 |
« | Week of May 25 | < | Individual Entries | > | Week of Jun 8 | » |  |
 |
 |
Consolidating Bookmarks
internet, usability
June 06, 2003, 11:52 PM
For my ongoing effort to construct a usable open-source RSS news aggregator, I've been doing some modified contextual inquiries of several of my compatriots in the HCII and elsewhere here at CMU. So far, I've observed five participants as they checked various web sites that update on a periodic basis and that they return to frequently to locate fresh content. I plan to run three more users to refine my personas which will feed into the interface design of my new aggregator.
As an unexpected side effect of the experiment, I've run across a real need for a centralized bookmark system in web browsers. The basic problem I continue to encounter is that all the participants I've observed have multiple computers they use on a regular basis (usually one at home and one at work, sometimes a separate laptop to boot). This creates a problem with bookmarks, since if they bookmark a page on one computer then want to access it from the other, they're out of luck. Many people didn't bother using bookmarks for this reason, and instead just remembered a few sites that they typed into the location bar manually. Some people even use Google to find sites they return to on a daily basis!
This is a problem I've confronted myself since at least 1998 (I now have a work laptop, a home desktop, the home server that handed you this page, and a home "backup" desktop, all of which I still use at varying degrees of frequency), and it's nice to see that I'm not alone. Granted, since all of my participants are from CMU, it is possible that they are unusually computer-oriented and thus are abnormally more likely to have multiple machines they use regularly. But I doubt this is the case; many white-collar workers nowadays have one or more computers at work as well as owning a home computer for their personal use. Even people who own laptops often like to keep their professional and personal computer usage physically separate.
To solve this problem for myself, I was thinking of installing a server-side bookmarks application on the Labs, but this is an inelegant solution that's only appealing because there are no better alternatives. Mozilla should provide built-in support for a centralized bookmarks repository (and possibly history and settings as well) to eliminate this problem, or possibly look into other design ideas for helping users to keep track of sites they wish to return to (since bookmarks have a tendency to get cluttered, similar to file folder hierarchies). I know Netscape used to have a concept of "roaming profiles", and IE supports a similar feature on LANs, but these tend to only work on intranets, if I recall correctly. If there are any available solutions, then they are obviously too difficult to set up, since no one I observed was using them (or even aware of them).
So enough ranting for now. I intend to run three more users, then pull together the observations to refine my personas and scenario analyses. Some people have expressed an interest in seeing the results of the study itself, so I'll probably try to put together some small report about it to share with you all. Stay tuned!
Email Rob:
Open Source and Efficient Interfaces
software development, usability
June 04, 2003, 01:03 PM
I met with Jim today about my open source and usability project. We were chatting about the current state of usability in open source software projects, and I observed that although open source products tend to have inferior usability with respect to novice to intermediate users of the type of system in question, they tend to have superior usability for experts. With commercial software, I mused, it is frequently the other way around, even if the project has a strong usability focus. Most of the commonly used usability techniques such as heuristic evaluation, cognitive walkthrough, usability testing, etc. are good at discovering the problems of first-time users and improving learnability and reduction of errors. They are not so good at improving expert user efficiency or satisfaction, since these attributes of usability generally only appear over long usage and thus are hard to detect in small experiments and heuristic methods.
This factoid has held true throughout my idle reflections on my experiences, and on a certain level it makes sense: open source developers and contributors tend to be power users who are highly concerned about efficiency and advanced functionality, and they tend to design for themselves. So when the user is, in fact, like them, open source interface design roughly works well. This is why many programmers eschew fancy commercial IDEs in favor of Vim or Emacs. The designers of Vim and Emacs know what programmers need, because they are programmers themselves.
I wondered, however, if anyone had done any research to provide more strength to this assumption than my idle hunch. What would be even cooler would be if someone investigated how various open source development social setups (e.g., Linus's "benevolent dictator" approach, Apache's meritocracy, Mozilla's more formal, commercialish approach) correlated to expert efficiency of the resulting interface. Jim couldn't think of any offhand and directed me to MIT's Open Source Research website.
