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Change Is Good. You Go First. January 23, 2009

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Leadership.
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Once again, a seemingly Minor Event in my life causes Great Consternation and, upon reflection, provides a Greater Lesson for us all.  In this case, the Minor Event was the arrival of a new cell phone.

Let’s be clear: I love cell phones, and PDAs, and any sort of handheld device that you carry about.  If it fits in your hand, needs to be charged, has a screen, and can be endlessly configured and customized, it is my kind of device.  In the spirit of clarity, I’ll also share that I am extremely picky about user interfaces and the user experience in general.  I will tinker endlessly to get the screen layout just right, or to optimize the sequence of clicks to perform some action.

Disclosures made, let’s move to the Minor Event. Last week, I upgraded from my wonderful Samsung Blackjack II cellphone to the Samsung Epix.  Both devices run Windows Mobile and sport dedicated keyboards.  The big difference: the Epix has a touchscreen and the Blackjack does not. I was excited to try out a touch interface, along with the Epix’s built-in WiFi.

I was astounded at how difficult it was to switch to the Epix.  I had been using the Blackjack for over a year, and my fingers had long ago learned the key patterns to accomplish everything I needed to do on the phone.  I had tweaked every nuance of the Blackjack, installed a ton of third-party tools, and had that phone perfectly configured.

After one day of the Epix, I was ready to give the it back.  I was absolutely inept with the thing.  The ringtones were wrong, the applications felt clunky, and my constant desire to click on a directional pad was thwarted by the fact the the Epix doesn’t have one.  The WiFi was indeed cool, and the virtual mouse touchpad was clever.  Even so, I felt clumsy and frustrated with every aspect of the phone.

Great Consternation had set in.  I took a deep breath, drew on my deep reserves of inner strength, and vowed to use the phone for another full day.  By then, things had gotten a little better: I found some decent software for the phone, reinstalled touchscreen versions of my favorite tools, and even found better versions of others.  I was acclimating to the phone.

After a week, I have come to really like this phone.  Some things still need some tweaking, but other features are too good to give up and go back.  So my beloved Blackjack II will be placed, gently, into my Drawer of Abandoned Devices, next to my RAZR, Palm LifeDrive, Palm Tx, and Casio Zoomer.  The Epix becomes my device of choice, at least until my contract expires.

Which brings us to the Greater Lesson: If this kind of minor, self-inflicted change is this distracting and painful, imagine how annoying the change that we inflict on others must be.  Those of us in IT like to see ourselves as agents of change, disrupting existing practices with new tools and processes for the greater good of all.  Let’s get real: we drive people nuts, making seemingly arbitrary decisions that turn their world upside down for no apparent reason.

We can’t ever, ever forget how painful change really is for our users.  Minor Events that we fully understand generate Great Consternation out in the real world.  Nonetheless, our job is to find and fix things.  As you go about doing that, don’t lose sight of how hard it is for people to put up with the changes we promote.  And if you do forget how hard that can be, I have an easy solution: go get a new phone.

Say The Secret Word! January 19, 2009

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Random Musings, Technology.
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It has become fairly common for sites to enhance their security by asking you to answer a few “secret questions” to confirm that you are, in fact, you when updating account information or even just logging in.  As a result, users now have the opportunity to forget several bits of information for each web site they visit, instead of just forgetting their password on a regular basis.

We use this approach at my company, where users can reset their passwords by answering special questions.  The system we use even lets people pose their own questions, which led to one user to create this question:

Question 1: How do you feel today?
Answer 1: Good

So far so good.  Here is their second question:

Question 2: How do you feel today?
Answer 2: Bad

I kid you not.  Not surprising, this user eventually forgot their password, and it took quite a while for us to figure out why they could never access the automatic password reset system.

Here’s my helpful usability tip for the day: No matter what the secret question, use the same answer every time.  Choose something different from your password, but use it consistently.

People are astounded when I suggest this.  It never occurs to them that the system cannot check to make sure that “groucho” really is the name of the first person you kissed, or your first pet, or your second grade teacher.  It just wants a string of characters that only you know.

Before all the security people reading this freak out, I’ll concede that this is not a security best practice.  It leaves you vulnerable to some tiny chance of a security breach.  You assume all the risk if you choose to go this route.  Et cetera.

But in reality, this is much better than the approach most people take, which is to write all this stuff down on a Post-It note and stick it on the monitor.  (Security-conscious users put the Post-It under the keyboard, or in their desk drawer.  Thanks for incorporating physical barriers into your security practices!)

Security breaks down when security systems are too complicated. People revert to simple solutions just because they want the computer to get out of the way and let them accomplish the task at hand. We need to stop creating complicated, unusable systems and focus on simple, usable ones. With security, as with everything else on earth, it is tough to make things foolproof because fools are so ingenious.

Brownie points to readers who know why I chose “groucho” as my answer!

At The Tone, The Time Will Be… January 16, 2009

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Technology.
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When it comes to user interface pet peeves, I don’t just have a few pets, I have a whole zoo.  Today, let’s talk about time zones.

Many, many web sites want to know your time zone so they can correctly send you messages or set appointments or reminders.  Fair enough.  But the manner in which they ask for your time zone leaves a lot to be desired.

One long-standing tradition involves providing a pull-down menu with every time zone in the world, starting with Greenwich, England and heading east or west.  Sometimes the list includes the official names of the zones, which may help, but often just lists the offset (in hours) from the time in Greenwich.  This is sometimes known as “Zulu” time or the increasingly common “UTC,” which is the French acronym (acronym Français?) for Universal Coordinated Time.  This is so handy: ask your Mom if she is in UTC-4 or UTC-5 next time you chat.  I’m sure she’ll know in a heartbeat.

