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1. Exactly 1 67 E 0 78 Parasia Height Distance from Text jo a At At Least f1 14 X Move with Tex CF Look Anchor ox C Remove rane noe For those of you without word processing experience frames are boxes that keep pictures in place The problem is that the online help offers this pathetic explanation Locks the anchor of the frame to the paragraph that currently contains the anchor Excuse me How is this explanation helping It is nothing but a fancy circular reference What is it telling us about why we would choose to have the check box on or off If it is not locked to a paragraph what does it do move around at random I struggled with this for quite a while because I really needed control over where things were on a page The full documentation of this feature requires a much more detailed explanation daunting actually If you re not a writer skip it Frame anchors are always attached anchored to a paragraph and the anchor is displayed in the left margin of the page Anchors always move with the paragraph mark as text is inserted or deleted or when the paragraph mark itself is cut and pasted elsewhere When you lock the anchor it prevents you from dragging the frame itself to a different page than the one where its anchored paragraph mark currently is It also prevents you from dragging the frame s anchor an alternate way to move the frame to a different paragraph By preventin
2. gt Hitting Enter gives you today s date gt If the user enters a single digit such a 8 the system assumes he means the 8th of the current month and fills in the full date January 8 1996 gt If the user enters 3 or 4 digits such a 110 the system assumes that the final two digits are the month for DD MM YY users such as in the U S and interprets the date as January 10 of the current year 1996 Free from Usability nstitute com Get a complimentary usability review now 2 A Computer User s Bill of Rights Of course this logic could be fine tuned for specific purposes such as order entry systems where the assumption might always yield a future date For instance a customer might never ask to have a product delivered in the past This is not difficult programming it just requires that we all put our heads and priorities together to deliver the absolute best possible software Don t think of this page as intentionally blank it is paragraphically challenged Free from Usabilityl nstitute com Get a complimentary usability review now 3 The Underlying Problems 20 3 The Underlying Problems One Central Problem There is one central problem that is ultimately at the root of all of this trouble Electronic processes are invisible to the naked eye More to the point the inner workings of the computer are so microminiaturized as to be completely beyond our ability to cope when things are not entirely as w
3. implying it is in some way extraneous it is often vital getting started information In the sound editing program zooming efficiently was vital The read through that I am suggesting is different than the minimal documentation that some packages now ship as a getting started booklet in my experience those booklets rarely discuss vital concepts or implementation considerations Let s look at some examples of the type of information that should be in printed read throughs gt Microsoft Word stores its paragraph formatting information in the marks at the end of paragraphs Every new user must be told this information A read through is the ideal vehicle gt Corel Photopaint has great features called objects and masks features that I need to use and which are central to its design but whose use is unlike any of the simple bitmap editors I ve used An overview of the design premise must be accessible without wading through all of the reference information as I had to do with the online help gt A system for managing railroad cars represents the physical world in carefully structured layers of data on which your entire understanding of the system is based There are locations facilities junctions segments routes and so on The design of such a scheme must be put in front of every user s eyes An imaging system on which I worked had 17 books For such a large system I would print a read through for each key user business ma
4. Some Not So Easy Recommendations A premise of this book has been that many of the changes needed in the computer world could be implemented with easy almost trivial changes The following few recommendations are a little more Free from Usabilityl nstitute com Get a complimentary usability review now 4 The User Interface Hit Any Key to Continue 55 ambitious but not revolutionary They build on techniques that are already in place in many programs but not in a uniform combined fashion Microscope Detailed View of Internal Data When programmers are developing a program they have a feature usually called debug mode that lets them look inside programs to see what s causing problems I suggest that this be taken to the nth degree made available to end users and called microscope For instance the problems with client server systems have become so complex and hard to pinpoint that the finger pointing between vendors is now a common joke among users The software department says That s a hardware problem The hardware department says That s a Microsoft problem Microsoft says That s a network problem Have a great day As a result when programs misbehave it requires a Herculean effort to pinpoint the problem I hardly need to scour my memory banks for examples supporting my ideas This one occurred today as I write this page At work a programmer with 12 years in the business no spring c
5. Let your fingers do the walking Before you pull out a screwdriver to start swapping parts check for software solutions that don t require such rash measures Swap swap swap OK now it s time for rash measures Almost all electronic diagnosis these days is done by swapping out components until the behavior of the system changes With computers this consists of swapping both software and hardware For instance a co worker once had trouble putting a Lotus ScreenCam display into a Microsoft Word document We fiddled with Word we fiddled with ScreenCam Nothing we did would get it to work Then we swapped ScreenCam with another program Windows Paintbrush lo and behold no external data could be pasted into Word meaning the problem had nothing to do with ScreenCam Next we swapped her PC for another pasting her ScreenCam movie into another computer s Word document via our office network and it worked The problem then was something peculiar about the setup of the laptop computer she was temporarily using for a presentation It either had an incompatible program called a Dynamic Linked Library DLL or had unacceptable settings in a thing called the Registry Free from Usabilityl nstitute com Get a complimentary usability review now 86 This whole swapping thing is just the computer version of the ol process of elimination If you must become self sufficient with your computer become an expert in this process
6. One last recommendation some advice for support technicians when working with inexperienced computer users Support technicians should never tell the user what he or she should see instead they should always ask the user what he actually does see and work fromthere In other words never put words in the user s mouth or expectations in their head The communication process is so difficult with inexperienced users that a lot of effort will be wasted with every mistake You will be surprised at how many times a user can be looking at an entirely different screen or function than you think they are If you develop the habit of constantly asking them what they see and working from what they describe in very small steps instead of having them work from what you describe you will make consistent progress End of troubleshooting course Questions to Ask About Support If you re buying a serious business system ask as many questions as you can about the vendor s support operation Here are some suggestions gt How many support people are there are This is just preparation for the next question gt How many customers are there per support person You ll have to decide whether the ratio is sensible for the type of application you are expecting to buy The vendor of a point of sale system thought that 100 customers per support person was reasonable At times it was often it wasn t gt What is the average response time
7. Programmers don t add extra steps that users must invoke in order to save their work Assume that all work is potentially savable and prompt the user to confirm 15 Tune for Learning Not J ust Cruising Speed This rule concerns a problem that occurs on business systems when installing the systems and training new users Invariably there are features which only make sense after the system has real data in it when the user is faced with actual circumstances For instance on a transportation system with which I worked there was no feature to browse for a railroad car number you had to know the number of a car already on the system The absence of a browse capability was rationalized by the fact that in actual use you would always be looking for a specific car whose number would be supplied to you by an outside party and by the expected large quantity of car numbers But when first using the system the inability to browse through the available data makes the learning process very difficult and unnecessarily time consuming What can you do Programmers stop rationalizing your design decisions based on actual use Allow in your design for those who don t know what they re doing as well as those who do Never presume what people will or won t know to do Free from Usability nstitute com Get a complimentary usability review now 4 The User Interface Hit Any Key to Continue 53 16 Usability Testing Usability testing means watch
8. Show your support for companies that write good soft ware Stubbornness does have its helpful features You always know what you are going to be thinking tomorrow Glen Beaman Free from Usabilityl nstitute com Get a complimentary usability review now 5 The Nine Levels of Help 59 5 The Nine Levels of Help It s no longer easy to tell where a good program ends and the online help begins This is a good thing and I guarantee you that it will be even harder as time goes on As programs continue to do more and more of the tasks that we used to think only we could do we will eventually find out just how little documentation you really need to read to learn to use even a powerful program This minimum amount of text will be in helpful panels that appear as a function of either the program or its training mode These trends are already well underway demonstrated by intro panels that can be disabled after you read them and wizards that guide you through major procedures As more of the procedural information is converted to these sort of user interface techniques I predict that the only substantial need for considerable text will be introductory concepts and troubleshooting More on that later Now let s look at a breakdown of where Help has been going for the last 15 years 1 None That s right none You ve seen it plenty of times so I thought I d mention it as a tribute to those who ve given you no help They deserve
9. Thefirst law of wing walking don t let go of one wing until you grab hold of the other wing If you re a computer veteran of course the following advice is unnecessary for you right gt Establish your pain threshold for repeating work and save your work that often In other words let s say the most work that you could bear repeating is 20 minutes of work Save your work every 20 minutes If your program has an automatic timed backup set it for 20 minutes And even though you have an automatic timed save still save your work manually every 20 30 minutes I have to interrupt this good advice for my most recent computer horror story I was using the previously most popular word processing program in the world recently when it started giving me trouble It would freeze indefinitely and wouldn t let me enter any text click on anything or even restart it without restarting Windows 95 Then I noticed that it was happening like clockwork Aha I turned off Timed Backup and the problem went away Something was making the Timed Backup fail and instead of issuing a message the best it could do was its own version of what some folks call the Black Screen of Death Let this be a warning to you I just don t know what the warning is gt Once a project consumes more than a day of work save at least one older copy under a different name still on your hard disk drive Having only a single copy of your data on your hard disk drive is
10. When you get to the relevant but inexplicit sign saying Exit you have no idea if it was for the road to our office Mystery solved Your Street 1 Mile Hain St 1 2 Mile If one person fell for a pitfall like this it would be user error when it happens repeatedly the system in this case road signs is at fault The principle is no less true with programs How does this apply to programming A business system for which I was a trainer had a very reliable pitfall which you could always count on After accessing a screen of user settable options the user was required to hit Enter an extra time to save the settings But there was no instruction of this on the screen If the user hit Escape from the settings screen no warning was announced and the changes were discarded The developers insisted that user carelessness or ignorance was the disease and that training and documentation were the medicine of choice Paranoia Mistaking Secrecy for Security Too often software developers fall into the trap of thinking that the best way to protect users is to hide things from them However controlling access to dangerous information or processes is quite different from making them unusable hidden or inefficiently accessible This bias is so pervasive that it resembles paranoia but I think it s from much more common uncomplicated motivations fear and misunderstanding All functions secret or not must be on menus all in
11. You expect to have most of your work retained after the power is interrupted You should be able to accomplish every task and entry with the fewest possible keystrokes Free from Usability nstitute com Get a complimentary usability review now wwo p SGN SO p a o N N N N_e e e e e e e e e a Ww N e O O AN Dn FW NY KF O 94 UsabilityInstitute com Rules for User Friendliness Put all functions mouse methods fancy keystrokes and instructions on menus Use verbose phrasing or at least make it an option Use perfectly accurate words Be explicit not implicit Put all orders on menus alphabetical functional learning date and so on Provide a master menu integrating all features Display from the general to the specific Always let users navigate by descriptive values not internal codes Use buttons as an additional option not an alternative to menus Put functions where users will look for them When in doubt ask users Always show the level at which options are invoked Use dynamic communication not dynamic menus and functions Provide visual cues for every action the system takes Don t add extra steps that users must invoke in order to save their work Design for the learning period as well as actual use Build usability testing into your written and spoken expectations Put elaborate error messages right into the interface When the user does not have control
12. not from written promises If your company tells you to document from specs an application that you can t actually get your hands on use all of your persuasive resources to convince the powers that be that it is a poor use of the company s money and not the most profitable way to serve your customers Put more effort into troubleshooting info identification of checkpoints and defining sufficient conditions You ll notice that this type of information is much more difficult information to collect and organize But that s good it s a sign that you are actually creating something of value Diplomatically recommend to your engineers that certain procedures might be good candidates for code on the next go round Restrict your printed publications to volumes that can be read entirely in a single sitting emphasizing vital conceptual information Free from Usabilityl nstitute com Get a complimentary usability review now Index airplane anecdote 40 anecdote airplane 40 Atari Company 13 Atari game cartridge 63 backup failure 32 can it 41 CAPS LOCK 36 car purchasing 11 cash register 82 expert programming 78 fuse on motherboard 66 Hawaii helicopter 84 holography film 22 intelligent lifeforms 14 Jack Tramiel 13 laptop 65 menus 29 Microsoft literature 74 Microsoft Word description 10 mouse button 33 multimedia upgrade 9 PC Labs tests 25 Philippic 15 Pong 13 Qwerty keyboard 31 retainin
13. s causing problems I suggest that this be taken to the nt Word is calculating the word count u m m m m Experienced users are learning to look in the status bar when the machine seems non responsive but the Status Bar is so subtle as to be unnoticeable It has a passive presence not an active one The Status Bar is entirely appropriate for reporting the mode you are in file information screen coordinates and other continually changing data But if the status is so severe that the program is ignoring you the message should be right in the center of the screen Word Count Mg Counting words please wait 19 Use Color to Speed Recognition and Sound for Feedback I don t want to get too deep into the nitty gritty of this particular issue but color and sound can be great additions when used effectively and they deserve mention because they are often ignored A color example a customized troubleshooting database that I made had four main screens Search Results Details and Add Record I made the background color of each screen a different color and it made it very quick to recognize your context The most important uses of sound are to signal the completion of a lengthy process and to alert the user to interruptions or failed processes Use color and sound as supporting not replacement methods but use them cautiously If you use them make the colors configurable and make sure the sounds can be disabled
14. If you haven t followed the story prior to this shrewd individuals have obtained the rights for a small fee to use such popular addresses such as MacDonalds com and have made big companies pay them to get the rights But if the Internet had set things up right in the first place the addresses would be a list of descriptive names that are retrieved when you enter an ambiguous value You could then browse through the list just as you might already do with most mail programs After choosing the right name the real address an internal numerical code would be invoked It would be up to the owners of matching names to distinguish themselves by providing more detailed descriptions For example if 10 entities wanted to be listed under IBM the serious owners would just add more qualification such as IBM Corp NY USA The frivolous addresses would then simply be ignored after users set their systems up to memorize the legitimate addresses as favorite sites Free from Usability nstitute com Get a complimentary usability review now 4 The User Interface Hit Any Key to Continue 49 9 Use Buttons as an Additional Option Not an Alternative to Menus This rule is really a corollary of Rule 1 Put All Functions on Menus but it warrants separate coverage Buttons are a great way to place more and more functions within one click of your mouse But in the zeal to use them some systems have created a wealth of buttons that see
15. a prescription for misery Sooner or later you will use a program that corrupts your data and the authoring Free from Usability nstitute com Get a complimentary usability review now 3 The Underlying Problems 22 program will not be able to read the copy of the file you are working with By having an alternate version you can revert to that one gt After adding days of work to a project copy your data files out of your computer to another medium such as a diskette Sooner or later your hard disk drive will fail due to static electricity voltage surges electronic deterioration disintegration of the magnetic drive surface or degradation of the rotating mechanism gt After working on a project for more than a few days get your backup diskettes or tape out of the building I keep copies of this book in my car to protect against theft flood and fire and randomly rotate new copies back and forth to the car or office When I worked at the Franklin Institute I took a trip one time to bring back an entire holography laboratory I came back after museum hours so I put everything away as well as I could The only problem was a big can of holographic film about the size of a five gallon paint drum it had to be put in the refrigerator which was behind locked doors After looking around a little I found a good spot Being in the basement the cool weather made the ten foot deep window wells a good choice I hesitated as I walked out
16. a complimentary usability review now 9 Training 83 9 Training I almost didn t include a chapter on training because a main theme of this book is that good program design should reduce the need for training But then I remembered The future belongs to companies that train Why Because anything that doesn t require training will eventually be done by machines most of them computers in one form or another And the machines themselves will not make good money trust me Good computer programs will continue to reduce the need for training and many programs will actually conduct the training But the greater portion of business volume remaining for workers to profit from will invariably be accounted for by two phenomena change and problems The geniuses out there will develop the changes and deal with the difficult problems The companies that can drag along the greatest number of non geniuses the most quickly will be the most competitive And the only sure fire way to do this is with systematic training computerized or personal or both You ve been warned Free from Usabilityl nstitute com Get a complimentary usability review now 84 10 Support and Troubleshooting How many support technicians does it take to screw in a lightbulb Please hold and someone will be with you shortly Support will kill you if you don t kill it first trust me But you probably know this already from your own experiences If you re a
17. critique your specifications or builds for wording and substitute exact explicit wording as needed Build usability testing into your written and spoken expectations Watch untrained users try to cope with your program Don t ask or answer too many questions Just watch and take notes For larger systems have a programmer create a tool that supports the registration of newly developed independent functions and automatically adds them to all access indexes alphabetical date of development and learning sequence Free from Usability nstitute com Get a complimentary usability review now 7 90 Make a single programmer responsible for an error trapping methodology including data microscope logging and layer diagnostic tools and helping with their implementation by all programmers Actions for Tech Writers 1 Documentation department leaders revolutionize your focus Stop documenting everything Isolate and target different issues the difficult things that users are likely to struggle with Build usability testing into your written and spoken expectations Watch untrained users try to cope with your program Don t ask or answer too many questions Just watch and take notes Spend your time writing about the things that you can t discover directly from the user interface startup concepts non intuitive and incomplete functions and user technique Write from interaction with customers experimentation and experience
18. crucibles Unsure of exactly what the certifier meant the envoy replied On the surface of the planet of course sir With that the certifier sent the envoy away disappointed with an ugly red blot across the top of his application REJECTED Free from Usability nstitute com Get a complimentary usability review now Programs and the Complexity of Machines How Bad Is It 5 Ideas and Solutions This book is a sort of a philippic Philippic A severe scolding a speech full of acrimonious invective So called from the orations of Demosthenes against Philip of Macedon to rouse the Athenians to resist his encroachments Brewer s Dictionary of Phrase amp Fable There you learned something But I m not hammering away at this keyboard for cynical commentary and scathing indictments alone I have ideas This is a book of solutions many short and sweet My ideas while sometimes idealistic are neither born in a vacuum nor the product of viewing the world through rose colored glasses For 14 years in the computer business I ve done all sorts of jobs from machine language programming to high level languages I ve personally sold systems to 15 types of businesses in many states installed over 100 systems with hundreds of workstations conducted about 30 training classes supported systems on the phone and written the user literature for about 20 systems As far as credentials however I would place much more signif
19. determined by the skill and desire of the programmers and the usual business limitations time and money Designing user interfaces involves a special area of expertise that has come to be know by the high falutin name of human factors engineering Human Factors Engineering Imagine you re on an elevator and as the doors are closing you hear someone out in hallway running up to the door saying Hold the door You hurriedly look at the array of buttons to find the Open Door button There are two columns of perhaps ten or twenty buttons perhaps with one row that has Open Door and Close Door in small letters Can you find the right one in the two seconds before the door has closed Sometimes yes sometimes no Now consider if the Open Door button was a large arrow shaped button immediately beside the doors rather than being the same shape as lots of other buttons which are less time sensitive Free from Usability nstitute com Get a complimentary usability review now 4 The User Interface Hit Any Key to Continue 27 That s human factors engineering designing things for the way they are used and the way we interact with them In the computer world 95 percent of the human factors involve communication And this communication occurs through the user interface The Communication Burden Interface or Documentation As programs have evolved from the command prompt systems of the 70 s to the menu systems o
20. example is in Word where right on the same dialog are two features one using internal codes and the other using more descriptive identifiers First the one with codes Notice the Field Names list with mostly meaningless codes such as RD TA TC and so on EES eR Categories Field Names Document Automation Document Information Equations and Formulas Links and References Mail Merge Numbering User Information Field Codes INDEX Switches INDEX Codes Description Create an index X Preserve Formatting During Updates Free from Usability nstitute com Get a complimentary usability review now 4 The User Interface Hit Any Key to Continue 48 Then look at the Field Names that appear when you select Document Information a ee Categories Field Hamez Equations and Formulas Index and Tables Links and References Mail Merge NumChars Numbering NumPages User Information Num ords Field Codes AUTHOR NewName Descriptive AUTHOR Values Description The name of the document s author from Summary Info Preserve Formatting During Updates All of a sudden the Field Names are meaningful Strictly speaking though this example doesn t violate my rule because the Description box at the bottom of the dialog provides a nice descriptive translation of each code But it does provide a nice side by side demonstration of the difference between internal codes and descriptive values Editors N
