Usability! It's (Not) Everywhere!

When I first moved to New York over 20 years ago, the city gloried in its lack of user-friendliness. Basic facts about getting around, finding the goods and services you needed and even keeping out of danger were treated as state secrets, or at the very least, badges of initiation, separating the cool knowing people in New York from the mouth-breathing yokels in New Jersey and points west. New Yorkers in those days vacillated between wanting show off their hard-won insider knowledge and wanting to keep it from others, who hadn't yet paid their Gotham dues. As a result, they had a tendency to answer requests for information either with over-eager explanations or Delphic ambiguities.  How do you read all those parking signs so as to avoid a ticket? Why do you need a car? In which neighborhoods can you rent an apartment without investing in window gates? Wait and see. How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice.

In those days, much of the city's signage seemed to be more valued for its emotional expressiveness than actual utility.

In the years since, some things have gotten better. Subway maps are now on platforms and inside cars. The MTA (Metropolitan Transit Authority) did two very good things for people who want to navigate its approximately 656 miles of subway and more than 300 separate bus routes:

1. They released MTA-approved mobile apps for navigating public transit.
2. They let people who didn't work for the MTA conceive, design and build them. 

A few months ago the unthinkable, "is this New York?" holy grail of usability happened: New York Redesigned its infamous parking signs, whose lack of readability was such a revenue boon to the city in years past. At the unveiling of the new signs transportation commissioner, Janette Sadik-Khan called the old ones  “a cross between an Excel spreadsheet and a totem pole.” So usability is even creeping into the most defiantly user-unfriendly metropolis in America. Of course, you still can't buy or re-up your MetroCard (NYC Transit pass) anywhere near most bus stops. Good to know  some people in charge are still fighting under the old motto of "damn the passengers, full speed...actually forget that part about full speed, just damn the passengers, OK?" 

In time, I suppose that will change too. Then I'll have to move. 

Silence is Golden

I've been busy (hence the verboten Friday post). A high-profile, long-term, work-over-Christmas online API for which I did information architecture just went live. I've gotten some nice compliments from people in-house; so have the developers who made it real. But the most gratifying response has been from the end-users: almost total silence. The user base consists of highly-placed professionals who can escalate issues in their sleep. And for the most part, they haven't been doing that. A few data glitches (NOT MY FAULT!!) and otherwise nothing.

I really enjoy this kind of silence.

Click Here!

The wonderful Prelinger Film Archives shares this great instructional short from 1927, instructing customers how to use a piece of new and unfamiliar technology: the dial telephone.

Yes, every obsolete technology was once brand new, and people had to learn how to use it.

...but after a short while, the novelty and mystery largely wears off and people don't need to hear about things like how to pick up a receiver without disconnecting the call, what a busy signal means,  or the many marvels that can be achieved by means of cut and paste commands.

It is in this same spirit of "OK, OK, we get it now!!" that I propose the following modest rule:

From this day forward, anyone who encloses with a hyperlink the words, "Click Here" or any variation thereof should be thrown in a deep ditch and have nasty things dropped on them by passerby. 

Seems reasonable enough.
Now allow me to contradict that rule completely. Get the nasty things ready for dropping. If you are including links in the text of a web page and it's not essential that your users click on them (as I did in this blog post), by all means link to a nice descriptive noun. However, if you are writing a web email, or a landing page that wants to prompt a single, desired user action, go ahead and say "Click Here" in a big orange banana button-- with my blessing. Study after dreary study shows that doing this improves all-important click-through rates by many depressing orders of magnitude.

Don't believe me? 
Want to see for yourself? 
Click Here!!. 

The Brave Old World of Cloud Computing

See also: Clouds by Joni Mitchell

Why do I get such a futuristic George Jetson-y thrill  whenever I save a document in my home Dropbox or Google drive folder and re-open it with all changes intact on my work machine?  Why such excitement over what is essentially a very user-friendly ftp client?

Aside from the obvious answer (I'm weird), there's another principle at work: great UI seldom depends upon bleeding-edge technology. In most cases, the gear that underlies some hot development like a Windows desktop system (then) or an iPad (now) has existed for years but was never widely used because it was just too difficult for regular people to operate. If you showed a UNIX programmer from 1981 a 2013 Macintosh command line interface, he (for in 1981, it was probably a he and a bearded he to boot) would be impressed by all the power under the hood but wouldn't find a lot that's new in the code needed to get around inside.

