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

Check out this article by David Pogue at the New York Times. He points out a number of usability flaws in Windows Mobile 6.

(If nytimes.com asks for a username and password, be sure to try Bugmenot, a site for generating username/passwords and skipping registration on annoying, intrusive sites.) 

Reaching for Apple, Falling Short

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.

Sorry for the prolonged absence, my loyal readers (all four of you…). It’s been a tough few weeks, at work and home.

But it’s all good. Just busy.

Here’s a post from a blogger at ZDNet UK, talking about why he’s gone from Vista to Linux. Some key observations:

Why did Microsoft ignore the first rule of usability and ditch all familiar methods of doing stuff that I’d spent 15 years getting used to?

Yeah, that drove me crazy too. Couldn’t find anything in the control panel areas. And I just couldn’t stand the new start menu.

Why is Vista so slow (part 1)? On a brand new £1300 notebook built (one would think) with Vista in mind, the operating system should fly, especially when no applications are running. Not so; it’s a complete dog. It’s so slow that applications often won’t register that I’ve hit the space bar until I’m halfway through the next word. I’m a fast typer, but not that fast.

Read my post about my downgrade to XP, and you’ll see I had this experience as well.

Why I’ve Moved From Vista to Ubuntu 7.10

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

Blogged with Flock

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:

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.

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.)

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.

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

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.

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.

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.)

I just read a great post by Joel Spolsky on Vista’s shutdown menu. Turns out there’s FIFTEEN items on this menu. Joel argues that you really only need two:

• I’m going away from my computer but I (or someone else) will be back soon
• I’m going away from my computer and want it to be off

Anyway, here’s Joel’s screengrab:

I agree with him. His analysis is spot-on.

My favorite time waster-slash-guilty pleasure weblog, Engadget, has posted a surprisingly thorough review of the new Microsoft digital audio player, the Zune.

The review is here: http://www.engadget.com/2006/11/15/zune-review/.

This review is better than most popular press reviews in that it touches on scenario- and task-based usability issues, as well as describing in great detail what it’s like to actually operate the Zune’s physical and onscreen controls.

Unfortunately for Microsoft, the Zune doesn’t fare so well in the review. I’m not a reflexive Microsoft-hater; in fact I was hoping that M$ would come up with something good enough to motivate Apple to flesh out the iPod feature set a bit more. Alas, the Zune doesn’t seem to be that something.

Happy World Usability Day.

This event, now in its second year, was intended to raise awareness around the globe of how important usability is to our everyday lives. It’s succeeding beyond our wildest dreams. And that’s great.

But I’d like to introspect for just a moment here. Those of you who work in the field, stop and give yourself a mental pat on the back. And then tell yourself how fortunate you are to have stumbled upon a field that is so engaging, fulfilling, and exciting. Admit it. Every day when you wake up and go to work, you’re secretely thankful that you’re not a lawyer, a doctor, a software developer, and so on. You’re a soldier in the user experience army. And it’s the best damn career you can imagine.

You know it’s true. You tell yourself that at least once a week, don’t you?

I know *I* do…

I have a problem: I habitually click “reply to all” when responding to emails. I can’t help myself. I do it EVERY time I reply to an email. I don’t know why. But I can’t stop.

As you can imagine, this has caused me no end of embarrassment. Countless times I’ve responded to an email, intending to communicate only with the sender, and shamed myself by writing to everyone on the To: list.

The last time I did this was particularly embarrassing. So I went googling for a “behavior-modification” tool. I found one. It’s a plug-in for M$ Outlook called Reply To All Monitor. Full disclosure: I have no formal or informal relationship with Sperry Software, the producer of Reply To All Monitor.

The plug-in pretty much does exactly what the title suggests. It monitors you as you reply to emails. When it detects that you’ve pressed the “Reply to all” button, it simply pops a confirmation dialog. If you in fact intended to reply to all recipients, you click Yes. If not, you click No, and the plug-in strips out all respondents but the original sender.

Simple. But for me, incredibly useful. It’s by far the best 10 dollars I’ve ever dropped on a software product.

