Nancy’s Blog

For what it’s worth - US News & World Reports list Usability/User Experience and Librarian among their 31 careers with the bright futures.

Why is it that computer technology manufacturers get away with a level of incompetence and callousness that we would not tolerate from other participants in the marketplace? The only answer I can think of is that they ALL do it. Which means it’s easy for someone to have a competitive edge: be usable!

[Yes, I'm thinking about switching to Mac. I have so much invested in hardware, software, and especially in learning how to do things in Windows...But...If switching means not having these problems...]

I currently have open trouble tickets with 3 different hard/software manufacturers:

• I upgraded Reference Manager fro 10 to 11 and now a crucial function doesn’t work
• I upgraded Atlas ti from 5 to 5.2+ and it failed completely. After much back and forth, including several uninstalls/reinstalls, they sent me a file that seems to have solved the problem. I’m waiting to see if it keeps working.
  • Tech support chided me for not installing the additional updates — but when I installed the first update it failed completely, barring me from further upgrades.
  • My Netgear wifi router, which I bought in October and which worked for a while, has more or less failed. The signal strength, even with my laptop literally right next to the router, shows 2 out or 5 bars, and neither laptop nor cellphone can connect to it (so it’s not the laptop that’s failing, it’s the router).
    • To get tech support from Netgear, I had to register the device. Several times, I put in the serial # and it told me that the number was a dupe (had I already registered it?), but it didn’t recognize any of my three email addresses (so no, I wasn’t in the system). I had to put in several variations on the serial #, capitalizing the letters and alternating between zeros and ohs, and with and without the asterisk at the end of the number. Now I’m not sure which combination of these finally worked. Same thing happened with the password they sent me. How hard can it be to create unambiguous serial numbers and passwords?
    • Ironically, the form that asked me how hard the device was to install offered a dropdown list of several 4 digit numbers — something like 1046, 1047, and 1048. So their usability questionnaire was unusable.

  And I’m actually more technically able than most of my friends and relatives outside of the iSchool. And I have built-in tech support from the iSchool staff and our students. I can’t imagine what most of my friends would do with this level of failure.

  As it is, I’ve spent much of my time over break troubleshooting and working around these problems. I suspect I’ve spent almost as much time on the technical problems as on the work this technology is supposed to support: analyzing my data (Atlas ti) and writing several articles (Ref Mgr).

  And that’s not counting the effort that went into connecting a new 2nd monitor — which worked, but it took a while to get the resolution right. At least I knew that the problem was the resolution — again, what would someone with no tech skills do when they brought home a new monitor and found the image was wonky? Again, I’m not that technically sophisticated, but more so than most of my non-iSchool friends.

  As long as there continue to be such usability problems with hardware and software — including those as completely pointless and unnecessary as the serial number problem — computer technology will come nowhere near the level of adoption that it could have. Not to mention the amount of annoyance and frustration that it generates.

Sunday’s New York Times has an article on usability and the usability profession.

It doesn’t say anything surprising, not to people in the field, but it’s nice that the New York Times is recognizing it as it field with career opportunities. They say there aren’t enough people available to fill the jobs, and that more and more companies understand the importance of usability.

What I haven’t seen in most iPhone discussions is point raised in an article in the NY Times June 30 by Joe Nocera http://select.nytimes.com/2007/06/30/business/30nocera.html:

But deep in Mr. Pogue’s review came the paragraph that stopped me in my tracks. Pointing out that the iPhone, unique among cellphones, doesn’t have a removable battery, Mr. Pogue wrote: ‘Apple says the battery starts to lose capacity after 300 to 400 charges. Eventually, you’ll have to send the phone to Apple for battery replacement, much as you do now with an iPod, for a fee.’

Huh? That couldn’t be, could it? Did Apple really expect people to mail their iPhones to Apple HQ and wait for the company to return it with a new battery? It was bad enough that the company did that with he iPod — but a cellphone? Cellphones have become a critical part of daily life, something we can barely do without for an hour, much less days at a time.

MAIL IN a phone to replace the battery???!!!!

The rest of the article (1) tries to estimate when this would be for most users — Nocera concludes that for many this’ll be at about the time that the 2-year warranty expires, and (2) describes Nocera’s efforts to get Apple to answer his questions about this - which is, basically, they never do.

Today’s NY Times has an article about how tech designers are figuring out that (gasp) women buy technology.

Don’t get excited. Wait till you see what they think women want:

Energizer, the battery maker, went so far as to create a charger for each sex. The Dock & Go, at $33, is aimed at men. Black and gray with shiny trim, the two pods hold up to four batteries each (AA or AAA). A light glows red when it is charging, yellow when it is charged.

The second device, the $20 Easy Charger [pictured], is aimed at women, who usually end up managing the household’s batteries. This charger is flat, round and sold with interchangeable faceplates in silver, black and eggshell that help it blend in with kitchen appliances. Large light-emitting-diode readouts spell out what the countertop charger is doing at every phase of the charging cycle. Focus-group testing indicated that men were turned off by the Easy Charger, especially in how its readouts appeared to tell them what they thought they already knew…“’We found that how people use chargers is very different,” she said. “For her, she wants it to be instantly understandable.”

