Dana’s user experience blog

I’ve been thinking about why airlines have been on this blog so often of late, and I have come to the conclusion that it must be because I travel more often than average, and small things that might not be annoying if they only affected me once a year have been affecting me roughly once a month for the past four months.

This time it is an airline booking website that has frustrated me, and (worse) wasted my time (which is, after all, the only thing in life that is completely irreplaceable, once spent).  I tried to book a domestic flight on Air New Zealand, and thus went to the local New Zealand website.  I searched for a flight, found an appropriate flight time and price, and tried to book the flight using Airpoints dollars.  After being redirected through a log-in page, I was shown the following error message:

When I clicked the continue button, it took me to the Australian site, but it had not passed on the search or selections I had made on the New Zealand site, so I had to perform that search over again (and then when I did, the prices presented were quoted in New Zealand dollars and the Australian price did not show until I had selected a flight).  There is no way I could have known this in advance, because there is no standard for which regional variant of an airline website users should use (Qantas insists you use the website of the country where your flight will originate, Air New Zealand likes you to use the site where you live, for example), and nowhere on the Air New Zealand website does it actually say which variant to use.

There are two problems with this scenario:

1. I am not Australian, and there is no reason for my Airpoints membership to think I am.  The membership was created in New Zealand, and it has me registered as a New Zealand passport holder.  Now, I am not patriotic, and I don’t particularly care about a website calling me Australian, but the text is misleading and could actively confuse some users (or seriously annoy users more patriotic than me). It should read “Airpoints members resident in Australia…” (because the sole reason it thinks I am an Australian is my address.
2. The website did not (though this is a technically easy feat) pass on what I was trying to do — I landed on a search screen on the Australian web-site and had to begin the booking process again from the start.  At best this is annoying and a waste of my time, at worst it could have meant I missed out on fast-selling sale fares.

Nowhere on any of the Air New Zealand websites does it tell you that you must book through your local version if you want to use your Airpoints membership to provide your information, accumulate points, or spend your accumulated points, nor does it use the IP address of your computer (the number your computer identifies by on the internet) to redirect you before you begin searching.  This is an easy error to make, and the time cost in recovering from it is relatively high (the two minutes it might take to make a booking basically doubles, given that the user has to start over).  Air New Zealand has ample opportunities to prevent this “error” (I find it hard to call reasonable user behaviour an error), and also to make it easier for users to recover from the error without costing them a lot of time.

Errors are something that should be considered in the design of any interactive system — both how to make it harder for user to make them, and how to make it easier for user to recover when they do make them — and Air New Zealand has failed in this.  Are there any systems you make mistakes in all the time?  It might not be your fault.

One of the 23 things is to put a photo of your pet on the wiki. As mentioned on some of the other 23 things blogs, there is a slight flaw in this task: Some people don’t have pets, and some don’t want them, either. I do have pets, however, and so that part of the task was easy for me (see the masters of my universe below).

The rest of the task, though, from uploading the file to putting the photo on the wiki, was absolutely painful. I’m a reasonably well skilled computer scientist. I know HTML, and I have been editing webpages for quite some time. I don’t use a wiki often enough, however, to ever remember wiki codes (especially for something like a table, which is pretty complicated).

The word wiki has its roots in the Hawaiian word wikiwiki which means fast. This is because wikis are meant to be a quicker and easier way to create collaborative web pages. Some things about wiki-ing are easier than standard HTML — creating links to pages that don’t yet exist, and writing in paragraphs for example. Nonetheless, though wiki code is awkward for those of us who do know HTML, and still significantly difficult for those who don’t — a kind of perverse worst-of-both-worlds compromise (clearly at least two of my colleagues feel the same). The compromise is made even worse by the use of obscure characters like ‘|’ — does that thing even have a name?

Of course my technocentric intuition is “let’s just use HTML, everbody knows it now anwyay”. This intuition is, of course, wrong; one quick look at MySpace (and the number of HTML customisation generators for it) will demonstrate that in fact most people still don’t know HTML, and nor should they have to. The interface I am typing in now automagically generates nice clean HTML for me — why can’t wikis do the same (especially since they are translating code anyway)? Well, it turns out some of them do, and if I were to suggest ways to invite more participation in our library wiki, investing in one of those would near the top of my list.

The video below shows how easy it should be — and too often isn’t — to contribute to a wiki.

I have to say, I am a little uncomfortable commenting on library 2.0. I’m not a librarian, and I have neither the academic background nor the practical experience to know what Library 1.0 delivery really means, nor what the rationale is (was?) for doing things in a library 1.0 way.

There seems to be a lot of chaos over what library 2.0 actually means, which is no doubt adding to my discomfort posting about it; the general consensus seems to me to be that the difference between library 2.0 and library 1.0 is that library 2.0 is user centric and user driven; and a lot of it seems to be driven by new technologies (though it doesn’t have to be) Now, I’m all for a great user experience, and often that is something that will involve a certain amount of user centrism, but I’m decidedly ambivalent about what it means for libraries.

To go any further with this post, I have to define what I think libraries are (or should be), and this will no doubt get me in a world of trouble with my librarian co-workers: I think libraries are free access point of information of many kinds, with value added in spaces to get that information, and librarians themselves. I think the defining point of libraries is actually librarians; they select targeted authoritative collections, and can help unsure users sort the wheat from the chaff online.

