A reader I’ll call Mike writes to me thusly: “They made me the product manager at my company!! They are asking someone who has been a server side developer for over 25 years to design user interfaces. They won't allow me to visit customers or do focus groups. How in the !@#$% do they expect me to design UI and processes? I don't know how the customer actually uses our product (I don't think the previous guy did either) and I guess I never will. I think I need to re-read your book so I will know how to commit every error you talk about. Sheesh!”
Mike is in a fix, all right. But at least he knows that a problem exists. Smart guy that he is, I have no doubt he’ll make decent progress on it, once he reorients his brain to cope with the new problem set that he now has. Here’s what I wrote back to him:
“At least you know that there IS a problem with most UI’s, and you know that you don’t have any experience with it. Socrates would say that this knowledge makes you wise, and I would probably agree with him. Many project managers wouldn’t realize that their users weren’t like themselves.
“As to not allowing you to visit customers, though, I’d have a huge problem with that if I were you. How can you possible know if you don’t look? If it were me, I’d insist on the authority to do that as a condition of taking the job.
“Focus groups I am less hot on. They’re hard to do really well. Consider, for example, the problem of simply recruiting the participants. Unless you can simply order random people to participate, as, say, the armed forces could, you have to recruit and entice them. And the guys that you’ll get are the ones who like to participate in focus groups, and who like to talk about software, which skews it towards the technophilic side, often largely. It’s hard to get real information out of them, as they often want to agree with and be polite to their presenter. They might not want to admit that they couldn’t figure something out, or at least not quickly, so as not to appear dumb in public. The ultimate example of a focus group failure is Clippy. Focus groups loved him because they only saw him once or twice. He only got annoying after he popped up the first five or six times. Then they wanted to kill him and his creators. It’s hard to find out what the silent majority really thinks, as by definition, they don’t say much. Automatic instrumentation of programs so you can see what users really do is, I think the answer.
“I’d suggest reading The Inmates are Running the Asylum by Alan Cooper, as a first step. You would probably also like his About Face, 3rd Edition, which just came out. And probably the best book of first principles in user-centered design is The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman. All are enjoyable reads.”
I wish Mike the best, and I’m sure he’ll do a fine job.
Monday, January 7, 2008
Knowing That There's a Problem Is Often the Biggest Problem
Thursday, June 21, 2007
Apple iPhone Debut to Flop, Product to Crash in Flames
The forthcoming (June 29) release of the Apple iPhone is going to be a bigger marketing flop than Ishtar and Waterworld (dating myself again, aren't I) combined. And it’s not for reasons of price, or limited cell carrier options, or lack of corporate IT support, which are the mainstream media’s main caveats when they review it. (See the June 19 issue of the Wall Street Journal for the latter).
Instead, the iPhone is going to fail because its design is fundamentally flawed. The designers and technophiles who encouraged development of the iPhone have fallen into the trap of all overreaching hardware and software designers; thinking that their users are like themselves. As I expound in great detail in my book Why Software Sucks (Addison-Wesley, 2006, http://www.whysoftwaresucks.com/) your user is not you. The iPhone’s designers have forgotten this fundamental law of the universe. The market will severely punish them for doing so.
I have three specific reasons why the iPhone’s design will cause it to crash in flames the way Apple’s late and unlamented Newton did, only much more loudly and publicly because of all the hype it’s gotten:
First, the iPhone ignores the main reasons that the iPod succeeded: simplicity and ease of use. The iPod is very easy to play and very easy to load, much more so than any other device had ever been. Even more important, the online ITunes store made buying music much simpler and easier than it had been. You didn’t have to drive to the store, you didn’t have to even wait for the UPS man to deliver a CD from amazon. You could listen to the whole song before you bought it, not just a small clip. And you could buy individual songs that you liked instead of having to buy a whole CD of mediocre gunk to get those one or two good songs. (There hasn’t been a packaged album side worth listening to the whole thing in order since Abbey Road.) You didn't have to carry the CDs around with you and change them and worry about losing them. The iPod was a success not because it made complex and sophisticated things possible, but because it made simple things (listening to the music that you liked) simpler and easier than they ever had been before. The iPhone is doing the opposite.
Second, the iPhone crams too many functions into a single box. Putting everything in the same package so you only have to carry one box sounds like a good idea, until you want to listen to music while surfing the web or reading your email or playing a game. Then users will find it essentially impossible to use one function of the tiny box without disrupting the operation of another. A few dedicated technophiles might, just MIGHT, figure out how to do so, but it will require far more dedication than an ordinary user is willing to invest in learning and then remembering. This combination condemns the IPhone to a tiny niche at best.
