User Interface / Usability

In yesterday’s posting, Monkey Knife Fight, I point to an argument made by Elliotte Rusty Harold that Java’s java.util.List is more “humane” than Ruby’s Array since it has fewer methods. He posed the question “Which of these three remotes would you rather use?”:

There is, of course, a point where having too few buttons or controls is a hindrance. Which instrument would you rather play? This beastly thing with an ancient user interface sporting 88 buttons, each of which reacts with volume proportional to the force with which you press them, and three pedals?

Or this much simpler, more “humane” interface with two controls?

Tagged as: User Interface / Usability

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Synthesizer Demo Buttons

I suppose my playing the accordion is a development resulting directly from my dislike of being tied down behind keyboard stacks. That’s why, prior to my getting my first accordion, I was an aficionado of the uncoolest way to play keyboards: the keytar. I’ve rented a number and owned two. My first was the Yamaha SHS-10, pictured below:

The next keytar was the one pictured below, the Yamaha SHS-200. I’m on my second one of these:

These two keyboards were released in the late 1980′s and were among the first wave of synthesizers to come with a “demo button”. The first affordable “workstation” synths were appearing on the market around then — these were synths that had enough sounds for pop songs, from keyboards to strings and horns to guitars and drums — and many of them also had sequencers, which could record “perfomance data” (that is, the keys you pressed and also how you pressed them). Pressing the demo button would start up a built-in song that would demonstrate the sound and recording capabilities of the keyboard. In the case of the SHS-200, the demo song was an obviously Japanese jazz fusion number, while for the SHS-10, Yamaha had somehow managed to licence Last Christmas by George Michael’s old group, Wham! I recall that the Roland D-5 synth had a pretty good intro to its demo song — so good that the Happy Mondays sampled it as the intro to one of their numbers.

Although these demo songs were cheesy, they were still useful in the showroom, as they gave the synth shopper a decent idea of a given keyboard’s sonic capabilities. It’s been a dog’s age since I hung around a keyboard showroom checking out the latest models, but I’m pretty sure that many synths, especially the ones aimed at hobbyists and amateur musicians, still have demo buttons.

html2wiki’s Demo Button

I found the html2wiki page by way of Reddit. It takes HTML that you type or paste in or HTML from an URL and converts it to wikitext, which you can then copy and paste into a wiki:

Click the screenshot to go to the html2wiki page.

When I thought about giving it a try, I thought “Well, I’d better go look around for some suitable HTML to try,” when I noticed the Use Sample HTML at the bottom of the form. I clicked that and a moment later, I had sample HTML as well as its conversion to wikitext.

There’s all sorts of research as well as personal experience that suggests that web users are an impatient sort. A lot of people might have navigated away and never seen html2wiki in action had it not been for that sample button. By providing that “demo button” at the bottom of the form, the creators of the page removed a small but not insignificant barrier to taking html2wiki for a test spin and provided a moment of satisfaction that users will remember.

It’s got me thinking about the software and services that I work on — are there places where a demo button would come in handy?

Tagged as: User Interface / Usability

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In the most recent posting on Jeff Atwood’s excellent developer blog Coding Horror, the question is posed:

Why does the Mac require the user to jump through a bunch of manual hoops to install an application? Why not use a traditional installer (a.k.a. setup.exe) that automates this manual work for you?

Rather than get into the details of the debate in the comments to that article over the ease of installing apps on the Mac the manual way, let me instead show you Jing’s answer to the question:

(I wrote about Jing in the last post.)

The Jing approach is to give you two options:

1. The incredibly easy way: Double-click the installer script and you’ll be shown this a dialog box that tells you that you’re about to initiate an action that will:
   • Copy Jing to the Applications folder
   • Eject the disk image
   • Start Jing
2. The traditional manual way, in which you drag the app to the Applications folder. An alias to the Applications folder is provided, so you don’t have to open another Finder window.

No options dialog boxes, no EULAs, no extraneous messages for the purposes of marketing — just install and go.

I think it’s a good solution. What say you, Jeff?

Tagged as: User Interface / Usability

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An unsuspecting customer drinking Jakob Nielsen’s kool-aid.

After reading Jakob Nielsen’s rather self-satisfied and smug Write Articles, Not Blog Postings and Robert Scoble’s counterpoint, I have these three things to say:

1. While Nielsen has a number of good ideas on making things usable, when it comes to communicating and reaching out to people, Scoble is the guy to emulate. As with some other UI guys I know, I suspect that Nielsen’s perspective on human factors come from his perspective as an interested outsider.
2. Reading Nielsen’s post, I was reminded of a description of user interface specialists that George once wrote: “little dictators — SimCity-sized tyrants — intent on foisting their New Orthodoxy on everyone.”
3. Finally, I leave you with the best version of an observation that Joel Spolsky has written a couple of times:
   

   Usability is not everything. If usability engineers designed a nightclub, it would be clean, quiet, brightly lit, with lots of places to sit down, plenty of bartenders, menus written in 18-point sans-serif, and easy-to-find bathrooms. But nobody would be there. They would all be down the street at Coyote Ugly pouring beer on each other.

   Tagged as: User Interface / Usability

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