Computers: Changing from power to experience

Selecting computers on their merrits ...

"It is clear to me, and the Apple move really got me thinking along these lines, that people are starting to make decisions based on other criteria than pure performance and that the overall user experience is becoming a bigger differentiator. There are reasons for what is suddenly driving Apple into big companies and it is affecting the battle between AMD, Intel and Nvidia as well.


Apple's enterprise move

Last week, I was visiting one of the most powerful companies in technology - one that is typically thought of as a Microsoft partner. I noticed a lot of Apple computers and even the guy briefing me had a MacBook Air. Since this was a traditional Windows shop, I paid a bit more attention on what was going on at that site.

Apparently, the buying authority for employee devices and supplies has become decentralized and has been moved to the managers who own the related profit and loss. The idea behind this is that these managers are closer to the problems and can better assess how to most effectively spend their limited budgets.

This is a heavy laptop shop and, like most, is still on a 2-year rotation and buys laptops with full services at a cost of about $3600, excluding the software or central services from the company's IT organization. Because a few people wanted to use Apple machines, an internal peer-to-peer support organization was set up and, initially, anyone who wanted an Apple had to get special permission and generally buy it themselves.

Upon review, the costs associated with these Apple users turned out to be vastly less than those associated with Windows machines for obvious reasons, including the fact that the employee, not the company, bought them. But, when managers looked at the departmental cost, a $1800 MacBook Air saved $1800 over a $3600 Windows machine, because the annual service cost can be avoided.

As a result, employees at this company can now select, once their Windows box is up for replacement, an Apple machine and speculation is that most will elect to do that. That means they save the company tons of money and those employees are usually very happy with their computer. Many apparently elect to use their own money to buy an even better laptop from Apple."    (Continued via UsabilityNews, TG Daily, Rob Enderle)    [Usability Resources]

Monthly BayCHI Program

Monthly BayCHI program on Google Chrome ...

"Tuesday, December 9, 2008:

Designing Google Chrome
Pursuing a philosophy of "content, not chrome," the Google Chrome team sought to design a window manager for the web, a browser that would recede into the background and elevate web pages, applications, and entertainment to first-class citizens on the modern desktop.

Glen will describe the process and reasoning behind this approach, the challenges and user research involved, where Chrome is going, and how you can get involved.

Glen Murphy is Google Chrome's designer and an engineer on its front-end team. Prior to moving to California to work at Google, Glen bounced around Australia as a CS dropout, a dotcom-boom designer, a programmer of interactive installation artwork, an engineering lead, a Master of Design student, and a suit-wearing enterprise software consultant."    (Continued via BayCHI)    [Usability Resources]

When Technology Fails

The usability of technology ...

"Modern information and communication technologies open doors to a wealth of information. But many users find it difficult to set up these devices and frustrating when they break. According to a recent survey by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, nearly half (48%) of adults who use the internet or have a cell phone say they usually need someone else to set up a new device up for them or show them how to use it. And many users of various devices and services encounter breakdowns from time to time.

Specifically:
- 44% of those with home internet access say their connection failed to work properly for them at some time in the previous 12 months.
- 39% of those with desktop or laptop computers have had their machines not work properly at some time in the previous 12 months.
- 29% of cell phone users say their device failed to work properly at some time in the previous year.
- 26% of those with Blackberries, Palm Pilots or other personal digital assistants say they have encountered a problem with their device at some time in the previous 12 months.
- 15% of those with an iPod or MP3 player say their devices have not worked properly at some time in the prior year."    (Continued via Usability News, Nico McDonald, Pew Internet)    [Usability Resources]

What if Gall’s Law were true?

Applying this concept to design ...

"An interesting bit came across my twitterstream the other day:

Gall’s Law

“A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system.”

Yup, seems to hold for the complex systems we know and love: organic life, government, law, medicine…and of course Twitter.

Let’s imagine for a moment that it does hold. This would change lots of things, including much of the software world, which is laden with complex behemoths who frustrate us daily.

1. Building simpler software from the start
Obviously, if Gall’s Law is true then more teams would start out building really simple software instead of overly complex stuff. Sometimes, though, it’s hard to think that way. Instead, the thinking seems to be, if we’re going to be as successful as (X), then our system needs to do more than (X). But in complex, social software, that may actually be impossible, since (X) didn’t spring fully-formed into life, either. Most of the software people try to emulate quickly took years and years to evolve to where it currently is. (as an aside, my recent argument is to focus on designing to support a specific activity and nevermind emulating success for its own sake)

2. Meeting solid metrics before adding features
This is an interesting idea: make sure that your software works at some basic thing before you add features to it. I’ve seen on a couple projects in which there was a tension between the current under-performing software and the ambitious engineering plan that adds a lot more features. Which do you do? Stop and get people using the simple software first or push on and hope that people will come flocking after you’ve added a few more features? Well, according to Gall’s Law you get the simple software working first. My question is…are there teams who actually do this? Are there any that have actually said: “we have not reached our initial goals, let’s stop adding features and work on the ones we already have”?"    (Continued via Bokardo, Joshua Porter)    [Usability Resources]

American English vs. British English for Web Content

Jakob Nielsen on American vs. British English for website content ...

"Users pay attention to details in a site's writing style, and they'll notice if you use the wrong variant of the English language.

There are many differences between American and British English, including:

* Spelling: color vs. colour, behavior vs. behaviour, theater vs. theatre.
* Terminology: truck vs. lorry, cart vs. trolley, two weeks vs. a fortnight.
* Concepts: what is football anyway — American football, soccer, or (for the truly brave) Aussie rules?
* Slang: do you call this sport "footie"?
* Abbreviations: do readers know that PA=Pennsylvania? Not if they're outside the U.S.

So, which version of English should you use on your website? There's no simple answer, but usability studies do provide two firm insights:

* Language matters. Users notice when a website uses a different version of English than the one they're used to.
o Some users will simply assume that the site is littered with typos, poor spelling, and weird words, all of which reduce credibility a good chunk.
o Other users will recognize that the site is using a different variant of English. These users won't think the site is poorly produced; they'll simply assume it's foreign and doesn't apply to them.
* Be consistent. Pick one language variant and stick to it. Varying the style confuses everyone and signals poor attention to detail.

