Microsoft Packaging Craziness

A very funny video circulated a long time ago asking the question, “What if Microsoft designed the iPod box?” The proposed re-design that followed Microsoft’s packaging guidelines was HILARIOUS and embedded here for your viewing pleasure:

While the Microsoft Vista box is not as ugly as the Microsoft I-pod box, it apparently is hard to open. Hard enough that it warrants a help page on the Microsoft site that includes the 3-step instructions on how to open the box. There are pictures involved, thankfully, since the text instructions are ridiculously confusing:

1. On the top of the box, cut along the grooves on either side of the Microsoft Certificate of Authenticity label.
2. Peel the red tabbed label off the front of the box and discard.
3. Holding the box with the Windows logo facing you, grasp the red tab on the top of the box, and pull it to the right to open the box as shown here.

This is an excellent example of why we need Human Factors.

Bad software design: PowerSchool

Recently, my sister’s high school amended a software platform called PowerSchool, which is single system to track attendance, grades, assignments, and e-mail. For those of you who went to a big college or university, you probably used Banner to schedule classes, pay tuition, etc. This is the high school version of that.Originally, because lunch was half of a period, the high school had periods (this is one example of 3 possible schedules):
1
2
3
4/5
6 (lunch)
7/8
9
10

However, my sister said that because PowerSchool couldn’t handle only some classes having half periods, EVERYTHING now has to be half periods! So now a schedule would look like this:

So now, instead of using the 10 period system they’ve used for the past 20-some years, they had to switch over to a 15 period system!

What’s the lesson here? Poorly designed software that didn’t go through a proper usability analysis (at the company making the software OR the school buying the software) caused a gigantic, confusing, painful, unnecessary and expensive restructuring just to make it work.

Editorial remarks: If you made it to the end of this post, you should also go read the comments. A reader makes some very good points about the merits of PowerSchool that I mostly agree with. Also, I back off on saying that PowerSchool being poorly designed in general (it’s not) and that the software has caused a gigantic and expensive restructuring. I still stand by confusing, painful, and unnecessary, however. I also add silly to the list.

Incredibly long menus in Excel 2007

I do a lot of data analysis in Microsoft Excel, and I’ve been using Office 2007 for some of it. I like my spreadsheets to look attractive (and be organized), so I use the Borders function a lot to delineate different pieces of data. In older versions of Excel, there were a limited number of buttons to draw borders around groups of cells. In Excel 2007, when you click on the Borders button, you get:

Not much to say except for: Wow. Bottom borders, top borders, top AND thick bottom borders. Oh, the choices! And just in case there aren’t enough choices, there’s a More Borders… button at the bottom. Thank goodness. OK, all snark aside, let’s analyze this design.

Why did the designers make a menu this long?
You need to give your users options - options are good in software design. However, in this case, every possible option is a staggering number of possible permutations. You can’t include every possible one, so you should make the most common options more accessible (by being in the menu) to speed up the selection process.

What went wrong?
Well, you can see what went wrong. So many options! Bottom Double Border, Top and Bottom Border, Top and Thick Bottom Border, Top and Double Bottom Border… Draw Border, Draw Border Grid…. the list goes on and on and on, and it doesn’t seem to have any sensible order. Clutter makes visual search more difficult, and working memory is unable to remember more than a few items. This menu is too cluttered and too seemingly arbitrary to be good design. What research was done at Microsoft to determine that “Top and Double Bottom Border” was a border configuration so popular that it warranted a spot in the menu?

What should be done?
Make a portion of the menu a box where you can click to selectively add the borders you want. By including a clickable grid in the menu, you present the user with a huge number of options, but it’s not daunting because the user can “draw” the lines that they want. It also wouldn’t be a bad idea to move the “More Borders…” option closer to the top of the menu. If users are not satisfied with the menu options given to them, it’s likely that they never will be. Giving them one-click access to a more complex menu box will satisfy them, and users who don’t need the “More Borders…” box will only have to skip over one entry, which is not a huge cost.

