Nielsen Norman group
One step forward, two steps back.
The usability crisis is upon us, once again. We suspect most of you thought it was over. After all, HCI certainly understands how to make things usable, so the emphasis has shifted to more engaging topics, such as exciting new applications, new technological developments, and the challenges of social networks and ubiquitous connection and communication. Well you are wrong.
In a recent column for Interactions (reference 2) Norman pointed out that the rush to develop gestural interfaces - "natural" they are sometimes called - well-tested and understood standards of interaction design were being overthrown, ignored, and violated. Yes, new technologies require new methods, but the refusal to follow well-tested, well-established principles leads to usability disaster.
Recently, Raluca Budui and Hoa Loranger from the Nielsen Norman group performed usability tests on Apple's iPad (reference 1), reaching much the same conclusion. The new applications for gestural control in smart cellphones (notably the iPhone and the Android) and the coming arrival of larger screen devices built upon gestural operating systems (starting with Apple's iPad) promise even more opportunities for well-intended developers to screw things up. Nielsen put it this way: "The first crop of iPad apps revived memories of Web designs from 1993, when Mosaic first introduced the image map that made it possible for any part of any picture to become a UI element. As a result, graphic designers went wild: anything they could draw could be a UI, whether it made sense or not. It's the same with iPad apps: anything you can show and touch can be a UI on this device. There are no standards and no expectations."
Why are we having trouble? Several reasons:
· The lack of established guidelines for gestural control
· The misguided insistence by companies (e.g., Apple and Google) to ignore established conventions and establish ill-conceived new ones.
· The developer community's apparent ignorance of the long history and many findings of HCI research which results in their feeling of empowerment to unleash untested and unproven creative efforts upon the unwitting public.
In comments to Nielsen's article about our iPad usability studies, some critics claimed that it is reasonable to experiment with radically new interaction techniques when given a new platform. We agree. But the place for such experimentation is in the lab. After all, most new ideas fail, and the more radically they depart from previous best practices, the more likely they are to fail. Sometimes, a radical idea turns out to be a brilliant radical breakthrough. Those designs should indeed ship, but note that radical breakthroughs are extremely rare in any discipline. Most progress is made through sustained, small incremental steps. Bold explorations should remain inside the company and university research laboratories and not be inflicted on any customers until those recruited to participate in user research have validated the approach.
There are several important fundamental principles of interaction design that are completely independent of technology:
· Visibility (also called perceived affordances or signifiers)
· Feedback
· Consistency (also known as standards)
· Non-destructive operations (hence the importance of undo)
· Discoverability: All operations can be discovered by systematic exploration of menus
· Scalability. The operation should work on all screen sizes, small and large.
· Reliability. Operations should work. Period. And events should not happen randomly.
All these are rapidly disappearing from the toolkit of designers, aided, we must emphasize, but the weird design guidelines issued by Apple, Google, and Microsoft.
What are we talking about? Let us explain.
Visibility
Non-existing signifiers
In Apple Mail, to delete an unread item, swipe right across the unopened mail and a dialog appears, allowing you to delete the item. Open the email and the same operation has no result. In the Apple calendar, the operation does not work. How is anyone to know, first, that this magical gesture exists, and second, whether it operates in any particular setting?
With the Android, pressing and holding on an unopened email brings up a menu which allows, among other items, deletion. Open the email and the same operation has no result. In the Google calendar, the same operation has no result. How is anyone to know, first, that this magical gesture exists, and second, whether it operates in any particular setting?
Whenever we discus these examples with others, we invariably get two reactions. One is "gee, I didn't know that." The other is, "did you know that if you this (followed by some exotic swipe, multi-fingered tap, or prolonged touch) that the following happens?" Usually it is then our turn to look surprised and say "no we didn't know that." This is no way to have people learn how to use a system.
Misleading signifiers
In the Android phone, there are four permanent controls at the bottom of the screen: back, menu, home, and search. They are always visible, suggesting that they are always operative. True for three out of the four, but not for the menu button. This visible menu button implies that there is a menu available, but no, many applications (and places within applications) don't have menus and even those that do don't always have them everywhere. There is no way to tell without pushing the button and discovering that nothing happens. (Actually, it means multiple pushes because the lack of a response the first time may reflect the unreliability of the technology.)
Worse, when on the home screen, pushing the menu will occasionally bring up the on-screen keyboard. Usually a second push of the same key undoes the action done by the first, but in this case, the second push brings up a menu which floats above the leeboard. (The keyboard does not always appear. Despite much experimentation, we are unable to come up with the rules that govern when this will or will not occur.)
Feedback
Both Apple and Android recommend multiple ways to return to a previous screen. Unfortunately, for any given implementation, the method used seems to depend upon the whim of the designer. Sometimes one can swipe the screen to the right or downwards. Usually, one uses the back button. In the iPhone, if you are lucky, there is a labeled button. (If not, try swiping in all directions and pushing everything visible on the screen.) With the Android, the permanently visible back button provides one method, but sometimes the task is accomplished by sliding the screen to the right. The back button has a major flaw, however. Push the back button to go to the previous page, then again, and then again. And oops, suddenly you are out of the application. No feedback that the next button no longer moves on inside the application but takes you out. (The same flaw exists on the Blackberry.)
In the Android, the back button moves the user through the activities stack, which always includes the originating activity: home. But this programming decision should not be allowed to impact the user experience: falling off the cliff of the application on to the home screen is not good usability practice. (Note too that the stack on the Android does not include all the elements that the user model would include: it explicitly leaves out views, windows, menus, and dialogs.)
Yes, provide a back button - or perhaps call it a dismiss button, but make it follow the user's model of "going back," not the programmer's model that is incorporated into the Activity Stack of the OS. Among other things, it should have a hard stop when at the top level of the application. Allowing it to exit the application is wrong.
Consistency and Standards
Whatever happened to the distinction between radio buttons and checkboxes? Radio buttons meant selection of only one out of all the possibilities: selecting one removed the selection of others. Check boxes, however, allow one to select multiple alternatives. Not with these new systems: Check boxes can work any way the whim of the developer decides, often to the distress of the poor person trying to use the system.
