(Click picture to see full-sized)

This is a picture of the desktop of an individual who has given up organizing their files and folders, and instead relies completely on Spotlight to access their files. I’ve said in the past that I think the desktop metaphor is insufficient for managing the stuff we now store on our computing devices. (Thanks to Flickr user danpatmore for the pic.)

I’m currently writing an article on this for UXmatters. (And I’m very late, my profuse apologies Pabini…). I’ll follow up on this line of thinking here when I cap that article.

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I got an email from a reader saying he had a usability issue to rant about, and could he do a guest post. I said sure thing. So without further ado, here’s a post from Andreas Bossard, proprietor of NewsOfTheFuture.net. I’ve got a Sony Ericsson phone too, and I’ve been annoyed by this little feature as well. I hope you enjoy UsabilityBlog’s first guest post, and a big thanks to Andreas for putting it together. -Paul

Every time I connect my Sony Ericsson phone to my Windows PC, I am reminded of an annoying feature of Sony Ericsson’s PC Suite: The time checker that checks if the time of the cell phone is the same as the time of the PC (see picture below).

Every time I connect it pops up and asks me if I want to change the time of my cell phone. The program assumes that the time of the PC is always correct. But the opposite is the case: The cell phone time is correct, but the Windows time is wrong. So I always have to select “No”. The funny thing is that “Yes” has the option “Every time I connect. Do not show this message again”, but “No” doesn’t ‘t have such an option.

Only about 30 seconds difference, but PC Suite sees immediate need for action…

What designers can learn from this mistake:

1. Make the right assumptions. Here it is assumed that Windows time is always correct, which may not always be the case.
2. Give the user the possibility to disable an unwanted feature. Especially if it is an annoying pop-up window.

Note: The current version of PC Suite is version 3. This time-checker-feature was present in version 2. Nevertheless, it’s a good example of bad usability.

Been meaning to post a link to this little rant I saw about iTunes. The author quite perceptively cites some of the biggest annoyances and usability issues with iTunes (both Mac and Windows versions), such as:

• Sort by *exclamation point*. Duh. I have a mass of broken links I want to delete and iTunes won’t give me a method to select and delete them all in one or two clicks.
• Find original tune for multiple songs. I can double click on a broken link and manually hunt for the tune. How embarrassingly easy would it be to do this en masse- select all broken links and resolve them all automagically.
• Check for dupes on import.

And there’s more where that came from. As much as I like the iTunes/iPod ecosystem, I have to say that iTunes has annoyed me to no end when it comes to music management. For syncing, it’s great. For managing my content, not so much.Remind me to tell you about the time I check a box in the Preferences screens, and “magically” ended up with dupes of EVERY SINGLE MP3 ON MY HARD DRIVE. Nice. 

Dear Apple: Why Does iTunes Library Management Suck So Bad?

(Originally posted June 2005 - P.S.) 

In the last entry I argued that enterprise software often falls short of the mark when enterprise vendors don’t pay sufficient attention to the specific wants and needs of the intended users.

I claimed that this happens because enterprise software vendors don’t set goals for the learnability and usability of their systems, and because the enterprises themselves don’t hold vendors to high enough standards of application learnability, usability, and efficiency.

In this entry I’ll relate some case studies where negative outcomes could have been prevented. I’ll also discuss why the factors that contribute to these poor outcomes seem to be persistent.

In the next post, I’ll provide examples of how to justify usability for enterprise software, and discuss a model for creating and deploying enterprise software that will result in more positive outcomes.

In the last entry I argued that enterprise software often falls short of the mark when enterprise vendors don’t pay sufficient attention to the specific wants needs of intended users.

I claimed that this happens because enterprise software vendors don’t set goals for the learnability and usability of their systems, and because the enterprises themselves don’t hold vendors to high enough standards of application learnability, usability, and efficiency.

I this post I relate case studies where negative outcomes could have been prevented. I also discuss why the factors that contribute to these poor outcomes seem to be persistent. Finally, I relate a model for creating and deploying enterprise software that will result in more positive outcomes.

Case 1: The “Business Intelligence” System
The technical support group for a major financial software application was responsible for generating weekly and monthly reports on calls to the help desk. Statistics on call burden, call reasons, call resolution time, hold time, post-call work time, and other statistics tracking cost and rep productivity were summarized for management. The process of producing the reports was mostly manual: the data resided in three separate systems, data was extracted via complex (though mostly repetitive) queries, and reports were generated and formatted in a spreadsheet application.

Other groups within the organization - product management, development, user-centered design, and quality assurance - frequently requested custom reports and raw data from the amalgam of systems. Individuals within technical support and the IT group were sometimes overwhelmed trying to deliver their regular reports and comply with “outside” requests.

The business decided to deploy an enterprise-level application enabling support to centralize the data, automate data retrieval and report production, and provide outside groups with the ability to self-service their data and reporting needs.

Upon deploying the application the business discovered that, even after support and IT staff trained to proficiency, it took 5 to 10 times as long for staff to extract data and produce reports. What these groups discovered was that the application’s user interface, which was presented via a Web browser, only allowed users to drag and drop date ranges, field names, and other delimiters into a “reporting wizard” form. Complex queries that previously took 5 -10 seconds to type now took 2 or 3 minutes to drag, drop, delimit, and run. These users, with considerable technical abilities and expert-level knowledge, were essentially forced to interact with the system as if they were neophytes).

