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How to make scheduling an appointment confusing

I needed to make an appointment with a government agency that gives me a choice of three different days and locations.

The process seemed more straight-forward and much simpler than I expected, until I realized they were leaving out one critical piece of information that was really required to be presented first.

Where.

I don’t know if the person responsible was a county employee, or a project manager or programmer at the company paid to implement the sign-up form, but they all had a part to play.

The choices were Thursday, Friday, or Saturday, and San Mateo, Daly City, or South San Francisco. But no addresses were provided! I could make multiple appointments to overcome the limit imposed by another silly rule, but it wasn’t until I booked all the appointments that I was shown the address.

Without that critical piece of information, I had to determine which location and time were most convenient.

Nuts.

When I saw the address, I was frustrated. Why there? It’s out of the way and not at all convenient. (For me, but I bet it’s the most convenient for their personnel.)

Had I known the location in advance, I would have chosen a different time, or perhaps a different service altogether.

The lesson

Software designers need to put themselves in the mindset of the ultimate end-user whenever they are asking for input, and ask themselves these questions:

  • Is all the information I need to determine how to proceed available to me?
  • Is anything confusing or in the wrong order?
  • Am I having to remember what I did or read in a previous step before continuing?
  • Am I having difficulty making a decision because I’m not sure what questions or steps have yet to come?

There are more things the software designer needs to be concerned with, of course, but they must never structure things in a way that makes the end-user wonder.

Posted in Design, Software, Usability.

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By Peter Sheerin – 2012-05-13

Synthesizing Innovation

Alan Kay once wrote, “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”—but how do you go about inventing the future?

I’ve been thinking a lot about that this week, as I’ve been working on some tough brainstorming and writing assignments.

I’ve spent most of my career analyzing and writing about things I could touch—whether it was hardware or software. But how do I write convincingly of things that don’t exist yet? How do I strengthen my existing innovation talents to become as strong as Kay, Jobs, and Heinlein? How do I think outside the box even more?

I’m blessed (or cursed?) to have one of the key high-level traits—that I don’t think like most other people. But this also brought up the corollary question—once I’ve further developed my innovation skills and accomplished some of my more important goals, how do I teach other people to innovate? To answer that, one must first understand some of the key enablers to thinking outside of the box.

For a long time, I have known intrinsically that these were some of the requirements:

  • read widely
  • be curious about everything
  • have a good long-term memory for inane details—this is far more important than having a good short-term memory
  • take copious notes—this will compensate for the lower-than-average short-term memory (which itself I’m convinced is part of what creates brilliance)
  • ask lots of questions—in fact, ask questions whenever you don’t understand something
  • read the life stories of brilliant innovators—biographies, autobiographies, whatever you can get your hands on
  • look for connections between disparate things
  • relax—living your life like a Type-A is not only a sure-fire path to burnout, but to stifled creativity as well

A few of these were confirmed for me when I was researching the fundamentals of enterprise social networking (including reading Where Good Ideas Come From), and a couple others were described brilliantly in an article on Wired.com, How to Spot the Future.

This common thread about looking for connections between disparate things is one of the most important behaviors, and my original inspiration came from watching James Burke’s marvelous Connections series.

Of all the rules in the Wired article, Rule #6, Demand Deep Design, is closest to my heart. It is possible—and for some of us far too easy—to carry this to the extreme, and lose sight of the original goal. But back off a little bit, and up pops the insight and persistence required to make things elegant—to make them just work. “Good design is hard” the author writes—but I will tell you that it is so worth it.

But Rule #7, Spend Time With Time Wasters, is most prophetic for me, especially this week. It’s related to my “relax” above, which I’ve long known intrinsically, and which Where Good Ideas Come From  and Drive confirmed for me.

I frequently do my best work early in the morning (though sometimes in late-night/all-night sessions), but I hit on a pattern this week that has excelled for forming ideas and completing them on the keyboard.

To an outsider this week, it might have looked like I was goofing off, but in reality, I’ve simply been carefully exercising all of those concepts above, including #7. I think I’d be a little embarrassed if I had to show you my browser history from the past few days, because on the surface, it would look like I was researching unimportant miscellanea. I don’t remember everything I was reading about, but some of it ranged from reset buttons to toys to electric cars to smoke detectors. And every bit of it helped me form and refine the ideas I needed to write about.

