Simple and Powerful

I have the greatest admiration for designs that truly succeed in combining ease of use with power. This is extremely hard, and very few organizations and designers have succeeded. Some products and services start out good but fail to keep stuff simple as the feature set grows, but most just suck from the start.

If you are old enough you may remember the AltaVista search engine. It was launched by Digital (later Compaq, now HP) as a project much to prove the superiority of the Alpha processors. It indexed more web pages than anyone before, it returned search result faster than anyone before, and it had a pretty good, simple design: A one-row search field, and a Submit button. Sound familiar? It didn't even have a domain name of its own at the time since altavista.com was already taken, but in spite of this AltaVista became the de facto standard for searching the web. Results ranking and speed could be improved, as we would later learn, but at the time it was pretty much the best search engine on the Internet.

But one day the age of the Internet portals arrived. Everything had to be a portal. Including AltaVista. Unfortunately the search functionality drowned in a sea of portal junk. This portal move really is ironic; with a really good search engine, why would you need a portal page with edited content?. The previously clean first page became so cluttered that you almost had to search the page to find the search functionality. Good thing Google came along to help you with that. AltaVista lost, both due to inferior interface design and inferior technology.

An other example. The iPod. Not particularly original as an example, I know, but this is for a reason. Apple designed the iPod as a music player, nothing else. They provided it with a simple to use piece of software to rip, organize and play music, as well as to transfer it to the iPod. They also gave it a very attractive design, being small, stylish and easy to use. The iPod really only did one thing, it played music. But did it really well. Every time a gadget blog or an online magazine writes about a new iPod model there inevitably has to be someone complaining loudly in the comments section of the article that the iPod sucks; it doesn't have a radio, the only supported way of transferring music to it is using iTunes, the battery performance is poor, it has no recording function, etc. But for the absolute majority, including myself, these things do not matter. We prefer the ease of use, the great sound quality, the small form factor. We rather not sacrifice the user experience the iPod provides for more features, as a matter of fact we are even prepared to pay a little extra for not having them. In this case less really is more. Sales figure speak on their own. There really isn't much of a competition. Yeah, sure, clever marketing didn't hurt either.

When a new iPod generation is released, the battery life is typically barely improved, instead the product is made smaller. Someone made a conscious design decision here: Battery life is good enough, size, however, is more important. Slowly new features are making it into the product line, first photos, later movies and games. But perhaps this isn't good enough in the long run. Perhaps the iPod users really want to consolidate their gadget collection, giving them less stuff to carry around? I sure do. This is nothing that escaped Apple, hence the iPhone. One would think that Apple is out on deep waters here, when they now enter a new market. Fortunately for Apple, there isn't much of a competition.

The Sony Ericsson p990i is the latest flag ship smartphone from Sony Ericsson. It is everything the iPod isn't. Sony Ericsson's design team has crammed pretty much every technology they could find into the p990i. It has support for GSM, WCDMA, WLAN, Bluetooth, an FM radio, USB, two cameras, and MemoryStick. It has a pen-based user interface and features software out of the box to make phone calls, send and receive SMS, MMS, and e-mails, synch with Exchange servers, read and write Office documents, read PDF files, play music and movies, surf the web, read RSS-feeds, a business card scanner(!), an alarm clock, and of course organizer tools such as calendars, contacts management, and tasks. And the list goes on. Looks good on paper huh? Too bad it sucks. It is badly designed, badly built and the software wasn't even half baked when the phone was released. The support documents even instructs you to reboot the phone (which takes 90 seconds by the way!) every now and then as a maintenance routine. And would you forget, the phone will do it automatically for you. When you least want it. We have suddenly moved more than 10 years back in time to the era of Windows 95 and pre OS X! Seriously, it is so bad it isn't even funny.

To add to it all, the arrogance shown by Sony Ericsson towards their customers that paid a premium price for this product is just sad. It shows every sign of a company that is immature in its customer relations and that has failed to embrace new CRM ideas and technologies that have emerged during the last few years. Things such as blogging and direct end user interaction. But that could be a good topic for a later post.

If the iPhone is even half as good as it looks, and if there is any justice in the world, Sony Ericsson will be in deep trouble over their smartphone product line.