Some applications allow pinching to change scale of an image, others use plus and minus boxes. Some allow you to flip screens up, some down, some to the right, some to the left, and some not at all. Touching an image can enlarge it, hyperlink from it, flip it over, unlock it so it can be moved, or whatever the whim of the developer decided.
The different operating system developers have provided detailed Human Interface Guidelines for their products. Unfortunately, the guidelines differ fro one another, in part because different companies wish to protect their intellectual property by not allowing other companies to follow their methods. But whatever the reason, proprietary standards make life more difficult for everyone. For sure, they undermine the main way users learn: from each other.
Discoverability
The true advantage of the Graphical User Interface, GUI, was that commands no longer had to be memorized. Instead, every possible action in the interface could be discovered through systematic exploration of the menus. Discoverability is another important principle that has now disappeared. Apple specifically recommends against the use of menus. Android recommends it, even providing a dedicated menu key, but does not require that it always be active. Moreover, swipes and gestures cannot readily be incorporated in menus: So far, nobody has figured out how to inform the person using the app what the alternatives are.
Scalability
Home computers, whether laptop or desktop, always came with a wide variety of screen sizes. Now that computer operating systems are starting to support multi-touch screen, this means that gestures have to work on large screens as well as small. There is a plethora of screen sizes for cellphones. And the emergence of an in-between breed of pads, we have mid-sized screens. So the screens will range from tiny to huge, conceivably wall size (or at least, whiteboard-sized). Gestures that work well for small screen fail for large ones, and vice versa. Small little checkboxes and other targets that work well with mice and stylus are inappropriate for fingers to hit with precision. Larger screens have their own problems with control sizes. Are the new controls to be used while held in the hand, laid flat upon a surface, or tilted at an angle? All varieties now exist.
Sensitive screens give many opportunities for accidental selection and triggering of actions. This happens on small screens because the target items might be are small and close together. This happens on large screens because the same hands necessary to hold and stabilize the device can accidentally touch the screen.
Reliability
Accidental activation is common in gestural interfaces, as users happen to touch something they didn't mean to touch. Conversely, frequently users do intend to touch a control or issue a gestural command but nothing happens because their touch or gesture was a little bit off. Since gestures are invisible, users often don't know that they made these mistakes. Also, a basic foundation of usability is that errors are not the user's fault; they are the system's (or designer's) fault for making it too easy to commit the error.
Traditional GUIs do have similar problems, for example when the mouse is clicked one pixel outside the icon a user intended to activate. But at least the mouse pointer is visible on the screen so that the user can see that it's a bit off.
When users think they did one thing but "really" did something else, they lose their sense of controlling the system because they don't understand the connection between actions and results. The user experience feels random and definitely not empowering.
Some reliability issues can be alleviated by following usability guidelines such as using larger objects and surrounding them with generous click zones. Others are inherent in any new technology that will have its bugs and not work perfectly. This is that much more reason to enhance user empowerment by deigning according to the other interaction principles we have listed in this article.
Lack of undo
Undo! One of the most brilliant inventions of usable computer interfaces seems mostly to have been forgotten. It is very difficult to recover from accidental selections or checking of boxes. First, the result often takes one to a new location. Second, it may not even be obvious what action got you there. For example, if a finger accidentally scrapes an active region, triggering an action, because the trigger was unintentional and subconscious, there is almost no way to know why the resulting action took place.
Novel Interaction Methods
Gestural systems do require novel interaction methods. Indeed, this is one of their virtues: we can use the body. We can title and shake, rotate and touch, poke and probe. The results can be extremely effective while also conveying a sense of fun and pleasure. But these interaction styles are still in their infancy, so it is only natural to expect that a great deal of exploration and study still needs to be done.
Shaking has become a standard way of requesting another choice, a choice that seems to have been discovered accidentally, but that also feels natural sandpiper. Note, however, that although it is easy and fun to shake a small cellphone, shaking a large pad is neither easy nor much fun. Scrolling through long lists can now be done by rapid swiping of the fingers providing some visual excitement, but we still need to work out the display dynamics, allowing the items to gather speed, to keep going through a form of "momentum," yet to make it possible to see where in the list one is even while it whizzes past, and to enable rapid stopping once the desired location seems near.
Although pinching and spreading seem natural ways of zooming an object out and in, when the dynamics are badly set, the movements are difficult to control. Different applications today use different rules, which ends up confusing people. Moreover not all places allow this, even if they could, another source of confusion.
Rotation and titling the device also is often used to change the display, although for some applications, such as reading, it has been found necessary to provide a lock to prevent the otherwise natural rotation of the displayed image that would prevent easy reading.
The Promise of Gestural Interfaces
The new interfaces can be a pleasure to use, a pleasure to see. They also offer the possibility of scaling back the sometimes heavy-handed visual language of traditional GUIs that were designed back when nobody had seen a scrollbar. In the early 1980s usability demanded GUI elements that fairly screamed "click me." Desktop GUIs are already less neon-colored than Windows 3.0 and we can afford to dial-back the visual prominence a bit more on tablets, which will further enhance their aesthetics. But dialed-back doesn't mean "invisible."
The new displays promises to revolutionize our media: news and opinion pieces can be dynamic, with short video instead of still photographs, adjustable, manipulatable figures instead of static diagrams. Consumer Reports could publish its rating tables with reader-controlled weights, so each viewer would have a tailored set of recommendations based upon standardized test results.
The new devices are also fun to use: gestures add a welcome feeling of activity to the otherwise joyless ones of pointing and clicking.
But the lack of consistency, inability to discover operations, coupled with the ease of accidentally triggering actions from which there is no recovery threatens the viability of these systems.
We urgently need to return to our basics, developing usability guidelines for these systems that are based upon solid principles of interaction design, not on the whims of the company human interface guidelines and arbitrary ideas of developers.
Monday, May 31, 2010
Don Norman's jnd.org / GESTURAL INTERFACES: A STEP BACKWARDS IN USABILITY
Don Norman's jnd.org / GESTURAL INTERFACES: A STEP BACKWARDS IN USABILITY
Nielsen Norman group
One step forward, two steps back.
The usability crisis is upon us, once again. We suspect most of you thought it was over. After all, HCI certainly understands how to make things usable, so the emphasis has shifted to more engaging topics, such as exciting new applications, new technological developments, and the challenges of social networks and ubiquitous connection and communication. Well you are wrong.
