Ignite 7: The Coming Revolution in Highway Communication

I promised I would have a more detailed discussion on my proposal to redesign vehicle signals. A five-minute presentation is great, but isn’t quite enough to really cover the details.

The current signal layout has stop lights, reverse lights and turn signals, which are also used as hazard lights. These are the only lights dedicated to signaling a driver’s intentions. We have parking lights and headlights too, but they don’t count. Seriously, they’re not signals.

What’s my problem with this setup? Let’s go over all the lights one at a time.

Turn signals

Turn signals are used to indicate all sideways movement. But there isn’t just one way to move sideways. For one, we change lanes quite often. In many cases, where it’s possible to change lanes or make a turn, it’s difficult to show a driver’s intentions.

Not all intersections are your standard four-way situation. Many have multiple roads in a given direction, and in those cases, it’s common for one lane to lead into two different turns. Also, on highways where two exits split off from the same place, it’s difficult knowing if a driver is taking the more gradual exit or making the sharper turn.

U-turns aren’t legal in all states, but even in those states there are places where they are explicitly allowed. And even where they aren’t, they still happen. Many drivers preparing for a u-turn will use a blinker, then start turning in the opposite direction to allow room to complete the turn. This confuses other drivers, but a dedicated u-turn light would clear up a lot of that confusion.

My idea to revamp the turn signal would look a little like this. To control these lights, we’d have a slight change to the controls we use today: The lane change signal would be activated by moving the blinker switch up or down, without clicking. Releasing the switch would turn the blinker off. Clicking the switch once would turn the soft turn signal on, and a second click activates the hard turn light. Once either direction is blinking, pulling on the switch (which usually toggles the brights with the current setup) turns on the u-turn signal. No matter what signal is on, pushing the switch will always return it to the center, disabling all turn signals.

Brake lights

It doesn’t seem too crazy to expect brake lights to respond to a driver slamming on the brakes, and inform other drivers that the car is decelerating faster than normal.

An outer ring could flash rapidly around the solid standard brake light when the system detects the car slowing down faster than what would be considered normal. I imagine there’d be some testing to determine what that rate would be. Also, if the driver slams on the brakes but the car doesn’t slow down as fast, maybe with faulty brake lines or ice on the road, the outer ring should still flash, to warn others that something isn’t right.

Hazard lights

It bothers me that cars still use the same lights for hazards that they do for turn signals. It seems irresponsible for a manufacturer to limit a driver’s ability to signal a lane change or turn while also signaling that there’s something wrong with the car.

Also, hazards are used in a wide variety of situations, from flat tires to overheated engines to simply driving slower than others up a steep incline. Hazards are generally thought to signal serious problems, so drivers are apprehensive about using them for more mild situations, such as driving a bit slower to save gas or driving in an unfamiliar area.

Like the two-part stop light, these lights would have a mild hazard mode and a severe hazard mode. Maybe drivers would be more willing to use them in less extreme cases if both modes were available.

It only seems natural to make the hazard signal in the shape of a triangle, since that symbol is used to illustrate dangerous situations on the road already. Of course the light should be red, like most hazard triangles and reflectors used to signal accidents and construction zones.

Controlling the dual hazard lights could use a switch much like the one used to control the fan on a kitchen stove: left to mild hazards, right for serious hazards, center to tun both off. Or a button shaped like the hazard symbol, where drivers can push the inner or outer triangles, and the lights would turn on accordingly.

The lights on an actual car don’t need to be nearly this big. That’s one thing many modern automobile manufacturers don’t seem to understand about LEDs. They’re much brighter and clearer, and a light made of LEDs is much more painful to look at than a traditional bulb light of the same size. A simple row of lights will work for the turn signals, and animating the signals would be even more effective.

The horn

This isn’t really in the scope of my main idea, but I do like the idea of a less aggressive horn, used when a driver wants to get someone’s attention when there is no immediate danger. First of all, it must be easier to engage the aggressive horn, since it must be used in emergencies. But a smaller button could activate what I called the Happy Horn in my presentation, which fades in and rises a bit in pitch, so it isn’t as surprising.

I’m very much against using the Angry Horn while arming and disarming car alarms. They’re typically used in parking lots where people are walking around, and to those people, it sounds like somebody is honking at them. Also irresponsible. I’m not a fan of superfluous government regulations, but I’d support one that bans horns used in this case.

Straight ahead signal

An idea I had when brainstorming for this presentation was a straight ahead signal. Why would this be a good idea? There are instances where it would be nice to let others know when I am going straight, and I just know they’re wondering if I’m just forgetting to signal a turn. A straight ahead signal would clear up that confusion, but to be effective, drivers would have to get in the habit of using the signal at every stop and every scenario where turning is an option. The straight ahead light would become the default signal, equivalent to using no signal, and would either be left on all the time or never used. I just don’t see this signal helping things, even though three of the four possible directions–left, right and backward–have their own dedicated signals.

Can we change?

This is all a pretty big change. Not just in the design and controls of the signals, but in the way we use them and expect others to do the same, in a world where half the drivers don’t already use the blinkers they’ve got.

I mention in the presentation that people have changed their recycling habits over time, which called for a change in the way garbage companies handled and dealt with the trash. This was a successful shift brought on by a concern for the environment. A concern for safety and efficient communication might be able to do the same for our car signals.

People are willing to invest in better systems when they feel the investment is worth it. We’ll pay money for a newer technology, like the jump from VHS to DVD, and spend the time learning to use a new computer application, as long as we think the time and money put into it will pay off.

So that’s what I’ve got so far. I would like to add some ideas to this proposal, but after working on the slides and narrowing my words down to 15-second chunks and then re-typing it for this blog post, I’m a bit burnt out on the whole thing. I want a milkshake.

28 Things Everybody Should Know, Part XXVIII

Roman numerals are great for game titles, and that’s about it.

There are a few reasons I saved this one for last. First, I titled all my posts with Roman numerals knowing I would be ironically denouncing them at the end. Second, the number 28 uses more characters than the first 27, and it helps prove my point when I have to type six characters instead of two in the title. And finally, it’s been quite a month typing one entry per day on topics I can be pretty obsessed with, and I thought a lighter subject like this would be a good way to finish it off.

Roman numerals fell out of vogue several hundred years ago, replaced primarily by the Arabic numbers we use today. The advantages of Arabic numerals over Roman are many. For one, Roman numerals use only three characters to depict every number until 40 (the added character, L, means 50, but the character itself is used in the number 40), and then a new character is added only a handful of times until reaching the largest character, M, representing one thousand (although, as with L, M is used in writing 900, which is 100 less than M represents). So, writing each number from 1 to 899, a scant six characters are used, resulting in long strings of characters to express numbers often less daunting than their characters make them out to be.

Another disadvantage to Roman numerals is the inconsistency with which increasing numbers are portrayed. While our Arabic numbers get longer as the value goes up, some simple additions with Roman characters, such as 98 to 100, seem to shrink considerably in size: from XCVIII to XCIX to C. This inconsistent correlation of numbers to characters makes it difficult to judge the size of a number by its length.

Because the largest number assigned a character in the Roman numbering system is 1,000, it would be difficult to show numbers used when discussing scientific matters, such as the age of the earth, the distance from here to Neptune, or the number of molecules in a cheese sandwich. Because Roman numerals add to themselves rather than multiply, the way our current numeric system works, a row of eight Ms would equal 8,000, while a one followed by just as many zeros would equal one hundred million. This also means scientific notation, our system for representing gigantic numbers with superscript exponents, is out of the question with Roman numerals.

And on top of all that, the Roman numeral system had no zero. So while there was no way to give an accurate depiction of the size of a piece of sand, there was also no number that would describe it to be essentially nothing.

Why am I even talking about all this? Are we in danger of an uprising of this archaic numbering system? Probably not, but there are times where Roman numerals are used in the interest of artistic license, despite their awkward and inadequate ways. Probably the few most common uses still employed today are in series of movies, books and video games, as long as the series doesn’t go much further than a dozen installments, and clock faces, most notably Big Ben.

Not only are these numerals foreign enough to hinder recognition in the first place, but here they’ve been further designed into obscurity as to render the numbers completely unreadable. The V appears to be II, and the X looks like I with a small line through the middle. Clocks like this are found in many places–there was one on my living room wall when I was a kid–and most aren’t much easier to read, even close up. But since most people are familiar with the placement of these numbers without having to read them–and, as Swatch proved in the ’80s, the numbers don’t even really have to be there at all–it’s not necessary to read the numbers, just the position of the hands relative to the top of the clock. Apparently using more legible Arabic numerals, while expediting the whole point of having a clock in the first place, just wouldn’t be as beautiful.

Many video game series use Roman numerals for each sequel beyond the first release. Because the need to quickly identify a game’s place in a series based on its cover rarely becomes an ordeal, this usage presents much less of a problem than when used on clock faces. And because most game series usually come to an end before getting into the teens, large lines of Roman characters hardly overwhelm the title. One series quickly approaching that threshold is Square Enix’s most popular franchise. Final Fantasy VI is a succinct title for a video game, while Final Fantasy XVIII (scheduled for release in 2016) is going to start feeling a little number-heavy. The Super Bowl, already well beyond the point at which most people can easily identify its title (this month marked number XLIII, or 43), shows how out of hand this usage can quickly become.

The same way sans serif typefaces are typically used as display fonts, Roman numerals serve, if anywhere at all, as display numbers. Trying to parse a string of Roman characters greatly impedes legibility in a block of text, but in small doses–and in small numbers–they’re acceptable as the titles of series, and very little else. Otherwise, they come across as pretentious and self-important, further detaching the writer from the reader.

28 Things Everybody Should Know, Part XXVII

No one system will make every user happy.

Judging by the sheer number of mobile phones, third-party plugins, variations of Linux and alternatives to Internet Explorer available, it’s clear that no one system can please every user. Reading through previous entries here, I assume I’m much harder to satisfy than most others (or at least louder about it), but I’m not completely alone. Everyone has a different philosophy on the ideal user experience, and while it’s impossible to cater to the needs and desires of every last user, it is possible to allow for customization and flexible interfaces.

I use Windows XP at home, but I’ve never liked the default XP theme, with its large buttons and rounded window corners. Yes, it’s more aesthetically pleasing, but takes up a bit more real estate on the screen and demands a bit more attention that the comparatively flat look and feel of previous Windows versions. (I think of the operating system as a launcher rather than a playground–I want it to support the programs I use, but I don’t need it to blow me away with its own graphics.) Luckily for people like me, Microsoft offers a reversion to the Classic theme, which also takes less of a toll on the CPU. I’m also not a fan of animated operating systems, such as the scrolling or fading Start menu, or the moving, fading, zooming functions in Mac OSX and Windows Vista. Again, these features can be disabled for users like me, who prefer a more efficient workflow over an aesthetically impressive one.

With user diversity in mind, Apple developed their App Store to make it easy for users to customize their iPhone experience. While the operating system itself is like nothing previously on the market, they knew the full potential of their product wouldn’t be reached without allowing downloadable applications and add-ons that take advantage of the multitouch screen, accelerometer and connectivity.

Adobe applications, like Photoshop and Illustrator, start with a default, consistent shortcut scheme for their functions–Ctrl + Z will undo an action, Ctrl + W closes a document–and users may set their own shortcuts in the Preferences menu. Adobe understands that some computers, especially in studios and offices, will often have multiple users, so declaring a shortcut key doesn’t override the default setup. This way, in typical Adobe fashion, there can be several ways to achieve the same result, improving the overall experience for those who are used to a specific setup without infringing on those who prefer the default settings.

While it’s not possible to predict the demands and preferences of every user, there are a few broad categories developers can anticipate most users falling into: those who will happily use the product the way it’s intended and expect nothing more, those who will be generally happy but want a little extra in terms of personalization, and those who stubbornly stick with a product–or give up on it–because of the product’s (and the user’s) inflexibility. Unfortunately, the first camp is rarely an overwhelming majority, and the latter is largely comprised of power users who are hardly ever happy with default settings and features.

With those in the middle group, users who would like something extra to enhance their experience, who may just be waiting for the next, slightly improved model to come along, customization is the key to ensuring a more loyal user base. Even after years of constant product testing, there’s no telling what might be the next social networking phenomenon or popular time-wasting puzzle game after a product is released, so allowing future updates and downloadable content should help keep a good chunk of customers from switching to a different product or service. In the short amount of time since the iPhone was released, websites like Pandora and Twitter have become increasingly popular among users; imagine how unfashionable it would be for Apple to have included a permanent Myspace button on the bottom of the iPhone.

It’s not bad that some people are stubborn, unyielding users who have definite expectations for human-computer interaction. What’s not so good is when those people become stubborn developers and let their compulsions get in the way of the interest of the user. The best way to reach a wide audience is to understand that no one system will make everyone happy, and allow enough customization to make users feel comfortable with the experience.

28 Things Everybody Should Know, Part XXVI

Punctuation should be used sparingly for efficient reading.

A lot of thought is often put into interaction design, from information hierarchy to iconography to computer feedback. Experts are hired to check every last detail of the user experience, making sure those who use a product, visit a website or subscribe to a service encounter the fewest possible problems. But all too often, one overlooked aspect lies in the content itself–not in the way information is typeset or presented on a page, but the way the copy is structured.

