googloopers (google bloopers)

Technology First, Needs Last

2009-12-15T20:24:00.002-03:00

I'm reading a new essay by Don Norman with this same title at and it makes me think.

For some reason the conclusions look rather evident to me.

Not being a design researcher, my opinions are simply opinions. But having spent many years alive, especially doing high usability software systems, my opinions might have some value.

On the relationship of technology and humans

It is very uncommon that somebody invented something that is completely out of sync with its epoch, may be Babbage did. Or it happens but silently, and so it falls into oblivion. Like the push Internet technologies of the late nineties, "invented" for the convenience of advertising instead of being requested by the people.

Usually there is an unsaid request from the Society for "something", a request that the inventor "hears" in the silence of his mind.

These requests happen in a context, especially a technological context that makes them feasible.

From Don Norman's list of "powerful inventions" I choose the cellphone as an example. Notice that the regular POTS telephone and the radio are above in the same list. The cellphone is a mashup of telephone and radio. In the meanwhile various intermediate devices existed, like citizen's band radio, pulse-code modulation phone lines, and wireless links in rural areas. All these technologies worked but none was so massively adopted as the cellphone, does this makes them less "inventions"?

What make the cellphone such a great breakthrough was not the invention itself but it's huge adoption. The same can be said of the Internet. And by sure of the original telephone.

Actually I could be saying that somehow all inventions are, in fact, just applications of prior inventions.

The same happens with science

Every now and then a pair of hard-working mathematicians assign themelves the merit of having created something.

This is not by chance, at least not completely. Both thinkers were "hearing" the society's silent request.

Less casual was the simultaneous isolation of the HIV by two research teams, one in USA and the other in France. The society's silent request was deafening then.

Role of design researchers

Design researchers are not inventors. Should we browse the patents held by one great design guru like Don Norman and I imagine that we would not find but small steps aimed at perfection. But not completely new devices. The "incremental" kind of invention.

The Design Researchers breaktrough is in way they influence the mind of people. The book "The Design of Everyday Things" helped many people to realize what was wrong with the operation of doors and computer systems and everything else and helped them change their minds.

It is great that Don Norman wrote it. But if he wouldn't then by sure somebody else would have raised the flag.

There was, for example, Mitchell Kapor's "Software Manifesto" published a couple years after DOET.

The society was somehow expecting the "... Everyday Things" book to be written. When it actually happened we read it and feel that it "interpreted our thinking". We are never completely surprised by the ideas of such "hinge" books. To me it was sort of a "déjà vu", and may be to many other professionals that were expecting their feelings to become ideas.

Macintosh & MS-DOS

Now that you mention it, yes, in the eighties there was a desesperate requiremente for "something" to make the newly created PCs usable. This was another deafening silent request.

Such was the need that the Society was ready to settle for anything, just anything. Thus DOS and later Windows: the real innovators were not listening and the opportunity was seized by somebody else.

Getting to the point

The inventors somehow recreate what the Society asks them to invent. They do not invent in the vacuum.

The Design Researchers are a breed of emergents from the Society that tell that Society what are the needs of their members. Their mission is to hear the silent request.

Great inventions are backed by massive adoption, that is what makes those great inventions great.

Google

Can we think of Google as inventors?

Yes, because the Company has that 80-20 rule for personal projects.

And also because many Google projects do not blossom.

The great invention was the search ranking method and its implementation.

The other great invention by Google that I like very much is Gmail, an email system that combines the advantages of the desktop email (which we already forgot) and those of the webmail. This one is great because it contributes so much to make the people's life better.

Other "inventions" like Google Maps are not actually inventions but better implementations of existing ideas and thus do not qualify as "inventions" ... don't thay? Actually every invention is a new view of something that already existed.

Google failures

2009-11-30T12:08:00.001-03:00

There has been some recent blogging about Google failures, like in Google’s Past Failures Offer Perspective on Chrome OS Release.There seems to be a list of failures that bloggers repeat, I found it in English andtranslated into Spanish.

The list was relaunched in the occassion of the announcement of the Chrome OS as anopen source product. Randall C. Kennedy of InfoWorld blog post about Chrome OSfailure was the trigger.