Aside from this, I can offer only one firm recommendation: If your site is based in a single, English-speaking country and you don't mind being viewed as a local site from that country, use its language variant. So, a U.S. site should use American English, whereas a U.K. site should use British English. Similarly, sites based in Australia or other Commonwealth countries that predominantly use British English should use that variant.
International Sites
Problems arise in two cases:

* When your site is based in an English-speaking country, but you want to be seen as an international site.
o The goal here is to go beyond borders, rather than to simply serve foreign customers. For example, a Las Vegas hotel site won't offend British tourists if it's written in American English. Nor will a site selling genuine Scottish tartans lose American customers because it uses British English. Indeed, when you represent local products, using the local language adds verisimilitude to your claims.
o Canadian sites that mainly target the U.S. should use American English, unless they want to emphasize the fact that they're foreign. (This can be a selling point, but most American users view it negatively.)
* Your local language isn't English, but you need an internationalized version of your site for foreign customers. (Ideally, you should produce a localized version for each country where you have customers, but this isn't usually feasible; typically, organizations have a single English-language site to serve users from many countries. See my earlier article for internationalization guidelines beyond language.)

With the latter issue, much depends on a site's context. For example, I came across the following case during my recent seminars in Europe: A Scandinavian university wants to attract foreign students and thus has an English-language version of its website. So, should it use American or British English? The answer depends on both the main target audience and the main competition. If prospective students hail primarily from Europe and the school's main competition is U.K. universities, the site should be written in British English. If the primary target is American and Asian students, the site should be written in American English. Similarly, if the main competition is American universities, the Scandinavian site should use American English. Why? Because prospective students will search the site using the same terms they've seen on other sites, and using the same language variant will enhance SEO (search engine optimization).
Spoken English
The guidelines are clearer for spoken English, as used in video voiceovers, podcasts, and the like:

* The Queen's English is posh and universally admired. Use "Received Pronunciation" like the BBC used to do, and people will understand you around the world. But don't speak upper-class English if you claim to under-sell Wal-Mart.
* Midwestern or Northeastern American accents are also easily understood by international users and carry less of an upper-crust connotation.
* U.K. regional dialects, such as Scots, Irish, Welsh, and Northern English are hard for foreigners to understand (and Cockney is impossible). So don't speak like the BBC does these days :-)
* Most other accents — such as Texan or Australian — carry strong regional connotations, which can be positive or negative, depending on your brand. Unless they are very strong, these accents are usually not as hard for foreigners to understand as the U.K. regional accents.

Language = Voice
Using American or British English definitely impacts your site's style. Thus, the decision ultimately comes down to identifying the content style that's most appropriate for you and your customers. The answer isn't easy, but the decision must be made; users will notice if your tone is off."    (Continued via Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)    [Usability Resources]

The UX Designer’s Place in the Ensemble: Directing the Vision

The role of the designer ...

"I’m sitting in a conference room with a coworker and two clients. It’s chaotic, hot, and a challenge just to walk around without tripping on the mess surrounding us. We are in the midst of designing and are buried in paper and sharpies and flipcharts. The walls around us are covered with consolidated data from requirements gathering and flipchart pages we’ve filled with our thought processes. Every few minutes, we need to retape some piece of paper that’s in danger of falling into a crumpled heap on the floor. Then, suddenly, I’m gripped with the feeling of déjà vu. It seems like I’m working on the same design I’ve worked on a thousand times before—and I’m getting bogged down in the details to boot! It’s at once disheartening and terrifying. But I’m the lead on this project, so I need to drive the team forward—which presents a challenge at this particular moment.

In that moment, I realized I had to step back and take a new perspective on both my role and the goal of our design.

Inspiration from an Unexpected Source

When I found myself trapped in déjà vu and needing a new perspective, I turned to theory I had learned in a directing class for inspiration—and ironically, direction. I realized I might gain insight on the lead role I was playing if I thought about how my role correlated to that of a theatrical director.

You may ask, What does directing have to do with creating a user interface design? Well, we know a director is responsible for the strategic vision of creative work. That’s a given. But, did you know he is also responsible for ensuring a successful outcome that both meets his vision and is in line with the producer’s desires and budget? To make that happen, a director works with the cast, crew, costume and set designers, and everyone else who contributes to a successful theatrical production to pull together a cohesive product, without losing site of his vision. It’s a complicated job. In this scenario, change director to UX lead, producer to business owner, and the rest to designers, developers, and technical writers. Is this starting to sound familiar? Though I’d found myself feeling lost, fortunately, I did find inspiration in the unlikely source of a directing class.

In my directing class, we had studied five different theorists—all with their own unique perspectives and ideas. While I absorbed all of this information in preparation for my own first directing experience—a scary story in itself, but one for another time—I found myself intrigued by how many of the concepts could translate to any creative process, not just theater.

Peter Brooks’s The Empty Space, in particular, stood out as an approach that could help define direction and purpose when doing any kind of creative work. His groundbreaking book describes the landscape of theater as he saw it in one moment in time. His categorization of the four types of productions he typically encountered—Deadly, Holy, Rough, and Immediate—slightly esoteric though it was—reinforced the need, first and foremost

* to understand the ultimate aim for the experience or design you are creating
* to continually go back to that goal if you start feeling like you are getting lost

Brooks also gives us a way to measure the success of our ultimate aim and think about a long-term strategy—if we take these things into consideration from the beginning. For me, these concepts were the lifeline I needed to pull myself out of the weeds and recenter my focus."    (Continued via UXmatters, Traci Lepore)    [Usability Resources]

Ten Recipes for Persuasive Content

Writing effective content ...

"In many of my columns, I have touted the importance of persuasive, or influential, content and shared relevant theories and arguments, sprinkling in some practical tips and examples along the way. This column brings together a collection of practical tips, or recipes, for persuasive content. My goal for these recipes is to help anyone who touches content to bake in some influential goodness. Because of my background and experience, these recipes have an English-speaking American flavor, but I think they are a useful starting point for international content, as well.
1. Talk like a person.

Your content needs to sound like a human being crafted it, not like a system regurgitated it. Letting Go of the Words, by Ginny Redish, offers some great tips along these lines—such as using first person. [1] Additionally, I’d like to point out two things you can do to make your content appealing to readers:

* Be polite. Being polite does not usually mean adding a dash of please and thank you to all of your content. Rather, it means ensuring your content communicates respectfully. For instance, if your customers are older or tend to communicate formally, you may want to add the occasional please. If your customers are younger or more casual, they may enjoy sassy or friendly sayings that serve the same purpose. [2] Figure 1 shows an example from Bliss that employs both traditional courtesies and clever sayings.
* Be genuine. Most people find someone who seems genuine more persuasive than someone who seems like a hypocrite. I believe we can imbue content with a genuine quality by maintaining a consistent tone, sticking to a consistent message or focus, and ensuring our content is consistently accurate.

