The layers are a lie

I scratched my head when I saw a cake icon light up in Adobe Acrobat today. The mouseover text explained.

I don't usually expect this level of snarky-ness from Adobe. I usually only see this in open-source applications.

On usability and the telephone ring

Last week xkcd had a great post of something I've been lecturing on for years. I've staunchly argued that all phones, mobile or otherwise, should emit a sound like a ringing bell when there is an incoming call. The Comic:



The issue is that the ringing bell sound has been the only option for the entire history of the device, including of a century of human usage. It's extremely easy to recognize that sound, even for very small children, and even in a crowd of other noise. All of society knows how to recognize it, what it means, and how to respond.

Enter: the custom ringtone, which obliterates all of that excellent usability. My wife puts a top-40 hit on her phone, and when we hear it at the mall on the PA system, she reaches for her purse. When her phone rings in the car, she turns down the stereo. It's a mess.

If you need custom tones because you just can't bear to let AT&T only collect their standard $50/month from you, and you must fill their coffers with a few bucks every time you like a new song, then please indulge yourselves by assigning tones to SMS, email, PTT, alarm, IM, and other alerts. Those don't have a rich history of standard usage to destroy.

My daily wtf: MTP default action

I enjoyed the prompt that Windows XP provided to me the last time I plugged in my mp3 player, especially the "always perform this action" checkbox:

Disassembling the Sandisk Sansa Sanmeister

I bought a Sandisk Sansa e260 from woot.com recently, even though I agree that the mp3 player is an obsolete technology. I really like the UI. They copied Apple's click wheel design, but used an actual plastic wheel that spins (instead of the stationary touch-sensitive wheel Apple uses.) I actually prefer it because of the physical feedback you get from spinning it.

It has a small, sleek design, very bright display, and does a great job at all it's tasks: video playback, photo slideshows, music, radio, voice recording, 4GiB USB drive.

Also, Sansa let's you use the USB Mass Storage Device Driver to copy music, instead of enforcing MTP like they did on previous players. MTP completely sucks in comparison.

The downsides: custom cable. Why does anything have a custom cable? Everything should use the USB mini-b so we don't need to keep 20 cables on our desk to plug in all our gadgets.

My particular e260 also had a problem: only 1 channel of audio would play. I took it apart to see if I could fix it. Disassembling things is always fun. Here are the pictures:



The electronics in this thing are tiny. Almost all of the weight is in the heavy steel case back and the battery, and almost all of the volume is in the frame & battery. I had fun pushing the battery back onto the power terminals and running it naked:



I eventually decided the problem was in the stereo headphone socket, which has 3 conductors for left audio channel, right audio channel, and a common return (see TRS connector). Looking down into the socket, I can see that a contactor is broken off. I couldn't get a focused image with my digicam though. Here's a shot of the back of the electronics, at least:

I think that the stereo socket needs replacing, and I'm not going to try to remove and solder a new one in place. I hope Sandisk will do it for me. I wonder if there were any hidden warranty-voiding stickers that I broke when taking it apart . . .

Todo: Books, games, gadgets

I just realized today that I can actually buy a copy of Spore now. I've got to get that in my list of games to play.

Then I learned Cory Doctorow likes The Armageddon Rag, by George R.R. Martin. I've liked GRRM's series A Song of Ice & Fire a lot, but I'm not sure about a book whose genre is fantasy/horror/alt history. I guess I have another for my to-read list.

John Hodgeman has gone and released a new book, too, as though I'm just swimming in money and time to buy & read new books. I suppose I have little choice.

Finally, I may have found the answer to my iPhone/Sprint problem. Specifically, that the iPhone I crave will never run on the carrier my company provides. The Sprint Instinct tries to emulate the iPhone. I wonder if it's worth the investment? When it comes to UI, I'm very picky. If they have the iPhone features but not the polish, I could go insane trying to use it.

Microsoft: I ALWAYS want to paste unformatted

Every time I past in an office doc, office carries the formatting over for me, which drives me nuts.

Consider a scenario: I copy from one doc where the font is 9 point garamond dark-blue italic, and paste in another doc where it's a title block of bold 14-point arial black, and office *carries over the formatting* and obliterates the point of copy/paste: saving time. I have to do more work fixing the formatting than the work I saved with copy paste.

Instead of reformatting, I often try to use a paste special where I can navigate a dialogue to specifically "paste unformatted", or I (faster, actually) launch notepad and paste then recopy paste, because notepad handily strips the formatting.

With all this work to copy a bit of text, why don't I just re-type my text at this point? I can do a lot at 80WPM and never have to touch the mouse. Copy/paste has been completely broken for me by Microsoft's attempts to make it more advanced.

Flash: Not Easy

I thought I'd fire up Flash for the first time, and quickly whip up a SWF that would preview audio, much like Amazon likes to do when they sell audio CDs.

What I found was a surprisingly convoluted interface, where widgets didn't do what I expected. See screenshot.



I wonder if there is a fundamental difference in design for applications sourced on a mac than their counterparts that are natively designed on Windows. Perhaps that's why photoshop wasn't an intuitive application for me to use either (I'm still sticking with PSP5 from 1998).

The Gimp isn't very intuitive to me either. Do Linux designers have even different philosophies?

UI Error: USB 2.0

So every time I plug a USB2.0 device to my WinXP computer, windows says "this device can perform faster" and provides a popup to tell me I shouldn't have hi-speed usb devices plugged into low-speed ports.

If you click it to learn more (as it instructs you to do), it says "There are no high speed ports connected to this computer."

I'm seeing an opportunity for optimization here.

...maybe check for high speed ports on the computer before you alarm the user that the device should be plugged into a high speed port. I mean, the only way the average windows user is going to get USB 2.0 ports on an older USB 1.0 motherboard is to completely replace the machine, which they aren't going to do just to move music faster to the mp3 player.

User Interface design: Google gets it right

The latest google friends newsletter draws attention to why google gets user interface design right, in a world where 99% of interfaces are wrong.

Google posted their list of user experience aspirations to the public. I think they got the order of priority right as well, since their bullets number 1, 2, and 3 are things which you'll regularly hear me lecturing my wife, children & friends about (much to their dismay).

1. Focus on people
2. Every millisecond counts
3. Simplicity is powerful

That's obvious enough - build fast, simple interfaces that work the way the user wants them to. How come only Google (and perhaps Apple) seem to be able to master this?

Flexibility is key, too, but you can provide power while maintaining simplicity through good design. I look at interface design a lot like building a Huffman Tree - you provide the smallest number of steps to accomplish this most frequently required tasks.

I could write a whole series on interface design flaws I observe every day. It's not limited to software, either. It's not even limited to electronics & mechanics. My home builder installed a perfectly smooth spherical knob on the shower exit door, guaranteeing the user no traction when twisting the knob to get out. This is terrible in a location where the users hands are always wet.