Furthermore, the reports were formatted into static HTML. Once produced, users were unable to reformat, rotate, or otherwise adjust the output. Although the simplistic process of query-building proved easier for occasional users from outside groups, the inability to manipulate the output proved frustrating. As a result, support and IT staff were again forced into a bottleneck role, laboriously creating reports to comply with outside requests for reports. Within six months, the technical support group had brought their old systems back on-line, and reverted to their previous process.

Case 2: The Expense Reporting System
A large telecommunications equipment manufacturer decided to move from spreadsheet-based expense reporting to a system that enabled users to input expense information directly into the company’s accounting system. The application promised to eliminate manual steps, including double entry of data, remove data entry bottlenecks, and streamline the accounting process.

Employees at this company had an inkling that the new system might pose difficulties when, two weeks prior to the system rollout date, HR disseminated a 50-slide training presentation to all employees. This was followed up by a mandatory, all-employee desktop video training session in the use of the new system. The training session, developed jointly by HR and IT, was 1.5 hours long.

The productivity lost to training for the new system was a significant expense, as was the projects related to producing training. These expenses were dwarfed by the time and expense lost when the system went live.Everything about the application’s user experience was a mess. The process employees followed to enter, describe and categorize expenses was confusing, long, and ill-thought out. The screens to capture the data were poorly designed. The terminology used throughout the application, while familiar to finance and accounting professionals, was opaque and unclear to most other employees. Information was presented in illogical formats; users were forced to scroll through 200-item drop down lists with nonsensical ordering.

Successfully submitting an expense report, which had previously taken only a few minutes, was now a half-hour undertaking fraught with error and frustration. As a result, productivity and morale suffered. Worse, compliance waned and systemic errors were propagated through the accounting system: some employees simply stopped expensing small purchases, or assigned expenses to accounts that appeared near the top of long account lists.

The Vendor’s Lament: If You Build It, They Will Complain
With their page-spanning feature matrixes, long lists of supported platforms and databases, ROI calculators and downloadable case studies, the enterprise application provider makes fantastic promises. However, many enterprise software development environments don’t adequately incorporate users’ specific wants and needs until too late in the engineering process (if at all).

So why weren’t the users’ wants and needs represented earlier in the development lifecycle? There are many reasons. They can be boiled down to this short list:

• The application is built to satisfy the vendor’s perception of users’ needs, not users’ actual needs.
• Engineering groups own too much responsibility for user interface design.
• “Featuritis”

The vendor is not the user: Often, applications are built without incorporating the perspective of actual user groups. Product managers, requirements analysts and engineers make assumptions about users, instead of observing them and asking the users themselves.

Gathering users’ wants and needs is not difficult, but it’s important to do it right. It’s remarkably easy to gather user needs poorly or incompletely, resulting in a biased or incomplete perspective of users’ wants and needs.

The key to developing an accurate picture of user needs is to distinguish the main user groups (and how the groups differ), then identify the users’ skills, tasks, and needs in the role they assume while using the application. It’s also helpful to usability test conceptual prototypes with actual users from the target customer groups. In this way, early concepts and designs can be tested and iterated very inexpensively.

Engineers are not the users: In many development organizations, engineers are given responsibility for transforming requirements into user interactions, process flows, and screen designs. What results is a user interface that reflects engineersâ’ mental models. Their models for how things work differ drastically from users. Consider this example:

• The engineer: “It’s a state-persistent container for database objects…it requires authentication and setting of cookies, etc etc…”
• The user: “It’s a shopping cart.”

Indeed. To the engineer, it is in fact a “state-persistent yadda yadda.” But not to the user, it ain’t…

Featuritis: Featuritis is a pernicious malady. Both vendors and purchasers contribute to this disorder. Here’s what typically happens on the vendor side of the equation:

• “Competitor A has these 5 features…competitor B has those 10…we’d better put them all in our next release.”

This kitchen sink approach leads to a mishmash of features, with no organizing principle or overarching information architecture.

And purchasers, well, they buy applications with undocumented usability in the door because they don’t know any better. The evaluation and decision-making process for enterprise applications usually looks like this:

• The need for a better, more scalable, faster, etc. process is identified.
• The business case is established.
• The IS organization sets technical and feature requirements (often informed, in somewhat circular fashion, by vendors’ application feature lists).
• Vendors are solicited, and sometimes asked to respond to a Request for Proposal, or RFP.
• Vendors are evaluated on the basis of their responses, and a short list of vendors is generated.
• Vendors’ systems are often brought into the enterprise’s test labs for performance and technical trials.
• A vendor is selected, and the deployment project is undertaken.

This process typically does not provide methods for evaluating the goodness of fit between the enterprise users’ processes, wants, and needs and the vendor’s solution. Many a rollout disaster could have been avoided simply by usability testing a vendor’s solutions with employees during the trial phase.

Solution:
I propose that user-centered design methods and usability testing can aid both applications producers and application purchasers.

Application vendors can utilize user centered design methods as a competitive advantage, to produce solutions that meet the enterprise users specific wants and needs.

Enterprise customers can utilize usability testing to ensure that the IT investments they make deliver fully on their value propositions.