One reason for this oversight is the idea that textual information, although commonly the primary reason behind a design, is still thought to be separate from the design itself, akin to a beautifully garnished and decorated platter used to present a meal still in the shape of the can from which it was removed. Poorly written text will look bad no matter how much thought is given to placement, spacing and choice of typeface.

I discussed quotation marks in a previous entry, but other forms of punctuation, when used judiciously and in the proper context, can also give the viewer an immediate feeling of professionalism, subconscious as it may be. At the same time, sloppy and unnecessary punctuation can portray a more amateur feeling.

Every punctuation mark has its place within a passage of text, calling from the viewer a unique reaction based on the understanding of how that punctuation has been used in the past. Because our language is still evolving, guidelines need to be reconsidered every so often; standards that held true just a few decades ago may be considered out of date–and therefore out of touch with the audience–in today’s practices. To explain what makes one idea acceptable and another obsolete, a few real-world metaphors can be applied to punctuation.

The colon is, loosely speaking, the literary equivalent of the equal sign; what comes after the colon should equal what came before. For instance:

Pear: the greatest fruit in the world.

It was then I learned the truth: my father was a ninja.

This shows that the word or phrase on the left (pear or truth) is equal to the definition or explanation on the right, that the two mean the same thing. However, the colon should not be used in the context of a full sentence:

The pear is the greatest fruit in the world.

It was then I learned my father was a ninja.

In other cases, the colon is usually reserved for when the author has something of great importance, such as a revelation, or a list of items or names that probably wouldn’t be spoken in a casual conversation.

Think of the colon as a spotlight on stage–the really bright kind used to suddenly reveal the face of the murderer or highlight the fact that the priceless vase has been stolen. It’s something you’d take a, extra breath before continuing, either for dramatic effect or because you’ve got a lot to say. Most people wouldn’t write, “In my bag, I’ve got: a banana.” (You might if you were preparing your audience for a list of items for comic effect.) But if your bag was packed with a long list of goods, you’d be more prone to taking that breath in the middle. “In my bag, I’ve got: (breath) a banana, some rope, a lunchbox full of dog food, a protractor, some sidewalk chalk, half a peanut butter cookie and a yo-yo.” This would be the perfect time to use a colon, which tells the reader to prepare for a substantial list of items.

My friend TJ designed this college catalog, and put his name on the final page. Because he’s the only one who worked on it, his name was all alone, and the sentence didn’t need that colon, which breaks the flow of a complete sentence. Now, if he’d dropped the word by, the colon would be a more natural fit for that context (Catalog design: TJ Barlow).

If the colon is like a spotlight, the ellipsis is like a drum roll, preparing the reader to expect something important and worth waiting for. Ellipses are used to signify a pause in one’s speech, and readers will most likely imagine a dramatic pause when a series of dots is encountered. There are a few places ellipses might be called for, but because of the gap they place within a line of speech, they are often more typographically bothersome than useful. Physically three times wider than the space a period occupies, an ellipsis can interrupt the flow of text more than a writer might expect.

Another problem with ellipses is a sense of forced excitement they present, much like placing an exclamation point at the end of a sentence that doesn’t carry the giddy exuberance of a kid with a new pair of roller skates. This type of punctuation seems awkward and out of place when teamed up with sentences that just don’t call for them.

This sign warns drivers of the possibility of having their cars towed, and explicitly states who will be paying the bill, but ending the sentence with an ellipsis implies a deeper connotation or serious consequence. It’s meant to force an air of authority, the kind of threat a mother ends with “or else,” without actually saying what that else will be. But it’s stated pretty clearly here, and I can’t think of anything else that needs to be . The sentence is fairly complete (although it could use an article and an apostrophe), and nothing else really needs to be said.

There’s another punctuation mark that is slowly fading out of fashion, but it still appears from time to time: periods used in contractions and initials. My friend TJ uses periods in his own name above, and the extra dots are little more than stumbling blocks for the reader’s eyes. Many abbreviations, such as Mr, Mrs, Jr, Sr, etc (especially etc) have outgrown the need for periods; we all know what they mean without the help of added punctuation, and they often get in the way when ending a sentence with an abbreviated word–does that sentence end with the word etc. or does the dot indicate that it’s a truncated word? In the spotlight / drum roll analogy, the period used in places other than the end of a sentence could be thought of as a skipped beat during a music performance. Not jazz or improvisational music, either, a performance otherwise devoid of skipped beats.

Years ago, we stopped writing to-day and placing an apostrophe in the word ‘phone, because those words became common enough to understand without the help of added marks telling use how to interpret them. Type is meant to emulate the flow of speech, but also to present that speech in a more polished manner than we are expected to deliver in casual conversation. If anything calls for a polished, professional voice, it’s the text we provide to our customers, our market groups and our users. Any amount of text cluttered with unnecessary punctuation will lower the chance that it will be read and taken seriously.

28 Things Everybody Should Know, Part XXV

Users can play their own music on their own time.

When the internet was a little younger, its destinations more foreign and its designers less aware of what they were getting into, websites were full of splash pages and blink tags and animated gifs of spinning mailboxes that linked to webmasters’ email addresses. One annoyance in particular, which still rears its head from time to time, was the embedding of audio into web pages.

A decade or so ago, before broadband overcame dialup and bandwidth was a precious commodity, websites would embed MIDI files which saved load times, but sounded a lot like a Casio keyboard playing elevator-style renditions of radio hits. As technology improved, audio files could be compressed and included on sites, loading slower, sounding flatter and skipping if the connection couldn’t keep up. It wasn’t perfect, but we finally had auditory accompaniment to our blink tags and spinning mailboxes.

Around the turn of the century, music groups began sprouting up all over cyberspace. Most bands on the radio had some sort of web presence, from an offshoot of a label’s site to their very own domain. I used to type band names into my address bar, followed by .com, and see where I ended up. A majority of the sites welcomed me by sending the band’s most recent single through my speakers, at whatever volume they had been set to. Hardly a warm welcome, especially considering some of the stuff I listened to back then. And in many cases, there was no audio navigation to be found–no Stop, no Pause, no volume control– so I was forced to either sit through the entire song, leave the site, or turn off my speakers, and my own music along with them.

The very reason I thought to visit many of these sites was because I was already a rather loyal fan, and in most cases, I already owned the music. In fact, there was a good chance I was listening to the very band whose site I was visiting, so forcing the same music through the same speakers at the same time was a bit unnecessary.

There are several ways to embed an audio clip into a block of HTML, and while today the options have been whittled down to a handful of refined, browser-friendly choices, a few years ago this wasn’t the case: designers had to choose from QuickTime, Real Audio, Windows Media Player, a bunch of third-party plugins, and even dropping entire audio files into an HTML editor and hoping visitors’ browsers understood how to handle them. We also had CD players and radios that played what we chose to hear, especially during leisure time which we spent browsing the internet. So forcing a user to listen to a song–even by a band they would probably enjoy, given their decision to visit the site in the first place–isn’t the friendliest way to welcome new visitors.

Today we have sites like PureVolume and Myspace, both aimed (at least in part) at helping bands reach a larger audience. Myspace uses Flash Player to play songs on a band’s profile page, but also lets users play music on their own pages. By default, the music starts on its own, unless a user logs in and changes the audio settings. Essentially, browsing a dozen user profiles could lead to a dozen songs playing automatically. We also have iPods, Pandora and XM radio, offering a much larger selection of music we can play at any time, and the choice to listen to music while browsing is becoming cheaper and easier. Why disturb users with something they may not want to hear at the time?

People browse websites at various times of the day, in various moods, and in various settings. Computers are used in libraries, on airplanes, and near sleeping babies. As it’s so far impossible for a computer to determine whether or not it’s a good idea to put some music on, it’s best to leave it up to the user to press Play. And a Pause button is never a bad idea either.

28 Things Everybody Should Know, Part XXIV

Some conventions just aren’t worth messing with.

More often than not, it would seem that analyzing and redesigning a piece of hardware or software to increase productivity would be a good idea, especially if such changes include faster, safer, cheaper or simpler operation. A good example is Leo Beltracchi’s implementation of a graphical display system for nuclear power plants in the late 1980s, eliminating the need to frequently compare numbers to ensure the temperature of a reactor core is within a safe margin. This replaced confusing numerical data with a simple curved line portraying the temperature at which liquid inside the core begins to evaporate, and a dot representing the core’s current temperature. This system, still in use today, is no doubt responsible for a drastic improvement in modern power plant supervision, if not the prevention of fatal accidents that would have happened due to a couple easily missed equations.

Consumer products, such as cars, electronics and appliances, often receive updates when laws or demand calls for them. Airbags, scroll wheels, touchscreens, a fourth razor blade–these are all added features meant to improve some aspect of an existing product. Without improvements like these, consumers would have less reason to replace their products with new ones.

There are, of course, improvements to products that don’t necessarily boost their efficiency. For instance, the Dvorak keyboard, an alternative to the much more common QWERTY layout, shows a decided increase in performance with users who are familiar with its key placement. However, the QWERTY layout has been around for over 130 years, and most computer users have never seen a Dvorak keyboard. The QWERTY layout has become an established standard in computing, and to replace it with the Dvorak layout would not only mean somehow convincing the entire world to give up what they’ve grown to know and learn a completely new system, but the cost of replacing every keyboard with the updated layout would hardly be worth what little increase in typing speed would result in the change.

Similar attempts to update the keyboard have been made with keys other than the numbers and letters. Supposedly, these changes are meant to better the intuitive nature of the keyboard, but to a user who has spent a lifetime working with a specific layout, the outcome is just the opposite.

These six keys–Insert, Delete, Home, End, Page Up and Page Down–are grouped in this order on most modern keyboards. Because of their location relative to the arrow keys, they can easily be found without the user looking down from the screen. In fact, I use the Delete key more than I use Backspace, due solely to its location, and have become used to moving my cursor to the left of a character rather than the right before deleting it. As a user from the days of DOS, I still use the Insert key from time to time, as Copy, Cut and Paste all used the Insert key years ago, and many applications still have that option. The rest of the keys in that cluster are frequently used in navigating many types of documents and browser windows, and the wonderful thing is that I never have to look down to use them.

Here is a keyboard which breaks that established six-button group, eliminating the Insert key and rearranging the rest. Home and End are now left and right of each other, which makes sense when considering the direction a cursor moves along lines of text in a word processor, but not so much in a web browser. The Delete key, for some reason, has doubled in size, and the orientation of the group is now vertically arranged. Even if this layout might prove useful for certain users in certain applications, changing the layout of a conventional, time-tested setup only confuses the majority of users and breaks consistency with other keyboards on the market.

Function keys, used a bit like wildcards in computing, can serve a number of uses. Most of us know that F1 will bring up help files to assist us when we’re stuck, and we know just where to find the key. Packed together in groups of four, the function keys are easy to discern from one another without having to read their labels. As it turns out, four keys grouped together are easy to count internally, so users can quickly find, say, F8 without much hassle–it’s the last one on the second group of function keys.

Here’s how the other keyboard groups the function keys, in sections of three keys each. Even if this turns out to be slightly easier for users to use, the vast majority of keyboards group the keys in fours, and keyboards that break this rule are only confusing users who have grown accustomed to the norm. Even worse, users who switch keyboards often will find more difficulty using either layout smoothly. It’s hard to develop a productive subconscious pattern when you’re forced to break the pattern half the time.

On top of the different layout, the function keys on this keyboard don’t recognize commands that others do. F2 doesn’t rename files, F3 doesn’t search, Alt-F4 doesn’t close applications and F5 doesn’t refresh pages. They don’t even do what their labels say they’re supposed to, unless they’re used in Microsoft Office applications. What good is a new layout when it must be relearned and fights every convention we’ve established in the past?

Fortunately, changes like this aren’t as common as changes that actually improve on the user experience. Users are often reluctant to accept change, which is probably a good thing. Without sticking to a few consistent, global standards, we’d be reinventing the wheel with each new product we develop.

28 Things Everybody Should Know, Part XXIII

Options, hints and buttons should be unique and easy to tell apart.

Some of the most successful computer applications–Microsoft Office, iTunes, Firefox, Adobe Creative Suite–are popular not only because of their abilities, but also because users can employ those abilities in a variety of ways, making functions easier to find for first-time users, and at the same time faster for seasoned users to operate without disrupting their workflow. For example, those wanting to italicize a word or phrase in a word processor might find the appropriate option after a few seconds of poking around on the taskbar, while those more used to graphical interfaces, ribbons and panels may search for the more intuitive slanted I button that indicates italic text. Finally, users with a little more experience know that pressing Ctrl + I will italicize selected text within a document. These three options reach the same conclusion in separate ways, allowing users of any background to find the option they’re looking for as painlessly as possible.

There are downsides to this desire to reach users of every possible skill level, however. One that can be fairly obvious in some programs is the clutter of repeated options in both the graphical interface and dropdown menus, which prolong the time it takes to sift through buttons and lines of text to find the right option.

A well planned application will offer hints to let the user know how to more effectively access more common options, such as saving documents and exiting the program. For example, this dropdown menu offers alternate key commands for creating a new document, opening an existing one, saving, printing and exiting the program.

