File this post under “more signs of the USPTO apocalypse.” In a story reminiscent of The Onion’s parody news article “Microsoft Patents Ones, Zeros“, iTWire reports on Microsoft’s patent “Method and system for navigating paginated content in page-based increments“… which is a fancy way of describing the Page Up and Page Down buttons.

The iTWire article isn’t bad, though like most news outlets it doesn’t provide sufficient background on why the patent system is in such a sorry state. (I did explain this in some detail in my UXmatters article; follow this link to read “Your Design Is Infringing On My Patent.”)

I don’t blame the Microsoft employees who put their name on this patent; they’re just playing the game that they were hired to play. (Though I do wonder whether they look at that patent plaque in their offices and feel a slight twinge of embarrassment.) It’s not Microsoft’s fault either. They’re playing the game too. The fault lies squarely with the USPTO, and with a Congress that is too deep in the pockets of large incumbent businesses from many domains.

I hate to keep ringing this bell over and over, but the fact of the matter is that patents stifle innovation and provide a means for lazy and litigious people to live off the work of others. And by patenting something so (pardon the pun) “patently obvious” as Page Up / Page Down buttons, Microsoft degrades the user experience for us all. Think about it: every time Microsoft (or some other software company) patents a commonly-used interaction pattern or UI design, they make it less likely that other product producers will want to pay a licensing fee to use the pattern or design. Which means that the producer will have to skirt the patent by creating a new interaction or design, even though a common and perfectly reasonable one already exists.

This isn’t just an academic problem, folks. If this is allowed to continue, we’re headed even farther down the slippery slope. What’s next? Will Microsoft or Apple or IBM patent the “OK” button? Will we have to label it “Affirmed” to skirt the patent? How many other patent landmines are sitting out there waiting to be stepped on?

If you’re interested in patent reform but don’t know what you can do or where to start, check out these organizations. You might find a way you can contribute to the elimination of obvious and overly broad patents. (These are taken from my UXmatters article.)

• The Electronic Frontier Foundation — The EFF is a nonprofit organization that advocates for free speech and individual rights in the digital domain. Its Patent Busting Project is an initiative “to protect innovation and free expression” by fighting against vague, obvious, or overly broad patents.
• Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure—Based in Europe, this organization currently runs the NoSoftwarePatents.com campaign, which has as its aim stopping enaction of a US-like patent system in the European Union.
• The Free Software Foundation — Founded by Richard Stallman, the FSF promotes and supports the free software movement. The FSF supports a less restrictive approach to patenting intellectual property. Founded as a US-based organization, FSF branches have opened in Europe, Asia, and Latin America.
• Another advocacy group is the Software Freedom Law Center, which Eben Moglen founded in 2005.

Microsoft Granted Page Up Page Down Patent  ::  iTWire

Tags: patentreform, user experience

If you remember back a year or so ago, I took issue with the customer experience associated with Adobe Acrobat Reader. Look here for my original nanorant. I believe I quoted someone who referred to Adobe Reader’s update manager as an “attention whore“.

The blogger over at microBlog has written an extremely sarcastic review of Adobe Reader 9’s bad customer experience. My favorite lines:

I had just slurped down the dregs of my coffee when the installer finished. I was so thankful when it told me I needed to restart my computer, welcoming the extra time to drink coffee, as well as the pure delight I knew I’d get from starting all my applications again.

Check it out.

microBlog » Thank you, Adobe Reader 9!

Profuse apologies for not posting in over a month. Standard excuses apply - swamped at work, volunteer tasks overwhelmed me, and I didn’t want my girls to think that Daddy was completely checked out.

I’m getting myself back into the blogging habit by pointing y’all to an article forwarded to me by a colleague. It’s about the poor usability of enterprise and business apps. Link is below as well.

You might ask why enterprise apps are generally so unusable. The answer is simple really: the people who evaluate and purchase the apps are typically not the target users. And the app vendors typically don’t take the time to understand and model customers’ workflow. (And when they provide the means to customize their apps so customers can modify screens and workflow, the tasks involved in customizing are often insanely obtuse and clunky.)

Have I made enough generalizations for the week?

Users Find Business Apps Complex and Hurt Productivity - Computerworld

Here’s a mini-rant about the usability of Apple’s Mac OS X:

I use Spaces, the multiple desktop feature found in OS X 10.5. It’s a nice feature for us Windows-on-VMWare-Fusion (or Parallels) people. I assign Fusion’s window to a separate space, and cmd+arrow down or over to get to my Windows window. I’ve assigned the Finder to be present in all spaces. (I only use the default four spaces.)

