Pat’s Point of View

Last year I bought my wife an iPod Shuffle for Valentine’s Day. I thought it was kinda nerdy (and I think she did too!) but I knew she wanted one, rather than flowers etc. Now Apple are thinking the same. This doesn’t mean it’s any less nerdy, but it makes me feel better :)

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On the weekend I found myself in a furniture store (as you do…once you’re married) and this particular store sells only sofas, which you can pretty much configure endlessly to match what you want. So there’s a huge number of options for width, height, length, arm size, arm style, cushion style, fabrics and feet. Fabulous flexibility.

This is good, right? Everybody wants options. Well what I’ve noticed (I’ve been in there more than a few times now) is that this confuses the hell out of customers. People spend literally hours in the store trying to play around with the configuration of their new sofa, locked in a verbal wrestle with the sales assistants. They sometimes comment that the poor girls working there get confused themselves and often don’t quote the same price twice. I’m not surprised, there’s too much choice!

Infinite flexibility leads to infinite options and a greatly reduced chance of the customer being able to make a decision–I mean this is the future of your home we’re talking about, a topic not to be taken lightly :)

Contrast this with your average furniture retailer. You walk in, they have this, this and this ‘model’ of sofa. Perhaps you can change the colour but that’s usually about it. You either like what they’ve got or you don’t. Sounds rather restrictive, but people buy stuff in this way day in and day out. They have a reduced set of choices, but are easily able to come to terms with those choices and can make a decision. Factor into this the weeks, if not months, of furniture shopping which husbands…err, I mean people, typically go through and the decision becomes even easier. Ahh, the power of apathy.

So I think this is yet another case of a business model based on what sounds like what people want, but the reality is that it’s diametrically opposed to what they really want once they’re in the shop. Possibly this would work better if it was done through a website that customers could interrogate with all conceivable combinations of options and get a price, as opposed to a human salesperson. Yet it’s still altogether too much choice, especially when you can go next door for the wham-bam-thank-you-maam shopping experience.

Counter-thought: perhaps this is only the case when shopping to a budget (which I always seem to be). If you had unlimited money to spend, then being able to just pick exactly the bits you wanted might work well. Trying to handle the complexity of the choices available and keep the finished sofa under a certain dollar figure, that’s hard. It means that rather than ‘following your heart’ and simply choose what you want, you end up going around in circles in an effort to find a balance between options and price.

Or maybe this whole problem exists because I’m a man; women probably have some genetic ability to handle infinite choice, like multi-tasking.

See what people are blogging about: furniture, choice, shopping behaviour

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Since it’s Australia Day and we get a day off work, Jenn and I decided to go to the movies. We saw Pursuit of Happyness starring Will Smith. It was quite touching and I doubt anyone left the cinema thinking how bad their life was. Instead I bet they were did the same thing we did: thanked God for how lucky they are.

It was inspiring, that a man could go through so much hardship and succeed when all the odds were stacked against him. I wonder if I could be that strong. But it does remind you that we can do amazing things if we have determination.

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It seems as though corporations are monitoring what people are blogging. Presumably looking for sales opportunities, but also for marketing and PR purposes too. Recently I’ve had companies contact me after I have posted comments regarding their products and services, in an effort to address the issue and make me a happy customer again.

So what’s the problem, this is evidence of the corporate world listening to customers, isn’t it? True, but this kind of thing won’t go unnoticed and I have to wonder what effect this might have on how we blog. Blogging became an ideal and popular way for us to say what we thought without having to worry about who might be reading. But would you say the same things if you knew any time you mention a brand, the issue will be addressed (or you’ll be redressed) by the company who owns it? How long will it be before “help us improve our service” becomes “you shouldn’t have said that”—not that I’m suggesting my blog is so influential as to have companies worried that the untapped customer base is in jeopardy :)

It’s not that far a stretch, in recent years there has been many stories of wiki-meddling and online stand-over tactics being employed by political parties trying to stop bad press.

On the other hand, does a blog post constitute a complaint to the company concerned and thus give them the right to respond? After all, it’s long been accepted that if you put it out there, you have to be prepared to answer for it. I guess it depends on the response you get to your posts (if only we could have telephone trackbacks!). Maybe things swing the other way too; bloggers being rewarded for saying positive things about certain products (although you need look no further than Amazon user ratings for evidence of this).