Another problem occurs when dealing with complex tasks, such as configuring a document to be printed. Using a desktop printer is rarely as simple as pushing the Print button, and with page configurations, different types of papers, inks, and hardware properties, the process often includes numerous settings over multiple dialog boxes. It is important for developers to make sure these commands are unique from each other, or they might cause even more confusion for the user.

The Print dialog box in Adobe InDesign has two separate buttons labeled Setup, leading to two different places. This is especially troublesome when trying to help a user over the phone.

Even more frustrating is this secondary dialog box displaying available printers. The box itself is simply titled Print, the same as the main dialog box, but the bigger problem here is the confirmation button, also labeled Print. Clicking this button won’t start the printer, but many users, not wanting to waste a sheet of paper by prematurely starting the process, will be apprehensive about selecting this poorly labeled button. A better choice would have been OK, setting this button apart from the final Print button, and consistent with other buttons that confirm settings but aren’t known to initiate printing. This will instill confidence in users who want to know exactly when they will be telling the printer to begin.

Planning an application as in depth and useful as InDesign, with multiple levels of interaction accessible to everyone from beginners to power users, is an extraordinary feat. I don’t have many suggestions for Adobe regarding the new incarnation of InDesign, but my main gripe is this oversight with the similarly labeled buttons. With a little more testing, I feel they would have found this redundancy to be resulting in user error and frustration, and could easily fix the problem by changing a few words around, distinguishing each button from the others and improving user confidence and understanding.

28 Things Everybody Should Know, Part XXII

Dangerous products should be harder to engage and easier to stop.

Earlier this month, a four-year-old girl died after being trapped inside a front-loading washing machine which was turned on by her 15-month-old brother. The event stirred up a good deal of discussion involving the design and usability of certain washing machines in households with children.

Childproofing a home is never easy, and often quite expensive. Entire aisles of safety mechanisms are often available at retail stores in an attempt to guard children against numerous potential dangers: electrical outlets, drawers containing unsafe products, closet doors, sharp edges, hard surfaces and choking hazards, to name a few. As soon as a family expects its first child, it quickly becomes apparent just what a death trap some homes can be.

It’s impossible to remove every hazardous element from a child’s life, and attempting to do so only prolongs the encounter for a later time. When dealing with products and environments that can pose a threat to a child’s safety, it’s good to take advantage of the one safety mechanism built into all children: their size. Kids unable to figure out dangerous equipment start out with a very limited reach, and this should be utilized when designing products that can’t be simply kept away from children, such as washing machines.

According to news reports, the controls to the washing machine in question (a Kenmore 417 front load washer) are a mere twenty inches off the floor–well within the reach of a small child–and can be engaged easily. In top loading washers, the controls are usually set behind the door, and require a taller operator with an extended arm to start. With the advent of front loading machines, perhaps because clothes can now be folded or piled on top of the machine, keeping the controls where they were would have seemed like a bad idea, as access to the buttons might be blocked with no need to keep the top of the machine clear.

Years ago, a few medicine companies began advertising bottles that were easier to open, responding to elderly users having difficulties opening their medicine containers. Most childproof bottles feature caps which must be squeezed and forced open, or arrows which have to line up with one another before the cap will pop off. Both took considerable strength, and the arrows were small and hard to notice, making them harder for children to figure out. Obviously, these safety features cause problems for older users, who often have problems with both the strength and eyesight needed to open the bottles. To solve this problem, the new bottles have a long tab sticking up from their cap, making them easier to grasp, but still take a bit of strength to twist off. On these bottles, instead of the standard “Keep out of reach of children” warning, the label clearly states not to allow the bottle in any household with children–which is wonderful for older users, who are typically beyond the stage of having to worry about kids running around their homes.

The problem with this new style of washing machine isn’t only where the controls are placed, but the type of controls they use. As a user, I never really liked the push-twist-pull dial used to select the type of fabric and duration of the wash. Because the dial can only spin clockwise (a limitation I’ve never understood but have found on every dial I’ve ever tried), passing the desired setting means having to turn the thing around another rotation, and it isn’t always easy to know if the arrow is right on the correct setting or one click behind it. I’m always a bit uneasy about advancing an extra click when trying to select my setting, and because I’ve always used the exact same setting with all of my clothes, the fact that I have to turn the dial with every load does seem a bit pointless.

So the dial isn’t necessary, but eliminating it also gets rid of a helpful safety feature. How can a button-driven menu incorporate an equally effective feature? One idea could be to require two buttons, placed far enough apart to require two hands, to be pressed simultaneously. This will make it almost impossible to activate the machine accidentally, and still offer a simple way to get the machine started. Because the contents of the machine move around during the cycle, a release lever or button inside the machine isn’t possible, but in the interest of preventing another accident, unlikely as this sort may be, it would be possible to install a small microphone that halts the cycle if a loud noise, such as a scream, is detected when the tub begins filling with water.

Cases like these make us realize how important it is to analyze every possibility regarding household objects, products and situations, and at least try to prevent accidents before they occur. I wouldn’t say a recall is necessary on washing machines like this, but users need to understand the ease with which they can be engaged, and make the controls harder to reach by keeping the machines elevated or their rooms locked if there are children about. Like with the medicine bottles, manufacturers of these machines should make sure customers are warned of their inherent shortcomings as equipment easily accessible to children, by including printed warnings on boxes and in manuals that come with the products. When accidents like this happen, there is often no one branch of the user experience process the place the blame, as all parties–design, development, sales and even the user–may all have contributed to the unsafe conditions which led to the accident. That’s why it’s important to consider every step of the process when working to prevent future incidents.

28 Things Everybody Should Know, Part XXI

Try to break your system before someone else does.

Product testing is often overlooked by developers whose products aren’t a threat to anyone’s safety, or for which laws don’t exist to mandate testing. But the majority of all products and services are designed for a market not comprised of like-minded developers, and users will inevitably end up making mistakes not accounted for during the development process.

Another problem with experience design is that developers often test their own products in the way they’re meant to be used, without exploring different approaches that might inadvertently–or even purposefully–cause the system to fail.

Corner cases are situations beyond those normally anticipated by developers, where a user might push the abilities of a product further than it was constructed to support. In certain scenarios, such as with load-bearing pulleys and cables, corner cases must account for wide margins (a pulley I have states its limit at 500lbs, but I suppose it will probably sustain twice that without breaking–the company probably severely understated its abilities to prevent accidents and ensuing lawsuits), whereas electronics like computers don’t need such a large safety net (many people safely overclock their systems, threatening little more than the longevity of the computer itself).

Borrowing from Murphy’s Law, wherever there is the possibility to break a system exists, someone will find it sooner or later, and it’s best to catch it and fix it (or create an acceptable workaround) before it hits the shelves and starts causing problems.

By way of example, most keyboards today only recognize four keys pressed at one time. Honestly, the keyboards themselves probably recognize many more than that, but probably refuse to relay the extra signals to the computer. I don’t know exactly why they do this, but seldom are more than three keys ever used simultaneously, and it’s possible that too many signals at once could cause some applications to go a little crazy. (In fact, it may be a Windows problem–I don’t recall experimenting on a Mac.) But with all the various programs out there, most only really dealing with one or two keystrokes at a time, limiting the operating system’s recognition of more than a handful of keys undoubtedly has solved some problems. And it’s still more than you could ever press at the same time on a typewriter.

This is a screenshot of LEOGEO, a website I discussed earlier. Under normal circumstances, the gray letters expand to display a link when the user rolls over each one, and reverts to its single-letter state when the cursor rolls away. Essentially, only one link is in its full state at any given time.

In Flash, the commands used to trigger events with the cursor rolls on and off buttons are on(rollOver) and on(rollOut). However, there are a few more states designers often fail to account for, and one in particular can result in multiple rollover states the designer hadn’t planned for: on(releaseOutside). This tells the computer how to act if a user clicks the mouse button down, drags the cursor away from the button on the screen, and then releases the mouse button. Without declaring a releaseOutside event, the button stays in its rollOver position until the cursor rolls back on and off the button a second time.

LEOGEO’s buttons weren’t scripted to handle this unexpected behavior, which can occur when a user is moving the mouse and clicking multiple buttons rapidly–or whenever I decide to test buttons to see what will happen. Once a website goes live, there’s no telling who will use it, and if every unlikely problem isn’t anticipated, it will very likely turn up at the most inopportune time.

The best way to make sure a system won’t break is by doing everything possible to break it. Automotive companies crash test their own cars extensively, using their findings to improve on future models and features. Unfortunately, many developers don’t have the mindset of a product tester, and certainly don’t think the way typical users do, so without knowing what it takes to break a system, they can’t possibly know how to prevent such a breakdown.

28 Things Everybody Should Know, Part XX

Interaction should enhance the user experience, not hinder it.

Technically, all websites can be categorized as interactive, no matter how basic and seemingly passive to a user’s behaviors. With the exception of parked domains and single-page sites with no buttons or links to any other page, there is some degree of interactivity between the human and the machine.

When the elements of a site are developed to react in a new, unexpected, experimental or engaging fashion, it becomes a subject of interactive design, with all the connotations and philosophies that go along with the practice. There are many reasons to choose to make the switch from static HTML to a more dynamic presentation such as Flash: added functionality, a more human look and feel, or just a desire to stand out from the drab expanse of drab unmoving, sites on the web.

When planning the style and degree of a site’s interaction, it’s important to consider the reasoning behind it and whether it will enhance the overall user experience. Quite often, websites will feature full Flash menus that, once looked into, are little more than simple menu lists with moving elements, often slowing user navigation and resulting in unnecessary disorientation. In fact, a large number of artistic portfolio sites made in Flash are simple menus made more frustrating than helpful by making users chase moving buttons, explore confusing landscapes with no visible hints as to what leads where, and perform feats well beyond simply clicking on a concise list of available options, which would have worked just as well.

The Amsterdam Film Experience website starts off with a number of thumbnails randomly tossed about the screen–some overlapping others at times–which lead to a featured film or information about the event. The menu is more engaging than a simple list of pages and videos, but makes it difficult to find what the user is looking for, especially since buttons don’t tell where they’ll lead until the cursor rolls over them (a phenomenon knows as Mystery Meat Navigation, which, aside from exploration-centered experiences, is a very bad idea, as it makes users do more work than should be necessary to discover where clicking will take them; after all, moving the eye is far simpler and takes less effort than moving the mouse and accurately stopping over the button’s hit area.)

When the user chooses a thumbnail–by either double-clicking or dragging the image into the box in the lower right corner, again muddling the experience–the remaining thumbnails fall to the floor, where they remain for the rest of the visit, unless the user drags them around to see what’s hiding behind them (having dropped to the same Y axis, thumbnails are even more likely to overlapped, leaving at least a couple completely hidden, as well as some important text and the email input field). The sudden exposure to gravity gives these thumbnails a tangible quality, which might make the user feel more connected to the site, but with all the overlapping and trouble caused by vague button descriptions, it’s a shame to give the appearance of a row of physical objects and yet not provide something to hit when things get too confusing.

Of course, while the interactive element of this site isn’t necessary, the experience can still be quite enjoyable. But forcing users to play along with less than conventional site navigation, when many of them might want to quickly find what they’re looking for and move on, isn’t a good way to reach the broadest audience. A successful interactive site will be designed with the understanding that some users aren’t looking for an immersive experience, and supply a secondary, static navigation style to allow those users a less complicated experience.

Interactivity can greatly enhance the user experience, but there is a time and a place for it, and it’s impossible to tell whether a user will be receptive to interactive immersion at any given time. Instead of expecting users to fully appreciate the artistic vision of a website, designers should try to make sure the experience will benefit from the addition of interactive elements, and even then, try to give an alternative for what might end up frustrating a percentage of their visitors.

28 Things Everybody Should Know, Part XIX

Users expect navigation either above or to the left of the content.

More often than not, when a user visits a website, the purpose for visiting–a certain bit of information, for example–isn’t on the first page of the site. Users generally have to click around before reaching the functional, meaty part of the experience, and the faster users can find the desired links and get started, the less chance a site has of chasing them away prematurely.

Because the English language reads from left to right and top to bottom, users are naturally inclined to scan for useful navigation starting in the upper left hand corner and moving either right along the top, or down along the left. (That’s once the user’s decided to move on to another page, of course. Large splash images and other content usually grab the user’s initial attention, but when it’s time to move on, our instincts tell us to head for that upper left corner.) The layout of the page, in much the way a painting directs the viewer’s eye around its canvas, has a large impact on where the eye moves from that starting point in the corner: a prominent horizontal row of buttons along the top will imply that the most utilized navigation will be included in that row, while a column of buttons down the left side will tell users to scan downward first.

LiveJournal uses a horizontal navigation along the top of the page, where rolling over a menu item will bring up a submenu underneath. Placing the site’s logo in the upper left corner assures users that this corner is a good starting point in searching for common navigation and functionality.

YouTube’s navigation is spread around the site a bit more, with video-specific functions to the right of a video’s playback area. This helps keep videos within the browser window, for user like me whose windows aren’t big enough to include the video and the options and links all at the same time. But still, the most commonly used buttons–or at least the most helpful buttons for novice users who don’t know their way around yet–are in the upper left, with user account options in the upper right.