In the next post on this topic, I’ll provide examples of how to justify usability for enterprise software, and a model for creating and deploying enterprise software that will result in more positive outcomes.

A colleague from my old company passed on a link to OS GUI timelines. You can see release dates, versions, and (of course) screenshots from different OS’es.

What’s fascinating is how little GUI’s have changed in 25 years. For example, look at these screenshots from Apple’s Lisa Office System. Check out the desktop in particular (below). How different is that than your current desktop? Not so much, I’d venture to guess.

(Click picture to see full-sized)

If you’ve read my post and followup about how I think the desktop metaphor is broken, you’ll understand my mixed feelings about this stability. Like I say in those posts, I think the desktop metaphor is tired. Both MS and Apple (and various versions of *nix, for that matter) have tried to improve the basic desktop metaphor, but at best their efforts have only made slight incremental improvements to the desktop experience.

I believe that the major players in the OS and productivity app spaces have a fundamental misunderstanding of what would improve the computer desktop. It’s about workflow and managing your “projects”, whether your project is a software application, the bowling league, or your kid’s carpool schedule.

(Originally posted April 2005 - P.S.) 

Enterprise software products are complex, powerful tools. This complexity is one of the reasons businesses sometimes don’t fully realize a positive return on investment from these products.

For enterprise employees who must use the enterprise application, their complexity poses a considerable challenge. When an application is deployed, users are expected to learn the new system, integrate it into their existing work processes, and become proficient enough to allow the organization to realize the system’s full benefits. Far too often, however, enterprise employees find these new systems hard to learn, hard to master, and difficult to integrate into existing processes.

Enterprise software, which broadly encompasses functions such as enterprise resource planning and management, customer relationship management, supply chain management, project portfolio management, and business intelligence, is a multi-billion per year industry Well-known vendors include BMC, Business Objects, Hyperion,  PeopleSoft, Oracle, SAP, and Siebel, to name a few.

Most Fortune 500 companies have multiple enterprise software products installed and many mid-sized business are either actively considering or have implemented solutions. As the market has matured and vendors have searched for new growth opportunities, even small businesses with fewer than 100 people have options available to them from enterprise software makers.

To the growing company, enterprise software promises to convey benefits in a variety of areas, for example:

• Centralizing customer information from sales, marketing, customer service, and support to improve customer service and enable better prospect identification.
• Identifying and managing enterprise-wide resources needed to receive, process, and account for orders.
• Gathering, storing, analyzing, and providing access to data to enable enterprise users make better business decisions.
• Tracking and organizing information related to project planning, tracking, and resource management for multiple projects, enabling an enterprise-wide view of project scope, resource allocation, risk, cost, and performance.

Complex stuff.

From the CTO’s and IT Director’s perspective, these promises assume that the internal user groups can and will learn the new systems and incorporate them into their work processes. But these outcomes are far from assured. Some of the problems and pitfalls:

• Some businesses find that their employees’ productivity decreases because common or critical processes actually take longer using the new application.
• Others fail to realize an application’s benefits because users “vote with their fingers” and don’t adopt the new system.

Businesses can also experience reduced employee morale and increased turnover related to the imposition of new systems and processes. There will always be employees who resist change in any form. However, if the business mandates process changes and deploys systems that users perceive as difficult to learn, use and remember, the user population will see it as a change for the worse. In this situation morale will decline, and the sufficiently disgruntled will leave.

IT organizations responsible for supporting an enterprise application can find themselves overwhelmed as they struggle under unexpectedly high numbers of support requests that often accompany an application rollout. As anyone who’s worked the help desk knows, rollout day for a complex application often seems like the perfect storm for Level 1 support staff.

Why do these scenarios play out in organization after organization? I argue that two factors are driving these outcomes:

1. Enterprise software developers don’t pay sufficient attention to the specific wants needs of the internal user groups.
2. Enterprises don’t hold their vendors to high enough standards of application learnability, usability, and efficiency.

In my next post, I’ll discuss:

• Some case studies where poor outcomes could have been prevented.
• Why the factors that contribute to these poor outcomes seem to be persistent.
• A model for creating and deploying enterprise software that results in more positive outcomes that these products can deliver.

(Click picture to see full-sized)

Hey, at least it’s not in legalese.

Originally seen on Worse Than Failure.

This is a few weeks old, but I did want to point to this article. It reviews a number of “web tops”, or web-based desktops. Calling them web OS’s is a bit grandiose, but if you accept for the moment the idea that to many people, the desktop *is* the OS, then you can get by this bit of semantic overreach.

What still consistently amazes me is that so many offerings simply recreate the tired old desktop/file/folder (and now “widget”) design. Some do it better than others, but it seems like everyone is stuck in this metaphor. What happened to 3D spaces where you could organize your “stuff” in nooks and crannies? What about more integrated views of people’s frequently used data?

Web As Desktop: 20 Web operating systems reviewed - Lifehacker

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Let me start this post by getting a few things out of the way:

1. I have nothing against Microsoft. In fact, I have depended upon their products for years, and am quite happy with a few of them, most notably Visio, Excel, and Virtual PC.
2. My issues with the Windows operating systems were mostly taken care of by Windows 2000. XP was icing on the cake. I’ve been really satisfied with XP since 2001.