21. expected by the user These functions are shown on the following menus Normal Outline Page Layout Master Document Ctrl 0 Save Ctrl S Save As Save All Find File Summary Info Templates Full Screen Toolbars Ruler Header and Ep Feoinetes Page Setup Print Preview Print Previewing a document as it would be printed should be on the View menu since it is simply another viewing option Instead because the programmer must perform the same tasks when previewing as when preparing the document for printing it is placed on most File menus adjacent to Print Free from Usability nstitute com Get a complimentary usability review now 4 The User Interface Hit Any Key to Continue 31 Examples of this phenomenon are endless but I ll stop at one more I use an alternative keyboard layout called the Dvorak layout It places the most commonly used keys A E I O U T R S N L on or near the home row so typing is easier once you learn it of course In Windows it is selected by one of the Control Panel options shown in the following figure Notice International and Keyboard Control Panel Heo 6 AS Colos Fonts Poits Mouse Deskiop Keyboard Printers 2 mep eR Y r Date Time MIDI Mapper ODBC Sound Divers Enhanced Specifies international setings Which one do you think controls the Dvorak keyboard layout The choice is under International not Keyboard because most ke
22. feature is highlight the letters which currently comprise the search criteria and when it times out clear the entry box indicating that the next letter you type will start things over again What can you do Programmers provide visual cues for every action the system takes 14 Default to Saving Work There was a time when everyone was new to computers and the assumption that the designers made was that every keystroke entered might be mistaken A plausible reason for this was that commands were generally entered in irrevocable batches or whole lines Therefore the pattern developed of making users perform deliberate additional steps to save their work not just for whole files but even simple settings A current example includes Netscape Navigator s options where a separate menu function must be chosen to save the selections you tediously made Notice the Save Options function below Netscape Jack Bellis s Home Page Bookmarks QUES Directory Show Toolbar Show Location w netaxs comfjbd 7 chow Directory Buttons Auto Load Images Show ETP File Information Those days are over The assumption should be that the keys a user hits are generally intentional and all work should be regarded as savable Before the computer overwrites anything including settings the user should be prompted to confirm but the burden of remembering to save should be carried by the computer not the user Go What can you do
23. file perhaps named MY999 ASD the ASD stands for Auto Save Document It also doesn t list the directory in which it is saved but that s a matter of explicitness which we ll talk about next not accuracy This inaccurate labeling is not a big deal until you lose some work and are bound and determined to unravel the mysterious workings of the backup method as I was For those who are curious here s the interesting twist that got me to investigating this inaccurate wording in the first place It turns out that there is or at least was a big time pitfall it s a scheme that could be improved so the developers would say it s not a bug in Word s backup scheme Let me walk you through a demonstration of it Let s say you set timed backup to 30 minutes and at some point the 30 minutes elapses and the timed backup occurs After that you work for 28 minutes then save your file manually On the 29th minute the system crashes When you reboot the program notices a 29 minute old ASD file which would ordinarily be deleted by a graceful shutdown It prompts you to save the 29 minute old file not the newer one with the same name as the newer file that has 28 more minutes of work If you don t take the time to figure out which one is older you lose your recent work Ouch In the backup example above more than just wording is at fault The program should display the date and time of the backup and your deliberately sa
24. floppy disk drive for 150 but retailers still weren t doing a terrible amount of embracing Another less publicized story concerns the fascinating business exploits of Jack Tramiel who built up Commodore Computers into the quickest company ever to gross 1 billion in sales Jack was a pure businessman not a corporate type but an innovator and dealmaker who could create value where there previously was none His shrewd positioning of the Commodore 64 at half the price of the Atari 800 at Christmas time in 1985 literally cut the legs out from under Atari which I believe had just been bought by Time Warner Commodore just after that forced Tramiel out because he wasn t enough of a corporate type guy He didn t believe in reports presentations meetings and all that jazz just making money Can you guess what Tramiel did Jack Tramiel Founder of Commodore Computers He took the 75 million buyout from Commodore and bought the bones of Atari from Time Warner The tricky part however was that with Atari came the store merchandise from all over the country the computers that had languished on shelves for a year because they were twice as expensive as Commodores The very next Christmas he did the same thing to Commodore that he did to Atari now selling Atari s for 200 half the price of the C 64 This was the beginning of the end for Commodore which recently went bankrupt You gotta love it Programming Mysteries It took me m
25. header that can hold as many as 99 small characters You are allowed five text reens plus one graphics screen You can specify the diiplay order and iimiag You can place text on 2 graphics ecren anid vice versa The graphics ediror ts similar vo other palandang pro grams on the market today You choe the olor brush size and special patterns from menus You can choose among six borders squares circles small circles asterisks a solid borders or no border Any of the borer chamctess can be set to rotate at a speed you choose Simax le an excellent product for _ store owners 10 display special pro motions Simax should pay for kscif many times over if used in high tevic In the words of the immortal Howard Beal of the movie Network I m mad as hell and I m not going to take it any more I ve used hundreds of computer programs learned 17 languages for talking to computers and I ve seen the same mistakes repeated over and over for 14 years now I ve seen one company after another have endless meetings to solve the same customer support problems I ve suffered through the same troubleshooting scenarios on my own and coworkers computers time and time again and I ve heard the same excuses over and over And while I see improvements they re hit or miss I don t see organized steady progress What concerns me isn t simply that computers stink As every user seems to learn you can quickly get used to the sh
26. in this Book This book will explain what makes some computer programs better to use and work with than others It covers user friendliness maintainability design documentation and administrative activities that go along with using a program and computer Recommendations are presented to combat many of the problems It s both curious and convenient that I could get almost every example I need for this book from one single program Microsoft Word for Windows And through the miracle of computers this includes both good and bad examples That s because the computer business creates the most complicated machines in the history of technology It can t help but mix up and lose some pieces in the R amp D department In his book The Underground Guide to Microsoft Word Woody Leonard aptly refers to Word as The worst word processor in the world except for all the other ones Thus I hope you can appreciate the predicament we have Even the best is a beast Before charging off into battle let me state up front that while I ll pick on MS Word for demonstration purposes Microsoft deserves credit for no less than delivering the USA to the forefront of world leadership in software and therefore the computer world in general I especially applaud the contribution offered by Visual Basic I believe history will eventually measure VB as the single greatest catalyst ever to software proliferation with Windows itself a close second By my mea
27. keyboard Duh gee you don t say I asked that in the future they consider putting the label physically on top of the switch so that one must remove the label before ruining the system I spent the rest of the day driving frantically around Puerto Rico did you know that they drive right off the side of the highway on the grass to make a new lane wherever they want to looking for a special fuse I actually soldered leads to the mother board to circumvent the existing fuse and installed a removable fuse on the back panel Another victory for Rube Goldberg if your parents ever told you who he was What can you do Label it write it down put it in your log book keep it in your files For advanced PC users keep a single chart of your interrupt IRQ and port settings drive specs and every hardware add on Free from Usability nstitute com Get a complimentary usability review now 6 PC Hardware 69 The Computer as a Household Appliance For several years now computer industry experts have been wondering aloud what it will take to make computers as prevalent and useful in the household as other appliances Even if the technology continues along its unfriendly way there is little question that the sheer numbers will match other appliances soon as more and more computer age individuals bring their work home and computer games gain ground But the notion of making computers a fixture of routine day to day home life seems to be
28. numerical values and watching the interpretation in the Word Processing area an advanced user can detect where a corrupted file needs to be fixed Trace Detailed View of Program Commands Another measure that is needed to minimize the time that is lost to troubleshooting is to enable full logging of processing status that could report on every command in a program Although the most detailed information would only be useful to experts it would at least put the user community in the driver s seat The current predicament often spells nothing but dead ends and unrecoverable lost time Many programs already offer varying levels of trace capability that log errors as they occur These trace modes are often hidden from users and activated only by typing peculiar commands Here s an example of a pretty good log file from CorelDRAW Setup Log File Opened 05 17 96 18 36 45 User Name jack bellis Install Type Normal Source Path F Destination Path E COREL50 22 Using Windows VER DLL to copy file F CONFIG CORELDRW REG to E COREL50 CONFIG CORELDRW REG IZANAZ ZAZ XZN Setup Log File Closed 05 17 96 19 10 50 Free from Usabilityl nstitute com Get a complimentary usability review now 4 The User Interface Hit Any Key to Continue 57 We need this type logging to be uniformly and easily available And it must be configurable to let you choose how much detail to track even including processing that is not regard
29. on the screen Who needs that talk about a prescription for failure The only thing that is sometimes in the specs but not on the screen is how the business processes relate to the program Too often however this information is lost between the customer and the sales force What can you do Writers write from interaction with customers experiment ation and experience not from written promises If your company tells you to document from specs an application that you can t document by using use all of your persuasive resources to convince the powers that be that it is a poor use of the company s money and not the most profitable way to serve your customers Reason 3 Companies Expend Resources on Superficial Editing Not Usability Testing Just like programs computer books can benefit from being tested Instead most companies pour their time and money into proofreaders who critique the spelling grammar and technical accuracy not the usefulness of the information When I worked at a big company I had a very knowledgeable editor proofreading my work and I learned a lot about some style and grammar issues I specifically remember learning to use might instead of the more common may when the issue was likelihood not permission You may perform function A or B You might find function B more useful in long procedures There are very few instances in software documentation where may is appropriate I fin
30. or more per page The user has to investigate the difference then try to remember which is which Instead they could simply have been named Document Annotations and Page Annotations gt At the bottom of the File menu on many programs the most recently saved files are listed for convenient re opening In an INI file this list was identified as the Pick List A more explicit name would be the Recently Saved File List eliminating the need for documentation explaining what a Pick list is gt Even some of what is otherwise considered progress in Windows standardization has had a negative effect on programmers understanding of explicitness Recently I encountered two programs that had dialog boxes with these options These are actually very good explicit buttons but they were criticized by programmers who have become accustomed to presenting only the standard but implicit options OK and Cancel This is because in addition to the belief that standardization is better it is usually less work for the programmer to use the built in OK Cancel choices Free from Usability nstitute com Get a complimentary usability review now 4 The User Interface Hit Any Key to Continue 44 A more important and worrisome problem that this example highlights however is that even bright programmers over time lose their ability to relate to the new user s perspective one in which OK and Cancel have much less inherent explicit significance
31. reports that were part of the point of sale system that I installed As it existed store owners would have to learn which of the 50 available reports were of interest to them and exactly which way to generate them Then they would have to decide which reports to print when and ultimately ferret out of the reams of resulting paper the specific business problems that demanded attention such as inventory discrepancies late service and so on If the design of this system were completed the reports could be configured for automatic timed generation as a group or better yet constant monitoring and the system would distill out only the needed information often called exception data The computer would then be elevated to it greatest role a business partner that tells you just what you need to know at the proverbial push of a button To put it another way wherever possible the computer should tell you what to do instead of vice versa Here s a clue on the QWERTY typewriter keyboard anagram problem it s a very ironic answer Special Values that Never Get Built into the System Another example of incomplete interface design is special codes or conventions that must be used in what are otherwise free form text fields For instance an imaging system on which I worked let you set up your own resources and name them however you want Jack s Printer Archive1 and so on But you are told in the manuals that you must also add resources
32. solutions to software design I am the problem When I let someone tell me to write a program without getting ongoing feedback from users I am the problem When I don t encourage my company to strive for methods that learn from the past I am the problem You get the point The most important thing you can do you ve already done You ve educated yourself about the problem and read at least one person s opinions on the solution The next most important thing is to spread the word Post my Computer User s Bill of Rights and Rules for User Friendliness prominently Copies are at the end of the book Most importantly publicize these expectations among new programmers They are next week s project leaders and next month s IS directors And if you are in a position to tell others what to do use the remaining portions of this chapter to hand out assignments Lastly give this book to someone else to keep the process moving Good luck and thanks for listening Actions for Hands Off Executives 1 Delegate the job of photocopying and cutting up the pages of this appendix and handing them out to the appropriate hands on folks Tell them that the next time they ask for a raise you will ask them to show you their list and whether they did any of the stuff The list as a whole is an ideal set of circumstances any compliance is a step in the right direction and represents a genuine accomplishment 2 Make everyone know that
33. specifically named Printerl Scanner1 and End for use by the system These should be built right into the program Bad Design Bad is bad I worked on a system used by retailers with tape backups When one customer s system crashed and we had to restore their data from their tapes we were disappointed to find little or no useful data on the tapes that they religiously used each night Here s why Every morning they would come in and the screen on their main computer would be blank because of the screen saver feature They would hit Enter to restore the screen For some reason the Free from Usability nstitute com Get a complimentary usability review now 4 The User Interface Hit Any Key to Continue 33 tape drive would jump into action at that point That s because the screen actually had a message which they couldn t see because of the screen saver that said Tape is full put in tape 2 and hit Enter When they hit Enter the tape already in the drive was being overwritten with the second half of the backup Unfortunately on this system the second half of the backup was meaningless without the first half I don t know how much they ever recovered This is an example of a system that simply needed more design work It needed lots of things in fact but this programming issue required more testing interaction with the users and responsiveness to their needs What can you do All users There is no
34. store he recently added this store to his chain stopped in as we were working on this and inquired what the ordeal was When I told him we were setting up the dryclean with tailor 30 discount he said WHAAAAAAT DISCOUNT Surprise This is starting to change slowly Testing labs understand and sell usability The distinction between ease of learning and ease of using is becoming apparent as the end user community realizes that training costs are a do or die business factor Some systems even though they are eventually easy to use take a huge amount of training and indoctrination With today s employee turnover the training impact on usability is crucial and can be the limiting factor in the successful rollout of a new system What can you do Whether you area user writer purchaser manager or developer learn more about usability testing Build usability testing into your written and spoken expect ations particularly your timelines Watch untrained users try to cope with your program Don t tell them what to do don t ask or answer too many questions J ust watch and take notes Rules For User Friendliness Welcome You ve arrived at the most important part of the whole book specific recommendations to improve user interface design and make your software self training easily discoverable and as fun to use as it should be If you can implement even one of the first five recommendations you can go a long way toward
35. substitute for proven tested backup not even good design Always copy your data to more than one medium Always keep copies of critical data in multiple buildings Before an emergency occurs test that you can reload the data It is simply not a backup if you have never successfully reinstalled it Notorious Screwups Award Secret Mouse Button Continuing the topic of bad design I offer this little hardware story When I was out of the office one day I got a call from our receptionist who had to get a file off of my publishing system She couldn t get the mouse to do anything No matter what she pointed to on the screen nothing happened when she clicked I rounded up the usual suspects including rebooting restarting Windows checking the cable and so on to no avail I almost gave up until I asked Which mouse button are you pushing She responded There s only one what do you mean Can you figure out this little tech support problem The receptionist had trouble with the mouse because it actually had three buttons but only the center button looked like a button it had a depression in its center The first and third buttons matched the shape of the corners of the mouse so they were unwittingly camouflaged ee Free from Usabilityl nstitute com Get a complimentary usability review now 4 The User Interface Hit Any Key to Continue 34 Just Plain Stupid Stuff Some user interface problems don t fit
36. that had developed Changeable Neon The program that I wanted to make would put very large letters and pictures on a television screen Retailers and others who used signs of various sorts would then be able to use a television as a sign It s similar to what you see on cable TV s info channels or in hotel lobbies to announce meetings Every once in a while a new use for this type of sign crops up but back in 84 it was a little too kooky for easy sales I called it changeable neon Simax the Author s First Program One of the more popularized stories in computerdom is about the original computer game Pong created by Nolan Bushnell who also created Atari He made his first prototype of Pong and installed it in a friend s bar in California but it was always breaking or so the bar owner thought It Free from Usability nstitute com Get a complimentary usability review now Programs and How Bad Is It the Complexity of Machines had a most pleasant problem however it was so popular that its cash box was always filling up over the brim jamming the mechanism Since my project was a graphics application I bought the then unrivaled Atari 800 computer a sight and sound powerhouse for less than 1000 I thought that when the price broke below the 1000 barrier any retailer would embrace the chance to have a changeable neon sign in their window Before long the computer itself was available for 77 and the
37. the end of a cable run at the manufacturer where the guy who runs the wire machine stops one production run and starts another But he forgot to flag the braid so the guy who winds the reels didn t know to cut the braid out Write It Down If communication is important in software it is desperately important in hardware Every time you realize too late that you need a piece of information about your hardware that you didn t write down you will pay dearly Your best protection from wasting time on hardware problems is labeling everything meticulously prominently and fanatically And keep elaborate organized written records I got into a most peculiar situation with a laptop computer when I set it up to use a full size monitor instead of the liquid crystal display LCD screen that is built into it I worked all day with the laptop s keyboard connected to the full sized monitor Then I turned it off The next morning I disconnected the monitor re connected the LCD screen and went off to work somewhere else When I turned on the laptop the screen was blank because it was configured to output only to an external monitor I had to figure out what keystrokes to enter blindly to reconfigure it for the LCD I believe the NEC tech support talked me through it From then on I kept the following little blurb in indelible ink right on the frame of the LCD panel SSALEEY It means press the first letters of the words Setup Screen Active
38. themselves What is the most the computer can do to automate this task the wizard approach will be applied to a surprising range of functions Whenever a sequence of three or more mandatory decisions must be made a wizard should be considered I d like to suggest that we start referring to this technique generically by the descriptive name of step through dialog rather than the metaphorical name wizard Maybe then programmers won t sneer when the technique is mentioned Summary Help at its best isn t separate from a program but a natural part of the evolving improvement in user interface design Even the most sophisticated help system is easy inexpensive work compared to the effort that goes into most programming so there s no reason for it to be shortchanged Free from Usabilityl nstitute com Get a complimentary usability review now 6 PC Hardware 65 6 PC Hardware Hardware s the fun part In fact there are very few hardware solutions only funny stories I used to sell my own computer program dragging around an Atari 800 with a separate floppy disk drive and a 5 inch TV in a suitcase the size of a small refrigerator One time I did a cold call at a small business that sold car phones real future tech at the time about 1984 After telling the prospective customer why he couldn t possibly live another day without my program I proceeded to open the refrigerator and put on my dog and pony show When I
39. things Despite all of the progress made in making programs friendlier there is still a great deal of ignorance and indifference about program design The following excerpt is a typical rationalization from someone who simply lacks the imagination to envision how a program could be as powerful as it is easy to learn The problem is that sore people confuse the idea of easy to use with easy to learn The only way you van make a complex syslen ao easy to learn that you can use it on the first day is hy removing lor hiding most of its l power But then onee you become experi enced you find that the system ia Lui Alm ple and awkward He just good doesn t get it Unfortunately this quote is not from 1980 but from 1995 It s altogether fitting that it s from a book on the Internet the towering inferno of obtuse opaque and arcane commands Today s best programs despite being very complex and powerful are easy to learn and easy to use Today s best programmers recognize that the statement above is a relic of days long gone Importance of the Interface What Is The goal of user interface design is to reducethe need for training and documentation to areasonable level such as zero The user interface must help you cope with the fragile invisible electronics the hiding places called disk drives the unfriendly operating systems and the incomplete programs described in Chapter 3 The relative success of an interface is
