Confusability

Inmates take over asylum. Door left open.

The Inmates are Running the Asylum
Excerpt from the new 2nd Edition Foreword

by Alan Cooper

In my recent travels I have noticed a growing malaise in the community of programmers. Sadly, it is the best and most experienced of them who are afflicted the worst. They reflect cynicism and ennui about their efforts because they know that their skills are being wasted. They may not know exactly how they are misapplied, but they cannot overlook the evidence. Many of the best programmers have actually stopped programming because they find the work frustrating. They have retreated into training, evangelism, writing, and consulting because it doesn't feel so wasteful and counterproductive. This is a tragic and entirely avoidable loss. (The open-source movement is arguably a haven for these frustrated programmers—a place where they can write code according to their own standards and be judged solely by their peers, without the advice or intervention of marketers or managers).

Programmers are not given sufficient time, clear enough direction, or adequate designs to enable them to succeed. These three things are the responsibility of business executives, and they fail to deliver them for preventable reasons, not because they are stupid or evil. They are simply not armed with adequate tools for solving the complex and unique problems that confront them in the information age. Now here I am sounding like I'm slamming people again, only this time businesspeople are in my sights instead of programmers. Once again, to solve the problem one must deconstruct it. I'm questing after solutions, not scapegoats.

Don Hopkins has ported pie-menus to Sugar and there has been some discussion about the usability and suitability of pie-menus in general but I haven't seen anyome who is putting serious thought and effort into the user experience aspects of olpc and sugar.

Matthew Olpihant has asked the question:

"I am interested to see what is the learning curve, and what are some of the drawbacks of the design."

Christoph Derndorfer also asked:

When was the last time anyone actually mentioned the children and teachers that are going to be using the Children's Machine XO? How many children and teachers have actually used the Sugar UI?

We all know that geeks (yes, I'm also guilty of belonging to that group of people) find the user interface very interesting. But has anyone done any large scale usability testing of the hardware and/or software with children in developing countries? Or any children at all?

Chrstoph also had this to say last week:

There have been many questions raised on the topic of training for potential OLPC X0 users, this might be the first glimpse at how OLPC plans to do that.

"One of the words Christopher used to describe working on the project was creepy... I asked if he meant because it was such a large idea that can have an impact? He said not exactly. Maybe it has to do with an earlier comment he made about being a bunch of geeky tech guys who have no notion of the environment these machines will go into on a personal level."

Walter Bender & Mary Lou Jepsen

Via his blog Christopher Blizzard later clarified that he

"said 'creepy' because it felt strange being in the middle of such an amazing group of people and trying to do something as amazing as this. You spend a lot of time beside yourself when you’re working on this project. It’s like watching some insane version of yourself from the outside."

It's nevertheless interesting that the guy taking these notes interpreted that phrase the way he did. This 'having little idea about the environment these machines will do into' is another aspect that many people have criticized or at least questioned about the OLPC project.

Can a bunch of well-educated Western computer and technology geeks working in fancy offices really come up with a solution for the developing world? Well, I guess that depends on whether you believe that OLPC is a laptop project or an education project.

I am surprised that organisations like the UPA haven't been more pro-active in getting involved with the OLPC and Sugar. It seems that an awful lot of usability decisions are being left to the engineers. It would be very sad if the OLPC is seen as a usability and accessibility failure just because the "user experience community" didn't get involved when they had a chance. Please remember that it is the programmers who actually create the software that defines the user experience and they need the help and support of information architects, usability experts and other design experts if they are going to produce something that makes sense to anyone other than the programmers who built it.

Are there any accessibility or usability "experts" out there who would like to put some spare time into helping to make Sugar more accessible and usable?

However it does appear that OLPC don't want to make it easy to get involved. You can just give them some money or you could actually use Sugar and report any usability "bugs" you find:

Getting involoved in OLPC :

You should use the software that we will use and you report bugs. In addition to simple functionality and usability bugs, you can also look for performance and optimization related bugs. Due to our memory and disk constraints, we need to be much pickier about certain types of inefficiency in software than many other users of free and open source software.