The problem I run into is the stupid no-op that sometimes occurs when I’m in Space 1, the Finder is in Space 2, 3, or 4, and I click on the Finder icon in the dock. Sometimes - but infuriatingly, not all the time and with no predictability - a click on the dock’s Finder icon does absolutely nothing. It doesn’t bring the Finder to my current space, nor does it pop me over the the space where the Finder window currently resides.

What I have to do then is cmd+arrow all over tarnation trying to find my frakking Finder window. Lame.

Interestingly, I just tried to reproduce the problem, and I couldn’t. So I don’t know whether it’s a strange interaction between the behavior of several OS X features, or an actual bug. One thing it definitely is is annoying.

(Click picture to see full-sized)

This is what you see in Outlook if someone has (rudely, in my opinion) sent an email with a read receipt requested. (It’s none of your damn business if/when I read your email, thank you.)

The problem is in the confusion engendered by the check box text, and the potential irrevocability of the action associated with checking it.

If I check the box, does that mean:

• Don’t ask me about receipts again and ALWAYS send one when requested,
• Don’t ask me about receipts again and NEVER send one, or
• Something else entirely.

I have no idea. But I’m frankly scared that checking the box will mean that I will always and forevermore be sending read receipts to all who request one.

From my old friend Pete, via IM this morning:

Why does Firefox make me hit “Continue” every time it updates a plugin? What other options do I have???

Good point Pete.

I’ve been meaning to blog this for months. Finally remembered.

My aftermarket car radio has a major, dangerous design flaw: the Power/Source button - yes, it functions as both an on/off and an input source switch - must be PRESSED and HELD for approximately THREE SECONDS in order to turn the unit on or off. (If you press without holding, it switches between radio, CD, and auxiliary input.)

Think about that for a second. A device that is DESIGNED to be used while the user is driving a vehicle requires a THREE SECOND PRESS AND HOLD. In other words, the designers thought that is was perfectly reasonable to have the driver remove their hand from the steering wheel for a three-count. And I should add that there’s no tactile feedback; you must observe the unit’s panel to ensure that the unit has powered on or off.

That is poor-bordering-on-negligent design. Scratch that. It *is* negligent design. Who thought that this was an OK design decision?

I’ll go out to the car over lunch and get the manufacturer and model number, so I can name names.

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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?

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):

(Click picture to see full-sized)

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

(Click picture to see full-sized)

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

(Click picture to see full-sized)

Hey, at least it’s not in legalese.

Originally seen on Worse Than Failure.

Joel Spolsky also has issues with Vista. Hilariously (or tragically, depending on your perspective), he also had trouble even opening up the friggin’ box. That’s a HUGE miss, as he mentions.

Even the Office 2007 box has a learning curve - Joel on Software

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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.

(Click picture to see full-sized)

Finally, in frustration I scrolled to the bottom of the list. I still didn’t see it. Then I scrolled back up to the top, and looked carefully at each batch of model numbers. I finally found the 640m…it was appended to model E1405 with a slash. At this point, I had spent about 3 or 4 minutes on a task that should take 5 or 10 seconds.

In other words, Dell expected me to know that my model laptop was released with another model number, and that I should look for “E1405″ when I wanted to access support for my 640m.

Give me a break. That’s just laziness. It would’ve been the easiest thing in the world to just put “640m” in the product model list, and have it lead to the same page as the E1405’s. Sigh.

One my regular reads - I think it was /. - pointed to a story on Space.com about the awe-inspiring discoveries made by the Mars Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity. The story is in the ever-popular “top 10″ format.

I’ll read anything about the space program, so I clicked on over to the story. And was bummed out to find some usability whoppers that seriously impaired my enjoyment of the story.

Here’s my “top three” list of usability issues I found. Follow this link or the one at bottom and see if you agree (or can find more).

Say it with me now…chromatic aberration and low contrast
The text in the story is rife with term-related hyperlinks. Nice of Space.com to define unfamiliar words, yes. But, the link color is blue and the background is (presumably a Mars-like) brick red. It’s nearly impossible to read the text links because there’s not enough foreground-background contrast.

Plus, the juxtaposition of blue and red causes your eye to attempt to simultaneously focus on short wavelengths (whose focus point falls short of your retina) and long wavelengths (which are most in focus at a point beyond your retina). This fatigues your eye because it’s trying to simultaneously accommodate to two disparate signals. As a result, the blue text appears jumpy or shimmery. Look at those links for a few minutes if you want to give yourself a headache.