A good example of a site with navigation on the left of the page is Hoogerbrugge, a site full of experimental presentations and animations. Anticipating most users’ ability to scroll or, at the very least, hit the Page Down button if necessary, Hoogerbrugge has large menu buttons with accompanying illustrations, clearly stating that the most important part of the site is waiting just on the other side of these buttons.

There are many reasons to break this pattern of navigation, especially when the architecture of a site’s content interacts with the menu–good examples are LEOGEO and Semillero, both sites that feature the navigation as an experience in itself. Other sites, especially those that rely on advertising revenue, need users to stick around a while before heading for the menu, and have a reason to be sneaky with their button placement (but not too sneaky, or users might give up and never return). But aside from this and artistic experimentation–which isn’t necessary as often as many designers want to believe–users want their browsing experiences to be as fast and painless as possible, and managing the navigation of a site with the understanding of where the human eye is conditioned to look will make everything run a little smoother.

28 Things Everybody Should Know, Part XVIII

Drunk people are users too.

Products deemed to be potentially dangerous to the user or the surrounding environment, such as vehicles, weapons and chemicals, are tested under more strenuous conditions and held to higher engineering standards to ensure a level of personal and public safety. Cars are built with a large number of features meant only as a last resort to save lives during an accident, while household products which can’t have safety mechanisms added–bleach, for example–can only be fitted with safety switches and warning messages on their labels; of course, once the bleach has left the bottle, the label can’t follow it to warn of the dangers of its use.

Some cars are equipped with breathalysers, usually issued after a driver has already been caught inebriated behind the wheel, that won’t allow ignition unless the driver’s alcohol content is below the legal limit. Unlike seat belt, airbags and engine mounts that release the engine rather than crush passengers under their weight, the breathalyser is a precaution meant to prevent a tragedy from happening in the first place, much like the safety switch on a pistol. These all seem like common sense today, but not so long ago they were mere suggestions to the manufacturers.

Architecture is another field of design where safety is a primary concern–emergency elevators, backup stairways and fire escapes are all mandatory additions to large buildings and public spaces. But one place where safety is overlooked, sometimes to an obvious degree, is in the interior design that comes after the architects have finished their job.

Interaction design plays a major role in interiors, and in many cases, it seems, safety concerns are overlooked in the interest of artistic value. In this example, I have to again draw from my experiences at The Triple Door in Seattle. It’s not because I didn’t like it there, but because it seems the designers felt like product testing just doesn’t apply to interiors or architecture, which is unfortunate.

The upper level of the establishment is an upscale bar, complete with a giant fish tank, floor-mounted lighting and, as I mentioned in an earlier post, unmarked restrooms. There is a row of booths for private dining along one side of the bar, and surrounding these booths is a wall about chest high and perhaps five inches thick. The wall is topped with a smooth black finish, and happens to be the proper height on which to rest one’s drink while mingling, dancing, or searching for the restrooms.

In fact, the wall seems like it was meant to hold drinks. And why wouldn’t it? No sense letting that space go to waste. The only problem is that the smooth, slick finish is set at an angle–maybe 10 degrees–and does a really good job of holding a glass full of liquid just long enough to give the illusion that everything’s under control. After picking up the shattered remnants of one too many pint glasses to qualify as random user error, I discovered the angle of the wall wasn’t flat, and tested my own glass on its surface. The less liquid in the glass, the longer it would stay–an empty pint glass generally stayed indefinitely–but a full pint fell off within a couple seconds. A half-full glass was too sporadic to come to any conclusions, but more often than not, it would eventually fall in the time it would take most people to remove their coat.

And that’s considering the people weren’t already hindered by the effects of alcohol. Of course, I was sober when I did these tests–the glass I used was filled with root beer–but this being a bar, the designers should have taken into consideration the altered state of a drinker–not just your average tipsy patron, but the Friday night college student with no kids and no responsibilities. If there is a law in effect disallowing a bartender from serving outwardly drunk customers, establishments like this should put forth the effort to lessen the possibility for accidents and injuries that are amplified when alcohol is introduced. Drunkenness may be considered a corner case from an engineering perspective, but that doesn’t mean it’s less common, just less anticipated in most situations.

Interior interaction seems to fall through the cracks between the architectural and decorative stages, almost as if all safety concerns are expected to have been solved by the architects who are long gone before the next wave of designers step in. But to dismiss the safety aspects of any facet of design is to invite more hazardous situations–especially when a user’s behaviors might be altered by a factor such as alcohol. I’d go so far as to say it would be more responsible for a team of designers to hire drunk product testers to examine new interiors and user experiences at various degrees of inebriation. I’m sure there are people who would volunteer for just such a position.

28 Things Everybody Should Know, Part XVII

Don’t fight the operating system.

While they continue to offer more than just a starting point for our applications, such as customizable applets and desktop widgets, operating systems like Windows and Mac OS have developed fairly steady, systematic guidelines by which most programs happily abide. These systems include color-coded, iconic navigation tools and affordance-specific hints that, when used appropriately, allow for easier usability and less confusion.

For example, programs in the Windows environment generally follow a consistent color scheme. In Windows XP, for example, title bars are by default given a blue gradient (which I’ve replaced with solid blue), and inactive title bars are grayed out to show the user that the focus is on another application. As only one program may be in focus at any given time, this is the most obvious hint as to which application will respond to a user’s input.

Adobe Photoshop used to adhere to these standards. Here we see blue title bars showing that Photoshop is the current active application, and which of the three open documents is active within Photoshop. Also, the toolbar to the left shows where a user can click to move the toolbar, or double-click to hide it.

Here is Photoshop’s newest incarnation. Notice there are no blue bars to be found, and the difference between the active and inactive documents is much more difficult to notice at first glance. And switching to another application changes nothing in Photoshop’s title bar, which can lead to confusion for the user.

This new Adobe color scheme, found in most CS4 applications, seems to echo Windows Vista’s default settings, rounding corners around documents and losing the blue headers for a less saturated color scheme. And it could be argued that more neutral surroundings will allow images to be seen with less distraction, but going so far as to eliminate even the option to replace the familiar, ever helpful blue bars that help discern active from inactive elements only takes control away from the user.

Overriding the established scheme also takes an unnecessary toll on the processor. Moving documents around in Photoshop 7 is much smoother and faster than in CS4, and the new layout scheme–really just a Vista/Mac-inspired skin–doesn’t always do its job:

The top part of this image shows Windows XP’s default scheme, and in the middle is Photoshop CS4’s own layout. Quite often, especially after minimizing and restoring the application, Photoshop will forget to refresh its skin properly, allowing a bit of the original format to show through, resulting in a choppy overlapping mess, as shown in the bottom of the image. Because the two don’t have identical buttons size or placement, the user might not know exactly where to click. Fixing this will likely take a couple minutes of coding, and will probably be improved in the near future with an update, but if Adobe had stuck to the rules, they wouldn’t need to come up with workarounds for problems like this.

Another example of ignoring common operating system guidelines is when a program doesn’t place a corresponding button in the Windows taskbar–that horizontal strip along the bottom of the screen. I understand the desire to free up space on the taskbar, but some applications–such as Trillian, my chat program–will often get buried underneath others, or minimized when I want to see my desktop. Without offering a button along the taskbar, it makes locating the application a lot more difficult than if it had just stuck to the rules.

Operating systems don’t always make things easy, but one thing that human-computer interaction benefits greatly from is conformity. With certain exceptions–full-screen games, for one–developers and designers should work together to create experiences that work within these limitations, or at least give users the choice to set their own. For the most part, computer applications like Photoshop are tools we use to achieve a specific end; they aren’t expected to be an experience in themselves.

28 Things Everybody Should Know, Part XVI

Screen edges and corners can drastically improve functionality.

Whenever I seem to lose track of my cursor–something that happens fairly often when using Photoshop, despite how much work Adobe has put into making the cursor stand out from the image behind it–I know I can swipe the mouse into a corner of the screen, where it will stay (unless I’ve got a dual-screen setup), and I’ll have my bearings once again. The corners of the screen give a little solace to those who lose sight of their cursors now and then, and provide a welcome alternative to shaking the mouse back and forth. If a parked cursor is hard to locate, a cursor wildly dashing left and right isn’t much more helpful.

Many elements of human-computer interaction also involve the edges and corners of a display. OSX’s application dock, the Windows Start button, and program-specific toolbars are often located along the edges of the display and nestled in the corners, making them easier to locate, and supposedly, easier to use.

The great thing about these locations is they demand very little attention from a user’s eyes, minimizing the delay in workflow and giving the user less to think about. In a typical setup, moving a mouse more than a couple inches in any direction will bring the cursor to the limit of the screen, no matter where it starts from.

There are cases, however, when a button is placed near an edge or corner, but doesn’t recognize a click unless it occurs a few pixels away from the outside of the screen. This still makes them easy enough to find, but miss out on a critical possibility to truly speed up the user’s actions.

This is the lower left corner of my screen. The Start button won’t activate unless my cursor is at least four pixels up from the bottom of the screen, or two pixels right from the left. Because of this, I can’t simply sweep my mouse down and left, and expect the Start menu to open when I click. I have to move away from the corner, but not so much as to pass the entire button. This takes a lot more of my attention than placing the hit area in the very corner.

Along the edge of the screen are my quick launch icons and buttons to recall all of my opened applications. As with the Start button, none of them are actually along the lower edge, but four pixels above it, taking considerably more effort to click on them.

Thankfully, Windows XP fixed this oversight, but being a fan of the original Start menu and organization, I always use Classic View, which doesn’t include that extra functionality. I have used systems with which Classic View does a better job or recognizing edge and corner clicks, but with all the different versions of Windows out there, and accounting for upgrades and service pack installations, I can’t recollect which versions behave in which way.

Many applications, such as Photoshop, override Windows blue title bar feature (something I’m not too happy about, but I’ll discuss that next) and place their toolbars and other interface components along the top edge of the screen. Again, these items aren’t actually placed against the very edge, but rather seven pixels lower.

This image shows all four corners of the screen using Adobe Lightroom with Windows XP’s standard Start menu. As with Photoshop’s toolbars, none of these are accessible from the very edge, nor are the program menu in the upper left or resize buttons in the upper right. It should be noted that Windows XP’s standard resize buttons, generally applied to all programs, do react to the very edge and corners.

Here, the Start menu and program bar buttons all accept edge and corner clicks, but in the lower right corner, the icons in the system tray and the clock all require the mouse to move away from the edges to work.

Mac OSX takes the idea of screen corners to a fuller extent, launching applications, organizational tools and screen savers when the user stows the cursor in a corner for a second. Many laptop touchpads and PDA screens utilize corners for user-defined applications and options. These make launching common programs much faster and require less interruption to a user’s thought process, adding to the experience, while those just a few pixels off slowly chip away at it.

Until everyone has a touch-enabled screen on their desk, the edges and corners of the screen are the closet thing to tactile response a monitor can provide, as users can safely assume the limitations of the screen will catch the cursor and hold it there for them. Placing buttons along the edges and in corners, rather than just short of each, will make this understanding work in the users’ favor.

28 Things Everybody Should Know, Part XV

Drivers need a lot of time to make decisions.

A few years ago, the the city of Seattle decided to renovate its underground transit tunnels, a process which would take at least two years, during which the tunnels had to be shut down, re-routing all bus lines to alternate above-ground routes.

Not surprisingly, the long-term detour packed the downtown area’s already stuffy roads with more buses than city planners originally had in mind. To alleviate the sudden wave of these giant wheeled monsters, certain city blocks were now off-limits to all personal vehicles during peak hours–6am to 9am and 3pm to 6pm on weekdays.

This was a wonderful solution for the majority of traffic concerns at a time when narrow, busy roads suddenly doubled in traffic at the busiest times of the day. However, the implementation of the signs warning drivers when the roads were and weren’t available, along with the way the system was enforced, created an entirely new problem.

White backlit boxes, the same kind used to inform drivers which lanes can turn left and whether U-turns are acceptable in an intersection, were hung near the traffic lights at every block, stating that the roads were closed to private traffic during peak hours, which were listed clearly on each sign. To anyone not a frequent traveler of these downtown blocks, these small, nondescript signs were all drivers had to determine when and where they were allowed to drive.

A central hub of transit, connecting several major freeways and less common but equally important inner-city highways, Seattle has dealt with a similar problem before, on a much larger scale, with great success–a triumph that would suggest the same city could pull it off on this smaller scale with the same results.

I’m talking about the expressways which help motorists living outside of town travel to and from work each day. These expressways are only large enough to allow one direction of traffic at a time, and are open to inbound cars in the morning and outward cars at night.

How do drivers know when taking the expressway won’t lead them head-on into a vehicle going the other way? A series of arms, much like those found at tollbooths and drawbridges, close off entrances when it’s not safe to enter. This obviously can’t be implemented with the downtown traffic, as the arms would be blocking the buses from taking the roads as well, but another effective signal is used on the expressways, and would have greatly improved the conditions of the downtown detour routes: big neon signs placed well before the closed-off street, with the words “EXPRESSWAY CLOSED” lit up only when the statement was true, made for an unmistakable signal that the motorist’s options were limited long before actually reaching the point in question.