Whoever runs Sperry Software is pretty savvy about email-related behavioral disorders. Check out their product page. They’ve got a plug-in to remind you to include attachments (and who hasn’t forgotten the attachment once in their life?), strip attachments from incoming emails, and more. Nice.

PC Magazine just gave Peachtree Accounting 2007 their Editors’ Choice award. Am I happy? Absolutely.

People who know me will know that I came to Sage Software in 2005 to lead the effort to redesign Peachtree Accounting’s user interface. The product, a small business financial management application that predates it’s 800-pound gorilla competitor QuickBooks, has never really been designed with any appreciable amount of user input. Throughout 2005, I and my very capable team of designers and researchers worked with over 150 users, using various methods, to redesign Peachtree’s navigation system, nomenclature, main screens and workflow.

The biggest challenge was striking the appropriate balance between what new users undoubtedly needed, and what the install base needed. As I’m sure you can imagine, people who’ve spent the time and energy learning a complex product do NOT like to have the rug pulled out from under them. So we not only paid attention to new designs; we attended to supporting existing methods of accomplishing tasks as well.

We still have a ways to go; this is a multi-year redesign. But to see the industry recognize our accomplishment is quite gratifying. Props to Matt Wallens, Stephanie Brawner, Darren Hauck, Cassandra Swint, and Amanda Nance for their contribution to this effort.

Click here to read the Peachtree Premium Accounting 2007 review by PC Magazine.

technorati tags:Peachtree, accounting, QuickBooks, software, financial

Blogged with Flock

Like every other wanna-be semi-guru in this field, I’ve written a book. OK, I really just wrote three chapters, got 10 other people to contribute chapters, and edited their contributions…but still, I think this counts as “I have a book coming out.”

It will be available in September or October of this year. It’s published by Gower, an imprint of the Ashgate Publishing Group.
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Regular readers of UsabilityBlog (now *that’s* an amusing concept…) know of my recent struggles with Linux. Not content to leave bad enough alone, I decided to try fixing a nagging little annoyance on my (now) dual-boot Ubuntu/Windows desktop.

I shouldn’t have bothered.
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Recently I’ve been thinking about just how goldarned stupid the desktop metaphor is. Think about it: you have a wide expanse of pixels, on which you can drag and drop files to your heart’s content. The thing is, it’s very, very inflexible, and doesn’t *really* help you get organized.

In fact, it’s too true to the metaphor - like your physical desktop, papers end up in piles, and similar or related papers tend to get grouped together. And just like your real desktop, the organizational scheme of your computers’ desktop is always one minor incident away from anarchy.

But the operating systems’ desktops (I’m talking to all three of you, Windows, Mac OS, and Linux…) are also less useful than your real desktop, in the following ways:

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Big computing tries to foist another poorly-thought out ahead-of-its time device on us again. Say hello to the “Ultra-Mobile PC.”

Of course MSFT is pushing it, but it’s not just them.

For more on why the UMPC platform is generating negative reviews, see this Google results page.

Interestingly, the Sony VAIO UX50, a UMPC-like device - but with a keyboard - is getting good press. I’m no fan of Sony (for all the right reasons), but I do appreciate good design.

I came late to the cult of Mac. I didn’t own my first Apple computer until 2003. I made up for lost time by disassembling, upgrading and tweaking a dizzying array of PowerBook G3’s and G4’s, iBooks, and PowerMacs (ranging from the old Beige G3’s to the snazzy G4’s). Never took apart a Cube though - but I’d sure like to…
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Way back in 2004 Daring Fireball’s John Gruber posted a long but very interesting rant about why open-source GNU/Linux software is hard to use.

The article itself was a response to a misguided, condescending post from a Linux alpha geek about how he couldn’t figure out printer-sharing on a networked Linux box. The geek’s take was that the software should be made “easy enough for Aunt Tillie,” and implied that UI design in the open-source world was close to achieving this.

Gruber rightly pointed out that the open-source developer ranks were nowhere near to achieving that level of usability in their software, and would never achieve it as long as they treated UI design as an afterthought.

A somewhat long, but worthwhile read.