Vincent Gable’s Blog

June 22, 2009

(Hyper)Text is King of Substance

Filed under: Accessibility,Design,Quotes,Usability | , , , , ,
― Vincent Gable on June 22, 2009

…I’d rather have the text of Clay’s speech than the video. For things that matter, written words are unambiguously better than speech. To start with, anything that matters isn’t just written, it’s usually rewritten repeatedly (and more important, condensed). Plus, it has hyperlinks. Plus, it’s smaller and cheaper to ship around. Plus, it’s searchable. Plus, it works on more devices. (I acknowledge that only the first of these is fundamental; but that alone would be enough).

Tim Bray

Videos, speech, etc. will always carry more emotional content. But for consuming ideas, text offers the highest bandwidth and most precision. Unfortunately, writing well takes time, and can hinder conversation.

Conceptually, I believe illustrative pictures and infographics are valid elements of modern text, like links, or typography.

June 17, 2009

We Feel Faster Than We Think

Filed under: Quotes | , , , , ,
― Vincent Gable on June 17, 2009

I’ve been saying this for a while — as a medium gets faster, it gets more emotional. We feel faster than we think.

Clay Shirky

April 30, 2009

Acceptable Delays

This is a collection of sources on what constitutes an acceptable delay. It’s very much a work in progress, and will be updated when I stumble into new information. I’m very interested in any insights, experience, or sources you may have.

Based on some experiments I did back at IBM, delays of 1/10th of a second are roughly when people start to notice that an editor is slow. If you can respond is less than 1/10th of a second, people don’t perceive a troublesome delay.

Mark Chu-Carroll

One second … is the required response time for hypertext navigation. Users do not keep their attention on the page if downloading exceeds 10 seconds.

Jakob Nielsen, (in 1997?)

In A/B tests (at Amazon.com), we tried delaying the page in increments of 100 milliseconds and found that even very small delays would result in substantial and costly drops in revenue. (eg 20% drop in traffic when moving from 0.4 to 0.9 second load time for search results).

Greg Linden covering results disclosed by Google VP Marissa Mayer

If a user operates a control and nothing appears on the display for more than approximately 250 msec, she is likely to become uneasy, to try again, or to begin to wonder whether the system is failing.

— Jeff Raskin, The Humane Interface (page 75)

David Eagleman’s blog post Will you perceive the event that kills you? is an engaging look at how slow human perception is, compared to mechanical response time. For example, in a car crash that takes 70ms from impact until airbags begin deflating, the occupants are not aware of the collision until 150-300 milliseconds (possibly as long as 500 milliseconds) after impact.

April 27, 2009

Don’t Trust TIME

Filed under: Announcement,Security | , , ,
― Vincent Gable on April 27, 2009

Technical problems can be remediated. A dishonest corporate culture is much harder to fix.

Bruce Schneier

UPDATE 2009-06-12: See also, The Top 10 Most Absurd Time Covers of The Past 40 Years.

BREAKING NEWS 2010-08-26: The Onion: TIME Magazine Announces New Version of Magazine for Adults.

Recently The 2009 TIME 100 Finalists online-poll was manipulated with hither-to unheard of sophistication. Not only did hackers vote their choice into the #1 spot, but they stuffed the ballot so that the runners up spelled out a message!

kg9kl.jpg

Jeff Atwood called TIME’s web developers clowns, but that seems too harsh to me, since online polls are so inherently untrustworthy that spending resources trying to secure them is almost always a waste. Even if all the technical problems could be solved, the results still wouldn’t be meaningful, because they wouldn’t be a census or a random sampling. An online poll is a way to engage readers, and let them do more than passively consume. TIME’s poll succeeded there, even if it was gamed. (Arguably it was more engaging because it was gamed).

But today, April 27th, TIME’s writers disingenuously denied the hack

TIME.com’s technical team did detect and extinguish several
attempts to hack the vote.

When I first heard news of the attacks, it was already a week old, TIME’s whitewashing came two weeks after the results of the hack were published. Portraying the hack as an “attempt” that was “extinguished” is just blatantly wrong.

I’m a big believer in Hanlon’s razor: “never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.” But it’s very hard to give TIME’s staff the benefit of the doubt here, since by their own admission they were aware of the hack, and the poll results were “surprising”. It takes a staggering amount of stupidity not to connect the dots, or be aware of what was being written about you for weeks.

