Recently in the Usability Category

Part of an Ars Technica review of Google's new operating system.

Longtime Ars readers may be familiar with my periodic rants about the increasing disutility of the "volume/directory/file" metaphor for modern networked machines. Saving files, copying them, syncing them--this is all pointless clerical work that I want my computer to do for me.

Bravo.

I've had a Kindle DX for a few weeks now. I've been using it as I read The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland to my daughter. I haven't yet used the Kindle to buy any books, but I've stuffed it with out-of-copyright classics and academic PDFs.

It takes maybe 5-10 minutes to set up the text files, break them into chapters, and set my text-to-speech program to generate the MP3s.  Depending on how long the text is, it might take 20 minutes for the MP3s to generate, but there's always something to do while I'm waiting.

Over the past couple of years, I'd gotten rather accustomed to using Text Aloud's file splitter utility to break a long e-text into separate chapter files, converting each chapter in to a separate MP3, and setting my voice recorder to require me to push "play" to start a new file.  I lie there in bed, with my finger over the "play" button, like a train engineer with his hand on the dead man switch. When I fall asleep, the recorder doesn't go on to the next chapter, so when I wake up in the morning I can jump back to the previous chapter, and in between snooze alarms, fast-forward to the last part I remember.

The Kindle has a very useful text-to-speech option, and in the past few weeks I've used it to listen to The Wizard of Oz and A Christmas Carol, both of which I've read several times the conventional way.  I'm teaching them as light after-Thanksgiving books in two different classes, and I've found that listening to a familiar text forces me to think about it in a different way.

But when I fall asleep listening to an e-Book on the Kindle, I wake up the next morning and the Kindle has advanced chapter-by-chapter all the way to the end of the book. It only takes a few minutes to find the table of contents and figure out what was the last chapter I remember before dozing off.  It's not a big complaint, but it is something I'd like to be able to control.

I just excerpted and linked to a story from the Huffington Post Blog, and after I checked my blog I found a strange link floating above all the rest of my text, making both my own text that was under the link and the link itself illegible.

I had already included a link to the HuffPo. I had to spend extra time locating and removing this extra crap that appeared in my clipboard buffer.

<div style="position: fixed;"><div id="new_selection_block0.017883485913577468" style="border: medium none ; overflow: hidden; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; text-align: left; text-decoration: none;"><br /><br />Read more at: <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lenore-skenazy/as-goes-halloween-so-goes_b_340163.html" target="_blank_">http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lenore-skenazy/as-goes-halloween-so-goes_b_340163.html</a></div>

I feel bullied, or at the very least treated with the assumption that anyone copy-pasting from HuffPo intends to steal the content.

The next time I think of driving traffic to The Huffington Post, I'll remember how their CSS trick messed up my layout, and I'll probably pass.

Okay, so it's after midnight on a Friday night... but surely someone's awake in a call center, somewhere in the world.

After following the maze of links for getting contacting Verizon by telephone, I get this screen, which dead ends.

I presume there's supposed to be a phone number or a chat applet or a dancing teddy bear in that box, but it's empty -- both on Firefox and Safari. So my quest to get Verizon to undo its URL hijacking is not over. On the upside, I learned how to do a screen capture on my new MacBook Pro.

I'm blogging the Verizon tech support number so I can find it again -- it's very hard to find it on the website..

1-800-837-4966

 

 

Listservs, a trademarked software for running e-mail lists whose name is often used to refer to the lists themselves, were once a "killer app" that tempted many professors to try the Internet in the first place, back when many established scholars were skeptical of computers. A Chronicle article nearly 15 years ago proclaimed the exciting new world of academic e-mail lists, calling them "the first truly worldwide seminar room."

"This is the academy of the 1990s, where 'being connected' has taken on a whole new meaning," the 1994 article went on. "Attending the right graduate school and being published in prestigious places are still important, but establishing a name for oneself online has become the newest way to win recognition."

