hard to know when to stop looking.

This is one reason why it's useful for links that we've already clicked on to display in a different color. It gives us some small sense of how much ground we've covered. (p. 57 and note)

Imagine a browser extension that lets you specify how soon to revert links to the univisited color on a per-domain basis, instead of the global setting that Internet Explorer and Firefox provide. I would be all over that.