I say this because I’m about to slag on Windows Vista, and I want it understood that I am not a reflexive MS-basher. I’m not a Mac or Linux fanboy, either (although I regularly use OS X).

A few weeks ago I decided to load Vista on my 4-month old Dell Inspiron 640m. It’s got a Core 2 Duo proc (the T2050 @ 1.6GHz), 1 gig of RAM, and a 120GB HDD. The graphics adapter is the ever-popular Intel 950GM.

Having learned my lesson about upgrade vs. clean install back in the Win98 days, I wiped the HDD and installed Vista. My troubles started as soon as I started playing around with the OS. You know that User Account Control “feature” that everyone’s talking about? It’s a major PITA. Vista was constantly asking me for confirmations, to the point where I simply started automatically confirming whatever it asked.

I’m a fairly sophisticated user and I take care to run firewall software that monitors inbound AND outbound communications, as well as keeps tabs on applications’ behaviors (such as when apps are requesting access to OS resources or services). So I shut off UAC.

Well, it turns out that certain applications won’t install correctly unless UAC is enabled. I’m not talking about obscure apps; I’m talking about things like Adobe Reader. I found myself enabling and disabling UAC ad nauseum as I installed and configured my applications.

My next problem occurred when I wanted to ensure that my command-line based backup process would work with Vista. A while back I bought a fantastic little network-attached storage drive from SimpleTech, which I highly recommend. I use the XCOPY32 command in a batch file along with Window’s built-in scheduler to ensure that my and my wife’s files are backed up regularly to the NAS drive. (And to several other portable drives as well; I like redundancy.) It’s a very simple-to-use and dependable little process. Or it was, anyway, until Vista entered the picture.

After migrating my data back to the laptop, I tested the command-line backup file. I figured better safe than sorry. I honestly expected it to just work. I ensured that the NAS drive was mapped to a drive letter, changed the data paths to reflect the new default locations for Vista user data, and ran the file.

Vista barfed. It thought my NAS drive was full and would not write to the drive. But my wife’s Windows XP machine (correctly) saw the NAS drive as having 145GB free, and had no problems backing up to this drive.

So, Vista had two strikes at this point. The 3rd strike was stability and performance.

Soon after loading the rest of my standard apps (Office 2003, Visio 2003, Nero 7, Flock, Firefox, Quicken 2007), I noticed that Vista was often unresponsive for seconds at a time. This happened A LOT. It didn’t matter what I was doing; at random times the “wait” cursor would spin for 5-15 seconds. Most of the time this would be the cue for the laptop’s cooling fan to engage. (And it usually stayed on for 20 or 30 minutes once it started.) The unresponsiveness and “hanging” behavior was especially pronounced when Outlook 2003 was launched. When this happened I basically couldn’t use Outlook at all.

At times it was so bad I found myself taking the PowerBook out of sleep and sneaking a look at my emails via the webmail interface while Outlook and Vista churned and churned…and when Outlook finally came back, I responded to my mail using the Outlook email composer.

So let’s review: UAC was annoying me to no end. My simple-as-dirt backup system failed under Vista. The system was unresponsive and “hang-y”. And Vista was making my normally-silent-and-cool laptop’s fan spin constantly.

After about 4 days of putting up with this, I decided enough was enough and scrubbed the unit down to bare metal, then reinstalled the XP image I had made shortly before “upgrading” to Vista.

To console myself, I loaded the subtle and attractive Royale Noir XP theme and used an old MS Powertoy freebie to switch the desktop wallpaper every 15 minutes. (I have amassed a huge collection of landscape pix and Hubble shots over the years, so the wallpaper switcher puts them to good use.)

I’m done with Vista for the foreseeable future. With a rock-solid XP SP2 install, an attractive theme, and the wallpaper switcher, I have all my needs met - my computing environment is stable and predictable, the system is responsive, the visual appearance is attractive, and the overall user experience is pleasurable.

I suspect many other people have had a similar experience with Vista.

How About a Little Pizzazz, Adobe?

I love that disclaimer asterisk, too. Of course I just had to find out what caveats they were issuing with that qualified speed claim, so I clicked the “More Info” button. Of course, the corresponding note was nowhere to be found.

So yes, someone actually went to the trouble of visually caveating a claim, but didn’t follow up with the disclaimer text. Nice.

Too funny not to share. Gizmodo posted a link to a parody video of Microsoft’s recent “Surface” video. You know, that “AT&T-you-will-someday” type of futuristic sci-fi.

Let’s see if my copy/paste embed fu is up to the task:

The online version of The New Yorker published an insightful article on that annoying phenomenon known as feature creep. From the article:

Technology is supposed to make our lives easier, allowing us to do things more quickly and efficiently. But too often it seems to make things harder, leaving us with fifty-button remote controls, digital cameras with hundreds of mysterious features and book-length manuals, and cars with dashboard systems worthy of the space shuttle.

This spiral of complexity, often called “feature creep,� costs consumers time, but it also costs businesses money. Product returns in the U.S. cost a hundred billion dollars a year, and a recent study by Elke den Ouden, of Philips Electronics, found that at least half of returned products have nothing wrong with them. Consumers just couldn’t figure out how to use them.

As folks who work in tech, I think we all know why this happens: too much focus on the corner case and the feature matrix.