But now collaborating online with colleagues is so accepted that scholars are trying new tools that are easier to use and, well, a little more exciting. When was the last time someone enthusiastically recommended a new e-mail list to you? -- Jeffrey R. Young, Chronicle of Higher Ed

I've blogged before about how much I dislike Adobe's arrogant use of popups that take over your computer while you are trying to do something else.

This morning, I set up the computer my kids use so that my son would be able to follow the simulated progress of Apollo 11 on wechoosethemoon.org.  That meant upgrading to Flash 10.  I made a mental note to make sure that the upgrade didn't overwrite my attempt to disable Adobe's auto-update feature (which pops up an aggressive, sticky box that demands far too much attention... I don't want my kids getting in the habit of clicking "Yes" to every box that pops up while they're on the computer), but I was on my way out the door to go to work, so I didn't have time to do check to make sure that Adobe hadn't reset all my preferences to "By all means, feel free to interrupt me as often as you like."

Taking a break at the office just now, I watched the simulation of the lunar descent and landing, and found the experience very moving. ("Tranquility base here... the Eagle has landed."  I did a fist pump and posted "W00t!" to my Twitter feed.)

As I was still poking around the site, listening to the audio from the surface of the moon, the phone rang. It was my 11yo son, his voice quavering.  He had been sitting at his computer, watching the same thing I'd been enjoying.  But on his computer, one of those intrusive, annoying, evil Adobe pop-ups had appeared, blocking the actual lunar landing. 

I had maximized the browser window (following the advice on wechoosethemoon.org), so it's probably the case that neither my son nor my wife knew that I had set them up to watch something that was on a website.  My son does know enough to "cancel" out of a dialog box, but the Adobe popups don't function like normal creatures. 

On the phone, he says he tried closing the box, but it wouldn't go away.  When he sent his sister to explain the problem to my wife, a miscommunication happened, and my wife ended up thinking that my son had closed the web browser himself, and thus was responsible for the interruption.  My son isn't very articulate when he's upset, and my wife is not exactly a techno-troubleshooter.  So, according to Peter, there was shouting and consternation, and what should have been a powerful educational experience was ruined.

Thanks a heap, Adobe.

The LA Times technology blog critiques the new Google Reader interface.

For example, let's say we have a news article that we like. Well, might as well click the "like" button, right?

OK, now we've told the Internet that we think it's cool, and we can see a list of strangers who also think it's cool.

Hmm, we should also share this with our friends to make sure they see it. Let's click "share."

No, wait.

Let's "share with a note." "This is cool," we write.

OK, cool. Now, let's leave a comment.

Wait, we don't have much to say besides, "This is cool." Let's not.

Maybe we'll tag this as "cool." Done.

Our cousin doesn't use Google Reader, but she'll think this is cool. I'll click the "email" button to send her a link to it.

In fact, we think this is so cool that we're going to click the star button so it will save so that we can come back to it later and just reflect on how cool it is.

In short, these new features aren't that cool.

From a thoughtful review of the Kindle:

The Kindle DX's five-way joystick is quick, convenient, and expertly designed. (Plastic Logic's touch screen really isn't markedly better than using Amazon's joy stick, but that's because the touch options are fairly rudimentary.) The problem is the dearth of good places to direct the cursor.

That's a real shame because one thing we've learned over the last two decades in journalism is that information architecture is everything. Charticles, sections, deep captions, multiple points of entry, these are the hallmarks of journalistic innovation--and successful careers--for this generation of editors and readers. But all of that has been thrown out with the E Ink interface. We're back in the days of William Shawn's New Yorker with no table of contents and bylines at the end of the article. -- Marion Maneker, Slate

Teen tries out a Walkman for a week.

