shayc, rant, & roll

Dell’s apology

I’d like to talk about Dell’s apology for its poor choice of speakers at a conference in Denmark.
-50 points

https://t.co/QQ8tO6oB (via @mikkelmarius)

First of all, thanks for issuing an actual apology. It’s much more sincere than “we’re sorry you were offended”.
+40 points

That said, I’d like to critique this apology. It looks like you remember some of high school composition: intro, body, and conclusion. Unfortunately, you’ve been in business so long that you actually wrote a compliment sandwich. You apologized, told us why you’re actually awesome, and then re-stated your apology. The “sandwich” itself comes off a little insincere.
-5 points

The crap in the middle of the sandwich tastes fake. You’re clearly publicizing your Dell Women Entrepreneur Network, which you had to spell out for us because we have never heard of it before (way to make a difference). From an argument standpoint, this is the same thing as saying “I have a black friend”. This doesn’t change the fact that you fucked up. This doesn’t count as making up for your mistake.
-10 points

And then you continue by telling us that you actually do a lot to promote equality in the workplace, and even won awards for it. This is misdirection, and bad misdirection at that. You’re touting the award you got for “Cleanest Student in Mrs. Fogarty’s Class” in defense of the mess you made in the kitchen at home. This argument is bunk for two reasons. 1, nobody’s impressed that you did better than the other animals in Mrs. Fogarty’s class. 2, you still made a mess of the kitchen! And on Mothers’ Day! That’s all you have to say for yourself? We should be pleased that you’re not WORSE?
-10 points

And where is this apology posted? I read it on Google+, which would be ok if you were a tween apologizing for those hurtful things you said about your classmates. In actuality, you’re a huge multinational company with your own website. Put this apology up where it can be found! If it actually IS on your site, I’ll take some of my criticism back, but you still should have made it more obvious. Otherwise, you’re still just saying “we’re sorry IF you were offended enough to come looking for our apology”.
-5 points

Total: -40 points
Mrs. Fogarty gives you a D.

The iPhone mute switch and the fate of Humanity

Okay, so there’s a new discussion floating around the Internet. It started with a story of a mortified man who accidentally interrupted a symphony with his iPhone’s alarm. This is always embarrassing, every time it happens. This case in particular was exceptionally well poorly timed, which made the faux pas that much worse.

Some have taken to using this story to ignite a design conversation, specifically whether the iPhone’s mute feature behaves properly. For those who may not know, the iPhone mute switch silences almost all sounds the iPhone might make, with a few notable exceptions. Specifically, its designers felt that the feature should silence sounds that the user did not specifically request. That includes phone calls, email and text message alerts, i.e. things that the user can’t stop from happening. This excludes sounds that the user has specifically requested, e.g. audio that accompanies user-controlled video. The user’s alarms fall into the second category. Because alarms are strictly user-defined, they are not silenced by the mute switch. After the incident with the New York Philharmonic, some people have begun to question whether alarms have been categorized properly. If they haven’t, how should the mute switch affect alarms?

One proposed solution is for the mute switch to silence alarms. Defendants are quick to point out that this would lead many users to miss their alarms. Alarms are historically used to get our attention because time is of the essence. Nobody has ever said “thank God I missed my alarm”. Plaintiffs have since returned with a suggestion that the iPhone should indeed silence alarms when the mute switch is on, but when it is turned on, the iPhone should inform the user of the future alarms he or she will not hear.

Wait. What’s that? Look! Up in the sky! Is it a bird? A plane? No! It’s Edge-Case Man!

That’s right good people of the Internet, I’m here to help you solve this dilemma. Using my superpower, edge-case vision, I can help you see the light. There are a few problems with this proposed behavior.

1. First of all, exactly how many of the future alarms did you want to be warned about missing? The next 24 hours worth? More? Less? There is no way of knowing how long the iPhone will remain muted. When do you stop listing alarms?
2. The mute switch can be actuated by accident. I have done this countless times, even while my iPhone remains safely in my pocket. Just brushing up against the seam in my pocket can flip the switch one way or the other. What if I don’t know that my iPhone was muted? Now I’m going to miss an alarm that I specifically set? No, that’s unacceptable.
3. What if we could eliminate Problem #1’s unknown of how long the phone will be muted? What if mute was controlled in software instead of hardware? The user could tell his/her iPhone: “be quiet for 5 hours”. That would allow the software to clearly warn the user of any alarms scheduled to go off before the end of “quiet time”, and would prevent accidental muting.