Please add OLPC bugs filed in other bug-tracking system to this wikipage.

The only problem is the wikipage you are pointed at doesn't actually exist! This problem was reported in the discussion page in January 2007 but nothing has been done about it yet.

In the mean time why not make a contribution by thinking about how you could help Peter Korn improve sugar accessibility?

Peter Korn (Accessibility Architect from Sun) just posted this message on the Sugar mailing list:

"Hi guys,

Thanks to Jim Gettys I've started looking at OLPC & Sugar accessibility
in what passes for spare time. We've just started a mailing list to
discuss it (accessibility@laptop.org), and I've updated the
Accessibility wiki page (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Accessibility and
also added a bit to start things off on the accessibility section of the
OLPC human interface guidelines
(http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_Human_Interface_Guidelines/Design_Fundamentals#Accessibility)

I would very much appreciate a conversation looking at these issues, and
on how (and when) we might address accessibility in Sugar and on the
OLPC.  From my brief play with the OLPC via a stock BTest-2 system,
there is quite a lot of work to do to provide anything like a similar
level of accessibility support as we have in a GNOME 2.16 or later
desktop (including keyboard navigation support, theming for visual
disabilities, and of course assistive technologies).  There is also a
lot of great potential for this device to open up some neat new options
for people with disabilities (sign language chat with the built in
camera; augmentative communication for folks who can't speak by having
the OLPC talk for them), and also for a rather radical cultural shift in
the many developing countries where people with disabilities are often
shunted into a horrible, marginal existence (I recommend the book "My
Path Leads to Tibet" about the story of a German blind woman's efforts
to teach Braille to children in Tibet - see
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1559706589/104-7759792-5139164?v=glance).

As I'm new to the OLPC & Sugar, I'd also appreciate your patience and
understanding (and your kind assistance) with my ignorance of what has
already been discussed in this area."

I have included some extracts from the OLPC guidelines that relate to accessibility.

From the OLPC Human Interface Guidelines

Accessibility

There are lots of things to think about relating to accessibility in a set of human interface guidelines. We've just started hashing out general accessibility issues at the Accessibility page.

Broadly speaking, the user interface of the GUI shell and of activities must address the following accessibility issues:

• Using the interface only from the keyboard (without a mouse or trackpad)
• Using the interface without requiring the ability to distinguish color (a significant portion of the population has some level of color blindness)
• Providing an enlarged print/icon option for folks whose vision is less than 20/20 (but who still can see things that are somewhat enlarged - e.g. 18 point fonts)
• Using the keyboard without needing to press more than one key at a time (all modifiers must work with AccessX functionality)
• Supporting programmatic access to the GUI (which for us will mean supporting ATK in Sugar and all activites)
• Either shipping with some number of assistive technology applications (is a screen reader an "activity"?), or making them easy to download
• Providing some way for a user to discover accessibility support and enable what they need (Windows XP & Vista offer an "accessibility wizard" for this purpose; we don't have good upstream technology from GNOME we can take for this unfortunately; the Ubuntu accessibility folks are perhaps furtherest along in thinking about this)

From laptop.org/accessibility

Tasks toward making the OLPC accessible

• We need to define what "accessibility" means in the OLPC context (this is primarily for Sugar, and would likely feed into some place like the Sugar accessibility design guidelines
• We need to make the GNOME accessibility framework work on OLPC/Sugar, in order to support assistive technologies (right now we have ATK, but AT-SPI depends upon CORBA and Bonobo which are presently too big to fit comfortable in the OLPC hardware envelope). This might mean putting the existing AT-SPI infrastructure on a major diet, or it might mean moving to something like DBUS (which is attractive for other reasons)
• We need to define & implement a handful of accessible themes for Sugar
• We need to ensure that Sugar & all OLPC Activities (the concept of "application") implement ATK and work with AT
• We need to ensure that Sugar & all OLPC Activities support these accessible themes (large print, high contrast, etc.)
• We need to bring software AT to the platform
• ...

