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.

Google failures

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 and translated into Spanish.

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

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

Chrome OS is not like Windows in that it does not come out in a finished version but it is open for that kind of continuous evolution that makes software "getting better all the 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 trying to call their attention to make them more successful so the users can squeeze more value from Google's products lineup.

Each and every time Google comes out with an useful and usable application, the users life 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 ask me!

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

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

Calendar and timezones

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

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.

Downloading the GWT Example Programs

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 high usability example: Gmail

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.

Gmail is a bit better

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!