November 2003 Archive
Real Silly
Why does Mac RealOne Player — and for that matter Mac Windows Media Player — leave behind an icon every time I play a media clip? There’s no real reason for it. It never happened on Windows, and I never found myself wishing, “Oh why can’t RealOne Player download a shortcut of every media clip I play with it?” It would be like my Web browser leaving behind an icon for every page it downloaded. (Wow, that would be a lot of icons.) Okay, it’s not quite that bad, but it’s still real silly.
An Adapted View of Accident Causation for a Complex Web System
A few weeks back, a few other students and I gave a presentation on James Reason and his theories on human error. One of the topics we covered was accident causation in complex systems. In our presentation, I talked about the decisions and actions that led up to the King’s Cross Underground fire. Reason doesn’t apply much of his research directly to interactive systems so I thought it would be interesting to explore how the Web might fit into his framework for complex system disasters.
Reason’s framework is broken down into five planes. I’ll briefly describe each plane where necessary and then describe an event that could occur in each plane.
Fallible Decisions
In this step a high level decision maker such as the vice president of technology makes a fallible decision due to a conflict of interest between website production goals and quality assurance goals.
Event: an insufficient budget is given to the quality assurance of a particular website.
Line Management Deficiencies
Consequences of the fallible decision manifest themselves differently throughout the organization. The decision may have no effect on the design of the website, but it greatly affects quality assurance outcomes.
Event: quality assurance review begins on the website, but the insufficient budget results in a cut back on hours and time constraints on review. Because of these time constraints, every input on a particular form is not tested.
Psychological Precursors of Unsafe Acts
Psychological precursors don’t necessarily result from line management deficiencies or fallible decisions. They could arise from outside factors, but they’re mostly introduced directly by the human condition.
Event: time constraints cause stress and sleep loss, which further contribute to the potential of unsafe acts occurring.
Unsafe Acts
Unsafe acts are derived from a complex interaction of system influences and outside world. In the case of a website, the acts could be completed by users, website administrators or by the system itself. In the larger scheme, these are more than just unsafe acts. They’re unsafe acts committed in the presence of a potential hazard.
Event: a website end-user is purchasing a product and inputing information into the same form that was untested by quality assurance. This information is submitted and sent to the web server.
Inadequate Defenses
Few unsafe acts result in accidents, or in our case website errors. However, every aforementioned plane has windows of opportunity, which vary over time in their location and size. If this windows line up, the error opportunity is able to move through all planes and create an error.
Event: the web server is not able to accept information submitted and consequently generates an error.
Much of this framework seems pretty obvious, but it’s interesting to think about how very different interactive system errors can follow this same framework.
Money Usability
Making different denominations of coins different shapes and sizes is obvious. You keep them in your pocket, wallet or change purse, and they get all mixed up. When you want to find a five cent/pent coin, you unconsciously think to look for a certain shape and size. Coins of different shapes and sized make sense.
Being from the United States, I’m used to all of my paper money being all the same size. So after I arrived in England, I had to get used to dealing with notes that are all different sizes. Like coins, you keep notes in your pocket, wallet or purse, and they also get all mixed up.
Now there are a few important differences between how coins and notes get mixed up. Coins are relatively small things. You can hold a whole bunch of them in your hand and have a pretty good idea how much money you have by just looking and counting. Notes are relatively larger things that are usually stacked on top of each other. When you hold a bunch of them in your hand, you can’t know how much money you have by just looking and counting because there will inevitably be notes that are covered by other notes. When this happens, what I would normally do is shuffle the bills together and count them by glancing at the number in the corner of the bill. I can’t do this in England because the different denominations of notes are also different sizes. There might be a £5 note between two £20 notes, but I could easily miss it because it’s smaller. The only way for me to count all my notes is to remove each note from the top of the pile and put it on the bottom of the pile, thereby allowing me to see every note I’m holding.
I do realize that different size notes are great for the blind, but do they have any other user advantages over same size notes? If you’ve used both types of notes, which seems more usable to you?
Four Different Applications, Four Different Interfaces
Interfaces for changing views in four different Mac applications, all created by Apple:
iTunes
Network Utility
System Preferences
Update: I didn’t want to be the first one to say this, but doesn’t this strike anyone as a little odd? It this an example of blatant inconsistency, stubbornness or using the best interface for the job?
Personally, I really like the iTunes/iPhoto/10.3 Finder style interface for changing views with the view source on the left. Why can’t all Apple applications share this — or any other — interface?