Well I for one won’t change my blogging habits, I don’t care who’s listening. Buy Dell. There would be no bigger shame than to have the river of free-speech that is the blogosphere be strangled by commercial snoops. Drink Pepsi. No sir, ain’t nothing going to change here. Intel inside. You can’t buy me off (if anyone from Porsche is reading this, I might be willing to negotiate).

See what people are blogging about: blogging, blogosphere, censorship, blog monitoring

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I use an iBurst card in my laptop for mobile "broadband", but as anyone who does so will tell you, it’s so unreliable! I don’t know if it’s the card itself or the ISP we use, Chilli, but it’s almost intolerable and a bit of an inside joke at our office. Funny enough, the advertising slogan for iBurst is "It just works" (implying simplicity and reliability wouldn’t you say?), but this should be "It just works" (as in it barely works at all).

Today I’m on-site at a clients office, and of course connectivity is an issue. I’ve tried moving the laptop around the room every few minutes, which usually prompts it into action, but that got old really quickly. Now I’ve taken to stroking its little antenna which seems to work just as well. See instructional photo to the left, for the correct technique.

This is best combined with some soft banter and gentle encouragement. I can see the movie poster now: Robert Redford in The WiMAX Whisperer.

See what people are blogging about: iBurst, mobile broadband, wimax, wifi

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OK what is this? I came across this in a restroom cubicle in a 60s office block I was visiting recently.

I have no idea what it is and its purpose was far from obvious based on visual inspection alone. I didn’t try opening any doors or turning any handles, for fear of starting something I wasn’t prepared to go through with!

It looks like an oven…but that’s a thought I don’t even want to think about. Something to do with disposal of drug paraphernalia also came to mind, but it looks like original equipment for the building and thus predates ’sharps’ boxes in toilets.

The badge on the bottom plate says “SUGG Westminster”. Means nothing to me.

The first to explain this mystery will receive a suspicious look followed by a “how the hell do you know that?”.

See what people are blogging about: cubicle, what is that?

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I’m a bit of a history nut—ancient, modern, local, it all fascinates me. In particular history that has some link to the present (hence my love of castles and the like), or that is unknown to most people (especially local history, names of places for instance).

One characteristic that touches on both of these aspects is when something is unfinished or abandoned. Things like disused underground railway stations, old tram systems, ruins of buildings or incomplete public infrastructure works really pique my interest. It’s terribly sad and I hate to admit it but I can get terribly obsessed with roads.

You see, Sydney had massive major road plans in the past, but unfortunately something often got in the way of these impressive engineers works:

• Warringah Freeway: ever wonder why when heading north over the Harbour Bridge you hit a lovely freeway-like bit of road for a few kilometres then it kinda ends? That’s because they didn’t finish what was meant to be a monster freeway going all the way to the Manly area (hence the name). This bad boy would have been truly grand, and would have gone north to cross Middle Harbour from Castlecrag to Seaforth then onto the Burnt Bridge Creek Deviation (the only other freeway grade part ever built). Imagine no more chugging along Military Road through Neutral Bay, Mosman and the Spit!
• Northwest Freeway: more road that looks suspiciously like a freeway, Victoria Road over the Gladesville bridge, a few more bridges and then up Burns Bay Road. It’s mostly six lanes. Well, this was meant to be the start of a freeway (also known as the Castlereagh Freeway) going from the City (using Anzac bridge and meeting up with the M4 East) to Castlereagh in Sydney’s far west. Eventually the M2 and M7 were built (which together go most of the way) but the start and end of the whole route were never finished. Since the M2 is now being linked to the Warringah and Gore Hill Freeways via the Lane Cove Tunnel there’s no need. What a shame. Equally fascinating is the fact that this would have also been connected to the F3 to Newcastle, instead we have to use Pennant Hills Road as the link.
• M4 East: The plan was to link the M4 motorway to the City West Link and then on to Anzac Bridge. This would give uninterrupted freeway from the city (and eastern suburbs) all the way to the mountains. Of course this one would probably mean a great big tunnel under where I now live, or something equally bothersome, but it would be an impressive road.
• And there are plenty more Sydney ‘ghost roads’. A fascinating piece of evidence for many of these aborted plans exists in the form of land reservation (where the government reserves the land it needs to build a freeway). It’s easy to spot the huge line of vacant land snaking its way through the suburbs using satellite photos. At the time of writing this the partially constructed M7 (and reserved land further down the route) can be seen using Google Maps.

Even in the face of logic, something inside me is screaming “Just finish it!”. Most of these planned works would be brilliant if completed, forming a very impressive network of freeways (all interconnected) and would eradicate horrific traffic on existing roads (just think Military Road or Parramatta Road during peak hour). They said they would build it, why don’t they just build it? Arrgh!

