Key in the cognition

09:08 am - Dear banks, please make your websites stop sucking

Over the past few days I've been using the websites of various financial institutions and have been frustrated by how terrible they are.

While trying to change my 401k investments at Fidelity, I was stymied by an error message that told me my fund choices could not be honoured by the website and I should call them instead. Upon calling them I was informed that one of my selections was no longer available and had not been so since 2004. Since 2004! Why then is it still showing up in my list of available funds!? And why doesn't the website let me know what the problem is so i can alter my selection instead of being forced to wait for business hours and call them?

Today I tried to log into my CitiBank account, only to find myself presented with the login page again. There was no error message provided. After retrying my password - the same one I'd used successfully yesterday - I called them and was told that the website was being updated and I should try again in an hour. Again, why don't they state these things on the website...? Bizarrely, I was then able to login using the current beta version of Opera, although not with Safari 3.1.1.

Even ING isn't that great. The ask you to provide a "Saver ID" but make absolutely no mention of the purpose that it serves. They then send an email thanking you for creating this ID but still neglect to mention where you can use it! Finally, they allow you to link one external account for ACH transfer when you create your account but force you to mail them paper cheques to add subsequent ones. Why!?

I remember when the websites of financial institutions sucked back in the late 90s but I figured that they were still getting the hang of this newfangled Web thing. Well, it's been a bloody decade and they still suck. No wonder so few people use online banking... So I'm offering up my services as a professional UI designer at no charge to financial institutions that want to make their websites suck less. Give me a test account (if I don't already have one) and I will tell you how to improve your customer satisfaction with online financial interaction.

Current Mood: annoyed

08:58 am - Observations on watching a kid use a computer

Yesterday I was helping a kid edit an essay at the Pirate Supply Store - it's a front for a writing clinic - and couldn't help but notice some interesting characteristics of the manner in which he used the computer.

Like many people, he was using webmail as online storage. Surprisingly, he was using his mom's Yahoo/SBC account instead of having one of his own. I've heard that Google was surprised to discover how many people type entire domain names into their search box instead of the browser's address bar but watching this in person is still pretty weird. The kid typed "yahoo.com" into the Safari search box, which brought up Yahoo as the top hit. That's when it got even more bizarre. Google had conveniently provided links to the commonly used subsections of Yahoo in the search result. The first of these was Mail, on which I expected to see the kid click. Instead he just clicked on the main link and went to the yahoo home page before eventually logging in and arriving at his inbox.

The next observation to surprise me was the difficulty he had selecting text with the mouse. I'd previously assumed that any middle-school kid in San Francisco would be an expert mouse-user and he certainly displayed no other signs of impeded dexterity so I am tempted to attribute this difficulty to unfamiliarity with basic usage of a mouse. My hunch is somewhat supported by his complete surprise at my introduction of the scroll-wheel to his arsenal of mouse-using techniques. Later on I noticed that he tended to backspace his way through multiple words upon realizing that he'd mistyped one instead of just repositioning the cursor. Admittedly, I have seen this behaviour in expert computer users as well.

Made me wonder how much exposure kids really get to computers in school and how many kids in this city lack access to one at home. Maybe desktop computers are just getting old though, since he seemed to have no trouble using his cell-phone. Finally, I can't help but wonder if there's a way to make the enormous number of people currently using webmail as storage to start using the more effective tools we now have available for storing dynamic textual documents on the Web.

Current Mood: amused

03:35 pm - iPhone

After waiting a week for a free crackberry that never materialized, I bought an 8-gig iPhone today. It refuses to sync my non-subscription calendar & lacks the wonderful opportunistic playlist synching featured by the Shuffle but otherwise largely meets (high) expectations. Typing on it is definitely much harder than on the crackberry but I'm willing to give it a few days as others have suggested.

Update: I created a new calendar, moved the few upcoming events from my old calendar to it and am able now to sync the new calendar with the iPhone :-)

Current Mood: hungry

02:13 pm - Filtering restaurants by hours of operation

Earlier this afternoon I was trying to make dinner reservations for myself and a couple of friends who are visiting from the exurbs on Monday evening. I was pleased at how easy it was to filter the T-dot's cornucopia of restaurants by type of cuisine, price level, and distance from me. I was even more pleased that I could visually scope out how far places are from the subway line. Frustratingly, however, nearly all the restaurants I'd shortlisted are closed on Monday nights. Why is there no way to filter restaurants by their hours of operation? I'm surprised nobody thought of this whilst designing any of the otherwise excellent websites that purport to make finding a restaurant easy.

