New Now Know How

Apparently tomorrow is World Usability Day. The slogan is “Making it Easy” which is generic enough, I suppose, but pointless and in my opinion, downplays what usability really is.

Tom Stewart wrote recently for the BBC:

Now, I have no objection to making life easier but I believe - and I’m supported in this view by an international standard - that a usable product or service has two other key features in addition to being easy or pleasant to use.

It must also be effective and efficient. In other words, the interface to our personal mp3 player should actually allow us to select the right music with an appropriate degree of effort and also be nice to use.

This approach to usability involves focusing on what users are trying to do with the product and making sure it delivers results without requiring us to be rocket scientists or contortionists. It doesn’t need to be easy - it depends on what we are doing.

It depends on what we’re doing. Context is important. A hammer is easy to use, until you want to make soup. Experience is important. Unix is easy to use but only if you know your ls from your rm *.

Usability is really, really important. But there’s a lot more to usability and making something good to use (as opposed to easy) than the trite slogan suggests.

On a lighter note, I’m going to put a usability violation ticket on my Mum’s stove. Take that, poorly designed stovetop!

The promise of computing technology dissolving into behavior, invisibly permeating the natural world around us cannot be reached. Technology is, of course, that which by definition is separate from the natural; it is explicitly designed that way. Technology only becomes truly invisible when, like the myriad of pens sold in Japan’s department stores, it’s no longer seen as technology at all. Deliberately creating something ‘invisible’ is self-defeating. I can think of few recent technologies as visible to the public as RFID, no matter how physically ‘invisible’ it might be.

The point being, that you can’t design something to be invisible. It becomes invisible as people make it part of their lives, as it becomes part of the “fabric of society” or just something that people take for granted.

Design for appropriation is where it’s at. Being aware of the seams between things rather than making the seams invisble. Seams are useful. Edges make things clear. Inside. Outside. Here is the street. Here is the footpath.

The question before us today is: why are mobile phones chock full of functional goodness when cordless phones can’t or don’t do a lot of the things that a mobile phone does? My really old mobile phone has an easy to use addressbook, a multi-line screen and buttons that are easy to press. My cordless landline phone has a single line screen that is hard to read, big buttons that are difficult to press and a 10-position address book that only stores numbers. Also, a cordless landline phone only has to transmit to a base station that is inside your house while a mobile phone has to transmit to a base station that is 5 kilometers away! Yet, the mobile phone is smaller, has better buttons (well, mine does), has an easy-to-use address book, is light and slips into a pocket. Weird. Why do cordless phones mock us so?

Merlin hates his phone with a passion. So much so that he’s made a pod-cast about it.

At the top of Merlin’s hates about his (cordless, landline) phone:

• buttons that suck
• Bad UI for:
  • caller ID
  • address book entries
• form factor
• weighs as much as a toddler

Merlin, of course, uses his extreme hatred of his phone to segue into a life lesson. As he points out, most things in your life are temporarily not broken. So that you know what you hate about your object du jour Merlin’s advice is simple: make a list. If you’re on Mac, Merlin suggests Quicksilver (which is free). I would use wikidpad which isn’t at all the same thing as Quicksilver but it works for me.

NPR (National Public Radio) has a cute story on speech recognition that, surprisingly, acknowledges the flaws as well as benefits.

Is it naive of me to sugggest that anyone who needs the upcoming 1,048,576 rows by 16,384 columns in Excel 12 really needs something other than a spreadsheet?

Back in the day Ricky and I made Excel do some stuff it was never meant to. Ricky even ended up refactoring all the VBA that we wrote to make it easier to maintain.

But 16,348 columns?

Lawrence Lessig has a great presentation style that I try to copy, badly, when I have time to prepare the extensive files that are requried. He links to a Dick Hardt’s presentation on Identity 2.0 at the recent OSCON.