Another piece of the puzzle was to wait a little bit, but not too long. For one of my white papers, a long lunch break was just right. For the other, more integration time was needed, so it was a long lunch break, some initial writing, a good night’s sleep, and another whole morning being a “Time Waster”. But this still wasn’t quite enough, and I knew it. The secret you won’t find in the Wired article.

Call it Rule #8, Go Out And Explore. Get off your butt and go do something. Get outside and go for a walk, go window shopping, or go to a museum or art gallery. You should sometimes do this without any purpose, other than to have fun. But at least half of the time, do so with a purpose—to find inspiration about something specific.

It all adds up to idea synthesis.

In my case, I needed to find some inspiration about factory floors, and some other inspiration about homes. Not having access to a factory floor at the moment, the closest proxies I could think of were Costco, Home Depot, and the mall. I didn’t know exactly what inspiration I would find there, just that I would find it.

OK, I was thinking that something related to seeing the forklifts in action at the big box stores would be it, but they were nowhere to be found. Instead, I found one key concept while staring up at the massive ceiling lights in Costco (and it had nothing to do with light bulbs!), and another on an endcap at Home Depot.

In the end, these couple of white papers just about wrote themselves over the course of a couple hours late in the afternoon each, and the results were met with a bit more acclaim than I was expecting.

With one white paper in particular, I hit the nail on the head so cleanly that when I found perhaps the best scientific paper on the subject, it listed the same four components I had concluded were ideal, and in the same order, and almost completely validated the concept I had arrived at independently. Explaining why nobody had yet brought the concept to market was the essential missing ingredient, and made the story complete.

That’s a long, long way of saying I can validate the methods espoused by these three writers, but I don’t think you’d believe me as much if I just told you to read these things, now would you?

(And yes, I know this isn’t the complete answer of how to teach others to be innovative, but ask me down the road a while, and I’ll have a much better story for you, I’m sure.)

Posted in Innovation.

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By Peter Sheerin – 2012-05-10

The profit in designing great

I’ve been tinkering with a Ramsey 555 timer kit, refreshing my long-dormant soldering skills (not bad; first attempt passed our lab guy’s inspection) as a practice project before embarking on something more sophisticated at work.

In trying to decide how I would design the package and the UI, I realized it was also a good exercise in designing something that will be elegant and might not even need an instruction manual. My goal is to get to that point without using any text labels at all.

I know I will spend more time designing this than the project justifies, but I fully expect to develop or refine concepts that I can re-use later (and share with others), so it will be worth the perfectionist penalty.

I have already learned a few things, even before wiring in any switches or drilling holes in the case.

The first is how hard it is to find and source the right parts, even when you know what you want and can see it on display.

“Sorry, that switch is out of stock. No, I don’t know when we’ll order more. No, I don’t know the manufacturer.”

Even a Google search only got me close.

Part of the problem is the dearth of real electronics stores, even here in Silicon Valley. They’re essentially all gone. Without easy and ready access to actual parts, and the ability to touch and feel them before completing the design of a product, designers are hamstrung with a bunch of bad choices. Search online, and guess if the part will feel and work right. Design an appropriate part from scratch (which might be the best option). Or pick something close at hand and pray that it will be good enough.

But “good enough” is not how you define great, and the product will likely suffer. Especially as multiple design decisions like this compound.

The specific design decision I’m making at the moment will be interesting, because the result is likely to include a symbol, color, and shape that all reinforce the purpose of the switch. But that’s another post.

In the middle of this, I came across a great article on the benefits of taking this high and expensive road. In Design vs. Cost: Who Wins?, the CEO of Dero Bike Racks describes the tough choice the company had to make when a competitor ripped off one of its designs and undercut their price. The result of taking the expensive path was amazing, and it gives me hope that the genius philosophy of Steve Jobs is starting to spread.

Posted in Design, Easy, Usability.