Current Mood: annoyed

09:09 am - Social search @ BayCHI

Last night's BayCHI seminar was a panel discussion by the heads of 5 hi-tech companies involved in new ways of finding information. In an unusual move, rather than having each speaker's bio read out, we were just shown the top-ranked Delicious tags for their companies. Netflix's Neil Hunt spoke about the Long Tail and how it forms the core of the competitive advantage that Netflix has over Blockbuster by letting them suggest cheaper indie movies to customers, which holds costs down.

Live365's David Porter began by describing the core model of his business: they make it very easy for anybody to create their own radio station, which leads to lots of viral marketing by DJ wannabes who convince all their friends to listen in. He talked about the 4 ways in which people find stations on his website: typing in an artist will list all stations that have that artist in regular rotation; you can browse by genre; people can bookmark their favourite stations; the system makes suggestions based on what users with similar tastes enjoy that you don't.

Pandora's Tom Conrad spoke about how the Music Genome Project spent countless hours deconstructing songs into hundreds of objective quantitative attributes to form a giant database that can now find similar songs across genres, time periods, etc. Since most people spend much more time listening to radio than their own music, Pandora lets them find new artists that sound similar to what they already like. Despite the obvious propensity for pigeonholing, he assure us that it exposes listeners to more new music than they would ever hear otherwise.

Joshua Schachter of Delicious revealed how the service stemmed from a previous incarnation that lacked multi-user support and existed solely for people to organize their own bookmarks and share them with a few select friends. Delicious was born when he discovered that there were thousands of people subscribed to his personal bookmarks! The advantage of this heritage is that the service overcame the initial inertia of most social networking systems by offering them immediate utility until the network effect could take over.

Digg's Kevin Rose demonstrated some features of the service of which I'd been hitherto ignorant: users can see what their friends thought of links; current stories can be visualized in a cloud where the popularity of each is indicated by font size; the Spy lets users watch as stories are rated in real time; a map that graphed users VS stories; a graph of people's friends that indicated what interests were shared between them. He vaguely alluded to taking more advantage of the social networking data in future.

The first topic of discussion was kick-starting the database with expert information. Apparently AZ seeds heir DB with book reviews to pick up information about more obscure titles. NetFlix uses metamoderation of users who categorize movies by comparing them to other movies. It was pointed out that transaction history lacks judgement info so users need to be given a very convenient way of rating their experience.

The next topic was about getting users to rely on suggestions made by the system. In a study by Pandora, people had no idea how interactively their ratings were being used so they added wordy explanations to the process. And Digg got much more user activity when they made it easy to rate stuff.

When somebody asked about Last.fm, Tom revealed that a Last.fm plus pandora mashup is in the works. The night ended with a brief discussion about accuracy in reporting. Both Digg and Delicious take the view that the people should be able to flag inaccurate stories themselves instead of relying on journalistic integrity.

Current Mood: cheerful

12:47 am - The office of the future

last week's HCI seminar was about research into improving the workflow of knowledge workers. After telling us about his discoveries from the experiments that he had conducted over the past decade in France, he left us with a valuable pair of requirements lists for designing and deploying new systems within an organization.

What you need for a successful deployment:

• No training requirements
  
• No initial configuration requirements
  
• No regular maintenance requirements
  
• No impact on current work environment
  
• No complexity in usage
  
• No monetary cost
  
• No privacy infringement
  
• Immediate benefits for individual users
  

• Get the high-status individuals to start using it and the rest will follow
  
• Make it trivial to enrol as a participant
  
• Demonstrate the system instead of explaining its benefits
  
• Empower & socially reward users
  
• Offer a free trial until users are addicted
  

Current Mood: optimistic

11:10 pm - 24 hours with the Mac Mini

My Mini showed up yesterday afternoon. After dinner I unpacked it and turned it on. There were no problems with my Dell LCD display but I was mildly disappointed that, despite the promises of digital audio support, it did not offer either optical or coax audio ports so I'm still stuck with stereo sound. Upon booting it asked me if I wanted to transfer data from another Mac. I did so I connected the Mini to my Powerbook via a Firewire cable (borrowed from Shawn) and rebooted the Powerbook in Firewire mode. The data transfer tool did an impressive job of migrating everything over. It felt like I was using the same system, only with a lot more memory!

There were a few small problems but the only one that I wasn't able to work around easily is the lack of a universal binary driver for my Blackberry, since PocketMac hasn't been ported over yet. After moving my music over I was informed by iTunes that this machine was not authorized to play the songs I'd purchased from iTMS but providing my Apple account userID and password fixed that in a few seconds. My Flickr export plugin for iPhoto and Cisco VPN client no longer worked but upgrading to the latest versions of both solved that too.