Why the city didn’t use this tactic downtown is beyond me. As it was, unprepared drivers would have to notice these signs, legible no more than half a block away, register their meaning, and figure out whether the streets were open or a sudden turn onto a different street was in order. This required drivers to find a clock (usually there’s one somewhere on the instrument panel or stereo, if it’s working and properly set), and figure out whether the streets were open or closed. Essentially, drivers were forced to do math while behind the wheel. Drivers should never be expected to handle numbers while driving, regardless of how simple it seems under other circumstances.

On top of that, some perpendicular streets were one-way, forcing last-minute lane changes in order to exit the closed streets.

If that wasn’t enough (and believe me, it was), police were dispatched to each one of these streets during peak hours to issue rather hefty tickets to those who broke this rule, no doubt earning a good deal off those unfortunate drivers caught off guard by the city’s lack of sufficient signs. And not only did they nab motorists, but pedestrians now had more to worry about than passing cars: police waiting to cite drivers also began ticketing jaywalkers much more frequently than before.

Now that the renovations are complete, the mess above ground should be more or less cleared up. The city has decided to keep one street closed to cars during these hours, and I hope the signage has improved. I’ll see when I visit Seattle next week.

The last thing a driver should be expected to do is make sudden decisions with little warning ahead of time. Washington state already outlawed talk on mobile phones while driving, based on the understood limitations of the human attention span; Seattle had no reason to drop the ball on this one. I might go so far as to suggest the entire situation was planned to increase ticket revenue, or at least wasn’t fixed because of the money it pulled in. Nevertheless, in the interest of safety and clarification, drivers should always be given ample time to make decisions, and a simple Yes or No is much more effective than making drivers do the work on their own.

28 Things Everybody Should Know, Part XIV

Navigation layout should reflect the movement it represents.

When the blueprints for information architecture are laid out, developers have a clear understanding of the relationship between each option and its ensuing result. This is because the elementary structure of an experience, such as a website or presentation, is a visual series of options branching out to other options, like the outline to a Choose Your Own Adventure book.

In the later stages of development, navigation is added to give the project functionality, usually in the form of buttons that serve as design metaphors.

In terms of human-computer interaction, a metaphor draws a parallel to something we know in the real world. We refer to directories as folders because we’re used to a folder holding papers full of information, or files. When first opening a web browser, a user starts off at a default page, specified by an icon of a little house. This home page is supposedly a more familiar place than the rest of the internet, and can be returned to at any time when things get out of hand. And when was the last time you used a cassette tape to take messages? Chances are your cell phone still uses the images of a cassette to represent the voicemail feature. Chances are probably just as great that we’ll see the same obsolete icon as long as voicemail exists, despite the fact that, thankfully, you’ll never have to wait for your machine to rewind your messages ever again.

This is an image of the minimal but essential navigation I have on my browser. I don’t use these buttons a lot–I prefer holding Alt and using my arrow keys to navigate, and F5 to refresh–but the metaphor is abundantly clear: pressing left will move back and right will move forward. This hinges on the assumption that our brains perceive progression from left to right, and being raised on the English language, that works out perfectly for me.

Another simple and effective example is audio and video controls, with applications like WaveLab, Audition and Media Player Classic, which emulate the buttons on a stereo. Here, the back and forward buttons represent not only the direction, but the relative scope of the movement: the button just left of the center will move back a little each second, while the one further to the left will jump all the way to the beginning of a song, or, when multiple tracks are used, skip to the previous track, which is visualized as being positioned to the left of the current track.

Interactive presentations, such as PowerPoint and HyperCard, utilize buttons to move forward and back along a series of pages (also called slides, frames, cards and so on, depending on the application). These buttons can be placed anywhere by the designer, so instead of progressing to the right, a presentation can move down, up or left–but it’s important to stick to a scheme and be consistent with it.

And then there’s Microsoft.

Thankfully I seldom have to resort to using Windows Help, but when I do, this button layout gets me every time. The Next button, used to move to the next step in the process, is on the left, then the Back button, followed by Start Over, the button that shares its behavior with the Skip Back button on a stereo. Why is this button on the very right when it brings the user back to the beginning? The layout of this menu is not only a little off, it’s exactly backwards.

Not only would I suggest reversing the order of the buttons, but because two of them move back and the other moves forward, I’d put a little distance between the Next button and the other two, giving a bit more indication that the Next button navigates to the right, while the other two, grouped closer together, will both take the user back, just with varying distance. Even better, icons to accompany the text would give a more easily recognizable hint as to what these buttons do. People only come here when something goes wrong with Windows. The last thing they need is another headache on top of what they’re already trying to deal with.

Users are accustomed to common interaction metaphors such as this, and there’s likely nothing you can do to break the presumptions they’ve built up over years of subconscious use. As long as a system is built with these established presumptions in mind, users will find it more intuitive and easy to navigate with no extra training–years of real-life experience will provide the training no tutorial ever can.

28 Things Everybody Should Know, Part XIII

Embrace tactile feedback as much as possible.

My favorite cell phone design was a monochrome clamshell with little in the way of frilly add-ons. Besides the nigh indestructible casing and small real estate it occupied in my pocket, I loved the distinction I could feel between each button without having to look at the keypad. If I knew a contact’s place in my address book, I could flip the phone open, push two buttons, and the phone dialed the appropriate number without the assistance of my eyes at any time. Even taking voice-triggered dialing into consideration, this remains the fastest I’ve ever seen a mobile phone dial a number.

The shrinking and slimming of phones has taken quite a toll on keypad designs, cutting back on the noticeable differentiation between individual keys, and the most extreme example of this, the full touchscreen phone, has been in high demand since the launch of the iPhone. Large touchscreens have a wide variety of uses, but one thing they fall short of providing is a keypad, which generally isn’t a problem since most of the time users select contacts from a list instead of using conventional dialing.

I’ve found that phone keypads manufactured after around 2002 have been ignoring the spacing between keys, and often, the tactile clicking that comes with pressing those keys, to accommodate smaller overall phone bodies. Some companies find creative ways around this lack of sensory feedback by adding a little of their own.

This phone features raised beads, almost like rhinestones, on each key, giving the user a sign as to the approximation of each button. Not only do the number keys have beads, but the navigation and phone option keys as well.

Most computer mice, have scroll wheels that provide a soft click for each time the mouse sends a signal to the computer. That way, users will have an understanding of how much they are telling the computer to scroll up and down. Many Microsoft mice don’t include this feature, and I have a friend who appreciates the lack of a clicking scroll, while the absence makes me somehow feel uneasy. My mouse, the Logitech MX Revolution, can switch between clicking and smooth scrolling for gliding through long documents and web pages, and after two years with the MX, I can’t imagine using anything else.

I used to play a lot of computer games in the days of DOS, and most of those games used the Ctrl and Alt keys due to their location on the keyboard. I love those keys, and have found that one reason is the gap between the two. (There are several important gaps in between certain keys that make navigation much easier for users, which I will discuss in a later post.) But with Windows 95 came a new key, one that fit neatly between Ctrl and Alt : the Start key.

So this is my keyboard today. I no longer play DOS games, but the modifier keys–Ctrl, Alt and Shift–are an absolute necessity when dealing with applications like Photoshop. (Furthermore, accidentally hitting the Start key activate the operating system’s Start menu and forces the focus off the current program.) So that gap I grew up with means a lot to me. The same goes for the other side of the Space bar, where I’ve removed the Start key and the Context Menu key.

Most users appreciate a level of feeling to their actions, something beyond simply seeing and sometimes hearing what they’re doing. The more senses an activity offers response to, the more viscerally connected a user will feel to the activity, and possibly, every factor involved in the process: equipment, network, manufacturer and service provider, all of which should show an interest in how an activity responds to the user.

28 Things Everybody Should Know, Part XII

Don’t limit options when any key will do.

Another example of meaningless button-pushing is something I call Start Button Syndrome. As a child in the ’80s, I played a lot of Nintendo games, and after the opening credits, I’d see an intro graphic and two simple words, usually white on black, urging me to “Press Start!” Sometimes with two exclamation points. Such enthusiasm right off the bat.

Many titles screens offer several options: start a new game, load a previously saved game or enter a password, modify settings and gameplay options, and maybe view the game’s credits. But those games that only had one available option–to continue to the next screen–still primarily called for the user to press only the Start button.

The Nintendo controller is generally held with two hands, one on each side, while the Start button sits in the middle of the controller, a thumb’s stretch from the comfort of the A button.

The Start button is aptly named for its intended purpose of getting things going. Other purposes, such as pausing and unpausing the game, are less commonly used and should require more effort than the more common game buttons. But when a player’s thumb typically rests on the A button, why force the stretch to the Start button and ignore everything else on the controller?

Personal computing largely worked around Start Button Syndrome early on, asking users to “Press any key” when ready. With the multitude of keys on a keyboard, asking a user to locate and press a certain button would only slow down the process and cause unnecessary frustration. Still, there are times when it makes sense to require a specific key to continue: with so many available on a keyboard, and at least one hand normally resting on a row of keys at any given time, it’s easy to accidentally bump a key and agree to something before the implications have sunk in. Certain actions–those which can’t be undone, agree to legal terms or trigger hardware such as a printer or other equipment–should require a bit more thought to activate.

Many Flash games these days suffer from their own version of Start Button Syndrome. Instead of allowing a user to click anywhere on the page to skip an intro animation or bypass the start screen, a tiny button is used when no other functional elements are on the screen. Using a button labeled “Start” clearly tells the user what will happen once the button is clicked, which may take away from the desire to allow a user to click just anywhere–but a full-screen button should enable the hand cursor, which will tell the user the entire area is clickable, and many intro screens include the text “Click anywhere to start,” which makes it much easier to begin the game, and clears up any confusion that might arise from displaying the hand cursor throughout the entire page.

The DS, Nintendo’s most recent portable game platform, has several games which still stumble into the pitfalls of Start Button Syndrome, although I’m pleased to say the problem is getting better. Many games still begin by prompting the player to push start–an action which can be even more difficult than on the original NES controller if the player is holding the stylus at the time. To rectify this, games can allow a tap anywhere on the touchscreen to substitute for the Start button.

Another problem, however, is when a game requires a tap on the touchscreen–or a specific button somewhere on the screen–and won’t accept any other button in its place. This assumes the player is holding the stylus, and can serve a purpose if it means to prepare the player for a stylus-heavy gaming experience. But since the inclusion of a stylus essentially allows for two types of hand positioning (much the same way the N64’s three-armed monstrosity led to the forced triage of at least a few of the controller’s available buttons at any given time), both positions should be accounted for when trying to get past the introduction.

Limitations serve many important purposes, but can get in the way when a user is forced to take a specific action for no apparent reason. Showing an interest in the user’s available options and taking care not to unnecessarily limit those options is another step toward strengthening the developer-user relationship.

28 Things Everybody Should Know, Part XI

Avoid forcing users to click more than they really have to.

Mouse clicks demand very little strength. Children can learn to use a mouse at a very young age, and rarely does the pressing of the button cause much of a problem. More often, it’s securing the location of the cursor while the click takes place.

Despite what little effort a user must put into each click, it’s the more fine-tuned practice of positioning the cursor to prepare for the click that causes a bit more frustration. With many interfaces, users must center the cursor over a tiny cluster of pixels–and keep it there until the click is complete–to achieve the desired result. In some cases, shifting even one pixel in any direction between the downward and upward clicks will nullify the action, often with no visual indication that the click didn’t register, resulting in a user waiting for something to happen, until it’s realized that something went wrong. And many users, afflicted by memories of slowed and frozen computers due to multiple instances of a single program, will wait until they’re absolutely certain the computer didn’t catch a click before they try it a again.

There are a couple different shutdown menus used in different versions of Windows. An earlier dialog box, also used in Windows 98 and 2000 if I recall correctly, uses a dropdown box to give the user a list of shutdown and logoff options:

With a dropdown menu such as this, only the selected option is visible, so a user would have to click on the narrow box just to get a glimpse of the other possibilities. (There are dropdown menus which use rollovers to invoke the drop, but this isn’t one of them.)

After the first click, the user may then find and select the desired action, again zeroing in on a rather small area–13 pixels high–to make the appropriate selection. Keep in mind that nothing is happening with the rest of the screen–in fact, the rest of the screen fades to gray as this dialog box is open. At no other time in the entire Windows environment does this happen. All that space to offer a handful of options, and each one is limited to a hit area 13 pixels in height.

Later on, Microsoft divided the shutdown and logoff features into two different boxes, and revamped the design of each.

The newer option box features all three choices clearly visible at all times, and offers larger buttons with both English and iconographic hints for each option. It may have eliminated the need for only one extra click, but each click scratched from a procedure also removes the need to center the cursor over a small portion of the screen.

When Adobe first introduced Creative Suite, a more integrated approach to their design applications, I couldn’t get over a trivial but annoying new element to Photoshop’s Layers panel.

I the previous version, Photoshop 7, clicking once on the arrow next to the Opacity or Fill percentage dropped down a slider which, on the same click, could be adjusted until the user released the button. The two-click method–one to drop the slider down and one to position the arrow–worked just as well.

