The User Advocate

Security as an afterthought is bad for users:

“The problem here is that a commercial organisation is being given the
task of collecting data on behalf of a foreign government, for which it
gets no financial reward, and which offers no business benefit in
return,” says Laurie. “Naturally, in such a case, they will seek to
minimise their costs, which they do by handing the problem off to the
passengers themselves. This has the neat side-effect of also handing
off liability for data errors.

Check out the full Identity-Theft-Ready horror story of a simple airline passenger. Users are being told data is for one thing and it is used for another, with no incentive for protection. We’re back to unintended consequences…

Technorati Tags: identity+theft, airline, security

Our local regional commuter train system, BART, introduced paid-preferred-spot parking something like a year ago… but I’ve now seen the users working the system and I have to wonder whether the change really improved BART’s revenues.

The deal was $63 per month, and the buyer gets a reserved spot until 10am and avoids the hassles of parking validation.  That’s about $3 per day on a 21-workday month, and looks like all gravy — cash above and beyond the fares — to BART management… until you see the people parking and walking over to the SF casual carpool.

There goes $4.00 for the ride downtown.  By making a revenue-enhancement change, your income goes down. 

This highlights the dangers of changes that do not benefit users.  They will fight back and find ways around your system.

Contrast this with BART’s long-term parking program, where people can leave their car for trips for a small (smaller than the airport parking) fee.  This seems to be more thought-out, with the user avoiding the airport traffic and parking hassle as well as saving money. 

Always find a way to work with your users!

Technorati Tags: BART, unintended+consequences, parking

Many many people laud iTunes for the interface, but that does not mean there isn’t room for improvement. Apple is very good at getting the small things right, so these pesky annoyances should be dealt with…

When you’re using iTunes in a minimized-to-system-tray mode, it is impossible to directly start a song over. How many times are people sitting at a desk, listening, and get interrupted by a co-worker? I don’t know about you, but it happens to me daily. I would find a menu option such as “Restart song” far more useful than the “My Rating” option – and it isn’t easy to restart a song in the full-size interface either.

How to fix it in the full interface? Most CD and DVD players use the “rewind” button to skip to the beginning of the current song and a second press to skip to the previous song, or they use two sets of buttons. I think the first option is more elegant, but either would be preferable to having to drag a teeny diamond all the way left in a slider…

Technorati Tags: itunes, apple, user+advocacy

Bad user interface isn’t exclusive to software! My family has a Ford Focus wagon, and it has the American Car Vent Affliction. You know, the one where the car knows better than you do what you want…

Well, in case you aren’t familiar, here’s the scenario. I want the air from the outside to blow up in front of me and at my feet, consistently. That means I have the direction knob on Heat/Defrost and life is good. Then a car who needs a smog check pulls in front of me and so I go for the other air control, recirculate, so I can not inhale their exhaust.

Not so fast! Ford has out-thunk me. It is impossible to recycle the air and have the defrost air path at the same time.

Why? I understand the physics, that the windshield would not de-fog as quickly with inside air, but it’s my car. Why does Ford think they know better than the driver? Interlocks on the parking-brake-and-key-removal, OK fine I see the need and the safety improvement. But interlocks on the air direction? Give me a break.
It’s almost as bad in a GM car, where you have air conditioning and the airflow on the same knob. At least the designers don’t fake you out by giving you two controls – they tell you before you buy the car that you’re a lunkhead who can’t handle separate functions.
The imports have this right – two controls, independent function. Let’s see domestics fix this design flaw, please!
Technorati Tags: Ford, ford+focus, general+motors, user+advocacy

Yesterday and this morning the BART system had a failure, one far more severe than the other.  The different comments from the users (the commuters stranded on the platform) showed the different perceptions of the two outages.  Yesterday the delay was over an hour and a half, and the grumbling from the commuters was significant.  Many people were upset and not afraid of sharing that.  Today, few people mentioned it.  Why?

Communication and recovery time.

Yesterday, there was only sporadic mention of how soon the trains would be running again.  Today, there was an announcement every few minutes with precise data on the next train’s arrival time.  Yesterday a sign showed a train due in 23 minutes – and that was when the system finally admitted there was going to be another train – and trains came 8-10 minutes apart.  The signs only showed one train in the queue… you never knew when the train after the next would arrive.  Today, the signs were showing the normal couple of trains and how fast they were coming.

How to fix it?  At least do damage control.  When you have a bunch of commuters stuck in the system, make a token gesture to say ‘thanks for waiting.’  If they suffer through the delay, make their trip free at the exit turnstile.  If they need to call home to tell their spouse they will be late or if they want to take alternate transportation, let them out of the underground station and reset their card without charging them the exorbitant round-trip fee.

Show that you understand you destroyed an hour of their lives and feel sorry.  Don’t behave as an aloof monopoly, or you’ll drive people back into their cars.

