The other side of the moon

Alex Limi has an excellent post on the overuse of checkboxes in Firefox's preferences screen. It reminded me of something Nat mentioned during his talk with Miguel de Icaza back at Linux Bangalore 2003 about Gnome. They mentioned several UI idioms including checkboxes and disabled menu items, but the gist of it was, every time you give the user a decision to make, you're making their lives harder. As the domain expert for this product, it's your job to pick sane defaults and not bother the user with these choices.

We took this to heart on the Ayttm project. At the time ayttm probably had over 200 user modifiable configuration options in the preferences screen, and each plugin could add its own. It was way past the point of violating one of our primary design requirements, that it should be easy enough for Colin's mum to use. We had a bit of a dilemma though. While our target audience was definitely non technical, we had a significant number of geeky early adopters who really wanted the ability to modify everything.

Over the next few days we stripped out almost every configurable option from the Preferences screen, however, we left them all in the config file on disk. Any user that really wanted to modify the options could edit the config file in their favourite text editor and make the changes themselves. This made everyone happier. Our technical users were happy that they didn't have to click through too many screens to change all their options, and our non technical users had a preferences screen where the most they'd have to do was enter their account information, and the type of smileys they wanted.

The Gnome Human Interface Guidelines cover a lot about designing intuitive interfaces, so go read that.

Just got a Nexus 4. Started it up, and tried to sign in to my gmail account. I have two-factor auth set up for extra security, and you'd expect a google device to work well with google auth, but here's a list of bugs I've found within minutes of opening the package.

1. It first asks you to sign in to your gmail account. Type in your username and password.
2. It then tells you you need to sign in on the web to continue, so it opens the browser for you to sign in.
3. Focus is on the username field, but there's no keyboard available. You need to tap on the username field (which already has focus) to bring up the keyboard. This is counter-intuitive.
4. Type in your username and password and submit. It then takes you to the 2FA page (at least in my case) where you enter your security code.
5. Again, tap on the field to bring up the keyboard. This field is a numeric field, but the keyboard starts out in alphabetic mode. This is probably a bug with all mobile devices, but you'd think that something this new would have fixed it.
6. Type in the code, and now try to click on the checkbox that says "Remember this device". Except the keyboard goes away and you now end up clicking a link that explains what 2FA is.
7. Ok, cool, I just want to go back and hit submit... except there's no back button on this browser. There's no toolbar that normally pops up at the bottom of the browser. No, this is a special browser that does not allow you to navigate through the browser history. FAIL.
8. The only way forward is to shut down the phone and then start it up again. Except at this point you start from scratch, including selecting your language.

A few other things I've noticed...

• The timezone by default appears to be UTC. You'd think that it'd localise this based on my location, which it knows and is configured to use.
• If a transient alert message pops up, and you try to tap on it, you'll actually tap on the item below the message.
• The icons are a bit too small for someone with normal sized fingers like me. It's easy to tap on the wrong item.
• The position of the power button and volume control buttons means that when you press the power button with your thumb, your forefinger will inadvertently hit the volume control (or vice-versa). This happens because of Newton's third law of motion. Google/LG engineers should know this since it's a 300 year old basic law of motion.
• You cannot move a widget from one screen to another by dragging it. You have to remove it from the old screen and then go through the process of adding and configuring it again for the new screen.
• When you select punctuation on the keyboard, entering an apostrophe should switch back to alphabetic mode. It doesn't.
• It just reboots at times.

Will post more as I use it.

We frequently see reports of website usage going up as load time goes down, or vice-versa. It seems logical. Users use a site much more if it's fast, and less if it's slow. However, consider the converse too. Is it possible that a site merely appears to be faster because users are using it more, and therefore have more of it cached? I've seen sites where the server-side cache-hit ratio is much higher when usage is high resulting in lower latency. At this point I haven't seen any data that can convince me one way or the other. Do you?