IMO his view about Crome OS is a bit shortsighted in that it does not allow headroomfor evolution. The same arguments he raises today as of Novenber 2009 about Chrome OScould have been raised about Gmail in 2004 April fool day when it was first released. ButGmail did not flop, not at all. Even considering that the arguments were more sound bythen.

Chrome OS is not like Windows in that it does not come out in a finished version butit is open for that kind of continuous evolution that makes software "getting better allthe time" as The Beatles sang.

Let's not talk abot how it is but about what can we do to shape it to be valuable.

Google success

Despite its name this blog is not about Google failure but success. It is about tryingto call their attention to make them more successful so the users can squeeze more valuefrom Google's products lineup.

Each and every time Google comes out with an useful and usable application, the userslife is a litle better.

So if Google keeps trying to enrichen their offering, thay are welcome.

Lively & the realisting paradigm

I can't believe they launched Lively, based in a real world realistic paradigm! Why didn't they askme!

Almost all applications based on realistic paradigms fail. This is because thecomputer version will never be as "real" as the real version, and on the other hand therealistic design deprives them from leveraging the advantages of the computer.

Another company, Microsoft, released a few realistic products that flopped. It's saidthat the roots of these producte are in the mind of Bill Gates' wife. May be.

Trouble with Google Sites while reporting trouble with Google Sites

2009-11-13T17:13:00.010-03:00

I was willing to stop posting small bloopers, like program errors, and focus on more interesting things like the end of the document era.
But it's not possible yet, or ever. Especially the day after having read the Google phrase "Saving the world, one line of code at a time". I seems I always stumble upon the "other" code lines.
Let's go to the point: there is a small issue in Google Sites. We are spoiled by one of Gmail's huge usability steps, the organization of email threads as "conversations".
As always happens with software enhancements, the novelty quickly becomes mainstream and the prior state of the art is forgotten.
Except for a piece of software in Google Sites, the one that sends the change notifications. Actually, it does conversations every now ahd then, whimsically.

See a screen snapshot of said emails in the inbox of my Gmail account:

As you can see the picture has two dimensions: height and width. Both are too big.

Height is too much

Height must be reduced by lumping together all the messages related to one page. For example "Novedades IxDA" apperas 4 times, "Anuncios Generales" appears 10 times, ans so on. The first 48 entries, if properly aggregated in conversations, would be only 21: less than half of the height.
I noticed that getting to read and actionate on these emails is a burden. Other users expressed the same so I decided to blog this in an attempt to help to get it fixed. Prior to writing tis post I added a "question" in the support forum (there is no public bug traqcher). If you feel so open it and add your own comments or support mine.

Width is also too much

Width is also an issue. Notice that to find out what is an email about I have to scan horizontally a lot of "noise" text, more or less up to the yellow vertical line.

A usability suggestion

So I suggest that Sites reorganizes the email subjects thus:
[IxDA Buenos Aires] A comment was added to Día Mundial de la Usabilidad y Contacto entr...? - John Doe
[IxDA Buenos Aires] Día Mundial de la Usabilidad y Contacto entr...? [comment added by John Doe]
That is, put first the interesting part of the subject "Día Mundial ..." so the user can get to if after having quickly skipped the "[IxDA Buenos Aires]" tag. Else the user in informed thar a comment was added to ... never mind (a page she is not interested in).
As you can see there is a vertical yellow line approximately dividing the noise from the information. It leaves approximately 43% of the width at its left, the noise part. I'm somehow cheating here, because all the tags to the left should not count, but anyway ...
Another enhancement would be to hide the [IxDA Buenos Aires] tag, redundant with the sender and the colored [IxDA-BA] tag.

The issue with the issue

While trying to add a "question" in the support forum I ran into further issues, this time with the support site.

Encouraged by the phrase "The more you tell us, the more likely you will get a great answer" and willing to see a great answer I prepared a nice posting with the content of the inbox image in text, carefully edited and trimmed, using the text editor I prefer.