Nice to see the popular press picking up on this issue. Direct link to the article is here.

My Sage colleague Chuck LeDuc put me onto this interesting article about some guy’s experience with burning CD’s in Windows Vista.

Rife with usability issues. Check it out.

It took me the better part of ten minutes, but I finally found a way out of my dilemma: File menu –> Preferences –> Reset Preferences –> select the checkbox labeled “Make all toolbars/pallettes visible and on screen.”

I wouldn’t mind those 10 minutes of my life back.

I have been quite happy with Jasc Software’s Paint Shop Pro 8 for years, for one reason: it’s quick and easy to grab screenshots, edit them, and save them out to whatever format you like.

I wanted to grab a screenshot of my webmail client today. So I did what I normally do - launched PSP, pressed Shift+S, drew a rectangle around the portion of screen I wanted to capture, then left-clicked to capture.

There was a little bit of shmutz in the screenshot that I wanted to crop out, so I clicked on the “crop” icon in the PSP “modebar” (at least that’s what I call it in my head).

I drew a rectangle around the portion of the screen capture that I wanted to keep, then moved my mouse on up to the toolbar, where I’m supposed to click the “checkmark” button. I guess it means “do the action that you’ve just cued up.”

It wasn’t there.

The whole toolbar containing the checkmark button was gone.

I right-clicked in the toolbar region, hoping to find a way to display the toolbar containing the checkmark button. None of the toolbar choices I turned on contained the checkmark button.

Then I went looking through the menu system, hoping to find a “do it!” menu item that perfomed the same function as the checkmark button.

There’s craploads of menus, submenus, and items. But I can’t find anything that suggests it has the equivalent functionality of my missing checkmark button.

Now I’m looking for a menu item that would let me reset my toolbars to some kind of default configuration. But I’m not feeling confident about this. I just can’t seem to find it.

It’s pretty lame when an application gives a user enough rope to hang themselves with…and then doesn’t even offer you a knife to cut yourself down from the gallows.

Body Text, Body Text, Body Text, Char

My apologies to MSFT if this has been fixed in Word 2007. But I just could not resist showing off this classic of poor usability.

Here’s a quiz for my half-dozen readers: how many usability issues can you find in this screen grab?

Winner gets two crisp United States dollar bills, mailed to them in a No. 5 security envelope with an Elvis stamp affixed to it. (Fat Elvis only, sorry.)

No Contrast In Nero

C’mon Ahead guys and gals. Couldn’t you increase the contrast just a teeny bit in those navigation boxes on the left?

I can’t read that text at all. And when I mouse over them, all I get is a bold face version of that same dark lettering.

Guess they just don’t want me to use the text-based navigation…

In a post somewhat related to my “the desktop metaphor is dead” diatribes, my favorite open-source pinko commie has written about how and why the desktop OS is inching its way to irrelevance.

I think I agree. Google and a few other web-based productivity tool vendor are either furiously working on or already releasing beta versions of their software that allow the user to work in offline mode.

The day is coming when you will start your computer thusly:

• You turn on your machine.
• A very lightweight OS is loaded; it could be GNU/Linux, Open BSD, whatevah. It doesn’t even necessarily have to have a significant amount of GUI itself; it only needs to be able to display a browser via a GUI.
• The OS loads a TCP/IP communications stack, device drivers, and searches for a (wired or wireless) connection, authenticating itself as appropriate.
• An (open-source of course) browser opens, and presents some or all of the projects, documents, spreadsheets, etc. the user is working with.
• The user works. Through the magick of AJAX all the user’s content is implicitly saved.
• If for some reason the user’s PC goes offline, the applications automatically go into offline mode, saving up the changes the user has made, and adding them into the document when a connection is reestablished.

I truly believe it’s that simple. Of course this is basically the idea behind the network appliance that was touted by many a guru at the turn of the century. It didn’t pan out then for now-obvious reasons: the online productivity apps weren’t mature enough. Well, now they are.

Turns out there *is* a real article, not just a sidebar, about browser-based desktops on CNET. Here’s the link to the story.

You might also want to check out the comment left on my previous post from a goowy.com guy named Alex (they’re the folks who bring you yourminis.com). He makes some pretty interesting points. Thanks for commenting, Alex!

I still get mildly freaked out when I get comments, especially from people who are somehow related to the topic of the post. It’s the “holy crap, people actually read this?!?” kind of freaked out.

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Browsing my Google IG homepage this morning (man, I *have* to switch over to Netvibes; my Google homepage is sooo lame…), I found an interesting article on CNET about browser-based desktops.

The article itself is very short - it’s more of a sidebar, really - but the pics are worth a gander.

I haven’t played with any of these applications so I won’t make specific comments on any of them. (OK, I lied, I really like the widgety look of YourMinis.) But I’m still convinced that the desktop metaphor is broken, whether delivered on your OS “desktop” or inside a browser. It’s just not sufficient for the large majority of peoples’ needs. See this previous post for some reasons why.

I also recommend checking out Central Desktop. It’s somewhat similar to these “webtop” apps, but appears to be much stronger on collaboration features.

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Readers of UsabilityBlog have probably gotten the impression that I’m a whiny b*tch. I do tend to slag on designs that aren’t immediately learnable.