It took me three days to figure out that there was another side to the tape. That was not the only naive mistake that I made; I mistook the metal/normal switch on the Walkman for a genre-specific equaliser, but later I discovered that it was in fact used to switch between two different types of cassette. --Scott Campbell, BBC

Big, two-dimensional drop-down panels group navigation options to eliminate scrolling and use typography, icons, and tooltips to explain the user's choices. -- Jakob Neilsen

Roundtable
Chair. Charlie Lowe, Grand Valley State University

Scott Banville, University of Nevada, Reno
David Blakesley, Purdue University

How can open source software, open access publishing, and commons-based peer production (CBPP) principles help us to create a sustainable university?

How can they positively impact the social and economic development of the university and expand the resources available that sustain university culture?

What is the role of the university in the larger community in fostering such sustainable practices?

I arrived late and completely missed the first talk, so I'll start with the three I did see.

Surveillance of Power and the Power of Surveillance
Mike Edwards, United States Military Academy at West Point

Hansel and Gretel in Cyberspace: Following Breadcrumbs in a Forest of Hypertext
Mary Karcher

The Digital Emergence of the Public/Private Authority
Casey McArdle
Ball State University

Chair Mikhail Gershovich, Barch College, CUNY

Hacking Spaces: Place as Interface

• Danielle Nicole DeVoss, Michigan State University
• Douglass Walls, Michigan State University

• Scott Schopieray, Michigan State University

Writing-a-go-go: Ubiquitous Computing and the Thirdspace of Workplace Writing
Tina Bacci, University of Rhode Island

The Examined Life--Cyberspace Style: The Construction of Space in the #philosophy IRC Undernet Community
Kennie Rose, University of Louisville

What follows are my rough notes, lightly edited. [My own comments are in square brackets.]

These are my notes, lightly edited, from a panel at Computers & Writing 2009.

I only found a single plug in the meeting room, in the very back row. This is a small conference, so I probably appear fairly antisocial typing way in the back here.  (I'll move up when the panel actually starts in a few minutes, after my laptop has sucked in a bit of juice.) 

I had considered attending a simultaneous panel on blogging, but I'd already heard one of the presenters make a very similar talk, so this panel won out.

Chair. Andrea Murphy, Old Dominion University

• Technologizing Pedagogy: How FY Writing Curriculum is Created by Electrons
  Will Hochman, Southern Connecticut State University
• Computers, Tools, and Instruments: Academic Dependence on Machine Terminology and Its Effect on Student Perceptions of the Computer Classroom
  Sarah Spring, Texas A&M University
• Ubiquitous Computing and The Perils of Early Adoption
  Jim Kalmbach, Illinois State University

A Kindle DX is on my lust-list, in part because I read a lot of PDFs. In Slate, Farhad Manjoo offers a thoughtful critique of Kindle's self-proclaimed destiny to be a news medium:

The Kindle presents news as a list--you're given a list of sections (international, national, etc.) and, in each section, a list of headlines and a one-sentence capsule of each story. It's your job to guess, from the list, which pieces to read. This turns out to be a terrible way to navigate the news.

Every newspaper you've ever read was put together by someone with an opinion about which of the day's stories was most important. Newspapers convey these opinions through universal, easy-to-understand design conventions--they put important stories on front pages, with the most important ones going higher on the page and getting more space and bigger headlines. You can pick up any page of the paper and--just by reading headlines, subheads, and photo captions--quickly get the gist of several news items. Even when you do choose to read a story, you don't have to read the whole thing. Since it takes no time to switch from one story to another, you can read just a few paragraphs and then go on to something else. -- Farhad Manjoo, Slate

Many of the canonical works of hypertext fiction were written before the World Wide Web, so the author/designers were creating an experience for users who were not already familiar with the conventions of HTML documents. (When we surf the web, we expect links to change color after we visit them, we expect a home button in the upper left corner, etc.).