40. things back at square one actually eliminates some past capabilities and doesn t fix everything that was wrong with its last product For instance a single keystroke still doesn t get us back to the highest figurative spot in the environment a clear desktop Another favorite example I have for Windows 95 s shortcoming is the simple act of copying files from one drive to another early magazine articles made it quite clear that there was no single method as convenient as that in Windows 3 1 And many system functions are not supported by menu options The list goes on and on Well what did I expect for a billion dollar development effort I already told you most computer programs are incomplete Why should Windows 95 be an exception The fundamental problem epitomized by Windows 95 is that in addition to all of the technical problems presented by computers we must put up with marketing strategies Despite all of Microsoft s pride and technical leadership Windows 95 is no better than it must be for Microsoft to achieve its marketing goals I don t know what the question is but the answer as usual is money Free from Usabilityl nstitute com Get a complimentary usability review now 4 The User Interface Hit Any Key to Continue 26 4 The User Interface Hit Any Key to Continue The Little Things that make the difference between good business and badare only little when you do them lf you don t do them theyre very big
41. threw the switch on that lightning fast 3 megahertz Atari on came a basketball game not a bad game by the way It was a cartridge that I had left in the machine by mistake I had left my Basic language cartridge at home on my desk making a demo impossible Arrghhhh The customer however agreed to buy my program sight unseen This was mostly because he was just a modern sort of guy what the marketing weenies call an early adapter or is it adapter but also due to my silver tongued salesmanship no doubt Modular Hardware PC hardware stinks and there is little prospect for serious change It got this way because of the public s justifiable need for a single interchangeable format The need to honor this legacy hardware has left us with a persistent very old hardware design the familiar desktop box or tower with its awkward boards and non interchangeable main circuit board and microprocessor In an ideal design world PCs should be made of completely pull out push in boards that can be removed by simply throwing a bar which also cuts off the power Unisys stop groaning actually made such a modular machine that had levers between the slices to separate them so you could swap parts such as hard drives and modems in a jiffy But they were doomed from the start because the entire system was proprietary hardware the components could only be bought from Unisys The Unisys Modular PC While on the subject of Un
42. to actually work on a problem not just return the phone call gt Do you have a call tracking system to assure that all calls are returned and issues resolved gt If they have a call tracking system tell the vendor We ll consider you product after we see the printouts of last week s calls gt What is your procedure for enhancement requests gt Ask other customers about their support experiences gt Can we sit in with support for a while T once installed a system in Hawaii And it was one of the very few times I actually had time to do any sight seeing on the road I took a helicopter flight to see the active volcano on the big island We flew around and saw the devastation roads overrun by now cold lava vast gray black moonscapes smoldering pools of lava Then our helicopter arrived at the edge of the ocean There was a flowing spout of molten lava about 3 feet in diameter squirting out into the water like a huge spigot of blood with another helicopter sticking its nose right into the stuff what a whirling idiot I thought We remained a cautious hundred yards away The other helicopter headed off to other sights and we proceeded to do exactly as he had done stare head on from about 25 feet into an unregulated funnel of 2000 degree liquid rock Sort of like buying a computer I paid a lot of money to flirt with disaster Free from Usabilityl nstitute com Get a complimentary usability review now 87 11 Actio
43. turning a difficult system into a beneficial one 1 Put All ALL ALL ALL functions Mouse Methods Fancy Keystrokes and Instructions on Menus This is probably the single greatest piece of advice I have for the entire computer community One might think that the success of Windows has made it a safe assumption that all or even most functions of Windows programs are accessible from menus But that s hardly the case even from the purveyors of Windows itself even in Windows itself For instance in Program Manager try to save your screen appearance the way you ve arranged your groups without exiting Windows There is no Save Screen Layout or save of any sort except the Save Settings on Exit option But there is a hidden keystroke one of ten thousand tips and tricks being foisted on us Hold the Shift key while selecting File Exit Voila you ve saved your Program Manager settings This should be on the File menu The Purpose of Menus Is for Training The purpose of menus is to teach you how to use a system not simply to enable you to invoke functions Therefore even functions that might be infrequently invoked from a menu should be learnable and accessible from a menu A case in point pardon the pun is changing from uppercase to lowercase in Word for Windows Version 2 You had to hit Shift F3 and only the online help could clue you in Free from Usabilityl nstitute com Get a complimentary usability review now 4 Th
44. was stick the point of a Free from Usability nstitute com Get a complimentary usability review now 85 straightened out paper clip into a hole somewhere on the back of the laptop to press on a hidden reset switch I certainly can t make you an expert in PC troubleshooting but I do have some ideas that might help you out based on the thousands problems I ve worked through Here is my short training course on technical support The First Law of Software Support Reboot I don t care what the problem was Turn your computer off and start all over again Even an exorbitantly priced consultant will probably suggest this first Don t overlook the possibility that the computer is actually doing what it s supposed to Some of the hardest problems to diagnose are not even problems sort of For instance I once had trouble with a Help window that would not appear It seemed like it wasn t working at all But it was displaying after all it was just too far off the right side of the screen to see I had recently changed my screen from 800 x 600 dots to 640 x 480 dots and the window was residually set to display at perhaps at the 700th horizontal position Old Screen Size Current Screen Size When you are pounding your head against the wall try to imagine that the computer is actually doing what it s supposed to Think of things in a different way to accommodate this possibility then work from that vantage point
45. you value user friendliness and that it is one of the things that puts people in your good graces Free from Usability nstitute com Get a complimentary usability review now 88 Actions for Purchasers of Software Actions Actions 1 If you are buying custom made business software get a written commitment that all options settings utilities conversions fixes work arounds and functions with predictable entries will be supported by menu options that invoke dialog boxes with values selected from lists rather than by typing the characters at a command prompt or text box Write friendliness criteria into your purchasing requirements by including my Bill of Rights Quantify penalties for unfriendly software design against support dollars Build usability testing into your written and spoken expectations Watch untrained users try to cope with your program Don t ask or answer too many questions Just watch and take notes 4 Big system purchasers preview the documentation If you see lots of error messages make sure you talk to several satisfied users to prove your users won t be reading them too often Visit and observe the support staff unannounced 5 Make a written requirement that all independent components must have independent menu driven diagnostic tools that clearly establish the health of their layers Establish the delivery of these tools as milestones in your implementation and payment plan 6 Return bad so
46. your time twice Fool me once shame on you Fool me twice shame on me Microsoft offers their knowledgebase as part of the quarterly package that they sell to developers called the Developers Platform or the Developers Library The knowledgebase is pretty good and it s called Technet It has a full text search and other powerful navigation tools If you have more than 25 computer users get it at least once Make your knowledgebase in whatever tool is suitable to your needs It can be as simple as a table in a word processor or a full fledged database system Include columns for the program that had a problem the hardware component the problem the resolution and any other valuable information A Primer on Technical Troubleshooting A member of my family had trouble with a brand new 6000 laptop It had gotten into a state where Windows appeared on the screen but neither the keyboard nor the mouse would do anything even after rebooting It was returned to the friendly in house support department who promptly fixed it and sent it back When asked what they did the support department gave a typical vague answer We re not sure what we did that made it work Don t settle for this sort of mumbo jumbo that keeps the user community in a state of perpetual non motion The computer was probably stuck in a laptop hell called Suspend mode which is a great feature until you try to use it What they probably did to resuscitate it
47. 0 and you have to go to a computer store no matter what you want to buy The salesman took a few measurements did some clipping with his scissors and sewing with his machine and immediately wrapped up the new suit The customer remarked Don t you want me to try it on The salesman replied Oh no sir that s not how we do things in the computer industry Computer people are starting to acknowledge the importance of usability testing which means imagine this actually trying to see if people can do what they bought your program for Wow what a concept Most of today s business software is designed developed and sold in a 1 2 3 sequence a one way street if you will Even good developers don t routinely expect to involve the users in the design process If they do it s for verbal input not an actual examination of the system in use Funny things happen when you actually work with end users not just the people buying systems and deciding what they want the program to do I was installing a system at a drycleaner and was struggling to set up a discount method that the store manager needed It turns out that when a customer gets clothes altered by the tailor they can get 30 off on the drycleaning A little industry info here by law tailors can only work on clean clothes Free from Usabilityl nstitute com Get a complimentary usability review now 4 The User Interface Hit Any Key to Continue 37 The owner of the
48. 5 Pong anecdote 13 print vs help 73 Free from Usability nstitute com Get a complimentary usability review now printer anecdote 7 problems 20 productivity tip 48 Qwerty anecdote 31 read through guide 74 retaining programmers anecdote 77 review 15 roadsign anecdote 35 Simax review 15 sound board 9 source code 77 special values 32 specs 71 style guides 10 support 82 support joke 82 suspend mode anecdote 82 timed backup anecdote 40 92 trace detailed view of program commands 55 training 81 Tramiel Jack anecdote 13 underlying problems 20 UNIX 24 usability testing 71 usability testing 36 user interface 26 designers 29 user sensitive help 60 videos 75 Visual Basic 10 visual cues 51 Windows 95 25 wiring anecdote 64 wizards 61 Word table of contents anecdote 54 Free from Usabilityl nstitute com Get a complimentary usability review now 93 UsabilityInstitute com A Computer User s Bill of Rights You shouldn t have to read a manual certainly not a huge one You should be able to do things out of order without being penalized You should be able to make mistakes without being terminated executed canceled re booted or erased You should be able to understand why the program does what it does You expect that all of what you type into the computer is saved by default You expect to be forewarned when any work is over written undone or erased
49. Computers Stink J ack Bellis How to Make Today s Technology as Productive as It Is Powerful Note This is conversion of what had been a glued binding book to a PDF file Sadly though this book was written in 1997 most of the complaints about software design are just as valid today Jack Bellis November 8 2004 gt gt gt No Marketing No Spam No Registration lt lt lt This book is provided courtesty of http www Usabilityl nstitute com to promote our service of performing inexpensive usability reviews Contact us for a complimentary review And make sure to check out our free product GenericUI a style sheet and accompanying design elements for software applications presented in Web browsers It will save large companies thousands of dollars during just the first few days of creating a new system and it s free period Free from Usabilityl nstitute com Get a complimentary usability review now This book is free to copy as you please No copyright is claimed by the author ISBN 0 9655109 8 0 All brand names used in this book are the trademarks registered trademarks or brand names of the respective holders For Susan Jessica and all the computer users waiting for the promise to be fulfilled without the problems Free from Usabilityl nstitute com Get a complimentary usability review now Contents 1 Introduction Is This Book For You Cut to the Chase 7 7 7 Mass Market Improvements Hav
50. For example when toady s Internet connections go kerphlooey some techie type will eventually type ping 123 663 9 03 or some such gibberish on your system She s proving that you have a healthy TCP IP layer Another example I had trouble with my modem and the vendor told me to type in c echo atdt1234 gt com3 to see if the modem was working irrespective of Windows and the other software I was using It failed the test Every vendor must supply diagnostic tools like this that isolate their layer and prove that theirs is not the problem The problem gets worse when the individual layers test OK but the relationship between them is to blame The most common example of a so called relationship problem is timing In this case computer problems can reach infuriating proportions often resulting in extensive finger pointing and painful protracted periods of diagnosis That s why our only way out is microscopic logging impeccable diagnostics and user interface design that leaves absolutely nothing to the imagination What can you do S oft ware Purchasers make a written requirement that all independent components must have independent menu driven diagnostic tools that clearly establish the health of their layers Establish the delivery of these tools as milestones in your implement ation and payment plan Mixing Metaphors One last recommendation from the Future Thinking department Many of today s programs use a single d
51. Get a complimentary usability review now 4 The User Interface Hit Any Key to Continue 29 computer teaches them to do and how blindly they apply it once learned If you condition people to hit the ESC key to go back to a previous state they will quickly start hitting ESC to reverse no matter what The machine makes you a machine This finding was an interesting by product of my work with a point of sale system Although our system was head and shoulders above our few competitors our customers learning difficulties were painfully apparent The machine made them into automatons but the user interface didn t apply the rules uniformly A great example involved the method for exiting our menus The menus on the system were alphabetical menus That is they offered A B C choices and if the menu had only 2 functions you exited it by hitting C If the menu had 4 features you exited it by hitting E and so on A DO THIS B DO THAT C DO SOMETHING ELSE D EXIT We had perhaps five programmers who had written the programs and used different ways to exit from the specific features that the menus accessed my favorite being HIT 99 TO END which I vaguely recall we also used in Mrs Murphy s 11th grade Algebra computer class circa 1972 One day I told our company president that we really should clean up this mess and make all features end with one technique I bet him that there must be 20 different exit techniques on our syste
52. Here s a simplified example for a retail system Program File Edit Accounts Prices Transactions All Functions in Order of Use All Functions Alphabetically Balance Cash Drawer Charges Customers Reconcile Cash Drawer Notice above that Balance Cash Drawer and Reconcile Cash Drawer would invoke the same function but it is listed under multiple names to make the program more self discoverable The same technique would be valuable for other orders such as order of development Imagine the same list box sorted by the date in which features are added to a system For business systems that are frequently updated this would provide directly within the program itself one of the functions that is usually relegated to the rarely read release notes Free from Usability nstitute com Get a complimentary usability review now 4 The User Interface Hit Any Key to Continue 45 Another more subtle order is the learning sequence which for business systems is often similar to the order in which you start using the features of a system This applies to some programs more than others While not all functions of a system necessarily have a specific priority for learning some features usually stand out For instance a retail system usually has functions to enter products and prices these would be at the top of the list Very detailed functions might not be on the list at all Here s the same system as in the previous example but sor
53. LCD Exit Exit Yes This was on a 4 77 megahertz monochrome dual floppy no hard drive laptop in about 1989 I thought it was a bizarre one of a kind problem but I eventually found myself in the same situation 7 years later on a 120 megahertz l gig color multimedia laptop In the computer world when you have the same problems with more powerful equipment that s called upgrading You ll notice that some heavily computerized offices have stickers on all of their PC s with critical information that is either not well stored by the system itself or unrecoverable if the system fails Most recently this includes Internet addresses host computer names and mumbo jumbo like that Host Name BELLISJ IP Address 198 225 118 228 Subnet Mask 255 255 255 0 Default Gateway 198 282 118 1 For PC s in general you should keep a written card with port addresses and interrupt settings expansion slot contents hard drive parameters modem settings and the choices that have been made for what are called jumpers on hardware cards These are little switches that are set by connecting jumping pins together to specify how the devices should work Free from Usability nstitute com Get a complimentary usability review now 6 PC Hardware 68 Below is a sample chart Use a pencil when you enter values in the right hand column so you can change them easily Resource Used For Com 1 Modem Com 2 Mouse Com 3 Fax Com 4 IO Port 2AD6 Vid
54. This lack of perspective turns a groove into a rut What can you do Development managers Have someone Specialize in user interface design and weed out excuse me find and remove implicit metaphorical indirect wording Always use words that directly describe things in common terms or terms used elsewhere in the program 5 Put All Orders on Menus Alpha Functional Learning Date This recommendation applies mostly to larger systems those with more than 50 functions Traditionally program menus provide one order of accessing a program s capabilities This order which you might not even notice is an ordered list arranges the capabilities of the program by related function Part of the disguise is that menus are not a consecutive list but a set of separate hierarchical drop down lists The almost unnoticeable value of this particular order is that if you know what you want to do you should be able to instantly find the required function What is missing however is an additional alphabetical ordering of the functions For instance if you know a feature by a different name than it has been implemented under or you are looking for a function that is several levels down on submenus you start browsing around the menus or you must use the documentation online or otherwise It would be a tremendous advantage to have a drop down list box with all of a program s functions listed alphabetically accessible by several synonyms
55. Word the Print Preview function should be on the View menu with other viewing options not on the File menu And the Page Setup function should be on the Format menu with other format setting functions You might even find it necessary to put functions in two different places on your menus There s nothing wrong with this A reasonable analogy could be drawn to rooms in a building would it necessarily be the case that all rooms should have only one entrance Of course not What can you do If you are a programmer when in doubt ask a few people where to put functions put them in more than one place and make your menus customizable Free from Usabilityl nstitute com Get a complimentary usability review now 4 The User Interface Hit Any Key to Continue 50 11 Always Show the Level at Which Options Are Invoked Most programs have many options that can be set to the liking of the user sometimes numbering well into the hundreds And each option has a sphere of influence such In other words each usually affects only a specific range of action or data such as the file you are currently working on or all files The problem is that today s programs can have five to ten layers of technology and data and users have a difficult time working with some features because it is unclear at which level the options are put into effect Consider Microsoft Word here are the levels at which options might work All sessions and documents The current s
56. a complimentary usability review now 6 PC Hardware 70 The one thing I don t know is whether this type of approach can get enough momentum with today s telephone line situation meaning relatively slow modems It might have to wait for the cable modem technology to speed things up Recently a popular PC columnist observed that there seems to be an unavoidable chasm between two different ways of using a PC the user is either at arm s length from the monitor or sitting on a sofa several feet away There is no in between For information use you will be close for entertainment you will be far away One leading manufacturer is trying to sell an entertainment computer and everyone is wondering is this the elusive home appliance PC It s a PC with a big screen TV and some necessary hardware to accommodate it This fine concept will have to fight it out with the cable modem technology to see who ultimately gets the game market but it will remain that the game market It will not be the holy grail home appliance PC An entertainment PC might be able to do double duty as an Internet browser and multi purpose home information machine but its reliance on distance viewing will always relegate its use to games not information gathering or synthesis And information is where the computer as home appliance will find its greatest value In the entertainment realm PCs will certainly become an increasingly prevalent household fixture but the cre
57. ally got it drilled into my head when I was corrected a thousand times Then I moved to a small company where the owner proofread my work He corrected every might to may Traditional proofreading is great stuff but not if it displaces time and money that might may be spent proving that the information in the books is what users need and that users can find it Why is more effort put into proofreading Because it s easier Free from Usability nstitute com Get a complimentary usability review now 7 Documentation One Step Forward Two Steps Back 74 No amount of traditional prufreeding seems to attain even the superficial goal of aesthetic perfection so you should not allocateresources to it resources that could be used instead to improve content To prove to myself that no amount of money seems to produce grammatically perfect documentation so why emphasize it at the expense of real testing I started collecting publishing mistakes My favorite proofreading failure is from a user manual of a presentation program One section had the following heading Appendix Desinging Effectuve Presentations s 259 Defining the goal ssssseecrensnesnstesnenene itseenne EOE 259 Identifying the audience ssseccsecerecseesee tiserareeernntsennta tetes 259 Organizing your ideas ccsscsecsessceeesecetseseeateesenenescaneeninarenstines 260 Collecting VOUT FESOUTCES cscceeeseseeeceececsnteateseennestestennee
58. and gave me a copy of the very book with a different colored cover but otherwise the identical 1945 book I was amazed And then I realized that I shouldn t have been he probably had several copies at home one in every color In fact he probably had my friend s copy at home by now but was too embarrassed to give me that one thinking I might blame him for taking it even though it was abandoned I suggest that we start referring to this up to 75 pages introductory printed matter as a read through The closest word we currently have is guide but there are guides of 1000 pages out there No one reads them through Delivering them on paper adds incremental value but considerable cost Worse they are a disservice because they hide vital concepts in a cloud of minutia that can be learned later from the product itself Microsoft has figured out how to condense its literature The following figure shows an edgewise view of the binding of a typical Microsoft technical manual that is approximately 1 4 thick Can you guess how many pages a book this thick might be Language Reference Techy Volume 12 Microsoft s innovative approach don t laugh is to make the pages thinner The book above would be about 250 pages Their other options were to print increasingly thicker books split the Free from Usability nstitute com Get a complimentary usability review now 7 Documentation One Step Forward Two Steps Back 71 topics int
59. announce it prominently Use color to speed recognition and sound for feedback Give users access to the most detailed level of their data Make your program support configurable exhaustive logging Provide diagnostic tools for every layer of technology that you provide Don t limit users to a single design metaphor combine the best of them all Free from Usability nstitute com Get a complimentary usability review now 95 About the Author 2004 Jack Bellis does user interface design and usability consulting His earlier background is technical writing most recently with a software consulting company in Wayne Pennsylvania near Philadelphia He got into computers in 1982 when he bought a home computer and created a graphics program that he sold to video stores and other retailers He s programmed in all sorts of languages from machine language and assembler to high level languages and about a dozen flavors in between He s sold systems to 15 types of businesses in as many states installed over 100 systems with hundreds of workstations conducted about 30 training classes supported systems on the phone and written the user literature for 20 systems As a member of the Society for Technical Communication his work has been published at the regional and national levels At Unisys where he worked for two years his interactive training demos and help systems earned the second highest level of corporate exc
