Americans are increasingly choosing to live among like-minded neighbours. This makes the culture war more bitter and politics harder

The

most interesting thing I discovered about it though, was not the article’s basic conceit

- that Americans are being subdivided into different cultures, but how it was discussed. Naturally on Slashdot, Reddit, MetaFilter, and others, you have certain standards of discussion. I generally find Reddit to be the most politically confrontational.

You could

argue

that it’s the community–

the people in it

that decide whether a website will be a meeting of parliament or a Hello Kitty fan club. But I think there are other things to look at.

Interestingly:

I was also recently looking at a Yahoo! blog on patterns for designing a reputation system. Basically, a pattern is a recognizable formula that a lot of sites use. For example, both Digg and Reddit use a “points” system. Users can award each other points when they like each other’s posts.

The most interesting thing,

however,

was taking Yahoo!’s reputation systems and using them to

reverse engineer sites like Reddit,

Digg, Slashdot, etc. and see the results.

From http://developer.yahoo.com/ypatterns/pattern.php?pattern=points:

(Emphasis Theirs.)

Problem Summary

In some communities, participants want a tangible measurement of their accomplishments for personal satisfaction and to make comparisons with other competitors.

EXAMPLE:

Use When

Use this pattern when the community is highly competitive, and the activities that users engage in are competitive in nature (e.g., player-vs-player contests, or coaching a fantasy football team).

Points are generally discouraged, except in cases where the fundamental, primary purpose of the community is competition, such as fantasy sports or games.

The competition isn’t just because the people on Site X

are jerks

• political extremists
• or sexually frustrated

The design of the site is built to promote competition.

[more (full article)]

I was just as much shocked as dismayed. Mulberry was hawked by so many colleges that I assumed its destiny was all but sealed. College students, as early adopters, would all be exposed to Mulberry and see how wonderful it was, and they’d take it to their jobs, promoting an almost viral spread.

I guess the Thunderbird/Outlook duopoly was just too strong for Cyrusoft to handle. However, all is not lost, as Mulberry is available for free now.

Let’s take a look at all the wonderful features of this program! (full article)

[originally started a long time ago]

Security is not just about locking down a system from a list of attacks. The way you design a UI dictates how people behave, and people’s behavior is responsible for 90% of attacks. [citation needed] Defaults matter. No one forgets to lock an automatically locking door.

The fact is, while a security system must be set up to prevent hacking attacks, guesswork, and theft, it must also be designed in such a way that leads people to behave more securely. When you have a system where keys are hard to create but easy to copy, naturally, people will end up using the same keys at eBay that they do at Flickr.

The need to “educate users” is an indication of design failure.

You probably have friends who use the internet. How much would you guess most of them use the buttons on the IE (or Firefox) toolbar?

Observation suggests a rule like this: For 80% of the users, only 20% of the buttons gets used (I, for one, never click anything under “Page”). There’s a great book that points this out quite nicely, but it doesn’t draw the thought to its conclusion. Perhaps there’s a place for ugly design that stitches together a haphazard mess of seemingly unrelated functions, knowing that most long term users will use their tunnel vision to filter out all but the most important functions to them.

TimGas: saying myspace and “design” within one sentance of each other
TimGas: is just asking for me to block you
Me: but it’s so true
Me: i don’t look at all the stuff on a mys**** page
TimGas: i’m feeling sick now
TimGas: brb, puking

Me: I hate windows mobile.
Tim: Why?
Me: In what universe do you get a smart phone that’s too smart to make calls with?
Tim: Yours must be defective, i’ve never had a problem with that.
Me: No, it’s not. I’ll explain.
Me: My mom got a palm treo 750.
Me: This should have incited my “ruh roh” response.
Me: somehow it didn’t.
Me: That was fine, even though she never uses mobile web
Me: but then, she got this plantronics headset
Tim: ruh roh
Me: and she was telling me how she couldn’t get the regular phone speaker to work anymore
Me: she disabled bluetooth
Me: but she could still only make calls with the headset
Tim: hmm
Me: soo, I removed the device from the partnership. Now, it still doesn’t work, bluetooth’s off, and when i call i don’t hear anything.
Tim: Did you check the volume?
Me: Furthermore, it requires some ridiculous YES I CHECKED THE VOLUMEFDSFDSF
Tim: and does speakerphone work
Me: –anyways, ridiculous passkey (no speakerphone doesn’t work)
Me: and without the pass key you couldn’t reattach the headset
Me: So now i couldn’t talk on the phone,
and couldn’t talk on the headset.
Me: ==with a palm treo and winmobile, you can do everything but make voice calls
Me: We called tech support
Me: They had us do a hard reset
Me: The lady’s basic explanation was “you have to think of the phone as a little computer. and just like your computer builds up cookies and stuff and slows down, your phone can also get cookies and slow down as well, so you need to turn it off regularly”
Me: (I congratulated myself on keeping a straight face through that one)
Me: but it seems to have worked
Tim: treos suck

Tim: the phone is clearly better than my old one
Tim: but the cpu sucks, and the screen configuration is retarded

Me: it’s totally unacceptable to have to whip out a stylus just to turn off the headset
Tim: there’s not a button on the headset?
Me: there is….it doesn’t work
Tim: my friend josh has a blackjack and bluetooth headset and has zero problems with it
Tim: it’s clearly the treo that sucks
Me: menu->cancel bluetooth
Me: so….go to the MENU menu
Tim: whaaa
Me: i want to find the idiot who dreamed that one up
Me: and give them their phone back
Me: with my fist
Me: the button on the headset hangs up
Tim: funny
Me: not when mom’s on a 2 year contract
Me: there are three buttons on the headset
Me: volume up, volume down
Me: and the “multifunction button”
Me: which i believe is mainly for hanging up

http://www.facebook.com/terms.php

There are 6000 words and 70+ paragraphs. How many Facebook users do you think actually know the legal terms they accept when they join the site?

