[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.

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.

The OOBE (Out Of Box Experience) is excellent. Setting up live writer to work with my blog was a breeze. Type in the URL of my blog, type in my account info, and I’m set. The account info is saved and automatically used without prompting, which is very convenient. However, security-minded users may not be happy with this feature, as there seems to be no option available to disable saving the password.

The password is saved in the registry under HKCU\Software\Windows Live Writer\Webblogs\<guid>\Credentials\Password. The password seems to be encrypted, but this is no more than weak obfuscation. The password can easily be retrieved by viewing your account details, and getting the contents of a starred-out textbox through the use of my Passfinder utility. Anyone with access to my computer could easily find the password to my blog very quickly. Saving the password is not a crime in itself, but failing to provide an option to disable this behavior is not ideal.

The user interface, however, is very clean and easy to use. There are quite a few tools available, but the interface keeps these out of the way when they are not needed. The editing interface is very standard, with a standard formatting toolbar, standard menus, and a standard status bar. The WYSIWYG editing is done exceptionally well. The initial set-up with a blog site retrieves the style settings and allows you to preview your blog post in the actual style in which it will appear. The edit control appears to be an Internet Explorer hosted control, so what you see is really what you get (Unless you use Opera or Firefox…) At this moment, I am typing text in the actual font used on the blog, with the actual background as well. The title of this entry is displayed on top, just as it will in the real blog, and I can edit the title as if it were just part of the article.

This screenshot brings me to my favorite feature of Writer. Embedding images in my blog post is as easy as cut-and-paste. This is how WYSIWYG editing is supposed to be about. It just works. The screenshot you see above was pasted directly from mspaint, with no intermediate files being saved. The image is automatically updated as a png through the standard blogging APIs. In addition, if your blog does not support uploading images, Writer can use an FTP server instead if needed.

Publishing is quick, easy, and painless. A preview mode can allow you to see your post as it will actually appear on your front page. When you’re ready to save, publishing is a breeze, and can be done with a single click. Saving drafts is also just as easy, and can be posted to the blog as a draft, or saved locally as a draft. Editing existing posts is also easy, and even allows editing posts that were not made in Writer.

My final complaint with Writer is that all of the UI seems to be custom designed. The menus are nonstandard, the toolbars are nonstandard, and the dropdown boxes are nonstandard as well. I would be very surprised if the status bar was a standard windows control. The only standard controls that I can find on the window are the “hyperlink” tools in the sidebar, which in reality are static text controls which change the cursor and underline the font when the mouse hovers.

I understand the reason for using custom designed controls; the custom controls used look nicer than the standard windows controls. However, when the user changes the theme or uses a different version of windows, the common theme will not be used in applications that draw their own controls. This sets a bad example for programmers, who end up doing custom UI like the UI we see in Java applications and GTK applications (Yuck!). I’m of the opinion that native UI is a good thing, and should be used whenever possible.

Overall, I think Windows Live Writer is an excellent blogging tool. It will be interesting to see how Word 2007 with its new blogging features competes with Writer.

Score: 14.5 FooBars (on a 17 point scale)

——————————

EYE OF SAURON NEWSLETTER

1) Saturday meeting: Trash talking and board elections

2) Sauron-con ’96 is here!

3) Concerns about membership dues

4) Membership rules change
——————————

1) The Saturday meeting

Yup, that’s right, it’s time for ANNUAL ELECTIONS again!…

Now, this e-mail observes standard practice in e-mail etiquette. It has a well ordered table of contents; it organizes and divides elements so there is a clear distinction between each event; it includes an unsubscribe message at the end (trust me).

So why is this so bad?

1. The Undeletable E-mail

E-mail is the primary form of communication in many organizations, especially ones with members in far-flung locations. As a form of communication, e-mail is much like a phone conversation or meeting with someone in person–we convey ideas to each other and exchange knowledge so that we can work as a team.

Unlike e-mail, however, phone conversations and personal meetings don’t keep records of themselves. If we’re having a phone conversation, we may jot down a person’s name; in meetings, we may take minutes. Phone and in-person conversations are not forms of recording information–we handle that separately.

We rarely save actual phone or in-person conversations, and we rarely have the option. And perhaps this is a good thing–saving communication in its raw form may sound like a feature, but it’s really preserving the disorganization of the original communication.

Consider the e-mail we mentioned in the beginning. That e-mail was well-organized as a form of communication, but what if you were interested in just elections? That e-mail is now the de facto record of information for elections–you’d save that newsletter just for one piece of information out of four.

And what if you wanted to hold on to the rules change? Now the e-mail morphs into the dreaded “Undeletable E-mail.” Since it has only one or two items in it, you look at it almost every other day you check your e-mail, but you never get anywhere with it because you can’t delete it!

2. An Improper State

Is an e-mail message to proper way to record information? Obviously not–the best way would be to enter an event, for example, would be in your calendar. As it is, e-mail acts as a stand-in for all sorts of information–to do lists, contact information, website addresses–which all get stored in an amorphous blob that we call the “inbox.”

This is a poor state to keep things in. To understand why, let’s compare e-mail to its closest pre-internet counterpart–the answering machine.

Most people delete messages on their answering machine. [1] The idea behind an answering machine is simply to allow communication in a non simultaneous way–if you’re not home, you leave it on and call people back when you get home.

Can any of us imagine keeping several thousand messages on our answering machine? (All neatly ordered with labels and searchable by Google, of course.)

3. The Way It Should Be

E-mail was never meant to be used as a tool for storing information, and it’s only the result of an unfortunate accident that it is. The main problem is that we don’t have convenient ways of storing all the information that comes on e-mail. We can put certain things in our calendars, and we can add names to our address books, but as a matter of convenience e-mail is still the most accessible place to put everything, since it’s already there.

Many of the pieces of the solution are already being experimented with. Instead of using e-mail to describe events, we can schedule them online using something like Google Calendar or Kiko and send invites. We can also collaborate on documents online to keep track of notes.

Each of these things is only a part of a much wider solution. Since none of these new tools are as universal as e-mail, they can’t solve everyone’s problems–some things will just have to remain in the dreaded inbox.

4. At the Source

Interestingly enough, the latest systems of e-mail handling sometimes seem more designed to act as this record of information than the old fashioned dreaded inbox. Despite the informality of e-mail, it’s often possible for computers to find organization in these messages where humans might have to dig. Whenever GMail finds an address in your message, it offers to map it, as well as automatically attempting to find events and calendar them.

In today’s world, most of us read e-mails and have to file them manually. Filtering allows some of us to construct gadgets to avoid the task of management, but perhaps technology will soon help us all avoid that second step.

Interesting References

[1] 6 of 7 surveyed responded that their families delete messages on their answering machine. The 7th eventually answered my message and said their family “probably” deletes.

How You Handle Your Inbox Can Say a Lot About You

The inbox makeover (do-it-yourself filtering)

Email is not suitable for business use