RHFtech™ Write on Tech » usability

Toaster or toaster oven, simple vs. complex

Richard Frisch — Sun, 19 Sep 2010 11:59:14 +0000

If all you want is toast a toaster is a better choice than a toaster oven. The toaster is the simpler appliance. It does the job it was designed to do. Sure the oven can bake a potato and reheat pizza, but it costs more, takes up more counter space and is harder to operate.

Last spring I proposed that the Fairfield County Concours d’Elegance accept credit cards at the entrance gates. The main Sunday event features over 200 extraordinary cars and motorcycles. It costs money to get in. We only accepted cash or checks in the past. The 7^th Concours was Sep. 11 and 12. It was a great show. We successfully accepted credit cards at the main entrance, the north gate. We had hoped to do this at all three gates. Economics and a bank salesman changed the plan.

The Concours is a different merchant than the typical one credit card banks cater to. It is open to the public two days a year. The Saturday event, Club Day, was free. General admission tickets to the Sunday event were $25 per person. Family discount tickets were $40. VIP tickets cost $75. Discount coupons were available in local papers. We had thousands of attendees. Some ordered their tickets online before. Many others bought tickets at the gate.

I proposed that the Concours get three handheld credit card terminals that worked off batteries, printed receipts and communicated with the merchant bank via a cellular data link. These terminals are expensive and require a multi-year, monthly data plan with a cellular company. The merchant bank’s sales representative suggested that we substitute two USB powered, credit card swiping devices attached to portable computers, connecting to the merchant bank via WiFi for two of the handhelds in order to save money. I thought this was folly as the solution was based on economics not utility. I expected that computers would be too complex to use in our venue.

Also, the computers could not print. We couldn’t put printers at the gates. We had no electricity nor owned any printers. Credit card printers are designed to do one thing and to print receipts of a transaction. They are expensive.

The salesman convinced the executive director that the computers would work. I understand. We had no idea how many people would use credit cards at the gate. Why invest in two extra handhelds (the first was free) and obligate the Concours to pay for the data plans for them if we didn’t know if they would work and be much used?

The event takes place on a large polo field. There is no WiFi signal on most of the field. The Concours executive director thought that the clubhouse WiFi would reach the West gate. He was correct, sort of. The signal was extremely weak, often lost, and the Internet connection was slow.

The Concours is staffed with volunteers. Most are older and not good with computers. Our netbooks are great little Windows 7 machines. They run 6-8 hours on a charge. But they have small screens that are difficult to read outdoors. They also have touchpads. Most of the volunteers had trouble using the computers even after I attached a mouse. I was not surprised. During trials, the bank’s website logged us out when we were inactive and the computers went into power saving mode. It takes time to wake up a machine, reconnect to the bank site and get ready to accept a charge. This was frustrating to volunteers and customers.

So I put the computers away. The volunteers were grateful. The executive director was a bit displeased but understood. The single handheld worked great. At the end of the day it was but a moment’s work to generate a tape of the day’s credit card transactions. Perhaps next year we will have two more handhelds.

The lesson here is simple: if all you want is toast get a toaster.

The rise of the personal appliance era

Richard Frisch — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 16:47:22 +0000

The personal computer (PC) revolution began in the 1970s. It altered our lives. None of us ever wanted a mainframe or mini-computer in our houses but a PC was different. First it changed how we wrote, with rudimentary word processors, like WordStar, and how we calculated, with the early spreadsheet programs like VisiCalc. PCs changed how we communicated, as they became connected, first by telephone networks like CompuServe and later on the Internet. Telephone calls and written mail gave way to email, instant messaging, chat, and VoIP (e.g. Skype). The Internet would not have been possible without PCs. Today, we use still and video cameras differently than in pre-PC days. We rarely print photos, instead we share them digitally. We listen to music and watch Internet-streamed video that would have not been possible without PCs.

I could go on at length comparing the pre-PC and post-PC periods, but this article is about the next era, an evolution more than a revolution—the rise of the personal appliance (PA). The word appliance is defined as, “A device that is very useful for a particular job.” These are devices like smartphones—Android cellphones, BlackBerrys, iPhones—and tablet PAs, i.e., iPads. Today the tablet-form PA is only available from Apple since there are not yet any iPad competitors. This will change before year-end. Soon there will be lots of alternatives to the iPad. Many of these will be Android devices. HP is supposedly developing a webOS-based tablet since their recent acquisition of Palm, and Microsoft has stated that its equipment partners will have Windows 7 tablets available soon.

What differentiates the PC and the PA? PC devices are general purpose. They can do almost anything. Personal appliances cannot. PA devices are limited in function and feature set. They do a few things very well, some things okay, some things poorly, and some things not at all. For example, you can’t print from an iPad. PAs are primarily communications or consumption devices. They are not designed for producing. I can imagine trying to compose this article on an iPad or a smartphone. I would not want to.