Tiny aperture for reading the text
Why oh why did the designer choose to put the text of the story in a (yes I measured it) 440-by-100 pixel scrolling box? Well, I can guess; they were probably slavishly adhering the now-mostly-discredited “below the fold” decree. I wish they hadn’t done this. It’s like trying to read by looking through a keyhole.

Designers, I’m talking to you: it’s MUCH better to give the text room to breathe instead of stuffing it inside a tiny little box. If the content is interesting, people WILL scroll below the fold. Really, they will.

Small pix
This issue is not just about *strict* usability, it’s about enjoyability: the pictures accompanying this story are just too damn small! If we’re being asked to read a story about exciting findings from the Mars Rover missions, a key part of the story is showing us the wonderful pictures snapped by those intrepid little anthropomorphized vehicles. But the pictures are dinky little 240-by-170 thumbnails. Yes, I tried to click on them. It’s a no-op.

Sorry, Space.com, but poor design has put a big hurt on the user experience of this story. But please publish more articles…I just love ‘em.

Mars Rovers’ Top 10 Most Amazing Discoveries

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If attacked by a giant segmented worm, throw thick spears at it while running.

If your accordion expands uncontrollably, you should duck underneath it.

Caution: running underneath staircase may cause lengthening of the arm and loss of neck.

If you have any interpretations to share, comment away and I’ll update.

Oh really? I wonder who they tested with. And for that matter, whether they tried the participants on such mundane tasks as changing screen resolution or setting up boot order…

Munich’s KDE Desktops Usability Certified

Slashdot posted a short mention of a ZDNet columnist’s article positing reasons why Linux hasn’t tipped.

Some of his reasons are prosaic - number 1, for example is because “on the whole, users aren’t all that dissatisfied with Windows.”

Reason number 5, and of course you knew it was coming, is because “Linux is still too geeky.” Quoting the columnist:

Over the last few years there’s been a huge push to make some Linux distros easier to use, and when you look at a distro like Ubuntu, you realize that they’ve done a pretty good job. Problem is, there are some areas of the OS that are still overwhelmingly geeky (for example, updates).

And of course, there’s my personal favorites, changing the display resolution or modifying the boot order on dual-boot boxes.

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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.

Flickr Has The Hiccups…

Similar to my earlier screengrab off of Overstock.com, here’s another error message that makes me feel like I’m dealing with humans, not robots.Thanks to Dan Szuc for pointing this one out.

If you have to say it, then you haven’t designed it well enough for people to figure it out on their own…

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.

CNET’s What’s Hot Grid

I honestly don’t know, and I’d like your opinions. (All 30 of you - I checked my Google Analytics yesterday…that’s how many visitors I’m averaging over the past week…)

Is this useful? If yes, is it usable?

Here’s a little more about this tool, quoting CNET:

What’s Hot gives a visual snapshot of which stories are most important on CNET News.com right now. What’s Hot is updated every time a story is published, or at least once an hour…

The bigger the block, the hotter the story. The brighter the block, the newer the story. Bright yellow means the story was just published.

I definitely appreciate their attempt to innovate in this space. And I’m not trying to damn it with faint praise. I really do think it’s kinda neat. But I’m wondering about a few things as I look at it…

• Scan: From the gestalt p.o.v., is the image as a whole conducive to quick scanning and accurate parsing?
• Use of font, position on grid, and color for encoding importance: I’m all about multi-encoding to impart information, but are these encoders working together, or interfering with one another? Maybe they’re not doing either. There’s just something that’s not hanging together for me, and I can’t put my finger on it.
• Color: Warning, snarky tone approaching…this thing’s color scheme is what my wife always accuses me of doing when I dress myself: thinking that putting on nearly-identical colors is a good thing. When I go to work with a medium-blue shirt and jeans, she tells me I look like a plumber. CNET’s What’s Hot looks like, well, a Burger King employee. Plus, the palette as a whole is way too saturated.

There’s a lot more I could say about this, but I encourage you to check it out and provide your feedback. It has a couple of other neat features that you may want to play with.

You can check it out in context by following this link. Look on the right side, about halfway down the page.

And with good reason. Anyone who buys a new Windows PC is subjected to the kind of poor treatment Uncle Walt describes in his article: crippleware and for-pay services vying for your attention, wasted hard disk space, etc.

No more craplets. Please.

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OK, my fine faxing friend. I just fed you eight pages of insurance policy + cover sheet, dialed the phone number, and pressed “Fax”.

You happily snarfed up the pages from your automatic document feeder, sent them out your bottom, and flashed a “Dialling” message at me. But here’s the thing: you did nothing after that.

