Just found a good article at ZDNet that talks about the LinuxHaters site. It’s not really a site for true haters, it’s more a site where people can socialize and discuss particularly egregious usability or functionality issues Linux has…and the community can figure out what to fix.

If it helps drive out usability problems from Linux distros, I’m all for it.

Tough Love: Linux Needs More Haters :: Between The Lines :: ZDNet.com

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I know, it’s not nice to point at somebody’s work and say snarky things. And once you look at this site, it becomes clear that it provides a ton of functionality. But the design seriously detracts from the overall perceived quality of the site. The visual design just doesn’t scan, if you know what I mean. And that hurts discoverability.

If I was ready to put my money where my mouth is, I’d mock up a redesign. It’s easy to point out problems, harder to provide solutions.

Man, it’s a busy week. But I’ll try to put something together this weekend.

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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.

Just ran across this article about the accessibility of the US Presidential candidates’ sites. Obama gets the A+, good on him. Sad to hear that Ron Paul failed in this respect. I would’ve thought his organization was capable of more, given it’s strong grass-rootsiness.

Making the Grade: The Candidates and Accessibility

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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”.

Drop what you’re doing right now and go look at the screenshots of Android, Google’s open-source smartphone OS.

It’s…it’s…beautiful.

I want one. Now. Not now. Yesterday.

I know it’s not even a real phone yet, it’s just a reference design. But I want my next phone to run this platform. That’s how neat it looks.

A Visual Tour of Android’s UI - Engadget

Or general availability as we called it in the telecom software world.

Again, go get yourself a copy. It’s the most enjoyable, highly functional web browser out there.

Flock is no longer in pre-release, it’s 1.0bn-ware now.

You really ought to try Flock. It’s that good. Remember that feeling you had when you first loaded Netscape Navigator 1.x? Or Firefox? You’ll get that feeling, a little bit of it anyway, if you give Flock a shot. It’s really usable and very enjoyable.

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I’m in downtown Atlanta in the waiting room at Emory Hospital, waiting for my wife to come out of Lasik surgery. Happy to discover they’ve got wifi here, not happy to discover that the Terms of Use page is a big image of the legalese. Not only is it inaccessible with screen readers and simple assistive tech like text resizing…it’s also damn hard to read for someone like me who’s 20/20.

What a shame. You’d think that hospitals and universities, two organizations used to accommodating people with disabilities, would know enough to make their site accessible.

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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.

A reader (omg I have those?) just pointed out that the Space.com story I critiqued is down. I checked; it’s not down, exactly…it just leads to a blank white page. No 404, no “the page you are trying to find doesn’t exist”, just…blankness.

OK, I guess that qualifies as “down”.

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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Can you say inappropriate verbiage?

And then there’s the little usability booboo’s, like the red/grey stereopsis, and the not showing me the field where I can correct my error. (Lazy coder, why should I have to press Back?)

Someday I’ll tell y’all about my feelings toward the Yahoo! Messenger install, which is sneaky AND ugly.

Make sure to follow the link to Flickr so you can see screens 2 and 3.

Fans of web-based productivity apps might want to check out this Techcrunch article about Orgoo, a new tool that smushes together your email and IM accounts.

I tried to sign up for the beta but all I got was a “we’ll let you know” email. Still, I do want to try this out. Check out it yourself:

Orgoo - The Web Email/IM Replacement

Google Maps recently added the moon and Mars to its mapping service.

If you go to the moon version and zoom down to the highest magnification, it displays…swiss cheese. How great is that?

I am not making this up.

Damn you, Google! You make it so hard to dislike you.

http://moon.google.com/

Zen and the Art of Inbox Management

It’s completely clear and understandable! I know exactly what is expected of me from this email.

If only all my emails were this simple and soothing.

A Little Expectations Mismatch Between Amazon and I

Amazon barfed on my search string, and offered up some product in lieu of results. Course it didn’t help that I misspelled “solar system”. (It’s my fancy new wireless keyboard’s fault…really….)

It took me a minute to realize that they must have been keying on my previous purchases, not on matches to substrings of my search strings, like “space solar system” or “space picture children”.

I definitely did a double-take when this screen showed. I mean, zombies? And project management? How are they similar to my search string?

Oh duh, they’re not. It’s just that I recently purchased “How To Survive A Robot Uprising” and some project management book, is all.

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…

There’s a good article on information architecture in the enterprise over at Boxes and Arrows. Written by James Robertson, it talks about how an IA has to work at different levels of analysis to be effective in an enterprise setting.

Quoting James:

In a typical web or design project, the information architect is given a task…the problem is known, and the challenge is to work out the best way to design the solution.

However, within the enterprise space, the problem to be solved is often not well understood. For example, information architects may be approached with ill-defined “problems� such as:

• Improve the effectiveness of the intranet
• Help call center staff to access required information
• Increase the uptake of the document management system
• Support sales staff with better online resources

The first task for the information architect in this context is to better understand the problem. Only then can an overall approach be defined, and the normal user-centered design process initiated.

In all, a good read. Full article at “Enterprise IA Methodologies.”

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The nice folks at UXmatters offered me the opportunity to write a column, and I said yes. My first article just got posted. Follow this link to see it, or just look on the front page. It should be there for the next few days.

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.

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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Gerry Gaffney of UXPod fame posted a great interview with Karen Loasby of the BBC. The interview is from November; but I’m so scandalously behind in my reading/listening I’m just now getting around to it.

It’s worth a listen; it provides her unique perspective on what it’s like managing the information architecture for a major media web property. You can get the podcast here: UXpod - User Experience Podcast - Interview with Karen Loasby.

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Found this on Digg today: a nice article on using CSS and Javascript to provide form field hints.

Painful Monster.com Error Message

By the way, this was the entire contents of the error screen. I would’ve screencapped the entire screenful of white in all its blinding glory, but why bother?

A co-worker sent me a link to Jack Bellis’ very good review of FreshBooks, an accounting web app. Find it here: Usability Institute- Review of FreshBooks.com.

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Flickr Error Message

Now *this* is a great error message! I just got it while posting the Paypal screengrab (see previous post).

Let’s talk about why it’s great:

• It clearly states the problem, and offers multiple solution paths.
• It speaks to me in English, not SQL or ASP.NET.
• It uses vernacular (”Sometimes web services can be a bit flaky”) to reassure me that Flickr is run by caring people, not automatons.

The only nits I have with the message: It’s a bit busy. Yes, there’s multiple solution paths accessible from here, but it’s a bit slow to parse it from the visual standpoint.

Also, it took me a second to figure out that they were talking about my blog’s configuration details. The addition of that one word would’ve made all the difference.

Paypal Error Message

Well, the post’s title says it all.

P.S. If you’re less than impressed by this post’s title, go read my previous post, “Oh Brother Intellifax 4100, Where Art Thou?”

Now *that’s* a good title.

I walked around all day yesterday quite impressed with myself that I came up with that.

Windows Live Messenger Freaks Out

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