Sacrilege? Four Mac Usability problems

So I admit it, I’m a MacHead. My Windowsearthal friends detest it - the cloud of smug which rises up from my Powerbook. But I want to prove I’m not beyond some criticism of the glorious thing that is MacOSX. Here are my top 4 MacOSX Usability bugbears, and yes, it does feel rather sacreligious …

1. Minimize is irreversible without the mouse

I love the Dock. I love my keyboard. I enjoy being to Apple-M windows away, but I also want to be able to make those windows come back with my keyboard - without switching to my mouse.

Reversible interactions is one of the cardinal rules of Usability. Come on Apple, please make the Dock keyboard accessible! I know I could simply layer my application windows and use Expose, but sometimes a bloke just wants an uncluttered desktop.

Possible solution: this article on arstechnica refers to a “Full keyboard access” feature which gives you complete control over the Mac from your keyboard. The catch is that its buggy … and its so buried that I can’t find it within the preferences …

2. Non- shortcutable Preferences

I use some of the MacOSX preferences everyday, e.g. Network. But getting there is a hassle (Apple menu -> Location -> Network Preferences, or Apple Menu -> System Preferences). I tend to use Spotlight which helpfully includes them in results (but see problem 3 below). I’d love to be able to have a simple link from my Dock.

Possible solution: there is some talk of esoteric keyboard shortcuts to some of the preferences, but I don’t want to remember such detail …

3. Spotlight results reordering

Spotlight is a great thing, but I hate the way it keeps resorting after the first items have appeared. Again, this is really poor usability … I’d almost suggest not displaying results until they are all in. I’m invariably after a sub-panel of preferences, and the number of times I’ve clicked on a document due to reordering. Grrr.

4. Those mini windows which aren’t quite real windows

Why does Apple use those mini-windows for certain features like the Colour Picker (see pic below)? Why is this annoying? Well they don’t obey all the keyboard shortcuts (e.g. Apple-` to switch between application windows), and you can’t minimize them. Also, the close/maximise icons top-right are half the size of normal windows’ ones. Cue Fitts-law fiddliness.

Thats it - enough ranting. Please let me know if I’m being an idiot regarding any of the above!

Floss your open source UI once a year

I’m excited to be taking part in the 3rd FLOSS Usability Sprint later this month. FLOSS stands for Free/Libre/Open-Source Software (think Firefox, Thunderbird, ubuntu, gimp, and all the other freely downloadable open software which have making significants inways into the commercial software giants’ cash cows).

Why the sprint? Open-source software has been traditionally known for relatively poor usability. Reasons include focusing on more technically sophisticated users (and why not? if you are going to code for free, you may as well code highly-featured stuff that you would use), a lack of centralized management (contributing to feature bloat and inconsistency), and a lack of financial resources for investing in usability and design. However, the FLOSS community has recognized the problem and their is a burgeoning movement dedicated to alleviating it.

The Sprint will bring together open-source developers and user experience professionals to - over the course of one intense weekend (hence the term sprint) - brainstorm, interview, usability test, prototype and iterate improvements to a number of open-source projects. Projects signed up so far include Drupal, HyperScope, SocialSourceCommons, and SocialtextOpen.

Interested in taking part? Are you a user experience researcher or designer with a bit of time on your hands in late October who would like to do your bit for open source? Are you in an open source project and worried that your UI isn’t Mum/grandfather/non uber-geek friendly? Sign up here.

D (as per DCamp) stands for … usability, ajax, opensource, Cinematic user experience, …

Its the day after DCamp, and I'm happy to say that I had a great time. I was slightly apprehensive about giving up my Saturday but it was worth it.

The thing which really impressed me was the mix of people. D stands for usability, research, ethnography, development, techwriting …. not just design. The spontaneous nature of the event (anyone could suggest a track), resulted in a lot of energy, bountiful networking, and a load of interesting sessions.

I took part in the Agile Design, Development and Usability session in the afternoon - I'll add my notes about that here soon.

In the meantime … here are some pics

Instant Messaging meets Agile Usability at CHI2006

I'm attending CHI 2006 next week in Montreal where I'm presenting a user experience report discussing the use of Instant Messaging to provide a dialog between the moderator and the observation room/team members during usability testing. If you are interested, you can read the paper here: No IM Please, We're Testing (PDF). The report includes a survey of moderators (who in general were wary of possible disruption) and observers (who were highly positive). I present some guidelines to try and achieve a balance between these 2 perspectives. Comments/thoughts/critiques appreciated.