Despite having to go through binary translation layer, using Photoshop is actually faster for me now because I don't have to deal with constantly swapping to disk. That's one sound I'm not going to miss!

Update: FrontRow is freaking awesome! I can control iTunes and browse my photos while sitting on the bed :-)

Current Mood: content

04:42 pm - Corporate memex

About 6 months after graduating I'd begun to miss the classroom a little so I looked into what Stanford had to offer and discovered that there's a grad-level seminar course on HCI with weekly guest lectures that are open to the public. Yesterday I attended the final lecture for this quarter, delivered by a trio of research scientists from the nearby PX PAL lab.They talked about their solutions to the problems of capturing information from presentations and then making people aware of information that might be of use to them without requiring them to make any extra effort. At the end of the talk I made a suggestion for improving their UI (by using faceted browsing and spatial navigation) and they seemed to think it was an excellent idea.

Current Mood: impressed

11:22 pm - I need a name for my new Mac

The Mac Mini I ordered on Tuesday night was just shipped and has begun it's journey to my office from the urban sprawl we call LA. If you want to participate in the excitement, subscribe to the RSS feed for its trip.

It's a Core Duo system with 2 gigs of RAM. The keyboard and Mighty mouse arrived today so it would be super-awesome if the Mini itself shows up tomorrow because then I can play with it over the weekend.

Related anecdote: I told my friend Deirdre that I was buying a Mini and she assumed I meant a Mini Cooper, leading to much hilarity.

Current Mood: excited

08:27 am - GTD: Chandler and 43Folders @ BayCHI

Last night's BayCHI talks were about Getting Things Done. The 1st talk (by Mimi Yin of the Open Source Applications Foundation) was about Chandler. She outlined all the ways in which it would support the GTD methodology. They seem to have covered many of the ideas I've had while thinking about collaboration tools for almost 2 years and included a few little things I hadn't thought of yet. I think I'll download the 0.6 release and give it a whirl.

The 2nd talk (by Merlin Mann who writes the 43 Folders blog about life-hacks) was about the insights into personal productivity he's had while experimenting with GTD and discussing related techniques over the past several months. He was a particularly funny speaker.

Current Mood: creative

10:41 pm - Apple-flavoured kool-aid

I bought some Apple stock today at $65ish. I'm expecting the iSteve to do something crazy to celebrate the company's 30th anniversary in a few weeks.

In the mean time, I want to replace my Powerbook because I'm tired of constant disk swapping due to Spotlight and I don't really want to sink any more money into a gigabyte stick of memory for it. Based on the fact that I've moved my Powerbook out of the house exactly once since I moved down here I think that I could make do with a desktop machine. I don't mind using Ubuntu at work but I don't want the hassle of trying to get Linux to synchronize with my Blackberry or iPod Shuffle. And I find Windows too annoying in a myriad of ways to even consider it. So my new desktop will have to be a Mac. But getting an iMac would waste my lovely 24 inch LCD display. That leaves the Mac Mini.

Aside from having lousy 3D performance the reviews seem to be quite positive about the Mini, especially when outfitted with the Core Duo and 2 gigs of RAM. And since I don't really play 3D games it should be just fine for me. Even though Photoshop hasn't been ported to the x86 yet it will run under Rosetta and I won't notice a performance issue because I only use it for colour correction and JPEG compression, neither of which use Altivec heavily. In fact, since my biggest beef right now is the lack of memory, moving to a system with 4 times as much RAM should be a nice change.

Current Mood: thoughtful

09:25 pm - Of apostrophes and injustice...

On Friday morning I visited the DMV to apply for California state ID. It's almost as useful as a driver license but doesn't permit you to drive. However, they don't make you pass a test of skill to get it. Anyway, I'd made an appointment via the Web a couple of weeks ago and wanted to confirm it before I left home in the morning so I tried looking my appointment up on the Web by providing my full name and phone number but the system insisted that it couldn't find me. Frustrated, I called them and spoke to customer service rep. She asked me for my last name so I spelt it out for her but she stumbled after the 1st letter, having apparently never heard of an apostrophe before! This did not fill me with much confidence in the competence of DMV staff. After informing me that the DMV "didn't use apostrophes" she tried to look me up by last name (minus the apostrophe) and phone number but was unable to find me. I wasn't surprised. I told her that my appointment should be for 9 am that day and asked her to look it up by the time slot. After a few moments she discovered that my last name had been recorded by the system as simply "D", dropping the apostrophe and everything that followed! I'm certainly unimpressed with the degree of care taken by the DMV to handle such exceptional cases in their online data-processing code.