60. appen when you are training and don t run the night time cleanup process Resolution Manually delete the old response file and resubmit the batch The additional half megabyte of text is nothing compared to today s software size and it is infinitesimal compared to the time lost What can you do Programmers put the information right into the code Don t wait for the tech writers to track you down for the inside story Or work with the tech writers to add problem resolution info to your messages Big system purchasers preview the documentation If you see lots of error messages make sure you talk to several satisfied users to prove you won t be reading them too often Free from Usability nstitute com Get a complimentary usability review now 4 The User Interface Hit Any Key to Continue 54 18 When the User Does Not Have Control Announce it Prominently Often when using a program you will encounter lengthy internal processes that keep the computer busy while you must wait For instance if you tell Microsoft Word to count the words in your document you will not be able to use any other Word functions other than cancel the process while it is busy counting The problem is that most programs use the Status Bar at the bottom of the screen to tell you that the system is not paying attention to you When programmers are working on a program they have a usually called debug mode that lets them look inside program what
61. ation What I often find is that the books tell me step by step what to do or they certainly try But the circumstances are so variable that the procedure is rarely straightforward instead bouncing around quite a lot Usually the writers have no alternative As soon as you have trouble with the exact procedure as published you realize that the books almost never tell you how to analyze your current state to establish which steps have and haven t worked and what you must do next My most recent experience with this phenomenon was when I upgraded my hard disk drive In fact I think it was the proverbial straw that broke the camel s back and made this camel finish writing his book Thank goodness I upgraded when I did What can you do Writers put more effort into troubleshooting documenting checkpoints and defining sufficient conditions You ll notice that this type of information is much more difficult information to collect and organize But that s good it s a sign that you are actually creating something of value Free from Usabilityl nstitute com Get a complimentary usability review now 7 Documentation One Step Forward Two Steps Back 75 Reason 5 Failing to Roll the Books Back into the Product And now here it is the greatest sin of all the Mt Everest of documentation screw ups computer programs will not live up to their expectations until we stop expecting the problems to go away by creating better books So
62. ative work will be supplied by professional authors not the person using the computer That s the big difference PCs will be most valuable as PCs when they re placed at arms length combined with the telephone technology as an information and communication system How much friendlier will PCs have to be to leap this marketing hurdle I think if the developers simply applied the rules in my book that would do it Free from Usabilityl nstitute com Get a complimentary usability review now 7 Documentation One Step Forward Two Steps Back 71 7 Documentation One Step Forward Two Steps Back I m a technical writer and I m embarrassed As a group we re not part of the solution we re part of the problem The following example epitomizes the often laughable state of the art in software documentation It is an excerpt from the training manual for a data entry system showing the content of an entire page Using the System Summary Ifyou have a problem with the system follow the correct procedure If Gosh I wish I d read this pearl of documentation in 1982 imagine the lost time I would have saved with all of my software problems Why Documentation Stinks Long before computer books were lambasted for their low quality most other instruction manuals were the universal object of derision How many comedians have poked fun at the Christmas tradition of struggling with the assembly instructions for Johnny s n
63. ause they failed to spend the last ten years learning DOS batch programming Even with my extensive years in the business I spent the better part of the weekend in the typical trial and error process of massaging their startup files before they could tee off If this type of situation were an isolated incident this book would be unneeded Or if this type of situation were completely eradicated by the wonderful world of Windows 95 this book would be unneeded But neither is the case In fact this book lingered in semi completion while Windows 95 was being released in the hope that all our problems had been answered but I was sadly mistaken To the average user at home or at work the PC cure is often worse than disease Although the causes are many and varied the solutions are often straightforward and inexpensive Free from Usability nstitute com Get a complimentary usability review now 1 Introduction 10 What About Popular Style Guides There are several books about user friendliness notably IBM s Common User Access and a huge tome from Microsoft on design Judging by the software I use these books have somehow missed the mark I suspect that these books are so detailed that they miss the larger message They typically describe every type of field and on screen control putting you too close to the forest to see the trees My book aims at much broader targets Perhaps my book will also be more effective because it is shorter Topics
64. ave documented work arounds that never see the light of consumer day What can you do If you are buying custom made business software get a written commitment that all options Settings utilities conversions fixes work arounds and functions with predict able entries will be Supported by menu options that invoke dialog boxes with values selected from lists rather than by typing the characters at a command prompt Remember the vendor will do anything reasonable to get a sale Is such a request unreasonable User Friendliness is Long Term Marketing in a Short Term Market Lack of UNIX It takes a disproportionate amount of time to make a program bullet proof If a programmer can make a function work with one man week of effort it might take her 3 4 weeks to make it bullet proof self training and easily discoverable The marketplace however buys functionality first This is the big lesson of WordPerfect for DOS This was one of the goofiest interfaces ever but it was first to market with a wide range of powerful features so it dominated many demanding environments such as law firms Only recently has its grasp on the marketplace been slipping away to friendlier alternatives Knowledge or Concern The more energy and thought that is put into making a program goof proof the friendlier the program will be But this requires that you have some idea what makes a program friendly And not everyone knows or cares what make
65. bility review now 8 Inside Computer Programs S ource Code 80 input terse or otherwise to meaningful phrases And there s no reason that the Foundation Class functions can t read clearly If programmers want to see or enter the code in a terse format that option should certainly exist But verbose descriptive phrasing should be an equal goal Another programmer friend helped me one time with a graphics program I made The program produced super sized letters on the screen but too slowly He took a routine of mine that was about 200 lines and reduced it to perhaps 12 lines If you re an engineer I don t have to tell you it ran 10 times as fast Obviously he saw an underlying world that I simply had no idea existed To this day I couldn t possibly diagnose a problem if it ever occurred with those 12 lines of code Of course it never did I asked that same programmer if the terse symbolic appearance of C was really a benefit to the programmer other than simply saving keystrokes on input In other words did the symbolic appearance such as double colons asterisks and ampersands actually make it more legible He said that yes it was possible to scan some well written code and visualize the logic more easily than if it were prose I can understand this point and concede the value of symbolic representation I maintain however that it should be an option with the computer doing the labor of converting the code to legi
66. ble human intelligence not the program s inflexible intelligence Simply put to programmers that is we need an ASCII dump with a simultaneous dynamic translation chart In some contexts this would be called a disassembler A mockup of such a feature is shown below Yiew Word Processing Codes and Numeric Yalues i gt The only way this can stop is if every layer of technology has the option to enable full logeine that reports on every command and allows the inspection of the most minute details of the data While the reported information might still require expert diagnosis it would at least put us in the driver s seat when need be The current Word Processing Codes on lt Toggle Bold gt every command lt Toggle Bold gt and allows the inspection of the lt Toggle Underline gt most minute details lt Toggle Numeric Yalues 32 105 110 115 112 101 99 116 105 111 110 32 1v E 32 116 104 101 32 109 105 110 117 116 In the sample shown above the Word Processing Codes would show you why the program might not be doing what you want even when it is working right For instance I ve shown the space after the word details accidentally underlined In the gray area you can see the reason the second lt Toggle Underline gt command is after the space not before it The Numeric Values section would be useful only by experienced users when the program is not working right By advancing the cursor through the
67. ble text which could be learned more easily and would therefore be less expensive to maintain To restate you should be able to enter a program with even the most sophisticated most powerful development system with descriptive English like phrasing instead of terse symbolic contrivances As you become experienced you should be able to abbreviate or symbolize as you enter code It should be an option how the code is displayed symbolic or descriptive The point of this argument is for computers to carry the maximum proportion of the training burden that they can possibly bear There s no reason that this burden shouldn t apply to the realm of expert programming just like it does with application interfaces I ve never believed that there must be a tradeoff between learnability and eventual power Time will prove me right as the competition in the marketplace will bring legible power code to the market by 2005 A decent step has apparently been taken in that direction by Borland s Delphi Provide Menu Support For Program Syntax You might recall from an earlier chapter that Bellis s first rule of user friendliness was Put All ALL ALL ALL functions Mouse Methods Fancy Keystrokes and Instructions on Menus It applies no less forcefully to the commands and syntax of programming languages This means that in addition to being able to type commands with the keyboard as most programming is done you should be able to build pro
68. c documentation so much easier to use than printed books that what might have been a good but unused book might get used quite often With a little collaboration between the help author and programmers cue cards can also be supplied that actually launch functions in the program and work back and forth between the help system and application Perhaps you ve seen some systems like this where you click on buttons within the help to perform the steps in a procedure 5 Better Books Better books have not just the basic information but all the bells and whistles that make the book easier and more encouraging to read graphics liberal examples nuances of operation what if questions complete business scenarios and good trouble shooting information Adding this richness of truly valuable content takes perhaps three times the effort and requires significant input from the end user world If you re waiting for some sort of business case to justify this sort of effort don t hold your breath in my experience this type of virtue must be its own reward 6 Good Programming Good programs communicate No amount of add on information whether printed or online is a substitute for embedding the instructions right in the interface Good programming has verbose text that doesn t get in the way configurable labeling for icons balloon help introductory help for procedures status bar elaboration of selections a menu system that doesn
69. ce quickly enough With such a system a truly user centric application could evolve because the help and the software could be updated based on accurate real world information 9 Wizards Step Through Dialogs There is little question that what Microsoft calls a wizard is a big part of the future of programming design Despite the cutesy name wizards are not a trend or incidental development They represent the culmination of the last 15 years of interface design Don t be fooled just because they are not applicable to all design tasks Where they are applicable they raise a computer product to its highest most profitable rung for both user and developer As muchas possible the computer shouldtell the user what to do and not viceversa If you disagree with this law just be patient dig your heels in and ignore what is going on around you Eventually your competition will help you see the light Free from Usabilityl nstitute com Get a complimentary usability review now 5 The Nine Levels of Help 63 With a wizard the computer does the maximum amount of work possible for a given task and requires you to do the minimum At each step the screen presents either information or choices and asks you to make limited decisions Here s a good example from Microsoft Publisher Your design can include a picture or logo Include a picture Include a business logo Neither thanks As programmers learn to always ask
70. d glasses view of the world and will explain how to use the interface not how to make the system work with your actual circumstances and problems More and more Free from Usability nstitute com Get a complimentary usability review now 5 The Nine Levels of Help 62 this is inevitable because the systems are developed faster and the application areas are becoming more esoteric Accordingly it is time for help systems to grow up I recommend that we let users add to the help system and enter questions and issues directly from the help screens Today s plain old Windows help already lets you add your own comments called annotations but these are stored on the user workstation so they are not shared and there is no capability to send messages to the help desk when information is lacking The system I envision would have a button in the button bar of the help system labeled Notes This button would bring up a dialog like this Help Annotations Show Which Comments All Users Just Mine User Comments Don t use this for Narviscopan 403 Does this function work on retrovirus Users could add comments based on their experience and declare the comments as public or private They could also enter questions and issues that would automatically result in an e mail to the help desk This would reduce the vicious cycle of frustration that occurs when users can t find the information they need and can t get assistan
71. do Even if you don t you should find much of interest here if you are Howard Beal mad as hell about the troubles you ve had using computers and want to understand why whose fault it is and what to do about it Cut to the Chase If you re in a hurry P11 summarize the entire book for you right here Although the problems of computers can t be reduced to a single item they do have a single origin computers are a worst case scenario of an already invisible technology electronics Combined with the usual machinations of the business world this has spawned a morass of problems with an equally complex range of solutions The premise of this book however is that complicated or expensive solutions are not needed to cure most of what s wrong with the computer world The lion s share of the problems can be fixed by simply improving communication mostly in the form of the user interface the design of the software components with which users interact Often these changes are as simple as more and better words on the screen and these are usually the easiest least expensive changes to make Free from Usability nstitute com Get a complimentary usability review now 1 Introduction 8 This increased role of wording is not an incidental trend It is the direct result of a major shift in computer job responsibilities In the past programs and their documentation were entirely separate things created by different people Now much of the d
72. e Now before you programmers out there blow a gasket at my hopeless naivet and petty insistence on chasing a mirage hear me out In the 60 s the COBOL language had a partial goal of making programs legible Some would have us believe that the motivation was to free the business world from dependence on high priced programmers Whether this was true is immaterial COBOL is now the object of programmers derision because it stinks by today s standards apparently it was designed too specifically for business use COBOL s goal of legibility was soundly trounced with its fall from grace We in the metaphor business refer to this as throwing out the baby with the bath water Visual Basic has made some strides in legibility and has by my estimation been responsible for the greatest short term burst of development and productivity in the history of computing But VB is being overshadowed for serious development by C the champion of illegible arcane nonsense C and its endless array of strange commands supplied by the Microsoft Foundation Class library is the mother tongue of Windows development but it is incomprehensible A big selling point of C is that it is terse it requires a minimum of keystrokes to type in the commands My complaint is this the capability for terse input shouldn t mean that we are limited to terse output The computer should do the work to convert the Free from Usability nstitute com Get a complimentary usa
73. e User Interface Hit Any Key to Continue 38 Put Even Non Menu Functions on Menus Even functions which cannot be invoked from menus should be placed on menus By doing so the menus can show you hot keys fancy key combinations such as Control K if appropriate Even when no key combination applies a dialog box can display brief instructions explaining how to invoke the function with the mouse An example of this in MS Word is the technique for selecting a column of text within normal paragraphs you must hold down the Alt key while dragging as shown below In this case the menu item might be as shown below Edit Select Free form Column Alt Drag Wow a Complete Menu dialog boxmi eplay brief instructions is the techSGRESi selecting a column of dragging Selecting Columns in Word with Alt Drag Earlier in this chapter we discussed a sound program that used a contrived keystroke right mouse clicking a minimized icon to invoke a function Even a peculiar technique like that could be made somewhat user friendly by adding menu function perhaps as shown below Announce Clipboard Text Even if the function doesn t do anything but display an instructive message telling how to click the minimized icon it will do the job Sound Program Sounds Announce Clipboard Text Announce Clipboard Text ae How to announce text on the Clipboard 1 Copy desired text to clipboard 2 Minimize Sound program 3 Rig
74. e dark I later found out that one didn t have to produce machine language programs the way I was doing it one instruction at a time there were actually programs that let you type things out a little more clearly My first machine language program looked something like this 169 7 141 212 165 99 120 230 217 204 193 182 64 Pretty exciting stuff eh I ll bet some of you propeller heads are out there mumbling to yourselves Add accumulator 7 store accumulator 212 To make a long story short the whole thing taught me that computers stink No matter how much more powerful they keep getting the power doesn t seem to consistently translate into productivity The same mistakes seem to occur time and time again With each new technology we seem to start at the beginning again All over the place the machines are mastering their users instead of vice versa Why At a distant outpost in the universe the Certifier of Intelligent Lifeforms attended to his in and out bins An envoy arrived one day to apply for one of the universe s most cherished honors a certificate offering formal recognition that his world s people had at last attained bona fide intelligence The Certifier proceeded with the usual questioning of first time applicants a no brainer for the accomplished civilization First have you harnessed the power of atomic energy Yes we have replied the envoy Very good Where do you operate your nuclear
75. e expect Almost all other problems are really results of this one deadly killer don t be fooled What Can You Do Use every countermeasure to battle against the most hidden aspects of the computer Improve the hardware soft ware document ation training purchasing demands support and record keeping Insist on every countermeasure that increases the visibility of the machine s inner workings That s what the rest of this book is about Electronic Troubles How can I blame so much on so singular a factor The limiting factor with today s computer systems is not their performance when things are working right but their ability to frustrate us when things are less than perfect With mechanical systems by my rough estimate one in three people can understand or even fix a problem two in three can at least understand what s causing the problem This is even true for what are called electro mechanical systems such as automobiles of the 1960 s But once electronics enter the scene I m sure the numbers change dramatically for the worse Perhaps only one in a hundred people can diagnose an electronic system In fact true root cause diagnosis is almost never done Instead whole electronic modules and even whole products are replaced when there are problems This is often done without genuine diagnosis but with a process that requires less expertise swapping parts in a crude process of elimination Too many times the underlying problem goes
76. e readable learnable and less expensive for training development and debugging But there seems to be no getting away from contrived terminology in programming languages no matter how many billions of hours are wasted learning deciphering and debugging this stuff In the most recent issue of PC Magazine the following statement was made about the leading software product in a category called groupware which coordinates tasks among many workers Then you have to develop a cadre of trained maintenance and support people who can handle the arcane commands and tricks of the proprietary groupware package Fifteen years have elapsed since the computer revolution yet this kind of statement is still the rule not the exception Every new generation of software language seems to start over again as unfriendly and hard to learn as the first one I asked a programmer friend of mine how his company dealt with the problem of incredibly complicated programs whose commands were understood by only their original authors Did they for instance have standards for internal documentation the notes that programmers put inside programs for the next poor slob who has to decipher 20 000 lines of spaghetti code He responded They pay us enough so that no one leaves Make Descriptive Terminology a User Option I have only two issues to take up with programming The first concerns the failure of the programming world to make programs English lik
77. e recent campaign includes the following slogan now posted to my cubicle wall It gets strange looks from my cohorts at work knowing that I m a tech writer But Intuit is stating it from the user s perspective Give me a program whose power is in its friendliness as well as its depth of functionality You should be ableto do things out of order without being penalized If a specific order is required it shouldn t be some sort of hide and seek game Instead the user interface should lead you by the hand That s what programs are for At the core of this issue is the notion of protecting your investment the investment you make in time using the program Free from Usability nstitute com Get a complimentary usability review now 2 A Computer User s Bill of Rights 8 You should be able to make mistakes without being terminated executed canceled repbooted or erased Developers say the program should be forgiving In the worst case you want to be warned before having your mistake punished You should be able to understand why the program does what it does Menus and dialogs shouldn t change inexplicably Nor should functions refuse to work without informative messages Long delays should be explained You expect that all of what youtype into the computer is saved by default The computer should assume that all routine data entry transactions settings options and so on are retained without the user bear
78. e was 10 MB This might explain why when you drop down a menu the captions are very terse You might think that each letter was expensive or that brevity was a virtue for some other reason Indeed brevity can be a virtue when a function s purpose is perfectly apparent in which case scanning a list of single words is quicker than scanning one of full sentences But as programs have become more sophisticated more detailed functions have been appearing The tendency has remained however to try to identify these functions with one word or two word names Here s an example of a menu as it is typically worded with terse labels Sound Program File Edit EE Clipboard Selection E Dictionary BA Recently you can see that programmers are placing almost full sentences on menu a change for the better The following diagram shows the earlier menu reworded with verbose labels Announce Selected Text ney Maintain Dictionary of Yord Sounds Early Dan j Eastburn Steve m E avenson Bettie Ebbert will Eberhardt Mick Fherle Here s another excellent example that drives home the point A very good graphic conversion program has the following three functions on a menu gt Resize gt Redimension gt Crop It takes several minutes of experimenting to decode these choices into these verbose descriptions gt Rescale Stretch Shrink Image or Selection Free from Usability nstitute com Get a compli