OK, I’ll own that. I am a bit of a whiner. But it really does cheese me off when products make implicit claims of learnability and usability, but in fact possess neither attribute.

So it’s with all this in mind that I’d like to talk about the incredibly high usability and utility of the GUI’s ancestor, the command line interface (CLI).

CLI: Not “Walk-Up-And-Use”
Let’s be clear about one thing: in most circumstances, a CLI is NOT a “walk up to and use” interface like the touch-screen kiosks at the airport check-in counter. Using a CLI requires that the user possess *some* understanding of both the syntax and command set, AND the general concept of interacting with a computer via a command line interpreter or shell.

But once a person takes the time to learn a particular CLI, they possess the ability to perform tasks and accomplish their goals in an incredibly efficient manner. It’s the old tradeoff, learnability vs. efficiency. It’s not exactly a zero-sum game, but these two attributes are often in opposition.

Let me give you a real-world, personal example of how learning just a little bit about a command line interface provided me with an incredibly powerful, comprehensive, customized, and trustworthy method of regularly backing up my and my wife’s data.

The CLI and I
First, a little bit about my situation and goals: ever since grad school I have been obsessive about backing up my data. I make (somewhat) up-to-date redundant backups of my and Susan’s data files to two large external drives. And yes, I even maintain an offsite backup, although the drudge of carrying that drive from work to home and back again means that the offsite backup is hardly ever as up-to-date as the onsite backups.

Lately, with the pace of work picking up for both Susan and I, I’ve been feeling the need to keep the backup stores as up-to-date as possible. And I had grown tired of running the backups manually.

Finally, since Susan and I have both become avid podcast consumers, I have noticed that the backup drives are filling up with unwanted podcasts. So my goals are:

• Back up my and Susan’s critical data safely and redundantly.
• Automate the execution of backups.
• Conserve space on the backup drives by deleting files that we don’t need anymore (i.e., old podcasts).

Now I’m sure that I could buy a software product that would make periodic, maybe even continuous incremental backups. And I bet that a premium product might even let me specify which data can be discarded. In fact, many external drive manufacturers provide “lite” or even full versions of backup software with their drives. But I build my own external drives from empty enclosures and drives I purchase from eBay or Newegg. So that’s not an option for me.

I first started using computers back in the dark days of DOS 6x, so I know a little bit about Microsoft’s CLIs. Not much, mind you, but just enough to accomplish some rudimentary tasks.

So about four years ago, I started opening up a command line window in Windows 2000 (and later, XP) and entering DOS commands to copy all the data in the directories holding my data (as well as all subdirectories underneath) to another directory. (I always split my laptops’ drives into an OS partition and a data partition, so in essence my D: drive is the first line of defense. It keeps a backup of the contents of my user folder.)

The command I used was xcopy.

Using various options provided by xcopy, I could specify that I only wanted to copy files that had changed, and suppress confirmation prompts (”Are you sure you want to overwrite foo.bar”) as well. Pretty powerful.

I soon grew tired of entering the backup commands manually (yes, I kept the syntax on a post-it on my monitor…), so I put the xcopy commands into a batch file, and then executed the batch file whenever I remembered.

Obviously, I’m much less reliable than a computer, so about two years ago I decided to schedule the execution of the batch file using the scheduler feature of Windows XP. If you want to find it, go to Start / All Programs / Accessories / System Tools / Scheduled Tasks.

So about two years ago, my batch file looked like this:

Filename: Backup.bat

REM Copies Susan’s Favorites to the D:\ drive.
xcopy C:\DOCUME~1\Susan\Favorites\*.* D:\Susan\My_Docs\Favorites /s /d /e /i /r /y

REM Copies Susan’s desktop files to the D:\ drive.
xcopy C:\DOCUME~1\Susan\Desktop\*.* D:\Susan\Desktop /s /d /e /i /r /y

REM Copies Susan’s My Documents, Outlook data file, and desktop files from the D/: drive to the USB drive backup folder.
xcopy D:\Susan\Desktop\*.* U:\Susan\Desktop /s /d /e /i /r /y
xcopy D:\Susan\My_Docs\*.* U:\Susan\My_Docs /s /d /e /i /r /y
xcopy D:\Outlook\*.* U:\Susan\Outlook /s /d /e /i /r /y

You probably noticed that I used the 8.3 name for the “Documents and Settings” folder. A bit of trial and error taught me that xcopy will indeed preserve long folder and file names at the destination, but doesn’t always recognize long names in the xcopy command itself. So I used the 8.3 name for “Documents and Settings,” which is (usually) “DOCUME~1″.

Podcasts Improve - And Complicate - Our Lives
This little batch file served me well until last summer, when we both started downloading podcasts. This lifestyle change was definitely for the better; as we no longer had to listen to any of the incredibly annoying local radio stations. But it had one unintended effect: every time the backup batch script ran, it would back up all the podcast files that happened to be sitting in “My_Docs\My Music\iTunes\iTunes Music\Podcasts.”

Even though Susan and I erase listened-to podcasts on the source drive, they started piling up on the backup drives. I needed a way to regularly clear out the contents of the podcast folder on the backup drives so the backup devices didn’t become overrun with stale copies of “This American Life” and the Battlestar Galactica podcasts.

