'This is a Unix system!'
Jakob Nielsen’s clearly in the holiday spirit, since his latest Alertbox is an exposé of the 10 biggest User Interface bloopers in films, which we’ll all see countless times over the next few weeks.
I’d forgotten all about Jurassic Park, where a 12-year-old girl saves the day and stops the usual rampaging dinosaur hordes through her knowledge of Unix. Gripping stuff, I'm sure you'll agree. However, there is one Jakob missed: noughts and crosses as an allegory for Mutually Assured Destruction. WarGames, of course.
Admit it, you’ve seen it. But, if your memory isn’t so fresh, WarGames sees teenage hacker David (Matthew Broderick) poking around WOPR, your typical global nuclear defence mainframe. Sadly, sloppy information architecture (seen above) causes poor David to inadvertently trigger global thermonuclear war – although, in WOPR’s defence, it does at least offer a confirmation dialog.
Realising his rather egregious error, David quickly stabs away at Ctrl-Z, but WOPR is having none of it. He can’t even shut it down through Task Manager. In the end, he has to rely on a cunning hack. By forcing the computer to play noughts and crosses against itself repeatedly, David causes WOPR to realise (in a flash of logic that somehow drains electricity from surrounding appliances) that the Nash equilibrium for global thermonuclear war is to not start it. WOPR smugly declares “the only winning move is not to play” and cancels the missile strike.
A close call indeed. And that, kids, is what happens when you don’t do user testing.
Mobile TV – not quite yet
Just upgraded to a Nokia N73. Very nice it is too. I've pretty much come to expect good usability from Nokia - I loved their older phones and they do an admiral job of keeping complex phones as simple as possible.
Anyway, it being a 3G handset, Orange are desperate to foist 3G content on me. So I have two months of free mobile Sky Sports TV, and unlimited off-peak browsing (meaning I'll be spamming the lovely Flickr upload feature whenever the photographic urge takes me).
So, my first foray into mobile TV... Well. It's a great idea, but the quality's just too damn low right now. Massive compression, glitchy visuals, and nowhere near enough detail. For the Ashes, it's better than Test Match Special, but not by much. I can pick out a Warne leg break, but there's no chance of seeing Hoggard swing it, although, based on the last Test, you'd struggle to see that on a 42" high-definition screen.
But, oh well, it's a start. It will get better soon enough. Google think an iPod will hold all of the world's TV programmes in 12 years. Interesting, but I think the bigger issue is that TV programmes won't exist in a format we know by then. As the long tail grows and convergence and YouTube continue to flatten everything in their path, where's the line between 'a programme' and 'visual content'?
Grasping the obvious, the BBC bleat "Online viewing eroding TV viewing". Yep. It'll erode it so much that they'll be the same thing soon.
But not yet.
You can’t Have Your Say and eat it
Interesting article on the BBC site: "Web fuelling crisis in politics". As a rule, I tend to find any government proclamation on the state of the web patronising at best, dangerously ill-informed at worst - but, for once, I'm in agreement. I find the majority of political blogs little more than infantile, partisan nonsense. This is normally countered by the stultifying suggestion that one can achieve a thorough knowledge of a topic simply by reading two contrasting and equally biased pieces.
This isn't confined to new media of course - news orgs are largely the same and, yes, I'm quite aware that the paper I read (Guardian, natch) is guilty too. But there, opinion should act as the starting point for debate. As Ben Hammersley has said, no one buys newspapers for news any more. The web and 24-hour news channels will always be first for immediate unfolding reportage. Newspapers have to reposition themselves as channels for editorial and debate.
The news orgs that 'get it' - Guardian, Telegraph, BBC come to mind - are starting to open up in this way. Sure, the results aren't pretty (particular the latter - Have Your Sayis home to some of the most rabid prejudice and catfights I've seen) but at least they're starting something genuinely interactive. I don't see political blogs doing the same, despite the rhetoric of two-way communication and citizen activism. Instead, I only see the negativity and criticism that seems to blight our perception of politics.
Cynicism is healthy in small doses, but sometimes I think politicians get it right. It's time to move on from the name-calling and sniping, and start using the citizen's new voice for positive benefit.
Understanding comics
I don’t like the word seminal. Besides its dual meaning, it’s a lazy, overused shorthand. But I would grudgingly apply it to Scott McCloud’s 'Understanding Comics', which I’m currently reading after many months on my ought-to list.