Third, users will detest the touch screen interface due to its lack of tactile feedback. Using a thumb keyboard, as on the very popular Treo phone, allows the user to feel the keys and know subconsciously that he’s about to press this one and not the one next to it. A touch screen doesn’t allow that, so the user will have to be looking at the keyboard at all times while using it.
Consider the case of an airline passenger relaxing in her seat, eyes closed, iPod mini hung around her neck with a cord, or maybe just lying in her lap -- the very picture of relaxation. Suppose she wants to skip forward or back in the song list. She just presses the forward or back button, which her finger can easily find by touch, a one-handed operation for which she doesn't even have to open her eyes. Now think of the same thing with in iPhone, which doesn't have separate forward or back buttons, just an icon on a touch screen. The user has to interrupt her blissful reverie, open her eyes, come back visually to the yucky airplane that the beautiful music from the iPhone has been helping her escape. She then has to pick the phone up in one hand, lift it up to where she can see it, use her other hand to press the forward button, and put the phone back down. Instead of a one-hand, no eye operation, it's a two-hand, two-eye operation. Please explain to me how that's an improvement.
Also, touch screen keys are small compared to the fingers that touch them. Even though its keys are small, a thumb keypad focuses the force of the finger, so it works even if the user doesn’t touch the key exactly in the center. If the user rolls his fingertip at all while removing it from the touchscreen, which is hard to avoid, he’ll change the key that he THINKS he’s pressed, which is not the case with the thumb keyboard or the iPod controls. The designers and early technophile testers of the iPhone were willing to retrain themselves to deal with the touchscreen’s shortcomings, to always look at the keypad and to move their fingers exactly in the required manner, because they like technology and are willing to adapt to it. The vast majority of users don’t care about technology in and of itself, and are therefore not willing to do so.
When the 100 million iPod users said, "Oh, if only Apple made a phone," they meant that they wanted the simplicity and ease of their iPods to transfer to a phone, not complex, hard to use stuff that they had never imagined. An iPod with just a cell keypad on the back would have been, may still be, a smash hit product for someone. But the iPhone as currently consituted? Forget it.
Because its designers forgot Platt’s First, Last, and Only Law of User Experience Design (“Know Thy User, for He Is Not Thee”), that product is going to crash in flames. Sell your Apple stock now, while the hype's still hot. You heard it here first.
Instead, the iPhone is going to fail because its design is fundamentally flawed. The designers and technophiles who encouraged development of the iPhone have fallen into the trap of all overreaching hardware and software designers; thinking that their users are like themselves. As I expound in great detail in my book Why Software Sucks (Addison-Wesley, 2006, http://www.whysoftwaresucks.com/) your user is not you. The iPhone’s designers have forgotten this fundamental law of the universe. The market will severely punish them for doing so.
I have three specific reasons why the iPhone’s design will cause it to crash in flames the way Apple’s late and unlamented Newton did, only much more loudly and publicly because of all the hype it’s gotten:
First, the iPhone ignores the main reasons that the iPod succeeded: simplicity and ease of use. The iPod is very easy to play and very easy to load, much more so than any other device had ever been. Even more important, the online ITunes store made buying music much simpler and easier than it had been. You didn’t have to drive to the store, you didn’t have to even wait for the UPS man to deliver a CD from amazon. You could listen to the whole song before you bought it, not just a small clip. And you could buy individual songs that you liked instead of having to buy a whole CD of mediocre gunk to get those one or two good songs. (There hasn’t been a packaged album side worth listening to the whole thing in order since Abbey Road.) You didn't have to carry the CDs around with you and change them and worry about losing them. The iPod was a success not because it made complex and sophisticated things possible, but because it made simple things (listening to the music that you liked) simpler and easier than they ever had been before. The iPhone is doing the opposite.
Second, the iPhone crams too many functions into a single box. Putting everything in the same package so you only have to carry one box sounds like a good idea, until you want to listen to music while surfing the web or reading your email or playing a game. Then users will find it essentially impossible to use one function of the tiny box without disrupting the operation of another. A few dedicated technophiles might, just MIGHT, figure out how to do so, but it will require far more dedication than an ordinary user is willing to invest in learning and then remembering. This combination condemns the IPhone to a tiny niche at best.