So I went prospecting in the Microsoft KB, and found that the RMDIR (”remove directory” or RD) command has some very useful options. For example, “RD D:\Foo\Bar /q /” will delete the folder “Bar” and all its contents, without asking me for confirmation.

I added some RD goodness to my batch file, and this is what I ended up with:

Filename: Backup.bat

REM Copies Susan’s Favorites to the D:\ drive.
xcopy C:\DOCUME~1\Susan\Favorites\*.* D:\Susan\My_Docs\Favorites /s /d /e /i /r /y

REM Copies Susan’s desktop files to the D:\ drive.
xcopy C:\DOCUME~1\Susan\Desktop\*.* D:\Susan\Desktop /s /d /e /i /r /y

REM Deletes the old podcasts from the backup drives before kicking off the current backup.
RD U:\Susan\My_Docs\MYMUSI~1\iTunes\ITUNES~1\Podcasts /q /s
RD S:\Susan\My_Docs\MYMUSI~1\iTunes\ITUNES~1\Podcasts /q /s
RD O:\Susan\My_Docs\MYMUSI~1\iTunes\ITUNES~1\Podcasts /q /s

REM Copies Susan’s My Documents, Outlook data file, and desktop files from the D/: drive to the USB backup drive.
xcopy D:\Susan\Desktop\*.* U:\Susan\Desktop /s /d /e /i /r /y
xcopy D:\Susan\My_Docs\*.* U:\Susan\My_Docs /s /d /e /i /r /y
xcopy D:\Outlook\*.* U:\Susan\Outlook /s /d /e /i /r /y

REM Copies the same data as above to the secondary backup drive.
xcopy D:\Desktop\*.* S:\Susan\Desktop /s /d /e /i /r /y
xcopy D:\Susan\My_Docs\*.* S:\Susan\My_Docs /s /d /e /i /r /y
xcopy D:\Outlook\*.* S:\Susan\Outlook /s /d /e /i /r /y

REM Copies the same data as above to the offsite backup drive (when I remember to bring it home that is).
xcopy D:\Desktop\*.* O:\Susan\Desktop /s /d /e /i /r /y
xcopy D:\Susan\My_Docs\*.* O:\Susan\My_Docs /s /d /e /i /r /y
xcopy D:\Outlook\*.* O:\Susan\Outlook /s /d /e /i /r /y

So there you have it. It’s not rocket science, but it works pretty well for me. It’s usable - provided you have some working knowledge of CLI’s. And I didn’t have to buy a separate application.

What did we learn today kids? First, the command line is your friend. Second, it can save you money.

Chris Shaw of Userkind passed me a classic error message. You can see it here.

Windows Live Messenger Freaks Out

Windows Live Messenger, your error message is soooo helpful! Thanks! This really helps me solve my problem!

Slagging on software EULA’s (”end user license agreements”) goes in and out of fashion. Since I’m perpetually the third-to-last guy to hop on a bandwagon, I figured I’d at least be consistent and join this party late as well.

So let’s get right to it: software EULA’s are broken. They’re unusable. And not just for the reasons you might think. Pretty much everything about the EULA experience is horribly, horribly wrong.

Let’s start with the legalese. I’m aware of how and why legal writing has become so impenetrable and difficult to parse. (For more on this, check out this Wikipedia article.) Defenders of the language and style of legal writing point to the need to disambiguate as much as possible and cover all potential contingencies when writing law or a contract. But that argument is specious. Bloated, meandering legalese is created by lazy people who can’t be bothered to express their thoughts and intent clearly and succinctly.

Here’s an example of laziness in action (now *that’s* a contradiction in terms…) that I just encountered while attempting to install a software application I was interested in evaluating. For the curious, I was installing the open source version of SugarCRM, an application for managing customer and sales information. Let me be clear about one thing: I am NOT singling out SugarCRM for extra-special vituperation. They’re just doing what everyone else does. Their EULA experience is really no better or worse than any other vendor’s.

I started the SugarCRM install, and in one or two clicks was presented with this screen:

I don’t typically give the EULA screen more than a nanosecond of thought, but something spurred me to actually check out the license agreement. I started scrolling the text box, but quickly grew frustrated. So I put my pointer in the text box and pressed CTRL+A (”select all”) to highlight the EULA text. I planned to copy it and then drop it into a Word doc.

Surprise… the text didn’t highlight.

Now I know a usability issue when I see it. My curiosity was piqued: just how bad *was* this user experience? So I manually highlighted the EULA text on the first line, and then dragged my pointer downward. Sure enough, the text started highlighting. I figured I’d just keep my index finger down for however long it took to highlight the entire text, then try CTRL+C (”copy”).

The scrollbar indicator was taking an awfully long time to move downward. Then I noticed just how small the scrollbar indicator rectangle was… and I knew this might take a while.

After a solid 2 minutes, I had finally selected the entire block of text in SugarCRM’s EULA screen. Of course, upon pressing CTRL+C I received no indication that the text block had actually copied to the clipboard. But I took the chance, opened up Word, and pressed CTRL+V (”paste”).

When Word stopped grinding, the first thing I did was look at the page count at the bottom left of the status bar.

It said the document was SIXTY PAGES LONG.

Back in the day, I had occasionally seen Word spaz out on a page count; so I hopped to the end of the document then back to the beginning, thinking that the page count would settle down to a reasonable number.

