A few predictions for the New Year

As this year draws to an end, I wanted to offer a few predictions for what I think 2007 will bring:

1. Apple will release a new UI with Mac OS X 10.5 that is reminiscent of iTunes 7, and I will spend the rest of the year slagging it.

2. The word “innovative” will be used in a sentence with another Microsoft product.

3. I will begin offering many more thoughts on Web 2.0 usability and design than I do today.

4. Slashdot will become even less relevant, but Digg may not necessarily gain a greater readership for it. In fact, I think that 2007 will show that Digg has peaked. For Slashdot, I think we will find that its Alexa rating (where lower == better) has gone from 228 to something above 300.

5. PodTech.net will change its name to something a little more aspirational and less asinine.

6. Apple will release an iPhone, the journos will go nuts for it, and people who actually need their mobile phones for business will yawn and go back to their Blackberries.

7. Drunkenbatman will actually post something to his blog. It may or may not crash your browser.

8. Either Final Fantasy XIII or Metal Gear Solid 4 will be announced for the Xbox 360.

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December 31, 2006

Rahm on Rahm: Electoral Season Hysterics

GQ has an article about Rahm Emmanuel, Illinois Congressman and one of the architects of the Democratic Party’s November triumph, and the state of histrionics the party elite found itself in during the waning weeks of the campaign:

Rahm delivers a tongue-lashing [to Adam Nagourney, Chief Political Correspondent for the NYT] unlike anything I’ve ever heard from a United States congressman…”Do you know one voter in America who votes because Washington has a conversation with itself? Nobody gives a fuck what Washington has to say, including me.”

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December 26, 2006

Irony in Accessible Design

My web browser’s home page is set to MSN.com, and I just noticed an interesting-sounding article on the main page, entitled Designing for the Visually Impaired. As I have a fairly keen interest in this topic, I opened the link to discover a beautiful Flash-based website entitled Open for Design, which appears to be curated by Infiniti, whatever that means (when is an ad not an ad, or vice versa, I suppose).

What struck me immediately, though, is that I’m not entirely confident that this website is actually accessible. It should be entirely possible to make a Flash site accessible (and easy to use), but the sense I get in general is that most sites are anything but. Oh, the irony.

Will, if you’re reading this, could you take a pass over the aforementioned site and let me know what you think about it?

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December 20, 2006

Getting a little more human every day

I spoke too soon the other day when I complained about the Geek Squad’s new automated phone system. I received an email from Robert Stephens, the company’s founder, earlier today informing me that he had read my blog, and was indeed fixing the problems I had outlined. Robert wants to hew to the gethuman standard v1.0, which I think is quite commendable. Thanks for the follow-up, Robert, it’s great to know you haven’t lost your obsession with perfection :)

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December 18, 2006

When clarity is the anti-goal

Helen, my girlfriend, received a new endtable from overstock.com today. It turned out that the metal frame was physically warped, and she spent 15 minutes trying to track down Overstock’s phone number in order to request an RMA number without success. This whole episode reminded me of the single-most popular article I’ve ever seen on Slate, which documented one author’s Quixotic quest for Amazon’s customer service number.

As it works out, the phone number for Overstock is 1-800-The-Big-O. We had an additional complication in that our phones are too smart to print the bell telephone letter equivalents on our keypads any longer, and I had to hunt around for that information (Helen has a Blackberry, and I have a T-Mobile Dash). Fortunately, Google was on the case and this wasn’t an issue for long.

What amazes me are the lengths these companies will go to in order to purposefully obfuscate and ruin their overall user experience in order to save money on customer service calls phone calls. I understand that they operate on razor-thin margins, but I believe it ultimately does them and their customers a disservice. I appreciate being able to relate to another human being when I have a problem with a product. Sometimes it can be helpful and far more effective to speak with an operator instead of trying to pigeonhole yourself into categories 1, 2, 3, or 4.

Incidentally, Avis does a fantastic job of this. I called them up for a reservation last week. I was decidedly surprised when I got a real person on the phone after 10 seconds instead of an automated phone system. As they put it, they try harder.

Back when I was in high school, from 1998-2000, I worked for the Geek Squad in Minneapolis. The owner, Robert Stephens, had a strict no-automated phone system policy. He felt that it dehumanized the service, and kept us from interacting in a timely fashion from our customers.

How times have changed. I just called up the Geek Squad phone number, 612-343-4335 (GEEK) to find an automated phone system. It asked me whether I would like to converse with it in English or Spanish, whether I’d like to check on an existing case, or if I had a problem with a cable or UPS system purchased with the Geek Squad logo on it. How times have changed, indeed. Robert, I don’t think you read my blog, but I’m disappointed in you for letting go of your principles on this matter.