Although advocates of hypertext narrative (Bolter 2001, Jackson 1997, Landow 1997, for example) have enthusiastically argued that interactivity offers the reader more creative input, the difficult balance between the positive rewards of creative control and the negative effects of unwanted effort, is an aspect barely discussed in the literature, though Murray (1997b) and Ryan (2006) acknowledge the issue.The data strongly supports Murray's (1997) contention that authorial control and reader agency must be carefully balanced. What appeared to be happening for the readers in my study is that the presence of interactivity promised something that hypertext in its current form could not deliver -- ie, a game-like level of user control combined with a novel-like level of audience subordination to authorial leadership. The two experiences seemed to clash destructively in many readers' minds.The readers who commented on this issue all talked about the need for control to be given such that it progressed the narrative at all times. Whether that control is the offer of hyper-linked words, or animated images, whatever the reader does to the screen should develop the story. -- James Pope, interjunction.org (See also Part 1, "Twists in the Digital Tale")

This sort of thing makes me very unhappy... without my permission, Microsoft pushes out an add-on for a competitor's product.

The service pack for the .NET Framework, like other updates, was pushed out to users through the Windows Update Web site. A number of readers had never heard of this platform before Windows Update started offering the service pack for it, and many of you wanted to know whether it was okay to go ahead and install this thing. Having earlier checked to see whether the service pack had caused any widespread problems or interfered with third-party programs -- and not finding any that warranted waving readers away from this update -- I told readers not to worry and to go ahead and install it.

I'm here to report a small side effect from installing this service pack that I was not aware of until just a few days ago: Apparently, the .NET update automatically installs its own Firefox add-on that is difficult -- if not dangerous -- to remove, once installed.-- Brian Krebs, Washington Post

I am not a fan of Adobe Acrobat Reader, though I do read a lot of PDFs.

With all the Internet attacks that exploit Adobe Acrobat Reader people should switch to using an alternative PDF reader, a security expert said at the RSA security conference on Tuesday. Of the targeted attacks so far this year, more than 47 percent of them exploit holes in Acrobat Reader while six vulnerabilities have been discovered that target the program, Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer of security firm F-Secure, said in a briefing with journalists.--CNet

"We love you, but signing this agreement doesn't make us legal partners." -- Aviary EULA

That's from the "summary" column, on the right side of a page that has the equivalent legalese on the other side.  It's an example of a human way to present an end user license agreement (EULA), one of those legal documents that you have to assent to when you sign up for an online service.

This site is a good example of treating a user like a human being, instead of a pawn in a gotcha game. (Thanks for another good suggestion, Josh.)

Does Adobe Shockwave fit your definition of malware?

I train my kids not to click on random boxes that pop up, and I don't want any boxes popping up on computers my kids use.  So I was very annoyed the other day when I first saw this box -- intrusive auto-update window that shows only two options, without a "Cancel" button or a "Close dialog box" button.
I've blogged before about the lengths I went to avoid using Adobe's Acrobat PDF reader.  My nerves are a little raw from several late nights at work, but even on a good day, the arrogance of this dialog box would disgust me.

Even more insulting, this window stays in the front of the screen, and there's no way to move it, minimize it, or even kill it from the Windows Task Manager "Applications" screen. Unless I yield to the "choice" Adobe presents here, when I want to search my hard drive for a Shockwave setup program, or search the internet for tips on how to disable the intrusive auto-update, or even use the Windows file removal utility to install the stupid program, I have to do with this digital cataract, this abomination of an eclipse, in my field of view.

After peeking aroud the edges of the box, searching the internet for advice on how to remove this unwanted "feature," I found a page on the Adobe website that purports to include a feature to disable the autoupdate feature, but 1) it's damn anoying that this box doesn't include a link to that page and 2) I don't expect to have go to someone else's website in order to control what happens on my computer.  I also found some advice on how to adjust the Windows registry, but that was far too complex to do with an obstructed screen.

And the final insult -- when finally managed to use the program manager to remove Shockwave, the stupid popup was blocking the confirmation button. 

It ticked me off to no end that I had to click "Remind me later" just to make this box stop blocking the button that I had to click in order to remove Shockwave from my system. 