In a recent column for Interactions (reference 2) Norman pointed out that the rush to develop gestural interfaces - "natural" they are sometimes called - well-tested and understood standards of interaction design were being overthrown, ignored, and violated. Yes, new technologies require new methods, but the refusal to follow well-tested, well-established principles leads to usability disaster.
Recently, Raluca Budui and Hoa Loranger from the Nielsen Norman group performed usability tests on Apple's iPad (reference 1), reaching much the same conclusion. The new applications for gestural control in smart cellphones (notably the iPhone and the Android) and the coming arrival of larger screen devices built upon gestural operating systems (starting with Apple's iPad) promise even more opportunities for well-intended developers to screw things up. Nielsen put it this way: "The first crop of iPad apps revived memories of Web designs from 1993, when Mosaic first introduced the image map that made it possible for any part of any picture to become a UI element. As a result, graphic designers went wild: anything they could draw could be a UI, whether it made sense or not. It's the same with iPad apps: anything you can show and touch can be a UI on this device. There are no standards and no expectations."
Why are we having trouble? Several reasons:
· The lack of established guidelines for gestural control
· The misguided insistence by companies (e.g., Apple and Google) to ignore established conventions and establish ill-conceived new ones.
· The developer community's apparent ignorance of the long history and many findings of HCI research which results in their feeling of empowerment to unleash untested and unproven creative efforts upon the unwitting public.
In comments to Nielsen's article about our iPad usability studies, some critics claimed that it is reasonable to experiment with radically new interaction techniques when given a new platform. We agree. But the place for such experimentation is in the lab. After all, most new ideas fail, and the more radically they depart from previous best practices, the more likely they are to fail. Sometimes, a radical idea turns out to be a brilliant radical breakthrough. Those designs should indeed ship, but note that radical breakthroughs are extremely rare in any discipline. Most progress is made through sustained, small incremental steps. Bold explorations should remain inside the company and university research laboratories and not be inflicted on any customers until those recruited to participate in user research have validated the approach.
There are several important fundamental principles of interaction design that are completely independent of technology:
· Visibility (also called perceived affordances or signifiers)
· Feedback
· Consistency (also known as standards)
· Non-destructive operations (hence the importance of undo)
· Discoverability: All operations can be discovered by systematic exploration of menus
· Scalability. The operation should work on all screen sizes, small and large.
· Reliability. Operations should work. Period. And events should not happen randomly.
All these are rapidly disappearing from the toolkit of designers, aided, we must emphasize, but the weird design guidelines issued by Apple, Google, and Microsoft.
What are we talking about? Let us explain.
Visibility
Non-existing signifiers
In Apple Mail, to delete an unread item, swipe right across the unopened mail and a dialog appears, allowing you to delete the item. Open the email and the same operation has no result. In the Apple calendar, the operation does not work. How is anyone to know, first, that this magical gesture exists, and second, whether it operates in any particular setting?
With the Android, pressing and holding on an unopened email brings up a menu which allows, among other items, deletion. Open the email and the same operation has no result. In the Google calendar, the same operation has no result. How is anyone to know, first, that this magical gesture exists, and second, whether it operates in any particular setting?
Whenever we discus these examples with others, we invariably get two reactions. One is "gee, I didn't know that." The other is, "did you know that if you this (followed by some exotic swipe, multi-fingered tap, or prolonged touch) that the following happens?" Usually it is then our turn to look surprised and say "no we didn't know that." This is no way to have people learn how to use a system.
Misleading signifiers
In the Android phone, there are four permanent controls at the bottom of the screen: back, menu, home, and search. They are always visible, suggesting that they are always operative. True for three out of the four, but not for the menu button. This visible menu button implies that there is a menu available, but no, many applications (and places within applications) don't have menus and even those that do don't always have them everywhere. There is no way to tell without pushing the button and discovering that nothing happens. (Actually, it means multiple pushes because the lack of a response the first time may reflect the unreliability of the technology.)
Worse, when on the home screen, pushing the menu will occasionally bring up the on-screen keyboard. Usually a second push of the same key undoes the action done by the first, but in this case, the second push brings up a menu which floats above the leeboard. (The keyboard does not always appear. Despite much experimentation, we are unable to come up with the rules that govern when this will or will not occur.)
Feedback
Both Apple and Android recommend multiple ways to return to a previous screen. Unfortunately, for any given implementation, the method used seems to depend upon the whim of the designer. Sometimes one can swipe the screen to the right or downwards. Usually, one uses the back button. In the iPhone, if you are lucky, there is a labeled button. (If not, try swiping in all directions and pushing everything visible on the screen.) With the Android, the permanently visible back button provides one method, but sometimes the task is accomplished by sliding the screen to the right. The back button has a major flaw, however. Push the back button to go to the previous page, then again, and then again. And oops, suddenly you are out of the application. No feedback that the next button no longer moves on inside the application but takes you out. (The same flaw exists on the Blackberry.)
In the Android, the back button moves the user through the activities stack, which always includes the originating activity: home. But this programming decision should not be allowed to impact the user experience: falling off the cliff of the application on to the home screen is not good usability practice. (Note too that the stack on the Android does not include all the elements that the user model would include: it explicitly leaves out views, windows, menus, and dialogs.)
Yes, provide a back button - or perhaps call it a dismiss button, but make it follow the user's model of "going back," not the programmer's model that is incorporated into the Activity Stack of the OS. Among other things, it should have a hard stop when at the top level of the application. Allowing it to exit the application is wrong.
Consistency and Standards
Whatever happened to the distinction between radio buttons and checkboxes? Radio buttons meant selection of only one out of all the possibilities: selecting one removed the selection of others. Check boxes, however, allow one to select multiple alternatives. Not with these new systems: Check boxes can work any way the whim of the developer decides, often to the distress of the poor person trying to use the system.
Some applications allow pinching to change scale of an image, others use plus and minus boxes. Some allow you to flip screens up, some down, some to the right, some to the left, and some not at all. Touching an image can enlarge it, hyperlink from it, flip it over, unlock it so it can be moved, or whatever the whim of the developer decided.