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By Peter Sheerin – 2012-05-08

The Long Tale of the Caliper: Part 1

You’ve seen them before—and probably even have one in your toolkit. Those inexpensive digital calipers of questionable design lineage that make measuring things fun, instead of a pain in the Vernier.

Mine is a General Tools 147 came in a nice, sturdy case, runs one one button-cell battery, and can display either millimeters or decimal inches (the newer equivalent model can display fractional inches to the nearest 1⁄64th).

Its coolest feature is hiding under a sliding cover on the top: four electrical contacts on the PC board that the instruction sheet describes as a “SPC RS-232 serial port”. Yet I have never, until this week, been able to locate a serial cable for the unit.

Actually, I long-ago discovered the truth—that it’s not a real serial port. No, not your typical serial interface trying to masquerade as RS-232 using ±5 V DC instead of ±10−12—this thing ain’t even close, using 1.5 V DC signaling, with an oddball data format.

But getting this thing to talk to computers turned out to be the perfect foil for a work project (and I might even be able to share the results somewhere down the line), so I’ve spent more than a few hours this week researching this funky caliper interface and its battery usage.

The reasons behind the funky design of this unit couldn’t be found anywhere on the Net until two months ago—when the original design engineer posted a couple of paragraphs on a message forum. And what I discovered in my research is interesting and relevant enough for product design that this will take more than one post.

When I finally found a cable that will fit, it was one that ends in a 4-pin mini-DIN plug—just like your old-fashioned S-Video cables use—and costs between 1/2 and nearly double the cost of the calipers it fits (depending on which supplier you choose. No, this is not an old Macintosh serial connector (that’s another mini-DIN, and maybe not even a standard one). Nope; not a serial cable. It’s meant to connect the caliper to a DRO (Digital Read-Out) for use on milling machines.

You see, this caliper design is a cheap Chinese knock-off of a Swiss-made caliper—from 1982, when computers with serial ports weren’t all that common in the average hobby’sts garage or even in machine shops and engineering firms.

Because of the scarcity of this cable/connector, all of the hacks I’ve seen to interface it with a PC’s serial port wind up soldering wires directly to the PC board or carving out the plastic case and soldering a small 4-pin connector never meant for repetitive use to the caliper.

Beyond that, the caliper’s output is not quite to scale, and is fairly difficult to decode. In a blog post comment from March of this year, original design engineer Hans U. Meyer writes:

Here’s why the Chinese Caliper’s binary output is not to scale: I designed it for Sylvac in 1982, when the small number of on-chip transistors limited the options. Hence a scale pitch of 5.08mm=0.2inch, easy to subdivide in both metric and inch with serial binary (LSB first) arithmetic logic. The same logic also calculated the serial BCD output in mm or inch for the display. The serial binary signal, common to both units, was output as an afterthought: only few people wanted it, to which Sylvac simply sold binary-to-BCD-to-RS232 adapters.

Elsewhere in that thread, and in other discussions sprinkled across the net I discover that among all of the code examples of how to read these calipers, nobody has quite done it correctly, because they typically ignore the last bit of data that is “too jittery”, instead of averaging it to extract all the valid data available.

Yuck.

There are so many things wrong with this picture that I’m not quite where to start. So, in no particular order:

  1. These companies essentially stole another company’s design, copying it verbatim with engineers that didn’t fully understand the technology.
  2. Said companies are still making and selling a badly compromised design from 1982, having invested zero dollars or time in improving it.
  3. These companies in the past have falsely (even if unknowingly) advertised these units as having a true RS-232 serial port.
  4. We as consumers have blindly bought these units, unaware of their design and operational defects.
  5. Very few people spend the time required to analyze and/or rectify these problems.

In a word, it’s all schlock. But why?

I fear that it’s become an inherent part of our culture—that executives, product managers, and engineers alike have misconstrued the concepts of “good enough”, “progress”, and “value”.

This has happened because our media and schools have taught us to learn by copying, instead of by analyzing and thinking. This is unacceptable, and as I go further down the tale of the Chinese Calipers, I’ll share with you what I believe should have happened at each step, as opposed to what did happen.

Posted in Design, Standards.