This is in keeping with the progress of a a new technologiy, which usually goes something like this

1. clever somebody invents it
2. bunch of propeller heads fool with it for a while 
3. propeller head demos pique interest of usability designer
4. usability designer builds widely copied open-source prototype
5. wily capitalist finds way to sell a variation on that prototype
6. monetized variation hits the bigtime, is widely adopted by non-techies
7. Years pass. People marry, have children, grow old and die.
8. your cable company includes it in your 3-for-1 bundle.

Note that new technology and great usability almost never arrive in tandem. (The exception to the rule might be Apple's airport base station, which managed to be innovative and elegant.) Computers grew smaller and cheaper all through the late '70s and early '80s but didn't turn into essential home appliances until they stopped demanding their users learn complex command lines. Likewise, touch screens, cell phones with computing power (tip calculators anyone?) , and mp3 players were all around before 2007, but they had never been put together in such an elegant and easy-to-use package as the iPhone before. When mature technology gainss a really friendly UI makeover and distribution model like the one that turned ftp storage into cloud computing, the ease and naturalness of the experience makes you (me) forget that you ever used anything like it before. And that is precisely the point.

Gmail Just Knows, OK?

One of the less-well-advertised side effects of responsive, data-driven technology is its ability to depress the living hell out of you. Recall the moment when the running tally in TurboTax turns from comforting black "Anticipated Refund" to an alarming red "Amount You Owe" and your mental movie of cut abruptly from Caribbean beaches to ramen noodles. Or the time you changed your dating profile body type from "Normal" to the more forthright, "A Few Extra Pounds" and watched your number of potential matches plummet as your publicly acknowledged weight climbed.

While it's true that math calculations have been delivering bad news ever since the Sumerians first began making golf tee-shaped marks on lumps of clay, today's global data network can disenchant  from afar and do it more quickly and thoroughly than ever before, in realms of human experience long untouched by the meaty paw of Big Data. (No wonder that with every well-documented bummer just a Google search away, so many people spend their screen time building redoubts of shared denial. )

My most recent episode of awful truth delivered via asynchronous server query came the last time they upgraded Gmail, a new build which came about when a Mountainview, California-based software engineer  remarked over his cafeteria tray of trout almondine that Gmail's tony exclusivity (you must have at least one human connection on earth in order to use it) might not in itself be enough lock-in its  user base for the rest of this geological epoch. Once the gasps had subsided he went on to propose the development of  a new Gmail, vastly improved by the addition of "features and stuff."  At this point, a fatherly senior developer reminded him in sternest tones that this wasn't the "Google way" and that Google developers weren't put on this earth in order to fine-tune the usability of already-popular apps, but instead to adorn the web with more abandoned beta APIs than there were stars in the firmament or half-assembled lawnmower engines on a meth addict's lawn.

Despite the institutional push-back, the Gmail upgrade eventually went live. Immediately I noticed the biggest improvement  to its "getting all up your business" functionality: its ability to instantly file  incoming emails into "Important" and "not so much" categories as soon as they arrived in my POP account, a triage process that used to take me weeks if it happened at all.

So, for a while now, Gmail has weighed my emails in the balance and more often than not it has  found them wanting. Its codebase quickly determined that nearly all my incoming mail was insignificant enough to siphon into its not-quite-the-thing "Everything else " folder while, my "Important" folder sat,  there like a high school wallflower in taffeta gown and braces, waiting for somebody, anybody to come up and say hello (OK, maybe not anybody. I draw the line at lonely hearted devotchkas from Minsk and temporarily out-of-pocket Nigerian millionaires.).

Maybe you're expecting me to complain about Google's arbitrary and error-prone way of prioritizing my email. I won't because. I can't. With a few rare exceptions, Gmail does a scarily good job at sorting out what doesn't matter (damn near everything), from what does (far too little). And of course, its spam filter is so discerning that when I first switched to Gmail, I flattered myself that the sudden drought of emails promising  endowments to rival the Rockefeller Foundation's was because word had finally gotten around. But no. Gmail knows what really matters.  The paucity of exciting stuff in my  inbox (I imagine Willy Loman's  looked much the same.) is nobody's software bug,  but a fairly accurate snapshot of what is (at least for now) an undramatic  life.