The different operating system developers have provided detailed Human Interface Guidelines for their products. Unfortunately, the guidelines differ fro one another, in part because different companies wish to protect their intellectual property by not allowing other companies to follow their methods. But whatever the reason, proprietary standards make life more difficult for everyone. For sure, they undermine the main way users learn: from each other.
Discoverability
The true advantage of the Graphical User Interface, GUI, was that commands no longer had to be memorized. Instead, every possible action in the interface could be discovered through systematic exploration of the menus. Discoverability is another important principle that has now disappeared. Apple specifically recommends against the use of menus. Android recommends it, even providing a dedicated menu key, but does not require that it always be active. Moreover, swipes and gestures cannot readily be incorporated in menus: So far, nobody has figured out how to inform the person using the app what the alternatives are.
Scalability
Home computers, whether laptop or desktop, always came with a wide variety of screen sizes. Now that computer operating systems are starting to support multi-touch screen, this means that gestures have to work on large screens as well as small. There is a plethora of screen sizes for cellphones. And the emergence of an in-between breed of pads, we have mid-sized screens. So the screens will range from tiny to huge, conceivably wall size (or at least, whiteboard-sized). Gestures that work well for small screen fail for large ones, and vice versa. Small little checkboxes and other targets that work well with mice and stylus are inappropriate for fingers to hit with precision. Larger screens have their own problems with control sizes. Are the new controls to be used while held in the hand, laid flat upon a surface, or tilted at an angle? All varieties now exist.
Sensitive screens give many opportunities for accidental selection and triggering of actions. This happens on small screens because the target items might be are small and close together. This happens on large screens because the same hands necessary to hold and stabilize the device can accidentally touch the screen.
Reliability
Accidental activation is common in gestural interfaces, as users happen to touch something they didn't mean to touch. Conversely, frequently users do intend to touch a control or issue a gestural command but nothing happens because their touch or gesture was a little bit off. Since gestures are invisible, users often don't know that they made these mistakes. Also, a basic foundation of usability is that errors are not the user's fault; they are the system's (or designer's) fault for making it too easy to commit the error.
Traditional GUIs do have similar problems, for example when the mouse is clicked one pixel outside the icon a user intended to activate. But at least the mouse pointer is visible on the screen so that the user can see that it's a bit off.
When users think they did one thing but "really" did something else, they lose their sense of controlling the system because they don't understand the connection between actions and results. The user experience feels random and definitely not empowering.
Some reliability issues can be alleviated by following usability guidelines such as using larger objects and surrounding them with generous click zones. Others are inherent in any new technology that will have its bugs and not work perfectly. This is that much more reason to enhance user empowerment by deigning according to the other interaction principles we have listed in this article.
Lack of undo
Undo! One of the most brilliant inventions of usable computer interfaces seems mostly to have been forgotten. It is very difficult to recover from accidental selections or checking of boxes. First, the result often takes one to a new location. Second, it may not even be obvious what action got you there. For example, if a finger accidentally scrapes an active region, triggering an action, because the trigger was unintentional and subconscious, there is almost no way to know why the resulting action took place.
Novel Interaction Methods
Gestural systems do require novel interaction methods. Indeed, this is one of their virtues: we can use the body. We can title and shake, rotate and touch, poke and probe. The results can be extremely effective while also conveying a sense of fun and pleasure. But these interaction styles are still in their infancy, so it is only natural to expect that a great deal of exploration and study still needs to be done.
Shaking has become a standard way of requesting another choice, a choice that seems to have been discovered accidentally, but that also feels natural sandpiper. Note, however, that although it is easy and fun to shake a small cellphone, shaking a large pad is neither easy nor much fun. Scrolling through long lists can now be done by rapid swiping of the fingers providing some visual excitement, but we still need to work out the display dynamics, allowing the items to gather speed, to keep going through a form of "momentum," yet to make it possible to see where in the list one is even while it whizzes past, and to enable rapid stopping once the desired location seems near.
Although pinching and spreading seem natural ways of zooming an object out and in, when the dynamics are badly set, the movements are difficult to control. Different applications today use different rules, which ends up confusing people. Moreover not all places allow this, even if they could, another source of confusion.
Rotation and titling the device also is often used to change the display, although for some applications, such as reading, it has been found necessary to provide a lock to prevent the otherwise natural rotation of the displayed image that would prevent easy reading.
The Promise of Gestural Interfaces
The new interfaces can be a pleasure to use, a pleasure to see. They also offer the possibility of scaling back the sometimes heavy-handed visual language of traditional GUIs that were designed back when nobody had seen a scrollbar. In the early 1980s usability demanded GUI elements that fairly screamed "click me." Desktop GUIs are already less neon-colored than Windows 3.0 and we can afford to dial-back the visual prominence a bit more on tablets, which will further enhance their aesthetics. But dialed-back doesn't mean "invisible."
The new displays promises to revolutionize our media: news and opinion pieces can be dynamic, with short video instead of still photographs, adjustable, manipulatable figures instead of static diagrams. Consumer Reports could publish its rating tables with reader-controlled weights, so each viewer would have a tailored set of recommendations based upon standardized test results.
The new devices are also fun to use: gestures add a welcome feeling of activity to the otherwise joyless ones of pointing and clicking.
But the lack of consistency, inability to discover operations, coupled with the ease of accidentally triggering actions from which there is no recovery threatens the viability of these systems.
We urgently need to return to our basics, developing usability guidelines for these systems that are based upon solid principles of interaction design, not on the whims of the company human interface guidelines and arbitrary ideas of developers.
Friday, May 28, 2010
Robert Reich: How Conservatives Made the Case for Increased Regulations
According to a new CBS News poll 70 percent of Americans disapprove of how BP has handled the oil gush, compared with 45 percent who disapprove of how Obama has handled it. This could change in the days or weeks ahead if the spill continues to worsen and the White House looks and acts powerless.
The poll also points out a danger for Obama: Only 35 percent approve of his words and deeds so far during the crisis. He seems too willing to defer to BP executives, even as Bad Petroleum Ltd. tries to shift blame to Transocean Ltd., the rig operator, which is trying to put blame on Halliburton, which made the cement casings.