Well designed products must be simple yet powerful for the novice user, but it must also prove effective with the experienced user. That's why the Wizard style of user interface programming doesn't work that great for everyday tasks. Consider the Google GUI as a wizard:

Step 1: Select what you are searching for 'a', a web page, 'b' an image 'c', a PDF document. [Next->]
Step 2: Enter a search string, then select 'Submit'. [Next->]
Step 3: The search string is presented to you, if it is correct, select 'Continue'. [Next->]
Step 4: Chose 'a' if you would like to show the first ten results for this search string, or 'b' to immediately go to the highest ranked item based on your search result. [Search]
Step 5: Show result.

This is not something that would be used that often... Come to think about it, it is not far from this: Award for the Silliest User Interface: Windows Search.

The AltaVista example shows us a design that started out good, but, as features were added, started to fall apart. So how do you expand the feature set without ruining ease of use and the user experience? Very carefully. This is what Apple has done with the iPod, this is what Google has done with its search engine.

Google has done a decent job with the search engine. Adding a few tabs for images etc is OK, the search is still the centerpiece, easy to use and extremely fast. Adding the 'Personalized Home' feature made me a bit worried, but it is still OK since you have the default option of not using it. Although, it did also add a bit of unnecessary clutter to the page. AltaVista, on the other hand, failed completely and eventually reverted their design to what it is today.

Carefully consider if a feature is worth adding, and how it fits with what is already there. Perhaps skipping a new feature is the best choice. I believe these are often the really hard choices to make.

I am not a designer. I believe I am pretty good at telling when a user experience works, unfortunately that doesn't mean I can design one from scratch. But it doesn't mean I wont try either. Read about how we try to apply these ideas when we develop sventon in part II.

"Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to remove."
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

The Year of 2006 in Music

When a year ends and a new one begins we're swamped with summaries and retrospectives of the old year. So, adding to that, these are a few albums that were released 2006 and I think deserves mentioning.

This really doesn't have anything directly to do with developing software, so it is a good candidate for trying out the label functionality of the new Blogger platform. I have really no idea how this work, but I'll label the post 'music', and we'll see what (if anything) happens. Oh, exciting!

Really good stuff (buy now):
Anna Ternheim - Separation Road
The Knife - Silent Shout
Peter Bjorn and John - Writer's Block

Good albums that didn't quite reach the level of previous releases (buy as soon as you have bought all the albums above):
KOOP - Koop Islands, good, but not as good as Waltz for Koop
Dub Sweden - Done With Loveless Days, good, but not as good as Welcome to Our World

2006 turned out to be a good year for Swedish music!

This year I look forward to new music from Timbuktu when OberoendeFramkallande is released February 21.

New Year, New Look!

I really started to dislike the old blog look, especially after my old ISP finally decided to close my web hosting account and delete the images stored there... So I thought I should do something about it. And once again it became painfully clear to me that web design really isn't one of my stronger skills. Anyway, it looks a bit different, it will have to do for now.

Hopefully I'll get around to post a bit more regularly also (but no promises).

Don't forget to visit the other Citerus' bloggers, there's a lot of good stuff to read there!

But wait, there's even more!

Two interesting upcoming classes at Citerus:

First, Test-Driven Development and Refactoring - a two days hands-on workshop, December 11-12.

Second, Certified Scrum Master, January 23-24.

And don't miss Tobias Fors' talk "Am I Agile Now?" at Oredev, 11 am on Thursday November 16 (yes, that's tomorrow).

Oh, Blog turned Citerus billboard...

Eric Evans: Domain-Driven Design Three-Day Workshop

Eric Evans, renowned author and internationally recognized for his significant contribution in the area of Domain-Driven Design, DDD, returns to Citerus fall 2006 to host a three day in-depth workshop on Domain-Driven Design.

Last time Eric visited Sweden and Citerus in the fall of 2005, the seminar sold out in just a few days; make sure to register on time!

Read more and register.

sventon 1.0 RC1

Just a short note to announce sventon 1.0 RC1.

Read more and give it a try: http://sventon.berlios.de

/Patrik

On Shipping Crap. Part II

Some things are just hard to understand. On a daily basis I encounter really badly designed websites with poorly implemented technical solutions, and it’s really starting to get to me. Seriously, when is this, 1997? The web has been used commercially for about a decade now, and it’s not getting any better. We had the first simple web pages with a few images, and some text, preferably on the default grey background of Netscape 1.12N. Then the hype came along and we got insanely over-designed, mostly unusable, web pages that assumed that most users had a 10 Mbit broadband connection (which, at the time, pretty much no one did…). Then the bubble erupted. One would think things got better, and perhaps they did. But it’s pretty far from OK.

