Usability Notes - by Chris Baker

UI design - taking "no" for an answer

From time to time, I get the following pop-up about an online backup system which, as it happens, does not interest me. The options it gives me are "Remind me later" and "Activate Trial". There's no obvious "No Thanks" button. I guess there is a balance: an obvious No Thanks allows people to opt out first time, who might otherwise eventually have decided to give the system a try. But on the other hand, being driven down a path that suits the vendor and not me is nearly as irritating as those switcheroo buttons I blogged about in a WinZip nag screen.

Update 15 June 2011 -

Aha, I am now being offerred an exit - a "Do not remind me again" option is now appearing ....

 

Reviewing your unwritten plan

How often do you join a project and find that the documentation tells you all you want to know? Yep - never works completely for me, either. In "Your Crucial - and Unwritten - Plan"  (Linda Hill & Kent Lineback - Harvard Business Review) the authors give one important reason for this - our written plans are rapidly supplemented or superceded by a  constantly evolving unwritten plan. It' not just that most of us don't make the time to update our written plans at every twist and turn - the unwritten plan is a different beast altogether:

In sum, a written plan covers only those portions of your thinking that are clear, specific, focused, thought-through, and ready to go public as a formal (and often official) document bearing the title "Plan." Unwritten plans consist of your and your group's thoughts — ranging from vague hunches to roughly-written ideas — about the future and how all of you will create it. Formal, written plans are prepared at key points, while unwritten plans are living, dynamic possibilities that constantly change as you learn more from experience and carry on discussions with your people and network.

(From Your Crucial - and Unwritten - Plan  (Linda Hill & Kent Lineback - Harvard Business Review, 10 May 2011)

In that case, I was thinking, a key point is to take time to review and evaluate your own unwritten plan. Writing the darned thing down, while time-consuming, might help - it allows you and others to critique it, and allows one to step back from it. The unwritten plan can readily become one that is obsessed by the next milestone, or fatally discounts a certain risk or suffers from other forms of myopia. But a periodic write-up may not be the whole solution - vague feelings of unease about something can be too nebulous or personal to put into a formal plan (especially if it is to be shared), but can be a really useful indication of trouble ahead. Time out to think about things seems the only way to review the unwritten plan - hard to achieve in today's busy working lives (I used to find my cycle ride to work or a lunchtime walk very useful for this).

 

iPads users in meetings - we can see when you're slacking

On April 3rd, I enjoyed - Tablets to cure our smartphone sicknesses. By Lucy Kellaway (Financial Times).

Discussing the recent decision to allow tablet computers such as the iPad into the UK Parliament, Lucy Kellaway says:

...unlike other gadgets, the iPad is not actually meeting-unfriendly. That is because the screen sits flat on the table and is large enough to give everyone a good view of what you are up to. If MPs wish to shop for groceries, they will have to do so in the public eye. Even e-mailing on an iPad is an unpleasantly exposing activity. The same is not true of a laptop – where the lid affords a certain privacy.

Seems that this theory was recently tested to destruction in a different parliament, the Indonesian one, where a member recently resigned after being filmed watching  explicit videos on his computer during a parliamentary session.

With just one week between these events, that might be a record for theories about an tablet computer being backed up by some evidence :-)

 

ROI of Social Media Marketing: on average, nearly breaking even

Marketing Sherpa have just published their 2011 Social Marketing Benchmark Report.  There's an interesting graph in the promotional email about this report, showing the ROI that marketers are reporting, in a survey of 3,342 responses. The mode is a 95% ROI (25% of respondents) but about 30% of respondents said they were making a profit (i.e. ROI more than 100%). Forty-three percent were not yet in happy street, making an ROI of 50% or less.

 

There are some more samples and stats (and a link to buy the full report) on MarketingSherpa's site

eBook pricing problems

Publishers are now under 2 investigations about price-fixing of eBooks (just investigations - no proof so far that anyone has done anything illegal). Whatever happens, the episode raises some interesting points about how publishers, wholesalers and customers do businesss.