If you're at CHI, here's my session info:

Monday Mid-morning 11:30-12:00 EXPERIENCE REPORTS ROOM 511CF
Session: Usability Evaluations: Challenges and Solutions
No IM Please, We’re Testing
Richard Boardman

Since I wrote the report, I've become interested in the field of Agile Usability (the meeting of Usability/UCD and Agile Programming techniques). Traditional Usability and UCD has been criticised in some circles, for encouraging a slow, inflexible, formal waterfall style development process (requirements gathering, design, test, iterate …). Agile Usability is all about speeding things up in usability research so it can keep up with the dynamic, lightweight nature of modern engineering approaches like Extreme Programming (XP) and other Agile techniques.

Now I believe that the approach I discuss in my paper - using IM during Usability tests - can be a useful Agile Usability technique. IM can enable live collaboration for traditionally passive observers. They can ask additional questions, and diagnose (and hopefully fix) prototype bugs. This observer empowerment may thus be useful in promoting attendance behind the one way mirror, and rapid iteration on usability data by teams.

I've just been searching the CHI program and found at least 6 presentations directly related to Agile Usability. Here they are, FYI (did I miss any?)

1. Tuesday 430pm, PANEL ROOM 517C, Agile Development: Opportunity or Fad?
2. Doctoral Consortium (poster) 009 Embracing Agile Development of Usable Software Systems Jason Chong Lee, Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State, University, USA
3. Poster 155 The Role of The Interaction Designer in an Agile Software Development Process Matthew A. Lievesley, Joyce S. R. Yee, Northumbria University, UK
4. Poster 185 An Interactive Speech Interface for Summarizing Agile Project Planning Meetings Shelly Park, Jörg Denzinger, Frank Maurer, Ehud Sharlin, University of Calgary, Canada
5. COURSE 14 ROOM 513AB Usability and Product Development: A Usability Course for Management, Tuesday 9:00 – 18:00
6. COURSE 25 ROOM 514ABC How to Collect Field Data and Produce a Tested Design in 1– 8 Weeks, Thursday 11:30 – 13:00

See you in Montreal!

Baychi - Beyond Search: Social and Personal Ways of Finding Information

Here are my notes from the session:

Beyond Search: Social and Personal Ways of Finding Information

April 11, 2006 - PARC, Palo Alto - Neil Hunt, Netflix; David Porter, Live365; Tom Conrad, Pandora; Kevin Rose, Digg; Joshua Schachter, del.icio.us; Rashmi Sinha, Moderator

Rashmi gave a really nice intro, using del.icio.us tags! (see links below, I will be sure to steal this sometime soon). She also presented a 3-way theoretical framework for discussing the "beyond search space"

DCamp - an unconference on user experience, usability and design

If you are interested in the fields of user experience, usability and design, and you'll be in and around the Bay Area on May 12-13, you should swing by DCamp. It promises to be fun, and will be the first barcamp focused on user experience. What is a barcamp? A barcamp is an unconference! What is an unconference? An unconference has no official pre-defined program. The event is fluid and evolves depending on attendees' interests. Expect lots of talk/discussion/debate/bickering on UX methods, design, open source, web2.0 and much much more. I hope to slip in a talk somewhere too. Come and heckle me.

You can find out more via:

• The unconference's un-un-official wiki
• Rashmi's blog (she's a BarCamp veteran - I haven't been before, but she promises it'll be fun)
• Also - here's a link to DCamp at upcoming.org

Personal Information Management at CHI2006

I've just been perusing the CHI2006 advance program, and since Personal Information Management (PIM) is a particular interest of mine, I paid special attention to this area.

Its a busy year for PIM, just go back 3 years and there was barely anything presented at CHI on this field. Here are the PIM papers (PIMPs?) which caught my eye … plus links to researchers' homepages. Descriptions are from the CHI website. I plan to fill in more commentary on these papers at the conference itself. Did I miss any?

Baychi notes (14/mar/06)

Undigested, unadulterated, flow of consciousness notes from the Getting Things Done Baychi last week (14/mar/06)

Chair: Paul Sas E*TRADE

First Mimi on Chandler, scroll down for Merlin on Getting Things Done.

New (juicy) Usability journal

The UPA have just launched a new international peer-reviewed journal, the Journal of Usability Studies (JUS, or Juice as I reckon it will be referred to).

The first issue seems to be freely browsable, I wonder how long that will last? (-; It includes an invited article by Jakob Nielsen, who asks how the usability community can scale to support the millions of interactive systems being developed today. He offers 2 possibilities: (1) train a million usability professionals (picture useit.com running courses in the Astrodome), or (2) improved discount usability methods, easily accessible to designers etc. (1) is frankly terrifying to both non-Usability and Usability people. (2) is frankly terrifying to Usability people. So I guess (2) wins out.