My center click gripe

A simple gripe about web browsers and navigation.

When searching through the Internet, I often come across links to pages I want to further investigate. This is, of course the intent of the Internet. My typical interaction is to cnter click a link to open it in a new tab. This solves a variety of browser based issues. It minimizes the number of windows open. It loads data I want while reading the current page. It is a single action.

Now enter javascript. Many sites use javascript to open links in new widows or tabs (browser specific). This is great in the case of FAQ pages and third party sites. In fact, one could argue it negates my need to center click.

That is the problem though. It does not negate it. Instead of opening my new tab, I am directed to a tab with a single line of jss and no actual content. Why does the hack provided by developers negate the hack I have taught myself? Shouldn't center click still work, especially if my hack and the jss solve the same interaction dilemma? Users should not learn a hack because of an application's shortcomings only to have a workaround sparingly implemented come along and cause that solution unhelpful. There needs to be more standardization across development and, perhaps more importantly, more acceptance from the system to a variety of inputs that aide the same result.

MVC and alan cooper's inmates

MVC stands for model, view, controller and is the idea of separating Interface from functioning code to interactive elements. That is a blanket statement with many gaps but let us assume it is true. With that in mind, code and user interface happen in separate places, completely unique from eachother. In the web world, this means you may change the layout without consulting the owner of the content.

Now take into consideration alan cooper's book "the inmates are running the asylum". Again to paraphrase, cooper suggests that developers and designers need to work hand in hand from the beginning for a sucessful product. All stakeholders involved in development need to have a mutual understanding of eachothers needs and motivations and willingness to find solutions. So how does that model, that I agree with, compare to MVC?

If the design and the code are fundamentally separate, what is instigating their interaction? I do not think a new model has to be made for code. Instead, there needs to be a change to how the mental model of development is taught to parties involved. This happens in some academic program such as Carnegie Mellon's HCI program that I am a product of. Still, the majority of design and computer science education lives remote of the other fields involved. Until joint education is widespread the inmates issue cooper described by cooper will continue to exist and design, marketing, and developers will continue to struggle in the attempt to find a cohesive product.

Design persepecive

This does not warrant a long post. Nor can I write much on the topic considering my recent perspective is and will always change.

Still, an interesting experience today as I interviewed a potential Carnegie Mellon design student. I was able to see my views about design in his responses and compare them to what I know now and there was a lot of interesting and surprising differences.

Smart phones that aren't

I have decided that society as a whole has settled for mediocracy in the department of mobile devices. We have the term 'smart phone' and believe our devices are augmenting our lives. True they keep calendars and contacts in order, let us check our email, and even write this blog. That does not make them smart. It does make them feature ridden.

I believe smart phones are more like trained dogs. Teach a dog a command and he responds. Sit and he sits. Speak, paw, roll over. Alarm, schedule, call. Are smart phones really that advanced? I see them as conditioned beings.

To side with Alan Cooper, I am the sole user of my iPhone. It should know I always want the device to turn on to the homescreen and should load the highest level of a feature upon load. That is what a smart phone would do. Instead I find myself following a series of actions to go back in hierarchy followed by hitting the home button so that the device is ready for my next encounter. That is not a smart phone. My need to take these steps are the same as needing to clean a dogs paws after taking him for a walk. The only difference is the dog might learn to expect this and wait while you put the leash up before tending to the animal. Smart phones have no memory of past events and dart into the house first chance they get, tracking mud for the owner and user to clean up.

There has to be a fundamental change in what users expect before technology will be updated. There has to be a movement for device names to accurately reflect their abilities. This change will not come from developers as it requires coding and learning on the devices part. Users don't know to ask or what doesn't exist. Which leaves the void to be filled by interaction designers. The only problem there is how to speculate on what should and should not be learned in a polite, wizard free manner?

I am open to ideas as technology becomes more pervasive innour lives.

The answer is right in front of you

Users are conditioned through little or poor design, unforgiving code, and a time before usability was a popular term to believe that systems and devices are inherently difficult to use. Show a user a new product and they will be hesitant to use it expecting the experience to be unpleasant. Similarly, provide a user with a simple task and they will search high and low for the answer expecting it to be hidden in some lost corner.

I have witnessed this most recently not with software, but with elevators. Waiting in the lobby of my office building an individual saw the elevator call button turn out. The user looked all around them to five of the six machines to see which had arrived. Not discovering the answer, she reluctantly turned around and sighed in frustration as she realized the available elevator was the unit she was staring at while waiting.

I see this incident as being very similar to the question "where are my glasses?" where a user will wander around searching for something to find that is on top of their head. Users have been presented with so much inept software that we no longer accept a simple solution. If an application doesn't require 20 steps to load a new document we don't trust it. That's not to say we won't complain about 19 of those steps, but we as users have become conditioned to poor interactions.

Users no longer look in the box labeled batteries for a fresh set of AAs for the flashlight. We expect the linen box to have our answer. It is the role of interaction designers to regain the trust of users in systems that they can be useful, usable, desirable, and polite.

Social networking

An interesting observation about my personal life that I would be shocked if it didn't expand to most of my generation.

I am comfortable if not overly willing to network via the Internet but am hesitant or unsure in person.

I don't mean to say I don't like meeting new individuals in my field. In fact it's quite the opposite.

Instead it is the method. I have spent the last few month expanding my digital footprint, updating linkedIn, Coroflot and facebook profiles, starting a Twitter account, and posting on various design blogs. All of this is natural if not second nature to me. Then, about a month ago, I met an individual and exchanged business cards. A seemingly natural transaction, I have become used to digital networking and this physical transaction threw me off.

Now there are many articles out about new social media and networking. What they all fail to address is the need to preserve physical networking as well.

Technology is moving social networking forward and it is infinitely easier to stay in touch with people, but are we losing simple human interactions?

More funny mental models

The first design post of 2009 and immediately I am going to criticize my innapropriate mental model of how the real world works.

Usually I catch the 6B bus to work. It's a standard bus with a front and back door and I always get to stand for a lack of seats. Occasionally, I catch the 6C. This bus comes earlier an is nothing like a bus... More like a party bus for bar crawls. All seats ad nowhere to stand, it is generally full but not crowded.

Now riding in today I happened to catch the early, smaller bus. About halfway through my mile and a half journey I began to think:
Wow the bus is stopping a lot more than usual.

My brain had made the assumption that being a smaller bus it should have fewer stops despite the routes are the same between the two busses between my apartment and work.

Once again I had to laugh at myself and how my brain makes assumptions based on observations.

I will never st tired of matching incorrect mental models with the physical world.

Back from break

A week and a half of design observations can be found on my Twitter feed www.Twitter.com/dafark8

Back from a brief vacation my writing will resume this week.