Personal appliances appeal to the general population. PCs, including Macs, are frightfully complex devices. It is amazing to me that people put up with this complexity so that they can surf the Internet and read email. The iPad does away with that complexity. There is only one physical button for navigating the user interface (UI). Contrast that with a PC that has special navigation keys on the keyboard and pointing devices like a mouse or touchpad. Smartphones and the iPad UIs are designed for one finger navigation. Your other nine fingers are superfluous.

One disadvantage to PAs is that we will end up collecting a lot of them. PAs, unlike PCs, are rarely shared. We will end up with cellphones and PA tablets. You may also own a gaming device like the PSP (PlayStation Portable). Many of you have ebook readers like the Amazon Kindle. And you may still want a media player device like an iPod. All these devices come with power adapters and cables to connect them to our PCs. Our future is one of even greater technology clutter than today, more unidentifiable cables and power adapters, and discarded out-of-date PAs.

Curiously, we are not happy with our devices. We complain about their shortcomings. We forget how fantastic they are and all the marvelous things they do. Remember using a rotary phone? Today I can tell my cell phone to, “Phone home.” I don’t even have to remember the phone number. That is real convenience. Incidentally, convenience is a synonym for appliance.

KatMouse makes your mouse work better in Microsoft Windows

Richard Frisch — Sat, 08 May 2010 13:02:38 +0000

KatMouse has been around since 2002. It is an incredibly useful tool that lets you scroll the window under your mouse cursor without requiring you to click on that window to give it the system focus. It works with all versions of Windows since Windows 2000, including Windows 7 (32-bit and 64-bit).

Downloading and installing it is simple. The whole installer program is 339KB. Once running, it displays an icon in the Taskbar’s System Tray to show it is there. You can now use your mouse the way you want to, the way you expect to. You may wonder how you ever lived without KatMouse.

Some applications, such as Mozilla Firefox, have their own mouse application programming interface (API) calls that differ from the standard Windows API. KatMouse has a simple method for teaching itself about non-conforming applications mouse behavior.

Right-click on the KatMouse System Tray Icon.
Select Settings… from the context menu. The KatMouse Properties dialog should appear.
Click on the Classes tab.
Drag the icon to the non-responding application like Mozilla Firefox.
The application’s API mouse calls will be added to KatMouse.

Our technological lives are too complicated

Richard Frisch — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 11:57:19 +0000

This is the tale of two troubleshooting issues. One was easy the other was not.

I am usually good at problem solving. But the constant grind is wearing. I have to solve problems for my clients, friends and myself. I do that all day and night long, seemingly 7 days a week. It used to be exhilarating to find solutions. Now it is not. Too many puzzles, too frequently served. Too many applications, on too many operating systems, Mac and Windows, are taking their toll.

Problem No. 1 – Google Calendar Sync not working

I had set up Google Calendar Sync for a client quite a while ago. We were syncing Outlook 2007 to Google Calendar and to his BlackBerry. Everything worked fine for many months.

My client has had issues with the new BlackBerry Bold. Battery life could be better. It is too large and too different than the BlackBerry Curve he had owned and liked. He has gone through 3 or 4 Bold units in the last few months.

I received an email, after he got the latest Bold, that calendar syncing was broken. I sent him instructions for downloading and configuring Google Calendar Sync on his BlackBerry. But it still did not work.

Ironically, I was fortunate that his two year old Mac Pro suffered a hard drive failure that required me to replace the drive and reinstall/reconfigure the Mac Pro’s OS and software. I couldn’t get his mail applications to log into his Gmail account. I knew his credentials. They would not work. When I mentioned it to him, he said, “Oh, I changed my password.” Problem solved. He had not entered the correct password in Google Calendar Sync.

If I had not had to fix the Mac Pro I might have spent hours trying to find a solution for a problem that the client had inadvertently created. It is not his fault. We all have too many user names, user accounts, passwords, and security questions.

Problem No. 2 – Buffalo Linkstation not connecting

I have a new client, a commercial photography business. They have tens of thousands of photos, and add more every day. They wanted to upgrade their existing storage configuration. They used four Buffalo Linkstation NAS drives attached to an Ethernet switch on their LAN. The drives were almost full. There was no backup.

We agreed on repurposing an old Windows XP computer, adding an attached 4 bay eSATA drive enclosure as a file and backup server for the network. We also agreed on adding offsite drives to mirror the active data drives on the new server.

I replaced the existing router, switch and Ethernet connections for each of the company’s computers with Gigabit capable equipment. The old router had been a Linksys running at 10/100Mbps. The new one was a D-Link.