2. Establish credibility.

People tend to find a trustworthy person more influential than an untrustworthy one. B.J. Fogg has done some interesting work on credibility. [3] The following points draw on that work, as well as my own experience:

* Provide specific contact information. Showing a company’s phone number, email address, and physical address reassures customers that your business is legitimate and accountable.
* Show credible affiliations and certifications. If you’ve got them, flaunt them—especially if yours is a new brand or business. Figure 2 shows the scanR home page, which incorporates positive product reviews from well-known brands.
* Make related policies or guarantees easily available. While people often discuss doing this as a way of offering answers to customers’ questions about policies or guarantees, in my opinion, what’s just as important is customers’ seeing you have policies or guarantees. Making them available is a sign of your company’s credibility. Following this tip with the right timing is especially powerful."    (Continued via UXmatters, Colleen Jones)    [Usability Resources]

The Non-Intrusive User Interface

Cluttered and complex interfaces ...

"Technology as a whole should enable us. It should ease our daily tasks, offloading some of the burden, whether that be mental processing or physical expenditure. This should be especially true of computers our daily interactions bring us in contact with and more still when the bulk of our time is spent working with them. Personal computing should allow us to focus on a given task in a way that encourages us to accomplish more than we otherwise could. Every means of interaction within the system should support the task at hand with as little interference as possible.

Sadly this is not the state of computing for most users. The most popular metaphors in computing today - the desktop, the start menu, folders - and commonly learned ways of interacting with them - point and click with the mouse - actually discourage productivity and break concentration/focus from a task. The implementations of these ideas further this interruption. True most users now have been trained to reach for the mouse and their hand eye coordination is good enough to accomplish any given step within a reasonable time frame.

How though does the switch-tasking our brain does to accomplish these steps affect the flow of thought for the current project? Clearly the less divergent thoughts and less steps required for any single step, the less the thought process is diverted from the main task. Further while few people struggle to make the required movements with a mouse, what affect does the repetitive nature of the movement have on long term health and usage? No doubt anyone who uses a mouse on a daily basis for several hours has personally felt the strain on their wrist that naturally comes with such usage.

The modern computing user interface has become cluttered and distracting, albeit a composited, semi-transparent glossy distraction. The initial appeal of such common interface elements hides the distraction, disguises the intrusive elements. It’s as if the computer were telling you, “never mind this modal dialog that just interrupted your thought process, it’s so glossy it must be helpful”.

Consider the average means of launching a program. Is it really ideal to require the user to graphically navigate to some onscreen coordinate that receives instructions before thought is transferred to action? Doubtful. How much screen real estate is essentially wasted for interface elements that support this idea? And how much time is spent arranging or re-arranging the frequently less than ideal placement of windows within this paradigm? Most daily computer users quickly outgrow the nagging tedium of these interfaces, but have no option to adjust the defaults.

I personally prefer an interface that is minimal and stays out of the way. An interface that handles much of what we have come to think of as routine automatically. And one that is fully configurable and flexible enough to support interaction in the manner that works for best me. The tiling window managers available on Linux and specifically Xmonad support this beautifully.

With Xmonad window management is automatic. I do not have to think about window placement as every window is automatically arranged to take the best advantage of screen real estate based on simple rules that I have configured. I can call applications with a single keystroke and they appear exactly where and how I want them. I can send them away or bring them back to the current screen with little more than a gesture, not once having to remove my hands from their comfortable perch above the keyboard. Many applications do not play nicely with this idea though and try to force certain window behavior. For these few troublesome programs it a simple thing to always “float” them, so that they behave in much the same as with traditional window managers. All of it is easily configurable in Haskell, an advanced purely functional programming language that is truly a joy to work with. Because of it concise syntax and clarity, I have been able to easily configure Xmonad to behave as I like, and it’s completely stable.

What is more, the means in which information is communicated is extremely configurable. I chose a minimal status bar using dzen, based on example scripts on the dzen wiki. Information when, where, and how I want it."    (Continued via WebFramp)    [Usability Resources]

The Biggest Web Site Usability Mistakes You Can Make

Asking the right questions ...

"When you built your first web site, didn’t you just want to promote it everywhere with big bold letters saying, “HEY EVERYONE! COME HERE AND LOOK AT MY WEBSITE! ISN’T IT GREAT?” Or, when you submit your web site to forums for web site reviews, what do you typically ask for? You may write, “Tell me what you think of my web site” or “Which color do you like better, blue or red?” or “Did I optimize for search engines properly?”

The worst mistake you will make as a web site owner is to ask someone to “look” at your web site. It’s like the dreaded, “Do I look fat?” question. There’s never a safe answer. For starters, someone may look slim standing up, but resemble the Buddha when sitting on a couch. You need to assign tasks to get honest answers to these tough questions.

To understand if your web site is meeting its usability requirements, ask people to take it for a spin and try it out—and more specifically, to see if they can answer the following questions:

What is the purpose of the site?

Ann Smarty wrote in Check Your Site Usability With These Fun Tools about the Five Second Test tool. It’s a fun way to explore immediate impressions and experiment by asking, “Tell me what the site is about”, to see if the site’s purpose is communicated clearly. It can’t warn if your shopping cart is broken. It doesn’t alert you if your sales lead form was invasive and turned away potential customers.

When car shopping, good sales people begin by explaining a car’s features and describe updates from previous models. They’ll walk around the car with you and demonstrate how to pack the back with groceries and squeeze in fishing poles. You won’t buy it at this point, however. For now, the sales person is spinning you a tale to help you imagine yourself inside that gorgeous expensive hunk of machine.

Sales people don’t approach you with “Do you think this car would look better in orange?”

What need does it fulfill for me?

Another area of concern that web site owners have is conversions. They’ll ask for feedback by writing, “My sales are down! Can you look at my homepage and tell me what I’m doing wrong?” Sometimes they’ll write, “We just redesigned our entire web site and our data tells us people are still leaving from the homepage. Help!”

If you’ve ever sold a home, you know that real estate agents will tell you to clean up the yard, paint the walls, empty it out so it looks roomy and place flowers around. If all we had to do was to make a house look pretty to sell it, we wouldn’t need real estate agents to show our homes. They’d sell themselves. Web sites with fresh paint on the homepage but no repairs to the information architecture, persuasive content, functionality and user experience can’t be expected to perform miracles.