But it's not just the oil gush. Most Americans continue to be livid at Wall Street executives and traders -- for which they blame an economic crisis that's cost many their jobs, savings, and homes -- a crisis that's still costing taxpayers a bundle even as the bankers are back to collecting huge compensation packages. Yet the President continues to consult and socialize with many of them. Inexplicably, the White House won't go along with proposals by several Democratic senators to cap the size of the biggest banks (the only way to ensure they'll never be too big to fail and their political power is contained), to resurrect the Glass-Steagall Act (except in its weaker "Volcker rule" form), or to force the biggest banks to do their derivative trading without the artificial support of tax-payer insured commercial deposits.
Most people are also furious that executives at Massey Energy failed to use mandated safety equipment and procedures that might have saved the lives of 29 miners. Where were the regulators? What does the Administration plan to do to the company or its executives?
Most Americans upset that the top guns at Anthem, WellPoint, and other health insurers are still hiking insurance rates. Why are these health insurers still immune from the antitrust laws? How can the Administration not blow the whistle on their current attempts blunt regulations that would cap their premiums?
Many are angry that the executives of credit card companies still charging outlandish rates on overcharges that are still hard to compute. What happened to the new rules that were supposed to stop this?
Most Americans who know about it are bothered that the managers of hedge funds and private-equity funds (the 25 richest of whom took $1 billion each last year) are taxed at only 15 percent because of a loophole in the tax laws that the Senate continues to protect.
You get my drift.
Yet the President is treating these corporate and financial executives the way he treats Senate Republicans. At most, he respectfully disagrees.
Respectful disagreement is virtuous in a democratic society, but so is appropriate indignation. Indignation signals to the public that social responsibilities have been breached, and thereby lends credence and authority to all those who are working toward them. Franklin D. Roosevelt had no hesitancy blaming the "economic royalists" -- the rich bankers and executives who stood in the way of the New Deal.
Moreover, without indignation, the President opens himself up to libertarian critics such as Rand Paul, who oppose almost all government regulation ("What I don't like from the president's administration is this sort of, 'I'll put my boot heel on the throat of BP"), as well as right-wing opportunists who claim the President is pulling his punches because he receives campaign donations from oil companies.
Here's Sarah Palin, of all people: "The oil companies who have so supported President Obama in his campaign and are supportive of him now -- I don't know why the question isn't asked by the mainstream media and by others if there's any connection with the contributions made to President Obama and his administration and the support by the oil companies to the administration [and] President Obama taking so doggone long to get in there, to dive in there, and grasp the complexity and the potential tragedy that we are seeing here in the Gulf of Mexico."
It's also important for the President to connect the dots -- providing Americans a clear narrative for why government is so critically important. Corporations are organized to maximize profits, not to achieve public goals such as environmental protection, financial trust, safety, and so on.
Since Ronald Reagan first opined that government was the problem rather than the solution, right-wing Republicans have blasted all forms of regulation. Now we see the consequences of years of regulatory neglect.
The President has an opportunity now to express appropriate indignation and to assert the importance of reasonable regulation. He should waste no time doing so.
This post originally appeared at RobertReich.org
Thursday, May 27, 2010
Wednesday, May 26, 2010
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
Monday, May 24, 2010
Friday, May 21, 2010
Poll: Most Think Arizona Should be able to Pull the Plug on L.A.'s Power - LAist
I appreciate you taking the time to "take this".
My data on the reduced illegal immigration in the last couple years begins with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_immigration_to_the_United_States. A more comprehensive study might be found at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/03/us/03immig.html?_r=4&oref=slogin&or... with a Pew Center study on current immigration rates. I agree with you wholeheartedly that Bush was pro-immigration. He was a Texas Governor and was elected in Texas based partly on an immigration stance favorable to Hispanics. I never said nor promoted amnesty, which I don't think is a policy and is generally a slap in the face of anyone immigrating to the US legally. The distinctly nasty anti-immigrant tone in the US right now doesn't jive with the fact that there are less people endeavoring to cross the border illegally at the moment, so I wonder why now? Why not then? Where was the indignation?
The economy and having a handy scapegoat is the answer. The economy didn't hit the skids because too many illegal immigrants were going to the emergency room, it was because a bunch of people bought some really bad debt and got over their heads. Some really shortsighted people sold it to them. The entire anti-immigrant hoo-ha right now is fearmongering and distraction, for political gain. The pawns are the angry public and a bunch of poor people willing to do whatever it takes to improve their lives.
Pathetic, really.
Opening shots of Civil War 2.0?
The Rachel Maddow Show - Morning Maddow: May 21
I spend my mornings reading the internet looking for tasty tidbits to tempt Rachel Maddow's news appetite. Check back here throughout the morning to see what I find. Got a story you want her to see? Tell me about it in the comments.
BP stockholders are suing.
The architect of AZ's immigration law wants to go even further. (h/t to facebook commenter Patricia Roach)
Conflict of interest worries raised in oil spill tests.
Sec. Clinton condemns N. Korean attack on S. Korean warship.
The other side of the COIN: the Obama administration gives Hamid Karzai's rival the cold shoulder.
Are we turning Japanese? Paul Krugman really thinks so.
Today is Mark Souder's last day in Congress. You can read his resignation letter here.
Webcast of Texas school board meeting and vote on curriculum standards today.
Rand Paul sticks up for BP.
There's a new Nigerian scam. This one is on Craigslist.
How they passed health reform part two.
Hell, meet my friend hand basket
Thursday, May 20, 2010
Apple Outsider » Google Rewrites History
Daring Fireball’s headline of the day is a bold quote from Google’s VP of Engineering, Vic Gundotra:
If we did not act, we faced a draconian future. Where one man, one company, one carrier was the future.
Good old competitive potshots are fair game, but this one is particularly offensive when one recalls Google acquired Android in August of 2005. That’s nearly 18 months before the world even knew about iPhone, let alone its carrier model or prospects for success. And it’s nearly a full three years before the App Store went live on July 11, 2008.
Google is a publicly traded corporation that controls the flow of more and more information every day. It’s very troubling to watch them rewrite history in such a self-serving manner.
Maniacal Rage
Think i am going to skip right past CS4 and onto CS5. Hell the flight to and from thailand might be worth it to grab a bootleg copy AND have a vacation... Just kidding IRS and Adobe.