Yes, some companies do get it right, everyone’s current favorite, Google, comes to mind with a built in integrity that is really hard to beat. But it really is an exception. And that really is too bad. Unfortunately it looks like recent events in regard to Google’s China venture makes that integrity a bit less shiny.

Let me give you some examples from the last few days:

Oracle
In the aftermath (or perhaps it’s actually the beginning) of the Oracle PeopleSoft merger I got an e-mail from Oracle asking me to review their new privacy policy and update my registered profile. I usually throw most of these things in the trash, you only have time to read so many privacy policies and update so many web profiles, but I thought I should do this one. So I logged onto the given URL and an ordinary web form was presented. For some reason my area of work was set to "Fishing and Agriculture", so I changed that, and updated some other items. I did however not select a State, since we don’t do states in Sweden. State does not carry any meaning in the contents of a Swedish address. This is surprisingly often a problem with American websites; they assume that states matter in the rest of the world, which simply is not always true. It was marked as a mandatory field, but I must admit, naïve as I am, that I thought I could leave it empty and submit the form anyway. I couldn’t, an error screen was presented stating the missing field, and a Retry button. I hit the Retry button and was presented with the original form, with all my changes gone.

What is going on? This is Oracle, they have been shipping frameworks for building websites for ages, and surely they know how to keep the posted values during the validation phase, perhaps even present the errors in connection to the incorrect field? Any half decent framework will do this for you.

I did take a look under the state drop down box this time and found that they had dug up something called Län, I guess it could be roughly translated to State if you really wanted, but in Sweden, it simply bares no meaning in this context.

Filling out the form again was really not an acceptable proposition; I had already done it once. As far as Oracle is concerned, I’ll be doing Fishing and Agriculture also in the future. So I logged out, only to be presented with the following text:

Partner Application Name: EMKTAPMID2.amts402.oracle.com
Logout Status: OK

What a joke.

SAS
The number one website category on the unusability chart has got to be online hotel and airline reservation sites, and absolutely worst of the ones I have tried is Scandinavian Airlines' site. Nothing manages to drive me so close to insanity as this one…

In the IDG IT-business paper Computer Sweden the other day, we could read that almost all companies in Sweden they had talked to were unhappy with the result of outsourcing their IT department. The only exception was SAS that considered their IT outsourcing effort a success. I don’t know if web development and maintenance was part of the outsourcing deal, but I bet it was. If that is the case, SAS managers and I have quite a different definition of success.

I don’t want to spoil the fun for you by giving examples, just try it out for yourself! It will fail in new unexpected ways in all its glory no matter which browser/OS combo you use. I think I have tried everything from Camino, Firefox and Safari on the Mac to Windows XP with Internet Explorer and Firefox. They all fail at some point. Preferably they fail with an old-school Mac OS type error code, like -1233456243.

Apple
This could perhaps be considered the odd one. Apple is a company that’s offering products in the premium segment. If you are looking for raw power to the best prices, you probably should look for another vendor, why not Dell for instance. But if you look for an integrated whole, where your digital audio player (with video) seamlessly integrates with smooth software running on a beautifully designed computer with a modern and powerful operating system, there’s simply not much of a competition. You will pay a premium for this, which apparently more and more people are willing to do.

But this package falls apart when it comes to the web site. On the surface it’s rather nice, but when you start to use it the flaws appear: Dead links, missing images, incorrectly localized text, weird PeopleSoft pop-ups about expiring web sessions, forms that can not be submitted, and so on. Just the other day I got this message when browsing the Apple Store:
"Skickas vanligen: Momenteel niet beschikbaar
Gratis frakt
Sold out for the Holidays and we hope to have supply again later in January."

That's at least three different languages in one go, Swedish, English, and perhaps Dutch(?)

Another example from the Swedish version of the Apple Store: "Visa status för din Beställningsstatus", which translates to "Show status for your order status".

Apple, just fix it.

So, what does this have to do with software development? It got everything to do with software development. These sites are results of a software development projects, and once again we didn’t deliver.