Every year Stanford puts on a production of the Vagina Monologues to raise money for, among other things, the "comfort women" who were forced to serve as sex slaves under inhumane conditions by the Japanese government during WW2 and continue to be denied so much as an apology for this horrible mistreatment by the current government of Japan. I'd heard about the deplorable treatment meted out to Canadians of Japanese descent during the war by the Canadian government but I see now that both sides have their respective skeletons. But the Canadian government eventually did issue a formal apology for their misdeeds so there may be hope yet that their Japanese counterparts will come around too. The monologues were both educational and entertaining for the most part although they did betray glimmers of misandry at a few points.

Current Mood: discontent

11:41 pm - Pixelicious

My new 24 inch LCD monitor arrived today :-)

It actually has an SD card reader built into it, making my existing card reader redundant. Oh well. It's too bad so many web pages are badly designed and won't take up more than a third of the page width. But this monitor does have the ability to be twisted sideways and display in portrait mode so maybe I'll end up doing that...

Current Mood: pleased

07:39 am - The camwhores flood Gooogle Base

I was playing around with the newly released Google Base yesterday. It's pretty neat but there are some serious flaws, even after they fixed the nasty security hole. The idea behind the system is an excellent one but Google's implementation of it is not up to their usual high standards. I guess they've been forced to lower their traditionally high barrier-to-entry for employment as they continue to grow in a reviving tech industry.

They have divided the items up into different stock categories, although they allow you to customize them at will. I experimented with the people profiles, only to discover that it has been overrun by camwhores and is already being abused by dating services, although some people are just having fun. I wonder how Google is going to deal with the flood of spam...

Current Mood: annoyed

04:49 pm - External FireWire HD

I've been meaning to get an external mass-storage device for several months now but today I actually went out (to the local Apple store) and got one; A LaCie d2 Hard Drive Extreme with Triple Interface (FW, FW-Extreme, USB 2.0). The hardware setup instructions were great: 3 easy steps entirely illustrated with simple diagrams that did not require any text. The software instructions couldn't be simplified to that extent but, as it turned out, OS X did not actually require any software setup at all anyway.

There was an OS X data backup utility called SilverKeeper included on the accompanying CD-ROM. I'd actually been using it for a while in the past but this was a slightly newer version so I upgraded it and told it to backup my entire home directory, which is slightly over 4 gigs (mostly thanks to all the photographs I've been taking since I got my new camera). FireWire Extreme is impressively fast and the entire process was already over by the time I had a shower.

Now I don't have to worry about data-loss if I inadvertently lose or destroy my Powerbook :-)

Current Mood: blank

11:47 pm - Some personal revelations inspired by tonight's BayCHI talk

Eight years ago I discovered Visual Basic 3. At the time I had only ever used simple imperative languages like GW BASIC and PC Logo so the ability to create user interfaces via direct manipulation was both impressive and addictive. About a year later, after having tried to build a customer and sales management system and failing miserably, I became disenchanted with VB and swore off it forever.

Tonight at BayCHI I listened to Alan Cooper talk about the death march and how to avoid it. One of his points was that, in addition to the nontechnical aid provided by product management and executive direction, good software development requires 3 different technical roles that are generally muddled together, to disastrous effect, in most software companies. For the purpose of explanation he assigned them labels: programmers write code to be shipped by adhering to well-defined process and are concerned by the minutiae of production-quality software but need to be good at solving complex problems that arise in the process of crafting code; design engineers create the detailed architecture that the programmers will use to build the software but need to be good at writing throwaway code fast so they can tackle the tough conceptual issues via rapid prototyping; interaction designers envision and describe the user experience that the software is eventually going to provide so they need to be able to translate between the otherwise mutually incomprehensible jargon employed by geeks and suits.

If you're wondering into which camp you fall, I think an effective way to determine this is based upon your programming language of choice. Interaction designers will tend to prefer visual programming (like Flash or VB) or RAD for creating quick mock-ups of the user experience; design engineers will tend to prefer weakly-typed esoteric languages (Like SmallTalk, Lisp and Ruby) for iteratively prototyping solutions to challenging problems; programmers will tend to prefer strongly typed mainstream languages (like C++). Alternately, consider which of these goals is closest to your heart: end-user satisfaction and productivity enhancement (Interaction designer), a clean design based upon the best technology (design engineer), or releasing software that is standards-compliant, reliable, efficient and secure (programmer).

But what does this mean for the executives running software companies? Well, they need to avoid mixing up the 3 distinct roles so that people do what they excel in and each task has sufficient brainpower devoted to it. Furthermore, the software ideas should begin with the interaction designers and end end up as code produced by the programmers with critical guidance from the design engineers midway through.