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
Curated hypocrisy: How Google camouflages its attacks on Apple « counternotions
Last week, Forrester analyst Sarah Rotman Epps published Curated Computing: Designing For The Post-iPad Era where she observed:
“What’s revolutionary about the iPad is the experience that it delivers: The iPad is a new kind of PC that ushers in an era of Curated Computing.“
Not unexpectedly, this drew the attention of the anti-Apple echosystem that regards the Cupertino company as the evil incarnate who’s hellbent on destroying the “open web” by curating its users’ experience on Apple devices.
Taking the baton of anti-Apple venom from Adobe’s Lee (Go screw yourself Apple) Brimelow, Google’s newest evangelist Tim (I hate, hate Apple) Bray responded to Forrester’s “Curated Computing” notion with élan:
I shudder to the core.
In a series of tweets on Twitter, Bray piled on Apple with escalating snarkiness. Let’s review his misdirections away from Google’s own sins:
Curated computing: Who needs complexity?
Exactly, who needs complexity? Who does need complexity other than those who profit from mediating its ill effects on consumers? Who, for example, needs Byzantine complexity purposely injected into our legal, tax or health care systems? Who profits from the shameful complexity of our IT universe? Who benefits from the anti-virus industry? Who profits from the complexity of Facebook’s privacy settings, Oracle’s pricing structure or Microsoft’s SharePoint hairball? Who needs the complexity of users being forced to navigate through six different Android OS versions against a permutation of dozens and dozens of carriers, handset manufacturers and devices? Google would like you to believe users are craving for this complexity, just as Microsoft tried to convince you for the last two decades.
[John @gruber answers @timbray: I think this one actually nails it: "Curated computing: Who needs complexity?" Many use cases where we *don't* need complexity. Tim Bray responds:]
Agreed, many indeed, but freedom is too high a price.
Freedom? Whose freedom? The freedom of those who directly profit from the artificial complexity to continue as they please or the freedom of users who are being taxed by these parasites? Let’s ignore the absurdity of equating Apple’s banning of proprietary Flash with the abrogation of, say, the First Amendment, a real freedom.
Curated computing: Don’t bother your pretty little head, we’ll take care of what you see.
Just like Google telling the rest of the world: “If someone forced us to [disclose how our search advertising business works], it would destroy our product.” This from a company that’s currently being investigated by the European Commission for antitrust ramifications of its opaque search ranking algorithms and the resulting 90% monopolistic share of the European search market. Google knows best.
Curated computing: Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
Let’s open that curtain a bit. Here’s what Bray’s bosses and Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page said in their The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine a few years ago:
Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users.
We expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.
It could be argued from the consumer point of view that the better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want. This of course erodes the advertising supported business model of the existing search engines. We believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm.
It’s not as if, a decade later, the rest of the world can see what’s behind Google’s perfectly opaque and proprietary search and advertising curtain, is it? Can you say “link farms”and SEO? Do you really know what exactly Google does with your click-stream history? Did you know Google has been snooping on European WiFi transmissions until a few days ago even though the company denied it previously? Do you really know what the man behind the curtain is doing?
Curated computing: Admire the beautiful murals on the garden walls.
Or you can go “out there” to admire the graffiti on the…ground? In Google’s walled garden of advertising, for example, “cougars and cubs are out, but sugar daddies and sugar babies are in.” Google “will take care of” your sexual proclivities.
Curated computing: Freedom is over-rated.
So are utopias.
I, for one, welcome our new curatorial overlords.
Of course, no mention of our current overloads: complexity merchants.
Curated computing: What they have right now in China.
And what they also had in China just a few years ago when Bray’s employer Google went in three-monkey style to conduct commerce, despite all manner of people pleading the overlord of search/ad business not to.
Curated computing: Just fine if you’re the curator.
Google should know, its share of the search market hovers around 65-70% and its U.S. search advertising share is over 75%. If you’re the sole “curator” of AdSense/AdWords things should be just fine.
Curated computing: Your gated-exurban-community home on the Internet.
Perhaps the most pernicious proposition of the “everything must be open” crusade is the notion that curation is bad and anti-freedom. Soldiers of this crusade confuse freedom with competition. Our museums are not football-field sized warehouses where art objects are indiscriminately dumped and our magazines and blogs are not amorphous containers of randomly selected articles. Our classrooms, restaurants, hospitals and indeed all our civilized institutions are firmly reliant on curation of one kind or another. The goal should be for curators to compete, not for curation to be declared illegal and unholy by the “open” zealots.
Who’s behind the curtain?
Just as Adobe is desperately trying to yell at the world, “Don’t buy into Apple’s walled garden, get locked into our own proprietary Flash,” so is Google trying to misdirect consumers’ attention from its own monopolistic sins to Apple’s mobile platform where 100 million users voted with their own money to enjoy 200,000 apps. The evil man behind the curtain in this scenario is not Apple’s curation, it’s the frightening prospect of Google getting cut off from search and ad revenue derived from its naked domination of the search box on top of your web browser. That, unfortunately, doesn’t sound like an appealing public cry, hence the “Curated Computing” misdirection whining.
Farmlab: Farmlab Public Salon Karen Atkinson Friday, May 21, 2010 @ Noon Free Admission
Farmlab Public Salon Karen Atkinson Friday, May 21, 2010 @ Noon Free Admission
10 Steps to Getting Your Sh*t TogetherKaren Atkinson will present various steps every artist should know in order to have their sh*t together, using the software she created for her artist run company. As a follow up to the presentation, Karen will hang around to answer any questions.Karen Atkinson is an artist with a wide variety of experience that includes curating and exhibiting in multiple countries, guest editing publications, producing independent projects and public art. She has taught for 30 years, 22 at CalArts. Karen’s company Getting Your Sh*t Together has a professional practices blog, tons of free information on the website, an Artist Manual publication and a Teaching Manual for teaching the business of art. She has spoken at numerous conferences and events.Further information: www.gyst-ink.com
posted by not a cornfield / under spring / farmlab @ 5/14/2010 09:41:00 AM
Get on it you artists... damn too bad i'll be out of town for this one.