Third, users will detest the touch screen interface due to its lack of tactile feedback. Using a thumb keyboard, as on the very popular Treo phone, allows the user to feel the keys and know subconsciously that he’s about to press this one and not the one next to it. A touch screen doesn’t allow that, so the user will have to be looking at the keyboard at all times while using it.
Consider the case of an airline passenger relaxing in her seat, eyes closed, iPod mini hung around her neck with a cord, or maybe just lying in her lap -- the very picture of relaxation. Suppose she wants to skip forward or back in the song list. She just presses the forward or back button, which her finger can easily find by touch, a one-handed operation for which she doesn't even have to open her eyes. Now think of the same thing with in iPhone, which doesn't have separate forward or back buttons, just an icon on a touch screen. The user has to interrupt her blissful reverie, open her eyes, come back visually to the yucky airplane that the beautiful music from the iPhone has been helping her escape. She then has to pick the phone up in one hand, lift it up to where she can see it, use her other hand to press the forward button, and put the phone back down. Instead of a one-hand, no eye operation, it's a two-hand, two-eye operation. Please explain to me how that's an improvement.
Also, touch screen keys are small compared to the fingers that touch them. Even though its keys are small, a thumb keypad focuses the force of the finger, so it works even if the user doesn’t touch the key exactly in the center. If the user rolls his fingertip at all while removing it from the touchscreen, which is hard to avoid, he’ll change the key that he THINKS he’s pressed, which is not the case with the thumb keyboard or the iPod controls. The designers and early technophile testers of the iPhone were willing to retrain themselves to deal with the touchscreen’s shortcomings, to always look at the keypad and to move their fingers exactly in the required manner, because they like technology and are willing to adapt to it. The vast majority of users don’t care about technology in and of itself, and are therefore not willing to do so.
When the 100 million iPod users said, "Oh, if only Apple made a phone," they meant that they wanted the simplicity and ease of their iPods to transfer to a phone, not complex, hard to use stuff that they had never imagined. An iPod with just a cell keypad on the back would have been, may still be, a smash hit product for someone. But the iPhone as currently consituted? Forget it.
Because its designers forgot Platt’s First, Last, and Only Law of User Experience Design (“Know Thy User, for He Is Not Thee”), that product is going to crash in flames. Sell your Apple stock now, while the hype's still hot. You heard it here first.
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
Norton Internet Security Doesn't Just Work, and It Should
Norton Internet Security is sold as a turnkey system for novice users. They certainly need something of the sort (although a case can be made that security is now so important that it should be the operating system vendor's responsibility). Users need something that keeps the bad guys from hurting them, without requiring a whole lot of fiddling with, because they don't know how to do it. That's why they buying that product, right?
Unfortunately, Norton Security is written by geeks, who are unable to shed their geek mindsets and produce something that Just Works, as their users need it to. Here's an example of their doing it wrong.
Carbonite, as I've shown you on this blog, is an automatic Internet backup system that not only Just Works, but is my poster application for the Its Just Works movement. Carbonite, like many other applications, periodically updates itself with bug fixes and (we hope) improvements. When Carbonite communicates back to its Internet home site after an update, Norton security detects it and pops up the following box, which caused my wife to come running to me in panic:
If the ultra-smart geeks at Norton, who do nothing but eat, sleep, drink, and live security, can't figure out whether allowing Carbonite to access the Internet is safe or not, how the heck is my poor wife supposed to know? In fact, I MYSELF do not know whether this box is crying wolf, or whether it actually has detected something bad, such as Carbonite being hijacked by bad guys. Take that one step further, and I MYSELF don't know how I would even go about figuring out whether this communication is safe or not.
Norton seems to THINK that this situation is probably benign, as you can see by the "Low Risk" label and the recommendation of "Allow Always". And I think, or at least I HOPE, that they're right. But if that's true and the action really is benign, why is Norton bothering to ask me? It's the same confirmation mindset that I've decried over and over again on this blog. Rather than put themselves in their users shoes, Norton is forcing the user to put on security programmer shoes, and there's not a chance in hell that any user on God's good earth, and I mean NOT ONE SINGLE PERSON, can possibly do it properly. Instead, by crying wolf when no lupine creature is in sight, Norton is conditioning users to click "Yes" every time they see a security warning. They're making all users less secure. Bad idea.
Maybe Norton's lawyers made them do this so that they can disclaim responsibility if they actually do make a mistake. In that case, it wouldn't be the designer's fault, and I will hereby transfer my annoyance and scorn to the lawyers. But Norton messed up here, because they did not put themselves in their users' shoes, as they should have.