I pasted the text and clicked the "Post question" button. Only to learn that they didn't want to be told issues in so much detail. Silly me, I didn't read the page in detail, it must be my fault ... but wait! it is not said in the page, there was no coutdown visible!
Anyway I edited the text well below the 8192 characters limit and posted again. Same result.
After many trim and try cycles the post was accepted. It was about 4500 characters long by then. I didn´t post the issue found while posting the issue.

A better world

Google speas about saving the world, one line of code at a time and I think it's right and that they really mean it. And in fact some Google products are so carefully crafted that it is a pleasure to use them, they contribute to make the world better.
charter is to help them to do so by pointing at the next code line to fix. And also to point to non.existing code lines like in The end of the document age.

Nice chrome bug

2009-10-29T14:22:00.004-03:00

Almost all the times I write a post I stumble upon one or more Google bugs.

Notice that I don't mention a single application but just Google, because this is the way it should be: integrated.

In this case the prize is for Chrome, because it displayed some HTML text over a flash advertisement, see the picture.

Firefox nicely flows the text around the flash object.

This is Google Chrome 4.0.223.11 and I-m not supposed to complain about it because it's a developer's version. I'm posting this because of the nice looks of the outcome.

The end of the "document" age

2009-10-28T16:51:00.016-03:00

The prediction

Gartner is predicting the end of the "document" age. Finally!

I'm waiting for this to happen since years ago.

See "Gartner Says 80 Per Cent of Enterprise Collaboration Platforms Will Primarily Be Based on Web 2.0 Techniques by 2013".

They say "Managing Users' Transition from File-Orientation to Web 2.0 Approach Will Be a Major Challenge" while it should not be so.

The (painful?) transition

I imagine that Gartner interviewed people working in offices and asked them "What do you prefer, wiki-like or file-based documents?" and got honest answers biased by the prior experience of those who asked and those who answered.

Office is enough painful so that nobody wants to switch, not even to a free option like OpenOffice, after all that whining about its cost. This is so because nobody wants to go again through such a painful training experience. Remember having had an experience like this?

The choices

Both choices, Office and Wikis, are painful.

Office because of its ancient design that MS does not want to change because they are locked in because they have so many million users locked in, reluctant to open their wings and fly away because they are afraid of more pain.

Wikis are, well, wikis. Limited in their capabilities, providing almost a single format for everything, most of the times lacking WYSIWYG capabilities. Geeks can grok Wikis, just another simple language to master, but normal people does not: they have more interesting things to think about.

But change happens

Change happens, and very quickly when the conditions are met. See, for example, Gmail (It seems I always pull the same example!).

Honestly, when web mail was as it was before Gmail, if you were interviewed by Gartner about a choice between desktop email and webmail, what would you have answered? Yes, you would have chosen desktop mail, wholeheartedly.

But Gmail reared and you changed your mind, didn´t you?

So it's about Google Docs ...

Actually, no. Not at all.

Google Docs is a straight copy of the Office UI and thus is has many of the issues Office has.

It has two good points: it´s online and it's collaborative. Unlike Office + Sharepoint, for example, that define "collaboration" as successive offline solo steps.

And Docs has a lot of issues of their own. I will not blog any more about all those bloopers because I don't have that much free time, and I want to blog about positive ideas, but trust me that Docs deserves a sound revision.

So what?

In future posts I will clarify what´s wrong about the "documents" and will sketch my take on the Office replacement, the one that will work, adopted with viral frenzy. Like Gmail was

Making AJAX crawlable

2009-10-23T10:11:00.004-03:00

There is a not-so-new slideset by Katharina Probst and Bruce Johnson (the GWT guy) about making AJAX crawlable, here: http://docs.google.com/present/view?id=dc75gmks_120cjkt2chf

It's short and interesting.

It's not only about AJAX but any dynamic web site who wants their pages indexed like, for example, a news site.

One way to have dynamic content indexed was to make the internal engine render all the possible pages in HTML and store them in a special directory, in a simplified format to avoid a traffic spike .

Now Probst and Johnson say that Web sites willing to be indexed should provide a server script that outputs all the data the site wants to be reached through.

For example a site about places can output a list of cities with additional relevant data, in a simple listing "internal page" (do crawlers index very long pages?)