Farmlab: Farmlab Public Salon Karen Atkinson Friday, May 21, 2010 @ Noon Free Admission
Farmlab Public Salon Karen Atkinson Friday, May 21, 2010 @ Noon Free Admission
10 Steps to Getting Your Sh*t TogetherKaren Atkinson will present various steps every artist should know in order to have their sh*t together, using the software she created for her artist run company. As a follow up to the presentation, Karen will hang around to answer any questions.Karen Atkinson is an artist with a wide variety of experience that includes curating and exhibiting in multiple countries, guest editing publications, producing independent projects and public art. She has taught for 30 years, 22 at CalArts. Karen’s company Getting Your Sh*t Together has a professional practices blog, tons of free information on the website, an Artist Manual publication and a Teaching Manual for teaching the business of art. She has spoken at numerous conferences and events.Further information: www.gyst-ink.com
posted by not a cornfield / under spring / farmlab @ 5/14/2010 09:41:00 AM
Get on it you artists... damn too bad i'll be out of town for this one.
Crackdown in Bangkok - The Big Picture
I spent a few weeks in Bangkok in 07. These photos are really shocking. Seems so surreal.
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
2011 Triumph Sprint GT 1050 official video
Finally a new bike that looks good. this might me the one for me.
2011 Triumph Sprint GT 1050 official video
Finally a new bike that looks good. this might me the one for me.
Monday, May 17, 2010
Thursday, May 13, 2010
Cancer's sweet tooth becomes a target - health - 12 May 2010 - New Scientist
What strikes me about this is it seems so obvious. the cells go into panic mode turing off normal aspiration and turning that back on seems to fix the problem. Additionally our national diet high in sugar and the lack of exercise and the large areas of the body the end up being starved for O2 seems to lead to cells resorting to this inefficient and destructive process to stay alive.
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
iPad Usability: First Findings From User Testing (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)
Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox, April 26, 2010:
iPad Usability: First Findings From User Testing
Summary:
iPad apps are inconsistent and have low feature discoverability, with frequent user errors due to accidental gestures. An overly strong print metaphor and weird interaction styles cause further usability problems."It looks like a giant iPhone," is the first thing users say when asked to test an iPad. (Their second comment? "Wow, it's heavy.")
But from an interaction design perspective, an iPad user interface shouldn't be a scaled-up iPhone UI.
Indeed, one finding from our study is that the tab bar at the bottom of the screen works much worse on iPad than on iPhone. On the small phone, users are likely to notice the muted icons at the bottom of the screen, even if their attention is on content in the middle of the screen. But the iPad's much bigger screen means that users are typically directing their gaze far from the tab bar and they ignore (and forget) those buttons.
Another big difference between iPad and iPhone is that regular websites work reasonably well on the big tablet. In our iPhone usability studies, users strongly prefer using apps to going on the Web. It's simply too painful to use most websites on the small screen. (Mobile-optimized sites alleviate this issue, but even they usually have worse usability than apps.)
The iPad's bigger screen offers reasonable usability for regular Web pages. Of course, there's still the "fat finger" problem common to all touch screens, which makes it hard for users to reliably hit small targets. The iPad has a read–tap asymmetry, where text big enough to read is too small to touch. Thus, we definitely recommend large touch zones on any Web page hoping to attract many iPad users.
Also, most Web pages offer a rich and overstuffed experience compared to the iPad's sparse and regulated environment; when an iPad app suddenly launches users onto the Web, the transition can be jarring.
For more than a decade, when we ask users for their first impression of (desktop) websites, the most frequently-used word has been "busy." In contrast, the first impression of many iPad apps is "beautiful." The change to a more soothing user experience is certainly welcome, especially for a device that may turn out to be more of a leisure computer than a business computer. Still, beauty shouldn't come at the cost of being able to actually use the apps to derive real benefits from their features and content.
First Studies
We conducted our initial usability studies of iPad apps and content a few weeks after Apple launched the device. We tested 7 users — all with at least 3 months' iPhone experience — but only one was an "experienced" iPad user.(This user had only a week's experience — far less than the minimum of one year's experience that we usually request of usability study participants.)
Obviously, the findings from this research are only preliminary. However, we're releasing them anyway because the iPad platform is so different and is expected to attract considerable application development during the coming months. It would be a shame for all these apps to be designed without the benefit of the usability insights that do exist, despite the gaps in our current knowledge.
We tested the following applications and websites:
- ABC player
- Alice in Wonderland Lite
- AP News
- Art Authority
- BBC News
- Bloomberg
- craigsphone (Craigslist)
- eBay (both app and website)
- The Elements (physics courseware)
- Endless.com
- Epicurious
- ESPN Score Center
- ESPN.com
- Gap
- Gilt
- GQ magazine
- GWR Lite (Guinness World Records)
- iBook
- IMDb (Internet Movie Database)
- iverse Comics
- Kayak (kayak.com)
- Marvel Comics
- MLB.com (Major League Baseball)
- Nike.com
- Now Playing
- NPR (National Public Radio)
- The New York Times Editors' Choice
- Popular Science
- Time Magazine
- USA Today
- virginamerica.com
- whitehouse.gov
- Wolfram Alpha
- Yahoo! Entertainment
Wacky Interfaces
The first crop of iPad user apps revived memories of Web designs from 1993, when Mosaic first introduced the image map that made it possible for any part of any picture to become a UI element. As a result, graphic designers went wild: anything they could draw could be a UI, whether it made sense or not.It's the same with iPad apps: anything you can show and touch can be a UI on this device. There are no standards and no expectations.
Worse, there are often no perceived affordances for how various screen elements respond when touched. The prevailing aesthetic is very much that of flat images that fill the screen as if they were etched. There's no lighting model or pseudo-dimensionality to indicate raised or lowered visual elements that call out to be activated.
In contrast, long-standing GUI design guidelines for desktop user designs dictate that buttons look raised (and thus pressable) and that scrollbars and other interactive elements are visually distinct from the content.
The traditional GUI separation between "church and state" — that is, between content and features or commands — has carried over to modern Web design. Those 1993-style image maps are long gone from any site that hopes to do business on the Internet.
The iPad etched-screen aesthetic does look good. No visual distractions or nerdy buttons. The penalty for this beauty is the re-emergence of a usability problem we haven't seen since the mid-1990s: Users don't know where they can click.
For the last 15 years of Web usability research, the main problems have been that users don't know where to go or which option to choose — not that they don't even know which options exist. With iPad UIs, we're back to this square one.
