Designing without knowledge

Snipped from CNET’s Appliance and Kitchen Gadgets blog (emphasis mine):

I’m a big fan of Alton Brown. When it comes to cooking shows, I think his scientific approach is better than pretty much everything else on the Food Network. So, when I heard that he had helped General Electric design an oven, I had to check it out.

Brown consulted with the engineers who designed GE’s line of Trivection ovens. The company asked Brown to teach their engineers to cook, so that they would better understand the way their appliances are used. The ideas GE’s engineers learned in Brown’s classes lead to the combination of thermal, convection, and microwave energies to cook food faster.

So the engineers at GE were designing ovens when they didn’t really know how to cook? Are you kidding me? GE has been making ovens for how many decades, yet they only think now to bring in an amazing Food Scientist to teach the engineers to cook?

Lesson #1 of consumer product design: KNOW YOUR USER

Author Note: Even though I don’t own my own house, I love to cook and desperately want this oven.

Inconsistencies in Deleting Objects on the iPhone/iPod Touch

Transfer of training is the concept that if you learn how to perform a function in one context, learning is much faster to perform the same function in a different context if the actions are the same. For example, copying and pasting is the same between Microsoft Word, Notepad, Adobe Photoshop, and others – Control-C and Control-V. These conventions are created through traditions and user interface guidelines, such as Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines for OS X and the iPhone. Consistency is good: users learn an action once, and it can be applied everywhere. Transfer of training.

However, the iPhone/iPod Touch interface has several glaring inconsistencies. One is how to delete objects. What’s been touted in Steve Jobs’ presentations has been swiping your finger across an object to delete it. For example, in Mail, the user swipes their finger across a message, and they get:

Then, they press delete, and it’s done. Simple enough, once users learn the finger swipe action.

This is almost the same with deleting a video. The finger swipes across a video and the red Delete button appears, but there’s a second confirmation:

This is not too drastic of a change, and adding a confirmation is not necessarily a bad idea, especially when it’s so obvious as to which buttons do what.

However, trying to delete a bookmark in Safari requires not only confirmation, but trying to guess at the meaning of buttons. The user brings up the bookmarks list, and a finger swipe does nothing. Instead, there is a button on the lower left labeled “Edit,” which does not evoke the “Delete” action at all. Once the user finally presses “Edit”, they are presented with little red circles to the left of the bookmark. It is important to note that this iconography is not used anywhere else in the interface. Finally, once the user clicks on the red circle next to the bookmark, they see the familiar red “Delete” button. Whew, that was different.

Moving on to the Notes application, however, shows a major breakdown. This, in my opinion, is the worst offender of implementing the delete feature. Deleting a note does not involve a finger swipe or an “Edit” button. Instead, to delete each individual note, they must be opened one-by-one. Of course, there is no indication of this. Once the note is opened, the user is presented with:

Suddenly, there is a Trash Can that is assigned the Delete command. More iconography that is never used in the iPod Touch interface, despite its familiarity to the user.

Yes, the iPod Touch interface is very new, but Apple is known for its consistent and intuitive user interface. This is an example of a total disregard for consistency in Apple’s shiniest new product, and it detracts greatly from the usability of the iPod Touch. Every computer user knows how to Copy and Paste, because the keystrokes are the same across applications. But when something as simple as a Delete command takes on four different implementation in four applications on a system, there is a problem. Apple desperately needs to standardize their interface to make transfer of training much easier from one iPod Touch application to the next.

Bill Gates’ 2003 e-mail detailing usability nightmare

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer recently published an e-mail from Bill Gates to several Microsoft employees about his experience trying to download Windows Movie Maker for Windows XP. It’s scathing in the level of detail Gates goes in to, number of steps he had to perform, and the fact that he never got it working. Bill Gates didn’t get it working. He created Windows.

Now THAT is user testing!

Best Bill Gates quote from his e-mail: “So I give up on Moviemaker and decide to download the Digital Plus Package. I get told I need to go enter a bunch of information about myself. I enter it all in and because it decides I have mistyped something I have to try again. Of course it has cleared out most of what I typed.”

Best quote of the replies in response to Bill’s e-mail: “Guess we should start working on a list of things that need to be fixed withe web sites. W1J, and with windows, and identify owners. Bill’s frustration is not unreasonable.”

Note: This e-mail is from 2003, but I’m sure much of the content is still relevant today.

Link to article
Link to the original chain of e-mails (PDF)

Visit the Air Force Web Sight for more details

The military, being what it is, is very competitive. There are rivalries between the Army and Marines, for example, because they’re both ground forces. Another big rivalry is between the Navy and the Air Force to determine who has the better toys (nuclear submarines win over fighter jets, of course).

Nonetheless, after seeing a banner ad on the NBC website, I can say that at least the Navy knows how to spell, unlike the Air Force:

The only human factors lesson to be learned is to proofread your work to make a good impression on the one who is reading the advertisement. They are much more effective that way.

Microsoft Word 2008 keyboard shortcut insanity

One of the rules of software design is that menus and commands should be as similar as possible between all applications. In OS X, Command-C means copy and Command-V means paste. This eases Transfer of Training from one application to another. Microsoft Word 2008 violates this principle, however. To initiate a search, the standard Command-F is used. However, to find the next instance of the search term, Command-G is traditionally used. This is not the case, unfortunately. It is possible to re-assign shortcuts to different commands. As blogger Pierre Igot found out, it is surprisingly and ridiculously difficult to do.

Snip:

“Easy,” you say. “Just go to the ‘Customize Keyboard’ dialog box, find the ‘Find Next’ command and assign command-G to it.” Right.

First of all, good luck finding “Find Next” in the list of commands in the “Customize Keyboard” dialog box. Due to Microsoft’s completely nonsensical way of naming Word’s internal commands, the “Find” command is actually listed as “EditFind,” but the “Find Next” command is not listed as “EditFindNext”:

That would be too easy. Instead, it is listed as… “RepeatFind”:

In the menus, the commands are listed as “Find” and “Find Next.” However, in Word’s internal naming, the command is “RepeatFind.” That’s not even transfer of training - that’s simple consistency, and it is not followed here.

Hit up the rest of the post and read about this exercise in frustration.