A problem arose immediately once the new network was in place. One of the four NAS drives did not appear on the network. We tried everything we could think of to recover that fourth NAS box. Of course, it was the most important of the four NAS devices and it was not a simple single drive configuration. It was two, half-terabyte drives ganged together using an internal RAID card to make one TB,

I spent a lot of time trying to coax that NAS drive back onto the network. I tried everything that I could think of. And then a light bulb went off in my head. It occurred to me that the NAS box might have been configured with a static IP rather than the default DHCP. Linksys routers generally use 192.168.1.x for their IP addresses. D-Link uses 192.168.0.x.

I fired up the old Linksys router, connected the NAS box and my ASUS Eee PC netbook. Sure enough the drive was now connected to the old network and functioning correctly. I opened its management console via a browser on the netbook and found that it had been configured for a static IP, 192.168.1.107, which would never work with the D-Link equipment, as configured. I set the NAS device to use DHCP and then reconnected it to the D-Link network. It showed up instantly. Problem solved.

If Buffalo designed their products with a reset button, back to factory defaults, like most routers have, I would have solved this problem with less headache and much faster.

Why do these problems arise? They arise from complexity. There are too many things we all have to know in order to make our equipment and applications work. It is not our fault that we are often at sea trying to coax our stuff to do what it is supposed to do. It is often the fault of the executives, designers and engineers who push out product without working hard enough to make it simple.

Windows or Mac – Launch applications or files the modern way

Richard Frisch — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 12:32:47 +0000

The NY Times’ David Pogue’s 2009 ‘Take Back the Beep‘ campaign is trying to get cell phone carriers to eliminate the lengthy messages that precede recording a voice message. My campaign is to change the way we launch applications or find files on our computers. I want you to learn to use the Windows’ built-in Search bar or the Mac’s Spotlight search technology. Once you start using these two similar tools you are unlikely to return to the old way. Sorry Windows XP users this does not apply.

Do you still launch an application from an icon? If you use Windows 7 or Vista do you click on a desktop icon, a Quick Launch toolbar icon, or search through the Start menu’s All Programs listing? If you use a Mac running OS X Leopard or Snow Leopard, do you launch programs from an application icon on the Mac Dock, or do you open a Finder window and manually search the Applications folder? Alternatively, do you look through your documents, pictures, or music folders to find a file that you want to edit, view or play?

Spotlight and Windows Search are similar search technologies that provide lightning fast results when we search our computers. They do this by indexing your hard drive ahead of time so that when you want to find Microsoft Word the computer already knows where to find it.

Try it out. You will see what I mean. If you are using Windows 7 or Vista, click on the Start button or press the Windows key. Your computer’s focus is immediately placed in the Search bar. Type "word" and it will probably show you a list that includes Microsoft Word and WordPad. Select one or the other, using the cursor keys, and press the Enter key and the program starts.

Use a Mac? Click the magnifying glass icon on the upper right of the Menu bar or press Apple key+space and the system focus moves to the Spotlight search bar. Type "word" and it will probably show you a list that includes Microsoft Word as the Top Hit. Press the return key and Microsoft Word starts.

Microsoft Word is a trivial example since most of you have Desktop, Taskbar or Dock shortcuts already set up. Try it with another application or document you use less frequently. Type "char" in the Windows Start menu Search bar and you will see Character Map as the first result. If you use a Mac type "text" in the Spotlight search bar. You will immediately see TextEdit as the Top Hit. I doubt that either of these two utilities reside on your Desktop, Dock or Taskbar.

Your old way of launching applications from icon shortcuts have deficiencies. If you have too many Quick Launch icons in Vista or pin too many applications to the Window 7 Taskbar you end up with visual clutter.

The desktop is a poor place to locate application shortcuts. It is almost always covered by open windows on Window or Mac computers. So you need to move or minimize your open windows in order to see the icon.

The Mac Dock is a horrendous waster of vertical screen space, a precious resource on wide screen monitors. Most people leave the Dock at the default location on the screen bottom. If it were not there you gain 15-20% more useable screen space. You can auto-hide it or move it to the side of the screen or both. But if you start using Spotlight to launch applications you can do away with it altogether. You lose the eye candy but you gain significantly in productivity

Did Bill Gates know Microsoft was broken and do nothing to fix it?

Richard Frisch — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 10:44:23 +0000

My very first blog post, The Curse of the New Computer, written four years ago, recounts my experience replacing a failed computer. I cursed Gates to an eternity of installing Microsoft software. Surely, no one who had experienced the frustrations of what Microsoft wrought and ran the company would allow it to continue. I was wrong.

Gates knew firsthand how bad the end user experience was when dealing with Microsoft products. (Smoking gun memo below.) Apparently, he did nothing to fix it.