Until recently, publishers typically sold by the Wolesale model. The publisher and wholesaler agree a price and a number of printed books to be shipped to the wholesaler. It is then the wholesaler's business to decide what price to charge their customer. Since the collapse of the Net Book Agreement in the 1990s, a UK publisher has had no legal right to dictate retail prices. Probably that has resulted in a lot of books that I have bought since then have been cheaper for me as a consumer. But it has caused some discomfort in the publishing industry, and probably not just moaning about having to work harder to survive in an industry that has become more competitive.

Critics of the wholesale model say that it leads towards monopolies in book-selling. A wholesaler doing large volume can arm-wrestle better with publishers over terms, and then gain competitive advantage from that lower price. That can drive up market share, enabling the seller to get better terms out of the publisher next time. And so it goes. Moreover, sellers with enough volume can afford to sell some titles as a loss-leader (i.e. making a loss on every copy sold but hoping to make up in other ways). Later Harry Potter novels famously were used as loss-leaders, with stories of small bookshops buying stock from supermarkets and reselling, as they could get a better price there than from the publisher or their usual wholesaler. Only those with deep pockets can loss-lead, and trade magazines at the time had a lot of copy about the fairness of all this.

Perhaps because of these problems, a number of publishers are using the Agency model for eBooks. In this, the publisher and wholesaler agree a price and a percentage commission that the wholesaler gets. With eBooks, it would not be necessary to agree a quantity of copies - the agent could sell what they can and the publisher could find  out how things went from the sales data the seller provides. Apple use this model for iTunes, for example.

But once publishers are again able to set prices (nowadays without legal cover from the Net Book Agreeement) publishers have to be very careful what they discuss with each other, lest they move into cartel land.

It is a confusing time for the industry - I recently was discussing the fate of fiction publishing with my friend the author and lecturer Anthony Nanson. We couldn't decide whether a combination of price-cutting and piracy would render today's publishing models mostly un-economic, or whether there would be a new golden age.

 

 

Multiplication table games - squeebles, Tom Sawyer and the Fence

Multiplication Tables - just about everyone lucky enough to get the benefit of a modern education has to learn them. And although the times tables can be an entry into a world of pleasing patterns, there's usually just no substitute for the chore of memorizing them.

Nearly forty years ago I was at that stage. I remember my parents and I made some flash cards on which I drilled until I had it.  That's not an approach that has been working at all well for my daughter though. So I had a look to see what the world of iphone apps might offer. There are many times tables apps, and I picked on Squeebles . Squeebles is proving quite a success for my daughter- which is a bit of a surprise, since it is basically the app equivalent of flash cards and a star chart.

I suppose that this is yet another illustration of the principle of Tom Sawyer and the Fence
 (the only difference between work you avoid and fun that you crave is whether you think it is work or fun.)

Facebook "friends" and what to call computing concepts

I've recently come across a few newspaper and radio items about Facebook "friends" not being friends in any older sense of the word. The usual observations are that you can have many more Facebook friends than you could have conventional friends; that Facebook friends may include people you don't know in any conventional sense; and that your Facebook friends may not behave in a way that friends traditionally ought. (The last point comes up, for example, in reports of tragedies of people posting suicidal messages on Facebook, but no-one responding seriously).

This is not another one of those articles. Let's take it as settled that Facebook has coined a new sense of the word "friend". Computing often does that  - "mouse", "menu", "password" are examples. When co-opting any word from the real for your interface, the existing resonances are a two-edged sword -  from the name, users may "get" what this function is for, or they may (like the journalists decrying "friends") "get" something else. But it's that or invent new terms ("dongle"), or use old words in a bizarre way ("tweet" in Twitter).

