The Great Linux Experiment is Over

In October, a friend asked me for help with an Acer Aspire One netbook that wouldn’t boot. It turned out to be a bad hard drive; I picked up a new one at Fry’s and popped it in. Then I thought, “I wonder if Linux would perform better than Windows on this anemic processor and 1 GB RAM?” So I downloaded Ubuntu 10.04 and installed it. I was impressed: it installed effortlessly, ran speedily and required less than 200 MB RAM. And the Netbook Edition launcher looks slick!

When I returned my friend’s computer, I explained that I had installed Linux instead of Windows and walked her through some basic tasks: connecting to a wireless network, importing photos from her digital camera, etc. She seemed pleased with the snappy performance and cool appearance; she said she only used the computer for basic tasks, so Linux should be fine.

As I was leaving, she asked, “Will this work with my Zune?” Uh oh. Current versions of Ubuntu can sync with Apple devices, but apparently Microsoft’s player uses a non-standard protocol that hasn’t been ported to Linux. So, um, no. “No problem,” she said, “all my music is on my mom’s computer anyway, I’ll just sync the Zune there.”

A few weeks later she called me about another problem: she had recently purchased a Palm Pre phone, and had downloaded a program to install third-party apps onto the phone. The program is written in Java, but apparently it requires the Sun (now Oracle) Java runtime, which is not included with Ubuntu. She had made a valiant attempt to download and install the correct runtime, copying and pasting commands into the Linux terminal, but she couldn’t get it to work (turns out she had downloaded the 64-bit version).

I borrowed the computer again and installed the correct Java runtime. I also installed VirtualBox, Windows XP and Microsoft’s Zune software, so she’d be able to sync her Zune without going to her mother’s house.

A few weeks ago she sent me a frustrated email with the subject, “I give up.” She was trying to apply for a job, and the application included an online test; for some reason the test didn’t work on her computer. She asked if I would please put Windows back on her machine: VirtualBox was giving her an error and she didn’t want to keep bothering me. So I did.

So, the Great Linux Experiment lasted about two months. Maybe if I had installed the Sun Java runtime and VirtualBox at the outset, my friend wouldn’t have gotten frustrated so quickly. Or maybe you need to be a geek (or live with one) to make it work.

 26 Dec 10 1:24 AM · Comments (0) · Tags: Tech, Ubuntu

Traveling with the iPad

Shortly after Apple announced the iPad, I began planning a trip to Europe. I had been thinking about buying a small-and-light notebook computer; the iPad seemed like the ideal travel device, so I bought one instead. For the first time in as long as I can remember, I’m traveling without a laptop. Here's what's worked well on this trip, and what could have been better.

Good:

• Battery life. I flew from Portland, OR to Paris by way of Philadelphia, and still had plenty of battery left when I arrived. Apple’s estimate of 10 hours is conservative.
• Instant-on. Using the iPad feels more like using a smartphone than a computer: press the power button and you're ready to go. No waiting for a PC to boot, or even awaken from sleep.
• Portability. At 1.5 pounds with a 9.7-inch screen, the iPad is easy to bring almost anywhere; my carry-on bag has never been lighter. The tablet form factor is a pleasure to use, even for an overweight guy seated in coach.
• Capacity. I wasn’t sure if 16 GB would be enough space, but it’s plenty. I keep music on my phone, freeing up the iPad’s gorgeous screen for video and e-books. I’m carrying 9 full-length movies, 5 books and several TV shows, and I still have about 4 GB free.
• Remote desktop. I use an app called iTap RDP to access my home desktop computer from the iPad. This has allowed me to check my work e-mail even though my employer doesn’t support connectivity from personal mobile devices.

Not so good:

• Sharing photos. I like to upload photos from the road to Facebook or Picasa; there’s currently no easy way to do that with the iPad. Before leaving the U.S., I made several attempts to purchase Apple’s Camera Connection Kit; the local Apple Store never had one in stock, and the wait was 2 to 3 weeks if I ordered one online. But even if I had one, I don’t know of a good way to upload multiple photos to an online service: the services’ Web sites don’t play well with the iPad’s lack of a file system, and there are no iPad apps for Facebook or Picasa. Fortunately, I’m traveling with friends who brought a laptop, so I’ve been able to impose upon them to upload my photos.
• Limited content options. With a laptop, I can download fresh content, such as new episodes of my favorite TV shows. I can do that on the iPad, too, but only from iTunes at $2 a pop (plus DRM). Hulu is not an option on the iPad (since I’m outside the U.S., it wouldn’t be an option even on a laptop); I’m using an app called Air Video to stream content from my media center PC at home.

