There, I Fixed It is a hilarious photoblog that catalogs kludges, jury rigs and hastily-improvised duct-tape repairs and modifications to everyday objects. The photos below are a sample of some of the quick fixes shown on the site, each one somewhere on the spectrum spanning “clever and thrifty” to “cheap, shoddy and frightening”:
(Regarding the photo in the right column, second one from the bottom – the piece of paper attached to the pencil sticking out of the computer says “Pull to turn on”. It’s a jury-rigged replacement for the power switch.)
Sloppy work like this isn’t limited to the physical world. I’ve seen (and okay, sometimes I’ve written) code that could’ve been a candidate for There, I Fixed It, and chances are you have too:
Some of my hacks were a little more elegant and useful in the long-term, as long as you weren’t going to be too fussy about aesthetics. They were the software equivalent of the CD-ROM drive installed below the car radio and attached to it with a cable with 1/8” stereo jacks. They weren’t pretty, but they were solid, reasonably maintainable and viable in the long term.
Others were terrible kludges that were originally intended to be temporary solutions that forgotten and lived much longer than they should have. They were like fixes shown in the two photos on the bottom (the hasty bridge repair and the car exhaust held together with zip-ties).
I’ve also copped out by glossing over bad user interface design with some explanatory text or dialog box instead of actually correcting the design. This is not unlike labelling a doorknob “hard to open” or a hastily-improvised switch “pull to turn on”.
Be sure to check out There, I Fixed It. They’ve had some pretty hilarious pictures lately, and perhaps it’ll inspire (or shame) you to eschew the quick fix or kludge in favour of putting some time and thought into writing better code and building better user interfaces.
Kathy Sierra, who co-created O’Reilly’s “Head First” series of books and who used to write the very inspirational Creative Passionate Users blog, is awesome at helping users become awesome. I use her lessons as guidelines in my evangelism work and even borrowed from her to create a catchphrase that I used when interviewing for my job at Microsoft: “My goal is to help developers go from zero to awesome in 60 minutes.”
The blog O’Reilly Radar points to a great Ignite presentation (a style of presentation that’s restricted to 20 slides, each auto-advancing every 15 seconds for a grand total of 5 minutes) in which Kathy Sierra talks about ways to make your users awesome. The presentation is titled Being Better is Better, and I’ve posted it below, followed by point-form notes, which I took so that it’s easier for you to become awesome at making your users awesome:
If we want to create passionate users, we need to help them get better.
‘Nobody’s passionate about things they suck at.”
Many people still have their cameras permanently set on “P” – automatic mode — even though those cameras offer finer control over things like shutter speed and aperture
What would it mean to our users if we unlock the door and help them be awesome?
In Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Outliers, a major theme is the “10,000 Hour Rule”, which states that it takes about 10,000 hours of practice to become really good at something.
10,000 is a long time – it’ can be a depressing prospect
[Joey: According to Outliers, 10,000 hours makes for about 3 hours of focused practice every day for 10 years.]
To get good, you have to practice all the time.
Anything that makes it easier for your users to get practice – any time, anywhere – will help them get their 10,000 hours (and get good) sooner.
Give your users patterns for success
In any pattern you give your users, make sure that there’s “the one thing” that they can take away as a lesson
You need to answer the question: “What’s the one thing you can do to be amazing?”
Give your users better gear
They’ll work better
“Spend the money!”
Give people a way to justify the better gear you’re offering them
Motivation is important
Treat motivation as a gift
Make a product that people will actually use
“Your treadmill is not in the corner gathering dust because you don’t use it, you don’t use it because it’s in the corner.”
“Make the right thing easy for people and the wrong thing hard.”
And now, some anti-patterns:
We focus on the tool and not the thing the users want to accomplish with the tool
“We treat people really well before they buy, and afterwards, we treat them poorly.”
This is also the reason people don’t want to upgrade
If we want to help people upgrade – which is what they’ll need to do if they want to go forward – we have to accept that it’s a loss and a hit to their self-esteem
We write FAQs as if our users they were intellectually curious and have a tablet PC handy
People hit the FAQs and help because they’re having a horrible experience
“Don’t let the ease-of-use police” step in an dumb something down
You don’t feel awesome when you’ve mastered something that a 3-year-old can master
Hiring a social media consultant is the wrong thing to do
They focus in the wrong direction
Social media consultant are focused on making your users love you, which is the wrong thing – nobody is awesome because they love you
They think the goal is to make users want to party with you
The true goal is to make your users want to party because of something you did that helped them become awesome. They should want to party because of you, but without you
You want to connect users with other users, not with your company
A much better use of social media is to find out:
What role we play in our users’ lives
What role our competitors play in our users’ lives
What the pain and pleasure points for our users are
By trying to be competitive and focusing on our competitors, we end up being uncompetitive
This leads to featurities
We end up building things that end up harming our users
The best thing we can do is to look at the bigger, cooler thing – the world in which our products and our competitors’ products exist, the problems that the products are trying solve, the things at which our users are trying to kick ass – and blog, tweet and use social media about that
Getting WOM (Word-of-Mouth) may be the social marketers’ holy grail, but the true goal is WOFO – Word of [Effing] Obvious.