This would be better that to run the server scripts to make it generate all the possible pages. But it might be a resources waste, as instead of many pages one could do with a simple, long, "internal page" sporting the keywords and other fixed data ony once, and a listing of the variable parts, pointing to the URL where the user would choose his selection. http://docs.google.com/present/view?id=dc75gmks_120cjkt2chf Web sites wanting to be indexed should provide a simple script that outputs all the data the site wants to be reached through.For example a site about places can output a list of cities, in a simple listing "internal page". In some cases it is possible to run the server scripts to make it generate all the possible pages. This might be a resources waste, as instead of many pages one could do with a simple, long, "internal page" sporting the keywords and other fixed data ony once, and a listing of the variable parts, pointing to the URL where the user would choose his selection. "

"All possible pages" sounds scary, but in most cases it's not. Obviously Google can't generate each and every page. But most other sites could. Even eBay, for example, which must be doing something like that. Each site has to do its math: number of unique "items" times number of characters per item pure content, devoid of all the surronding stuff like hundreds of links that make a page weighty. Disk drives are inexpensive.

I think about loading a special directory with barebones XML "bait" pages containing all the relevant data with appropriate URLs that the web server could redirect to the actual page for viewing. This way the bait pages could be designed to display better in the search results list, with more relevant abstracts.

And when I write "bait" I think of scams, sites luring users to click in search results that take them to different contents.

Actually, the site should design and store indexing raw data, linking text content with URLs, to feed the crawler. And ideally the site should ba abre to run it at the time that best fits them, like for example during the local night hours. As the indexes do not update so frequently, not in real time at least, choosing a time should not be an issue.

No new posts

2009-10-18T23:30:00.003-03:00

No new post. Many days ago I tried to sprout a new article, funny, revealing, but it was not possible.

I ran into problems, the kind of problems I blog about here, and it was impossible to come out with a post in a finite time lapse.

So I decided to blog about those problems and in doing so I ran into more issues.

The issues were difficult to describe so I recorded the screen action and after doing so I noticed that I didn't know how to publish video, er .., flash, because I recorded the screen with Debugmode's Wink that outputs a flash video.

The "Add Video" button does not know about flash, only AVI, MPEG, QuickTime, Real, and Windows Media.

So I delved into the docs that would help me to learn how to include a simple, small, animation into my new post but no luck.

So this no-post is about not posting because of the reasons I post about.

I googled about posting flash in blogger and nothing clear came out, only that I could upload the movie into youTube and embed it.

youTube refused to accept my swf but didn´t tell why.

Does anybody know how to do it? Now I suspect that youTube rejected my swf because it featured cht usual pause/run controls.

Calendar and timezones

2008-01-17T14:53:00.000-02:00

Today I registered myself for an event, a webcast about a technology (making Eclipse pulgins) that will happen in a few days so I want to enter it in my Google Calendar.

The event is slated for starting by January 22, 2008 at 9:00 am PST / 12:00 pm EST / 5:00 pm GMT.

As I'm not in USA the first two time tags are meaningless to me so I'm left with only the third one, namely "5:00 pm GMT". As I'm in Buenos Aires my time id "GMT - 2" during this summer so after some reasoning I think I have to add (or subtract?) 2 hours to the GMT time to get my local time. Or I can visit timeanddate.com and after a while look for Buenos Aires in the long places list to find out that the event will start at 3PM here.

Why didn't I use the timezone option in Google Calendar event details input form?

Well, it happens that there is no such option. Which I think it might be useful for people entering events that will happen somewhere else, for example one that is going to travel.

Actually the screenshot is only a quick and dirty mockup I made for this posting. Just an idea to be developed.

Posting is a pain

2008-01-01T19:34:00.000-02:00

Posting in the Blogger UI is a pain, one posts struggling against the system instead of being helped by it.

The first noticeable bit is the working area. In my modest 1024x768 screen only 21% of the pixels are devoted to input text, the rest is mostly flat blank or dark blue. Few artifacts, this is good.

Hey, I paid for the whole screen, why should I want to use only 1/5 of it?