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By Peter Sheerin – 2012-05-05

Tailless Mice on Glass

I needed a new travel mouse a couple weeks back, to fill in for those times when my favorite TrackPoint isn’t quite the right tool, and to save a bit of wear-and-tear on my right index finger.

Now, I’m picky when it comes to input peripherals (on the desktop, only the Microsoft Natural 4000 will do; on the road, only a good ThinkPad keyboard gets me to even consider a laptop, etc.), so it was not an easy choice.

Logitech Anywhere Mouse MXI’ve normally gone with Microsoft mice in the past, but this time, I went back to Logitech. Partly because they had one that felt like the best compromise between size and ergonomics. But more than a little bit because of a feature Logitech calls Darkfield, which allows these optical mice to work without a mousepad on darn near any surface, even including glass.

The only caveat is that the glass must be at least 4 mm thick—I’m not sure that’s a real limitation because I wouldn’t want to put any computer on glass any thinner. ;-)

This little rodent lives up to the Darkfield claims perfectly. I haven’t yet tried a surface it didn’t work on, and when I pulled it out in a meeting last week and set it down on the glass table, being able to amaze another geek when he said, “Uh, you’re going to need a mousepad for that.” was priceless.

I haven’t dived into its features enough for a proper review yet, but this Anywhere Mouse MX works so flawlessly and is such a joy to use, that I feel obligated to give kudos to Logitech.

Posted in Design, Easy, Hardware.

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By Peter Sheerin – 2012-04-29

Aesthetics over Information = Confusion

Last night a buddy texted an invite to dinner, but because I had been in the library earlier, I had silenced my iPhone, and didn’t notice for a while.

Just how long a while was remains a mystery to me, because I immediately sent a query back, and as soon as I hit Send, the Messages app deleted the timestamp from his text.

(It was a moot point, because I was already retired for the evening, getting my fix of Person of Interest, but it was still frustrating.)

I understand the desire to simplify the display of messages and make it look more pleasant, but the scope of the removal goes too far, because it removes critical context from the conversation.

This all-or-nothing approach satisfies Apple’s desire for elegance, and makes it easier to follow conversations without being distracted by ugly, repetitive timestamps, but the complete elimination of the data is inexcusable.

I can imagine a couple of solutions that fall short of complete removal that would still be visibly and operationally elegant.

  1. Show the timestamp for any individual SMS when you tap it with your finger.
  2. Show all timestamps for a while (a minute?) whenever you tap the screen and scroll back in the message history. (Their display could then fade out to nothing after a minute or so of no manual scrolling.)

This is the type of elegance I expect from Apple, and I’m just a little disappointed in them.

Posted in Design, iPhone, SMS, Telephones, Usability.

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By Peter Sheerin – 2012-04-20

Simplicity Through Obscurity is Bad

Making things easy is hard; it can never be said enough.

However, there is a tendency by many technology developers to attempt at solving this difficult problem by hiding things. In my humble opinion, this concept is usually taken too far. This week’s example involves Apple.

Somewhere along the lines, the Notepad app on my iPhone lost a whole slew of notes I had entered over the years. I don’t know exactly when or why. There are several fundamental issues exposed by this:

  1. Computers and services must treat your data as sacred—as Ford would say, Quality is Job #1. If I enter something, your system must do its very best to ensure it is never accidentally deleted. If you can’t debug the current system, than it is too complex, and the only solution is to throw out that code and start over. (This should be considered simply a variation on Alan Cooper’s theme of prototyping in Visual Basic, throwing away the code, and redoing everything in C (substitute the prototyping and production languages of your choice). It matters not that what you’re throwing away was coded with a production language and that you’ve been shipping it for years. It is defective, and any further fixes will only make it more complex. Adding more noodles to spaghetti code will not make it better. You have to take away as many noodles (carbs/bloat) and add more meatballs (protein/goodness) as possible.
  2. You need to test more.
  3. When all else fails, make recovering from the problem simple.

On this point, Apple must pay more attention to #1 and #3 (#2 becomes increasingly impossible the more twisted noodles you add to the dish), and #3 is what frustrated me enough to compose this post.