The only problem now is that the task of silencing the phone has become significantly more complex than it was. The user must go through several manual steps (increasing the definitive length of the task) but must also declare an endpoint for the silence (adding a new cognitive load). While not ideal, this almost seems reasonable. Except that in real life, this creates the same commonplace frustration that users had to deal with before the iPhone simplified mobile phone ownership. Just imagine explaining to your parents that in order to silence their phones, they must first calculate when they want their phones to be allowed to make noise again. I know that would be the point my parents couldn’t get past: that would be the moment they would decide to quit and go back to a dumber phone. But never-mind the parents… how much will you resent having a prolonged discussion with your iPhone about the muting? I imagine it would be quite like trying to put a 4 year old to bed.

It’s time to go to bed now.

Why?

Because you need to sleep

Why?

Because you need to rest so you can do things tomorrow.

But I’m not tired.

That doesn’t matter. You have to go to sleep. Now.

Why?

Because I said so, dammit! Now shut up and SLEEP!

Clearly, we have lost the tenuous grip we had on elegance. Trying to perfect this tiny feature has just muddied up a much more common activity. Let’s go back and start again.

The embarrassed owner of the iPhone that interrupted a symphony explained that his iPhone was new to him, and that he didn’t know that the mute switch would not silence alarms. In fact, he is quoted as saying:

“I didn’t even know phones came with alarms”

This is unfortunate. Everybody has been a newbie at some point, and nobody likes to feel like an idiot. But his deduction isn’t technically correct: phones don’t come with alarms. Alarms on iPhones don’t exist until they are set by a user. That’s the original premise that led to the decision to exclude them from silencing. He or somebody who had access to his iPhone set that alarm. He certainly didn’t mean for it go off during a concert, and may indeed have assumed that the mute switch would have prevented the interruption.

On the bright side, he probably won’t make this mistake again. This is cold comfort, but mistakes make for some of the most memorable lessons. We can learn things by repetition, by memorization, by deduction, by experiment, but nothing is learned more quickly or permanently than lessons learned by making a mistake. Perhaps this is not such a horrible thing.

As a UI designer, one spends so much energy trying to prevent users from making mistakes that it can be easy to forget that mistakes have their good sides. Certainly, some mistakes are so destructive that the education they provide isn’t worth the trouble. Yes, please tell your child not to touch the stove before he finds out first-hand. But repairable mistakes can be used for good. We should keep in mind that there are different kinds of mistakes.

It may sound like I’m being harsh, but there are times when we have to stop and realize that we cannot (and should not) eradicate all the world’s problems. It’s wonderful to have a phone that is so easy to use that it doesn’t require a manual or a course to use it. But to say that a user doesn’t need to learn to use an iPhone is patently false. Users do learn to use iPhones, but they learn on the job; they learn to use it by using it. This is still a superior experience to learning to use an iPhone (or any phone) by first reading a manual or taking a class. That would not only be boring as hell, it would be harder than hell.

At some point, UI designers need to recognize when they are trying too hard to protect the user from making mistakes. More specifically, we need to be careful that in preventing mistakes, we aren’t preventing the user from learning. A future in which we are surrounded by “yes-men” interfaces would be awful. A life without mistakes is a life without dissent, without argument. If our opinions, our beliefs are never challenged, then there are no facts, no truth. To make that world work, we would interact only with machines and not with each other (à la The Matrix). Our brains would atrophy to the point that we are nothing more than Eloi. Every book you ever read about a utopia was warning you about this.

I first considered this at the 2009 UX Week conference. We were discussing how to prepare mobile phones for their second lives as hand-me-downs in the 3rd world. There was a strong emphasis on iconography, because most of the users surveyed (poor, uneducated housewives) were illiterate. The ethnographic research was fascinating, but I had to ask if we were not doing these people a disservice by directing energy toward making Snake a usable game on a Nokia candy bar phone instead of directing energy toward promoting literacy. There’s a quote by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe that I think sums this up nicely:

If we treat people as they are, we make them worse. If we treat people as they ought to be, we help them become what they are capable of becoming.

So, let’s keep in mind that some mistakes are not fatal. There are some things that users are better off from having learned.

My superpower

I love that I seem to have this inexplicable power over technology: I can scare it back into behaving properly. It’s almost as if all the pieces of electronic technology in the world share a consciousness that is overly dependent upon me.

What is Steve talking about? Has he finally, truly lost his mind?

You know when you have a problem with your computer or phone or TV remote? You call a friend or family member or coworker to take a look at it. Sometimes, it’s something you just didn’t understand, but sometimes you KNOW something’s wrong. When people call me over to take a look at their technology being weird, my presence seems to make things work correctly. Many times, if I’m talking to somebody about a problem, the mere suggestion that I could come over seems to “scare” the device into behaving. This happens a lot with SVN at work. And it’s the norm when troubleshooting my family’s computer problems.