A good real estate agent will bring potential buyers to a house and encourage them to turn on the water faucets, open closets, and help them visualize 50 people in the family room at Uncle Frank’s birthday party. What if you move in, get arthritis and can’t manage stairs anymore? The value proposition is not just about features and price. It’s about what benefit someone will get by purchasing your service, buying your products or experiencing your online tools. In addition, try to help visitors plan ahead and make logical choices rather than purposely pushing them into a revenue stream that will only benefit you in the long run. Why? Word of mouth marketing, the “long tail”, customer satisfaction and brand management.

Is it responsive to my emotions?

When you wrote up requirements for your online business, did you remember to include emotion? Most likely, it never crossed your mind. Do you watch how people use web sites when they’re in a hurry? Upset? Worried? Stressed? Tired? Hungry?

Google recently launched SearchWiki. Regardless of what you may think about it, what motivated them are their users. Their data shows that searchers want better ways to search, organize, save their research and quickly find favorite web sites. With user feedback, Google can create user personas to help developers understand how searchers use Google when they’ve just been informed of bad news. How do stress and exhaustion affect search behavior?

Consideration for your web site visitors’ emotional state may be vital for your web site. While testing a web site recently for a young adult rehabilitation center, I was pleased to find their content was written in a warm, caring way. The colors were soothing pastels. The pictures showed happy clients. Unfortunately, their content was all about the center and types of therapy. It was long winded, requiring time to read and digest. What wasn’t addressed with bullet point details on the homepage was proof of their claims to calm fears and concerns over ethics. Were there case studies or testimonials? Could a parent talk to other parents who sent a child there?"    (Continued via SearchEngineLand, Kim Krause Berg)    [Usability Resources]

5 Ways to Get Usability Testing on the Cheap

It does not take a large investment to do usability testing ...

"Usability testing is a good idea for any new web site. Increasing the usability of your web site is a good idea because it will increase visitor satisfaction, which in turn increases sales and user loyalty. On the business savings side, usability testing can also save you money in development, maintenance, and support costs. Unfortunately, traditional usability tests is pricey — it can cost up to tens of thousands of dollars to run a usability test.

But it doesn’t necessarily have to. Here are five ideas to get usability testing done on the cheap. The results might not be quite as good, but they won’t hurt your pocketbook nearly as much.

As always, if you have any other ideas or have experience with any of the ones we’ve listed, please let us know in the comments.

1. UserTesting.com

UserTesting.com is a low cost way to get a look at what goes through the minds of average web users as they interact with your web page. For $19 per user, you get a 10 minute video of a user talking their way through your page, as well as answers to a short, written questionnaire. There is a sample video available here.

We reviewed UserTesting.com in an August issue of the SitePoint Tribune.

2. Feedback Army and Mechanical Turk

Feedback Army is a new low-cost usability testing service that for $7 will provide answers from up to 10 people to a text-based survey about your web site. It isn’t quite as visual as UserTesting.com, and the quality of feedback might be suspect, but nonetheless could provide valuable information about how people view your web site. And it’s cheap enough that if the results are a waste of time, $7 shouldn’t put you out of business.

A similar result could likely be had via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service."    (Continued via SitePoint, Josh Catone)    [Usability Resources]

Why the iPod Touch Didn't Get Google Street View

Deciding what features to put in the iPod Touch ...

"The new 2.2 update for the iPhone brings a lot of great new features. Google Street View, direct viewing, listening and download of podcasts and a few small but neat tweaks. The iPod Touch also got a 2.2 upgrade, but it lacks one headline feature: Street View. Why? To answer that, we should take a look at the different goals Apple seems to have in mind for the two products, and also at arbitrary, software-based product differentiation in general.

On launch, the iPod Touch was immediately labeled the "phoneless iPhone". There were some other hardware differences (camera, volume buttons) but the description was essentially correct. If didn't want a contract, or if you lived outside the US, you bought the Touch.

As the two lines matured, they grew apart. The 2.0 iPod Touch gained built-in support for the Nike+ system, a dongle which sits in your sneaker and tells the iPod how far you have run. The iPhone 3G got GPS. These were hardware differences and made sense: The way Apple uses GPS pretty much mandates an always-on Internet connection to be useful, and the iPod Touch, lacking 3G, needed another way to track a runner's distance.

But the lack of Street View is a software diference. Why wouldn't Apple include it in the Touch? You might say that, without an Internet connection in the street, it would be useless, but my computer can access Street View and I never take it outside. In fact, out in the street is arguably the least useful place for Street View -- you can just open your eyes and see the real street in front of you.

This seemingly `arbitrary crippling of devices isn't unique to Apple. Camera makers do the same thing. Take Canon as an example. All Canon cameras use a version of the company's DIGIC chip to process images. But while the high-end (more expensive) cameras have RAW support, auto-bracketing and higher shutter speeds, the cheaper cameras don't. Because it's a lot cheaper to make a lot of the same chip, Canon simply switches the extra features off in firmware. Otherwise, all the products in the range would start to look very similar.

In fact, most camera manufacturers do this, and Canon is one of the more open ones. Because it makes public the inner working of parts of its software, hackers can re-enable many of the disabled features. Take a look at the Wired How-To Wiki to find out how easy it is."    (Continued via Wired.com, Charlie Sorrel)    [Usability Resources]

iPhone 2.2

State of the Art - No Keyboard? And You Call This a BlackBerry?

A critical review of the BlackBerry Storm ...

"Research in Motion (R.I.M.), the company that brought us the BlackBerry, has been on a roll lately. For a couple of years now, it’s delivered a series of gorgeous, functional, supremely reliable smartphones that, to this day, outselleven the much-adored iPhone.

Here’s a great example of the intelligence that drives R.I.M.: The phones all have simple, memorable, logical names instead of incomprehensible model numbers. There’s the BlackBerry Pearl (with a translucent trackball). The BlackBerry Flip (with a folding design). The BlackBerry Bold (with a stunning design and faux-leather back).

Well, there’s a new one, just out ($200 after rebate, with two-year Verizon contract), officially called the BlackBerry Storm.

But I’ve got a better name for it: the BlackBerry Dud.