Consequently, TIME has lost my trust. If their denial was written in stupidity, it shows an unforgivably incompetent journalistic ethic. If it was a deliberate whitewashing of the poll results, then it’s an even more egregious failure. Also, what kind of an article announcing the winner of a poll only has pictures of people who are not the winner? (Hint: something by the hacks at TIME)

March 25, 2009

Crazy Idea: Using iPhones During Interviews

Filed under: Uncategorized | , , ,
― Vincent Gable on March 25, 2009

Using an iPhone as a resource during a job interview is an idea worth considering. An iPhone can google answers to trivial questions Unlike a laptop, it can be used while people face each other, and it’s small enough not to obscure someone. Additionally, it can’t compile and test code, so candidates must still think everything through in their head.

Adding technology to an interview, just because it’s technology, is a bad idea for exactly the same reasons that just putting computers in a classroom isn’t helpful without special curriculum.

But since an iPhone is so unobtrusive, I think it’s uses are worth considering.

In technical interviews, it’s very common for the interviewee to have a question about an API or other detail. The standard practice is for them to agree with the interviewer on an assumed answer and run with it. This works. But it might be interesting to have the real answer available.

Another open question is if google-fu is something that should be tested during an interview. If so, an iPhone might be one way to do it.

Do you have an idea for incorporating some technology into a face-to-face interview?

February 24, 2009

More Flash Hate and Graceful Degradation

Filed under: Accessibility,Announcement | , , , ,
― Vincent Gable on February 24, 2009

Adobe’s website for Air (their cross-platform ‘web for the desktop’ technology) requires Flash 10. If you have an earlier version of Flash, like 75% of the visitors to my website, then you see a big blank box.

This is a terrible mistake for the company that makes Flash. In no way does it inspire confidence that Flash is accessible.

The real irony is Adobe’s own website was the first website I’ve seen that was incompatible with the version of Flash I was using. If other websites leveraged Flash 10, they gracefully degraded so that I could use them with Flash 9.

When I finally upgraded, I couldn’t see why Adobe’s website needed Flash 10 was required. I wasn’t wowed. All I saw was some fancy transitions between slow-loading flash videos.

Just by being open, that one website used 125% of my CPU even when I wasn’t interacting with it. No joke, 125% is what OS X reported. I am using a dual core machine, so the 125% means that 100% of one CPU, and 25% of another were used — just to render a webpage I wasn’t even looking at.

Is Adobe fine with alienating 75% of the internet?

Why can’t they make their own website laptop friendly?

Why should I trust their new Air platform that “lets developers use proven web technologies” if its own website won’t just work for me?

February 9, 2009

Google Monoculture

Filed under: Announcement | , , , , ,
― Vincent Gable on February 9, 2009

Jeff Atwood remarked,

Google delivers 350x the traffic to Stack Overflow that the next best so-called “search engine” does. Three hundred and fifty times!

All I can say is that’s a Belgium big number!

Here’s his data:

Search Engine Visits
Google 3,417,919
Yahoo 9,779
Live 5,638
Search 2,961
AOL 1,274
Ask 1,186
MSN 1,177
Altavista 202
Yandex 191
Seznam 103

The server logs for vgable.com, for 2008, show google giving me a much more modest 3.6x of my traffic.

13 different refering search engines Pages Percent Hits Percent
Google 3039 72.8 % 3047 72.3 %
Windows Live 1055 25.3 % 1055 25 %
Google (Images) 40 0.9 % 41 0.9 %
Yahoo! 12 0.2 % 12 0.2 %
MSN Search 7 0.1 % 7 0.1 %
Unknown search engines 4 0 % 4 0 %
Google (cache) 3 0 % 35 0.8 %
Scroogle 3 0 % 3 0 %
del.icio.us (Social Bookmark) 2 0 % 2 0 %
AOL 1 0 % 1 0 %
Clusty 1 0 % 1 0 %
Dogpile 1 0 % 1 0 %
AltaVista 1 0 % 1 0 %

Of course, having 3.6x as much market share as everyone else combined is still market domination.

I can’t speculate why the numbers for my niche website are different from Attwood’s niche website (especially w.r.t Live Search).

But Yahoo’s consistently irrelevant 0.3% and 0.2% of referrals looks especially bad for them. Google has too few competitors.

Color Blindness

Filed under: Accessibility,Design,MacOSX,Programming,Usability | , , , ,
― Vincent Gable on February 9, 2009

Roughly 10% of men are color blind to some degree. You need to be sure your interfaces are accessible to them. (Unless you are designing exclusively for women I suppose, since women are about 20x less likely to be color blind.)

Sim Daltonism is the best way to test an interface on Mac OS X I’ve seen.

Here is a web-based colorblindness simulator. Here is another. Personally I prefer a native program though. It’s faster and more versatile.

If you are curious, you can test yourself for colorblindness. I have no idea how accurate that test is, but since different displays and operating systems usually show colors differently I’d be a little skeptical.