An example comes to mind: the visualization and edition of environment variables in Windows. It is done in fixed-size small windows that didn't make much sense in 640x480 screens and are ridiculous as of today's resolutions.

As I said, this is the first bit. There are so many! For example whilst editing HTML, newlines become line breaks instead of being handled as blank space. A newline in the HTML source is replaced by a ... hmm, I already struggled trying to show tags here ... lets try, newlines are illegally converted in <br> tags.

Ten pearls of wisdom

2008-01-01T17:30:00.000-02:00

Yesterday a couple in Florida found a pearl in their dinner.

That´s nothing, in terms of economical value, when compared with this pearl of wisdom I found the day before. It´s a small excerpt from a book, see for yourself:

Top Ten Signs That Things Are Going Badly

"Our Web site is intuitive and user-friendly."
We need to start doing some usability tests before our launch next month."
"We can use [XML/SOAP/ insert other buzzword technology] to fix that."
"If you stop and think about how the interface works for a second, it makes complete sense."
"How can our customers be so stupid? It's so obvious!"
"Well, they should RTFM!"
"We don't need to do any user testing. I'm a user, and I find it easy to use."
"We'll just put an 'Under Construction' sign there."
"Shrink the fonts more so that we can put more content at the top."
"We need a splash screen."

Yes, since long ago I noticed that when a developer designing any piece of software says they were planning to build it "APB" (A prueba de bobos = fool proof) then that system is bound to failure.

What usually follows is "How can our customers be so stupid? It's so obvious!" and maybe the addition of some user-patronizing instructions.

But all these ten bits together! Understanding this might save the site much more value than that of the rare pink pearl.

The book, whick I recommend without having read it in full, is "The design of sites".

It´s not about graphical design the "surface design" but on functional design which accounts for 90% of a site´s usability.

How to learn to loathe usability reviews and stop worrying

2007-12-07T13:47:00.000-03:00

An usability review is always about issues in the user interface of a system.
It's the contrary of raving about the web site or whatever, is pinpointing design errors.
In the programming world those unavoidable errors are called "bugs" and usually are fixed without blaming anybody.
This is fine, the whole team owning the bugs and fixing them happily.

One problem I frequently found with usability reports is that the author of the UI resists the reports sayings as if it were an attack, arguing forever.

But so are those reports ...

Downloading the GWT Example Programs

2007-12-04T17:28:00.000-03:00

How to download GWT Example Projects

Adhering to the currently running GWT Conference I'm blogging about a small issue in the GWT site.

It happens that, after seeing the reasonably good demos, I wants to have the code in my PC.

It looks easy: there is a prominent link button closing the page content (see image) labeled "Download Source Code."

So I clicked the button and it took me to a page titled "Google Web Toolkit Downloads" contaning the GWT download offerings, which does not include the sample code I wanted. Only a "Download Google Web Toolkit" button.

I said to myself "It must be somewhere near here" and started looking around.

A "see our complete download list." link seemed the solution, but not: it contains lots of GWT versions including release candidates for version 1.0 (1.4 is current as I write this.)

Conclusion: not a single sample download, I verified that all five example projects led to the same page.

The bottom line

It happens that the examples are included in the GWT download. So it's right to take the user to the download page, but #~@%gggg!

Instead of the notorious "Download Source Code" it would have been better to write "The source code gets installed with GWT in subfolder x."

A bit on usability

Most usability issues are small and silly, the problem is when they are so many!

The very first GWT conference has started today

2007-12-03T10:10:00.000-03:00

The first GWT conference

I don't go to such conferences. It's not that I don't want to, I'm too far away and currency exchange is not at all convenient (by a factor of three) so I have to observe them as an outsider. I have observed many, since the first JavaOne and before.

Usually the first few conferences on each new technology convey all the excitement, the feeling of being pioneers, a sense of evangelism.

A new and promising technology captures the vested interest of thousands, usually because it promises to solve all the pending problems or because it appears to be an opportunity to make big money.

The GWT opportunity

That said, GWT is also a huge opportunity for the IT masses to solve a pesky problem that has been always endemic to computer systems. Because it is a product positioned near the User Interface and computer systems too often deny the user.