Inconsistent Interaction Design
To exacerbate the problem, once they do figure out how something works, users can't transfer their skills from one app to the next. Each application has a completely different UI for similar features.In different apps, touching a picture could produce any of the following 5 results:
The latter design was used by USA Today: Touching the newspaper's logo brought up a navigation menu listing the various sections. This was probably the most unexpected interaction we tested, and not one user discovered it.
- Nothing happens
- Enlarging the picture
- Hyperlinking to a more detailed page about that item
- Flipping the image to reveal additional pictures in the same place (metaphorically, these new pictures are "on the back side" of the original picture)
- Popping up a set of navigation choices
Similarly, to continue reading once you hit the bottom of the screen might require any of 3 different gestures:
iPad UIs suffer under a triple threat that causes significant user confusion:
- Scrolling down within a text field, while staying within the same page
- For this gesture to work, you have to touch within the text field. However, text fields aren't demarcated on the screen, so you have to guess what text is scrollable.
- Swiping left (which can sometimes take you to the next article instead of showing more of the current article)
- This gesture doesn't work, however, if you happen to swipe within an area covered by an advertisement in The New York Times app
- Swiping up
When you combine these three usability problems, the resulting user experience is frequently one of not knowing what happened or how to replicate a certain action to achieve the same result again. Worse yet, people don't know how to revert to the previous state because there's no consistent undo feature to provide an escape hatch like the Web's Back button.
- Low discoverability: The UI is mostly hidden within the etched-glass aesthetic without perceived affordances.
- Low memorability: Gestures are inherently ephemeral and difficult to learn when they're not employed consistently across apps; wider reliance on generic commands would help.
- Accidental activation: This occurs when users touch things by mistake or make a gesture that unexpectedly initiates a feature.
Crushing Print Metaphor
Swiping for the next article is derived from a strong print metaphor in many content apps. In fact, this metaphor is so strong that you can't even tap a headline on the "cover" page to jump to the corresponding article. The iPad offers no homepages, even though users strongly desired homepage-like features in our testing. (They also often wanted search, which was typically not provided.)In electronic media, the linear concept of "next article" makes little sense. People would rather choose for themselves where to go, selecting from a menu of related offerings.
A strategic issue for iPad user experience design is whether to emphasize user empowerment or author authority. Early designs err on the side of being too restrictive. Using the Web has given people an appreciation for freedom and control, and they're unlikely to happily revert to a linear experience.
Publishers hope that users will perceive content as more valuable if each publication is a stand-alone environment. Similarly, they hope for higher value-add if users spend more time with fewer publications rather than flit among a huge range of sites like they do on the Web.
Using the desktop Web, a user can easily visit 100 sites in a week, viewing only 1–3 pages on most of them. (For example, for one task in which B2B users visited 15 sites, they spent an average of 29 seconds per pageview.) Most sites are visited once-only, because users dredge them up in a search or stumble upon links from other sites or social media postings. Without real customer relationships, content sites have no value and 90% of the money created by users spending time online accrues to search engines.
The current design strategy of iPad apps definitely aims to create more immersive experiences, in the hope of inspiring deeper attachments to individual information sources. This cuts against the lesson of the Web, where diversity is strength and no site can hope to capture users' sole attention. Frequent user movements among websites has driven the imperative to conform with interface conventions and to create designs that people can use without any learning (or even much looking around). The iPad could be different if people end up getting just get a few apps and sticking with them.
Card Sharks vs. Holy Scrollers
UI pioneer Jef Raskin once used the terms card sharks vs. holy scrollers to distinguish between two fundamentally different hypertext models:The Web is firmly in holy-scroller camp, particularly these days: users scroll a fair amount and sometimes view information far down long pages. Even mobile-phone apps often rely on scrolling to present more than will fit on their tiny screens.
- Cards have a fixed-size presentation canvas. You can position your information within this two-dimensional space to your heart's content (allowing for beautiful layouts), but you can't make it any bigger. Users have to jump to a new card to get more info than will fit on a single card. HyperCard was the most famous example of this model.
- Scrolls provide room for as much information as you want because the canvas can extend as far down as you please. Users have to jump less, but at the cost of less-fancy layout because the designer can't control what users are seeing at any given time.
In contrast, card sharks dominate the early iPad designs. There's a bit of scrolling here and there, but most apps try to create a fixed layout for the pretty screen.
There's no real reason we can't have both design models: cards on the iPad and scrolls on the desktop (and phones somewhere in the middle). But it's also possible that we'll see more convergence and that the Web's interaction style will prove so powerful that users will demand it on the iPad as well.
Toward a Better iPad User Experience
Even our limited initial user studies provide directions for making iPad designs more usable:Although our full report offers additional detailed advice, we obviously haven't yet developed a full list of design guidelines.
- Add dimensionality and better define individual interactive areas to increase discoverability through perceived affordances of what users can do where.
- To achieve these interactive benefits, loosen up the etched-glass aesthetic. Going beyond the flatland of iPad's first-generation apps might create slightly less attractive screens, but designers can retain most of the good looks by making the GUI cues more subtle than the heavy-handed visuals used in the Macintosh-to-Windows-7 progression of GUI styles.
- Abandon the hope of value-add through weirdness. Better to use consistent interaction techniques that empower users to focus on your content instead of wondering how to get it.
- Support standard navigation, including a Back feature, search, clickable headlines, and a homepage for most apps.
One big question will remain unanswered for a year or so until we see how daily use of the iPad evolves: Will people use the iPad mainly for more immersive experiences than the desktop and mobile Webs? In other words, will people primarily settle on a few sources and dig into them intensively, rather than move rapidly between many sources and give each cursory attention?
Maybe people will begin to use the desktop Web for more goal-driven activities, such as researching new issues or performing directed tasks like shopping and managing their investments. And they might use the iPad for more leisurely activities, such as keeping up with the news (whether "real" news or social network updates) and consuming entertainment-oriented content. We don't know yet. The answer to this question will determine how far iPad UIs have to move from their current wacky style.
Learn More
93-page report on iPad usability is available for free download.Full-day seminars on:
will be presented at the annual Usability Week conference. (Different topics are offered in each city, so check your preferred city's agenda for an exact list of seminars.)