But the boring message list is not without an upside. I'm sure that somewhere in the algorithmic depths of its  heart, Google mail knows that  inboxes short on credible big money offers and lusty come-ons from a string of real-life lovers more than likely belongs to somebody with a decent, steady job, a supportive long-term relationship and a kid. Nothing cements your squarejohn status like having  kids, creatures fashioned by the evolution to continue the species, but not before telling their parents they're really boring.  Still, (I tell myself)  it's a good kind of boring.  It's got the things I longed for and missed back when checking my Erols.com email on my Power Mac 7200 was a walk on the wild side. And for that I'm more grateful than depressed.

So thanks for the insight, Google. I'll do my best to take it in the constructive spirit intended. And if any of your future APIs should  include a "countdown to death" clock, please make sure it's an opt-in feature.

Taking a Friday Dump

If you want people to notice what you've been building online, launch that big project on Tuesday morning; if you want your hard work buried, go live on a Friday afternoon..People who work in online advertising accept this as a well-supported article of faith, but  non-web folks elsewhere in the corporate world  put their hands over their ears and sing "Call me Maybe" at top volume if you dare suggest it. For them, the atavistic urge to dump web content into the laps of a distracted public late on Friday afternoons overwhelms mere reason, or Google Analytics stats.

The obvious question is "why?" For an answer,  consider how things work in efficient offices on the Friday before a long holiday weekend. A carnival atmosphere pervades the cubicle farm. Baked goods are shared, sweatshirts donned, while the boss walks around bestowing meaning glances, whose meaning is,  "Don't be lulled by the apparent laxity. This is still a workplace and if anything's left on your plate, de-plate it before quitting time, cupcakes or no cupcakes. And send me an email  when you're done." This the efficient office people do,  knowing that a contented boss is essential  to continued employment-- and may be all that stands between them and a gap-toothed, type-3 diabetic future. With these bracing sentiments in mind, the efficient and bicuspid-partial workers clean out their in-boxes and Outlook task lists before heading off to weekend cottages or dim hovels to enjoy 48 to 72 hours of not thinking about work.

This "off my plate by Friday night" strategy works great when the only person who judges your efforts  also writes your employee evaluation.  The moment your site's intended audience starts to outnumber the population of your firm's corner offices, it becomes a full-on disaster. Politicians have been taking advantage of the public's Friday night attention lapse to release of news they would rather you didn't see en masse via the "Friday Night News Dump". People who work in offices, on the other hand, envision Friday night before a long weekend  the way TV advertisers view Super Sunday, only with much less evidence to support their confidence.

Smack-talk politicians all you want, but all their pandering has taught them one big thing. They know that: whether you spend your Friday evenings pounding Cuervo shots enough to convince yourself your rendition of "Eye of The Tiger" is the finest ever slurred into a karaoke mike, ferrying your daughter to her Junior Varsity basketball game, or binge-viewing a 42-DVD boxed set of Dr.Quinn, Medicine Woman,  what you are NOT doing, is deep-reading disappointing GDP growth figures from the U.S. Department of Commerce.

You know what else you, the Friday night pleasure-seeker aren't doing? You aren't sitting by your computer waiting for the development department of a medium-sized nonprofit to update its home page, nor is anyone else who doesn't work there.

You might think that explaining  to office people just why that their Friday obsession as charmless as that belonging to 15-nanosecond YouTube sensation, Rebecca Black would convince them to delay things 'til Monday, but you would be wrong. Somehow, they've gotten the idea that since their website could, theoretically be seen by every wired person on planet, it will be, regardless of what earth's other inhabitants have planned for the weekend.  "What you say may be true of other people's websites," their indulgent expressions seem to imply, "but this is different. This is our website: beautiful, engaging and uniquely beloved of God and man. Different rules apply." Like the toddler who must show Mom and Dad the funny thing they did with their Calico Critters play set, even while those parents are in a tête-à-tête with an IRS auditor, they can't process the word, "later." and all your appeals to time and place won't dilute their preschool-strength solipsism one drop.. Their motto is "no time like the present", and  the present is always a Friday night.