I highly recommend Bruce Schneier’s blog. Security involves thinking about what how things can go wrong, and that’s an excellent skill for any designer to have. Psychologically people are biased to remember catastrophically bad experiences, and can develop an adversarial relationship to something from just one bad experience, if it’s unpleasant enough. Minimizing unpleasantness can be more important then optimizing goodness, when trying to cultivate a good relationship with users.
January 24, 2009
January 23, 2009
Never Submit
Submit is always the wrong title for a button. Yet it’s still commonly used, even by people who should know better. I had “Submit Comment” buttons on my blog when I first published this.
Buttons should say what happens when they are pushed, in the vocabulary of the person pressing them. Technically a button might submit a form to a server, but what matters is the consequence of submitting the form.
For example,
this button should be called “Search” or “Find” or “See Matches” — something that describes what happens when it is pressed, or what the operator will see after pressing it.
That’s a Bad Word
“Submit” has negative connotations, and should be avoided. The first three example usages (in Mac OS X’s Dictionary.app) are all negative,
submit
verb
1 [ intrans. ] accept or yield to a superior force or to the authority or will of another person : the original settlers were forced to submit to Bulgarian rule.• ( submit oneself) consent to undergo a certain treatment : he submitted himself to a body search.
• [ trans. ] subject to a particular process, treatment, or condition : samples submitted to low pressure.
Say an apartment takes applications on their website. It would be pedantically correct to say “Submit Application”. But it is more respectful to say “Send Application”, or “Apply”. Pressing a “Submit” button implicitly says “I submit”. And that’s the wrong relationship for a user to have to an interface.
Blame The Programmers (Not Really)
One reason so many buttons are labeled “Submit” is that the HTML code for making a button has the word “submit” in it. The code for is <input type="submit" value="This Button">.
If the keyword send was used to build buttons, I would argue that the web would be a slightly less intimidating place today. A button that demands you “send” something is better then a button that forces you to “submit”.
Choose Your Words Carefully…
So perhaps, when choosing programming terms, we should pick the ones with the fewest negative connotations, since inevitably some of those words will bleed over into user-land. Even if programmer words stay in programmer-land, word-choice influences the way we think about things. Best not to encourage berating your users and customers.
Of course, you shouldn’t go overboard avoiding “ungood” words! There is no question that the most clear term should be used (even if it’s offensive). A better programming-vocabulary means better, less buggy, programs. And that’s better for users (no matter what they are called behind their back). But if possible, avoid disparaging words.
And never submit to the temptation of calling a button “Submit”. There’s always a more accurate, respectful name.
New Police Computer System Impeding Arrests
In Queensland, Australia, policemen are arresting fewer people because their new data-entry system is too annoying:
He said police were growing reluctant to make arrests following the latest phased roll-out of QPRIME, or Queensland Police Records Information Management Exchange.
“They are reluctant to make arrests and they’re showing a lot more discretion in the arrests they make because QPRIME is so convoluted to navigate,” Mr Leavers said. He said minor street offences, some traffic offences and minor property matters were going unchallenged, but not serious offences.However, Mr Leavers said there had been occasions where offenders were released rather than kept in custody because of the length of time it now took to prepare court summaries.
“There was an occasion where two people were arrested on multiple charges. It took six detectives more than six hours to enter the details into QPRIME,” he said. “It would have taken even longer to do the summary to go to court the next morning, so basically the suspects were released on bail, rather than kept in custody.”
He said jobs could now take up to seven hours to process because of the amount of data entry involved.
(Via Schneier on Security.)
January 20, 2009
Control Screen Saver Security With Automator
Set Screen Saver Security sets the time until the screen saver activates, and whether a password is required to unlock the screen saver.
Every company I’ve worked for that had an office also had a rule that any computer in the office had to be password-protected with a screensaver that kicked in pretty quickly. But at home it’s annoying to have to unlock your own laptop when you get up to make a sandwich.
If you use the same computer at home and in the office, IMLocation can use this action to lock down your computer at work, but leave it easy-to-use at home.
I recommend trying IMLocation (which includes the Set Screen Saver Security action) for best results.
January 19, 2009
Setting iChat Status With Automator
Set iChat Status is an Automator action that sets your status message, and availability in iChat. Amazingly, this action did not ship with Mac OS X.
I wrote it, because I wanted a user-friendly way for people to control iChat in IMLocation workflows.
I Need Your Help, Tiger
This action should run on Mac OS X 10.4. But since I don’t have a second computer running Tiger, I’m not sure. If someone would let me know if this works on Tiger I would really appreciate it! It should work just fine, but you know what they say about “should”…
January 18, 2009
iChat AppleScript / Apple Event Gotcha With “set status”
If you run the AppleScript:
tell application "iChat"
set status message to "testing"
set status to away
end tell
You might expect to have the away message “testing”. But what you get is an empty away message. That’s because set status destroys your status message. It behaves as if you had selected “Away”, “Available”, etc. as your status from iChat’s status menu.
If you want to set a custom away message, call set status first, so it won’t over-write your message.
tell application "iChat"
set status to away
set status message to "testing"
end tell
Filled as radar://6505882, but Apple considers it expected behavior.
Touching The Information
Alan Kay talking about GRaIL, Graphical Input Language, a system implemented in the late ’60s that was so far ahead of it’s time, it’s still pretty impressive today.
“I felt like I was sticking my hands right through the display and actually touching the information structures directly.”
I had no idea this sort of interface was done so early.
January 17, 2009
Lessons From Fast Food: Efficiency Matters
Every six seconds of improvement in speed of service amounts to typically a 1% increase in sales. And it has a dramatic impact on the bottom line.
–John Ludutsky, President of Phase Research, quoted on the “Fast Food Tech” episode of Modern Marvels, aired 2007-12-29 on the History Channel.
I wouldn’t expect things to be much different in the software world. The faster you get your burger bits the better.
UPDATED: 2009-02-05:
Apparently people want service much faster from software. Greg Linden reports,
Half a second delay caused a 20% drop in traffic. Half a second delay killed user satisfaction.
This conclusion may be surprising — people notice a half second delay? — but we had a similar experience at Amazon.com. In A/B tests, 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.
If the Mr Ludutsky’s figure is accurate, a 20% drop in fast-food revenue would require a two minute delay. Does this mean every second spent waiting on a computer is as bad as waiting 4 minutes in meatspace? I don’t know — I’m doing a lot of extrapolation from hearsay. But it’s something to consider.
January 16, 2009
Economic Distress and Fear
Part of the debtor mentality is a constant, frantically suppressed undercurrent of terror. We have one of the highest debt-to-income ratios in the world, and apparently most of us are two paychecks from the street. Those in power — governments, employers — exploit this, to great effect. Frightened people are obedient — not just physically, but intellectually and emotionally. If your employer tells you to work overtime, and you know that refusing could jeopardize everything you have, then not only do you work the overtime, but you convince yourself that you’re doing it voluntarily, out of loyalty to the company; because the alternative is to acknowledge that you are living in terror. Before you know it, you’ve persuaded yourself that you have a profound emotional attachment to some vast multinational corporation: you’ve indentured not just your working hours, but your entire thought process. The only people who are capable of either unfettered action or unfettered thought are those who — either because they’re heroically brave, or because they’re insane, or because they know themselves to be safe — are free from fear.
Quote is from The Likeness, a novel set in Ireland, by Tana French. (Via Schneier on Security.)