It stayed at sixty pages.

Sixty single-spaced, twelve-point, Times New Roman, one-inch vertical by one-and-a-quarter-inch horizontal margined pages.

Guess how many words?

It has 18,284 of ‘em.

I’ve posted the EULA here so you can revel in its repulsiveness.

So let’s review: the application’s EULA is sixty pages long in Word. The text box on the EULA screen is 470 pixels wide by 135 tall (less if you subtract the gutters). And you can’t easily copy/paste the EULA into an easier-to-read format; you’re expected to read it in this tiny 470-by-135 aperture. Here’s the kicker: it’s written in dense legalese, with seemingly random switches between sentence case and upper case.

Sucks, doesn’t it?

It’s almost like they DON’T WANT you to read it. Typically, the only people who want you to agree to a legal contract without fully understanding it are slimy car salespeople and dishonest mortgage loan officers. Now I doubt that anyone at Sugar actually thinks like that; a quick perusal of their site shows that they’re committed open-sourcers who do much for the development community. In short, they seem like good people.

So why the unusable EULA? Probably the typical reasons: the developer who coded the installer forgot to enable right-click select/copy/paste in the EULA text box. And the Sugar legal team undoubtedly just concatenated the separate boilerplate licenses for the open-source components installed with SugarCRM, then added in a bit of their own liability-proofing text for good measure. In other words, they were lazy. What resulted is an unfriendly, unusable mess.

Now I was even more curious, and I wanted to do some comparative EULA-gawking. So I played around with the next two apps I had occasion to install: Windows Live Messenger and the iTunes 7.1 update.

Windows Live Messenger

Microsoft’s instant messenger app had a surprisingly readable EULA, but was a snooze-inducing 12 pages and 6,343 words long. The EULA text box was super tiny at 415 by 100 px, but it did permit both keyboard and right-click select/copy/paste.

I’ve posted the EULA here for your edification and enjoyment.

iTunes

Apple’s iTunes EULA experience was not considerably better or worse than the other two. While (relatively) brief at five pages/2,091 words, it yelled at me (i.e., was in all caps) at random times. Guess that famed Apple user experience doesn’t extend to the EULA. Here’s a screenshot showing the generous-for-this-crowd text box aperture:

The EULA itself can be found here. It too suffers from a bad case of boilerplate-itis.

Usable EULAs

This is the part of the rant where I should tell everyone how to create a better EULA experience. So without further ado…here are my recommendations for more usable EULAs:

• Content: Lose the legalese. Lawyers, say no to boilerplate. Say yes to plain language. And try your best to keep it brief. Not only will you communicate more effectively, the lay community might hate you less.
• Readability and flexibility: Display a bigger text box, provide easier ways to select/copy/paste, provide a print button, or (preferably) do all three.

And while we’re on the subject of readability… I also recommend NOT SHOUTING AT YOUR READER. PEOPLE REALLY DON’T LIKE READING IN ALL CAPS. Sentence case is much more civil, don’t you agree?

So that’s all I have today about the EULA experience. I know several other people have written about the sorry state of software EULA’s, so here’s a few links for you. And thanks for listening to my EULA kvetch.

More about EULAs at:

Boing Boing: ReasonableAgreement.org - the anti-EULA
Ben Edelman: EULAs Gone Bad
EFF: Now the Legalese Rootkit: Sony-BMG’s EULA

I just loaded two desktop PC applications recently, both of which come from Yahoo!. They could not be any more different in how they treated me and communicated with me during install and beyond.

I think y’all will enjoy this post. Look for it tomorrow. (Promise!)

No, it *wants* my attention. There’s a difference.

Adobe, you’ve been annoying me and interrupting my train of thought for 9 days now. Enough already.

And the worst part is your demanding tone. Language does matter!

I’m not the only one who thinks so:

This guy agrees.
So does this guy.
And this guy.
And this guy too.

My favorite take on this is the commenter to that last blog who referred to the update manager as an “attention whore.”

Found this article on installing Ubuntu Linux in my web meanderings. A blogger who looks an awful lot like a young Newt Gingrich decided to rate the difficulty of installing Ubuntu as well as associated configuration tasks like setting up dual monitors, installing Wine (an open API that allows running Windows programs on Unix/X Window systems), getting WiFi to work, etc.

Not surprisingly, installing graphics drivers and a multi-monitor setup was very hard. Ya think? My readers (all three of you) will remember my epic n00b struggles with Linux. Sigh.

Just read on Slashdot that the UI for the OLPC (”One Laptop Per Child”) is going to be “kid-tested” in February.

Oh. My. God.

They’ve already developed it and they haven’t tested it with kids yet?

Wow. No wonder our field has so much work. It’s dumb decisions like this one that keeps us all gainfully employed, cleaning up after the technologists’ mistakes.

You can take a gander at the OLPC’s UI, code-named “Sugar”, at this YouTube page.

Oh, and happy new year, everyone.

I just found out that Gower has posted the first chapter of the book I edited.

The PDF of Chapter 1 can be found here: http://www.gowerpub.com/pdf/Usability_Success_Stories_Intro.pdf

I still don’t think you should buy it at 100+ dollars, though. (If you want to know why, you can read my rant.)