Geez, and all these years I’ve been using a (unisex?) Radio Shack charger instead of one for women. But then my charger doesn’t match my kitchen: a decorating faux pas! How nice that the women’s charger costs less - did the men in their focus groups prefer to pay more?

Besides a general level of cluelessness, this reveals the misuse of qualitative research methods, in this case, focus groups: sit down a bunch of people, ask them some questions, and, voila, make proclamations about “women” and “men.”

The article does indicate one area where this research is valid - sometimes: size. Smaller and lighter objects for carrying around, such as for cameras. However, they come to some odd conclusions in this domain, too:

….the wider spacing of the keys on a new Sony ultraportable computer notebook …accommodates the longer fingernails that women tend to have.

Quick, look around: how many women who would buy an expensive Sony ultraportable actually have long fingernails? Of course there’s also the issue of smaller keys with lesser spacing for women’s smaller hands. What’s a poor tech company to do?

Here’s an idea: offer a range of options, not for women and men, but for people with different needs and preferences. Oh, but then they wouldn’t know which to make in black and silver, and which to match the kitchen appliances.

So Outlook has figured out that daylight savings time is starting early this year — sort of. All my events after March 11 have been shifted by an hour — so it shows my recurring appointment of a class 2-3:30 as 3-4:30 after March 11. So now it has me completely confused — if I put something I my calendar for a time next week, should I put it at the correct time, or at the “wrong” time? I synch Outlook with my phone calendar — so what happens March 11? Will Outlook “revert” to the right times, and the phone fail to? Or..???

Since I switched to an electronic calendar, I’ve worried about not having a paper backup. And this verifies the danger of relying on an electronic calendar. But it’s so much more convenient. !!

Update 3/8/07:

There is a Microsoft update for this, however — the instructions warn you to click on “details” after you run it, and it then presents a set of appointments and shows you when it’s going to change them to and allows you to override its changes. Well — I know what time my classes are, and other regular events, but I don’t necessarily know about one-time appointments. So when it asked me whether to change the time on these, I really needed to already know what time they were supposed to be; but that’s what I use the Outlook calendar for. I didn’t know what time those appointments were supposed to be, and didn’t know whether to override Outlook.

Given the number of people using Outlook for calendaring, and the number of them who don’t know about the Outlook update, I predict weeks of confusion after the change to DST.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRjVeRbhtRU
Everyone needs help with the new system.

Just got a Nokia N80, thanks to my friends at Nokia Research Palo Alto. I may write a longer review of it later — I like it a lot, and will like it even better when Zonetags catches up to it.

But here I want to comment on one odd design choice.

My recent Nokias have had voice dialling, which was erratic. The caller trains the phone with voice tags for selected contacts. I then had to remember exactly how to say a name the same way every time for the phone to recognize it, and differences in environmental acoustics affected it substantially.

The N80 is different. Instead of the user training it for specific numbers, it uses voice recognition to try to match any effort with the phone book. However, there is no way for the user to give it feedback and help it improve its recognition. Trying it out, I found that when I named a friend I call all the time, it wanted to call the optometrist I call once a year, and persisted in its error. I finally had to change the entry for my friend so that the names (which are not particularly close) seemed less similar to the N80.

So the user has no opportunity to give the phone feedback or to override it (other than to cancel the call that it tries to make).  In my teaching I often include the topic of configuring the user: what the design assumes about the user, and which tasks are delegated to the user or arrogated to the technology. In this case, the technology claims ownership over matching the user’s voice with the contacts list. This is particularly frustrating since I need to use the voice commands when I’m least able to fiddle with the phone, such as while driving.  In addition, the computer-generated voice with which the phone announces who it’s about to call sounds like a seriously hearing-impaired person trying to speak, but only marginally succeeding. This does not inspire confidence — I feel like I’m delegating a task to a being too impaired to fulfill it, with no ability to learn.

Yesterday someone I didn’t know favorited one of my Flickr photos within minutes of my uploading it. The fast response was itself suspicious. When I went to look at their photos to see who they were, the photos were, well, probably just this side of what Flickr would remove as porn. The favoriting was clearly a ploy — probably automated — to get me to go look at their images. (No, they didn’t seem to be selling anything, but I didn’t stick around to find out.)

Sigh. Actually, I’m surprised it has taken this long for the yuk factor to find a way into Flickr.

Reminds me of a science fiction story I read many years ago — with Marconi’s first radio transmission, Earth started sending out radio messages that attracted some sort of unintelligent but voracious radio-wave-eating beings. Since electricity generated the waves they liked (magnetic waves? radio waves?), once they found the earth not only all radio and TV transmission became impossible, but so did all electricity, since these parasites ate it as soon as it was generated. Any time anything in the internet world becomes popular, the sleaze factor starts eating it.

UPDATE: a friend at Flickr tells me they call these “Flickr flashers.”

Funny!  (I still want to see them trying parallel parking, however.)

http://www.fquick.com/videos/viewvideo.php?id=520