Unfortunately it seems as if the focus still were the computer ...

From the conference site ...

"Google Web Toolkit enables developers to use their favorite Java tools to build AJAX applications without having to tackle the steep learning curve and quirks of JavaScript and CSS. The Voices That Matter: Google Web Toolkit Conference will insure you understand why this is so and how you can leverage the power and functionality of GWT for your applications."

The text above is the very first paragraph from the landing page. By reading it one can not follow that this is a user-focused conference. It'sall about developers, once again.

In the last paragraph of an inner page the good news appear. Under What is Google Web Toolkit? one can read ...

"The GWT engineering team makes this abundantly clear by stating unapologetically that when there is a choice to be made between "easy for the user" versus "easy for the developer," "easy for the user" wins. That may be a surprising sentiment coming from tool builders, but, then again, their first design axiom is four words: User experience is primary."

There is that candid passage where the author says that this " ... may be a surprising sentiment ... " and yes, it is surprising, a nice surprise.

Who is the conference for?

Obviously the GWT Conference is for developers, technologists, like me and most of the featured speakers. With a couple "usability" sparks, IMO too lame.

It's also clear that one can't make a user advocate out of a hardcore IT geek in the lapse from monday thry Thursday at 1:30PM.

The fact is that GWT solves a problem to the developers, that of having to write Javascript for the UI. Besides that, it could even be harmful from the point of view of the users, leaving them at the sole mercy of the Java developers.

There is nothing wrong with Java developers, many of my friends ara Java developers ...

Seriously, it's not the developer's fault. Can't explain it now ... it's in Alan Coopers book "The Inmates Are Running the Asylum."

The technology and the solution

A technology is not a solution but a tool. Supposedly it will be easierfor a Java developer to build a UI using GWT. This is not to say that the application will be necessarily better, read on ...

Many years ago a tool was announced, one that allowed developers top build UIs with great ease, dragging and dropping controls in a canvas. It was bundled with a well known programming language.

That tool brought GUI development to the masses, literally, and thus itwas used to build both a few good and many loathed UIs.

You know, I'm talking about Microsoft's Visual Basic. VB applications were
used to "upgrade" many DOs applications, frequently with reduced usability. Yes, GUI replacements were not necessarily better for the user than their command linre counterparts, maybe Lotus 1-2-3 was the most dramatic example: the DOS version dominated the spreadsheet marked but the GUI version fumbled.

The bottom line

Althought Java in the server plus GWT for the UI plus the developer sounds like three of a perfect pair, that does not mean that any application is going to be plain better.

In fact, we'll see worse applications because GWT is doing a good job in lowering the threshold.

I revolve thinking about how to help even the most hardcore geeky
devlopers to build usable applications.

Trivia

Alan Cooper, the guy who wrote the "inmates" book, is also the one who invented Visual Basic.

The high usability example: Gmail

2007-11-14T09:20:00.000-03:00

Why is Gmail an example of high usability?

This happened in two steps, by sure. I imagine it like this:

First step, the idea:
The first step was a positive one, about thinking on behalf of the users, the inception of a useful product.
Remember: before Gmail we used slow webmail, with very little alloted space. For example I used Netscape mail because it offered 10MB, twice as much as the others did!
Also, web mail was cumbersome and slow, made with traditional HTML forms that took ages to reload completely making you lose the focus.

On the other hand we had the desktop mail, with enough space to store messages and with quick interaction. But usually installed in a single PC, unreachable from elsewhere.

The Gmail idea was to question this status quo and seek a solution providing the advantages of both web mail and desktop mail:

reachable from anywhere,
quick response,
lots of space to store messages,
and the innovative "conversation" newsgroup-like organization.

Second step, the implementation:
This second step was a "negative" one in that it was about not doing wrong.
Although the developers (I imagine) were conscious that they were challenging the model, they refrained from adding the many features that surface in such circumstances, coming out with a really clean user interface.
Those who are not developers have to imagine how compelling is to show the world a feature that just appeared in one's mind. Whatever excitement you imagine, please double it.
Yes, the team was led by someone with really strong ideas! Perhaps a woman, because women are much more resistant than men to the gadget kind of feature.