There are a number of usability issues too (and "friends" does well when you think about it in these ways):

• If the term is going to appear on interface buttons, breadcrumb trails etc. it is useful if it is short (so "friend" is better than "aquantaince" - whcih in any case sounds stuffy and posh, so should probably already be rejected on resonance grounds)
• Helpful if the word is easy to spell and to say, so that customers can re-use it easily (so, again, "friend" is better than "aquantaince")
• Use words that will be understood internationally, if you seek an interntaional audience ("Mate" instead of "Friend" might work in the UK or Australia, but perhaps not in the US. "Buddy" the converse, perhaps).
• Avoid words that already have any confusing senses ("Mate" instead of "Friend" might alarm non-native speakers looking it up in a dictionary)

I don't recall other adopted terms ("contacts" in Linked in, "followers" in Twitter) causing as many column inches as "friends" though. Perhaps "friends" is particularly redolent a term, or just particularly useful for "we-are-all-going -to-hell-in-a-bucket" journalism ("Young people today, their "friends" are not friends - In my day...."). Well, in the words of the Grateful Dead, "I may be going to hell in a bucket, babe / But at least I'm enjoying the ride"

Beware of Wantum Computing

I enjoyed the idea of "wantum physics" and think we could usefully have "wantum computing".

By "wantum computing" I don't mean quite the same as "wantum physics". Wantum physics is  fictitious science made up by a science fiction author, to do what is wanted to further the plot. "Lithium crystals", "flux capacitors" and "midichlorians" spring to mind. By wantum computing, I mean computer technologies that are in that tricky gap when the potential benefits have become clear enough for organizations to "want 'em", but there's still a substantial risk that the benefits can't actually be delivered. So a project is tried and overruns badly or has to be abandoned.  Or (perhaps more sadly) the project is completed and released to baffled or indifferent users who don't think they have a problem for that solution.

It's usually a matter of jumping too early ("making a wantum leap" I suppose). "All of this has happened before and it will all happen again." In the 1990s, many publishers invested in CD-ROM publishing, expecting a move to electronic formats from print. That shift is even now under way (it has gone a long way if you are a scholarly journals publisher, nowhere near as far if you are a fiction publisher now moving into eBooks). Then there was the dot.com boom just before the millenium- massive investment on the promise of a big shift to online eCommerce and marketing. Well that did happen, arguably is not complete yet, but took longer than the enthusiasts thought. 

CD-ROMS, dot.coms, "Web 2.0", Cloud computing... in each case there were (or are) early success stories, to enthuse and frustrate those who made the wantum leap a bit too early:  for whatever reason they didn't turn out have the right combination of factors to break new ground successfully.

Treknobabble and wantum physics

I came across a great couple of words yesterday: Treknobabble is a nonsensical but technical-sounding explanation used, for example in a science fiction work such as Star Trek (though many other works use the device too). The lovely term "Wantum Physics" describes the same thing (i.e. physics that will do whatever the author wants it to do for plot purposes). Either way, it is a well-used device to plug a plot hole ("Why don't we just go back in time and prevent it from happening?" "But if we did that, the quantum overload will gegauss the flux capacitor and cause an abilene paradox"). Or it can yank the characters out of what has been set up as certain doom ("Wait a minute! What if we reverse the polarity and cross the streams?!").

Probably it's best for treknobabble to be incomprehensible as well as nonsensical - as a teenage know-it-all doing science courses at school I remember snorting with derision at some wantum physics in Superman 2. If I remember rightly, the bad guys arrive near Earth discover their superhuman strength and theorise that it is because "our molecular densities are increasing because of the higher gravity of the Earth's sun". The problem with that is that it's too comprehensible, and so instantly dismissible as tosh. Whereas who knows what technical opportunities and restrictions there are from reversing the polar flux on the quantum overload Heisenberg defibrullator?

 

Objections

"[Objections] are part of the nature of the very conservative society we live in. When new ideas come up they are scrutinised for perfection. If that perfection is not found, they are rejected for the status quo, which if scrutinised in the same way would fare much worse."

I saw this quote in a newspaper article about the pros and cons of changing UK time to match the Western European mainland, but applicable widely beyond that, I think. The quote is from Dr Mayer Hillman, author of a number of clock-change studies over nearly 30 years.