The Dan Brown Standard

Wednesday, July 19, 2006

"Don't pick up this book if you are expecting a masterpiece comparable to The Da Vinci Code" says a random review trawled from Google. Well, if I was expecting a masterpiece comparable to The Da Vinci Code, I wouldn't be expecting a masterpiece. I'd be expecting a piece of sensationalist junk written by an illiterate and benefiting from a world-class marketing (I'm assuming that "comparable" is taken as meaning "of similar merit to" rather than "it is ok to compare it" ...). It seems almost impossible to find a book these days which does not feature some cover blurb about the bloody Da Vinci Code or Dan bloody Brown. "Comparable to the Da Vinci Code" .. ."If you like the Da Vinci Code, you'll love this" ... etc etc. The absolute limit is when some moron claims that Umberto Eco's "Foucault's Pendulum" is too difficult to read and not as good as the "Da Vinci Code". Listen, the Zürich phone book is comparable to the Da Vinci Code, although it is more rewarding to read and is far better written. The only book that I've ever read which I would say is worse than the Da Vinci Code is, well, Angels and Demons, by Dan Brown. Actually, it is more or less the same book, except it is slightly worse written (difficult to imagine, I know), and even more ludicrous. The totally unchallenged rise of absolute mediocrity puts me in mind of scenes from "Brave New World". People are becoming less and less willing to submit to any kind of intellectual challenge, to the extent of being actually terrified of any book which doesn't come with 35 how-to-read-it guides (with lots of pictures). Imagination is dead. Literal-mindedness spread by the love affair that geeks have with autism (a bit like Romantic poets and consumption), is taking over. I guess an age gets the literature it deserves. It is really ironic that Leonardo's name is associated with such tripe. Now that the literary world appears to aspire to the Dan Brown Standard, can we assume that sales of crayons and colouring books are rocketing? Pshawww.

You can’t do that on stage any more

Monday, July 17, 2006

Euan Semple recently posted an article about business taking itself too damn seriously, and the consequences of this both on the business and the individuals working for it. I'm coming to the end of my stint of trying to integrate into a big business, and I cannot say how much his words resonate. It may be a cultural thing (both national and business), but the stern, we-are-so-important stuff, in my opinion, totally dehumanises business, make it lose sight of any moral perspective, demoralises or corrupts its employees, and generally serves to cover up mediocrity. Frowning on levity is a sign of a business with no self-confidence, and no sense of proportion. There is no company, no business in world which is so important that it should be beyond laughing at itself. I'm not saying that it there should be an open licence to mock, to attack, to insult. Humour is not an excuse for damaging the company, or for breaking rules. But humour has many benefits. It acts an emotional safety valve. It can make people look at things in a different way. It can encourage participation. It can defuse tense situations. It can make daunting situations seem much less so. In summary, it enhances productivity and creativity by making people feel more like they are part of a community, and not just a bunch of wage slaves. People who frown on humour usually have some personal approval-seeking agenda, which can be seriously detrimental to the company. Introducing a touch of (controlled) levity into a difficult meeting can save the day. Cood managers know this. Bad managers fear it. Related Andecdote: If you come into the arrivals hall at Zürich airport, you will be assaulted by a barrage of huge banners exhorting the wares of the Swiss banking industry. Each one shows what the respective advertising companies appear to believe are aspirational images, generally trendy-blurry monochrome images of immaculately groomed suits (of both genders, but frankly little different) congratulating each other on their good fortune to have inherited huge stacks of loot. Almost always in a cold, impersonal concrete and glass environment, totally devoid of warmth, emotion or humanity (and I'll leave the extension of that line of thought to the reader). To me, this is a sign of an industry, which in the wider scheme of things, has totally lost the plot, at all levels, and from all perspectives.

The AJAX experience ?

Wednesday, May 24, 2006

The brave new world of Web 2.0 ... So when do we start seeing "This site optimized for AJAX" buttons ? "Bugger", as Unlucky Alf would eloquently put it.