The result was an interface that anyone could use without special training, just having operated another email client (even the infamous Outlook) was enuogh.

Wrap up
The first step was to have a good idea, and the second was not to spoil it.
Gmail changed the world. After it's success all other web mail services had to catch up in a hurry, some of them did not resist the urge to add frills and came out with heavy UIs that their users complain about.
Gmail is so good not because it's Google's mail approach but because the team leader did not let features creep into the devilered product.
As I like to say, usability is the lack of defects. One can not add usability but take defects from the product.
Best of all, an application can be born with no defects, strictly sticking to a minimalist design plan. This is what returns the best results.

Today is "World Usability Day 2007"

2007-11-08T08:26:00.000-03:00

This is the third edition of the "World Usability Day", comprised of a set of events that are performed all around the world starting in New Zealand under the motto “Making life easy!”
This year's theme is "Healthcare."
The number of events makes evident the interest of the people, not necessarily usability-related people, on the subject.

What's "usability?" Uh?
In the context of last year's Usability Day there was a "Usability Hall of Fame" contest (web site now defunct) and you could vote for your pet usability feature. And the winner was .... a japanese toilet!

It seems that the toilet defeated the other features because it was green: it reused the hand wash water as flush water.
Albeit now everybody is aligned with Planet Care (including the US Gov) the greenness of a thing has nothing to see with its usability. The toilet is interesting but not the epitome of usability.

As we all know, the epitome of usability is Gmail, isn't it?

The Usability Hall of Fame contest made evident the fact that few people has a clear idea about what Usability is.
For example, many think that it's in the user interface design! I used to think that, for a while, many years ago.

The World Usability Day Celebration is useful in that it brings more people in touch with usability concepts. As soon as you look at a few of the events slated for today you get the idea.

Usability does not exist
What is real is the lack of usability. Over time, the things that now are notoriously more usable tend to become mainstream, "normal."
We can notice the lack of usability and act upon it, because it is a facet of design, or better: the final result of design.
Yes, visual design is desirable, and we enjoy it. But is is useless if "the thing" drives you mad every time you have to suffer it.

If you want a 5-minute briefing see "Importance of Usability," a page I just found. It refers only to web sites and usability testing, but anyway ...

Gmail is a bit better

2007-11-07T19:07:00.000-03:00

I just noticed that Gmail changed the way it reports that a message is being sent.
Now there is a green banner that reads "Sending" instead of the older red one. The interesting bit is that, after a while when one is about to start clicking all around, the banner changes to "Still sending" and one refrains from messing it all.
We users save time, as instead of cancelling and resending we just wait a little more.
Google saves bandwith, as more emails containing fat attachments will be sent only once.
Everybody is a little happier, and the World is a better place to live in!

This blog ...

2007-11-07T08:50:00.000-03:00

Statement of intention

The plan is to share my perception of quirks and glitches found in the Google applications I use, like Gmail, Google Documents, Google Desktop, Browser Sync.
Along my career as a software developer I noticed that all too often we developers disregard the user's interest to favor software development considerations like reusing a piece of code or simply easing a development task.
Obviously in Google they strive to do things well, to be respectful of the users needs.
But it happens that every now and then a developer lets an unnoticed glitch emerge: the idea is to help them notice and fix it if they found fit.
Every small detail that could make the user's life better.

A counter example

Since day one Windows had a clock in the task bar. It displayed the time, and one could conveniently hover the mouse over the clock to see the date for a while in a popup like a tooltip.
Did I say "conveniently?" Why couldn't it permanently display the date too? Actually, it happened as of Windows XP many years after the introduction of the original clock.
In the meanwhile millions of people wasted millions of seconds (in fact many a human life) hovering that clock instead of spotting the date at once.
Well, the Google types are much more prone to receive and act upon thai type of requests. Also, Google's software distribution model "The Permanent Beta" is more suitable for doing small incremental corrections in their products.

Finally

If you think that something is wrong, or can be done better, please write it. Millions of people will be grateful, albeit marginally, and their lives will be easier and happier.