I brought a Bluetooth keyboard, which has turned out not to be necessary. I’m writing this from a café in Brussels using the on-screen keyboard. Maybe I’d prefer a physical keyboard if I were a touch-typist, but for this hunt-and-peck typist the on-screen keyboard is fine. When I do use the external keyboard, I find that I miss the iPad’s auto-correct feature (which converts “Id” to “I’d”, for example), and it feels awkward to have to touch the screen to select text.

Bottom line: the iPad is a great travel companion; overall, the pros outweigh the cons. For my next trip, I'll bring a Camera Connection Kit and leave the external keyboard at home. Maybe by then someone will release an app that makes it easier to upload photos. If you have any suggestions, please post a comment!

Update: Add blogging to the list of “Not so good.” I wrote this post in Pages, Apple’s word-processing app for the iPad. When I went to post it, I discovered that my blogging software’s Web interface doesn’t work well with mobile Safari: the rich text editor doesn’t work at all, and the HTML editor doesn’t display a scroll bar; if your post doesn’t fit on a single screen, you’re out of luck. [Update: I discovered, quite by accident, that a two-fingered drag scrolls a text area in the browser. Still, I’d have to edit raw HTML in order to post from the browser. I wish Pages could post to blogs!] There are a lightweight Web interface and a native iPad app, but neither of them supports formatting text — not even hyperlinks! I ended up e-mailing the Pages document to myself and remoting into my home PC to post it.

So now it’s a tie: I love the iPad’s size, weight and battery life, but blogging and uploading photos are a hassle. Add the fact that I’m limited to iTunes for additional content and I have to connect to my home PC to check my work e-mail, and maybe a small notebook computer wouldn't be so bad after all.

 22 May 10 3:38 PM · Comments (0) · Tags: Tech, Travel

Free Webinar: Extreme Makeover, Web Edition

I will be presenting a free webinar on Tuesday, March 16 at 11 a.m. Pacific time. This presentation will consider 5 common Web usability problems and how to avoid them. You’ll learn ASP.NET techniques to improve input validation, avoid confirmation alerts, simplify complex forms, and more!

To register, visit http://my.dimdim.com/philweber/. Thanks!

 26 Feb 10 8:04 AM · Comments (0) · Tags: ASP.NET, Usability

New Series: UX Tip of the Week

For the past several years, I’ve given a presentation called Create Great User Interfaces at various conferences, user groups and code camps. I’ve been meaning to write up the content as a series of blog posts, and I’m finally getting around to it. Please check out the first installment, UX Tip of the Week: Why Message Boxes Are Evil. I hope you’ll enjoy it, leave a comment, tell a friend, and most of all, stop using message boxes!

  6 Jan 10 5:37 PM · Comments (0) · Tags: Usability

Travel Tip: How to Beat the System at the Airport

If you’re flying Northwest Airlines out of Portland, OR, you can take advantage of short lines for passengers who have only carry-on luggage, or for those who have bags to check and have printed their boarding passes at home. Unfortunately, this morning I was in the much larger third group: passengers without a boarding pass who have bags to check. The line for those kiosks looked like the line for Space Mountain.

In case you ever find yourself in that situation, here’s a tip: First, use the kiosk for passengers with only carry-on luggage. When the machine asks if you have bags to check, lie and answer, “No.” The kiosk will happily print your boarding pass. Next, get in the line for passengers who have bags to check and who already have a boarding pass (which you now do). After you check your bag, smile and wave at the people who are obediently waiting in the Space Mountain line.

I don’t know why Northwest makes its customers do this little dance, but this tip can save you about 20 minutes the next time you’re on the dance floor.

 22 Jun 09 3:21 PM · Comments (0) · Tags: Travel

Women in Technology, Kosher Edition

When was the last time you attended a programming conference or user group that had more than a handful of women in attendance? Yeah, same here. That’s why I was so surprised when I arrived for the first day of my training class in Tel Aviv last week: 11 of the 26 students were women!

During lunch I commented on the unusual ratio and learned about this:

One company in Israel has built a successful [outsourcing] operation [by] building IT centers in specific neighborhoods in Israel filled with ultra-orthodox Jewish women, who often find traditional jobs outside the home difficult or impossible.

Because of their religious beliefs, the women often find conventional employment in the secular workplace uncomfortable at best. Ultra-observant Jewish women are more formal in their interactions with men, for example, than in the average workplace. Many – though not all – of the Talpiot workers are ultra-orthodox, and Talpiot addresses issues specific to them by offering separate break rooms to women workers, for example.

Because the ability to work at challenging IT jobs while remaining true to their religious values is so appealing to the women, Talpiot is able to pay far lower wages than are offered in nearby Tel Aviv. That enables Talpiot to employ Western workers while remaining financially competitive with outsourcing firms located in traditional low-wage countries such as India and China.