The first sign of trouble was the concept: a touch-screen BlackBerry. That’s right — in its zeal to cash in on some of that iPhone touch-screen mania, R.I.M. has created a BlackBerry without a physical keyboard.

Hello? Isn’t the thumb keyboard the defining feature of a BlackBerry? A BlackBerry without a keyboard is like an iPod without a scroll wheel. A Prius with terrible mileage. Cracker Jack without a prize inside.

R.I.M. hoped to soften the blow by endowing its touch screen with something extra: clickiness. The entire screen acts like a mouse button. Press hard enough, and it actually responds with a little plastic click.

As a result, the Storm offers two degrees of touchiness. You can tap the screen lightly, or you can press firmly to register the palpable click.

It’s not a bad idea. In fact, it ought to make the on-screen keyboard feel more like actual keys. In principle, you could design a brilliant operating system where the two kinds of taps do two different things. Tap lightly to type a letter — click fully to get a pop-up menu of accented characters (é, è, ë and so on). Tap lightly to open something, click fully to open a shortcut menu of options. And so on.

Unfortunately, R.I.M.’s execution is inconsistent and confusing.

Where to begin? Maybe with e-mail, the most important function of a BlackBerry. On the Storm, a light touch highlights the key but doesn’t type anything. It accomplishes nothing — a wasted software-design opportunity. Only by clicking fully do you produce a typed letter.

It’s too much work, like using a manual typewriter. (“I couldn’t send two e-mails on this thing,” said one disappointed veteran.)

It’s no help that the Storm shows you two different keyboards, depending on how you’re holding it (it has a tilt sensor like the iPhone’s)."    (Continued via NYTimes.com)    [Usability Resources]

No Keyboard

15 Things Every Web Developer Should Be Thankful For

Happy Thanksgiving everyone ...

"With Thanksgiving only a couple days away, it’s appropriate to look back on the things that we appreciate best about our jobs. Let’s face it: Web Developers have the best jobs around, right? We’re incredibly lucky to have the professions we do.

Here are 15 things that we all should be thankful for. These are the technologies that we couldn’t live without, or that have previously paved the way and allowed us to be web developers.

1. Mosaic

Graphic designers everywhere should reserve a day in November to give thanks to the software that’s enabled our careers. Without Mosaic’s picture support, the Internet doesn’t need good design. The 1993 launch of this web browsing software opened up a brand new world to web developers and web browsers alike.

2. Firefox

Firefox ended the long tyranny of IE oppression for experienced web users. The extension-enabled browser has forced IE to play catch up and improve their lukewarm browser, which hadn’t seen an update for 5 years.

Aside from pushing a standards-based browsing initiative, the ability to extend Firefox has made the developers life much easier. There are oodles of extensions that are nearly essential to the developer."    (Continued via The Best Article Every day)    [Usability Resources]

Turkey Dinner

A 'where's the feature?' report: iPhone 3G

Interface changes with Apple iPhone 3G ...

"Since Apple is rumored to be releasing the next major iPhone firmware update today, I thought I'd run through the list now, and then see how the new firmware changes things. Many of these comments apply to the iPod touch as well.

The things I like are, generally, the same things everyone likes. The iPhone is feature-rich, well integrated, well supported by independent software developers, and fun to use.

The things I don't like are, generally, software features that ought to be present but just aren't.

Each time I discover another one of these missing features, I jot it down in my iPhone WTF list. WTF, of course, stands for "Where's the feature?"

Muting and sounds
For example: Where's the feature to mute the phone? You may point to the little toggle switch on the left side, but no, that just mutes the ringer and certain audio alerts, not the whole phone. On my old Palm Treo, the mute switch darn well muted everything, as if the switch disconnected the speaker wires themselves.

On the iPhone, there's no way to predict which sound sources will respect the mute switch. Calendar alerts do; alarms don't. These are good choices--I like knowing that the alarm function will still wake me up even if I mute the phone before going to sleep--but hardly intuitive.

Alarm volume is controlled by the ringer volume, but even the minimum ringer volume is still audible.

Application-generated sounds have a separate volume control. If you're not in the iPod application, which has a volume slider, I think the only way to adjust this control is to use the volume rocker switch while an application is making sounds. Sometimes, that's after the phone has already started to annoy the people around you.

Bottom line: I can't find a way to make the unit completely silent without going into multiple Settings panels and applications, and even that isn't completely effective because some applications (as exemplified by the otherwise valuable Phone Aid) will turn the volume back up when they run.

Alerts and Calendar app
While I'm on the subject of alerts: in the Calendar application, where's the function to set an alert for the exact time of an event? Sometimes I just want to beep myself at 10 a.m. to make a phone call, for example. I don't want to have to set the time for 10:05 a.m. and the alert for "5 minutes before." I love the fact that Calendar supports up to two alerts for the same event, but I wish I could set them to, say, 15 minutes and 0 minutes respectively. This problem could be solved by providing a "Custom" time choice for both of the alerts.

The Calendar app also has the worst user-interface design in the whole iPhone, I think. To select the date and time for an alarm, you spin three wheels apparently stolen from the game show The Price Is Right. The minutes wheel is so easy to spin that in going from :00 to :30, I commonly spin right past :30 and back to :00. Apple has developed many ways to select dates and times for other systems and applications; this is by far the worst."    (Continued via CNET News, Peter Glaskowsky)    [Usability Resources]

Apple iPhone 3G

Why We Call Them Participants

Participant reality ...

"It was not an easy recruit. Directors of IT are busy people. Oddly, they’re hard to get hold of. They don’t answer calls from strangers. They don’t answer ads on web sites. The ones who do answer ads on web sites we had to double-check on by calling their company HR departments to verify they had the titles they said they did.

And now this.

“Hi! So we have some executives coming in tomorrow to observe the test sessions.” This was the researcher phoning. He was pretty pleased that his work was finally getting some attention from management. I would have been, too. But. He continued, “I need you to [oh yeah, the Phrase of Danger] call up the participants and move some of them around. We really want to see the experienced guy and the novice back-to-back because Bob [the head of marketing] can only come at 11:30 and has to leave at 1:00.”

“Sure,” I say, “we can see if the participants can flex. But your sessions are each an hour long. And they’re scheduled at 9:00, 10:30, 12:00, and 2:00. So I’m not quite clear about what you’re asking us to do.”

“I’m telling you to move the sessions,” the researcher says, “so the experienced guy is at 11:30 and the novice is at 12:30. Do whatever else you have to do to make it work.”