Occasionally the list presents you with major cities in each time zone.  Presumably, you pick a big city near you and your time zone is set to match.  Why, then, do they list several cities in each zone?  Atlanta, New York, and Washington, DC, are all in the Eastern Time Zone (UTC-5, duh).  Why three choices?  Are we catering to the city slickers but rebuffing small-town America?  Seems like someone is going to get offended, somehow.  And then, you need that special time zone for Indiana, or at least you did until this year, and parts of New Mexico, I think.

You might also get prompted for Daylight Savings Time.  I always read too much into this question.  Are they asking if my locale use DST in general, or if it is in effect right now?  In the summer, the safe answer is always “yes,” but in the winter you are rolling the dice, my friend.

I’ve seen lots of interfaces for setting the time zone, and they all violate the important rules of user interfaces: they require too much geeky user knowledge, they are hard to understand, and they make the user do more work than the computer.

All but one, that is.  I recently came across a delightfully elegant interface that asks one simple question of the user: “What is your current time right now?”  It then presents a pull-down menu with the current time in every time zone.  The user just finds the time that is closest to their current time (usually within a few minutes either way) and the computer figures out the rest!  What a concept!  Gather one bit of trivial data from the user and do the heavy lifting to compute UTC offset, look up DST rules for that zone, and set the time zone accordingly.

Kudos to the developer!  There is always a better way that respects the user and exploits the computer, if we only work hard enough to find it.  Every aspect of every user interface should be this elegant and clever.

Life On A Barge January 12, 2009

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Leadership, Technology.
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My company ships some of our products by barge, up and down the Mississippi river.  When you ship things by barge, people are naturally inclined to ask things like “Where is my barge?”  Answering that question is more difficult than you might think.

Barges are extremely low-tech devices.  They are nothing more than an enormous steel bucket, floating in the river.  They are moved about by tugboats, and a single tug can have as many as 30 barges lashed to it as it moves up and down the river.  Sometimes a barge will break loose and float away, coming to rest in some nook or cranny of the mighty Mississippi.  Most barges are owned by a few companies, and you rent your barges from one of these companies.  You might rent a barge for a single trip, or for many trips over a period of time.

Being a technology kind of guy, I had an instant answer for the barge question.  Just attach a GPS transmitter to each barge, and collect position data in real time.  Put a snazzy web site in front of the data, enable authorized user access, and you’re good to go!

(This was a few years ago, so these days I’d include a barge Twitter stream, a barge blog or two, a barge-cam streaming live to Hulu, and an app [iBarge?] so you can track a barge from your iPhone.  If there was time, maybe even an app that would identify a barge using a picture you snapped from the shore using your phone.  Not to mention a search engine that looks for #barge hashtags on Twitter and aggregates them, along with matching Flickr barge photos, on trackmybarge.com. Web 2.0 really enhances the whole barge management experience in ways that Mark Twain could only dream of.)

I pitched this plan to the barge people, and the idea quickly sank.  First, barges have no power source.  This meant that the GPS unit had to be battery powered with solar charging panels.  Second, barges get banged around a lot, so the unit had to be hardened and waterproof, and would need to be welded somewhere on the top edge of the barge.  The rough estimate for such a unit was $1,000 each, which worked out to a $1,000,000 investment to outfit a fleet of 1,000 barges.  This didn’t  include the whole web and data infrastructure, or programming effort.  (Not to mention the blogs, webcams, and Facebook app that would soon follow.)

A bit miffed, I aked how they currently track the barges.  Easy: each morning a clerk calls each of our tugboat pilots on their cellphone.  She asks them where they are, and they reply with a mile number on the river.  She knows which barges are tied to each tug, and she writes each barge number and the mile marker on an index card that she puts on a bulletin board in the office.  If you want to know where the barges are you, you can stop by the board or call her.

Just as importantly, the pilots like to be called each morning.  It’s nice to hear from the home office, and a friendly voice on the phone is a pleasant way to start each day.

The clerk makes $25,000 a year.  My solution pays for itself in 40 years.  Analysis over; project cancelled.

As we get completely wrapped up in applying technology to everything we encounter, it helps to remember that some things work fine just as they are.  And in the end, processes that work because people like to hear each other’s voices are probably worth keeping, even if only for a little while longer.

Lazy Developers November 17, 2008

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Technology.
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You see it all the time on web forms: the little bit of “advice” next to entry fields for phone numbers and credit cards: “No dashes or spaces.”  This drives me crazy!

Let’s understand this: the developer is asking you, the unfortunate user, to make sure you enter data correctly to match what he needs.  Because… it’s so hard for computers to get rid of characters that aren’t numbers?  No.  Because the developer is too lazy to write the code to get rid of the unwanted characters you may type.

Ever type in a phone number with dashes, only to be dinged with an error popup chastising you to not type the dashes?  Ever put spaces in a credit card number only to be similarly admonished?  If so, you have been the victim of a lazy developer, one who deserves to have their keyboard seized and their pocket protector revoked.  That’s shameful coding, and it should be punished.

In case you were wondering, it is trivially simple to automatically remove non-numeric stuff from numeric fields.  Actually, it’s trivially simple to configure the field to keep you from typing them in the first place.  It actually takes a lot more work to check for the errant characters and pop up a window to irritate you that it does to fix the $%&^# field in the first place!  Bad developers will spend more time writing bad code that irritates the user than they will writing good code that makes life easier for the user.  Go figure.

All software development is about the end user experience.  Period.  The user experience should be natural, easy, forgiving, and rewarding.  It should not be filled with pedantic errors and foolish activities better left to the machine.  Developers who develop anything less should be ashamed, and user should complain vociferously when they are forced to use such systems.  Stand up and demand better!