I'll check it out, but I imagine there's probably a research gap in this area. And I don't think it would be too difficult to fill; someone could use Bonnie's GOMS technique to analyze expert efficiency for a number of common tasks with two similar products, one closed-source and the other open-source (e.g., Trillian and Gaim). They could also try to correlate the open-source development social setup with the efficiency reported by GOMS. I'd imagine this study could have interesting results both for the HCI and open source communities. Unfortunately I have no interest in actually running it. Abby, are you out there? :)
Email Rob:
The Users We'll Never See
design, information, society & sociology, usability
June 03, 2003, 05:10 PM
About an hour ago, I felt a need to feed my Chipwich addiction, so I invited Kerry to go to Entropy with me. On the way back, she needed to stop by the Hub to get some registration and class scheduling issues worked out. Since I had nothing imminently pressing to do, I waited for her.
While sitting in the Hub waiting area, surrounded by brochures, magazines, important-looking forms, computers, and the various other trappings of a functioning administrative center, I started to reflect on how much information was out there in the world, and how much of it had to be dealt with. That's the thing about information; it always seems to need processing and organizing and analyzing and basically loads and loads of attention. Information can be rather childish in that sense.
I was reminded of Herb Simon's quote: "In the future, the scarce resource will be human attention". I reflected for a bit about how right he was.
But wait a minute, a little voice in my head remarked. Exactly how right was he? Sure the information-overload problem is a big deal for people at CMU, and probably is for information workers everywhere. But is everyone like us?
My father owns a house in rural West Virginia (Monroe County, for those of you familiar with the area). Life's quite different out there. People aren't so busy, for one thing; they don't appear to be so bothered by all this information. The information is there; there are construction projects and farm vehicles and weather patterns and plant DNA (scads of information lies in the DNA of even a simple organism) and who knows what else. But this information doesn't seem to be so concerned with getting your attention. It could care less about being processed.
My point is not that this "simple" life is ideal or perfect; it isn't. My point is not even that it's better; "better" is a matter of opinion and generally doesn't mean much in any absolute sense. Hell, I happen to like city life; I wouldn't move to the country if I was given a million bucks to do it. Rather, my point is that old Herb was not thinking about these people when he made up that quote. And how could he? He was here at CMU, where everyone is information-overloaded. Of course he saw the future in those terms; he was extrapolating from the present, just as any rational person would.
As human beings, our conceptions of the world and its problems are necessarily a product of where we are situated in society, both physically and status-wise, and who we choose to associate with. Dan Sieworek, Scott Hudson, and many other researchers here at CMU, are taking Herb's quote seriously with projects like Aura and Situationally-Appropriate Interaction to try to solve this information-attention problem of the future. But whose problem is this, really? It's their own problem, ultimately, and the problem of the people they associate with and the people who fund them.
As user-centered designers, we can only design based on our conceptions of the world. We can only perceive and design for the slice of reality we find ourselves in, and for most of us, this slice is quite limited.
Around this point, I was interrupted from my meditations by the secretaries loud discussion about whether picture files are supposed to end in ".jpg" or ".jpeg". They spent a good five minutes trying to figure out the correct answer (of course, both extensions will work fine for most modern programs). I smiled. File extensions are one of those known usability problems that no one can get seem to rid of. Usability advocates routinely complain about how design decisions such as this one are made by programmers who don't understand the mentality of the users they are designing for. But in the large scale, in the "redesign society" sense that researchers and the upper echelons of industry and government confront daily, does anyone really know who they are designing for? Does even the most skilled user-centered designer have any meaningful grasp on who the users are when the user base includes the population of entire countries (or the entire planet)? In this scenario, even we user-centered designers may be no better than the archetypal isolated programmer in a cubical we so frequently revile.
Sometimes I wonder if at least a subset of the designers of the world need to step out of their bounds sometimes. Some of us should go out into the world to observe the people whose lifestyles and values clash with the ones we are familiar with. Perhaps this would help us get a larger view of the world we are so eager to change, essential if we are to do more good than harm.