79. easing trend to print little or nothing Rather than resorting to minimization however manufacturers should be seeking the strategy that takes the greatest advantage of both methods The most win win view of the issue then is this Of all the information about the product which portion provides the maximum benefit for the manufacturer to offer as a high quality printed document The answer starts with an examination of the key strengths of the two methods Free from Usability nstitute com Get a complimentary usability review now 7 Documentation One Step Forward Two Steps Back 76 Strengths of Paper and Electronic Documentation When you must read more than a few sentences printed paper is easier to read than a computer monitor When the amount becomes more than a few minutes of reading the advantage of paper becomes even stronger since you can take paper wherever you go and read it when you have time Electronic documentation on the other hand can provide instantaneous access to relevant information Another distinguishing strength of online info is that wherever there s a computer there s access to information Many other factors distinguish the two methods but it all boils down to this for reading paper is better for reference information good online help is far more powerful than paper Put All of the Information Online The first part of my recommendation is that your electronic media should include every bit of the
80. ed and how many times At appropriate intervals based on this information it alerts you to under used features For instance after using a word processor for months you might get a message that the system is surprised that you ve never used the Styles feature a feature that professional writers depend on for consistency and productivity This would help solve what I call the toolbox problem complex programs are like huge toolboxes with hundreds of unfamiliar tools Most users in their understandable struggle to get work done familiarize themselves with only the most easily reached tools and rely on them to the exclusion of all the other goodies User sensitive help could periodically dump the whole toolbox out help you see what you ve been missing That s all It just has to be completely configurable by the user Various companies have incorporated elements of user sensitive help but in a patchwork fashion Some have coaches others have de selectable intro help or tips I haven t seen one that puts it all together Contributory Help This level of help applies primarily to large specialized business systems used by many users over a corporate network In such systems especially when the software is used by experts in a sophisticated field it is unrealistic to expect that the software creators will be able to put genuinely valuable information in the user literature The literature will usually emphasize the rose colore
81. ed by the program as erroneous Then we would have a chance of working around even problems that the program creators did not anticipate A typical situation that would be improved by a detailed trace occurred to me and a co worker recently We were trying to use a utility program and got a vague error message saying that a file couldn t be found A lot of trial and error investigation proved that the file was quite findable but it couldn t be loaded because of memory limitations actually the Windows resource limitation While better error messages might have helped in this situation there are simply too many similar but unpredictable situations to base a solution on improved messages alone We need a systematic solution A somewhat more proactive measure is described next Layer Accountability What can you do Programmers make your program support configurable exhaustive logging with an openly accessible on off swit ch Programming Managers make a single programmer responsible for an error trapping met hodology and managing its implement ation by all programmers Put it in your library Layer Testing Diagnostics I mentioned earlier that today s client server systems have seven or more layers of technology When a breakdown occurs you will learn how few people can truly and unequivocally confirm the health of each layer but you might notice that they do various hit or miss tests to prove the viability of the layers
82. ed processing is taking things to new extremes of frustration Distributed processing means splitting up programs into pieces that are then put on multiple computers instead of on a central system It is synonymous with client server computing and has resulted in software solutions that use between seven and ten layers of technology Eventually this approach will be refined to a point where a successful balance is reached between the costs and rewards of this complexity Until then it is a pot of gold for software developers because creating the full solutions not simply the programs is an incredibly tenuous process fraught with finger pointing at ever turn None of distributed processing s problems are unique Its problems are simply more and better versions of what the technology already offers invisible behavior poor diagnostic methods piecemeal engineering and for the pi ce de r sistance new state of the art tools every month Most Programs Are Only Half Finished The pressure to be first to market is intense in the computer business You know that It s one excuse that most programs don t do everything they should As programming standards have improved we are starting to understand just how much a program can do when it is as good as it can be The recent method which Microsoft calls a wizard is if not the ultimate close enough Wizards prompt you for the minimum required information and lead you by the hand thro
83. ellence award gt gt gt No Marketing No Spam No Registration lt lt lt This book is provided courtesty of http www Usabilityl nstitute com to promote our service of performing inexpensive usability reviews Contact us for a complimentary review And make sure to check out our free product GenericUI a style sheet and accompanying design elements for software applications presented in Web browsers It will save large companies thousands of dollars during just the first few days of creating a new system and it s free period Free from Usability nstitute com Get a complimentary usability review now
84. eluding the industry The answer is not entirely mystical however In France the computer as household appliance has already arrived and long ago It s Minitel the French information system delivered to virtually every household if I understand things correctly At a home I visited it sat on a bureau in an unused bedroom and was an all in one computer monitor keyboard unit like some of the early 1980 s systems we used to have only smaller Now with the advent of the Internet and the advancements made in laptop design the household PC is ready to happen in the U S Here s the requirements spec that I believe can make it happen A computer as household appliance must be A PC compatible laptop that snaps in and out of a wall mounted docking base probably in or near your kitchen but that s your problem with a modular but otherwise common telephone that works whether the computer is there or not ready to go Internet software voice mail modem and fax home banking and finance software pre loaded VV VV VV WV modular stacking add on units below the keyboard screen using the architecture that I described earlier in this chapter so the modules can be replaced without a screwdriver gt for among other options a continuous roll fed printer or any other printer since it s a regular PC gt That s it And here s my brainchild in stunning 2D Free from Usability nstitute com Get
85. en t Filtered Down to Business Software 9 What About Popular Style Guides Topics in this Book Programs and the Complexity of Machines How Bad Is It About Me My First Computer Idea Changeable Neon Programming Mysteries Ideas and Solutions 2 A Computer User s Bill of Rights 3 The Underlying Problems One Central Problem Electronic Troubles Walking the High Wire A Beginner s Guide to Backup The Invisible World Directory or Hiding Place Distributed Processing Most Programs Are Only Half Finished User Friendliness is Long Term Marketing in a Short Term Market Lack of Knowledge or Concern UNIX Windows 95 or Computers Still Stink 4 The User Interface Hit Any Key to Continue Importance of the Interface What Is Human Factors Engineering The Communication Burden Interface or Documentation Elements of the User Interface The Machine Makes You a Machine There Are Very Few User Interface Designers Major Problems with User Interface Design Form Follows Function Most Development Starts Over Again from the Beginning Complex Procedures That are Never Converted to Program Functions Special Values that Never Get Built into the System Bad Design Developer s Indifference Paranoia Mistaking Secrecy for Security Lost Productivity Hall of Fame Can You Guess Free from Usabilityl nstitute com Get a complimentary usability review now 10 10 No Usability Testing 36 Rules For User Friendliness 37 1 Put Al
86. entarily mistook elevation for altitude a harmless mistake unless you re piloting an airplane Fortunately he wasn t flying by instruments Splat Some wording choices are not as easily made as in the previous story Often there are two points of view and there are some good reasons why the words used in the user interface could be one way or the other But sometimes wrong is wrong One day my computer s power got interrupted or perhaps the system locked up for some inexplicable reason I really don t remember Upon restarting my word processor its automatic timed backup feature tried to help me out it reloaded the file that I was editing and prompted me to save it I subsequently found that I lost the last half hour s work even though I saved my work a minute before the power loss Can you figure out this little glitch Answer later Free from Usabilityl nstitute com Get a complimentary usability review now 4 The User Interface Hit Any Key to Continue 41 When you turn on Microsoft Word s automatic timed backup feature it periodically saves a backup copy of the current file In the status bar at the bottom of the screen it says something like Now backing up CH04 DOC He just gftn but from 1995 It s a Internet the towering ini amp Today s best programs despit ele T Autosaving CHO4D0C IN I BN BN BN However it is not saving a copy named CH04 DOC it is saving a specially named temporary
87. eo Capture IO Port 220 Sound Card IO Port 240 IO Port 260 IO Port 280 IO Port 300 IO Port IRQ 2 Video Capture IRQ 3 Sound Board IRQ Some of these settings can be retrieved from the system but only when everything is working perfectly Others such as the port addresses and interrupt settings need to be written down because there are a limited number of them available and you must not assign the same one twice since no feature of Windows 3 1 or older handles the task of allocating them you always need to be able to see them at a glance on paper to assure that they don t overlap with one another Funny Story Number Three I installed a system at a drycleaner in Puerto Rico the first time that I installed a new style of keyboard that my company had just developed I couldn t get the new keyboard to work so I called the hardware guys back home who asked if I tried the little switch on the bottom of the keyboard I immediately reached under the keyboard and flipped the little switch at which point the screen went blank the computer power stopped and the fan whirred to a stop Sweat started pouring out of my face in buckets bear in mind the average temperature in a Puerto Rican drycleaner is 150 degrees even without system meltdown Yes I had fried the system Meanwhile the hardware guys are on the phone saying You re not supposed to do that with the power on Didn t you read the label on the bottom of the
88. esign metaphor to guide the way they are used and they invariably limit the user to the techniques of that one method For instance graphics programs are now known as either draw programs or paint programs gt Draw programs use lines and filled patterns which the programmers implement with mathematical equations gt Paint programs on the other hand use dots of color as if you were filling in graph paper with a paint by numbers technique Free from Usability nstitute com Get a complimentary usability review now 4 The User Interface Hit Any Key to Continue 58 Both have special advantages We are only recently seeing programs which enable you to get the advantages of both previously users had to use one technique or the other Another example is multimedia authoring programs Some use a frame at a time metaphor others use timelines and still others use a diagramming technique It s time to stop making users choose between valuable but mutually exclusive methods Imagine if you had a custom house made for you and the contractor said Would you like a house made with a wood saw or a metal cutting saw What sort of nonsense is that But that s what this single metaphor model is like Today s machines are powerful enough to let you pick and choose metaphors and we ve got 20 years of experience creating the individual metaphors Let s put them together What can you do Return bad software for a refund
89. ession The current window All templates The current template All documents The current document VV VV VV V WV All Microsoft Office programs yes some Word options such as spelling even affect other programs And when you consider other programs the following levels add to the confusion gt Power on off and ROM BIOS restart gt Operating system restart DOS gt Hardware software drivers that control your monitor sound card and so on gt Windows restart A great deal of wasted time could be prevented by clarifying which level every option is associated with and when the option is invoked if you select a new setting Usually the level implies the time at which the setting is invoked but not always For instance if you change your Windows screen colors you do not have to restart Windows on the other hand if you change your screen colors from 16 to 256 you must restart Indicating the levels at which options are invoked is not sophisticated work They can easily be indicated by providing words directly on the screen grouping the options according to level or explicitly describing the levels in context sensitive help 12 Use Dynamic Communication Not Dynamic Menus and Dialogs Dynamic menus change as features become applicable Some programs also change the appearance of items on dialog boxes an equally offensive practice depending on the extent to which the items change For instance in Microsoft Word the Too
90. ew bicycle If the situation was funny with bicycles it is infuriating with computers And the newest trend to eliminate the books altogether and provide only the online equivalent threatens to take a bad situation and simply turn it into a moving target rather than nailing it down and killing it Reason 1 Why Computer Books Stink Insufficient Emphasis on Valuable Information Computer books stink because they are a low priority an afterthought to many companies Often the writers contribute to the low quality by falling into the same general syndrome as the technologists they concern themselves more with their craft than the ultimate value of their product and the outcome that the books must achieve In other words they work on punctuation grammar nifty new methods perfectionism editorial dogmas and stylistic issues ad nauseum They do this because it s easier and usually more fun than providing real information The result is that the books often look good but don t really have the information you need Well folks I have news for you Users don t want goodtechnical writing they want answers Free from Usability nstitute com Get a complimentary usability review now 7 Documentation One Step Forward Two Steps Back 72 My favorite example of this problem concerns a very detailed feature of Word called Lock Anchor which controls the placement of frames on the page None Arourtt Size Width At Position
91. f the 80 s and the full graphical user interface GUI of the 90 s the significance of the words on the screen has evolved too Command prompt systems with only a C staring at you required you to get all of your instructions from documentation or training You communicated with the computer but it did almost no communicating with you Menu systems provided more words on the screen to guide you Today s most advanced systems do everything for you except those tasks that absolutely require a human operator Free from Usabilityl nstitute com Get a complimentary usability review now 4 The User Interface Hit Any Key to Continue 28 During this evolution the mission of the user interface has changed to fully encompass communication Today s wizard techniques epitomize this the screen is full of pictures and text guiding the user through a relatively small number of critical decisions In other words the screen is mostly documentation Here s a Wizard panel from Microsoft Publisher Which paper direction would you like for your flyer Portrait tall py Landscape wide We ll discuss wizards in more detail later in Chapter 5 This is the expected progression of events After all users shouldn t need books to use programs The information should be embedded in the system The goal of a computer program is to perform actions but the goal of the user interface is to communicate with the user This enlarged com
92. fect solution to this problem This one will require some experimentation and might also require user configurable options One potential software only solution is to change the display background or border color when caps are on If this were done even peripheral vision would clue the typist to the current state Other possible solutions relate to the key itself notice that unlike its predecessor on manual typewriters the Caps key on computers does not stay down when locked it offers no tactile feedback That s the root cause of the problem Instead most keyboard manufacturers following the convenience of the manufacturing process instead of the convenience of the user place an indicator light on the extreme other side of the keyboards as their only feedback The best solution is probably to make the key work the way mechanical ones did staying depressed when active Or perhaps the surface angle of the key or its location should be modified to prevent so many accidental strikes As I said this is a difficult problem to simply predict a perfect solution It requires working things out Which brings us to the next topic ongoing design While on the topic of keyboards the answer to the QWERTY typewriter keyboard anagram problem as near as anyone can tell is Typewriter No Usability Testing A man walked into a computer store to buy a custom tailored suit Bear with me this is an analogy If you must imagine the year is 201
93. formation must be publ ished and distributed Establish security by protecting dangerous functions with passwords Whereappr opr iate recordthe date and name of the individual making changes ina log file Free from Usabilityl nstitute com Get a complimentary usability review now 4 The User Interface Hit Any Key to Continue 36 Lost Productivity Hall of Fame Can You Guess My candidate for the all time winner for user interface problems is so pervasive and trivial that it fades into the background But it s also obscure because it involves hardware It s the way that the Caps Lock feature works on most computers and specifically the lost time accounted for all over the world as users start entering text in the wrong case How many times have you done this oNCE UPON A TIME Since I spend a lot of time training other people and diagnosing their problems I ve been looking over others shoulders for a long time It s incredible but quite understandable the number of times I ve seen people start a sentence with the caps lock in the wrong state and go back and forth trying to get it right Imagine in a country of 200 million people how many times this happens every day Add it up every week month and year it s unfathomable for such a stupid oversight of interface design It persists because it s related to the hardware which is controlled by a few manufacturers I don t expect to instantly prescribe a per
94. free market system encourages manufacturers to develop the best engines in the world As silly as the notion sounds for cars this is basically how the PC world has evolved having the software and all of the hardware components designed and made separately from one another And it s true the competition has made it the platform with the world s most powerful engines at the lowest prices Paired with Microsoft s menus a la Macintosh at just the right time this has translated plain and simple into market dominance for PCs Continuing the car analogy I read about a new feature offered by a car manufacturer underscoring the extent to which bells and whistles have evolved in the auto world you can now get his and hers keyless entry that automatically sets the radio station presets seat height and interior temperature Car manufacturers are justified spending their time pursuing this extreme extent of indulgence and detail their products don t routinely crash and burn through no fault of the operator Especially bothersome about most computer problems is that most of them are very old problems and very easily solved but so many bright people are incapable of seeing the light The computer industry instead Free from Usabilityl nstitute com Get a complimentary usability review now Programs and the Complexity of Machines How Bad Is It p concentrates on reinventing itself every 18 months ignoring the unsolved problems and e
95. ftware for a refund Promote and support companies that write good software 7 Call the support department before you buy the software See how long it takes them to answer the phone If they ask for your serial number say This is a pre sales technical question and ask some sort of hypothetical configuration question for All Users 1 Use every countermeasure to battle against the most hidden aspects of the computer Improve the hardware software documentation training purchasing demands support and record keeping 2 Create separate directories for all categories of data When in doubt about whether a directory should be a subdirectory or at the same level as the previous one make it at the same level 3 Store all of your creations in subdirectories under a directory named MYDATA or similar Name them by project purpose This will make it easier to back up files find them later and move them to a new hard drive when you upgrade or move 4 Store all of your programs in subdirectories under a directory named MYTOOLS or similar This will enable you to rebuild your hard drive more quickly when it is broken or move to a new hard drive 5 Always copy your data to more than one medium Always keep copies of critical data in multiple buildings Before an emergency occurs test that you can reload the data 6 Label all hardware related information write it down put it in your log book and keep it in your files 7 Keep a single cha
96. g both of these actions you can ensure for instance that a frame containing a picture will always be on the same page as its referencing text Whew The reason this option requires such an elaborate explanation is that the program MS Word is just is not well suited to page layout It is a paragraph oriented program so explaining something that should be easy isn t But explaining difficult functions is the only reason to bother with tech writing in the first place Users want and need to have the gaping holes in the design of the computer program filled in by unvarnished information They want to know the things that the program doesn t tell them And they want to know how to fix the damn thing when it breaks Establishing valuable infor mation is hard work The degree of difficulty is directly proportional to its value This is the fundamental issue facing software documentation the value of information Sometimes value is established by providing an intense level of detail At other times it is established by better choosing which information to zero in on And as programs have become more friendly value can even be increased by making shorter documentation More on that later Free from Usability nstitute com Get a complimentary usability review now 7 Documentation One Step Forward Two Steps Back 73 What can you do Writers spend your time writing about the things that you can t discover directly from the user i
97. g programmers 77 road signs 35 support joke 82 Suspend mode 82 timed backup 40 wiring 64 Word Table of Contents 54 arrowhead 34 Atari company anecdote 13 game cartridge anecdote 63 backup failure anecdote 32 in Word 41 Bill of Rights 17 Bushnell Nolan 13 business expenditure anecdote 8 buttons vs menus 48 Can it anecdote about wording 41 Caps Lock anecdote 36 car anecdote 11 91 cash register anecdote 82 CD ROM 9 central problem 20 Commodore Computers 13 communication 27 descriptive 46 descriptive terminology 77 diagnostics 56 Dvorak 31 dynamic menus 50 electronics 20 electronics book anecdote 74 elements of the user interface 28 error messages 52 expert programming anecdote 78 fuse on motherboard anecdote 66 general to specific 45 half finished programs 23 hardware 63 Hawaii helicopter anecdote 84 Help 58 holography film anecdote 22 INI files 38 Intelligent Lifeforms anecdote 14 Internet 31 jumpers 42 keyboard 31 knowledgebases 82 laptop anecdote 65 layer testing diagnostics 56 learning vs cruising 52 Machine Makes You a Machine 29 magazine review 15 master menu 45 menus 37 menus anecdote 29 microscope data viewer 54 Microsoft literature anecdote 74 Microsoft Word description anecdote 10 Modular Hardware 63 mouse button anecdote 33 multimedia upgrade anecdote 9 options levels 49 PC Labs Tests anecdote 25 Philippic 1
98. ge of visible macros was below the list of macros not above it So he didn t realize he was saving the macros to a different template Another prominent example is the arrangement of the main menus on the Macintosh The menu that controls all of the current tasks is on the extreme right side of the top menu bar The tasks as a whole are more general than the currently active program so this menu should be the leftmost And one final example is the addressing scheme used on the Internet In this awkward notation addresses typically list the person then the organization then the type of organization for instance jbellis netaxs com Jbellis is my name Net Access is the company that carries my home page and com indicates that it is a company instead of for instance a government agency These nincompoop addresses cannot be sorted alphabetically to yield any sort of helpful list and this thing was invented by the best and brightest 8 Always Let Users Navigate by Descriptive Values Not Internal Codes At their deepest core computers deal with nothing but ones and zeros Each successive layer of programming insulates us from this internal gibberish but at the expense of programming effort There s a constant tension between the need of users to work with friendly descriptive terms and the starting point of all those ones and zeros So there s still a lot of places where internal codes sneak through into the user interface A nice
