Practice before Preaching

Tuesday, December 27, 2005

Whilst searching around today for some authoratative statements on web typography, I came across Richard Rutter's pages. This seems like it should be interesting. Unfortunately, however, as a web site it does not stand up very well. Flaws spring to the eye immediately. First, the home page seems to think it is a book cover. Cute, but for a start, surely the topic is quite clearly NOT print? And worse, the few links provided are at the bottom of the page, well below the "fold" on VGA screens (yes, people do still use them). Going a bit further, it gets worse. Viewed with IE6sp2, the text column on the Introduction page behaves very strangely. There seems to be a strange mouse over effect which rewraps the last paragraph, and the last line of the previous one, breaking the left margin alignment. In the next section, (Rhythm & Proportion), it gets worse. The formatting of the link list at the top right is clearly broken, and the links themselves are not clear. As for the Introduction section, the main body text suffers from some strange behaviour. Finally, the use of italics in the typography of the title, "The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web" doesn't seem to make much sense. Italics are used to convey emphasis, and here I cannot see what is being emphasised (or de-emphasised). To my mind, "The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web" is one version that would make more sense. Does all this matter? Yes, because I cannot recommend it to developers who havs a problem with text layout, issues, because they will immediately notice the implementation issues and mistrust the message. To me, the arbitrary use of text decoration reduces my confidence in the content. Since I followed a link from a site I have very high confidence in, Douglas Bowman's Stopdesign, overall I still trust the content. But this really illustrates that when the message is about the medium, the medium really is the message.

When usability goes bad

Well I thought this was quite funny in a subtle sort of way.... basically a metaphor for the perils of not being aware of usability issues in product design. My co-workers didn't get it. Cultural issues I guess...

iPhotocopy

Wednesday, December 07, 2005

Zero points for originality… : http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/12/07/creative_vision-m/ Can't the Japs et al work out the simple fact that if people WANT an iPod, they'll buy one. People who consider that Steve Jobs, not Bill Gates, is the Son of Satan, want an ALTERNATIVE…..don't they ? Honestly, it is all about fashion: very soon, iPods must morph from being "cool" to being "boring" - it is amazing it hasn't happened yet. I bet the average 16 year old girl does not want to go around looking like she's borrowed her dad's iPod, I'm sure that people would buy a better product, if one was offered. Clearly it is beyond the reach of the competition to (a) work this out and (b) come up with a new approach.

User support = support from users ?

Friday, November 11, 2005

You, er, want to me to destroy my data to debug your product ? This is a typical tale of the attitude of many software companies these days to user support. The fact that it emanates from a company which I used to believe offered excellent user support makes it sadder, but nevertheless, it is fairly typical. The company in this specific case is iView Multimedia, the product is iView Pro v3, the latest update to an excellent, agile multimedia catalog application released on 1st November. Unfortunately I discovered several problems with this new release. One, which killed my upload workflow stone dead, was an apparent change in AppleScript syntax. So I reviewed the FAQ, reviewed the user forum, drew a blank, and emailed user support. Here is the core of my support request: > Hello > > I've just upgrade to v3, and to my surprise (sort of...) I've discovered > that the AppleScript syntax for referring to custom fields seems to have > changed. Some 3 days later came the reply (iView turnaround on support used to be closer to 3 minutes, but since they have a clearly issue-ridden new release just out, I'll forgive them that): Have you tried this feature with the latest build of MediaPro from our website? What is the Build number of the version of MediaPro that you are currently running? So, what is wrong with this ? First, they're asking me for the Build Number of a product which was released less than a week ago. Exactly how stable is this product, if they already have a new build out ? They don't tell me where to find the Build number (it is in the About popup), and on the website downloads page the build number is not so obvious (there's a small unlabelled number there, but it would not be difficult to make it clearer). So, rather than ask me "are you using Build n ?" and telling me how to check, I seem to be expected to download, unpack, and install the application again, noting the Build number before and after to see if it has changed. Not ideal. I'd note as well that their download files don't even identify the version number - they've all been called IVMP.SIT since at least v2.0, if not before. Next, there was no attempt at all to answer my question. I could infer, perhaps, the standard "it's never done that before", but I'm not even convinced of that. I am left almost certain that the support guy has not lifted a finger to attempt to validate or duplicate my issue, which is actually quite specific. I might expect something like "sorry, we tried to duplicate the problem, but we cannot. Can you provide us with further information ?" before asking me to take full responsibility for testing. This is not what one pays $199 for. If he could tell me, yes, it was an issue in Build x, but it is fixed in Build y, then fine. But asking me to find out for myself when it could be verified at source is pure buck passing. Running AppleScript in iView, or indeed anywhere else, can have disastrous results. I should not be asked to try this, before any other avenue has been explored. In this case I could seriously compromise a 6 year photo archive. Ok, I'd be stupid to do that, and the security of my data is my responsibility but part of user support should be to suggest safe scenarios. Even worse - in parallel, I discussed the issue on their support forum, and I had in fact found a workaround, which I posted, and which at least one other user succesfully adopted. But this appears to have gone unnoticed. A major source of feedback, albeit unstructured, on their own server, seems to go unused. Let's be clear here: this is NOT user support. This is asking users for debugging support, and charging them for the privilege.. I like iView very much. I've used it for years, although I used to use Aldus/Adobe/Extensis Fetch/Portfolio, and I keep an eye on alterntives. The excellent scripting support and user support for iView kept me a firm customer. It would be quite complex to switch now, as I have a lot of development effort invested in an iView based workflow, not to mention many annotated catalogs. Possibly (dare I say probably) the company realises that switching on this sort of product is not a decision made lightly, and acts accordingly when allocating resources to user support. However, reputations are hard won and easily lost. I hope iView Multimedia realises this.

World Usability Day 2005

Friday, November 04, 2005

Yesterday was the first World Usability Day, conceived and co-ordinated by the UPA. I decided to go along to the event held at the round table event hosted by the Universita della Svizzera italiana, in Lugano. Seeing as Lugano is situated in a small and relatively isolated part of Switzerland, not known for it's IT industry (at least not any more...), I was pleasently surprised by both the number of participants and the quality of the presentations. One bit of useful information which I picked up was finding out about the existence of Roger Pressman's work on software engineering processes. Although I haven't had any time to follow this up yet, it seems that he is one of the few people - or possibly the only one - to have thought about the integration of usability engineering into a full blown iterative software development process. Certainly something worth following up.