Author Archive

Monday 10/15/2007
Design

Every time I elect to subscribe to someone’s RSS feed I am presented with this well-meaning page:

I have NEVER clicked on “Add to Google homepage.” I ALWAYS click on “Add to Google Reader.” Google probably knows this. I grab and shed feeds rather quickly, so this page is a frequent (and frequently annoying) interruption to my RSS-snarfing routine. In the words of Nancy Kerrigan: “WHYYYYYYY!!?”

Granted, this is a small annoyance. But fostering pleasure in use, beyond simple usability, is primarily concerned with removing (large and) small annoyances. Perhaps a checkbox: “Remember this choice?”

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Friday 10/12/2007
Tools

If you use Firefox you should use Google Browser Sync . Seriously.

Google Browser Sync (GBS hereinafter, because I’m lazy) is a Firefox extension that caches your cookies, history, bookmarks, open tabs, and saved passwords on Google’s servers for your later use. You can encrypt the data, ostensibly preventing even Google from reading it, and you can prevent the caching and syncing of one or more of these five data types. For example, I do not sync browsing history so that my work computer’s history isn’t littered with flash game sites, generally considered a no-no.

Having my bookmarks and open tabs and passwords available at work and home gives me a unique freedom: I can close a browser window with multiple tabs open in the middle of researching a problem or idea at home, drive to work, fire up Firefox, and pick up exactly where I left off. This capability is incredibly valuable.

Most writeups ( Google , Google Blog , Wikipedia ) of GBS focus on using this information on multiple computers, which is how I got started with this extension. But it has proven valuable even with a single computer on multiple occasions.

1. At work, Firefox and I were not getting along; it seemed the browser would crash at the slightest provocation. Even so, I could pick up where I left off thanks to GBS. When the time came to intervene, GBS saw me safely through profile pruning, creation of new profiles, reinstallations, and other usually destructive acts. (Trashing my old profile did the trick, at it turns out.)
2. A while ago I ditched my home PC in favor of a Mac. GBS handled this move without a hitch, making the brain transplant even easier than expected.
3. In my flush of enthusiasm over my new Mac I installed and uninstalled scads of third-party software, only to find that uninstallation (even with AppZapper , which is very good) is not as clean as it should be. Eventually this prompted a reformat and rebuild of the machine (I know, I know). Again GBS saved my bacon; I could get Firefox (or, better, BonEcho ) running with all of my bookmarks and whatnot very quickly so I could be somewhat productive while waiting for other apps to install.

GBS does not sync extensions, and that’s probably a good thing, although some way of caching and syncing a list of installed extensions and URLs for their .xpi files would be very nice. Even so, GBS is a tool that I’d rather not do without.

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Tuesday 10/9/2007
Business, Design

I received an eVite today, the first in a long while. It was not a great experience.

Strike one: lack of context. The HTML email message was pretty, but nearly information-free: it contained the sender’s name, the name of the event, and a smattering of descriptive text (that the sender deliberately kept short). No location, no time, no date; for those I would have to click through to eVite.com.

Without at least the date I couldn’t assess the urgency of the message. Is it something I need to deal with right away? Can it wait until I get home and put my daughter to bed? Can it wait for a few days, maybe until the weekend? The most important information an invitation ordinarily carries is actually hidden! Furthermore, not all of the invite graphic is clickable; a faiir portion of it is not. Obligingly, I found a clickable portion and clicked through.

Strike two: poor prioritization. The most prominent elements in the page at eVite.com are the ones I care about the least. In order of apparent priority (what draws the eye first):

1. The main graphic for the invite
2. “Guest Options” links (mostly useless or out-of-place)
3. eVite logo and tabs
4. Two ads from the University of Phoenix
5. The guest list
6. “Reply here” box
7. A “New! Send to Phone” button
8. “Plan your next event”
9. “Free eVite Cards”
10. Footer navigation and administrivia
11. Information about the event, including venue, time, date, and blurb.

That’s right, the very reason I came to the page is the LEAST prominent segment of the page. For a moment there I didn’t even see it, and was ready to accuse eVite of completely fouling things up. As it is, they’ve taken the part of the experience that I care about the most, and shown that THEY care about it the least. This is backward.

Des Traynor points out that a quick way to evaluate the user-centeredness of a page is to grey out the portions that the user doesn’t care about, and see what you have left. Rather than do that, I’ll desaturate the page and highlight the parts I DO care about with big yellow boxes.

(I’ve obscured parts of the image that identify other folks.) There’s a lot there that I don’t need, and most of it is high on eVite’s priority list. The meat of the page, the main event, the reason this page exists at all accounts for (charitably) 28% of the real estate and much of it is de-emphasized.

Strike three: poor organization. eVite’s difficulties with the prioritization if the invite page probably mask other usability and appeal problems that appear there, mostly due to the “I give up” “Guest Options” box of links that appears to the left of the Guest List. Guest Options contains a jumble of links related to disparate user tasks and far-flung parts of the interface. “Invite more people” and “Remove me from guest list” are strongly conceptually associated with the Guest List, while “Send a free Evite eCard” and “Go to Carpool Page” are not (and are heralded elsewhere). None of these are “guest options” so much as additional or alternate functionality, and they should be treated in context with the content they seek to modify or operate on.