99. gram lines by selecting commands and options from menus Free from Usabilityl nstitute com Get a complimentary usability review now 8 Inside Computer Programs S ource Code 81 I d be proud to say I thought of this myself but I didn t And the idea is more than ten years old Dan Bricklin one of the early geniuses in programming who is known for creating the first popular spreadsheet program Visicalc built this capability into a program called Demo2 shown here DEMO aa PENETAN h ROGAN ACILORS MENU Alir TARAI 1 F 8 Por Key Elec For While Block Leave Again Select Case End Goto Tag Tag Call Return Feom Tag You simply select functions from the commands at the bottom and the system prompts you for the relevant arguments variables and other items on which the commands operate There was even a selection that showed you all of the punctuation also called operators amp and so on that the language used While this type of prompting might not be applicable to all programming languages or tasks its value is clear It reduces the learning time for programmers so it saves time and money This type of improvement despite the fact that some programmers might see it as unnecessary hand holding is simply the logical conclusion of the relentless process in which computers bear more and more of the burden of information transfer Language syntax is not immune Free from Usabilityl nstitute com Get
100. h a an electrical connection in the back for power and data Look Add on Card Inside Stackable Modules Funny story number three If you re a mechanic at heart you ll like this story I installed a computer system at a drycleaner in Cincinnati Usually we would connect the main computer to the retail cash register terminals with wires that we ran on the floor or stapled to the walls But sometimes a helpful store owner would get ready in advance and have an electrician run the wires This guy however went all out running conduit in the ceiling about 300 feet to the furthest terminal What a guy When I got there I hooked up the terminals and tested them out Wouldn t you know it the furthest one from the computer wouldn t work I tested it every which way being quite experienced by then to no avail I tested the wire for continuity the electricity was going through all right Then I tested it for a short Aha it was shorting out So I cut the cable at the various junction boxes until I isolated the shorted segment then pulled the segment out I cut the 50 foot segment in halves until I isolated the shorted piece stripped the insulation away and didn t believe what I saw the four wires of the cable inside the insulation were actually braided together deliberately Do you know why Free from Usability nstitute com Get a complimentary usability review now 6 PC Hardware 67 My boss explained that the braid was
101. he notion of creating reusable modules whose properties are inherited by new creations But this method is still so new and complicated that the rewards are only beginning to be realized Most companies that are investing heavily in object oriented code are actually struggling to figure out how to get programmers to share their creations What can you do 1 If you manage programmers allocate a greater portion of time to active not passive code Sharing Assign a librarian and build a catalog Conduct training sessions as often as you release projects to introduce reusable modules to all team members 2 Keep a master list of all of the best features as opposed to program code of all programs for use in all new programs Make it a working prototype or printed functional specification if that s not possible Complex Procedures That are Never Converted to Program Functions Most programs have numerous menu functions enabling users to perform lots of little tasks Frequently however these little tasks are part of larger business procedures To figure out how to put the pieces together to complete the larger procedure users typically must resort to tedious written explanations in the books Slowly these procedures are becoming built into computer programs The old developers excuse that no two users do it the same so we can t make a procedure out of it is dying off to good competition A common example of this is provided by the
102. hicken was going crazy with a Microsoft Word problem The table of contents wouldn t rebuild itself correctly Iwas brought in as the resident Word guru I suggested using a less automated way to insert the code that builds the TOC and it worked But nothing we could do would get the automated method to work It kept turning the subsequent paragraph into a fancy code Word calls them fields as if the document was corrupted We used every tool that Word has to expose the internal values that represent the text and other codes that comprise the document Nothing helped I think she ultimately rebuilt the file piece by piece Another prominent word processor which one of my co workers poignantly referred to as a wretched little application actually has a feature to reveal the internal codes that make up the document This goes part way toward solving the problem But my experience with it 7 years ago pointed out even its flaw when investigating serious corruption situations it shows you what the program thinks the codes represent so it just gives you a more detailed but nonetheless misrepresented view Free from Usabilityl nstitute com Get a complimentary usability review now 4 The User Interface Hit Any Key to Continue 56 To be able to solve problems like this once and for all we need a feature that provides a raw exhaustively detailed view of the values in a document s data along with tools to evaluate the data with our flexi
103. hods the arrowheads or the sound function or any other bizarre methods beyond my grasp are inherently unjustified I only ask that if a program uses them it should directly communicate the method to the users For the arrowhead method put the instruction right on the dialog Use right mouse button A solution to the sound program s situation is described later under my first rule of user friendliness Put All ALL ALL ALL functions Mouse Methods Fancy Keystrokes and Instructions on Menus Developer s Indifference I once worked at an office where visiting guests frequently arrived about 10 minutes late complaining about having missed the exit off of the main road It happened often enough that any Free from Usability nstitute com Get a complimentary usability review now 4 The User Interface Hit Any Key to Continue 35 reasonable person must start to question the conditions instead of the individuals I decided to take a more careful look In my area of Pennsylvania many limited access roads have exit signs a mile or a half mile before an exit as in most locales But unlike some other areas at the exit itself there is only a right pointing arrow accompanied by the word Exit Ordinarily this is not a problem But at the exit for this particular office there are several exits in quick succession so much so that the advance notice signs come upon you fast and furious several in the space of about 1 2 mile
104. ht click the minimized icon The real purpose of menus is to communicate with users and to teach them how to use the program no matter how contrived the usage is Outlaw Secret INI File Parameters that Don t Have Menu Dialog Control Another frequent violation of the rule that Windows applications are primarily menu driven concerns the configuration options that are most often placed in a file called an INI file As problems and issues are found with programs options are very often added by placing additional settings in INI files but it usually takes several releases of the program before these options are controlled through the menu system Free from Usability nstitute com Get a complimentary usability review now 4 The User Interface Hit Any Key to Continue 39 The most recent example that I encountered was with the Microsoft Developers Platform CD where users were instructed that they should enter the following INI parameter to activate a certain button that was mysteriously dropped from one release to the next INFOVIEW INI File ControlSection PaneButtons 1 With business systems every one of these instances costs computer companies untold lost time in the support department as users at all levels in and out of the company struggle to discover and decipher the new options 2 Use Verbose Phrasing Many of today s programmers got into the field when there was as little as 64K of RAM and fixed disk storag
105. icance on the following magazine review demonstrating that my understanding and appreciation of user friendliness goes way back to 1985 Notice the circled comments Free from Usabilityl nstitute com Get a complimentary usability review now Programs and the Complexity of Machines How Bad Is It SIMAX VIDEO SIGNMAKER Jack Belis 2013 Green Street 3F Philadelphia PA 19150 69 95 48K disk Reun wed bv Brad Mershatw Simax is an outstanding business display program for ehe Amari in fact _Antic used Simaa for our booth display at the Consumer Etectrorcs Show in June and the presentation was a renl bit Smax makes quick and casy 10 create colorful eye catching signs and ae a sa gl samp nrosessocal results Almost all features can be selected with a singe time The graphics ellie wees Anal mode 16 permitting very nice effects ona high resolurton 80x 152 scien Animation effects are created by swapping ny of the nine screcn colons in a choice of paterns and thm ing Your finished display can be transferred to videotape November 7985 Slax msin menu options arm Edit Load Sereen Save Screen Delete Seen and tun show Each of these options aler brie where Re Specific work is done THE gram is selfprompting and will not ee pie Aa Pacare aa a pas semn es with i built in graphics editor Simax also has a built in clock which will display the time in a
106. ing the burden of remembering to perform additional steps such as clicking a Save button In computer terms Save should be the default When any work is over written undone or erased you expect to be forewarned Good programs don t replace one file with another without confirming your intentions You expect to have most of your work retained after the power is interrupted In fourteen years I ve only seen a few methods of programmatic backup In other words there are not many options nor a great deal of complexity here So there s no excuse for omitting at least the option of timed automatic backup You should be ableto accomplish every task and entry with the fewest possible keystrokes Users are not stupid they know when they are being forced to repeat something that they already told the computer One of my favorite examples of wasted keystrokes is entering dates I ve seen dozens of methods for having users enter dates some of the more recent ones using very handy point and click calendars with every feature in the world These are nice and friendly but slow But I ve only seen one or two programs that emphasized minimizing the required keystrokes and none of them took the concept to its ultimate I will now present you with the universal ultimate logic for soliciting a date from user while respecting the user s right to enter the fewest possible keys in the following examples today s date is January 12 1996
107. ing untrained users as they try to learn and use your system to find out if it s actually possible to make it work Ideally you should not help them but just watch and take notes Of course the assumption is that you will actually modify your system based on what you see You will won t you What can you do Development Managers start out small if you must but learn how people struggle with your systems and do something about it When contracts are negotiated ask to build in at least one or two rounds of feedback and design improvement 17 Build Error Message Details Right into the Program One system that I worked on had about a thousand error messages listed in the appendices of its 21 books along with the causes and resolutions All of this information should be directly reported on the screen rather than making the user seek out the full story in the literature Here s an example of a typical error message that the user would see on the screen Problem 285 Batch can t be processed response file exists The user would then read a more detailed explanation in the back of the user guide or just call support Instead it could go right on the screen like this Problem 265 Batch can t be processed response file exists Comments The existence of a response file for the batch indicates that you probably processed the batch already It didn t complete the entire process which would delete the response file This might h
108. into any neat category other than just plain goofy design One of my favorite examples is in a graphics program where you can put arrowheads on lines The dialog that enables you to set the arrowheads shows a left facing arrowhead and a right facing arrowhead ARROWHEAD SELECTION Start Arrowhead End Arrowhead 4 To get a left facing arrowhead you just click on that icon But no amount of clicking works for the right facing one I ve shown it to many people who have been unable to divine the mysterious method Can you guess the trick I came upon this dilemma in my early days with Windows Perhaps now it s an easy solve The answer is that you must click with the right mouse button After you learn the technique it might seem childishly simple but the real design flaw isn t the simple action it s the lack of instructions Notice there s no help button or instructions on the screen Another strange one comes from a program that uses your sound board to announce out loud any text string that you copy to the clipboard This was the very first thing I wanted to do so to me this was a major function of the program not an obscure detail I looked all over the program s menus trying to find this fundamental procedure to no avail Any guesses You had to run the program minimize it to an icon and after copying some text to the clipboard right click on the minimized icon I don t necessarily insist that either of these two met
109. isys I offer Funny Story Number Two I have no idea if it s true but fortunately that s not a criteria for a good story As the story goes Unisys had been supplying high speed line printers for all you youngsters this is a printer that prints a line at a time with mechanical impact wheels to a state transportation authority who used them to print drivers registration cards At one point they improved the design of Free from Usability nstitute com Get a complimentary usability review now 6 PC Hardware 66 the printers eliminating an annoying waviness to the lines of printed letters Subsequently the state police were upset because prior to the improvement it had been easy to distinguish counterfeit cards the print on counterfeits was perfectly straight This is believed to be the origin of the hackneyed computer saying That s not a bug that s a feature I m not crying sour grapes over the failure of the Unisys modular computer After all I m part of the user community that has voted with my dollars for the system we have today with its inconvenient screw in boards from a thousand different manufacturers But a modular solution is still worth pursuing The only thing I can imagine if the industry won t create a new plug together standard is for someone to make boxes that would individually accommodate the add on boards and drives we use today The boxes would snap together as a tower wit
110. it And it provides a starting point Let s get fancy and call it a baseline 2 Bad Books or Help Online or not a bad book is better than none if only for moral support At least someone can say they tried Bad books repeat what is on the screen and make the information accessible only in the order of the system with the same words the program s authors use Here s a nice example of a circular reference in of all things the online help from a Help authoring tool Try to figure out what a hidden link is characters ose RoboHELP Insert Index of all Topics in Document s acLpo El OE C _MYDATA TIMESRD HELP GLOSSARY ae Identifies t name of tl Insert Index Options MV Include Popup Topics Help MV Sorted by Topic ID MV Make Hidden Links Make Hidden Links Check this box if you would like the link to be created as a hidden link Let me see if I understand this now I should check the Make Hidden Links option if I want to create hidden links Wow thanks What you may wonder is a hidden link One that is not underlined as links generally are Another example using a word protesting er I mean word processing program I searched the literature for information on hotkeys function keys keyboard and accelerator keys But the documentation only listed it under the term shortcut keys Well excuuuuuuuse me Or consider another word processor where I
111. itute com Get a complimentary usability review now 4 The User Interface Hit Any Key to Continue 46 7 Display from the General to the Specific When several functions are provided on a dialog box or screen present the most general ones toward the top and left A classic example of violating this rule is the standard dialog box that Windows provides for opening files shown below Directories ci winword sue i Sue C newsletr Drives ingnov11 doc c ms dos 5 List Files of Type Word Documents doc I Bead Only In this dialog box the most general selection the one for choosing the disk drive has been placed inappropriately below the other three In this example the problem might not seem too important but as you find yourself using less familiar functions the design error becomes more apparent Here s the same dialog redesigned a little List Files of Type Word Documents doc l Drives c msdos 5 j Directories c winword sue Notice the line between List Files of Type and the other controls this highlights the fact that this control combines with the other three as a whole Free from Usabilityl nstitute com Get a complimentary usability review now 4 The User Interface Hit Any Key to Continue 47 I recall seeing a very experienced user misplace all of his template macros in Word We ultimately determined that the accident was encouraged because the selection for the ran
112. l ALL ALL ALL functions Mouse Methods Fancy Keystrokes and Instructions on Menus 37 2 Use Verbose Phrasing 39 3 Use Perfectly Accurate Words 40 4 Be Explicit Not Implicit 41 5 Put All Orders on Menus Alpha Functional Learning Date 44 6 Provide a Master Menu Integrating All features 45 7 Display from the General to the Specific 46 8 Always Let Users Navigate by Descriptive Values Not Internal Codes 47 9 Use Buttons as an Additional Option Not an Alternative to Menus49 10 Put Functions Where Users Will Look for Them 49 11 Always Show the Level at Which Options Are Invoked 50 12 Use Dynamic Communication Not Dynamic Menus and Dialogs 50 13 Always Provide Visual Cues 51 14 Default to Saving Work 52 15 Tune for Learning Not Just Cruising Speed 52 16 Usability Testing 53 17 Build Error Message Details Right into the Program 53 18 When the User Does Not Have Control Announce it Prominently 54 19 Use Color to Speed Recognition and Sound for Feedback 54 Some Not So Easy Recommendations 54 Microscope Detailed View of Internal Data 55 Trace Detailed View of Program Commands 56 Layer Testing Diagnostics 57 Mixing Metaphors 57 5 The Nine Levels of Help 59 1 None 59 2 Bad Books or Help 59 3 Good Books 60 4 Good Books Online Context Sensitive Interactive 60 5 Better Books 60 6 Good Programming 60 7 User Sensitive Help 61 8 User Contributory Help 61 9 Wizards Step Through Dial
113. ls Option View dialog displays an item called Style Area Width but not in Page Layout view In this case the item disappears leaving the user disoriented until you start poking around to find out why it has changed In this example perhaps the reason seems obvious at other times it might not be Free from Usabilityl nstitute com Get a complimentary usability review now 4 The User Interface Hit Any Key to Continue 51 In all cases it would be better if the appearance of the menus and items did not change but rather behave differently if they must perhaps displaying a message as shown below That s what friendliness is all about communicating Window Nonprinting Characters X Status Bar Tab Characters X Horizontal Scroll Bar Spaces X Vertical Scroll Bg Reragraph Marks Setting Style Area Width To set and view the Style Area change to Normal view by selecting View Normal Another example is in Microsoft Mail where the View New Messages item disappears from the menus when you are not viewing a particular folder the Inbox Ordinarily most programmers disable an option such as this which they deem inappropriate based on context Even disabling it represents a failure to communicate with the user Instead the option should be there and if clicked on from a completely inappropriate point should bring up a message explaining why it has been disabled Perhaps in a few more years programs will routinely take yo
114. m to which he remarked that the system needed work but surely there weren t 20 I counted them and was stuck at 19 until I found one that was on a password request and instructed users to Enter EN to END That s right to get out you would type E N followed by the ENTER key This expectation of consistency is a great thing when everything is designed well and working smoothly But it means that any serious departures from a consistent interface can become a serious Achilles heel A postscript to the previous anecdote When I recommended to the main programmer that all menus end with Z irrespective of how many items they had I was pleasantly surprised to learn that he implemented it in the next release of the software But when I looked at the new system I was disappointed to find the same old menus I asked the programmer why he didn t do it He told me he did make them all exit when the user presses Z he just didn t display the letter Z on the menus Which brings us to the next subject There Are Very Few User Interface Designers Every day thousands of programming jobs are advertised in newspapers but there is virtually no mention ever made of program interface design as a skill let alone a job classification Only the largest companies have someone whose sole job it is to design the human engineering of the programs What can you do IS Managers Make user interface design a job category even if it s part
115. m to turn the interface into a puzzle instead of a tool The balloon help that tells you what a button does shown below is a helpful antidote but not a cure Solution supply a menu driven equivalent for every button Microsoft Y File Edit View Insert Format MS Word does a great job of making buttons customizable and completely configurable but I think the best implementation of them would require a substantial enhancement to Windows itself imagine if every menu function had the relevant button graphic right on the menu drop down item and you could drag it onto the toolbar from the menu The system could even prompt you to do it automatically after sensing that you have used a function repetitiously Here s a little productivity tip for those of you who do word processing I promise this will be the only one Notice the buttons I ve added to the menu bar above The fourth from the left opens the most recent file you worked on the small text says 1 and the fifth saves your work and closes the file without confirmation in one action The likeness of the diskette in the second button is predominantly red to suggest caution These are two of the most repeated functions you do and each of these buttons saves a couple of actions 10 Put Functions Where Users Will Look for Them Put functions where users will look for them not where they are most relevant in the eyes of the programmer For instance as we previously pointed out in MS
116. me software makers are keenly aware of this as evidenced by the Quicken slogan I don t do manuals mentioned in Chapter 2 And recent press coverage has pointed to an awareness of this but the ripple is slow to reach the shores of Userdom In an interview a guy from Microsoft was asked if computerized interactive video tutorials were the next great step in the evolution of computer books He wisely pointed out that his company is trying instead to make their systems more discoverable Hallelujah Documentation is a stop gap measure and extremely valuable as a checklist for the next round of software enhancement Programmers should take everything in the documentation and find a way to put it in the user interface or the processes of the program Let s look at some examples gt Perpetual chores should be changed into pre built functionality For example when you are instructed to always set up a user named Administrator the program should do this for you gt Documented workarounds and contrivances should be changed into menu supported features For example with a notoriously lambasted publishing program to make white text on a black background you had to make a black line above the text and then adjust the thickness of the line and set its vertical alignment to a negative number The manual had a great formula to establish the alignment value approximately one half the sum of the ruling line overall height plus the font si
117. mentary usability review now 4 The User Interface Hit Any Key to Continue 40 gt Change Size of Selection Frame gt Crop Window Size to Current Selection This is an admittedly difficult set of functions to describe well in only a few words But the awkwardness of the terse names is highlighted by the fact that it was hard for me to remember which was which among the first two items even after I figured out what they do Notice in the verbose suggestions that nouns have been added identifying what the object of the action is Even on buttons there s no longer any reason to be stingy with words Spell out exactly what the button does The following figure shows two buttons one terse one verbose when formatting pictures in Word Reset to 100 Scale No Crop The first button requires you to guess whether the picture will be reset to the previous state or its original state The second leaves no doubt 3 Use Perfectly Accurate Words I went up in a friend s small plane one clear sunny day for a little jaunt around the neighborhood We flew into a nearby uncontrolled airport which means there is no tower operator My friend checked the gauges the situation on the ground and in the air and everything looked A OK for landing When we descended and got about 200 feet from the ground he acted a little flustered We landed without a hitch but it turns out that the ground came up on him about 500 feet too soon because he mom
118. mphasizing instead its self serving love of technology As nice as all of the new features and speed are they have pushed well into the realm of diminishing returns certainly when taken in the context of the productivity losses accounted for by computer problems It is my personal belief that somewhere around 1993 desktop PCs exceeded the speed necessary to match any manual process the way it was done before computers Having been involved with retail point of sale systems I know that there was a time when our systems were slower than the old way now the machine is always waiting for you I m not against faster and better features I just want to see an equal priority placed on achieving 100 productivity Now that we have the world s most powerful inexpensive cars with separately sold engines what are we going to do Let me tell you But first a commercial announcement About Me My First Computer Idea I ve used computers since 1982 At that time I had an idea for a program bought a cheap computer and thought I d make the necessary program and sell it Although I didn t have any expectations about how long it would take me to make the program I had no experience in programming I suppose I thought it might be several months Two years later the program was ready to sell In the interim I learned just how far computers had come in a few short years and just how far they still had to go if they were to fulfill the expectations