This idea has some background in design research; last semester we read a paper from DIS 2000 that advocated designing for "extreme characters" as an exercise to help break out of the mould of the existing interface design frameworks. But this is just a thought experiment; the extreme characters described in the paper are (by admission) caricatures of real people. A designer can't truly know what the elements of society outside his spheres of experience are like without seeing them for himself.
Now if we really were able to see the people of the world, the "end-users" of our world-changing visions, as who they are, and not just who we assume them to be, well, how mind-blowing would that be?
Email Rob:
Another Adams Awakens
announcements, internet, personal
June 01, 2003, 09:09 PM
My brother, Geoff, has started a weblog on The Labs with the apropos name of "Geoff Adams's Weblog". He is the only person I know who is (possibly) lazier than I am, so it remains to be seen how often he will choose to update it, but the first steps have been taken (and so far he's not doing half bad).
A warm welcome to him from my modest little corner of the blogosphere!
Posted by Dave on June 02, 2003 at 05:48 PM
HEY HEY!!! I am lazier than both of you bizatches put together. Im too lazy to list the rationale for my comment..
Posted by Geoff on June 02, 2003 at 07:28 PM
"Possibly"?! I resent that!
Thanks for the welcome, bro.
Email Rob:
Justifying My Existence, or Why I Have A Weblog
internet, personal, society & sociology, writing & communication
June 01, 2003, 01:57 AM
Back when I first set up this here weblog, Micah asked me what my reasons were for doing so. At the time, my answer was "I want to have a place to record my ideas" This was accurate if rather vague; I wasn't even sure then if I'd continue to maintain roBlog dot org or if I'd get bored after a couple weeks and take it down. Since then, I've obtained more experience with weblogs as a medium (I'm even planning to write my own news aggregator), and I think I've managed to refine that initial thought a bit.
The News Hour with Jim Lehrer did a report a few weeks back on weblogging. One of the people interviewed half-jokingly gave the reasons people blog (I still can't stand that word, but when in Rome...) as "narcissism, creativity, and a desire to connect with like-minded people". Not bad as one-sentence summaries go, but I think the reality is more complicated.
At Micah, Andy, and Don's CHI BOF on Weblogs, we talked some about the reasons people have weblogs. From that discussion and others, I've learned that there are myriad varieties of reasons why people choose to share their thoughts online. These range from:
- Emotional exhibitionism, or the thrill of sharing the intimate details of your personal life with (potentially) complete strangers. This works into the "narcissism" comment, and unfortunately is what some people tend to associate with weblogs.
- Communication with friends, which also involves sharing personal details, although possibly of a less sordid nature. Usually these types of weblogs are of little interest to those outside the author's immediate social circle.
- Sharing ideas with friends and strangers, so the author's thoughts can get wider circulation.
- Getting feedback on ideas from people with a different perspective, which may be the main reason the author wishes to share them.
- Recording thoughts and experiences for the purpose of having a "backup brain" that you can refer to later when your primary wetware has failed you.
- Improving writing skills, which was mentioned in the News Hour piece. Writing is a skill that requires frequent practice and good feedback to maintain and enhance.
- Reasoning through ill-formed ideas, since having to articulate an idea in written form is often a good way to identify where the idea is weak and needs further development, as well as identifying those ideas that sound good in your head but look pretty stupid when the (metaphorical) ink hits the paper.
- Connecting with others, since weblogs are a good way to express your interests directly without having to work them into a conversation. Others who are interested in similar things may find your weblog and get in touch with you about your common interests.
- Influencing others, since reading your thoughts may cause others to change theirs. You may express some insight they wouldn't have come to on their own, and thus start the spread of a meme. This is innately satisfying to many.
- And many others I've probably missed...
There are other dimensions of differences as well. Some authors tend to restrict their weblog posts pretty religiously to a single predefined topic, others write about whatever happens to be on their minds. Some authors post lots of personal details, others prefer to keep it dry and intellectual. I believe this variety is a tremendously good thing. Weblogs are a medium, they should be used for whatever people find them useful for.
I don't want to digress too far into ruminations on why other people use weblogs, however, since this post is supposed to be about my reasons for doing so. I set up roBlog dot org for several reasons. First off, as I said initially, I want to record my ideas, to have a "backup brain" where I can look back a couple of weeks, months, or years later and see what I was thinking about in June of 2003.