ADDITION 2009-10-11: WeAreColorBlind.com is a website dedicated to design patterns for the colorblind.

More Terms = More Specific (Assume AND, not OR)

Filed under: Design,Programming,Quotes,Usability | , ,
― Vincent Gable on February 9, 2009

Assumed-And is the way Google does it, with the more search terms added, the narrower the results. The other way around can be argued in the abstract, but your customers are not living in the abstract. The world has voted, and Assumed-And is the way it is. Having additional terms widen, rather than narrow, the scope confuses people in the extreme. They will leave you and find a site with a search function that “works.” This blunder alone could put a company out of business.

Bruce Tognazzini

January 29, 2009

Social Epidemics Take Time

Filed under: Quotes | , , ,
― Vincent Gable on January 29, 2009

The best viral content on the internet won’t reach its audience in a single week. It might sit on YouTube for weeks or even months before it gets noticed and distributed. There’s just so much content out there to compete with. My guess is, viral marketing is pretty hit and miss, but if you’re going to try to do it, give it time to happen. If you’d like to promote an event next year, start writing about it on your blog or MySpace page now.

Jobe Roberts

This reminds me of one of Steve Yegge’s anecdotes,

… long before we had company internal blogs (at Amazon.com), Jacob Gabrielson wrote and circulated a brilliant essay called Zero Config. At least that’s what people call it nowadays. The actual title is longer, but famous essays tend to get shortened, like the way Dick Gabriel’s The Rise of “Worse is Better” became widely known as the “Worse is Better” essay.

Jacob’s essay clearly articulated an acute pain we’d all been feeling, but which nobody had elevated to the status of First-Class Pain. That is, configuration was a huge problem, but it hadn’t made it onto anyone’s radar as an official problem to which we should dedicate company resources.

Sure, everyone had been bitching and whining about it, but we bitch and whine about everything around here, so it wasn’t a problem that was readily discernable in all the noise.

Jacob’s paper was brilliant on several levels. He was able to distinguish configuration as a first-class problem, worthy of a paper — and this was back when there was almost no precedent for writing and circulating papers within Amazon. He made his point in an amusing and memorable way, writing with considerable style and intellectual force. And he articulated a long-term vision for fixing the problem. His goal wasn’t to solve it, but simply to increase general awareness of the problem. It was a little masterpiece.

And nobody read it.

I read it, although not immediately; as I recall, it may have been a few days before I got around to it. But it was relatively soon after he’d circulated it. When I finally did read it, I was very excited, and thought everyone ought to read it immediately. I started asking around, and found that only a few of the people on the circulation list had read it. I felt rather deflated: the company was missing out on an important insight, one that could help steer us in the direction of faster development, more stability, and less pain. I’m sure Jacob felt pretty bummed about having wasted all that time on the essay.

I didn’t give Jacob’s essay much thought after that, although I’d of course internalized his core ideas, which helped me steer my own teams’ work occasionally. About eight months went by, and then the most remarkable thing happened: suddenly all the VPs were talking about the “config problem”. They were citing Jacob’s paper, and from the way they were talking about it, it was obviously considered a well-known and long-standing problem: in other words, in 8 months it had gone from a relatively unknown issue to one that had permeated our corporate consciousness.

It didn’t happen overnight, either. I started hearing references to the paper in meetings about 4 months after he published it, and the frequency gradually went up, until the config problem finally emerged on various strategic planning agendas almost a year after Jacob had written about it.

I was surprised at the time that it took so long, but now it makes sense. People will only read something as meaty as an essay when the time is right. The right time isn’t going to coincide for everyone.

Like anything else, word of mouth drives adoption for essays. Only a few people will read it at first: friends, and a few people who just stumble across it and think it looks potentially interesting. If the essay isn’t relevant enough, then people will just forget about it and move on. No big deal.

But if your essay strikes the right chord with enough people, it will eventually reach critical mass, and you’ll have effected change in the organization. It may not be a huge change, but think about it: getting an idea through to a thousand people, in such a way that they all remember it and more or less agree with you — this is no easy feat. You can’t do it with a single email, unless it’s a really controversial one, and then you’ll just be infamous. You can’t do it with a single public speech: only the folks in the room are likely to remember it. Trying to do it with hallway conversations doesn’t scale.

Jacob’s Zero Config article demonstrated that essays are the best way to change minds on a large scale, maybe the only way, and even then, it often takes months for the message to sink in via mass osmosis.

For Jeff Atwood, of Coding Horror fame, popularity took years

I started this blog in 2004, and it took a solid three years of writing 3 to 5 times per week before it achieved anything resembling popularity within the software development community.

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