119. munication role now highlights the significance of the words being used Sparse words wrong words and indirect words are a blight on the user interface landscape Fortunately the cost of correcting these problems is low Programs that have a good user interface are said to be user friendly That is they are easy to learn and use When using a particularly unfriendly program one day a co worker and I mused if this particular product s methods might more appropriately be dubbed a user in your face Elements of the User Interface There s some debate these days over whether the user interface includes the physical environment training situation work culture and so on but that s a didactic discussion for people who have too much time on their hands From a program design point of view the user interface consists of these ingredients gt The words and images on the screen The answers that you type on the keyboard The use of the mouse and the keys on the keyboard The sounds that the computer or other devices make VV V WV The way that the computer responds when you do things The rest of this chapter will discuss how these elements are used or misused The Machine Makes You a Machine A basic tenet of user interface design is that programs must behave very consistently that shouldn t come as a surprise What was a surprise to me however was how quickly users become trained to do what the Free from Usabilityl nstitute com
120. n Summaries This chapter summarizes the various recommendations made throughout the book grouped by audience so everyone knows what they must do So What Are You Going to Do About It I am the problem Repeat that a few times while I explain It s been fifteen years since the computer revolution Without question there have been many great achievements and remarkable improvements in the technology But the rate of progress in user friendliness is not fast enough for me If you ve made it this far in Computers Stink it s probably not fast enough for you either What can you do It is a complex problem that makes many of us feel powerless even when we are the programmers project leaders or purchasers we don t have enough time we can t spend enough money we can t change the hardware companies we can t tell the big software houses what to do we re not the decision makers How can we solve any of the problems I won t deny that anyone is often justified in their sense of frustration or helplessness But at a certain point we must all say to ourselves They are us We are them We are all responsible to some degree or it wouldn t have gotten this bad There is no magic fence between us and them When I accept deadlines that predestine a product for poor quality I am the problem When I buy bad software and accept it without objection I am the problem When I don t educate those around me about
121. n optimist or you experienced your worst computer nightmares so long ago that they are now fond memories perhaps you d prefer the maxim What doesn t kill you makes you stronger I handled some support calls at one job My favorite call was one where we eventually tracked the problem down to the big red power switch on the side of the computer It was in the off position Honest A somewhat more interesting situation was on site at a Manhattan drycleaner Often our customers would report just plain erratic performance and there was not much we could do to diagnose it Attempts at serious power monitoring devices were not too successful One time while training the customer at this Manhattan store before our very eyes garbage characters streamed across the terminal monitor It happened a few times before the store owner realized that it occurred whenever the old fashioned cash register did its quaint kerrrrr ching as the cash drawer popped open The motor in the register was generating interference that got through to the computer terminals Finally we had some reproducible eyewitness corroboration of corrupted data due to electrical power problems Knowledgebases Your only protection against being caught in an infinite loop of troubleshooting problems is to keep a better database of problems and solutions than everyone else Update it religiously and publicize it to all users The goal is to make sure that no mistake consumes
122. nager administrator clerk and integration programmer This still achieves my goal of giving each user an amount that they can read in a sitting By segregating the key information in short read throughs and providing all information online technical writers can provide the best readable documentation and get the best value for the printing dollar Videos and Other Passive Learning Tools With large complex systems users must exert a tremendous amount of effort to learn all of the necessary information Video training computer based training and interactive multimedia can all play a role in this transfer of knowledge The important difference between these tools and their primary alternatives books and person to person training is that multimedia does not require the user to do as much work the demand on the user shifts from active to passive Consider the imaging system that I helped document with its 21 books of 100 200 pages each Is it any wonder that no administrator ever became a bonafide trouble shooter It took too much work too much active Free from Usabilityl nstitute com Get a complimentary usability review now 7 Documentation One Step Forward Two Steps Back 78 effort Of course it was a UNIX system so there were also some fatalities before the learning process ever had a chance I wish I could tell you that I ve had some good experiences with video or multimedia substitutes for text documentation Unfortunatel
123. neanennns 260 Putting it all together e ccensneneen cnsenseensnnennvirnensonsecees 261 If you re desinging documentation don t fool yourself into thinking that proofreading makes it effectuve It only makes you feel better about documentation whose value you haven t proven Usability testing of a book is inseparable from that of the computer program itself It consists of having a new user try to get results out of the system while you watch them You watch how they use the documentation if at all and whether it works What do they read What do they look for and not find What do they do right or wrong after reading What do they have trouble understanding I had an editor at one company who was an expert at traditional proofreading and spent untold hours proofing my work If those hours were instead spent trying to use the system about which I wrote using my books as a guide perhaps our entire department wouldn t have been laid off What can you do Writers Ask your boss if your department can devote as many labor dollars proving your books as proofing them Stomp your feet Yell and scream Say you re mad as hell and you re not going to take it any more Reason 4 Cookbooks Without Troubleshooting Another serious problem is the general goal of much computer documentation As programs have become more and more friendly there is less need for routine instruction and more need for troubleshooting inform
124. not go half a day without some sort of unnecessary frustration problem or time loss That s the bad news that I want to turn around The printer whose program crashed was using an estimating program that he had created himself and he probably deserves a lot of credit for the accomplishment In fact he gave me the first part of the pricing information in a matter of seconds just before the program had a problem This put him head and shoulders above the other printers I called who all seemed to act as if obtaining a price estimate required conjuring spirits So his experience was very typical computers both elevate his business and make it more frustrating Go figure This book describes why computer programs are so difficult to use why more time is often lost than gained and what can be done about it The concepts discussed in this book apply to all software and hardware and the perplexing array of technologies and activities that intertwine the two Take your own informal survey of computer efficiency I did Ask the people you work with when the last time was that they wasted time with a computer problem Then ask them what percentage of time they think they lose to those problems I routinely get responses of yesterday and 10 20 percent Is This Book For You Most of the recommendations in this book are for programmers and their bosses But you will benefit from this book if you use or buy programs or manage people who
125. nterface startup concepts non intuitive and incomplete things and problems Documentation depart ment leaders revolutionize your direction Stop documenting everyt hing Isolate and target the genuinely valuable issues Reason 2 Books Are Often Written From Specs If you ve ever read a computer book and doubted whether the writer ever used the program your suspicion might have been right With business software there s a 50 50 chance that the words were written without ever using the feature in question perhaps without ever using any part of the program That s because some books are written from specs Specifications are the documents that tell the programmer what she must make the program do Companies often use three kinds of specs requirements specs from the marketing department describe the features that they would like to sell functional specs from the engineering department establish which of those functions will be implemented and how and then the programmers might respond with a design spec describing in detail how they expect to program the functions With programs from the 60 s and 70 s where there was very little instruction on the screen even the sugar coated information in the specs was potentially valuable to users so writing from specs was reasonable With today s programs where most of the spec information is on the screen writing from specs creates useless books that simply repeat the words already
126. o more volumes or make the systems themselves transfer the knowledge by using verbose menus more wizards and many of the other techniques I ve covered What Should Be in a Read Through The most important information in a read through is a conceptual introduction to your system information that is key to understanding the way the system is meant to be used often called theory of operation Alternatively you might say that this section describes how your business processes map to the computer system A read through also should describe the major features of the system and generalizations about their use particularly concepts that might be counter intuitive Remember the whole point is that this book can be read in a sitting Another type of information that is important to put in front of all users rather than wait for them to seek it out has to do with technique For instance I did a lot of sound editing recently It took me a long time to realize that the efficiency of the cut and paste process was dramatically affected by the zoom level how many words of sound you see on the screen at once Although there is certainly no requirement that you zoom to a specific level the experienced user eventually establishes a technique of adjusting the zoom level so that selections can be made accurately and with little wasted effort Although this type of information is sometimes presented under the offensive term tips and tricks
127. ocumentation is right on the screen so programmers must learn to be good communicators they must pay attention to matters traditionally the province of technical writers If you re a programmer you might want to skip directly to Chapter 4 The User Interface Hit Any Key to Continue The world will be a better place In fact that chapter is so important that P 11 paraphrase its most urgent recommendations right here gt Put all all all all functions on menus this includes typical dialog supported functions mouse methods fancy keystrokes and points of instruction Failure to put all functions on menus is the number one mistake of user interface design The menu system is not an option it is the primary improvement that has popularized software and the limiting factor in learning a system gt Use verbose phrasing Spell everything out Brevity is a virtue when you are reducing a complex paragraph to a simple one not when you strip off valuable words from already terse instructions gt Use perfectly accurate words Computers impose unyielding requirements on users so make sure your words give them every chance of understanding exactly what they need to know gt Be explicit not implicit Strive to use wording that requires the least amount of interpretation gt Display from the general to the specific Put the most general information or functions in the top and left portions of dialogs gt Always let users work wi
128. ogs 62 Summary 63 6 PC Hardware 65 Modular Hardware 65 Write It Down 67 The Computer as a Household Appliance 69 Free from Usabilityl nstitute com Get a complimentary usability review now 7 Documentation One Step Forward Two Steps Back 71 Why Documentation Stinks 71 Reason 1 Why Computer Books Stink Insufficient Emphasis on Valuable Information 71 Reason 2 Books Are Often Written From Specs 73 Reason 3 Companies Expend Resources on Superficial Editing Not Usability Testing 73 Reason 4 Cookbooks Without Troubleshooting 74 Reason 5 Failing to Roll the Books Back into the Product 75 To Print or Not to Print 75 What is the Real Issue 75 Strengths of Paper and Electronic Documentation 76 Put All of the Information Online 76 Print a Short Read Through Guide 76 What Should Be in a Read Through 77 Videos and Other Passive Learning Tools 77 8 Inside Computer Programs Source Code 79 Make Descriptive Terminology a User Option 79 Provide Menu Support For Program Syntax 80 9 Training 83 10 Support and Troubleshooting 84 Knowledgebases 84 A Primer on Technical Troubleshooting 84 Questions to Ask About Support 86 11 Action Summaries 87 So What Are You Going to Do About It 87 Actions for Hands Off Executives 87 Actions for Purchasers of Software 88 Actions for All Users 88 Actions for Programmers 88 Actions for Development Managers 89 Actions for Tech Writers 90 Index 91 Free from Usability nstitute c
129. om Get a complimentary usability review now 1 Introduction Preface I ve got to stop writing this book But every day I come home from work with more examples of how much time is being wasted with stupid avoidable computer problems There seems to be no end To make this book I ve taken every example and asked myself How could computer software be improved to make the problem go away I m convinced that a significant portion of the answers are now contained in the following pages so I will force myself to stop and leave the results in your hands Just remember as you read I m not opinionated I m right Those who agree with us may not be right but we admire their astuteness Cullen Hightower Free from Usabilityl nstitute com Get a complimentary usability review now 1 Introduction 7 1 Introduction I called a professional printer to get an estimate on producing the book you are reading now His estimating software crashed as he was entering the job information yes really He said he d call me back Productivity That was the promise right And what a payoff we got I can now operate the equivalent of a publishing house from my home office With programs like Ventura Publisher or Macromedia Director I can learn in weeks what used to take a lifetime apprenticeship and get results with a fraction of the time and money that used to be required That s the good news But the average computer user does
130. onths to determine that the manuals they give you with the computer told you only the most superficial elements of the machine s tricks A few more months passed before I found the secret insiders documentation this stuff was probably sold on newsstands in California but in Philadelphia it was like a deep dark secret After months of evenings I had cracked most of the secret codes and gotten the machine to do what I needed Free from Usability nstitute com Get a complimentary usability review now Programs and the Complexity of Machines How Bad Is It 4 Along the way I learned something called machine language or assembler code These are the most expert levels of computer programming reserved only for genuine propeller heads but the advertised strengths of the computer are possible only by using machine language This inconvenient fact is conveniently omitted from the glossy advertising I particularly remember one night when I stayed up till about 4 AM trying to get letters to scroll smoothly across the top of the screen A coarse bumpy scroll was built into the machine but smooth scrolling required something akin to decoding the Rosetta Stone When I finally got it I thought it was the happiest day of my life It was the hardest problem I had solved since Rubik s Cube Machine language the way I was learning to do it was like building a sand castle with a pair of tweezers in the dark And believe me I was in th
131. orld the most important target of the ideas in this book is business systems not mass market software business systems like the one referred to in the following little blurb in the Philadelphia Inquirer recently Philadelphia Online To Our Readers E We would like to apologize to Inquirer readers who received copies af yesterday s paper thal did net contain the financial tables Computer problems prevented us from publishing Ihe stack fables in about 45 percent of ihe papers distributed yesterday To those who dic not get the tables we re very sorry and believe we have fixed the problem Mass market software is seeing not just rapid improvement but an increase in the rate of improvement Fierce competition and other factors those that represent what s good about the PC world are improving this category at a pace far beyond my meager capacity to impact But the rest of the software world not just business software but home made programs student work chaotic network software and arcane operating systems comprise a huge portion of the day to day use of computers Unfortunately these categories are getting little or none of the warm breezes of progress that the mass market is experiencing I visited my in laws this weekend They recently upgraded their computer to include a CD ROM and sound board but couldn t get a golf game to work Little did they realize they didn t have the slightest chance of getting it to work bec
132. ortcomings of your present tools I once heard this put another way you can get used to hanging if you hang long enough What I m worried about is that they will continue to stink Enough Let s fix it The point of the little story about the Certifier of Intelligence was this It s not enough to create and wield power It must produce more benefit than harm Free from Usabilityl nstitute com Get a complimentary usability review now 2 A Computer User s Bill of Rights 1 2 A Computer User s Bill of Rights You shouldn t haveto reada manual certainly not a huge one For large business systems certainly manuals might be unavoidable But documentation is not a substitute for making the user interface do most of the work It s true that many of today s programs replace what was once a lifelong apprenticeship with what is now a 100 program The training required to eventually equal the skill of the trained artisan might still take a considerable investment of time and energy but good programs make it possible to get results with a minimum of effort I recall reading in a recent book about the Internet that it takes a certain seriousness of effort to jump the first few days hurdles of navigating the net because all programs must choose between power and friendliness That s nonsense it s the same old excuse we ve been hearing forever One software house after another is proving this false Take Intuit for instance whos
133. ote April 5 2003 MS Word for XP still hasn t fixed this Despite a newer dialog that provides more features the abbreviated codes are still there A prominent use of internal codes that causes lost time every hour of every day in my office is DOS s drive letters These are internal codes representing our shared network hard disk drive volumes such as F G and so on These letters are masquerading as helpful abbreviations but the net result finally a decent pun is that whenever you want to tell someone where to find something on the network you have to go through a little hide and seek game with each other The solution is simple the primary identifier by which the interface should refer to these volumes must be an explicit descriptive phrase e g Accounting Design not an implicit internal code Another state of the art failure that wastes inestimable hours is Internet addressing Some day obnoxious internal codes such as http www whitehouse gov will be replaced by the descriptive phrases that they ultimately represent White House US President and so on with synonyms equally accessible in a lookup list The capability to build this type of functionality into the Internet is much simpler than the technology achieved thus far In fact this particular misapplication of internal codes instead of descriptive values is at the core all the recent bickering which is almost completely unnecessary over Internet domain names
134. our door thinking to myself What are the chances that someone will come in our shop to clean the window wells for probably the first time in the 70 year history of the building no don t be paranoid it says in big letters right on the can Holographic Film Do Not Expose To Light The next morning I was busy with some chores when I passed by the building engineers walking into our shop as I walked out Halfway down the hall my eyes bulged out and my neck stiffened What are they doing in our shop Yes less than 10 hours from the return of my trip the basement window wells of the Franklin Institute were being cleaned I m certain it was the first time ever and yes the can was already open the bright yellow Kodak label lying on the ground the three layers of tape ripped from around its tightly sealed top and the dark black paper peeled back As I told you expect the unexpected Months later I learned that much of the film ended up working quite well I don t know how much was lost The Invisible World Directory or Hiding Place One of the most repetitive problems with software is just finding your work The typical computer disk drive has hundreds sometimes thousands of directories With the DOS limitation of 8 letter filenames most organized folks create a deep hierarchy of cubbyholes in which to store their many projects The result is that the disk drive can become a huge hiding place despite its surprisingly com
135. pact size But programs and operating systems have made slow hit or miss progress at addressing this problem All applications utility programs and operating systems must take more responsibility for finding things Search features must not be treated as an afterthought or optional accessory Features which search or sort must work across all directories and disk drives What can you do 1 Create separate directories for all categories of data When in doubt about whether a direct ory should be a subdirectory or at the same level as the previous one make it at the same level 2 Store all of your creations in subdirectories under a directory named MYDATA or similar Name them by project purpose Don t store them with the relevant authoring programs as many programs encourage you to do 3 Store all of your programs in subdirectories under a directory named MYTOOLS or similar Free from Usabilityl nstitute com Get a complimentary usability review now 3 The Underlying Problems 23 By relegating all projects and tools to two subdirectories the highest level directory on your drive the root directory will be less cluttered which will make your directories easier to work with And it will be easier to identify what must be moved or copied when it is time to rebuild your system or move it to another machine or hard drive That day will surely come Distributed Processing A trend that is now only a few years old called distribut
136. product information It should contain your getting started information tutorials guides reference books and cards marketing info and troubleshooting Obtaining information costs everyone a huge amount of money failing to make it accessible is bad business If some of the information is sensitive protect it or the system to which it refers with passwords but don t solve the problem by minimizing its distribution Print a Short Read Through Guide The second part of my recommendation is to print an introductory book of up to 75 pages with the highest possible quality I suggest 75 pages as the maximum because that s the most that any reader is ever likely to read in a continuous effort even over the course of a few days This is based on my own surveying of computer users and my own experience I ve never found anyone who has read the greater part of any user guide Let me interrupt this discussion about good reading with a story about a good book A friend lent me a 1945 book about electronics called Elements of Radio which I liked because it presented very simple explanations I left it on a chair at the Franklin Institute where I worked and it disappeared There was a guy who worked at the Institute forever a typical museum fixture the sort of guy who checked the dumpster every day to rescue treasures that the museum officials were not sophisticated enough to value A few days after I told him of my lost book he came in
137. r design for those who don t know what they re doing as well as those who do Never presume what people will or won t know Build usability testing into your written and spoken expectations Watch untrained users try to cope with your program Don t ask or answer too many questions Just watch and take notes Put elaborate error messages and error recovery information right into the interface When the user does not have control announce it prominently Use color to speed recognition and sound for feedback Give users access to the most detailed level of their data to recover from corruption situations Make your program support configurable exhaustive logging with a menu driven on off switch Provide diagnostic tools for every layer of technology that you provide Don t limit users to a single design metaphor for Development Managers 1 Allocate a greater portion of time to active not passive code sharing Assign a librarian and build a catalog Conduct training sessions as often as you release projects to introduce reusable modules to all team members Keep a master list of all of the best features of all programs for use in all new programs Make a functional specification out of it or a working prototype Make user interface design a job category even if it s part time or contracted out Include in each project development timeline the following discrete task have an interface designer or technical writer