I also want to be able to see how my thinking has progressed over time, which gets to my second reason; I want to have a means of connecting ideas explicity, both my own and other people's, and if there's one thing the web is good at, it's connecting ideas. Within the context of roBlog, however, I'm hoping to develop a better way of accomplishing this.
I also hope to improve my writing skills and ability to articulate myself clearly, which helps me reason through my thoughts in ways that I couldn't if I just kept them in my head. On several occasions, I've written up a weblog post just to sit back and remark "Ya know what? I'm not so sure I'm entirely convinced of that anymore." I've rethought quite a few points as a result.
Finally, I hope to share my ideas with others, get interesting and helpful feedback, and hopefully influence others and help them think about things just a little bit differently. I've already received lots of interesting comments from my friends (often in person, but sometimes on roBlog itself), and I know my thinking has been stimulated by the thoughts of others I've encountered on their weblogs. To me, this is the most unique and exciting property of weblogs as a medium, this ability to spontaneously share ideas and form connections between them.
In closing, I'd like to present my current vision of the site. I think of roBlog as my open notebook on life, intended both for my future reference and as a window into my head for others, both strangers and friends. I see life as the ultimate research project that never ends, and I hope roBlog continues to reflect that. Stay tuned for as long as you'd like.
Posted by Rob on June 22, 2003 at 10:54 PM
One of the reasons I missed is: to share other interesting content with other people (usually with some personal commentary on this content). This is the "MHP-style weblog" (Mindless Link Propogation, a Kuro5hin ( http://www.kuro5hin.org/section/mlp ) term), which seems to be especially common with Radio Userland weblogs, perhaps because of the tight publisher/aggregator integration. Micah's weblog mostly follows this style ( http://www.alpern.org/weblog/ ).
Email Rob:
Posted by Dave on June 08, 2003 at 12:08 PM
There's a Moz bug open trying to re-establish roaming profiles:
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=17048
Posted by Rob on June 08, 2003 at 06:10 PM
Yeah, it doesn't look like anyone is jumping to fix it though.
The problem with the old roaming profiles, IIRC, is that they only worked over LANs. What would be ideal, IMO, is a centralized bookmarks server that could transparently store and retrieve your bookmarks information with a login account. This is a service Netscape could provide; I remember they always used to bother you about signing up for Netscape Netcenter when you installed their browser, but I always cancelled because I couldn't see a compelling reason to do so (if I wanted an ad-ridden portal site, I'd go to Yahoo, thank you very much). But if Netcenter provided bookmark storage capabilities it may be a different matter.
Maybe this is moot; AOL doesn't seem too committed to Netscape recently. But it seems like a fairly simple feature to support and one that is definitely needed according to my observations, so I thought it worth mentioning.
Posted by Dave on June 08, 2003 at 07:07 PM
I think that Yahoo (speak of the devil :-p) Does provide a centralized bookmark server through their (IE only) browser plugin toolbar. This sounds more of what you are looking for.
I don't see how AOL/Netscape could provide a centralized storage server for this kind of thing unless they are offering it as a service, and there might be a market out there for it. Go Rob! Create thy standard for centralized bookmarks (in XML of course..)! Get the browser makers to implement it (maybe M$ in Longhorn...) and start a marketplace!! Theres the business idea your looking for.
Make a centralized bookmark repository and pluggin for browsers...
Posted by Rob on June 09, 2003 at 11:56 PM
Hey now, I'm just the messenger here! I didn't volunteer to do any _work_ to make this thing happen! That's all we usability guys ever do, right? Complain about how the software people got it wrong while refusing to do any of the real work ourselves. :)
Seriously though, I do think this is an important feature that requires browser support since it would have to be pretty transparent to the user. My suggestion was for Netscape in particular since with all the buzz going on about Microsoft ceasing to innovate with IE, it seemed like a good opportunity for Moz to step in. It would require some form of service, of course, but I can't imagine the bandwidth requirements would be any worse than making netscape.com the default home page for millions of people.