Technology First, Needs Last

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.

Trouble with Google Sites while reporting trouble with Google Sites

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.

The end of the "document" age

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

This blog ...

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.