I’m going to be “booth-bunnying” today and tomorrow at the Microsoft area of the Explore Design fair, which bills itself as “North America’s first design education fair for youth”. It’s an event where young people can find out about the creative, technical and career possibilities offered by the field of design. There’s a wide range of design disciplines represented at Explore Design, including:
Video/game design
Furniture design
Architectural design
Industrial design
Textile design
Fashion design
Interior design
Graphic design
Explore Design takes place today and tomorrow (Wednesday, October 14th and Thursday, October 15th) at the South Building of the Metro Toronto Convention Centre. I’m going to be spending most of my booth-bunnying near the XBoxes, where I’ll be talking about XNA and Xbox Live Indie Games.
Depending on the internet access situation at the Convention Centre and how busy it gets at the booth, I’ll be posting dispatches either from Explore Design during the day or in the evening once I get back home. Watch this space!
While flying home from TechDays Vancouver, something on the sign pointing the way to the gates caught my eye. Note the screen on the right:
Here’s a closer look:
It’s an interesting use for a tab control. The content of each tab page is the same, but each one shows that content in a different language: Japanese, Korean and Hindi (I have no idea why there’s no Chinese; there are lots of Chinese visitors at Vancouver airport). The sign cycles through each tab page, displaying each one for about 10 seconds before switching to the next one.
Is it an appropriate use for a tab control? My guess is that user interface/user experience types (Qixing, if you’re reading this, feel free to chime in) would say “no”. I say “no”, myself. It’s based mostly on a gut feeling, but a little thinking provides me with some rationale, which includes:
There’s so little information on each tab. The purpose of a tab control is to break down a large or complex set of controls into more manageable groups, which in the world of .NET controls are called ”tab pages”. The current tab page, which shows something in Hindi, has no more than a line of tex,t, and the same is true for the Japanese and Korean tabs. They could’ve shown all three languages on a single screen.
Tab controls imply interactivity. The tabs in a tab control are for all intents and purposes buttons. Buttons imply interactivity: you click them and something happens. The same is true for tabs: you click a tab and its tab page becomes the frontmost one. These tabs aren’t clickable at all; they’re just being used to show you what languages the sign uses. Using a tab control in this fashion seems like using a button as a label. It gets the job done, but it is the best way?
What do you think? Feel free to opine in the comments.
This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.
The Incident
I live in Toronto’s High Park neighbourhood, which puts me at that magical distance where biking downtown takes a half-hour, about as long as public transit. If weather isn’t downright terrible and I don’t have too much to carry – say, laptop, change of clothes and even [...]
This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.
The Open Letter
Justice Gray is concerned about TechDays, Microsoft Canada’s touring conference that will hit seven cities this fall. So he wrote an open letter, in which he stated:
I’m a big "fundamentals" guy, and TechDays hasn’t traditionally focused on any sort of development fundamentals. It’s been more focused [...]
This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.
Just in case there’s nothing good on TV and you’re having a “lazy Sunday”, here’s a video of Joel Spolsky’s recent presentation at Google, Learning from StackOverflow.com, in which he talks about the design decisions that went into and the lessons learned from the Stack Overflow site. It [...]
Among Windows 7’s Release Candidate 1’s Best New Surprise Features in Gizmodo are the funky (and quite unexpected!) new desktop backgrounds that come with “the Vista that should’ve been”. I have a couple of favourites. One is the one below, which is reminiscent of one of my favourite videogames of all time, Katamari Damacy:
This afternoon, I’m going to be at what I consider to be one of Accordion City’s best toy stores: Function 13 (156 Augusta Avenue), a place in Kensington Market that is part tech store, part art shop and part gallery.
I’ll be there for It’s Alive!, an open house featuring the work of Sheridan [...]
This article originally appeared in Canadian Developer Connection.
One of the things we saw at the behind-closed-doors, Microsoft-eyes-only TechReady 8 conference was the “2019” concept video shown to us by Business Division President Stephen Elop. Since then, the video’s gone public, with his showing it recently at the Wharton Business Technology Conference and its appearance on [...]
At CUSEC 2009, some of the attendees attempted to psychoanalyze the speakers out of concern for what seemed to be obsessions. The IRC backchannel during my presentation expressed concern for what they believed to be my fixation on butts, what with mentioning the movie Deliverance and showing the “Bottle Rocket in the Butt” video from [...]
Here’s a laptop case designed by designer Rainer Spehl that should work for the techie who wants to mix a little F. Scott Fitzgerald with his William Gibson. Designed for the 15” MacBook Pro, it’s made of wood and features a leather lining and a magnetic latch. I couldn’t find a price anywhere, but [...]
This article was originally published in Canadian Developer Connection.
Comments on “The Device/Desktop” Opportunity
The Device/Desktop Opportunity got a number of comments, both in the “Comments” section and sent directly to me via email. First, I’d like to say “please keep those comments coming!” One of my intentions was to start some discussion.
I got a number of [...]
My old co-worker Darren “Problogger” Rowse IM’d me to let me know about a new article on Digital Photography School titled Turn Ho-Hum Color into WOW! with Photoshop written by guest blogger Helen Bradley. The “before and after” photos show some pretty impressive results.
This technique makes use of the Lab colour space, which people [...]