Technorati Tags: BART, public+relations, user+advocacy

I’m impressed – an entire review of the usability issues in Windows Vista.  Microsoft, please start fixing the problems…

Technorati Tags: microsoft, vista, usability

So there was an interesting discussion of a command alias function within an SSH client on Slashdot where most of the commenters completely missed the point, and it was an important one. User interface isn’t always based on gorgeous buttons and easy clickability – it must be targeted to the user of that application. In this case, SSH users who manage more than one computer… which is probably almost all SSH users.

Good SSH clients should be definitively targeted at the advanced computer user, and the lack of this feature is an odd decision. Really, the question comes to two schools of thought:

1. Always provide the same experience on the same server
2. Always provide the same experience to the same client

Implementing #1 is already done via login scripts on most *NIXs, and is trivial because the files and configs are local to the computation. Implementation of #2 does not seem to exist, and we need to ask why. Configurations can be captured locally to the client, and many MUD clients already implement the command alias features requested. Surely one is written in the same language as PuTTY and could be integrated, either as a plug-in or core code.

I question, though, if these ideas are mutually exclusive. Now that software writers are recognizing that people have multiple computers in use, there are sync capabilities all over – for example, in Firefox plugins where you want to have the same web pages open in two places. Why not do it for SSH commands? Push a versioned alias file to a location on the server you’re connecting to, so if you connect using a different client you can pull it down and still use all your commands, aliased as you expect.

Best of both worlds!

Technorati Tags: ssh, user+advocacy

A great article on how to format written documents wisely, though he’s showing it as a way to make docs move from Open Office Writer to Microsoft Word and back. In fact, it is an equally valid point to preserve the prettification between Word versions, or even in the same version but across computers with different setups (like missing fonts).

So how come this is an insight? I believe it is because formatting styles in both Word and Writer are viewed as complex, and goodness knows it is not clear how to manage indentation either. Both applications are improving, trying to intuit when users really should be using styles or indenting when the same formatting changes. That’s a start, but we need to go farther.

An option – and it’s not really as user-friendly as I want, so offer comments – is to force people to use styles. Every time they change a typefont or size, apply it to all items that share the style. When styles start to be more obvious – like when the whole document font changes – then average users will care about them. Clearly there has to be a better way to manage styles, but you need to change the paradigm and the presentation. It will take a bold move to lead this charge with all the momentum built up around the old, bad, WordStar/WordPerfect markup philosophy and habits.

Technorati Tags: microsoft, formatting, user advocacy,

I had an entertaining Google Maps search that gave me better-than-should-have-been results and then a failure, showing that one of your systems knows more than the other and they aren’t 100% tied together.

First I searched for an address…
http://www.google.com/search?btnG=Google+Search&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=firefox&q=1000%20lislin%20court%20pittsburg%2094565
and got back a page with one link on it to Maps, which is what I expected. I didn’t read it closely, or I would have discovered it was wrong, with the zip and state mismatched.
“Map of 1000 Lislin Court, Pittsburg, IL 94565″

I clicked it and went to

http://maps.google.com/maps?oi=map&q=1000+Lislin+Court,+Pittsburg,+IL+94565
which let me browse the map I wanted perfectly… never noticing that I was looking at California maps with an Illinois state label.
However, I clicked on the Driving Directions, entered my origin, and it refused to show me the directions since it was confused as to my destination. From this I draw three conclusions:

1. Your main search is not as smart in geolocation to be zipcode-aware and find the right Pittsburg from the zip.
2. Your Maps feature is pretty smart relative to finding the right results even when given some erratic information in the query.
3. Your driving directions don’t inherit Maps’ good sense but take things much more literally.

You’re known for good user interface, and Maps made it work very well – enough to fool me that there was no bad data. I suggest you work on your interapplication handoffs so they meet the shining example of the rest of your features.

Best wishes,

The Advocate
www.useradvocate.com

Last week I received my first comment – evidence that at least one other person in the world hears what I’ve been saying this year. When I investigated, wary of comment spammers who had recently hammered my logs, I found there is an entire community of people like me writing – except they appear to have figured out how to make a living at improving usability.

One log had an entry about hypersensitivity to customer experience issues as an occupational hazard, coining it the “” or “PatPS”. He told a story about a problem experience and ended up feeling bad because of context unrelated to his experience. I admire his compassion, but I believe a business needs to be cognizant of the effects employees have when they’re having a bad day. It is essential to manage the employees so that issues like his are prevented. Move the employee off the counter, or give them time off, or figure out some other way to handle it.

It is important for him to not succumb to the inverse syndrome: “Oh it’s only a pea.” Too many businesses stop noticing peas and eventually the pile is big enough they keep customers away from that counter. Train your teams to see the peas.

And be thankful you have the ability to feel the peas… it is rare and should be valued.

Technorati Tags: Princess+and+the+Pea+Syndrome, user+advocacy, user+experience, employee+enagement