138. rt of your interrupt IRQ and port settings drive specs and every hardware add on for Programmers Ae p Pos Put all functions mouse methods fancy keystrokes and instructions on menus Use verbose phrasing Use perfectly accurate words Be explicit not implicit Put all orders on menus alpha functional learning date Free from Usabilityl nstitute com Get a complimentary usability review now Actions ena 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 89 Provide a master menu integrating all features Display from the general to the specific Always let users navigate by descriptive values not internal codes Use buttons as an additional option not an alternative to menus Put functions where users will look for them When in doubt ask users where to put functions put them in more than one place and make your menus customizable Always show the level at which options are invoked Use dynamic communication not dynamic menus and functions Don t change menu or dialog text labels or appearances based on context Instead make the interface inform the user of the situation Provide visual cues for every action the system takes Don t add extra steps that users must invoke in order to save their work Assume that all work is intended to be saved and prompt the user to confirm Stop rationalizing your design decisions based on actual use Allow in you
139. s a program friendly Friends talk to you They help you when you are in need they let you be you when it s not bad for you and they are forgiving These are also the qualities that make a program friendly Making software friendly is like any other human endeavor a matter of caring All the knowledge in the world is worthless if there is not someone who cares enough to make it a priority a mission a cornerstone of your trade in which you take pride and fight feverishly against compromises What can you do If you are a software buyer write friendliness criteria into your purchasing requirements Include my Bill of Rights Try to envision later spending huge amounts of time on the phone to the support department and then quantify penalties for unfriendly software design against support dollars When one is challenged to list what s wrong with computers there s one mega no brainer UNIX It s hard to say what UNIX epitomizes best the arrogance brilliance and power of technical dom or the sad inability to turn accomplishment into usable and lasting progress UNIX was best described as a user hostile system for serious propeller heads It is a beauty of a machine but hopelessly complex secretive and arcane Even the smartest computer dude takes about two years to learn enough to fix UNIX system problems UNIX has gotten a new lease on life because it is the mother tongue of the Internet and will linger for about
140. searched for right justified justified right aligned and aligned right but the authors only indexed it as flush right Bad very bad Free from Usability nstitute com Get a complimentary usability review now 5 The Nine Levels of Help 60 3 Good Books Good books answer the questions why and why not For example I installed a video capture board that s video not audio that came with a microphone input and speaker output connector but nowhere in the books did it explain what they were for or how to use them On this count genuine congratulations to Lotus Screencam s writers for actually including an explicit statement clarifying something that cannot be done They noted that you can t add captions to a movie that has already been recorded you must do so while recording or re record the movie Good books give you all of the information rather than trying to protect you protection is the job of passwords not documentation Good books have sections organized for reading in order like a textbook going from one concept to its siblings and offsprings When other orders are helpful they use indexes and tables to let you access the information in those orders 4 Good Books Online Context Sensitive Interactive Take the information in a good book and put it in a context sensitive help file and you ve got the next level Context sensitivity adds an element of convenience that makes electroni
141. sure it already is Hopefully my contribution can assure that this leadership position is fortified not undermined Free from Usabilityl nstitute com Get a complimentary usability review now Programs and the Complexity of Machines How Bad Is It 11 Programs and the Complexity of M achines How Bad Is It Have you ever seen a huge complicated machine like a newspaper printing press Such a behemoth can fill a city block and have a seemingly infinite tangle of parts hidden behind each other in layers 50 feet deep Imagine if the tens of thousands of lines of programming code in a computer program were turned into the gears motors and belts of such a machine What sort of effort would it take to build maintain and re engineer such a monster It s only because computer programs have so little physical weight that today s programmers can even pretend to maintain them with so little manpower When the programs work OK they bear little resemblance to the printing press When they break or need some work programs are more like mechanical nightmares with the pieces barely fitting together A man purchased a new car and after signing the paperwork was mortified when the salesman said Now go down the street to the Joe s Engine Store and buy an engine You mean there s no engine in this car he asked No the salesman explained This way you have the freedom to buy whatever engine you like and the competition of the
142. t act like a chameleon complete feedback and logging meaningful error messages and so on and so on Free from Usability nstitute com Get a complimentary usability review now 5 The Nine Levels of Help 61 7 User 8 User The following figure shows a good example of introductory help from Corel Capture a screen capture utility je Corel CAPTURE TM Copyright 1994 Corel Corporation All riahts reserved PrtSerm Capture Desktop Alt PrtScr Capture Current Window Alt Pause Capture Window Client Area Alt S hift F2 Capture Rectangular Area Captured bitmap is placed on the clipboard Press Cancel or run Corel CAPTURE again to remove Sensitive Help Context sensitive help is now commonplace User sensitive help is another evolutionary step waiting in the wings It adjusts the help based on username and can be controlled or disabled entirely at the option of the user so that experts don t threaten to shoot me Here s how it works When you start using the program it prompts you for your user name suggesting the most recent username if available For new users it defaults to display a lot of introductory help screens as some programs do now and offers you the option to disable those screens Unlike the way that most programs implement introductory help however user sensitive help would identify each user and adjust the level of help accordingly User sensitive help tracks which functions users have access
143. ted in order of implementation Program File Edit Accounts Prices Transactions All Functions in Order of Use All Functions Alphabetically Enter Prices Reprint Receipt Reconcile Cash Drawer Re s Notice above that each function is only listed once There is no need for synonyms since a new user will use each function in order to learn how to set up and use the system This will make the program much more learnable What can you do If you are a development manager have a programmer create a tool that registers newly developed independent functions and automatically adds them to all access indexes alphabetical date of development and learning sequence 6 Provide a Master Menu Integrating All features With many computer systems once the system is rolled out programmers add features as they see fit wherever they want often adding new independent sets of menus This is where the user friendliness of many systems starts to unravel Even if the additional features are appropriately accessed from their own independent menu a master menu for administrators should tie all of the parts together Often the rationale for making the new features separate is that they are not appropriate for most users But this protectionist logic is misplaced If the features are sensitive or dangerous in some way they should be protected by a password not by being isolated or inaccessible Free from Usabilityl nst
144. ten more years but will ultimately be bowled over by Microsoft This will happen because UNIX will Free from Usability nstitute com Get a complimentary usability review now 3 The Underlying Problems 25 continue to be more labor intensive than Microsoft s alternative plain and simple It was allowed to happen because of UNIX s failure to popularize a single format with a discoverable menu system I read recently that a common menu system was established but it is not widely marketed In terms of the problems that UNIX causes what was true about distributed processing is true about UNIX its problems are not unique or special just bigger UNIX in fact is the mother of distributed processing However unlike distributed processing which will eventually be cleaned and laundered nicely UNIX will take a more elegant approach it will pass away UNIX lovers would appreciate that they re always talking about elegance Windows 95 or Computers Still Stink The May 14 1996 issue of PC magazine starts off with this hook PC Labs Tests 170 Problem Solving Tools for Windows 95 and the Internet Excuuuuuse me one hundred and seventy That s not 170 problems it s 170 tools for solving problems If there are that many tools how many problems must there be This is typical for the computer industry The most successful software company spends countless millions to turn out a product that ignores many past lessons starts some
145. th descriptive values not internal codes No matter how easy this stuff is I don t suggest that it is common sense If it were it would already be common practice By some estimates businesses spend more on computer technology than on the natural gas automotive petrochemical steel and mining industries combined Now imagine how the results of your survey impact such a huge expenditure In a nutshell more technology in and of itself is not the answer But the entire computer industry loves to make you think it is That way they can foist on us all the latest techno miracle and by the time we realize it hasn t reduced the inefficiency they ll have another one The current flavor of the month is called Java the latest in an endless parade of programming languages which developers must learn again from a standing start According to the industry it cures cancer makes you live forever and gives you wealth beyond imagination According to me it s another distraction from the real goal following through on established practices to fully capitalize on the great technology that we already have Free from Usability nstitute com Get a complimentary usability review now 1 Introduction 9 Mass Market Improvements Haven t Filtered Down to Business Software The emphasis of this book is the PC world the platform that has commanded the greatest audience and therefore the greatest expenditure of time and money And within the PC w
146. th each new project As a result techniques and features that you came to appreciate from one program are often nowhere to be found in another program even from the same company Yesterday s program development tool of choice is unknown today But this is starting to change as a some programming tools become entrenched and are consistently providing results It s still a problem because of how much work it takes to make a program really friendly The Internet and its jumble of tools demonstrates this starting over phenomenon in painful detail One example is the arcane addressing scheme you must uSe to access a page http www mycompany com is a typical address Give me a break Within a few years you will only have to type in mycompany and the system will add the http www and com for you If it finds http www mycompany com it will display the page If it doesn t it will either append different prefixes or suffixes or simply search for it That s childishly simple code for today s programming experts Users shouldn t have to start over again with all that command line mumbo jumbo with every new technology Free from Usability nstitute com Get a complimentary usability review now 4 The User Interface Hit Any Key to Continue 32 Windows itself has been a big factor in providing a quick start to new projects with reusable components A tenet of today s much hyped object oriented programming is t
147. the IRQ Interrupt Request number I looked at the old board It had a set of switches called jumpers that were responsible for selecting the IRQ number They looked like this IRQ 0 o oe 0 o _oj The point here is that even though you might have no idea what an IRQ is you might guess from the picture above that my old board was set to IRQ 4 Stay with me now Free from Usabilityl nstitute com Get a complimentary usability review now 4 The User Interface Hit Any Key to Continue 43 My new board had a set of jumpers responsible for selecting the IRQ that looked like this This block of jumpers did double duty It also selected the IO input output port number Pins 1 through 4 select the IRQ 5 and 6 select the port This is an example of implicit labeling My old board had explicit labeling See the difference When computer programs are made many new functions are created and must be named In naming these functions I ve noticed that there almost always seems to be a choice to be made between a descriptive phrase that spells out the purpose of the function and a sort of shorthand nickname I think that programmers have felt an obligation to name their features rather than just describe them The nicknames are almost always a disservice Here are some examples gt An imaging system has two different functions for attaching editors comments to a scanned image They are Notes one per document and Annotations one
148. time contracted out or a portion of a current job The mandate of this job should be to make your systems comply with my Computer User s Bill of Rights Free from Usability nstitute com Get a complimentary usability review now 4 The User Interface Hit Any Key to Continue 30 Major Problems with User Interface Design Bellis s Law For every computer problem even hardware problems there is a corresponding improvement waiting to be done to the design of the softwareor user interface It is not your fault the problemis not user error Form Follows Function A common saying about design in general not just programming is that form follows function meaning that a thing becomes what it is because of what it does or how it is used But in my experience this is decidedly not true in many manufacturing instances and computer programming is no exception Bad design is often the result of designing things for the convenience of the manufacturing process rather than the end user In the example of the elevator s Open Door button earlier in this chapter the button is usually camouflaged among all of the other buttons because that s the easiest way to manufacture it A classic example of this problem is the location of the Print Preview feature in many programs It s on the File menu near Print instead of on the View menu In this case form has followed the convenience of the programmer instead of the function
149. tory of computers in the workplace is really the story of our complete and utter dependence on electronics The dependence becomes more complete as more organizations adopt what are called mission critical software This name is reserved for systems that totally replace an aspect of your business that you previously accomplished without a computer so that you don t even keep the paper alternative around for backup Mission critical systems are used in real time meaning that as the work is being done the computer is used You don t scribble some notes and say to your customer I ll get back to you What can you do Get down from the high wire every so often Prove that YOU determine when you get up and down not the technology Do backups and prove you can restore them Test your operation with various aspects of your computer not functioning If failure can happen you can bet it will happen at the worst time and it s not always just coincidental bad luck Many system failures occur at the worst times because those are the times when the system is stressed or tested the most Expect the unexpected A Beginner s Guide to Backup The following advice is primarily for users who are relatively new to computers If you ve never lost any work on a computer you are relatively new Computer backup has at it s core a very simple tenet realized a long time ago when thrill seekers would perform stunts on the wings of flying airplanes
150. u to the right context automatically What can you do Programmers Dont change menus and dialogs based on context Instead make the interface inform the user different ly 13 Always Provide Visual Cues Whenever a program does something it should tell the user or give some sort of visual feedback A particularly subtle example occurs in Microsoft Mail which uses a clever but secretive method on its main addressee look up list shown below Directory Global Address List Earle Paul Early Dan Eastburm Steve Eavenson Bettie Ebbert Will Eberhardt Mick Eberle Ebinger Eckholm Eckroth Here s what it does when you don t know a recipient s name and you try to get it from the list if you type the first few letters of the recipient s name it goes deeper into the list matching all of the letters you type not just the first one That s fairly conventional and apparent as you watch the screen But if you delay a few seconds before typing more letters it starts over again as if you were typing the first letter of their name again Free from Usability nstitute com Get a complimentary usability review now 4 The User Interface Hit Any Key to Continue 52 The concept is fine in fact I like it the problem is that until you decipher what it is doing you might go crazy because there is no indication on the screen when it times out and discards the letters you typed All they have to do to make it a great
151. ugh what would otherwise be a complex process An example is presented in Chapter 5 The Nine Levels of Help In earlier generations of programs such processes would have been lengthy written procedures in the documentation supported by many separate menu functions of a program But wizards demand the ultimate expenditure of effort from the programming staff After all of the basic functions have been built into a program a wizard puts them together adds elaborate instructions and even makes assumptions and suggestions about how those functions will be tied together The following quote possibly attributed to Peter Norton a prominent computer expert summarizes this unfortunate tradeoff for users Thereis always atradeoff between the convenience of the programmer andtheconvenience of theuser Another way of saying it is that good user interface design takes more work Wizards however are only one type of thorough program one suited to predictable procedures Free from Usabilityl nstitute com Get a complimentary usability review now Incomplete programs come in all flavors A common example is Microsoft s Windows 95 with its hundreds of options that are not represented on clickable dialogs but instead must be invoked by manually editing what are called registry entries Most business programs quickly develop a litany of supporting programs called fixes or utilities that are never fully incorporated into the system Still more programs h
152. unresolved and rises again to destroy the newly installed part Fromatroubleshooting perspective computers arean insidious subset of electronic appliances exacerbating the already disastrous natureof electronic troubleshooting with more levels of intricacy and variability In the sentence above it took me a long time to settle on the word disastrous after rejecting softer alternatives such as difficult troublesome and untenable Too strong a word Tell that to the folks at a nuclear power plant Or how about the many folks who insist that their automobiles accelerated without their having pressed the gas pedal I hate having electronic appliances fixed because I expect the repairman to replace what is essentially the entire electronic device At one point our house had a microwave oven that worked whenever it wanted a TV remote control that worked by appointment only an electronic air cleaner that worked sometimes and a furnace fan that worked incessantly when the mood struck it all electronic marvels Free from Usability nstitute com Get a complimentary usability review now 3 The Underlying Problems 21 What can you do Make sure at every step of the way that you are mastering the technology and not vice versa Strive to understand the layers of technology that have brought us to this level of performance or get people who do Walking the High Wire Computers areas fragile and vulnerable astheyare powerful The s
153. ved file and prompt you to choose between the two But improved wording would not require any additional programming and would go a long way toward clarifying the situation What can you do If you are a development manager have an interface designer or technical writer critique your Specifications or interfaces for wording and recommend more exact complet e wording as needed 4 Be Explicit Not Implicit Explicitness is different from accuracy The more explicit your wording is the less interpretation it requires For instance a graphics program has an option entitled Use stretchy lines This feature when activated enables the size of the selection box to be changed instead of having a fixed size A selection box lets you drag a rectangle around a portion of artwork A more explicit name would have been Changeable Selection Box Size Free from Usability nstitute com Get a complimentary usability review now 4 The User Interface Hit Any Key to Continue 42 I worked at one of the world s foremost science museums The exhibit coordinator one time told me and my boss in reference to a minor prototype that just wasn t developing into a usable exhibit Can it So we threw it out Some time later much to our surprise he asked us to resurrect it Our jaws dropped open and we looked at him dumbfounded as we explained that there was nothing to resurrect He meant can it in the theatrical sense where mo
154. vie films are put in tin cans for safe keeping Oops Often explicitness means expressing things directly in terms of the user interface For instance instead of presenting a message that might say If you insert a new index entry you will have to update all fields it should say If you insert a new index entry you will have to use Edit Update All Fields This is applicable to both documentation and the user interface Here s another example from a transportation system that managed railroad schedules and shipments It had a function to search for shipments based on date One dialog prompted for the relevant date with the expression As of lt date gt Does As of mean before or after An explicit phrasing would have asked for shipments before or after a certain date I installed a modem board recently for perhaps the thousandth time this time because my own board was returned to me after burning out and the manufacturer replaced it under warranty They didn t fix it nothing gets fixed anymore except cats My old one probably got zapped by an electrical storm but how can anyone know Nothing else got damaged and there s no mechanism to track the damage Anyway I removed my older slower modem which I was using while the newer faster one was being fixed and put in the new one It didn t do diddly I checked the port assignment which is ascertainable with software and it was OK Then I suspected
155. y my only experience with videos has been intro tapes that have been painfully basic to the point that the viewer was assumed to be a moron Almost every tape I ve seen starts off saying something like We won t try to teach you Windows on this tape and then proceeds to tell you one Windows technique after another Video is a tremendous tool and I can t wait until it starts being properly used I ve started to see some improvement with multimedia and other tutorial methods that require less active effort from users I m confident that this will be an improving trend that is only now beginning to gain momentum and acceptance as authors become more skilled with it The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do Thomas Jefferson Free from Usabilityl nstitute com Get a complimentary usability review now 8 Inside Computer Programs Source Code 79 8 Inside Computer Programs Source Code The following command was in a sample piece of program code I was reading about Can you guess what the ticks are set MyRandomValue the ticks Talk about buggy code If you re a programmer or shrewd logician perhaps you guessed from the word random that ticks refer to ticks of the clock actually the amount of time since the computer was turned on It could have been called TimeSinceStart or Seconds or TimeSecondsAccumulated anything but ticks would make the language mor
156. yboard choices refer to alternative language characters Microsoft fixed this minor transgression on Windows 95 Do you know why the conventional keyboard layout called QWERTY for the keys on the top left area has the keys in their current positions The first mechanical keyboards were quickly outpaced by the fast fingers of typists and they frequently jammed So Remington or Smith or Corona concocted the most inconvenient placement of the keys to slow people down Ingenious This means that if you are a Qwerty user you are using a layout designed to increase the strain you get from repetitive work If so raise your right hand and repeat after me I am doing it the inefficient way because that s the way it s always been done Of course you probably stick to Qwerty because it s too hard to learn a new way Windows by the way supports Dvorak pretty nicely at no additional cost Contact me for a free simple keyboard training game that will teach you the Dvorak layout in about 10 hours Or look for it on my web page which is currently http www netaxs com jbellis On a related topic here s a little puzzle What is the longest word that can be formed from the letters on any single row of your regular QWERTY keyboard layout Answer later in this chapter Most Development Starts Over Again from the Beginning Things have changed so much so quickly in the computer business that everything is usually started over again wi
157. ze How could any book with stuff like this ever expect to get regarded as good documentation when it s trying to do exactly the sort of job that a computer program should be doing That it took them so long to roll this documentation back into the product I m assuming they have literally cost an otherwise awesome product its market supremacy it was gobbled up by another company as it was swamped with bad reviews What can you do Writers diplomatically recommend to your engineers that certain procedures might be good candidates for code on the next go round Don t ask me for help on the diplomacy part To Print or Not to Print Is that really the question On my three most recent technical writing projects all of which documented Windows business software the question has arisen Which portion of the product information should be printed and which should be online This is a big issue these days in documentation as companies look for ways to cut costs In this section I will propose a strategy to provide the best product at the lowest cost What is the Real Issue The issue is not whether paper books are better than online help Both have their strengths But the higher cost of printing has forced many companies to transfer the burden of printing to the customer A hidden factor in this high cost is the practice that has developed over time of providing verbiage about every single feature of a program The backlash is the incr

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