Vincent Gable’s Blog

July 22, 2009

Anti-Sustainable Design

Filed under: Design | , , ,
― Vincent Gable on July 22, 2009

I’ve previously written about how design encourages sustainability. The gist is that people keep well-designed things, so good design encourages conservation, discourages waste.

But there is an obvious dark side to attractive things: we want to have more of them. So good design encourages over-consumption.

This article on reusable grocery bags is the perfect example. Reusable canvas bags should be more sustainable than single-use plastic bags in the long run, even though they are 400x more expensive to make. But people who use well-designed bags them like them so much, they tend to acquire too many of them!

I’m guilty here too. As I wrote,

I still shave with straight razors that are 60-80 years old. Although manufacturing, say a new Thiers-Issard razor, is expensive, the legions of disposable shavers it nullifies will grow for decades, possibly centuries.

That sounds good. But note the plural in “straight razors”. Because I like them, I have more than I strictly need from a utilitarian standpoint. And the truth is, over half of my razors were are new, not heirlooms (which are harder to get in good condition). Granted, I’ve used these “new” razors for 5 years, and will continue to use them for decades. But it’s still a big resource-debt to work off. If I start buying new razors regularly, I’ll never even the score.

The very same attractive qualities of good design that transform disposable goods into artifacts of lasting utility also encourage people to use more items than they need.

July 19, 2009

For iPhone and or iPod Touch and or Other Things As Well

Filed under: Announcement,iPhone,MacOSX | , , , , , ,
― Vincent Gable on July 19, 2009

It’s very clear that a program “for Mac OS X” works with any personal computer Apple sells, because they all have “Mac” in their name. Unfortunately, the flavor of OS X that runs on the iPhone and iPod Touch is officially called “iPhone OS” by Apple, which it implies an incompatibility with the iPod Touch, and any future device that doesn’t have “phone” in the name.

I don’t know a good way to unambiguously say that a program is for any iPhone OS device, without tedious enumeration.

“For iPhone OS” sounds like it excludes the iPod Touch.

“For all models of iPhone and iPod Touch” sounds terrible. It will sound even worse when Apple comes out with other iPhone OS devices (“…for iPhone or iPod Touch or iTablet or iFPGA…”).

Apple could help by renaming “iPhone OS” to “Mobile OS X”, but I don’t see this happening.

I personally lean towards using “for iPhone” in general writing, and clarifying, if necessary, in “systems requirements” fine print. This feels closest to how the press covers iPhone OS applications, and of course it’s how Apple named the OS.

I’d love to hear what you call iPhone OS applications, and why.

July 17, 2009

Color Me Explosive

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

From Wikipedia, a story of color-coding gone horribly wrong in Afghanistan,

HDRs (Humanitarian Daily Rations) are typically air-dropped into the disaster area on large pallets. The HDRs initially dropped in Afghanistan were yellow, before it was realized that the packages were the same color, and approximately the same size, as American cluster bombs, which were also dropped in Afghanistan.[1] Later packages were made in an orange-pink color described as “salmon“.[3]

(Emphasis mine, some links altered, perminant link to the quoted Wikipedia revision.)

I’ve written before about pitfalls of color coding.

July 14, 2009

Dozen Page Impression: Design your Life

Filed under: Accessibility,Announcement,Design,Usability | , , , ,
― Vincent Gable on July 14, 2009

I had some time to kill today, waiting for a catalytic converter replacement, and the book Design Your Life: The Pleasures and Perils of Everyday Things caught my eye. It’s loosely about about the value of design and how to apply UX to everyday life. I’ve only read1 a dozen or so pages of it in a bookstore, but so far I definitely recommend the book.

Visually it’s is appealing (but of course it has to be!), and accessibly written.

But what really impressed me the most, is that it gives you a critical eye and a reason to ask ‘why?’. And I think that’s the most important thing you can get out of a book on UX/design/accessibility.

The authors also have have a website which looks to be every bit as good as the book.


1You’re probably wondering why I didn’t buy the book if I like it enough to recommend it. Well, I had my iPhone with me in the store, and I looked up the price on amazon. It was half what the brick-and-mortar store was asking. So I didn’t buy it. Speaking of which, if you order the book through any of the links on this page, I get a small commission from Amazon. So please do doubt my recommendation — that’s what critical thinking is all about!

July 10, 2009

Build Dumb Interfaces to Smart Brains

Filed under: Accessibility,Design,Quotes,Usability | , , ,
― Vincent Gable on July 10, 2009

…control interfaces must not be intelligent. Briefly, intelligent user interfaces should be limited to applications in which the user does not expect to control the behavior of the product. If the product is used as a tool, its interface should be as unintelligent as possible. Stupid is predictable; predictable is learnable; learnable is usable.

—Mencius Molbug

Jeff Raskin calls this principle it monotony, and explains it comprehensively in The Humane Interface.

I’ve always felt a little uneasy about the idea. Computers are supposed to free us from tedium and repetition, by doing things for us. A fluid interface is unnatural yes, but the goal of computing should be to exceed what’s possible in the corporal word, not to copy it imperfectly.

But fundamentally, I think Raskin and Molbug are more right than wrong. Paradoxically, dumb interfaces beat smart interfaces most of the time.

July 9, 2009

HeyPervertStopLookingAtMyPEF

Filed under: Reverse Engineering,Uncategorized | , , , , ,
― Vincent Gable on July 9, 2009

When I was in my early teens, I played a lot of Marathon — the classic Macintosh first-person shooter by Bungie.

There’s a detail about Marathon ∞ that I haven’t seen documented anywhere, but I thought was very cool.