It will be difficult to put these functions in their proper places until the prioritization is fixed, but here are a few additional suggestions:

• “Send to Phone” and “Add to my Outlook Calendar” are most strongly related to the “When” portion of the invite. “Add to Calendar” is really only useful if I plan to attend or am a “maybe,” so making these options part of the reply form is another option.
• “Email me when Guests Reply” (what’s with The Bizarre capitalization?) appears as a link in “Guest Options” and as a check box on the reply form. The check box should be sufficient, although eVite has bloated this functionality by allowing you to further choose to watch only specific invitees.
• If we believe in direct manipulation, “Remove me from Guest List” probably should go with my entry on the guest list.
• “Go to Carpool Page” is a problem; it suggests that I’ll be taken away from the invite. Maybe I’ll lose my place? Already I am disinclined to click the link, although it may prove useful.

Strike four: print. The parts of the invite I am likely to want to print include the title, venue/date/time/blurb, host name and contact information, and (perhaps) the guest list. Using the “Print Page” just fires window.print(); , printing the entire page including the (useless on paper) tabs, “Guest Options” links, “send to phone” button, footer, ad banners, and reply form, with nary a print style sheet in sight. Easy to implement, sure, but NOT USEFUL. And a lightly-populated eVite prints on two pages with all of that needless content because the footer bloated with “partner sites.”

But wait, there is more.

1. The “Yes/No/Maybe” radio buttons in the reply form have unintended consequences. Selecting anything other than “Yes” disables the “I’m interested in carpooling” check box. But what if I am a “maybe” until I can get a ride? Trying to fake out the system by checking the box and THEN selecting “maybe” fires an annoying alert(); complaining that “You cannot participate in carpool if you select no or maybe.” Umm, thanks. Watch me! I’ll get a ride with someone, and we’ll point and laugh at the eVite carpool cops when they come to arrest me.
2. Out of curiosity I click on the “more info” link next to the “I’m interested in carpooling” checkbox. The page grows to include a little text telling me that I should continue clicking to learn more. isn’t that why I clicked “more info” in the first place? Weird.
3. Some of the ancillary functionality fires popups, and some of it takes me away from the invite. There seems to be no standard; “Invite More People” navigates away from the invite, and therefore away from the context I might need to choose people to invite (such as the Guest List, yeah?), while “Email me when Guests Reply” fires a popup that contains the guest list. I’ve given up trying to guess the reasoning behind these decisions.
4. “Add to my Outlook Calendar” fires the download of a VCS file. What if I use iCal? Google Calendar? Notes? Can I get an ICS, anyone?
5. It turns out that the “Go to Carpool Page” does take me away from the invite; it shows me a pretty map and has ABSOLUTELY NO CALL TO ACTION whatsoever until I notice that at the top there is a tiny message claiming that “You must reply ‘Yes’ to this invitation to join a carpool.” Thanks so much for your help.

Make no mistake, eVite is trying to do a lot on this page. But it does not appear that they have chosen carefully which of these things to emphasize and streamline for their users, nor have they chosen any particular facet of the experience to do particularly well. The overall flavor is that of an organization attempting to compete on the length of its feature list rather than the usefulness of any one core combination of those features.

I haven’t replied to the eVite yet, nor have I sent one of my own. If this episode is typical of the eVite experience, I’ll have more to write very soon.

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Friday 9/28/2007
Business, Design

Jason Fried over at 37signals mentioned today that he gets a lot of questions about “growing the business”: why aren’t they, when will they, etc.

They don’t plan to. Not in the traditional sense, by hiring. What’s important here is that they have oriented their business, and especially their products, to succeed without requiring additional head count. This means:

• fostering self-service to minimize personnel required to do routine account service (billing, signup, cancellation, etc.),
• improving usability and intelligibility to minimize personnel required to perform technical support,
• measuring their ability to keep customer support workload down even as enrollment grows.

I happen to work for a major medical device manufacturer, and I don’t think I am revealing any secrets when I say that while we talk a good game about fostering self-service and making our products easier to use and just plain figure out, we’ve nearly doubled our sales force and our customer service head count has grown significantly. It is nice to “show commitment to customer service,” but this is an expensive way to do it. I suspect we and other manufacturers (and our customers) would be much better served by an orientation similar to that of the 37signals folks.

I suspect that the groups that conceive of, design, develop, and build our products do not work toward metrics that encourage the reduction of customer service load, except when it comes to specific problematic features of already-released products. As Joel Spolsky once put it, “you get what you measure.” We are getting a product every 18 months (metric: schedule) that does more than its predecessor (metric: can we sell it) and is more reliable (metric: returns per thousand units shipped), but isn’t necessarily easier to use, more appealing, more pleasurable to use, or requiring of less support.

Here’s where the story gets interesting. Were we to add the missing metrics and do nothing else, suddenly these products (which dominate their market) would be scoring very poorly internally. There would be great pressure to stop using the new, bad metrics, because they wouldn’t seem to have a relationship to revenue, which would probably remain high. But adding metrics such as total cost of support per thousand units shipped would solve the second problem : you can’t solve a problem (the first problem, the real problem) until you measure it, which is a form of admitting that it exists at all.

Were we to add the missing metrics and suffer a while with unhappy numbers, sooner or later people would start asking what could be done about them, and one or more of three basic responses would emerge:

1. Distort the system
2. Distort the numbers
3. Improve the system

Distortion of the system might occur were we to outsource a component of our support functions to lower its cost. Such a move would result in lower total support costs for any product shipped thereafter, but not because the product improved. Something to watch out for.

Doing away with the “faulty” metrics would be an extreme form of distorting the numbers. A more likely form would be to adjust what costs make it into total cost of support, or narrowing the timeframe over which that total is recorded and/or projected. Perhaps initial training costs wouldn’t be included, or only support costs in the second, third, and fourth years (once the less certain users shake out) might be tallied. In either case, we’d be back to denying the problem rather than measuring it.

Improve the system? Lets, please.

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