Anyway, when I heard Alan elucidate this division among the technical staff I suddenly understood why I've felt such an identity crisis ever since I decided to study computer science and become a computer programmer eight years ago. My heart has never been in the code; I'm really cut out to be an interaction designer but am also fairly well suited to being a design engineer. The reason I became fascinated by computer programming back in high school is because I was enthralled by the prospects of how computer software could improve our lives and implicitly recognized that writing code was the only way to make these dreams a reality. Later on I noticed the distinction between programming and design engineering. Realizing that I was more interested in and adept at the latter, I gravitated toward what was then termed software architecture and almost ended up studying it in grad school. But about a year ago I began to creep back toward my original spark of interest in interaction design, which is what compelled me to jettison my plans for grad school in favour of a position on VMware's UI team where I now spend time in all 3 aforementioned roles of software development.

What I'd like to do is eventually increase the amount of time I spend on interaction design instead of programming. Unfortunately, Alan's encouragement to lavish more resources upon interaction design has not yet been taken to heart by most software companies. The obvious solution would be to start my own company. Philip Greenspun actually presented an idea for a startup tonight but it involves hardware so the Cooper model of running a successful software company can't be applied to it easily.

It's all very exciting. But I'm the sort of person who could have multiple heart-attacks while biking through rush-hour traffic with rabid pit-bulls snapping at my heels and then say it was an exciting trip... So what do I know?

Update: after a long IM discussion with adamspitz I am now convinced that the best software developers are those who understand and enjoy all 3 roles.

Current Mood: crushed

06:57 am - Reiser: the face behind the filesystem

( Last night I had dinner with Hans Reiser. )

Current Mood: nerdy

09:44 am - Sony begins to feel the pain of market rejection

For the past few years I have watched as Sony continued to flout consumer preferences in favour of pushing it's intellectual property. They avoided open standards like CompactFlash & MMC (and even licensable collaborative ones like Secure Digital) in favour of their home-grown Memory Stick technology that had to be licensed from them. As a result, anybody choosing to purchase an electronic device made by Sony usually ended up being locked in to their proprietary storage media that cost much more than any of the alternates.

They also made the ill-fated move of acquiring media companies, thereby entering the music and film industries. This produced some internal turmoil because of the inherent opposition between the market desires of media companies and consumer electronics companies. Media companies want to make sure that no device is capable of permitting their customers to share content with each other for fear of rampant copyright infringement. They seek this goal regardless of how unusable it makes the devices. Consumer electronics companies, on the other hand, want people to buy their products. This generally entails making them both useful and easy to use. But people like to share stuff. So the successful consumer electronics companies put the bare minimum of restrictions of their hardware. Unfortunately, this turned Sony into a rather conflicted corporate entity. And it showed in their product offerings.

Given that there was plenty of competition from Apple, Casio and the like, Sony is now reaping the fruit of its bad judgement as it is forced to abrogate 10,000 employees in a desperate attempt to trim some fat and become relevant again. But I don't see it gaining the focus it needs yet...

Current Mood: predatory

09:25 pm - The old fogeys are going down

When I was asked to write research papers at UW, most of my profs were adamant about us not relying upon the Net for our research; some went so far as to point out that the goood stuff is only to be found in obscure journals with no online presence. This baffles me. Do these journals revel in their exclusivity? If not, why do they not publish online? The world is changing. These days, if you're not in Google, you don't exist.

Current Mood: optimistic

09:13 am - Design

Design is what has allowed our species to adapt the environment to our desires in ways that no other species ever has. There are two sides to design: the first stems from art, focuses on form/presentation/austhetics, and results in style; the second stems from science, focuses on function/behaviour/usability, and results in engineering. We want things that work well to serve our needs/desires while simultaneously appealing to our senses in a manner that makes us feel good about using them.

Of course, the utility value of a thing will influence the balance of importance that each of these two side is given when designing it. For instance, style is more important in decorations and engineering is more important in medical equipment. But for most things both aspects of design are significant and neglecting either one will almost certainly result in a bad design.

We seem to be tackling this problem by getting people trained in the different sides of design to work together. Unfortunately, it doesn't usually work as well as we'd like. It's hard to collaborate on projects when we don't share the same mental frameworks.

It is a shame, then, that our formal education system pushes people to focus on one side at the expense of the other. Engineering students are given a scanty handful of electives and Arts students are effectively barred form taking engineering courses. I am concerned that this state of affairs is damaging our capacity to continue designing wonderful things by making the ability to do so into the exception rather than the norm.

Current Mood: creative