If you tried to use MacsBug on a PowerPC machine to inspect (disassemble) M∞, none of the functions had names, except for one: HeyPervertStopLookingAtMyPEF.

(PEF stands for Preferred Executable Format, the way Mac OS applications stored PowerPC code).

Today, you can still play Marathon 2: Durandal on XBox Live for a price, or play any of the trilogy for free on a computer. Sadly though, I don’t think the game has aged as well as Escape Velocity, which is still a blast today.

July 3, 2009

When In Doubt, UTF8

Filed under: Accessibility,Programming | , , , ,
― Vincent Gable on July 3, 2009 
/* If you are uncertain of the correct encoding, you should use UTF-8, */
/* which is the encoding designated by RFC 2396 as the correct encoding */
/* for use in URLs.… */

— CFURL.h

This echos my experience, when in doubt, choose UTF8 for the web. UTF8 is backwards compatible with 7-bit ASCII (eg. ‘A’ is 0x41 in ASCII and UTF8).

But know that UTF8 is a variable-length encoding: non-ASCII characters maybe represented by > 1 byte. As a general rule with Unicode, I do not expect a char or wchar_t to always map to a character in a string. Encoding details can be messy, e.g. “É” might be represented as one character, or two composed characters “´E”. It never hurts to brush up on Unicode.

Thank you sir, may I have another?

Filed under: Design,Quotes,Usability | , , ,
― Vincent Gable on July 3, 2009

Apparently by 1958, mankind’s subservient relationship with computers was sadly well established,

AT THE Vanguard Computing Center – in Washington, D. C, I watched a young woman present a machine with an extremely complex problem in ballistics involving hundreds of variables. At once lights on a control panel twinkled and winked as the computer checked to see that all equipment was operating properly. Then it set briskly to work. Magnetic tapes spun in their shiny glass-and-steel vacuum cabinets, the high-speed printer muttered. Suddenly the machine stopped and the electric typewriter wrote: “Last entry improperly stated!”

A little embarrassed, the young operator corrected her error, and the machine started again. Four minutes later it gave an answer that had required several million individual calculations.

“This is a wonderful machine” the girl said, “but it makes you shiver sometimes, especially when you give it a wrong figure. Once in a while we give it an incorrect figure on purpose—just to see it sneer at us.”

— THINKING MACHINES ARE GETTING SMARTER (Oct, 1958)

I’d never discourage anyone from making the most fun error messages and interactions possible. But when being sneered at by the machine gives operators more of a connection to it than using it normally, I think something is broken. I can’t imagine that fostering a healthy operator-machine relationship. Honestly though, I don’t know that it’s worse than the same boring regular interactions, but with boring error messages instead.

July 2, 2009

Design for Mental Imperfections

Filed under: Accessibility,Bug Bite,Design,Quotes,Usability | , , , , , , , , ,
― Vincent Gable on July 2, 2009

When it comes to building the physical world, we kind of understand our limitations. We build steps. … We understand our limitations. And we build around it. But for some reason when it comes to the mental world, when we design things like healthcare and retirement and stockmarkets, we somehow forget the idea that we are limited. I think that if we understood our cognitive limitations in the same way that we understand our physical limitations, even though they don’t stare us in the face in the same way, we could design a better world. And that, I think, is the hope of this thing.

—Dan Ariely, concluding a very entertaining TED talk. The transcript is up, but I liked his delivery so much I watched the video.

Stairs and ladders aren’t an implication that you’re too weak to pull yourself out of a pool. Yet amazingly people sometimes get insulted by simplified interfaces, as if it somehow implies they are so stupid they can’t handle complexity.

I was fortunate enough to hear Jonathan Ive talk about launching the iMac. As he was leaving a store on launch-day, a furious technology reported accosted him in the parking lot, shouting What have you done? He was incensed that the iMac was so cute, approachable, and untechnical — everything that he thought a computer shouldn’t be.

Some of this behavior is explained by simple elitism. If computers are hard to use, than it keeps the idiots out, and proves what a macho man you are if you can use them.

But I suspect refusal to accept our cognitive limitations is also related to our cultural refusal to accept mental illness. Quoting Mark C. Chu-Carroll’s experience with depression,

How many people have heard about my stomach problems? A lot of people. I need to take the drugs three times a day, so people see me popping pills. … Out of the dozens of people who’ve heard about my stomach problem, and know about the drugs I take for it, how many have lectured me about how I shouldn’t take those nasty drugs? Zero. No one has ever even made a comment about how I shouldn’t be taking medications for something that’s just uncomfortable. Even knowing that some of the stuff I take for it is addictive, no one, not one single person has ever told me that I didn’t need my medication. No one would even consider it.

But depression? It’s a very different story.…

Somewhat over 1/2 of the people who hear that I take an antidepressant express disapproval in some way. Around 1/3 make snide comments about “happy pills” and lecture me about how only weak-willed nebbishes who can’t deal with reality need psychiatric medication.

I confess to being thoroughly mystified by this. Why is it OK for my stomach, or my heart, or my pancreas to be ill in a way that needs to be treated with medication, but it’s not OK for my brain? Why are illnesses that originate in this one organ so different from all others, so that so many people believe that nothing can possibly go wrong with it? That there are absolutely no problems with the brain that can possibly be treated by medication?

Why is it OK for me to take expensive, addictive drugs for a painful but non-life-threatening problem with my stomach; but totally unacceptable for me to take cheap harmless drugs for a painful but non-threatening problem with my brain?

If we can accept that our brains are fallible, like everything else, and that this isn’t somehow immoral, we can build a better world.

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