I suppose I could have tried killing the process in the Windows Task Manager, but by that time I just wanted the stupid box to go away.

So... do the deliberate interface choices implemented by Shockwave's desingers meet your definition of malware?  Are the needs of users in any way served when Adobe deliberately makes it impossible to say "No"?

The new Kindle is still way out of my price range, though of course I'm still craving one. This news took a bit of the edge off of that craving, since I regularly load my MP3 player with the sounds of a computerized voice reading common-domain texts.

Amazon.com will let copyright holders opt out of having their books read aloud on the company's Kindle 2 book reader, in an apparent concession to concerns raised about the device's text-to-speech feature.

I've been using Google's Picasa for years. It's a very efficient tool for sorting, cropping, and otherwise tweaking images, and it's integrated with Google's online photo album and Google's YouTube service, so it's very convenient. It's also behaving very strangely.

After I updated recently to Picass 3, I notice that, every second the program is active, it dumps a 3-megabyte screen capture into a "My Pictures/Picasa/Screen Capture" folder, which very soon fills up my hard drive. Here's the screen capture Google took when I noticed that the folder contained a screen capture of me looking at the screen capture folder.


I'm using a brand new Dell Latitude XT Tablet PC with Windows XP service Pack 3 (for anyone out there who might be searching online for those terms).  I've dutifully checked the forums, and I wonder if the problem is something related to the way my Latitude XT treats the "PrtScn" button.  One poster said that the Picasa screen capturing starts when you push shift-insert (which I do all the time when I'm editing). 

It looks like the only way to remove this behavior is to re-install the older Picasa 2.7 (which I have done).  No more Picasa upgrades for me anytime soon.

At M.I.T., two introductory courses are still required -- classical mechanics and electromagnetism -- but today they meet in high-tech classrooms, where about 80 students sit at 13 round tables equipped with networked computers.

Instead of blackboards, the walls are covered with white boards and huge display screens. Circulating with a team of teaching assistants, the professor makes brief presentations of general principles and engages the students as they work out related concepts in small groups.

Teachers and students conduct experiments together. The room buzzes. Conferring with tablemates, calling out questions and jumping up to write formulas on the white boards are all encouraged.

"There was a long tradition that what it meant to teach was to give a really well-prepared lecture," said Peter Dourmashkin, a senior lecturer in physics at M.I.T. and a strong proponent of the new method. "It was the students' job to figure it out." --Sara Rimer, New York Times

It seems that a recent 'reply-all storm' at the State Department caused the entire e-mail infrastructure to crash. A notice sent to all State Department employees warned of disciplinary actions which will be taken if users "reply-all" to lists with a large amount of users. Apparently, the problem was compounded by not only angry replies asking to be taken off the errant list, but by the e-mail recall function, which generated further e-mail traffic. --Slashdot

Looks like this instance may represent a violation of #10 Show Respect and Restraint on the list of 10 e-mail tips (originally submitted by a student in my technical writing class back in 2000, and now one of the most popular pages on my website).

Another article that's on my mind as I consider how to integrate group work into an unusually large literature class.

In an undergraduate genetics course, students were, on 16 occasions during the course of a semester, asked a pair of "isomorphic" questions, which have different facts but require students to apply the same principles or concepts. Instructors asked students one of the questions, had them "click" their answers, discuss the question with their neighbors, and then revote. Then, they were asked to answer the second question individually, via the clickers. A significantly higher percentage of students answered the second question correctly than did so on either the original question or the first question when it was asked a second time (without revealing the results from the first query). -- Doug Lederman, Inside Higher Ed

A former student writes:

I need to find a simple book that sort of explains the trends of Web 2.0. Nothing too techy, but something that would talk about what makes it special, what people are doing with 2.0, and the best ways to utilize its philosophies.  Basically, my company is moving towards plenty of web work now that  I'm here (I'm the only designer who can do Flash and web design), but  my bosses aren't aware of a lot of the new practices in modern web design.  So I was hoping I could recommend a book for them to read that would help them get on track with modern web design and marketing. Does a book like this even exist?