In the next three revisions of Photoshop, one click no longer did the job. The user had to click once to show the slider, then click again to move the arrow left and right. I don’t know of any other people this bothered, but somebody at Adobe had to program that functionality into the program, and must have consciously chosen not to allow a one-click opacity change. (There actually is another way to do it, by clicking and holding the word Opacity or Fill, not the numbers or arrow, which adjusts the percentage without a visible slider, but that’s not intuitive in the least–in fact, I hadn’t heard of the trick until somebody stumbled upon it on accident and passed the word onto me.)

Finally, with the release of Creative Suite 4, my gripe has been answered. Again, I don’t know if this bothered anyone other than myself, but until CS4, Adobe had chosen to diminish the functionality out of their Layers panel, which only slows the editing process. I’m glad they eventually decided to add that functionality back into their product.

Withholding a list of options from a user can serve many purposes: it clears up space on the screen, it avoids confusion by clearly displaying selected options, and it adds a dynamic element to a series of choices, something much more difficult to do on a conventional paper form. There are several ways to display these hidden objects when the need arises, and there isn’t one right way to go about it in every scenario.

It should be noted that the double controlled click explained above–where both clicks must click on a different point to perform a task–is different than the double click, which only requires one placement of the mouse. Double-clicking is no more taxing on the user than single click, which is why so many users click twice on accident when only one is needed.

Eliminating redundant mouse clicks is a small but important step in increasing user productivity, especially when operations that would require multiple clicks are performed over and over. Most users likely won’t consciously notice when a click is unnecessary, but many will notice the increase in performance when the problem is recognized and addressed. And hopefully a few will even thank you for it, or at least mention it in a blog post.

28 Things Everybody Should Know, Part X

Blue lights are more abrasive on the eyes than red ones.

The advent of the light-emitting diode has changed the way electronics communicate with users. Looking around my room, I can count over 20 LEDs currently either flashing or glowing steadily, from my phone to my webcam to the lights inside my computer box, informing me as to whether an item is powered on, ready to use, whether batteries are charging or fully charged. I didn’t really have a say in the colors of lights that would accompany my electronics, and the majority of these are either blue or green.

All light is a result of certain wavelengths of light traveling rather quickly through the air. The smaller the wave, the closer to violet its color; the larger the wave, the more red it will appear.

If you imagine beams of light as sewing needles moving through space, the red beams would be the widest needles, maybe the kind meant for embroidering. If you’ve ever pressed the tip of an embroidery needle into your skin, it likely didn’t do any damage at all. On the other hand (and the other side of the spectrum), violet would be represented by much smaller needles–roughly half the width of the red ones. These would be much easier to sink into your skin, and therefore the most destructive needle within these bounds.

Beyond the visible spectrum, we have ultraviolet rays–so called because they’re smaller than violet wavelength of around 380 nanometers. Everyone’s heard of these rays, because they’ve been doing terribly destructive things to our cells since birth. Blue and violet rays come closer to being small enough to passing through our cells–not close enough to actually do anything, but much closer than red beams.

Blue LEDs are emitting some of the smallest wavelengths still visible to our eyes, which means that while the rays aren’t penetrating our cells the way harmful radiation would, they still cause more damage to the receptors inside our eyes than wider rays. From a design standpoint, blue seems to be a more attractive, less gaudy alternative to red–after all, red dominated the faux wood-panel clock radio market for years, and who wants to be reminded of that?

I used to have a computer with a bright blue LED on the front, which happened to be right next to me as I slept. I ended up slapping a piece of tape over it to stop the beam from bothering me at night, but I didn’t know until later that the blue light could actually harm the eye. I’m sure it didn’t do any real lasting damage, but the abundance of blue LEDs in computers, car consoles, and other electronics seems to be a bad idea if other colors–amber and green, for instance–have less of a tendency to disturb users and cause headaches, if not long-term problems.

I don’t want to imply that the lights coming from your clock will cause cancer, but on a much more superficial level, blue lights are generally more prone to causing discomfort for users, especially in darker environments, due to their smaller size. About ten years ago I predicted that LED usage would decline as designers realized how annoying a room full of brightly glowing lights can be, but it seems the opposite has proven true. With the exception of products like Apple’s iBook, which diffuses its LED to give it a softer glow, electronics are largely ignoring the discomfort that accompanies these lights. I’d love to see some more creative, less headache-inducing solutions for this problem.

28 Things Everybody Should Know, Part IX

Door handles should look like door handles.

I used to work at a bar and music venue in Seattle called The Triple Door. I only mention the name here because the three doors after which the place is named have some pretty obvious design flaws–dangerously obvious–and I urge anyone interested in interaction to visit and take a look at the doors in question.

After a short flight of steps down to the lower level, the first obstruction is a set of three large, black doors, which remain closed and locked to keep out those who haven’t been admitted to the theater area. Employees, armed with magnetic keys, always open one of these three doors for the guest, which only further adds to the big problem later on.

Once past the first door, the guest is in a small room with three more doors in front and a large, floor-to-ceiling window to the right, kept impeccably clean. The lights in this room are kept low, and the doors painted black, so not much is visible save for the performance through the window.

The main problem here is the design of the door handles: long, skinny poles connected to the side of each door, also painted black, with no markings to imply their affordance as door handles. Furthermore, as the doors must be pulled to open them, the hinges are on the inside–large, bulky, almost handle-shaped hinges, silver in color, to set them apart from everything else in the room. What’s more, the hinges are placed at the same height one would expect a door handle to be. So guests would frequently attempt to pull or twist these large hinges, obviously to no avail.

Because the first door had been opened for them by an employee, customers would have no idea how these doors should function. Pushing on them does no good, as they open in the other direction. Every night I worked there, frustrated customers would come back through the first set of doors (which do open outward, and can easily be pushed open) and ask for assistance, expressing embarrassment or claiming we forgot to unlock the second set of doors (which have no locks).

Another scenario, which I unfortunately witnessed several times in my short time there, was customers assuming the squeaky clean, floor-to-ceiling pane of glass was merely a walkway–it does face the dining area and theater after all–and would run face-first into the window, often causing bruises, fat lips and, at least once, a pretty big gash on a guest’s forehead.

The problem with the door handles in this cramped, nearly unlit space could be easily fixed, if the poles were fashioned to resemble handles. I made the suggestion of painting thin white lines on the poles, one above and one below where the average hand would reach for a door handle. This would easily imply the affordance of a pullable object. Nobody went for it, which is understandable. I wasn’t there to change anything, just greet guests and show them their seats.

I also suggested putting a vinyl sticker on the window–maybe the restaurant’s logo or a dinner menu–to make it clear just how solid this large piece of glass was. Nothing changed during my time there, but one day I found they’d put an event calendar in the window. I hope no more injuries had to happen to spur the change, but I wouldn’t put my money on it.

Good design turns bad pretty fast when aesthetics intrude on functionality. This establishment was designed with a certain look and feel that sets it apart from all others in Seattle, but at a cost. Along with the door issue, there were no signs pointing guests toward the restrooms–I guess they thought signs detract from the beauty of a bar with a fish tank and mood lighting–and employees must constantly point out what should be obvious to everyone in the room.

During my time there, nobody else seemed to like my suggestions–the guests were more often than not ridiculed for being too drunk or stupid to operate a simple door or find the restroom. No matter how much I explained the problems everyone knew about, how they occurred or how easily they could be fixed, I just wasn’t in the position to be listened to. Aesthetics were the first and foremost priority, and it takes a lot to spur change in such an established system, especially when design flaws instantly become labeled as human error–which is at once overestimating your market’s understanding of the system and underestimating their intelligence.

28 Things Everybody Should Know, Part VIII

Users should never wonder if the system is broken, unless it actually is.

As the typical user’s connection speed increases, so too does tolerance for large downloads and streaming content on sites such as YouTube and applications like DropBox. Whereas even five years ago, the term optimization would be largely comprised of checking for bandwidth usage and browser compatibility, these days the practice seems to ignore the former, while the latter has branched out to include mobile platforms and newer server technologies. File size has taken a back seat in terms of priority, which is wonderful. Who doesn’t want their streaming video in the highest possible quality?

Because of this, Flash websites, in all their bandwidth-hogging glory, are running rampant and nearly unchecked in every corner of the internet, resulting in longer loading times for everyone, but especially those who don’t have access to broadband, such as mobile browsers, users who live beyond the reaches of cable access and families who don’t want to  (or can’t) spring for the faster service.

The preloader has been a great addition to the arsenal of developers working with technologies such as Flash, AJAX and Javascript. A preloader is a progress bar that informs the user of how much content has been loaded versus how much is still expected. Graphical preloaders show a visual diagram of how much progress has been made, often in artistic and entertaining ways: the Nintendo Wii’s downloadable content shows an animation of the original Super Mario collecting coins, and the coins themselves represent how much content is left to download. Han Hoogerbrugge’s site displays a silhouette of the first frame of each project, which fills with color from the bottom up as it loads.

There are many sites with preloaders that don’t inform as to how much progress, if any, is being made: YouTube’s cluster of dots, shifting shades of gray in a circular motion, make it seem like the selected video’s on its way, but anyone who’s a regular to the site knows that in the event playback doesn’t begin with a handful of seconds–something that occurs quite often–it likely won’t begin unless the user refreshes the page. This sort of preloader is merely an animation that gives the illusion of progress–which is fine, if no problems get in the way of the implied progress. Unfortunately, that isn’t always the case, so problems need to be anticipated and accounted for to decrease frustration. In fairness, Vimeo’s preloader, while more aesthetically appealing, works (or doesn’t) in the exact same way.

Operating systems have various ways of telling the user something’s going on behind the scenes, such as the hourglass cursor and Mac’s spinning rainbow icon. But like the preloaders used by YouTube and Vimeo, these don’t actually say whether the machine is making any progress–many times a computer will essentially freeze except for the animated cursor, and the user is led to believe something’s giong on in the box, while in reality, the computer may be responsive to nothing less than the Reset switch.

Users generally don’t need to want to know everything that’s happening inside their computers, the same way drivers don’t need to know about every little interaction between the parts inside their cars. But if we’re going to trust the companies that make our operating systems, applications and websites, they need to provide sufficient information concerning the status of the systems we use.

A mindless loading animation doesn’t do its job if nothing is loading, and leads to angry users when it’s learned they’ve been misled. A much more responsible loading animation will communicate with the system and wait for confirmation that progress is being made before relaying that information to the user. And if it can do so with a little class, artistic quality or even interaction, it will make the waiting process that much easier to sit through.

28 Things Everybody Should Know, Part VII

Not all browser windows are maximized.

Monitors are growing in size these days. I jumped from a 15″ to a comparatively enormous 22″ just a couple years ago, and recently I’ve been considering a few models in the 24″ and over range.

Despite my monitor’s capacity, I tend to keep my browser window at a modest size–around 880 pixels wide by 980 high. I do this for several reasons, not the least of which the idea that websites are primarily modeled after vertically-oriented reading materials, such as books and newspapers. While my eyes scan up and down a column comfortably, they start to protest when they have to go much further than that 880 pixel limit. (Of course, pixels aren’t measurements of real space, and distance from the screen is a factor, but under normal circumstances with most monitors I’ve used, this continues to be a good rule of thumb for me.) And 880 is for all content on a page combined. When dealing with blocks of text, anything over 500 pixels wide is pushing it.

Fortunately, most websites I visit still limit their content to a rather narrow column of roughly 700 to 900 pixels–many still too large for my tastes, but I’d like to think a little market research has shown those widths have gone over well with their target markets. Of course, market research doesn’t happen as much as it should, but that’s another topic altogether. Several surveys on the matter place me around the middle of the chart, and a few say my browser size is slightly narrower than average.

Many websites offering tips for web design suggest optimizing a site for 1024 x 728 displays, which still isn’t the safest bet since, aside from maximized browsers with very little chrome and navigation tools hidden, display size doesn’t say anything about available browser size.

Monitors are getting much wider, but laptops (and especially the recent influx of netbooks on the market) are still stunted vertically, some even dipping below 450 pixels. This isn’t such a big deal, as we’ve typically got seven keys dedicated to vertical movements in a browser window (not to mention scroll wheels and touchpad scrolling), and only two used to move our browsers left and right–and only then in much smaller increments than we can move up and down. That, and our eyes are more accustomed to scanning downward rather than sideways.

I’m no better than the next guy at making predictions involving technology, but even as monitors grow to sizes larger than you can fit on your computer desk without finding a new place for your Rolodex from well before the turn of the century, I expect most websites will stick to the same limits they use today. Typesetters have long known the horizontal restraints of our eyes, and have developed meticulously measured columns that minimize fatigue and enhance the reading experience. By putting a little effort into online content so it conforms to the same limitations, designers will find their visitors sticking around a little longer without reaching for the aspirin bottle.

28 Things Everybody Should Know, Part VI

Red and green = stop and go. Red and blue = hot and cold.

Colors signify a variety of warnings in different cultures. Most commonly, in a majority of the world’s countries, red and blue are assigned respectively to hot and cold faucet handles. This color coding system is quite important, as an unexpected blast of hot water can do some damage.

Red and green, when used side by side, distinguish between two entirely different ideas. Obviously they’re used as traffic signals, but also on appliances to warn when a lock is open or closed, when a user can safely activate, dismantle or perform other operations on a piece of equipment.