Google Search by Title, Author or Subject
An excellent idea from Greg Storey:
I understand the plight of Google needing to make the search results relevant to what the user may be looking for. But instead of searching for an airbag why can’t a person search for the title airbag?
Why don’t search engines provide a way to search by title, author, or subject?
A few thoughts:
- Is search by subject already available?
- Google would have to come up with some killer algorithms in order to make search by title or author work well.
- Google probably wouldn’t want to clutter their homepage or add any decision points to their dead simple interface. One idea that would help to avoid these issues is to use Yahooesque search shortcuts. For example, to search for the title “unraveled,” you would type “title unraveled.”
Eighteen Months Without Spam
It’s been approximately eighteen months since I started avoiding spam. In that time, I’ve received only a handful of spam, all of it going to one of my spam email aliases. Here’s how I did it:
- I changed my personal email address to xxx@unraveled.com.
- I deleted my previous personal email address. (Yes, this means that anyone who had this email address would not be able to email me anymore unless they contacted me through other means. Using the Web, these other means are currently easy to find.)
- I created two new email aliases, yyy@unraveled.com and zzz@spammotel.com. (Spam Motel is an excellent service that forwards and manages email from your Spam Motel email alias to your personal email address.)
- I changed all of my active web accounts (Amazon, eBay, Buy.com) to use yyy@unraveled.com. I only gave yyy@unraveled.com to online retailers that I trusted would not share my email address with anyone. If I thought there was any chance that they would share my email address, I gave them yyy@unraveled.com or zzz@spammotel.com.
- When I wanted to include my email alias on any web page, I encoded it using the Hivelogic Enkoder so it would be protected from email-harvesting robots. (A big applause to Dan Benjamin for creating the Enkoder.)
- If I absolutely had to expose my email address on the Web, I used zzz@spammotel.com. (This has only happened once. On principle, I avoid services that require me to expose my email alias because I know it’s not necessary.)
- I only gave xxx@unraveled.com to people I trusted would not share my email address with anyone. If I thought there was any chance that they would share my email address, I gave them yyy@unraveled.com or zzz@spammotel.com.
- The idea behind yyy@unraveled.com and zzz@spammotel.com is that they are simply aliases for my personal email address. If I ever begin receiving a large amount of spam through these aliases, they can be changed without cutting off my contacts. (True personal contacts should have xxx@unraveled.com.)
That’s basically it. It might sound complicated, but after you follow it for a few months, it becomes second nature. If you do everything correctly, only your email aliases should ever receive spam, and your primary email alias should receive very little if encoded properly. Your personal email address — the one you give to people — should never receive spam. Of course, if a person gives your email address to spammers, this won’t do anything to stop spam. Then again, if you actually know anyone who who might give your email address to spammers, you may want to reconsider your friendship.
So where did the handful of spams come from? As far as I understand, the only possibility is that they came from spammers who physically browsed to unraveled and copied my email alias by hand. Nearly all spammers gather emails using email-harvesting robots. Apparently, some spammers still do it old school style.
Overall, this method has worked extremely well for me, but it does have a few drawbacks, namely that you have to manage which email your contacts have over time. For example, if you give your email alias to someone and they turn out to be someone who you want to stay in contact with, you have to make it a point to give them your personal email address. If you don’t, there’s a chance you may lose contact with them when you change your alias. Personally, I haven’t run into this because I haven’t had to change my alias yet, but your mileage may vary.
CSS Hacks
Peter-Paul Koch has written a nice article on the dangers of CSS hacks at Digital Web. When developing web sites and especially when working on unraveled, I’ve always firmly believed in staying away from CSS hacks whenever possible. For this reason, you’ll find no hacks here outside of the “safe” . CSS hacks help only in the short term and can very much hinder your site in the long term. So be safe out there kids, and “just say no to CSS hacks.”@import hack that Peter-Paul mentions
More Minimal
In my endless quest for minimal web design, I’ve implemented a sidebar hide/show feature with help from Paul Sowden’s very popular style switcher. IE/Win and Safari 1.1 are handling it well. Most other browsers including Mozilla (?) trip over it. Bug reports — or fixes if you’re so inclined — are appreciated.
Other changes include slightly recolored sidebar icons and a redesigned search interface. Thanks to John Gruber for his thoughts along the way.
Update: The sidebar hide/show widget should now work in Mozilla/Firebird, but you may have to dump your cache and then select either “Hide sidebar” or “Show sidebar.” Thanks to Oskar van Rijswijk for the fix.
London Underground Modern Art
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