Word is a four letter word

Friday, March 24, 2006

l found an interesting and well written post today about the GUI for Microsoft Office 2007 (scheduled for release around 2010 I expect). The post is hosted on an MSDN (= sanitised) blog maintained by Jensen Harris, a Lead Program Manager on the Microsoft Office user experience team (when he has time out from meetings about meeting about meetings, that is). This is all well and good. Sadly, though, it is likely to end up as the all time classic case of lipstick on a pig. Word is an abysmal piece of crap, designed by morons, developed by morons, and used by sheep. It is the mother of all bloatware. The basic text editing and formatting functionality works fine, as long as you don't try to extend it beyond a handfull of pages. but this functionality is obscured by countless badly designed bolted on features to support some nightmare vision of desktop publishing. And guess what? THEY DON'T BLOODY WORK, THEY NEVER HAVE, AND THEY NEVER WILL. Over the past few weeks I have been trying to write a technical document using Word. Technical documents usually need illustrations, and this one is no exception. No problem! Word supports embedded, fully editable Visio documents. Ok, so Visio is not exactly inspiring, but I can live with it. Only....after embedding a few illustrations, my Word file has balooned to 50Mb (hardly big in this day and age, but whatever) and it takes at least two coffees to save. Until it appears to choke when I add another table, and irretrievably corrupts the file. Fortunatly I have zero confidence in Word, so I keep backups. Anyway, no problem! Word allows you to link sub-documents to a master, just like real applications like InDesign - in a mind twistingly clumsy and obscure way, naturally, but at least it works. Sort of. Formatting gets screwed up repeatedly. Sudden wipe out crashes happen at least once a day, apparently associated with the styles & formatting pane. The piece de resistance so far, especially from a usability point of view, is the "remove subdocument" command, which actually inserts the subdocument content into the master. This application is out of control, and it has been for the best part of a decade. About 90% of the functionality is unused by 95% of users, and most of that is fundamentally broken. Is this addressed by Jensen Harris ? No. He honestly seems to think that it can all be fixed with lipstick. The ironic thing is that User Centered Design is largely pointless so far as Office is concerned. Almost nobody chooses to use the thing - it is imposed on them, in one way or another. The only point of this UI excercise on Office 2007 is that they've finally run out of pointless, broken features to justify the so lucrative corporate upgrade cycle, so they've hit on lipstick as an alternative. If these usability people at Microsoft had any integrity, they would insist on getting things to actually work first, and then, maybe, if they were really brave, they'd float the idea of a totally new suite of software designed for users, rather than corporate IT managers and beancounters. There is hope - after all, most of the R&D has already been done. In the meantime, I can only resort to childish reactions:

Motivation by ownership

Thursday, March 23, 2006

You have to be careful about what you write these days. I mean anybody can read this stuff, including the people who can decide if I remain in gainful employment. If I started going on about any sort of real world frustration or annoyance, it could get me into big trouble, as is well documented. Your life belongs to The Man. Of course, some people get away with it. Anyway, all this is to say that this post is NOT ABOUT ANYWHERE IN PARTICULAR. Any ressemblance to workplaces, large companies, and anything else whatsoever is totally coincidental. Where was I ? Oh yes: motivation. This comes up because many people in IT companies have talked to me about being unmotivated, over many years, both as peers and as people I managed. I've noticed it gets worse in large companies. Of course it could all be to do with the lack of empowerment in large companies, the politics, the "swimming in treacle" feeling you get when you actually try to accomplish something new. But in case of people involved in producing software products, I think it has more to do with something close to the heart of usability professionals: contact with users. Most people need to get a sense of value out of their daily life. After all, if you spend 8-10 hours a day sitting in front of a PC, you need to get some kind of payback above and beyond a trickle of money. You need job satisfaction. In my opinion, job satisfaction for software engineers is greatly increased when they see that the products they are working on are sold / used / valued by real end-users. I've found that just a brief exchange with a satisfied end-user brings huge encouragement and motivation to software engineers (and other team members), and the benefits to the company are quite measurable. People get fired up to improve the product, they generate new ideas, they get involved at stages which are maybe outside of their strict job description (requirements analysis, testing, usability). Basically, they build up a sense of ownership. The enthusiasm is actually sometimes a bit difficult to harness for managers, but only a very poor manager would find it a serious problem. In some organisational structures, there are so many layers of middle management squabbling over irrelevancies and jealously blocking any contact that the creative staff end up feeling so isolated that they just don't care anymore. When that starts happening, it's time to take serious note. Things move slowly in big companies, and a problem ignored today might only surface in 10 year's time. But a bit like climate change, once it starts, it is pretty hard to reverse. As I said, I'm not thinking of any particular company here (honest, really), but there is a movement towards employee empowerment, and hierarchy trimming, through mechanisms such as internal blogs, and the companies today that ignore these trends and dismiss them as "not for serious companies" may find themselves a bit further down the line in serious trouble.