If you read my epic rant about EULA’s from last year, you’ll remember I made the point that the legal dept’s who copy/paste these monstrosities assume that people never read them.

Well someone took the trouble to read the EULA for Apple’s new Windows browser, Safari 3.1. They found that legal couldn’t even be bothered to review their own work for accuracy. Seems that the EULA accompanying Safari for Windows prohibits the user from installing the application on a non-Apple computer. Oops.

Read the Register article, and the comments too, for a little shadenfreude at Apple’s expense.

Apple Forbids Windows Users From Installing Safari For Windows | The Register

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?

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WTF is my webmail client asking me to agree to (or not agree to)?!?I swear, that’s the only thing it shows. There’s no popup message, no other information on the screen other than what you see.And while I’m ranting, what does “Click to Continue” do? Will it perform maintenance operations, skip maintenance, or do something else entirely?Somebody better answer quick, because I’m paralyzed from fear and indecision, unable to do anything, my fingers trembling over the keyboard.

Just playing.

I don’t remember what I clicked; probably “Skip Maintenance”.

This morning I’m reading the Ars Technica review of Mac OS X Leopard. The author found a mighty big usability issue. Turns out the Leopard team went and changed the special folder icons in OS X from a high-contrast, readable look to a low-contrast embossed hard-to-read look.

The difference is quite striking. Look how different (and worse) the new folder icons are (below):

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Now here’s the Tiger version of those special folder icons.

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Definitely more usable. As the review author says, they’re just quicker to recognize, especially when small. The review goes into a host of other usability issues and is definitely worth a read. Link is below.

Mac OS X Leopard: The Ars Technica Review

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.

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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.

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