With permission, I've posted the question here.

My first thought was Chris Anderson's Long Tail, which argues (as expressed in a Wired article first published in 2004) that the future of business will be indie and niche marketing, selling small numbers of lots of different things (think eBay and Amazon), rather than pushing huge numbers of identical products to mass audiences.

The concept of the long tail has its critics, including Guy Kawasaki's "cynic's checklist", Lee Gomez, and some Slashdot threads. A typical observation: even when people have ample access to downloading niche content, the most heavily advertised, corporate-backed titles still make up the vast majority of what people want to download -- even when they can download the indie content for free. (Thus, it seems that it's the advertising that makes people want to pay for content, not the quality of the content. Of course, it may be that savvy marketers are good at spotting the few items in the slush pile that people will pay for, but either way, ready access to multiple alternatives has not made a big dent in people's choices.)

I've never been a fan of PDF documents, but now that I have a tablet PC, I thought I would try reading a few PDF documents and see how my tablet functions as an e-book reader, mostly for magazines, dissertations, or the occasional advance proof copy that someone wants to share with me.

My first order of business was to find an alternative to Adobe Reader, the bloated default monstrosity that periodically treats me to a pop-under window asking me to approve a pointless upgrade (completely freezing my browser until I go hunting for the box and click it). All I really want to do is scroll through the darn pages, occasionally searching for and/or copying text, and infrequently saving the whole thing as a text file.

I looked up Foxit, a free Firefox plug-in alternative to Adobe Reader. It looked good for a moment, but then I noticed that I had to approve to the installation of something called the "Ask.com Toolbar" if I wanted certain features.  I rejected the toolbar, which means that I got a crippled version that doesn't seem to be able to copy text. There's also a little blinking strip that flashes advertisements for Foxit. Sorry, no. I don't want that distracting my reading. (Yes, I am sure that I want to uninstall Foxit Reader, thanks for asking.)

Next I tried Sumatra. It loads fast, it fits on an SD card, and it has a minimalist design.  Best of all, the manual is a simple HTML page, not a bandwidth-hogging PDF document. A note indicates that printing is not well-tested, but I suppose I can always print from a comptuer lab if I must. But I also note that the program doesn't let you save the whole document as a text file. That might be a deal-killer for me.

Adobe has an online PDF-to-text converter, but the 11MB file that I tested got rejected for being too large. There are some geeky tools that convert PDFs to text, such as the pdftotext tool in the Xpdf suite. And again, I can always use the copy of Adobe Acrobat on one of the lab computers.

Philipp Lenssen at "Google Blogoscoped" spotted a change in Google's panorama map interface, and asked me to weigh in.

Since a recent Google Maps Street View update, Google shows the wording "Report a concern" at the footer of their panorama photos (in older versions, a text for this elsewhere was reading "Report inappropriate image" - the title to the report page still uses that wording).

How long has this been around? I just noticed it.  Google's user interface is so streamlined that any change at all is noteworthy. I haven't had the chance to play with it. I'm not sure how much I want my own biases to affect Google's search results, so I'm going to have to read up on this before I play with it.

SearchWiki lets you customize your Google Web Search results by ranking, removing, and adding notes to them. You'll see your changes whenever you do the same searches while signed in to your Google Account, or until you decide to undo them. You can also see how other users have tailored any given search results page with their own notes and changes.

Looks like it's got two parts... in one, you can signal your approval of a site by clicking the up arrow button, and in the other you can click the X to remove it from your results. And you can also leave comments (here, I've clicked on the speech bubble to open up a comment box.)

How will these various affect the results Google returns in response to different searches? I want to know that before I start using it -- I might X out a site that's very good, but that I already know about, if my goal is to find NEW sites that refer to a certain term.

Do I want to type my critical commentary into a Google box, rather than keep it on my blog (where I can keep an eye on it)?