“Okay, let me check the availability right now while we’re on the phone,” I say. I pull up the spreadsheet of participant data. I can see that the experienced guy was only available at 9:00 am. “When we talked with Greg, the experienced guy, the only time he could come in was 9:00 am. He’s getting on a plane at 12:30 to go to New York.”

“Find another experienced guy then.” What?!

Five signs that you’re dissing your participants

You shake hands. You pay them. There’s more to respecting participants? These are some of the symptoms of treating user research participants like lab rats:

They seem interchangeable to you.


If you’re just seeing cells in a spreadsheet, consider taking a step back to think about the purpose and goals of your study.

You’re focused on the demographics or psychographics.


If it’s about segmentation, consider that unless you’re running a really large study, you don’t have representative sample, anyway. Loosen up.

Participants are just a way to deliver data.


You’ve become a usability testing factory, and putting participants through the mill is just part of your life as a cog in the company machine.

You don’t think about the effort it takes for a person to show up in your lab.


Taking part in your session is a serious investment. The session is only an hour. But you ask participants to come early. Most do. You might go over time a little bit. Sometimes. It’ll take at least a half hour for the participant to get to you from wherever she’s coming from. It’ll take another half hour for her to get wherever she’s going afterward. That’s actually more than 2 hours all together. Think about that and the price of gas.

You don’t consider that these people are your customers and this is part of their customer experience.

You and your study make another touch point between the customer and the organization that most customers don’t get the honor of experiencing. Don’t you want it to be especially good?"    (Continued via Boxes and Arrows, Dana Chisnell)    [Usability Resources]

Flowmaps and Frag-Grenades, Part 1

Interview with Colm Nelson of Halo 3 ...

"By any measure, Halo 3 is one of the most wildly-successful consumer software interfaces in recent memory: more than 1 million players played the game in its first 24 hours on Xbox Live; over 8 million copies sold to date; and “over 100,000 pieces of user generated content being uploaded daily […] 30 percent higher than YouTube on a daily basis.” It’s probably safe to say that more cumulative man-hours have already been spent in Halo gaming lobbies than in Microsoft Word! But H3 is distinguished for another reason, too. It’s one of the earliest—and definitely one of the highest-profile—mass-market videogames to benefit from the contributions of a dedicated interaction designer.

Colm Nelson was the interaction designer for Halo 3 and has been a working UX designer since 2000. Before joining Bungie (the Studio that produces the Halo series), Colm’s background was largely in Internet consumer applications, with a heavy bent toward entertainment software. Colm’s experience is unique, but it’s part of a growing trend in the gaming industry toward employing UX professionals. Colm would like to see this trend continue, and was gracious enough to speak about it with us, and share some insight into the intersection between his ‘traditional’ UX background and his job duties at Bungie.

Hi Colm—I’d like to thank you for taking the time out to speak to the B&A community. Given the audience here, I thought this emerging trend—this matriculation of interaction designers into the gaming world—is something that folks would want to know more about…

Online systems that facilitate player experiences around social interaction, custom content sharing and online communities have received a lot of attention by both the gaming press and fans and is definitely a hot trend in gaming. The gaming press has even begun to draw comparisons with these features to You Tube, My Space and Facebook. My observation is that developers that are offering more features in [the] user experience around the game are seeing more of a need to specialize and fill roles specifically around user experience and interface design.

Games with success in these areas have generally done a good job developing a solid feature set and matching the social goals of gameplay with the accessibility and usability of the features. Ultimately these features add to the longevity of a game’s popularity, which translates directly to sales. I think as a result there are more opportunities for traditional interaction designers in the games business.

I’ve met developers that are actively recruiting from traditional software interaction design to take ownership of these features and if you look around you’re starting to see postings for UI designers—both Bungie and Blizzard are actively recruiting interaction designers and experience designers. There are also studios that are championing player experience research and design such as XEOdesign, Inc.

But I also think that if you look around you’ll see that it’s not as clearly defined role in all game companies as it is in traditional software so I think as a trend it’s fairly early. My impression is that in many game companies the interface and experience design in games is handled by either designers or artists that are also responsible for the overall game design. The good news is that if you are an interface designer with a passion for games, there are definitely opportunities out there.

Let’s start at the beginning. I actually remember seeing the job req. at Bungie that you filled … it even used the term ‘Interaction Designer.’ My jaw almost dropped—design jobs in the gaming industry typically focus on character design, level design, gameplay and mechanics. How did Bungie ‘catch religion’ about strong interaction design? About paying attention not just to the core gaming experience, but also all of that scaffolding that gets you into the game? The experience around the game?

Yeah, I had the same reaction when I saw the posting. I’d been looking for opportunities in the games industry for some time and had not seen any positions related to interaction design, so when I saw the posting I was amazed.

The guy that hired me, Max Hoberman, was the online, UI and multiplayer design lead for Halo 2. Max and the team at Bungie are really passionate about the user experience around the game and also about usability. It’s just part of the culture of the studio. You can see the results from the design of the party system and the matchmaking system from Halo 2. Heading into Halo 3 there was plenty of ambition for the social experience and with features for the game so the team decided to hire a dedicated Interaction Designer.

And how did you get the job? ;)

As soon as I saw the position I put together a portfolio and cover letter that said I wanted to help Bungie in their quest for world domination. I managed to get a phone interview with Max, which went OK. His feedback was that he enjoyed our conversation but if we had a second conversation he expected me to be more critical with my observations about what could be improved from Halo 2 and Bungie.net. This was on a Friday. The “if” felt pretty dicey to me so I decided to be proactive.

I worked all weekend on a concept document on ideas to improve Halo 2 and fired it off on Sunday night at 3am. I wasn’t sure how it would be received but it paid off because I got a invitation to visit Bungie for an interview. I flew to Seattle to meet the team for a full day interview and was really impressed with the energy and passion that they had for design and the experience around the game. It was a lot of fun—I was also passionate and the interview felt like a series of brainstorming sessions as we discussed problems and ideas and how we might solve them. I guess it went pretty well because they offered me the job!"    (Continued via Boxes and Arrows, Bryce Glass)    [Usability Resources]

Defensive design: Magnetic zones on the unibody MacBook

Paying attention to design detail ...

"To access the RAM slots in a unibody MacBook you must first remove the back plate—a thin piece of aluminum attached by eight tiny screws. Half of the screws are hidden beneath the battery cover, and each one is surrounded by a recessed magnetic zone. The purpose of these zones is ostensibly to help keep the battery cover seamlessly attached to the case.