If you’ve read this far and think I’m bizarre, think of my poor wife who has to listen to me rant about freeways, bridges, forts and trams. Like how the former tram system in Sydney has shaped the roads we use today; Anzac Parade, Great North Road to name but two. “Look honey, you can see where the tracks were!”

Anyway…I could go on and on :)

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Apple announces it’s new iPhone (iPod, mobile phone, palm-top). Too bad I’ve just recently got a new phone and new iPod.

It does look pretty darn nifty, especially the touch screen interface. It’s interesting that this final (?) version is quite different to the many different prototypes or suggestions that have been floating around for years.

The video demos on the site show the interface in action, but I wonder how well this would work in practice. That’s a hell of a lot of fairly complex functionality to squish into one device without any buttons. Most of their devices are quite usable, but lately the usability of Apple products has slipped a bit.

For example, my new 80GB iPod has a few surprises. Firstly the search functionality is new (or at least it wasn’t on my old one) and seems OK, but it might be pushing the limits of the controls (scroll ‘wheel’ and buttons) available.

Then there’s the fact you need to wake it up by pushing ‘menu’, on my old iPod you could just press play and keep going where you left off. The extra step is annoying, especially as the Apple logo that appears whilst it’s waking up is hard to spot and at first I thought it wasn’t doing anything at all.

Oh and then there’s this little gem: if a track has an artist but not an album, browsing by ‘artists’ doesn’t show the track! You can get to it by browsing through ’songs’ or by using the search though. For some reason I immediately started thinking this was because an SQL query buried in there somewhere joined the artist table with the album table in order to show the tracks for the artist in question. How geeky.

See what people are blogging about: iPhone, iPod, Apple

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Wanted: web developer
Term: freelance
Location: must be based in Sydney for face-to-face meetings
Time frame: next few weeks
Rate: open to all offers
Project description: I need a freelance programmer to build a ‘community portal’ website using an open source CMS (eg: Mambo, Joomla, Druple, postNuke, phpNuke etc) and then customise functionality and look and feel

By all means, pass this message on :)

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Could youth be to blame for poor usability?

Those designing and creating things we use in our daily lives are generally quite young. This is certainly true of web design, but also in many other fields such as product design, architecture and most things artistic. Along with youth comes enthusiasm, creativity and the inspiration one finds as they begin down their own particular path in life. Excellent, without this many great ideas simply wouldn’t exist.

But it’s an inescapable truth that wisdom only comes through experience, so with the above qualities also comes impatience, brashness and let’s face it, a bit of a superiority complex. Young designers are unlikely to consider factors such as audience goals and the broader context (social responsibility?) in which the product of their skills will exist. And that’s fair enough, they’re focused on toning their technical skills and forging their own presence in the big wide world. So the ’soft’ aspects usually come in second place, if they even finish the race at all.

Conversely, if you look at the most respected and influential people in the [broad] user centred design community—such as Don Norman, Bruce Tognazzini, Bill Moggridge and some of the ‘web crew’ like Jeff Veen—they are all seasoned veterans. Most have moved through many different jobs in their careers and have accumulated broad experience that helps them with ‘holistic’ design. That’s not to say they are perfect and made no mistakes when they were young; indeed that’s precisely my point, they have. It’s only through the passing of time, and building of experience, that we gain the ability to design products and solutions whilst giving proper consideration to all aspects of the ‘problem space’. Those who stay in the game for the long-haul are all the better for it.

I don’t mean to stereotype everyone under a certain age as irresponsible and everyone over that age as supremely wise. And of course there are exceptions to any rule, but I think generally the hypothesis holds water. Most cases of poor usability occur because the person directly responsible hasn’t the experience to know better, rather than deliberate malpractice, evil corporations or lack of methodology.

And it does seem that innovation and creativity are more prevalent earlier in one’s career and a greater appreciation for context and usability come about later. There’s little doubt in my mind that a combination of both ends of the spectrum is crucial for a successful design endeavour. And when this requires two ‘types’ of people to work together to achieve the right combination, mutual respect and knowledge sharing are the key.

Which is why the current trend for experienced members of the Information Architecture and UCD community to want to leave the practise, is so potentially devastating. If we lose the experience we will be left unbalanced, as the field of web design was before we ‘discovered’ usability, HCI and all the other old school knowledge that are now key fixtures in any responsible designers arsenal.

See what people are blogging about: design, usability, youth vs experience

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