Quote:

PLEASE READ THESE TERMS OF USE CAREFULLY AS THEY CONTAIN IMPORTANT INFORMATION REGARDING YOUR LEGAL RIGHTS, REMEDIES AND OBLIGATIONS. THESE INCLUDE VARIOUS LIMITATIONS AND EXCLUSIONS, AND A DISPUTE RESOLUTION CLAUSE THAT GOVERNS HOW DISPUTES WILL BE RESOLVED.

Here’s one all-too-familiar example:


The Terms of Service, or TOS, are a standard prerequisite for signing up for almost everything on the internet, from Amazon to Neopets to Flickr. This document usually contains all the rules required to join the service. These cover all sorts of policies, from standards of behavior to giving away your phone number to telemarketers [1] to waiving your right to legal action. [2]

Try applying principles of UI design to a TOS. You should notice immediately:

Everything about your average TOS screams out, “Don’t read this, but skim it and check the box that says you did.”

(1) The box is usually packed into an unnecessarily small space (in the nVidia example, it’s actually clipping most of the available room!)

(2) The page looks like it’s from the Web 0.1 era. Ever see links on a TOS?

(3) It’s totally impossible to read. Look at any TOS. It’s called a table of contents, geniuses. Use it.

(4) Doesn’t contain any interpretation. The legalese is required to get through in the courts, obviously. But why shouldn’t they provide a side-by-side translation or basic explanation?

(5) The check box almost never requires you to read the agreement.

This is something that has been around since the pre-Internet days; the fine print is nothing new.

What’s different now is that the Internet has made everything so much easier that, when it comes to Terms of Service, it’s blatantly obvious that they don’t want you to know what you’re agreeing to. We should demand better.

From now on, the Blog of Justice will have its own TOS, available here.

In order to make more than incremental progress, one must design constructively, by creating a new system. The web browser and the spreadsheet, for instance, were not examples of creating a better word processor; they involved a smart designer thinking about a problem in a new way.

In some ways incremental design is best accomplished through constructive design as well. If you start with the initial assumptions of the product (i.e. it must have a way of being turned off, it must have a menu, it must use buttons), then you’re stuck with the initial limitations. Incremental design is better when the designer can think without being absolutely fixed to any narrow paradigms.

Consider why pop-ups are bad: 

• They steal focus away from the current context: This should be obvious, but whenever something appears on the screen which interrupts your current task, it negatively impacts usability.
• They require extra actions to complete your task: Every pop-up must be closed before the existing task can continue. This may be as quick as hitting Alt-F4, or take as long as switching from keyboard to mouse in order to click the close button.

Despite knowing that pop-ups are evil in web applications, many application writers continue use pop-ups in client-side applications. The terminology for client-side applications is slightly different, however. Pop-ups in client-side applications are known as “pop up dialogs”, “modal dialogs”, or sometimes simply “dialogs”. Some great examples of annoying dialogs can be found The Daily WTF.

One specific type of dialog that is particularly bad is the “Do not show this again” or “Don’t ask me again” type dialogs. Here’s an example from a project on CodeProject:

These types of dialogs generally show information that the user might be interested in, but most likely isn’t. For developers, the easy way out is to simply implement a “Do not show this again” type dialog, justifying by saying “Sure, it’s annoying, but they only have to see it once”. Chances are, if it is annoying, you shouldn’t be showing it as a dialog to begin with. On top of that, users generally immediately click ok for this type of dialog without reading the text. And if they do click on the checkbox, it’s possible that they may want it to come back at some point, which is likely impossible.

Here are some guidelines for when dialog boxes are inappropriate:

• Providing informational messages that may be interesting to the user.
  Informational messages should never interrupt the users workflow. Present this information to the user in ways that are non-intrusive. Examples of this are tooltip-style boxes that provide information without stealing focus, and tooltip bubbles.
• Alerting the user to non-fatal errors and warnings.
  Users probably don’t care about non-fatal errors. Chances are, they don’t know how to fix the error, or don’t want to bother. For example: a dialog box alerting the user that the connection to a server failed is probably inappropriate. Alternatives would be: status bar text, status icon indicating connection state, and tooltip bubbles.
• Input validation errors.
  Don’t put up a dialog box saying “Hey, you can’t have letters in your phone number!” This is annoying, and interrupts the users workflow. Direct the users attention to the field using non-modal UI, such as highlighting the erroneous field, or using a tooltip bubble (can you tell that I like tooltip bubbles?)

On the other hand, however, there are some scenarios where you can, should, and must use dialog boxes.

• Feedback is required from the user.
  “Do you want to save this document?” is a great example of when a dialog is absolutely necessary. You need to get feedback from the user to determine the proper choice of action. However, if there is ever a scenario where a “default” is usually appropriate, consider the impact of using the default instead of prompting the user for an action.
• Fatal errors.
  A perfect application would never have fatal errors, but everyone knows that perfect applications are as common as unicorns. When your program crashes, make every attempt to save the users data in some form, and alert the user that a problem has occurred. However, under no circumstances should you give an error that looks like this: “Unhandled exception at doFoobar.cpp:2534″. This sort of information should be logged for customer support, not presented to the user in a dialog box.