I used an electric coffee pot every morning while working in Japan. It quickly heated water to boiling temperature, and had a pump button on top for dispensing the scalding liquid. A sliding lever near the button closed and opened the spigot, signaling its current state with one of two colored dots: red or blue.

I had assumed the blue dot meant the water was cold, and the red meant it was time for coffee (or tea, being in Japan and all). One day I went into the office hoping for a cup, found the blue dot showing, and decided to wait a while. An hour went by, and still no red dot. As I was waiting, a coworker came in, filled her cup with piping hot water, steam flowing from her mug and everything, and walked off. Confused, I took a look at the dot. Still blue! How hot did it have to be to register as hot?

As I’m now aware, temperature had nothing to do with it. The colors corresponded to whether the button could be pressed or not. My coworker had simply opened the spigot, poured her water, and closed it again before leaving the room, further contributing to my confusion.

Of course I was in a different country, but considering the similarities between American and Japan, especially regarding our technology and information systems, this oversight doesn’t make any sense to me. Using blue to signal a closed spigot on a heater that brings water to a fast boil, when users can easily read it as containing cold water,  is dangerous and irresponsible. Designers need to understand instinctual user responses to simple color combinations such as these before releasing a product like this on the public.

28 Things Everybody Should Know, Part V

Quotation marks are for quotations, not slogans.

It took quite a long time for the English language to evolve into its present state. Hopefully, it’s still in the process. There are rules I’d love to see thrown out or changed, such as the proper spelling of judgement (that isn’t it) or the particularly nitpicky one about not beginning sentences with conjunctions. But this is about something different–where quotation marks do and do not belong.

We use quotation marks for several reasons: to show that we are citing exactly what someone has said, to declare ironic usage of a word or phrase, to signify nicknames, and to indicate song and chapter titles in albums and books.

Where do quotes not belong? First and foremost, company mottos and mantras. The reason isn’t so much that they’re unnecessary (although they are) but because, as stated above, one usage of quotes is to show irony, or inform others that you’re joking.

“It was my friend’s birthday, so I had to get him a card. But I was mad at him, so I put quotes around the word happy.”

This was a line from Demetri Martin’s These Are Jokes. It illustrates the very reason why we don’t use them in company slogans. To do so says, effectively, “I’m joking about this part.” Basically, you’re saying the opposite.

I saw this on a high seat in a restaurant. I’ll ignore its selective use of capitals, complete lack of punctuation, awkward balance and inconsistent linespacing, but the quotes serve absolutely no purpose. It took slightly more effort to add them for no improvement in clarity or impact. I think the reason we see this sort of thing so often is because the quotes, in this case, don’t hinder the message either. They’re just there.

I wish I could have grabbed a picture of the sign that used to be up at the convenience store near my house:

“EXCELLENT” WINE PRICES.

Classic.

Quotation marks misused in company slogans are not only a source of humor and slight irritation, but they’re a often good way of distinguishing the more professional companies from those that don’t read into how users will take to their message. Nike, McDonald’s, Microsoft . . . we’ve seen them and their mantras a thousand times in a thousand places, but never do we see them in quotes–because nobody is literally saying it. It’s more of an attitude than something that must be voiced.

Like I said earlier, our language is always shifting. A hundred, even fifty years ago, you would have found quotes all over advertisements. Like the idea of dangling prepositions, it’s just something you have to let go of.

28 Things Everybody Should Know, Part IV

If you hold it like a gun and fire it like a gun, it should be a gun.

On the first of January 2009, during a dispute caught on several video cameras by witnesses at the BART station in Oakland, Oscar Grant was shot and killed by a BART officer who now claims he had mistaken his handgun for a taser. I don’t want this to become a political or personally heated topic here, but regardless of whether the shooter is just saying this for a chance at lowering his sentence, it brought up something that needs to be addressed.

Until the incident and ensuing assertion concerning this bout of human error, I had always thought of tasers in the shape of cattle prods, but with shorter handles. Apparently I was pretty far from the truth.

This is a police-issue taser, despite its resemblance to something I played with as a kid, pretending to guard my space station (bunk bed) from hordes of deadly aliens (army men). Its shape is immediately recognizable, its functionality easily identifiable. There is one huge problem with this: cops also have guns.

This is a gun. It shoots projectiles meant to kill humans.

In fact, the main difference is that the gun is meant to kill, and the taser is meant to stun. So why does it matter that the two have so much in common?

Regarding interaction, sensory fatigue sets in when a product is so regularly used or procedure so commonly practiced that it becomes second nature, and very little thought is given to what’s going on in the background. For instance, I don’t need to consciously think about pressing the clutch pedal when I shift gears in a car, or think too hard about the steps involved in making a sandwich. Because of this, unless something out of place grabs my attention, I don’t give much thought to what I’m doing. Sensory fatigue is generally an asset to us all, as we need to focus our attention on steering rather than shifting, on sentence structure rather than spelling all but the most complex and least frequently used words.

The flaw in the taser’s design is its context. Most police officers carry loaded firearms which share three significant properties with the taser: its location on the belt, the shape and style of its grip, and its trigger.

Aware that the taser is far less dangerous than a pistol, a police officer doesn’t need to be quite as apprehensive about using it, and in this sense, the taser has probably spared a good number of lives on both sides of the law. But this also supplies the subconscious with the idea that drawing a gun-shaped object from a gun-bearing belt and pulling its gun-like trigger is a safe thing to do.

As explained in Kim Vicente’s The Human Factor, the phrase “human error” is often thrown around without laying at least a little worthy blame on the developers of a product who didn’t fully take into account the intended audience. In this case (if the plea is to be believed), a police officer who was used to firing a gun with little consequence has fatally wounded a man he thought he was merely shocking with a little electricity. Two entirely different results from two unfortunately similar weapons.

How should we remedy this problem? First, recall all gun-shaped tasers. Review the shape and trigger mechanisms, and design both to allow the new taser to be easily distinguished from a handgun. Perhaps an overhand grip with a push-button trigger. Then provide a separate holster for the taser, such as on the chest or leg. Somewhere an officer would never think to grab a gun. Make sure the gun and taser can’t accidentally switch places by making the holster accept only one shape.

I’m the last person who could imagine what goes on inside the brain of a police officer, or behind the scenes of law enforcement. But with all the typos I’ve made writing this passage alone, I know well the human capacity to make mistakes, and thankfully there are teams of people happy to find potential problems such as this and fix them before they start. Unfortunately, this one hasn’t been fixed yet, and hopefully this fatality will help the appropriate people realize what needs to be done.

28 Things Everybody Should Know, Part III

Third-person testimonials don’t fool anyone.

Personal websites serve many functions, from expressing ideas to sharing images to merely being able to say, “Yeah, I have a website.” One great reason for having a personal site, especially as a designer or developer, is to cheaply promote your own skills and play up your abilities relatively uncontested.

The idea of the personal website is not a new concept, and for the most part, visitors will not only accept that the content is written in your own words, but they’ll expect that you’ve gone through the trouble of coming up with a few paragraphs to describe yourself. And nothing says “I wrote this” like writing in the first person. (Literally. That’s actually the definition and most basic use of the term.)

Third-person descriptions are wonderful for introducing guests at a panel discussion, preempting the presentation of an award to someone who’s worked hard to earn it, or in the About the Author section at the end of a novel. What makes these seem natural is that they’re presumably written by others as an homage to their lives and accomplishments; if the person in question gave the same account using the first person, it would come across as egotistical self-praise.

But a personal website is one of those places where a little self-praise belongs. Rarely do people write descriptive paragraphs about designers, and you can bet the kid who sat next to you in HTML class didn’t lift his blurb from a magazine article detailing how he’s been exploring Web 2.0 practices and cross-browser compatibility. Because magazines don’t generally report on things like that.

People can have a hard time talking about themselves. When they do, they like to show a side of modesty and self-control, so it’s easy to understand the desire to express themselves as if somebody else had pre-approved the message. But visitors want to know what you do, and if they’re visiting your site, chances are they want you to tell them without hiding behind someone else’s words. Besides, the meaty part of the site–the portfolio, resume and client lists–these should speak volumes more than your introductory text, and that’s where you’re just as likely to overstate your achievements.

So speak up. Nobody else will say it the way you want, so don’t pretend they are.

28 Things Everybody Should Know, Part II

Respect the Hand Cursor.

In the early days of UI development, the mouse cursor transformed from a full gray ASCII block to the more easily recognizable arrow we know and love today. Soon after, designers came up with a few added icons to give users hints as to what was going on in that beige box of theirs: an hourglass to suggest the computer was busy thinking, an I-bar to show where text could be entered, and double-ended arrows telling us how we could stretch and resize our windows.

Then HyperCard technology gave us a different kind of navigation, and pretty much changed everything. One important visual cue it offered was the obvious and incredibly effective hand cursor, which we now use to inform users of navigation options within a website. Simply put, when you see the pointing hand, you know you can click.

The hand cursor’s been around a long time, and has become an established visual metaphor for interactivity all over the world. It’s been used in Myst, a game initially created in HyperCard, and in a later sequel rendered in 3D, still maintaining its general behavior of pointing to indicate where a user can click.

Many applications, Adobe’s among them, use an open hand cursor that shows a document can be clicked and dragged to change the user’s view. This draws on the same design metaphor, and I’d guess they even found the same guy to model it for them.

The pointing hand cursor works the same way in Flash sites and presentations. However, there exist simple lines of ActionScript that allow developers to override the cursor’s behaviors: disabling the hand cursor when a user rolls over a button, for example, involves a single line of code applied to the button itself.

Without going into too much detail about Flash and its language, this can come in handy when a developer decides to use a rollover action to trigger an event, but doesn’t want to mislead the user into thinking the button should be clicked on. While there are better ways of going about it, this is a great example of understanding the user’s expectations regarding cursor cues and developing accordingly.

The problem arises when a button that is meant to be clicked on doesn’t display the hand cursor, and doesn’t give sufficient clues that it’s meant to be clicked on. The hand cursor is the easiest, fastest way to offer navigation cues to a user.

On the other hand, there are sites that improperly use buttons solely for their rollover behaviors without disabling the hand cursor feature, thereby telling users they should be clicking on elements that do absolutely nothing. Some sites even employ the hand cursor for the duration of the experience across the entire stage of the presentation, nullifying the purpose of its existence. It’s difficult to determine where we are to click when we aren’t told where we are not to click.

One area where it gets tricky is when form buttons are used. Form buttons are those capsule-shaped, gray buttons that seem to pup up out of the screen, and push down into the screen when you click on them. These are used in technical sites used by banks, auto dealers, and sites involving numbers and money. Offline, the shape and behavior of these buttons are used to confirm and close dialog boxes, minimize and maximize windows, and navigate through installation wizards. Online, users know that clicking on them gets something done, like calculating a chart or submitting personal information. But they don’t necessarily inform us as to whether or not they’ll be navigating us away from the current page, resulting in hesitation when dealing with large forms full of numbers that may or may not disappear once the button is pressed. On a good note, websites such as Amazon.com and Washington Mutual’s site have done away with form buttons in exchange for standard image buttons, complete with the hand cursor that instills that much more confidence in every user click.

As more and more developers understand the reasoning behind the cursor’s visual cues and utilize them appropriately, they will gain more users’ trust and acceptance, subconscious as it may be.

28 Things Everybody Should Know, Part I

This month I’ve decided to post about one unwritten rule, commonly ignored standard or overlooked behavioral pattern per day, so by the end of February I’ll (hopefully) have a list of things all designers and developers in the User Experience field will be able to access, but just as importantly, a list we’ll be able to show clients who might need a little more persuasion that a certain design element won’t be perceived the way they might think it will.

This list will touch on several rules that are quite obvious, and might not seem to warrant a mention at all. The problem is that many facets of User Experience are so glaringly obvious that they proceed to go unwritten, unspoken, and ultimately unnoticed. But the purpose of UX is to remain conscious of the most unconscious user behaviors and account for them as effectively as possible.

So here we go. Rule number one.

Reading direction should determine button placement.

Mobile communications, like all new technologies, had a slow and gradual beginning, tentatively adopted by a number of companies who had no idea how successful their ventures would become. Standardization in the physical design of the phones and key layout would take many years to iron out, but eventually an acceptable model became popular, and more common than features such as the four-way cursor key and side-mounted volume buttons that most landline phones don’t include, the Send and End buttons respectively found their homes on the left and right sides on the keypad.

This makes sense when we consider the direction in which our culture reads: left to right. Because our inclination is to begin on the left and move toward the right, placing the Send and End buttons in this order stays consistent with the progression of a phone call. The buttons serve as a visual and spacial timeline for the duration of a phone call.

Having tested a number of mobile phones for a research project, I hadn’t found one manufactured in the past decade or so that broke this rule, and figured I never would. But I’d just been lucky. During a trip to the Philippines around 2006, one of the Nokia phones I used had its Send and End buttons switched, resulting in the most frustrating experience I had on the islands: I’d punch in a string of numbers, go to hit Send, and the numbers would disappear. Even worse, when I received calls while typing text messages, I’d try to pick up and would not only hang up on the caller, but I’d lose the entire message which would have been saved during the call. (To say this was my most frustrating experience there says great things about the rest of my travels.)