Update: I heard back from Robert. It turns out he does read my blog, and he is working towards fixing these issues.

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December 15, 2006

Don’t do what Donny Don’t does: Email Edition

I get a lot of email everyday. And by a lot, I mean that it totals into the thousands of items*. Seriously. Much of this is addressed to various internal mailing lists to which I subscribe, such as an Xbox Discussion alias, or Visual Studio UI discussions. But, even then, I probably get a few hundred mails per day addressed directly to me.

There are a few important rules of email ettiquette that, if observed, would decrease my incoming mail rate, and make my life far better. MSN Lifesyle for Men, of all things, describes these rules in explicit detail:

Some people think out loud on issues of moderate import for 300 e-mails. And I’m in on all of them, because some doofus copied me on e-mail number one. E-mail should be used to inform, to resolve an issue, to end a conversation, to pass along a job, or to get out of something minor, without the need for personal interaction.

Study these rules. Live them. Love them. You’ll make me (and your coworkers) much happier for it.

* Despite its warts, Outlook is the best email application I have ever used. There is no way I could manage this glut of information with any other mail application. Period. Between the Search Folders and the new super-fast search mechanism, I’m actually able to stay on top of my mail. Whew.

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December 13, 2006

Roblimo seems grumpy

Imagine working for a company that is tolerated, at best, in many social circles. Imagine being a computer science graduate, going to a class reunion, telling people you work for Microsoft, and watching your former classmates slowly back away as if you’d just told them you had a venereal disease.

– Robin ‘Roblimo’ Miller on his recent Microsoft corporate junket.

The funny thing about this is that I cannot vouch for Roblimo’s assumptions about class reunions and working for the ‘Soft. In fact, I had the exact opposite experience. My former classmates thought it was incredibly cool that I was working for Microsoft. You hear about the blog echo chamber all the time; perhaps there’s an equivalent for people who are a little too plugged into the Linux community.

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December 12, 2006

Label *is* your friend, dammit!

I simply cannot stress enough that you. must. use. the. <label>. tag. when. creating. forms. ARGH! What brings this up for me today was a Digg link to a website entitled ObscureTags.com. The site is really quite funny, I’ll admit, but it’s always frustrating to discover that more web developers are not aware of <label>.

Why, you may ask, is <label> so important? Well, young grasshopper, I would say, the answer is quite simple (admittedly, for me to call anyone “young” would require them to be, like, nine years old). There are two reasons. First, if you’re using a Windows or Mac application, you expect that clicking on the label next to a checkbox or radiobutton will select that item. So, you’re getting a consistency win. Second, it enhances the usability of your form. By making the clickable region for your control expand from a dinky, little 6×6 pixel target to a 6×6 pixel target + a big-ass chunk of text, your users will have a much easier time hitting the necessary location to select said control. It’s all about Fitts’ Law. But isn’t everything?

As an aside, I abandoned Safari on Mac OS X and moved to Camino (which is awesome, btw) because Safari in Tiger lacks support for the <label> tag. Unfortunately, it’s not really clear whether this is getting fixed in the next release.

Old tags never die. They just go to Hell and regroup…This page contains absolutely no CSS because CSS is dumb.

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December 12, 2006

Crazy rumor: Apple planning on making Leopard ugly

Apple Gazette, a heretofore unknown Mac rumors site, claims that Apple will replace Aqua with a new look-and-feel codenamed Illuminous in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, scheduled for release sometime in 2007.

The conjecture states that:

What will Illuminous look like? That’s anybody’s guess at this point, but we might be seeing some hints of what Illuminous holds in the recent release of iTunes.

God, I hope this proves to be false. iTunes 7 is the ugliest piece of software Apple has released in a very long time. To be perfectly honest, I think that Panther (excluding the creepy brushed-metal Finder) was really the pinnacle of OS X’s User Experience. I guess the only place to go after that is down. I really hope this is false. I don’t want to make iRooster look like iTunes 7.

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December 11, 2006

Make your photos awesome

Blurbomat has a fantastic advanced Photoshop tutorial on retouching your photos without doing anything that that might “look like ass. Avoid looking like ass.”

Jon Armstrong, the tutorial author and husband of the chicken-hating Heather Armstrong, really published an amazing tutorial. The final product looks like an eerie, super hi-res image from Half-Life 2.

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December 11, 2006