I realized a few weeks ago that I was missing these notes, but finally had time this weekend to go spelunking for them. Fortunately, I’ve been using Genie Timeline as my backup solution for most of this year, and have a Time Machine–like backup on my NAS at home, so I figured it would be possible. Here’s what I’ve had to do because Apple obscures the IPhone backup/restore process.

  1. Since neither iTunes nor iCloud seems to provide anything more than one backup at a time, I’m lucky that my backup solution has been storing multiple versions of my iPhone backups for months. Kudos to Genie9 for making this work.
  2. Since the backup is on my NAS, I have to do most of the sleuthing at home.
  3. Because I configured Genie Timeline to use compression, the combination of that and the sheer number of files within one iPhone backup (> 6,300) takes several hours to restore, even over GigE. But why do I have to restore over 6K files just to find the one that contains the Notes database? Because Apple obscures the actual filenames as 40-character hashes. I put up with this once to make sure I had all the data necessary, and restored my first backup from January.
  4. But because I’m not sure exactly when my iPhone deleted all those notes, I will need to restore several time points to find the most complete set of notes. Even using a binary search, this would be painfully slow.
  5. The next problem was that iTunes can only do a monolithic restore, wiping out everything just for me to look at the restored notes. Bad Apple.
  6. So I bought the iPhone Backup Extractor, which so far has done an amazing job of extracting data from iPhone backups. It succeeded in restoring all of the notes I had in January to individual HTML files. Awesome!
  7. The developer, Reincubate Ltd., wins more kudos for having the answer to #4 on their web site: (click then scroll down to read why are the filenames garbled?).
  8. With that info, and a bit of trial-and-error, I was able to determine that all I needed to restore from each massive iPhone backup were two files: Manifest.mbdb and ca3bc056d4da0bbf88b5fb3be254f3b7147e639c.
  9. Update: Turns out restoring Info.plist, Manifest.plist, and Status.plist in addition to the above files makes the application work better—at least in that the actual date the backup was made is displayed, so that you know which backup you’re restoring from. Still better than restoring 6,338 files.
  10. So now I can quickly restore a few backups from different dates over the past four months, and browse the resulting HTML files to discover the one that is most complete, and paste them into something a bit more reliable than the iOS Notebook app.

I can only guess that Apple obscures these filenames to reduce the number of support calls they need to take from non-programmer end-users looking for help restoring their precious content. But this obscurity is only necessary because Apple has not made the Notebook app reliable and provided an easy-to-use backup restore module in iTunes that addresses the obvious and likely desires of its customers.

The moral here: It is better to fix a problem at its foundations instead of covering it up with spaghetti and sauce, however tasty and appealing the sauce is.

Posted in Design, Easy, iPhone, Software, Usability.

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By Peter Sheerin – 2012-04-15

Where did all the IrDA ports go?

Setting off to the East Bay for the family Easter gathering, I want to program the address into my GPS. But using the on-screen UI of this particular Garmin is painful—shouldn’t I be able to beam a vCard to it, and then just say “go there”?

This particular model has an infrared port on it that supports both consumer IR (for the remote control) and IrDA, ostensibly for receiving vCards via OBEX Push.
But none of my current-model electronics have IrDA ports on them any more. Neither my ThinkPad nor my iPhone have one, and I’m quite tempted to pull out an old Sony-Ericsson phone or an iPaq Pocket PC, to see if it actually works.
(On a side-note, why can’t any current smart phone match that iPaq in terms of connectivity? It supported IrDA, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, Compact-Flash for more memory or additional I/O, and even had a fingerprint scanner.)
So where did all the IR ports go? Once upon a time, they had been removed from the latest Mac laptop models in the final stages of engineering. And then Steve Jobs went to Europe, where everyone and his brother was beaming vCards back and forth, between their phones and laptops. Guess what happened when he returned to Cupertino?
I’m not sure how they disappeared again, but Steve was wrong on this one.
IrDA ports have several advantages over Bluetooth for small-scale data exchange, which have implications for power consumption, security, and privacy.
  • You don’t have to leave your device discoverable all of the time just to enable easy exchange of data
  • You never have to pair with a device just to exchange a phone number one time
  • You can leave IrDA on all the time and quickly receive a bunch of contacts rapid-fire, choosing to accept or reject them one-by-one, based on the content instead of a generic or funky device name that doesn’t give any clue as to who is pushing data towards your device
And in this usage case, the ability to push an address to a navigation device, IrDA is the one method that is both easy and operates in a manner that gives the sender a good sense of security. If I want to beam an address to the GPS in a friend’s car, a taxi, airport shuttle, I do not want to pair via Bluetooth, because I don’t want my whole address book to be transmitted to a device I can’t control and may never see again (not to even mention how much longer this would take).
So can we please bring back IrDA and OBEX Push for vCards?