 16 Mar 08 9:07 PM · Comments (0) · Tags: Tech

Adventures in UX

I joined Corillian Corporation in July, 2004. I spent about a year in tech support then switched to training, where I’ve been ever since. Last June Corillian was acquired by CheckFree, an online bill-payment provider. In December, CheckFree was acquired by Fiserv. In the space of about six months (without changing jobs), I’ve gone from a company of about 250 employees to one with over 22,000 employees!

One advantage of working for a larger company is the opportunity to explore different roles within the company. I’ve been fascinated by user experience (UX) design since I read Alan Cooper’s Guest Opinion columns in BASICPro (now Visual Studio Magazine). Those columns were excerpts of Cooper’s first book, About Face, which I similarly devoured as soon as it became available. And I found his VBITS keynote presentations in the mid-1990s thought-provoking and inspiring.

As an independent software developer, I wanted to create applications that were not just functional, but were a pleasure to use. My clients were usually more interested in having their apps delivered as quickly and inexpensively as possible. This conflict was a repeated source of stress to both me and my clients, and contributed to my decision to leave software development for the less schedule-driven disciplines of tech support and training.

When CheckFree acquired Corillian last year, I was excited to learn that CheckFree has an entire team (“User-Centered Design Solutions”) devoted to UX. The team was in the early stages of a major research and design project and, aware of my interest in the field, invited me to participate as an intern. It has been an incredible experience. It’s one thing to read about personas and how they can be used to inform the design of an application. It’s quite another to actually participate in field research and data analysis, to help design an application that will help real people achieve their goals.

Just before Thanksgiving, three teams of two visited the homes of 20 online banking users in Atlanta, GA; Columbus, OH; and Portland, OR. I was a member of the Portland team. We showed up with audio and video recording equipment and spent two to three hours talking with each participant about their financial and life goals, their current online banking experience, their desired experience, and how an ideal online bank could help them achieve that experience. (For more information on participatory design research, see Making Connections Through Participatory Design.)

Next, we spent several days going through our notes and recordings, entering data items about each participant into an Excel spreadsheet and assigning the items to various categories (e.g., demographic info, breakdown/frustration, ideal experience, quote, etc.)

At this point, I had spent about 15 hours with six very interesting people, and another 30-40 hours entering and coding their observations. They had shared some fascinating insights, but it wasn’t clear to me how we could distill all this raw data into something actionable. Thankfully, the team invited me to join them the following month at Lextant in Columbus, OH for the data analysis phase.

We began by having each field team present an overview of their participants. Our data entry items had been printed on Post-It notes; as we discussed what we thought was significant about each participant, we stuck the associated Post-It on a large sheet of paper representing that person.

As we talked about the participants, we began to see patterns emerge. At the beginning of the analysis phase, we had no idea how many personas we would end up with, but it soon became apparent that our 20 participants fell very clearly into three distinct groups. We created affinity diagrams to determine which characteristics of each participant were statistically significant. Next, we analyzed the three groups to determine the differentiating factors that caused an individual to belong to one group but not the others.

I’ve just described the process in two short paragraphs (and unfortunately I can’t go into detail about our findings for reasons of confidentiality), but in fact it was a full week of intense, exhausting, rewarding discussion. There were numerous inspired brainstorms and “a-ha!” moments. By the end of the week, I wanted to start my own online bank to deliver some of the amazing ideas we had come up with!

So, would I want to do this for a living? Yes and no. I find UX research extremely interesting, and interaction design is a wonderful creative outlet. I’m passionate about usability, but therein lies the problem: usability is not a verb. Toward the end of my week at Lextant, it began to dawn on me that ultimately we must create an application that Fiserv can sell to banks, which are primarily interested in “optimizing the online channel”: finding ways to separate customers from their money. Usability is a tool to attract eyeballs, but it’s far from the top priority.

I’d consider a career in UX if it were in an environment in which usability is a first-class citizen, where the people making the decisions are as passionate about UX as I am. Otherwise I would just be tilting at windmills.

  7 Mar 08 8:44 PM · Comments (0) · Tags: Career, Software, Usability

Farewell, IE7

I upgraded my home and office PCs to IE7 in late October. It’s a fine browser; I intend to keep it on my office PC. At about the same time, my wife and I bought a Dream’eo Enza Portable Media Center for our anniversary. My desktop at home runs Windows Media Center Edition, which communicates with a Linksys Media Center Extender in our living room. Unfortunately, that particular combination of devices does not play well with IE7.