I didn’t get a picture of the phone, but looking into it, I’ve found a couple more that violate this rule. The Moto V60i, a relatively newer model, is a good example.

Because we also read from the top down, an acceptable alternative to the left-right setup would be to place the Send button above the End button, but the side-bu-side placement makes perfect sense, doesn’t impede on the functionality of any existing phones, and has become so established that changing it at this point would only cause frustration for those who are used to it–which is pretty much everybody. Perhaps hands-free headsets, which are generally slim and don’t have much room for two buttons placed horizontally, would be better off using the vertical layout.

The human mind is unknowingly stubborn. Give it a pattern to abide by and it will remember that pattern without having to really think about it. When such an established pattern is broken, subconscious actions can lead to unexpected results.

Up with Left, Down with Right.

The jog dial has found its way onto most electronic devices–cameras, computer mice, and cell phones to name a few–with varying results and consumer reactions. My first digital camera, the Sony Cyber-Shot, came equipped with a jog dial for scrolling through pictures and settings, and pressing in on the dial selected images and selected menu options. Nikon cameras make use of their jog dials by combining the scroll feature with various buttons to enable power users to make complex adjustments much faster than a traditional menu system would allow.

I’ve owned quite a few portable media players in the past decade, and one that’s stood out is the relatively cheap Sansa e140–stood out, primarily, because it outlasted most of the other relatively cheap models that decided to stop working with months of purchasing them. The e140 is notable in that it sports a typical jog dial in a less typical location: the corner of the unit.

I’m sure the designers who came up with this idea figured the corner placement would allow users to access the dial in two different ways: with the thumb along the side . . .

. . . and with the index finger along the top.

Seems like a pretty solid concept. But there’s one thing about a rotational input that doesn’t exactly lend itself to this kind of placement.

The jog dial serves two distinct tasks on this player: to navigate the menu system and to control playback volume. Other devices, like the iPod, use this same approach, but here’s where it gets tricky.

When using the menu to find songs and change the player’s settings, the dial acts like this:

As the dial rotates downward, the selection bar moves down the menu. So far so good. Now let’s take a look at the same dial’s behavior when changing the player’s volume.

Why does it do this? It really seems out of place for the dial to be playing Opposite Day when it comes to volume control, but acting perfectly normal with everything else. There’s only one reason I can come up with to explain it. Perhaps the designers decided that most users would be holding the player in a pocket, or at least in a different position, when adjusting the volume. If you think about it this way . . .

. . . it makes a lot more sense. And here we find the inherent problem with corner-mounted jog dials. They violate an unwritten yet important rule in ergonomics:

Up goes with Left; Down goes with Right.

Sure, turning the dial to the right increases the volume, which makes sense, but that’s also turning the dial downward, which makes no sense at all. At the same time, the entire dial is rotating to the right, so if you view it as a volume knob, it’s doing its job properly. But without being able to view it like a knob, who’s going to imagine it that way?

It’s most likely different in other cultures, but because we read top to bottom and left to right, we want to equate those directions respectively. Moving up and left are typically regressive movements in menu navigation.

There are several exceptions to this rule. Television remote controls, for example, either display the channel buttons as left and right or up and down, and in this case, up goes with right, down with left. But in most other cases, it’s the other way around. Not just with navigation, but displaying information as well. Take a look at how both Windows and OSX arrange files within a folder. In both environments, a horizontal view will place the first file on the left, while a vertical view places it at the top.

I don’t know why the e140’s jog dial bothers me so much. I’m the sort of person who can remember the idiosyncrasies of a system and use it just as easily as if everything were perfectly consistent, but the whole idea of putting the dial in the corner, while apparently offering more access to the user, does nothing but add confusion.

If Sandisk, the manufacturer of the player, still wished to place their jog dial in the corner of the device, there are two corners more sufficient for the job: the upper left and the lower right. This way, an upward action and a rightward action would match. However, putting the dial along the lower right would cause a completely different kind of confusion: viewing the dial like a volume knob, if a user could visualize it that way, you’d then be rotating the knob to the left to turn the volume up.

So the only remaining option would be to place it in the upper left corner. Sure, most users are right-handed, but the player’s small enough to reach each corner no matter how you hold it. Still, it would be more ergonomically awkward to put it there, so the only conclusion should be to ditch the corner-mounted jog dial, at least until a better application arises. But a music player just doesn’t need it.

Closing Arguments

User intuition develops over years of using a product with consistent results. In this post, I’m analyzing several applications that offer the user the option to save a file upon closing.

I love open source applications, because they provide alternatives to many programs I’d like to avoid using, such as Microsoft Office and Internet Explorer. But the developers of these programs need to acknowledge and accept a few norms that have crept into most users’ expectations, especially regarding common key functions.

When a file has been changed in a document such as Notepad, the user is prompted to save the file before before closing. After the question is asked to save changes, the three options are Yes (Y), No (N), and Cancel (Esc key, not explicitly told to the user, but fairly obvious).

Just to prove there’s a pattern beyond Microsoft applications, Adobe programs use the same Y/N/Esc options, but without the helpful underlined letters:

I should mention that I can’t afford to show an example from Photoshop CS. This is Photoshop 7’s closing dialog box. Adobe may have changed the box in more recent versions, but aside from adding underlines to specify keyboard input, I don’t see a reason to.

This format has been consistent in most of the programs I’ve encountered since the DOS ages. As such, when I’m about to close a document, I’ve instinctively got my finger on Y or N before I hit Close. The underlines help remind users that the keyboard can be used to make the selection, rather than the often more time-consuming mouse click.

OpenOffice, however, has ignored this ages-old tradition and uses completely different options for its closing dialog box. Instead of the Y/N choices, the user is given three different but ultimately equal options:

The question remains the same, but now our options are Save (S), Discard (D), and Cancel (also Esc). One argument for this change is the proximity of the S and D keys, but I’d see that as a reason not to use them, as they might cause a user to discard important changes. But the biggest reason is the blatant disregard for an established set of options, for no apparent reason I can think of.

Now to look at Mozilla Firefox, which not only goes against the grain concerning user intuition, but uses different options depending on the number of windows open. Which is why we add another usability icon for Firefox:

Firefox uses tabbed browsing, which allows a user to open multiple pages in the same window. Because of this, a user may forget that several tabs are open, close the window and lose his or her place in every page being visited. To help fix this, Firefox gives a simple warning when multiple tabs are about to be closed at once:

This makes it much easier to tell if several pages are about to be closed, and it’s been very helpful to me on many occasions. However, starting with Firefox 3, a new feature has been introduced. For the first few days after updating to version 3, I got this seemingly random dialog box when I went to close the program:

This box is confusing for a couple reasons. First of all, it uses a completely different set of options from the above Y/N or even S/D. The Esc key will cancel out of this box, but now the C key will also. But it’s the presence of the dialog box, which took me a while to understand, that really got to me.

This box only appears when there is only one Firefox window open. It doesn’t explain why we’re no longer given the option to close the tabs, and for users like me, who are used to hitting ALT+F4 and immediately pressing Enter to close all the open tabs, now we’re unknowingly saving our tabs by default. This inconsistency causes our previous browsing history to automatically recall itself the next time Firefox opens–and the next user will know what we’d been doing just before we closed Firefox.

Also, there’s the much smaller gripe about the checkboxes in both Firefox dialog boxes. The first box, the one that displays if multiple windows are open, is checked by default, and will continue to warn the user if multiple tabs are about to be closed. The second is unchecked by default, and must remain unchecked if the user wants the option to save his or her place upon closing. Ideally, a program that offers helpful features such as these would be consistent in its use of checkboxes. Since Firefox has always used the first example I discussed, my suggestion would be to keep boxes checked to enable these features.

I’ve sent emails to the developers of OpenOffice and Firefox, but the option to conform to the standard options after having established their own set of choices poses another consistency problem: changing now would only further confuse users who have grown accustomed to these options. Once a product has been released, it’s hard to change subtleties in features like this, which is why it’s good to acknowledge and understand certain time-tested aspects of human-conputer interaction and stick to them whenever possible.

Gotta Love Japan

It’s not hard to find a few flaws in most traffic systems. I’ll go over the blindingly obvious problem with downtown Seattle’s business-hours ticket traps later, but this one’s screaming out to be fixed. Yet, in typical Japanese business fashion, nobody I talked to seemed to have the authority to do anything about it.

This is the driveway into (out of?) the biggest mall in my town. To be fair, there has been construction going on, and they’re currently expanding their parking lot, so I hope they’ll be repainting the arrows as well.

Normally, when directing something as bulky and potentially child-crushing as a neverending string of automobiles, you’d think clarity would be a priority. Not so, apparently.

Here’s a different driveway from (to?) the same mall, just to be sure we’re not dealing with an isolated case:

There are Do Not Enter signs posted on the street side of these exits, but no sign to assure those looking to exit that they’re on the right track.

I sure hope these get taken care of soon. It’s hard to imagine such a hazard going either unnoticed or simply ignored. I’d buy some black paint and do it myself if they sold any in this town–and if I thought it wouldn’t get me arrested.

Categorizing Bad User Experience

After years of analyzing interfaces in software, traffic systems and product design, I’ve realized that there are a handful of categories most mistakes fall into. Many of these categories overlap–for instance, a piece of hardware built without a user’s physical limitations in mind is labeled as Awkward, but in many cases can also fall into the Dangerous category–and many instances of bad design will fall under several categories.

I attempted to make icons for the reverse of all these situations: Consistent, Safe, Intuitive, and so on. But good design is much more difficult to categorize. A good system will take everything into account, from possible human error to clarity of affordances. I’m not trying to focus only on the negative aspects of design, but these icons can make it easier to classify what needs to be addressed, and a finished product will ideally have none of the eight labels associated with it.

A Quick Request

Most electronic devices today use SD cards. Very few use Compact Flash, and the rest have all but vanished (except for Sony products, but that company’s like a stubborn, greedy uncle who won’t comply to anyone’s standards but his own).

So why do we still have separate battery packs for everything? Why can’t my camera, my DS, and my mp3 player all use the same rechargeable cells? I’m not talking AA or anything. Toshiba / Matsushita did a great job making the SD card the globally accepted standard memory card. Why can’t someone come up with a universal battery pack? Maybe even in a couple sizes, or stackable depending on the size of the appliance.

It’s 2008. If my car won’t fly yet, at least grant me this one wish.

Real Life Level Design

Written 7/16/08

I’m writing this under the shade of several myrica rubra trees on a wooden bench near downtown Hamamatsu. The name of the trees really doesn’t mean much to me, but it’s worth noting, as it’s posted on a sign tied to one of the trunks.

Walking is my main form of exercise, and I do it a lot. Most of the time, there’s a reason behind the activity–the need to get to work, the desire for a sandwich, the instinctual urge to avoid getting smashed by a car–but I try to walk as often as I can for the sake of walking alone. You can’t sit at your computer all day. Someone said that once. Most likely an older relative.

Today, while exploring a part of the town I hadn’t seen yet, I came across a wide road, much wider than most others in the area, with a center lane bordered by trees, benches every few meters and a small, landscaped stream on one side. The path itself was even a different color from the rest of the road, comprised of square brown tiles in contrast to the street’s black rectangles. As I walked past the entrance to this path, all these elements that set it apart from its surroundings drew me in, and I abruptly took a left to see where it would lead me.

Walking down this path, with cars driving along both sides, all feelings of uneasiness one would typically feel while walking between cars were eliminated by the design of the street. Strolling down the middle of the around, I felt perfectly safe.

As I walked, I thought back to a presentation given by a level designer, who had discussed a few tactics for designing open-ended areas in which users feel free to explore, but don’t get lost or confused to the point of frustration. He spoke very highly of archways–apparently, if a player spots a circular passage off in the distance, that becomes the player’s goal, and no matter how unreachable it may seem, it will be assumed that the player must pass through it to continue.

The street I’m on doesn’t have an archway at its entrance, but a couple well-placed stones, carved and polished to look less threatening than those found in nature, with Kanji engravings on the sides facing the street. Now, in the year I’ve lived here, I haven’t bothered to learn much in the way of Kanji, but I can probably assume they say something to the effect of “No cars,” or perhaps the name of the street or neighborhood. Nevertheless, they serve as the first promise that pedestrians will be safe on this path. Add to that the benches, the trees, the varying floor pattern and the stream running the entire length of the path, and you’ve got an unspoken guarantee that not only is this a safe place to walk, it’s the best place to walk. You’d be crazy to make any other choice.

Now for the trees providing relief from the unbearable July sun: myrica rubra. I don’t really care to know the name of the plants around me, and I doubt many people do. But the fact that someone put the effort into placing signs on these trees adds another element of assurance to the experience of this path. Aside from those issuing warnings in dangerous situations, signs prove that people are meant to be in the area. After all, someone must have been there to post the sign in the first place.

Signs play an important role in the direction many adventure and role-playing games take. The mere presence of a sign, regardless of its message, tells a player they’re not completely lost, as the level designer must have anticipated that someone would end up there.

As I wrote this, a couple families played in the stream running along the side of the path for about half an hour, safe from the traffic around them. As it’s been said countless times, good design should be as transparent as it is effective, and I’m sure the kids felt just as safe amidst the surrounding cars as they would have felt in a field somewhere, if not safer.