Posted in Standards, Telephones.

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By Peter Sheerin – 2012-04-08

Wonderful Tech Support Call Experience

When the topic of a horrible tech support experience came up over dinner Monday night, just about everyone’s jaw dropped when I said I had just had a wonderful experience that morning.

But when I said, simply, “I own a ThinkPad”, a few said “Oh”—understanding implicitly that my statement was true. When I told the story, one even noted that the result was a bit better than what they would expect of Apple.

It began something like this:

“Hello, my name is Chris, and I’m in Atlanta, Georgia. How can I help you with your ThinkPad today?”

Continued…

Posted in Delighting Customers, Technical Support.

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By Peter Sheerin – 2012-03-30

When Good Enough is not Good Enough

There is a concept held by many engineers and analysts that products competing for market share generally have to be good enough—not perfect; perhaps not even optimal.

This concept does indeed work in some situations, but it does not always work, and even when it does work, it doesn’t last forever.

Perhaps the best-known trade-off between competing products where one was clearly superior is VHS vs. Betamax.

VHS and Betamax had a price delta, but it was small relative to the overall cost. I’d like to share a much more extreme price/performance delta with you.

But first, more skeptics.

In Wired 17.9, Robert Capps writes, “We now favor flexibility over high fidelity, convenience over features, quick and dirty over slow and polished. Having it here and now is more important than having it perfect.” Later in the article, he describes a 6-year long ongoing survey of music quality preferences conducted by a Stanford professor, who found an increasing preference for the lower-quality MP3 format over time.

But never take these examples as the final answer. Cheap doesn’t always win out, and I believe fundamentally that because nothing can ever be perfect, there will always be a competitive advantage to be had by making your product better than others.

But it can’t just be marginally better, and it can’t simply have more features. It must work much better.

More importantly than that, however, is that it must elicit stronger positive emotions in the user than its competitors.

If you can pull off this one-two punch, however, there are large profit margins to be had.

Apple has consistently achieved this with its personal electronics—first the iPod, then the iPhone, and now the iPad.

The key lesson here is that if you achieve this level of magic, you can overcome the dreaded commoditization of a technology, which otherwise destroys profit margins and innovation.

My challenge to you is to raise the bar on how much you want to delight the customer. Higher than you think you can jump. Here’s a good example of the potential payoff:

When I started shaving yesterday morning, I realized that I was down to the ragged edge of my last Gillette Fusion ProGlide Power cartridge. The green strip had been white for a while, and the razer no longer glided smoothly across my face.

I remembered the emergency stash of disposable two-blade razors I had in the drawer, and continued shaving with one. I was seriously considering using up my supply of these cheap things before dropping another yuppie buck on a 4-pack.

But I quickly stopped, switched back to the rough and over-used Gillette blade, and threw the remaining 10 cheapies in the trash.

Why? Let me count the ways:

  1. The shape of the handle combined with its subtly textured rubber overmold felt better.
  2. The heavier weight made it handle better.
  3. The angle of the blades was more comfortable.
  4. The larger surface area and rubber ridges kept the blades better aligned with my skin.

Most importantly, however, this horribly overused $4+ part that had done battle with my rough beard and been put away wet way too many times produced a smoother shave and was easier to control than the brand-new still sharp-as-a-laser $0.50 razor, that is quite adequate for the task.

No matter how little you think your potential market cares about quality over cost, there is always a possibility to create something that will bring them back to caring about better than good-enough.

Posted in Design, Usability.

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By Peter Sheerin – 2012-03-19