In short: Make the menu shorter to reduce the load on working memory. Reduce clutter to ease visual search. Change the confusing labels of “Borders” and “Draw Borders” - what’s the difference? I don’t know. But making these changes would improve the menu quite a bit. One menu down, only hundreds more to go!

GUI Wars: Web Browser Find Functions: Safari vs. Firefox

This is a great example of using attention research in user interface design. Standard Find functions in programs like Microsoft Word pop up a dialog box. You type what you want to find, then it highlights the word. It’s hard to find that highlighted word a lot of the time.

Firefox improves the search process by making the search box a bar that is part of the main window. Research has shown that attention often is distributed across discrete objects, and switching between objects incurs a cost (Egly, Driver & Rafal, 1994). With this layout, you don’t need to shift your attention between objects (though the search bar is all the way at the bottom):

The highlighted word is not that hard to find, but depending on where the word is, it can be difficult to do. In this case, you don’t incur an attentional shift cost from the Find window to the main browser window, but you do have to engage in costly visual search for the highlight word! Problematic.

The new version of Safari, however, fixes this incredibly well. It has the search bar right at the top, but it dims the entire page that’s not your search term and pops up and highlights in a bright yellow your search term. Luminance, motion, and color uniqueness. Talk about attention capture (Yantis & Jonides, 1984)!:

Making the Find tool part of the main window: excellent. Using animation to induce motion, brightness, and color uniqueness so that you can easily find what you were searching for? Genius.

GUI Wars: Window switching: OS X vs. Vista

Most computer users have a lot of windows open at once - web browser, e-mail, Word, Excel, etc. etc. Switching between them could always be accomplished through a variety of methods, but the latest operating systems have tried to jazz that up. Since a year or two ago, Apple’s OS X has had a feature called Expose. You press a mouse button or function key, and all the windows shrink to give you a live preview of each one. Then, you click on the one you want:

This works nicely because it gives you a bird’s eye view of all your windows. You can navigate this screen with your mouse or with arrow keys, so you can stay mouse- or keyboard-consistent.

Doing this in Windows Vista, the newest version of Microsoft’s dominant operating system, looks like this:

Pressing Alt-Tab brings this up, and multiple presses of Tab cycle through all the windows. This is nice because you can flip through your stack of windows until you find the one you want. In fact, the feature is called Flip3D.

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So the question is: which one is better? To answer that, we need to delve into the visual search literature. Visual search is a task used over and over again in attention research. You’re looking for a target amongst many distractors. What’s the best strategy you can employ to find it? Well, it depends on the properties of the targets and distractors. If your target is highly salient (i.e., unique compared to all the other items), search can be fast when you’re presented with all of the items at once. This is known as parallel search, and it’s fast no matter how many items are on the screen (find the green square):

However, if your target isn’t salient, then you’re slower. You generally have to examine each item individually until you find your target. This is known as serial search (find the green square again):

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So back to the window switching interfaces in both operating systems. How often is the window you want salient? Not that often - it’s not like the window that you want is bright green and everything else is gray. But you do have expectations sometimes. “I’m looking for iTunes, so I expect the window to look a certain way.” So you may be able to perform parallel search and get your search done faster. Not always, but sometimes.

Think about how both interfaces work - which interface allows you to perform parallel search? Expose! Because Flip 3D does not present you with all targets at once, there is no way you can perform quicker parallel search. You must perform serial search each and every time you switch windows. Considering how much people multitask, this can add up to a meaningful amount of time quickly.

There is the issue of clutter, though. More clutter in a display means longer searches. Expose definitely leads to more clutter than Flip3D, so a search in Expose may take longer. This primarily occurs is you have many windows open. Flip3D is not as cluttered because it only presents you with one window at a time, which underestimates how many separate objects we can handle at a time.

All in all? When it comes to switching windows, OS X’s Expose has the science behind it. By allowing users to engage in parallel search for their window, multitasking can be done much more efficiently than Vista’s Flip3D.