Today, for example, I had trouble with the Facebook iPhone app. More trouble than usual. All day today, I couldn’t actually use the app at all. Every time I tried to view my notifications, it would just crash. Very frustrating. Especially coming from an app that I EXPECT to frustrate me. Toward the end of the day, I decided to try using the website on my phone, and for once, it worked really well! So well, that I turned to my friend to proclaim: “The Facebook app sucks so much that I might just delete it and use the website from now on”. I launched the app one more time to make sure that it was still being a problem. It was, so that sealed the deal: website from now on.

A few hours later, I’m cleaning out all my notifications before going to bed. I launch the FB app out of habit, and voila! Problem solved. The app works fine now. Why now? I can’t be sure. But it was literally crashing all day instead of showing me my notifications, and viewing them on the website worked but didn’t solve the problem with the app. It seems that it was only after threatening never to use it again, that the app started working properly.

Yes, my electrical minions, bow before me for I am your god! Fear my wrath!

Kindle Library Books and my deep confusion

http://venturebeat.com/2011/09/21/amazon-kindle-library-lending/

I’m confused.  I’ve been confused a lot lately, so I’m going to try to reason this out logically.  Come walk with me.

Why do people check out books from the public library?  To read books for free.  Without public libraries, books would only be available to people who paid to own a copy (or paid for membership in a private library).

Why do people return books to the public library?  Several reasons, actually, but in short: to avoid being fined.  Again with the monetary incentives.  But seriously, people return the book they got for free because if they didn’t, they would be charged a fine.  

Why do public libraries need their books back?  Because those books are limited resources.  If a book is not returned, the public library must choose to replace it (which costs money) or to suffer without it.

So, Amazon recently decided to offer books from 11,000 public libraries for loan on Kindle devices/apps.  This is terrific news, and I am truly happy to see this happen… I’m just confused.

Digital books are not limited resources.  They can be reproduced so cheaply that the costs are negligible.  In fact, every time you check out a library book on your Kindle, you’re getting a fresh new, never before used copy.  

Amazon says that public library Kindle books will be free and they will have a loan period that does, in fact, expire at some point.  That explains why you might still want to buy a Kindle book instead of borrow it: you want to keep it.  But it completely overlooks the question of why you would want to return a borrowed book.

Again, you probably want to avoid getting fined for not returning a book on time.  But while you were reading your brand spanking new copy of whatever book you borrowed, you weren’t preventing anybody else from borrowing a copy.  In fact, the public library can lend out that one physical book an infinite number of times as a Kindle book.  They don’t need your copy back.  They even say this in their FAQ: you can check out the book whenever you want and have your bookmarks and notes just as you did before.  So why would you choose to buy a book instead of checking it out forever?  Convenience?  To avoid paying a late fee?  What’s the late fee for a book you can always renew?

You’re not paying a fine as a deterrent for being late to return your infinitely cheap book.  You’re paying a fine because that copied-to-order content doesn’t belong to you.  Well, it does (it was copied just for you); but you didn’t pay for it up-front.  I’m all for paying content creators.  But as a part of our economy, each work of art has a finite price (not value; price).  If you never return your borrowed content, you would pay forever.  But at some point, you will have paid the original price of the content, which should free you from future payments.  Think about that VHS tape you never returned: eventually, Blockbuster charged you for the price to replace it and absolved you.

So where does this extra money go?  It might go to the public library from which you stole a book they still possess.  But being brokered by Amazon, I’d like to think that the longer you “borrow” that content, the more you pay its creator.  I mean, you obviously really love that book.  Otherwise, you’d return it.  This sounds very nice, warm, and fuzzy.  Imagine a utopia in which artists didn’t starve because the world kept them fed.

But my fear is that the cake is a lie.  This is money, after all.  And there are large distribution machines that need to be fed.  I highly doubt that authors will get your late fees.  Instead, I’m sure the money will go to nurse the wounds of the publishing companies that slaved over all those bits your Kindle copied in a few seconds.

What’s worse, once the Beast gets a taste of good life, we could see books go the way of music and movies: rent forever, no purchasing.  Wouldn’t that be sweet for “Big Paper”?  Except that then, all books would cost money.  Libraries would become meaningless.  Rent your book from Amazon or rent it from your city: it makes no difference.  And then books would go back to being the luxuries of the wealthy.  The wealthy with juicy, automatically debited, ample bank accounts.

Interesting…

“Interesting” is a powerfully underappreciated word. It allows us to acknowledge a novel aspect of a design without having to bless the entire implementation as “good”. “Interesting” gives us the freedom to consider the look/behavior/implications of part of a design separately from its whole. This allows us to explore new ideas and try applying them to existing designs. In a way, we needed “interesting” to evolve, to improve, to build upon our fellow humans’ achievements. I know this is weird, but I just realized how important “interesting” is, and the more I thought about it, the more interesting it became.