You see, Windows Media Player won’t sync album art to the portable device unless the images are embedded in the individual files (or possibly if you let Windows Media Player automatically update all the album info, but I don’t trust it enough to try that). So I dutifully went through my music collection and embedded album art in all the tracks (using MediaMonkey, which I recommend highly). The portable device now displays the album art beautifully.

But now Windows MCE displays a black square where the currently-playing album’s cover should appear! This is apparently a well-known issue: MCE + IE7 displays album art just fine, unless it’s embedded in the music file.

So my choices were:

• Keep IE7 and embed the album art, so that it appears on the portable device but not in MCE;
• Keep IE7 and delete the embedded art, so that it appears in MCE but not on the portable device; or,
• Uninstall IE7, so that album art works correctly everywhere.

Sorry, IE7, you’re not that good. Farewell from my home PC until you work correctly with MCE and embedded album art.

UPDATE: Windows Media Player’s refusal to sync non-embedded album art to the Dream’eo Enza may be a problem with the device. If so, I apologize for impugning WMP. Nevertheless, my options remain the same.

Also, this comment claims that one can get IE7 to play well with Windows Media Player simply by allowing WMP as an add-on on IE7’s Manage Add-ons menu. Anyone with IE7 and MCE 2005 care to try this and let us know?

  9 Dec 06 10:14 PM · Comments (2) · Tags: Tech, Windows

My Calendar Wish List

Between the recent demise of Kiko and Scoble’s rants about Google Calendar, online calendars are a hot topic. I don’t use an online calendar because I have yet to find one that does what I want. Here’s my scenario:

• I use Outlook with Exchange with work
• I use Outlook without Exchange at home
• I carry a Palm PDA on which I want to see both work and personal items

I don’t know of any way to sync my Palm with Outlook on two different PCs, so I must currently enter appointments and tasks in Outlook and on my Palm.

I’d love an application that lets me enter all my appointments and tasks in one place, then syncs my work-related items with Outlook at work, my personal items with Outlook at home, and a combination of items with my Palm. Attention Web 2.0 companies: I would happily pay a monthly fee for such a service!

I had high hopes for AirSet, and it’s close. But I don’t see any way to sync personal items with Outlook and both personal and work items with my Palm.

Am I the only one who wants this? Do you know of an app that supports this scenario?

 21 Aug 06 11:43 PM · Comments (2) · Tags: Palm, Windows

Mailing List Drama: I'm a Net Nazi

Consider this scenario: One of your neighbors wants to build a deck. He’d like some assistance, so he decides to ask the community if anyone is willing to help. He climbs atop the roof of his house with a bullhorn and announces: “I am building a deck and would appreciate some assistance. If you are willing to help, please let me know. Thank you.”

Shortly thereafter, another of your neighbors replies through his bullhorn: “I built a deck not long ago. I’d be happy to help you with your plans.” A third neighbor replies (also via bullhorn), “I have some tools I can lend you. What do you need?”

This exchange continues over several days among various neighbors. Finally, you ask politely if they’d consider taking the conversation to a less public venue. Your deck-building neighbor becomes angry and uses his bullhorn to publicly object to your “incredibly stupid” request. He calls you a “Nazi” for trying to “control” his ability to communicate, and suggests that if you don’t want to hear it, you can simply wear earplugs.

Sound ridiculous? I experienced something similar this week on a private mailing list to which I subscribe. The list is hosted by a product group within a large corporation for the purpose of sharing future plans with and soliciting feedback from advanced users of the product. A member of the list asked if anyone would be willing to help him localize a free utility for which he is responsible. A few members responded, and over the course of several days they exchanged nearly two dozen messages on the list.

Eventually, one of the members (not me!) asked if they’d consider taking the conversation off-list. The original poster replied at length, explaining that this exchange had about run its course, but he didn’t think there was anything wrong with using the list for this purpose. At that point, desiring to express my support for the member who had objected and to discourage this type of activity in the future, I posted the following:

From: Phil Weber
Date: Apr 4, 2006 5:54 PM
Subject: Re: Want to show off your bi-lingual skills ?

I can't speak for Matt, but I have no problem with your posting a request for help to this list. But once someone decides to volunteer, they could (and should, in my opinion) take it offline and communicate with you directly. Thanks!
--
Phil

That’s when the original poster got angry, calling me a “Net Nanny Nazi” and my suggestion “incredibly stupid” on his weblog.

Personally, before posting to a mailing list, I ask myself:

1. Is this message appropriate, considering the topic and purpose of the list?
2. Will the majority of the list’s members find this information useful?

If the answer to either question is ‘no,’ then I don’t post it. Does that make me a Nazi? You be the judge.

  6 Apr 06 1:46 PM · Comments (12) · Tags: Rants