But because I can’t add plugins to the Beta version of Mac/Chrome yet, if I want to bookmark a link in Del.icio.us I have to copy and paste the link into Firefox to use the quick-add button.

Too many services? Information overload? Or should I just be content to wait for Google to sort out Chrome, Mozilla to fix Firefox or The Guardian to fix www.guardian.co.uk/ ? It’s not as if I’ve paid for any of the services mentioned.

UPDATE: To add insult to injury Firefox just crashed on me again – fortunately just after I clicked save. Phew!

Interestingly, I’m getting visited by something at one specific IP address again and again but apparently using different browsers and operating systems. One quick IP look-up later and it seems Adobe are hitting me about ten times a day, every day. Either someone there loves trees too or else some sort of bot is coming back again and again.

Adobe don’t have a search engine (as far as I know) so why are they bothering? Have I managed to offend them, or has a page of my site somehow got saved in their browser lab? Enquiring minds want to know! Anyone got any ideas?

I’ve also been catching up with all the new developments in browser font display that have been taking place recently. And what a lot of fun it is – easy too! If you are viewing this page in the latest version of any fairly modern browser (Firefox 3.5, Safari 4, Opera 10 etc.) you should be reading these words set in the excellent Graublau Sans by fonts.info. I’m not 100% sold on it for this blog yet but time will tell.

I’ve implemented this font change with the css declaration @font-face. For me, this seems to be the simplest, most standards-compliant way forward. Whilst there are other exciting projects in progress (Typekit and FontDeck to name but two), they aren’t free. So now, as well as the standard “img” and “css” folders at root, I now also have a brand new “font” folder! Joy! Simple things please simple minds I guess…?

Unfortunately @font-face does sometimes result in a not-so-nice “flash of unstyled text” (fout) but for personal sites I can live with this. Whether clients will be able to, well that’s a different matter…

For references and thanks, read:

Thanks to:

• http://www.font-face.com/
• http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/06/beautiful-fonts-with-font-face/
• fonts.info for creating the excellent Graublau Sans Pro that you may now be reading.

Nielsen initially launched his ‘discount’ ideas on the world twenty years ago this month. So what’s changed in all that time?

It might be hard to appreciate today, but these ideas were heresy 20 years ago… it has come a long way since I launched it to a lecture room of maybe 100 or so people. On balance, I’m happy that I started this campaign and will continue the fight for simpler usability, more broadly applied. Discount Usability: 20 Years, Jakob Nielsen

Hear, hear!

Read more: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/discount-usability.html

As a kid, I remember being amazed at the way they grow; by adding rings of tissue and expanding year on year. Even more exciting, you can also tell good years from bad by studying the thickness of each band. I’m sure none of this comes as news to you Dear Reader.

So you can imagine how much I like the idea of mischer’traxler’s idea of taking this “recording quality” of a tree,  and using it to inform the design of products. Take a look at the infosthetics link below and tell me you don’t like it as well!

“The work consists of a solar-powered apparatus that pulls threads through a coloring device, a glue basin, and then finally winds them around a mould. The physical height of the resulting object depends on the number of sun hours of the day, as the machine starts at sunrise and stops at sunset. At any time of the day, the thickness of the thread layer and the color is depending on the amount of sun-energy: more sun results in thicker layers and a paler color.” Via infosthetics.com

Visit the artist’s website: mischertraxler.com

The conference ran over three information-filled days. Day One was lecture day, with inspirational talks from the likes of Peter Merholz, Luke Wroblewski, Dan Saffer, Jared Spool, Jeffrey Veen and most excitingly Don ‘The Don’ Norman.

Days Two and Three went into much greater detail, with interactive workshops covering all aspects of user experience practice; from sketching lessons to learning how organisations can make better decisions through design. In fact there were too many fantastic workshops to get around all of them and there were no “fillers”.

One of the highlights for me however was hearing Don Norman speak on Day One. The author of seminal books such as The Design of Everyday Things, Things That Make us Smart and more recently The Design of Future Things, Don is well known to all user experience architects and designers alike. The fact that his comments were Twittered with the hashtag ‘#TheDon’ just goes to show the affection and regard in which he is held.

Often the contrarian (“When everyone is asking for something, I tend to take the opposite approach”), Norman has recently caused minor storms by arguing that simplicity is highly overrated and that complexity is good thing. At first this approach feels wrong: as usability people, we are often in the habit of trying to make online experiences as simple as possible. Surely complexity can only harm the experience and put customers off?

Norman offers a familiar example of simplicity: the Google search homepage – often quoted as the epitome of the simple. Without a doubt, Google is by far and away the most popular search engine. And yet Yahoo! have the most popular homepage and it’s packed with information. Yahoo! is optimised for exploration, with Google it takes a little more work. You might argue that these two homepages are different products but the sheer popularity of  Yahoo! goes some way to show that complex pages are popular.

Another example: the iPhone is often touted as simple and consumer-friendly. And yet with a new software update, Apple has added 100 extra new features. How is this level of complexity compatible with the idea of a simple product? One might argue it’s because users have learnt how to use the device and are now demanding more advanced tools (like Copy and Paste).