But removing the screws made it clear that the magnetic zones serve a second function. When my screwdriver slipped, the screw didn’t fall into the depths of the case. Instead, it flew right over to the magnet, and I was spared the pain of extracting a three-millimeter needle from an expensive electronic haystack.

It’s a perfect example of real-life defensive design: anticipate where your customers might slip up and try your best to keep them from doing it. Have you encountered any good defensive design lately?"    (Continued via 37signals)    [Usability Resources]

Magnetic Zones

The future of the click

Raskin's zoom interface ...

"Imagine you are flying high above a wide plain. Far below, vague rectangular shapes cover the ground in every direction. Swooping down, you find that these are not fields or even city blocks, but words and images.

Bold labels are stamped on the ground and flying lower you can make out activity beside each one. Off to your left flow the pages of a report you've been writing, while to your right a newly arrived email is springing up.

In the distance you spot your music collection neatly arrayed.

This little flight of fancy is based on one of the dreams of the late Jef Raskin, a key figure in Apple's Macintosh project in the early 1980s. He helped shape the way we interact with computers today.

Raskin called it the zooming user interface, or ZIP for short, and it replaces the familiar icons and windows with an infinite, zoomable plane holding all your information and activities. It sounds outlandish, but Raskin was convinced of its superiority.

Computers have come a long way in the last 20 years, but as we got better at making computers talk to one another, the interface between humans and computers stagnated.

The windows and icons may look different now, but they're still windows and icons. It's a lot like the '50s and '60s, when American car makers released new models each year with drastically altered body shapes but very little new under the bonnet.

According to some experts, even Apple – once the paragon of user friendliness – has lost its way.

There is more to a user interface than looks. Just as a chair is more comfortable if it is designed with the body's quirks in mind, an understanding of psychology is key to making machines easy to understand and use.

Usability experts know it is better to adapt the workings of machines to the way people think than to force people to adapt to the machines.

Taken to an extreme, this lands you with ideas like the ZIP, but these are unlikely to catch on anytime soon.

Radical user interface schemes may be provably easier to use, and even achieve popularity in niche applications, but most of us are just too set in our ways to switch overnight.

However, new technology is slowly driving change."    (Continued via stuff.co.nz, Hayden Walles)    [Usability Resources]

100 Ideas for Envisioning Powerful, Engaging, and Productive User Experiences in Knowledge Work

Good resource for developing good UX ...

"Working through Screens is a reference for product teams creating new or iteratively improved applications for thinking work. Written for use during early, formative conversations, it provides teams with a broad range of considerations for setting the overall direction and priorities for their onscreen tools. With hundreds of envisioning questions and fictional examples from clinical research, financial trading, and architecture, this volume can help definers and designers to explore innovative new directions for their products.

Working through Screens is built around a suggested overall approach to application design:

Extensive concepting,
based on intensive questioning,
driving visionary, collaboratively defined strategies
for exemplary tools for thought

The book begins with a critique of the contemporary state of onscreen tools used by people practicing their chosen vocations. It then examines the processes that product teams often use to create these applications, making the case for more time spent on early design research and ideation rather than simply marching into iterative product development with a largely unconsidered course.

In support of these early ideation, or "application envisioning", exercises, Working through Screens supplies 13 categories of ideas for product teams to discuss and explore. The 100 ideas themselves cover a diverse range of potential application design factors, ranging from suggested directions for understanding and modeling knowledge work; to probes for intensive, strategic support of certain human abilities and limitations; to key considerations for improving communication and collaboration; to arguments for workplace tools that provide an empowering sense of direct action and a pleasing sensory environment to think “within."    (Continued via Flashbulb Interaction, Jacob Burghardt)    [Usability Resources]

Web 3.0, User Experience and Intelligent User Interfaces

Toward a definition of Web 3.0 ...

"If Web 2.0 was all about fostering social interconnectivity, then the loosely termed Web 3.0, appears to be about the intelligent web. It’s about, amongst other things, contextually aware user interfaces (UI’s), hyperconnectivity, the semantic web and intelligent agents. These are all concepts which have existed for a very long time. Primitive implementations of Intelligent UI’s and Knowledge based Expert Systems have been around for decades. Successive generations have tried, and largely failed, to get these working and so we’ve seen these technologies re-invented in waves. The failure was often due to both the primitive nature of the machine intelligence and the unwillingness of users to accept some measure of control being surrendered to the machine.

The latest wave promises better things, and maybe we are on the cusp of a time where both machine and human are ready to make the leap. The increasing symbiosis between machine and human has see many of the trust issues erode, as users come to accept that their lives could be made easier by allowing machines to take some degree of control. It may, therefore, be that we see an increase in the number of what Alan Kay termed ‘Indirect Management’[1] interfaces augmenting the now omnipresent direct manipulation interfaces, as the amount of information we have to process in our daily lives becomes too much to handle.

Indirect Management

Indirect Management means machines that learn our preferences, using inference, and that leverage the collective unconsciousness/knowledge of the web to help us manage information overload. Typically, software entities termed ‘agents’ would help manage our goals, tasks or activities.

I think the sheer volume, and nature of information, out there and the growing momentum behind the semantic web might give this wave a better chance of success. The idea that we directly manipulate everything places too much cognitive load on users, machines need to take up some of that slack, if we are to make sense of the digital world especially as computing become more ubiquitous (ubicom). This is a real challenge for those of us working in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI).
Example of Indirect Management

So, a typical example of how this might work, and something of a familiar metaphor, would be the process of booking a holiday. In the real world we might visit a Travel Agent and give them our general holiday preferences and budget. They may even know us and have tacitly learnt some of our preferences from the past (that I had a bad experience on a particular airline or already know where we live and so can pick the best airport). We then trust them to use their expertise to look around and come back with options for us to choose from.

Now if we transpose this example to the web, it may be that we have a trusted advisor agent/site/application on the web (an entity of some sort that we turn to). It would have learnt from its past experiences dealing with us, can leverage expertise and knowledge it’s gained from talking to other customers (and other agents) and is an expert in knowing where to find the best deals and sources of travel information."    (Continued via Chris Khalil’s Musings)    [Usability Resources]

Nearly half of technology users need help with new devices

Products not easily used out of the box ...