Unfortunately, Norton Security is written by geeks, who are unable to shed their geek mindsets and produce something that Just Works, as their users need it to. Here's an example of their doing it wrong.
Carbonite, as I've shown you on this blog, is an automatic Internet backup system that not only Just Works, but is my poster application for the Its Just Works movement. Carbonite, like many other applications, periodically updates itself with bug fixes and (we hope) improvements. When Carbonite communicates back to its Internet home site after an update, Norton security detects it and pops up the following box, which caused my wife to come running to me in panic:
If the ultra-smart geeks at Norton, who do nothing but eat, sleep, drink, and live security, can't figure out whether allowing Carbonite to access the Internet is safe or not, how the heck is my poor wife supposed to know? In fact, I MYSELF do not know whether this box is crying wolf, or whether it actually has detected something bad, such as Carbonite being hijacked by bad guys. Take that one step further, and I MYSELF don't know how I would even go about figuring out whether this communication is safe or not.
Norton seems to THINK that this situation is probably benign, as you can see by the "Low Risk" label and the recommendation of "Allow Always". And I think, or at least I HOPE, that they're right. But if that's true and the action really is benign, why is Norton bothering to ask me? It's the same confirmation mindset that I've decried over and over again on this blog. Rather than put themselves in their users shoes, Norton is forcing the user to put on security programmer shoes, and there's not a chance in hell that any user on God's good earth, and I mean NOT ONE SINGLE PERSON, can possibly do it properly. Instead, by crying wolf when no lupine creature is in sight, Norton is conditioning users to click "Yes" every time they see a security warning. They're making all users less secure. Bad idea.
Maybe Norton's lawyers made them do this so that they can disclaim responsibility if they actually do make a mistake. In that case, it wouldn't be the designer's fault, and I will hereby transfer my annoyance and scorn to the lawyers. But Norton messed up here, because they did not put themselves in their users' shoes, as they should have.
Wednesday, March 14, 2007
From a Reader, About Just Working
A reader named David (no relation) wrote thusly about stuff just working:
"I'm in the United Red Carpet Room as I often am. I just spent 45 mintues (of the 90 I had to spare) trying to log in to purchase a one day pass to the TMobile hotspot. These guys should be flogged in public in front of their families. Every time I didn't get the exact sequence right it would clear out all fields and make me pull out my wallet to enter my Amex details and much more information; over and over and over. I state again, I'm a Technology Manager...it should not be so difficult that I can't spend my money with these people. I buy stuff online all the time. It makes me hostile and makes me want to go back to Continental where intenet access is free in their club in the first place. Shame on Tmobile (I'll cancel my cell phone contract next week) and shame on United. Is their goal to make it so hard to use people will want to subscribe to their outrageous 20 per month access fee or just make it so difficult that no one will want to try so they won't have ! bandwidth problems? Please consider adding this to your suckbusters as this is a defcon 5 suckfest"
In addition, he writes, "I read your fine novel [not sure I intended it as a novel, but OK, I'll take what I can get], and as a development and project manager I made it required reading for my entire team. It's part of our mantra now, thank you for so deftly identifying what we all have known all along. We are in the process of reengineering an applictation (internal proprietary) which is a full on 11 on a 1 to 10 scale of sucking.
You may consider it added, David. Thank you for writing.
"I'm in the United Red Carpet Room as I often am. I just spent 45 mintues (of the 90 I had to spare) trying to log in to purchase a one day pass to the TMobile hotspot. These guys should be flogged in public in front of their families. Every time I didn't get the exact sequence right it would clear out all fields and make me pull out my wallet to enter my Amex details and much more information; over and over and over. I state again, I'm a Technology Manager...it should not be so difficult that I can't spend my money with these people. I buy stuff online all the time. It makes me hostile and makes me want to go back to Continental where intenet access is free in their club in the first place. Shame on Tmobile (I'll cancel my cell phone contract next week) and shame on United. Is their goal to make it so hard to use people will want to subscribe to their outrageous 20 per month access fee or just make it so difficult that no one will want to try so they won't have ! bandwidth problems? Please consider adding this to your suckbusters as this is a defcon 5 suckfest"
In addition, he writes, "I read your fine novel [not sure I intended it as a novel, but OK, I'll take what I can get], and as a development and project manager I made it required reading for my entire team. It's part of our mantra now, thank you for so deftly identifying what we all have known all along. We are in the process of reengineering an applictation (internal proprietary) which is a full on 11 on a 1 to 10 scale of sucking.
You may consider it added, David. Thank you for writing.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)