Useful links:

• Open source usability is a technical problem we can solve on our own by Frans Englich
• Open Source Usability: The birth of a movement by Rashmi Sinha
• Why the OLPC needs lots of usability work by Harry Brignull
• The Sugar UI by Jeff Atwood
• $100 Laptop’s/OLPC’s user interface looks good, but... by Teemu Leinonen

Car usability and safety come before aesthetics

Bad, better and best?

"The position of lights on the car should be guided by safety considerations - not aesthetics" Andrew Bayliss

Modern car indicators could be compromising drivers' safety, a study by the University of Wales, Bangor, has claimed.

Many new designs position indicators within car headlamps - rather than a separate flashing light to the side.

But Bangor researcher Dr Andrew Bayliss said tests showed people took longer to react to the new-style lights.

BBC News - 28 March 2007

News Article | Research Paper | Andrew Bayliss

Perhaps Andrew could include this alternative design for a car indicator by John Wood.in his next study.

"This invention relates to a direction indicator for motor-cars, that is to say an appliance for use by the driver in signalling his intention to turn the vehicle and refers to that type of appliance wherein a direction-pointing device, such for instance as a representation of a human hand, is mounted upon a vertical axis to be turnable by the driver to cause such direction-pointing device to project either forwardly or laterally according to the direction it is the intention of the driver to proceed." - Patent 1664148

The Ministry of Transpoort in the UK have also put a lot of though into road safety over the years and In 1919, when drivers commonly used hand signals to indicate they were turning, the Ministry of Transport was keen to find a basic alternative.

One submitted plan proposed attaching a clumsy contraption to the side of the car, depicting an image of a hand with one finger pointing the way.

News Article

An Interview with Ralph Baer, the Father of Video Games

GS: Do you think real ping pong is more fun than your video game version?

RB: Well, it's different fun, but it's a lot of fun. And to think about ping pong, one more digression. One of the complaints that his highness Nolan Bushnell had was "Well, you didn't have any scoring on screen." To which I respond: well, it's kinda funny, you know. We've been playing real ping pong for the last hundred years, right? And tennis. And guess how you score tennis and ping pong? You call out the score, you know, nice and loud, right? Nobody needed any scores on the screen.

That was a real iffy addition. I had no way of doing it with the technology available to us for a price in 1966-67. But it was not necessary to play an interesting tennis game. You just call it out -- who needs scoring?

What was stupid on our part -- and I couldn't believe in retrospect -- was that we didn't have any sound. Yeah, that was the big attraction, addition, that made it much more lively a game that Alan Alcorn and Bushnell came up with, adding a "pong" sound when you hit the ball. Why we didn't think of that, in retrospect? I can't believe we didn't do that. Part of it was that I wasn't really a game person, ever. It only grew as I worked with the stuff.

Extract from interview with Ralph Baer on Gamasutra - 23 March 2007

Disorderly by Design

What do these three things have in common?

• The Trap
• A Perfect Mess
• The Agile Manifesto

They are all part of the undeclared war against Taylorism and it's allies. Rather than worrying about how we can Get Things Done more efficiently we should be slowing down and making some space in our lives to allow magic things to happen.

It's not revolutionary, it's not even a movement, but it could be a bump on the road that helps wake us up.

BBC Clocks

The clocks went forward today and here is an animation of an old BBC clock from 1969:

You can see more examples at Cult TV.

Familiarity breeds what?

By Pete Seebach (The Cranky User) February 2007 - Who Needs a Virtual Keyboard?

Usability people love to harp on the value of using familiar interfaces to help users adapt to new products. While good in theory, in practice this approach sometimes does little more than breathe new life into bad ideas. Just because I've seen something before does not mean I want to see it again -- ever!