There appears to be a fundamental conflict here: when asked, people will demand simplicity (“Why is it so hard to use?”, “Why can’t products be simpler?” [1]) but when you watch these same people comparing products side-by-side, it is the number of features that sell a product. People want more features even when they realise this must complicate the product. People believe that as you add features you add capability, thereby making more feature-laden products more desirable. However, as user experience professionals, we believe adding more features decreases usability. Both positions, Norman argues, are wrong. “We must distinguish complexity from confusion, perplexity, and unintelligibility. The goal is complexity with order, lucidity and understandability.”

People prefer complex things. If it’s too simple, it gets boring. Once a user gains experience with a product, the user moves into a new role; that of the Intermediate and suddenly their perception of what is complex changes.

An aside – roughly speaking, there are three classes of user: the Beginner, the Intermediate and the Expert. If we plot the number of people against perceived skill level, like most population distributions we get the classic statistical bell curve, with most users situated in the middle of the curve at ‘Intermediate’. It stands to reason therefore, that these are the users we should spend the most amount of time designing for. And yet it’s often the Beginners and the Experts who get the most attention. The Product Manager demands the Beginner must be able to hit the ground running and yet the engineer or developer, if left to their own devices, designs for their own skill-level – that of the Expert.

So how does Norman suggest we solve the complexity problem? Unsurprisingly the first approach should be through well-researched design. By modularising actions we can contain the complexity and by teaching users as they go, we can help them manage complex interactions.

I’ll leave the last few words to The Don himself: “Why are things so complex? Because the world is complex. Our tools must reflect reality. Complexity can be good, leading to a rich, satisfying life, filled with rich, satisfying experiences.”

And again: “The mark of the great designer is the ability to provide what people need without excessive complexity, without feature bloat. Simplicity should never be the goal. Follow the famous Einstein quote: “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” Complex things will require complexity. It is the job of the designer to manage that complexity with skill and grace.”[2]

Thanks

To Luke W for his notes on the lecture that were far more comprehensive than my own.

And to the Twitterers who helped refresh my memory.

References:

1. http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/simplicity_is_highly.html
2. http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/why_is_37signals_so_1.html

It’s handy until you actually make use of it… and then you get the following message:

I’d like to draw your attention to the first line, which reads: “Please be reminded that enquiries submitted via the ‘Comment on this page’ form will be ignored.”

Hmmm… thanks…

Presumably “enquiries” are different to “comments” and the LSE gets lots of “enquiries” submitted via the “Comment on this page” form, but who’s to know? My comment was an enquiry (at least as far as I understand the word) so maybe I’ll be ignored too? I’ve gotten used to it over the years…

UPDATE: I wasn’t ignored at all. I got a lovely response an hour later. Maybe I’ll look for the “Comment on our ‘Comment on this page’ function”?

Dilbert on User Experience:

http://www.90percentofeverything.com/2009/05/26/dilbert-on-user-experience/

* The views expressed in this title are Mordac’s alone and do not represent my own…

The tone of the blog is appropriately balanced between contrition and humour and if I’d heard no more about it, I wouldn’t have thought twice. So it was with real interest that I stumbled across the following graph at Wired’s Epicenter which illustrates just how much data stopped moving.

If you’ve got any interest in data-visualisation, you’ve just gotta love this graph! That’s a drop of 15Gbps in about a minute…

But when you think about it more, it does get a bit scary. And I’m afraid it’s the usual concern – just how much data does Google own? As Epicenter say:

the fact that Google’s slip-up causes such a stir in the media, on mailing lists and on Twitter, says much more about Google’s centrality to the internet than this graph does, even though its a really cool graph.

Hotels have been welcoming guests for many hundreds of years, and certainly since the invention of the light bulb, interior and electronic design have been integral to the guest’s experience. You might have thought, therefore, that hotel designers have had a chance to get things right. However, contemporary hotels are under pressure to provide all kinds of modern convenience. From wifi and iPod connections to innovative, comprehensible controls for taps, heating, lighting, television, cable, telephones, room service and trouser pressing – all in one room, without cluttering the place up or making it look ugly.

I recently had the pleasure to stay in the centre of Barcelona, in a fantastic new hotel. I’ll leave their name out of it but in case you’re up on your “boutique” Barca residences, this one had an open air swimming pool on the roof…

The hotel was marvelous and the service was wonderful, so no complaints there. The problem came in the room when trying to control the lights. Surely the lighting problem has been pretty much solved by now – it can’t get much harder than on and off? Or can it…

The lighting system in our hotel room was incredibly counter-intuitive. Suffice it to say my girlfriend got extremely tired of me trying to work it out, especially when that meant my fiddling turned the lights on and off every five minutes. However, the usability issue that really caught my attention was this – why illuminate an off switch in the dark? Surely it would be much more useful to illuminate the “On” switch, so that when you’re desperately trying to creep to the bathroom in the middle of the night, you don’t have to fiddle about? I can only imagine the button was wrongly labelled and then wired in according to the incorrect label? Or does someone see a benefit that I’m missing?

The fixed control – pretty simple huh?

So, it was particularly interesting for me to hear the following UIE podcast upon my return, where this sensible question was asked (and I paraphrase) “If Don Norman’s seminal The Design of Everyday Things is twenty years old, why are simple design mistakes still being made?”

Let me know.