You didn’t sound a dial tone and make dialling noises. You didn’t screech a “connected” tone. You didn’t show me any other messages like “Sending” or “Transmitting.” You did nothing for a good minute and a half. You didn’t show me an error message. You just left me standing there, wondering if you did what I asked.

(Yes, I checked that you had dial tone before I loaded you.)

You know what I did then, Brother Intellifax 4100? I walked over to your colleague and rival, Canon Laser Class 7000.

Canon Laser Class 7000 snarfed my insurance policy + cover sheet, told me it was “Dialling”, made a big production of loudly dialling and connecting, then told me it was “Transmitting.”

When Canon Laser Class 7000 finished, it was nice enough to tell me that “8 pages [were] faxed OK.” (And it printed a transmission summary, which I didn’t exactly need, but hey, it was nice of it anyway.)

Sorry, Brother Intellifax 4100. You lost the job.

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Last summer I blogged about my problems accomplishing even simple configuration tasks in the Ubuntu Linux distro. (Here are links to the first post and the second post.)

I noticed that someone in the open source community quite helpfully posted an explanation of how I could solve one of my Linux problems. I appreciate that quite a lot. However, the solution itself just reinforces my point that Linux is not as usable as it needs to be for the mainstream computing herd.

Here’s the excerpted solution:

When you logged in as root in the command window, you made it so that command window was running a session using the root login. However, the rest of your system was logged in using your normal user name, which does not have “root” privileges. So, if you open a text editor using the menuing system, then that instance of the editor is running using your normal login, not root. Hence, the editor will not be able to store a file the GRUB “menu.lst” file (I think this is what you’re trying to edit, right?).

What you need to do is invoke the editor from within the command window where you are logged in as root. If your editor is gedit, you can do this by typing the following at the comand line:

gedit &

Before you actually change “menu.lst” I recommend making a backup copy of the current version by going to the correct directory within your command window where you’re logged in as root and entering something like:

cp menu.lst menu.lst_ok

You probably knew the command, but the point is it has to be done within the command window where you’ve changed your user to root.

Ubuntu also provides an alternative approach for opening an editor with “root”/superuser privileges:

1. open a command/terminal window
2. execute: sudo gedit
3. enter your password

This runs a session of the gedit editor as user “root”.

Again, great help from the community. But the solution is tragi-comically (comi-tragically?) complex. Remember, I was just trying to change the boot order! I shouldn’t have to possess all that conceptual background knowledge.

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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!)

Am I Sure of What, Exactly?

Encountered this while emptying the trash folder for one of my seldom-used email accounts, on AT&T Worldnet’s webmail interface.It’s just plain laziness, isn’t it? How much more effort would it have taken the developer to type “Are you sure you want to empty the Trash folder?”

Feh.

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.”

Unfriendly SharePoint Error Message

My company uses Microsoft SharePoint. It really sucks. Badly.

Y’know why I got this error? I was trying to create a sub-folder under one of my project folders. I wanted to name the sub-folder as descriptively as possible, so in the name field I entered “Raw notes for 360 - polished visit reports are in root”.

SharePoint barfed on that idea and popped this ridiculous message. It’s so bad it’s almost funny.

Hey SharePoint…if you didn’t like my input, why don’t you TELL ME WHAT WAS WRONG WITH IT INSTEAD OF MAKING ME GUESS.

Wait a sec… oops, I meant to say that “Usability Success Stories” is ranked #1,272,131 on Amazon.

And don’t ask me why it’s still $115 at Amazon…sigh…(pounds head against wall).

(If you want to see the Amazon rank - and the insanely high price - for yourself, follow this link.)

Face Down…

A few weeks ago I found a nice little artifact…it’s a sticky note attached to a fax machine at work.

Evidently everyone puts the paper in the wrong way.

Could it be because the little icon indicating paper orientation is so very hard to see?

I just read Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox column from December 18th (”Usability in the Movies — Top 10 Bloopers”).

His main point:

User interfaces in film are more exciting than they are realistic, and heroes have far too easy a time using foreign systems.

I agree with this assertion. I also like his descriptions of the typical problems with cinematic depictions of user interfaces. (He refers to them as bloopers; god am I sooo tired of that word…)

But he’s way off base in his conclusions. At the end of the piece he says the following:

In the film context, unrealistic usability is only to be expected. Still, I see two real problems with it:

Research funding and management expectations are subtly biased by the incessant emphasis on unrealistic UI design such as voice, 3D, avatars, and AI.