Confessions of a User Experience Junkie

Yeah… so I haven’t posted in a while, huh? How I managed to be deprived of opportunities and/or motivation to write in this journal for the last six months or so is a long story, perhaps for another time. Suffice to say that my professional and personal lives are now (finally) back in a state that I actually feel like writing about UE stuff when I have time to, so this probably won’t be the last entry for another six months.

In other news… I got a new cellphone last month, and a new PowerBook a couple weeks ago. Bluetooth is officially the Coolest Geek Toy Ever, especially when Salling Clicker is involved. Thus far, there’s been a lot of noise in the academic HCI community over “attentive user interfaces” but not a lot of good real-world implementations; but now, I’ve quickly made the transition to living with a computer that (thanks to a wireless connection to the phone in my pocket) knows when I’m present and can react accordingly. In fact, I’m sometimes rather annoyed when other parts of my computing experience can’t be usefully presence-aware. (More on that another time.)

Anywho, today I threw together a Clicker script for iPhoto 4… going through hundreds of kitten photos to mark the cutest ones and delete the blurry ones is so much more comfortable when we can do it while relaxing on the couch instead of leaning over the keyboard. It’s a keypad script designed for the Sony Ericsson T608/T610/T616, but it should be easy to translate to other devices as well. Here it is in case you might find it useful.

Somebody noticed recently that the top result for a Google search on the letter “A” is www.apple.com, and then Rael noticed recently that the same is true for “O” and www.oreilly.com. From there, we get this interesting variation of a Zeitgeist:

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Some of these make pretty obvious sense (CNET, E! Online), some are tangential connections (the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation, the FSF) and some are just… odd (X for Netscape.com?). Either way, it’s an interesting snapshot of the ‘Net and some amusing weekend fun.

Okay, here’s a quick one for the Cocoa folks in the audience. We’ve got this nice convenient function (and several others based on it) for throwing up an alert panel:

NSRunAlertPanel(NSString *title, NSString *msg, NSString *defaultButton, NSString *alternateButton, NSString *otherButton, ...);

Back on NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP, the first argument was supposed to be a short title (one or two words) that would get put in the title bar, and the second was supposed to the main message in the window. Nowadays, the first argument should be the primary message, and the second should be (optional) additional informative text. But the API declarations and documention still refer to things the old way, so we still see lots of unhelpful alert panels like first one below. The most eye-catching part of the message is the command you just entered — you don’t need to have that repeated at you.

A good alert panel is like second picture. The eye-catching bold part tells you all you need to know in order to make a decision, and the secondary text provides extra information about the available options and their effects. (Also note the button titles: they correspond to actions. If the buttons are “Yes” and “No”, you have to carefully read the question, but if they’re “Save” and “Don’t Save”, you know what they will do.)

Even Apple forgets this guideline of theirs occasionally. (Actually, so have we at Omni. Gotta hunt down and fix all those old alert panels…)