QuickTime's thumb-wheel interface to control volume, for instance, was abysmal, not because I couldn't figure out how to use it, but because using it was awkward and inconvenient. Thumb wheels are great for objects that you adjust with your hands, but they're horrible as a GUI element. QuickTime has since lost that particular element, to Apple Inc.'s credit.

Another example is the virtual keyboard. Used for input, these elements are consistently hated. The entire point of a keyboard is that you type on it. A virtual keyboard that requires you to type with a mouse is a poor substitute. Even the most untrained typist can type with more than one finger, and real fingers are much easier to aim than mice.

Loneliness and Technology

(picture from Twitter: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly)

(from Is Twitter TOO good?)

The biggest benefit most people seem to be deriving from Twitter is the ability to feel more connected to others. Carson Systems' Lisa put it this way in a comment to Tara Hunt's defense of Twitter:
"Twittering fills in those gaps...recording our friends’ feelings, geographic location and actions as if we were spookily almost there. That makes us feel *really* connected..."

Is this really a good thing?

Probably, yes. For most people, perhaps. But I think it's worth a critical look as opposed to an automatic connected-is-awlays-implicitly-good response. UCSF neurobiologist Thomas Lewis claims that if we're not careful, we can trick a part of our brain into thinking that we're having a real social interaction--something crucial and ancient for human survival--when we actually aren't. This leads to a stressful (but subconscious) cognitive dissonance, where we're getting some of what the brain thinks it needs, but not enough to fill that whatever-ineffable-thing-is-scientists-still-haven't-completely-nailed-but-might-be-smell. He didn't make this claim about Twitter... I attended his talk at The Conference on World Affairs, and he was addressing e-mail, chat, and even television (brain recognizes it's looking at "people", and feels it must be having a social connection (GOOD), but yet it knows something's missing (BAD).

(from Adbusters, February 2007)

Forty year old Joyce Vincent had been lying dead in her London apartment for two straight years before the badly decomposed body was discovered by her landlord in April 2006. The story, quietly tucked away in British newspapers, profoundly upset readers around the world who saw her isolation as a failing of modern communities. As one outraged blogger put it, “Two years. She lay there. Alone, dead, unnoticed, and unmissed. How is it possible that in a city of about seven million, not one person noticed that a neighbor, sister, cousin or friend was missing?”

If you're not online, does anybody know you exist?

Favorite search requests for 1Q2007

Inspired by Adam Greenfeld

The following strings were used to find pages on usabilityviews.com during the first three months of this year. Comments have been appended.

- avoid the mouse
use a keyboard

- the war of the ghosts
searching for false memories

- history of the applause
the sound of two hands clapping

- computer can be best friend
woof woof

- create one leg table
it's called a bird table

- dylexic
oops

- how long is too long to wait for a website to load
one mississippi, two mississippi, three mississippi, four mississippi

- what is the internet used for
answering silly questions

- computers versus humans
2 - 1

- wise people admit their mistakes easily
yes no

- why is that thing beeping
because you haven't taken the battery out

Eyetracking and Gender

This picture says it all.

Conyne recommends designers avoid the generic pictures that are often used just for the sake of having a picture.

"For example," she said, "if an article is about a signature meal at a restaurant, say a tuna dish, display a scrumptious-looking picture of the plate of food. Don't show a generic picture of a spoon and fork, as many sites do."

When photos do contain people related to the task at hand, or the content users are exploring, they do get fixations. However, gender makes a distinct difference on what parts of the photo are stared at the longest. Take a look at the hotspot below.

Although both men and women look at the image of George Brett when directed to find out information about his sport and position, men tend to focus on private anatomy as well as the face. For the women, the face is the only place they viewed.

From Online Journalism Review

The UXerati Are Born

Lou Rosenfeld recently launched the UX Zeitgeist.

I like to think of it the next generation of the Userati list that I maintained for a few years.

I found that the most interesting thing about maintaing the userati list was the number of intersting people I came across who I had never investigated before. It does make you feel a bit like a stalker, but it is one of the most rewarding experiments from Mac Labs that I have ever worked on.

Congratulations Lou.