It’s as excellent as I’d heard, with some fascinating concepts on abstraction, graphical representation of time and motion, and icon design. Most impressive is a chapter on 'The Six Steps'. The creation of any work in any medium will always follow a certain path: a path consisting of six steps:
Idea/purpose – the impulses, the ideas, the emotions, the philosophies, the purposes of the work. The work’s content.
Form – the form it will take. Will it be a book? A chalk drawing? A chair? A song? A sculpture? A pot holder? A comic book?
Idiom – the “school” of art, the vocabulary of styles or gestures or subject matter, the genre that the work belongs to. Maybe a genre of its own?
Structure – putting it all together. What to include, what to leave out - how to arrange, how to compose the work.
Craft – constructing the work, applying skills, practical knowledge, invention, problem-solving, getting the “job” done.
Surface – production values, finishing - the aspects most apparent on first superficial exposure to the work.
My first thought was just how close this was to Jesse James Garret’s marvellous 'The Elements of User Experience' diagram. There are clear parallels – particularly the importance of strategy and choosing the appropriate medium, rather than jumping straight in to the visual layer. Ready, aim, fire.
McCloud talks too about how most newcomers start at point 6, then gradually realise the value of starting earlier through the process as their expertise grows. It’s the same issue that prevents information architecture being appreciated more widely: the “I can do that” syndrome, by which any untrained observer thinks that by merely replicating point 6 they can create a work of art. Hacked copies of Dreamweaver and Photoshop do not a designer make.
It’s great to see these issues talked about outside of the contexts I’m familiar with, and I’d love to learn more. Sadly I can’t make the day Scott’s presenting at NN/g’s User Experience Week 2006 (although I am going to the previous three), but I really hope he makes it to Page 45 later in the year as promised.
While I’m on the topic, this is King Cat by John Porcellino. [CB 2018: not the original image; this issue likely published after this post was written.] I was introduced to King Cat by a friend, who in turn was introduced by a friend, and so on. I try to continue the chain where I can. It’s probably the one title that got me over the comics-are-just-superheroes-and-fantasy hurdle, so I’m immensely grateful to it. The stories he tells are genuinely contemplative and sensitive, his drawing sparse yet lively – as much about space and omission of detail as what it portrays. Oh, and his animals are superb: Picasso dogs with jaws at obtuse angles, crayfish with pliable legs and squirming bodies.
To read King Cat is, for me, to be touched by a brief glimpse of the beauty of the world – which I something I think very few other media could achieve.
'My Very Excellent Mother…'
In which an astronomical trifle sends Cennydd into an orgy of arcane library science and obscure bands.
The hunt is on for a new mnemonic as Pluto is confirmed to, in fact, not actually be a planet, because it’s too crap. It’s your age-old classification problem: the item on the fringe, the one that makes you question your entire classification system.
Case in point: I bought a CD by !!! a while back. It’s poor, I can’t recommend it. More importantly, it caused me untold hours of frustration and grief. Should its punctuation mean that it precedes A? If so, does this mean I have to reclassify …And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead? And if so, which band comes first? Would this mean I would end up classifying by the ASCII character set?
Or should it go under C? (It is apparently pronounced “Chk chk chk”). Does that mean I’m now classifying by phonetics? Shaky ground, particularly when you’re dealing with bands called Xiu Xiu, OOIOO and 90 Day Men.
For a while, I actually started classifying my CDs by colour. While it satisfied the aesthete in me and worked fine for "driftnetting" browsing behaviour, it's useless for known-item retrieval. It's also incompatible with our mental models: we don’t tend to think in terms of “I’d like to listen to some purple music today”.
Some people rebel against the ideas of genres, but I can live with them. I don’t find myself offended by the labelling a large section of my collection “post-rock” or “shoegazing” or whatever. People who get offended by labels are generally more interested in listening to 'the right music' than listening to the music. But even that’s troublesome for the bedroom librarian. Where does one genre end and another begin? What about bands whose sound has evolved over the years?
Don’t even get me started on split EPs, or the Calexico/Iron & Wine collaboration. And do El Guapo go under E or G? Is the Spanish definite article to be ignored? What about Les Savy Fav? Is their name French or English? Should I be using ISO 639-1 to define it?
And this, my friends, is why iTunes is great. Don't like the way it sorts alphabetically? Browse by genre! Look for all songs under 2 minutes long! It's probably the most useful Ranganathan-inspired analytico-synthetic faceted classification tool I know of.