Can you imagine Steve Jobs putting up with this? Why do we?

From: Bill Gates
Sent: Wednesday, January 15, 2003 10:05 AM

To: Jim Allchin
Cc: Chris Jones (WINDOWS); Bharat Shah (NT); Joe Peterson; Will Poole; Brian Valentine; Anoop Gupta (RESEARCH)

Subject: Windows Usability degradation flame

I am quite disappointed at how Windows Usability has been going backwards and the program management groups don’t drive usability issues.

Let me give you my experience from yesterday.

I decided to download (Moviemaker) and buy the Digital Plus pack … so I went to Microsoft.com. They have a download place so I went there.

The first 5 times I used the site it timed out while trying to bring up the download page. Then after an 8 second delay I got it to come up.

This site is so slow it is unusable.

It wasn’t in the top 5 so I expanded the other 45.

These 45 names are totally confusing. These names make stuff like: C:\Documents and Settings\billg\My Documents\My Pictures seem clear.

They are not filtered by the system … and so many of the things are strange.

I tried scoping to Media stuff. Still no moviemaker. I typed in movie. Nothing. I typed in movie maker. Nothing.

So I gave up and sent mail to Amir saying – where is this Moviemaker download? Does it exist?

So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated.

They told me to go to the main page search button and type movie maker (not moviemaker!)

I tried that. The site was pathetically slow but after 6 seconds of waiting up it came.

I thought for sure now I would see a button to just go do the download. In fact it is more like a puzzle that you get to solve. It told me to go to Windows Update and do a bunch of incantations.

This struck me as completely odd. Why should I have to go somewhere else and do a scan to download moviemaker? So I went to Windows update. Windows Update decides I need to download a bunch of controls. (Not) just once but multiple times where I get to see weird dialog boxes.

Doesn’t Windows update know some key to talk to Windows?

Then I did the scan. This took quite some time and I was told it was critical for me to download 17megs of stuff. This is after I was told we were doing delta patches to things but instead just to get 6 things that are labeled in the SCARIEST possible way I had to download 17meg. So I did the download. That part was fast. Then it wanted to do an install. This took 6 minutes and the machine was so slow I couldn’t use it for anything else during this time.

What the heck is going on during those 6 minutes? That is crazy. This is after the download was finished. Then it told me to reboot my machine. Why should I do that? I reboot every night — why should I reboot at that time?

So I did the reboot because it INSISTED on it. Of course that meant completely getting rid of all my Outlook state. So I got back up and running and went to Windows Update again. I forgot why I was in Windows Update at all since all I wanted was to get Moviemaker.

So I went back to Microsoft.com and looked at the instructions. I have to click on a folder called WindowsXP. Why should I do that? Windows Update knows I am on Windows XP.

What does it mean to have to click on that folder? So I get a bunch of confusing stuff but sure enough one of them is Moviemaker.

So I do the download. The download is fast but the Install takes many minutes. Amazing how slow this thing is. At some point I get told I need to go get Windows Media Series 9 to download.

So I decide I will go do that. This time I get dialogs saying things like “Open” or “Save”. No guidance in the instructions which to do. I have no clue which to do.

The download is fast and the install takes 7 minutes for this thing. So now I think I am going to have Moviemaker. I go to my add/remove programs place to make sure it is there.

It is not there.

What is there? The following garbage is there. Microsoft Autoupdate Exclusive test package, Microsoft Autoupdate Reboot test package, Microsoft Autoupdate testpackage1. Microsoft AUtoupdate testpackage2, Microsoft Autoupdate Test package3.

Someone decided to trash the one part of Windows that was usable? The file system is no longer usable. The registry is not usable. This program listing was one sane place but now it is all crapped up.

But that is just the start of the crap. Later I have listed things like Windows XP Hotfix see Q329048 for more information. What is Q329048? Why are these series of patches listed here? Some of the patches just things like Q810655 instead of saying see Q329048 for more information.

What an absolute mess. Moviemaker is just not there at all. So I give up on Moviemaker and decide to download the Digital Plus Package.

I get told I need to go enter a bunch of information about myself. I enter it all in and because it decides I have mistyped something I have to try again. Of course it has cleared out most of what I typed. I try (typing) the right stuff in 5 times and it just keeps clearing things out for me to type them in again.

So after more than an hour of craziness and making my programs list garbage and being scared and seeing that Microsoft.com is a terrible website I haven’t run Moviemaker and I haven’t got the plus package.

The lack of attention to usability represented by these experiences blows my mind. I thought we had reached a low with Windows Network places or the messages I get when I try to use 802.11. (don’t you just love that root certificate message?)

When I really get to use the stuff I am sure I will have more feedback.

This memorandum was reproduced from the book After The Software Wars by Keith Curtis.