"Although information technology is well integrated into the lives of many Americans, gadgets and communication services require, for some, a call for help. Some 48% of technology users usually need help from others to set up new devices or to show them how they function. Many tech users encounter problems with their cell phones, internet connections, and other gadgets. This, in turn, often leads to impatience and frustration as they try to get them fixed.

New research from the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project shows that:
# 44% of those with home internet access say their connection failed to work properly at some time in the previous 12 months.
# 39% of those with desktop or laptop computers have had their machines not work properly at some time in the previous 12 months.
# 29% of cell phone users say their device failed to work properly at some time in the previous year.

“Struggles with modern gadgetry mean less engagement with the services they enable,” said John B. Horrigan, Associate Director of the Pew Internet Project and co-author of the report. “Time spent dealing with set-up or outages means less time using modern communication services to connect with friends or find information that might help people be more productive.”

Although tech users can usually fix the problems by themselves, with the help of friends, or by calling upon user support, some say they cannot fix tech problems at all. Here are some of the ways device owners fixed their broken technology:
# 38% of users with failed technology contacted user support for help.
# 28% of technology users fixed the problem themselves.
# 15% fixed the problem with help from friends or family.
# 15% of tech users were unable to fix their devices
# 2% found help online

“In an age in which new technologies are introduced almost daily, a new gadget or service can become popular well before the technology itself is understood by the average user,” said Sydney Jones, Research Assistant at the Pew Internet & American Life Project and co-author of the report. “Naturally, some users catch on to new technology more quickly than others, and those who have more trouble grasping the technology are left confused, discouraged, and reliant on help from others when their technology fails.”

Not only did users find different solutions to their device failures, they reported varying attitudes during the course of trying to solve the problem. Overall:
# 72% felt confident that they were on the right track to solving the problem.
# 59% felt impatient to solve the problem because they had important uses for the broken technology.
# 48% felt discouraged with the amount of effort needed to fix the problem.
# 40% felt confused by the information that they were getting.
Adults who are most likely to be impatient to fix their devices are those who had the most devices fail, those who use their devices most, and those who rely more heavily on their devices for work or information."    (Continued via Pew Internet, Experience Network)    [Usability Resources]

Thinking about Theory (Warning: Interaction Design Nerdery Ahead)

The role of theories in design ...

"In conversations and on mailing lists addressing the design of interactive media, I’ve found myself growing uneasy with just how little understanding most people practicing in the field have of how they are influenced by the various theories that undergird are standard practice. I think it can be problematic that so people are working in the context of these theories don’t understand how the theories’ assumptions are coloring their approaches.

What do I mean by theory? Theory is a robust conceptual framework that undergirds a practice. Standard thoughtful practice of design for interactive media is predicated on a cobbled-together set of theories, most of them coming out of the HCI community, which has been heavily influenced by cognitive psychology (think Don Norman’s Design of Everyday Things). So you have things like distributed cognition, perception, attention, etc. Cog psych tends to focus on the individual.

Another major influencer is Activity Theory, which I believe gained traction as researchers studied the workplace, and wanted to understand how technology influences groups of people, not just individuals. Since the dawn of the Web, there’s also been significant inroads by the Library and Information Science community (Information retrieval, metadata, etc.).

As experience design leads to people trying to understand more complex situations, we’re seeing folks embrace anthropological and sociological methods… which also have their various theoretical underpinnings, far too numerous to go into here.

I believe that my exposure to and understanding of various theories (not to say I’m an expert in them) has heightened my experience and practice in design for interactive media. But I also know I’m a knowledge wonk who gets off on such things. Still, I think people will perform better when understanding the theoretical constructs in which they operate, so they can appreciate self-imposed arbitrary limits that may not have realized. Pragmatists might take issue, saying that all that matters is practice and results. That might be true if we were designing simpler systems. I think theory gives us tools for making smart heuristic judgments that help manage the complexity inherent in our work."    (Continued via peterme.com)    [Usability Resources]

PDF Manuals: The Wrong Paradigm for an Online Experience

Usability of PDF Manuals ...

"Let me describe a familiar user assistance experience. A user installs a new application, and when the user wants Help, the application directs her to the user documentation on a Web site or CD-ROM. What the user finds there is a PDF file containing the manual—or a collection of PDF files, representing a library of manuals, including a user guide, configuration guide, troubleshooting guide, and various references. And the layout of each of these PDF manuals is exactly the same as if it were a printed book. This raises an interesting question: If we’re giving manuals to users to read online, why do we design and write them for paper?

I’m not down on every use of PDF files online. Campus maps, article reprints, and my aunt’s Christmas letters all work quite well as PDF files. What I want to challenge in this column is the use of PDF files for distributing user assistance online, in the form of large books.

Use the following checklist to see if I’m talking about a kind of document that is near and dear to your heart.

* The online document includes small topics—often called covers. Sometimes, these topics, though brief, use a very large font, so they convey about the same amount of information you could present in a single heading in a traditional online document. We call this kind of topic a front cover.
* The document comprises pages—those arbitrary boundaries that determine how much of a topic’s content a user can view at once. What is on a page depends on how much of that content fits within an 8.5 x 11-inch rectangle—even though this boundary in no way approximates either the size or the aspect ratio of a computer screen. So, topics sporadically interrupt themselves, requiring a user to manually intervene by scrolling to continue reading the same topic. We call these sudden interruptions to the reader’s flow page breaks.
* Topics are grouped into sequentially numbered sections called chapters. The chapter numbers that appear at the tops or bottoms of all pages further reinforce their sequence. The sequencing of chapters usually corresponds to the order in which a writer expects users will need each topic—or intends users to read them.
* Some of the pages identify themselves with Roman numerals and others with Arabic numerals as page numbers. This can prove helpful—once a user realizes Roman numerals designate topics with no useful content whatsoever—which we refer to as frontmatter.
* When a document switches from using Roman numerals to using Arabic numerals for page numbers, it often starts counting over again from 1—while the document viewer’s Print dialog box does not. Therefore, printing a particular range of pages requires users to do math in their heads.
* Those little page numbers seem to jump around—sometimes appearing on the right of the screen and sometimes on the left.
* The placement of text on alternate pages also shifts left and right, with a close correlation to whether those little numbers are odd or even. On the insides of the pages of print books, gutters allow space for the binding. To online readers, gutters are simply annoying.

If this checklist identifies the characteristics of online documents you’ve experienced, you’re probably starting to see what is driving my desire to move away from PDF manuals. None of these characteristics has any logical justification in the context of finding and reading topics online. If you were creating online documenta