Back to library 2.0, though. Some library blogs refer to library 2.0 in terms of teen gaming nights and library blogs, others talk about user control of information.  I question what any of these things have to do with librarianship — the difference between a library and the internet, as I expounded in my masters thesis, is that a library is a carefully collected information set (and the internet is not).  The internet is always going to have more choices than the library (some of which would never make it in to a library) and users are also going to be far more in control of the likes of Google than they are of EBSCO (unless EBSCO buys PageRank from Google).  Library blogs are notoriously silent, and I can’t really understand what teen gaming has to do with libraries at all.  If these things are the best library 2.0 can offer us, I’m with the Annoyed Librarian. Not only do these things not gel with what I want in a library (and after all, I am a library user too), they seem to dilute what it even means to be a library.

Kathryn Greenhill, however, has a post that makes many aspects of library 2.0 something I could get behind.  It paints library 2.0 as a move away from the purported days-gone-by librarian shusher model (did anyone ever really get shushed?  I never did and I’m not a particularly quiet soul) and toward an era where librarians have control of their catalogue software (thus creating scope for things like user tagging, which are long overdue), library spaces accomodate collaborative and individual work, librarians seek feedback and listen to their users, and library services are available on the internet. Library usability, particularly in terms of online services, has a big part to play in this version of library 2.0 — and I am all for it — and apparently so is Swinburne, because we are doing many of these things already.

The big risk of library 2.0 is throwing the baby out with the bathwater; trying so hard to be everything to everyone that libraries are no longer libraries.  The big opportunity is providing increasingly relevant, increasingly user-friendly and increasingly useful spaces and services.  I think the way forward is to get off the bandwagon — the term library 2.0 is so overused as to be meaningless — and at least in Swinburne’s case, to keep doing what we are doing — listening to our users, and providing the best responses we can in a library context.

Del.icio.us is one of the 23 Things I sort of don’t get. It’s not that I can’t see a lot of use for an online bookmark storage site, it’s the social part that I find a bit confusing. Sure, I can share my bookmarks (and check out the links in the sidebar for some more focused resources), and there is hype and hotlists and I can even look at the bookmarks of people who have bookmarked the same thing as me, but it doesn’t seem especially social.

I’m going to use some fools rhetoric here, and provide the Dictionary.com definition of social:

pertaining to, devoted to, or characterized by friendly companionship or relation

and

living or disposed to live in companionship with others or in a community, rather than in isolation

These are the only two out of approximately 8 definitions that could conceivably have anything to do with del.icio.us, but really, the links are pretty tenuous. There is no scope on del.icio.us, as it exists at present, for any real interaction — I can’t comment on others’ bookmarks, I can’t find and contact people with similar bookmarks to me, I can only add my own bookmarks, and look at others’ bookmarks. And really, those two things are both pretty useful, especially when using del.icio.us for a project or a teaching aid–but they aren’t social. Del.icio.us isn’t about community building or support, and it certainly isn’t about companionship — it’s about knowledge sharing, as far as I can see (though I am willing to be corrected on this point).

There are things Del.icio.us has right, notably the tags and being able to save and share bookmarks online. It’s pretty useful to be able to subscribe to a feed of someone’s bookmarks, especially if you’re working closely with them. And with the browser plugins, it’s really easy to ’save’ a site to your bookmarks.

There are things (besides touting itself as social bookmarking service) that Del.icio.us has wrong, though. First and foremost is the name — besides it not having anything to do with the service Del.icio.us provides, who can remember where the dots go? (They also make it a hard name to type). Another failing is that Del.icio.us uses a different tagging convention to every other piece of software I have ever used: Del.icio.us tages are space separated, where most are comma separated. Not only does this break a convention that users are accustomed to, thereby making things harder, it also makes my tags less likely to match the tags of others when talking about the same thing simply because we are likely to use different conventions for replacing the space (while I might use hyphens, they might simply run the words together). Causing a tag mismatch also seems to defeat the purpose of the site, somewhat, because finding other interesting links is dependent on sharing tags.

Del.icio.us is an example of a site that fulfills a need (online storage of bookmarks) with a few added features (tagging, sharing), but that doesn’t quite live up to its own press. It’s good at what it does, but it isn’t great, and it certainly isn’t social.

My apologies, I am behind and I have had some lovely comments from those of you who read regularly. My other work has gotten somewhat on top of me over the past couple of weeks, but I think the worst of the storm is past now.

I tried to use iGoogle for a week so I could make some educated comment on it, and the most educated comment I can actually make is that I didn’t actually manage to see the week out. The premise is good, but the execution just wasn’t there to keep me going back.

Part of the problem is that I can get most of the online services I use regularly into it, but not all of them; gmail, my rss feeder, a calendar and weather I could have, but I couldn’t get the metlink timetable, nor an online community I’m a part of nor Facebook in any meaningful way. Given that iGoogle is supposed to be my “one-stop shop”, the inability to access so many things that I use regularly is a substantial failing (and while I am aware that this is not Google’s fault, and someone needs to write a plugin for each of these things, knowing that doesn’t help me any).

The integration with Google’s own services is relatively poor; instead of Google content opening in a new tab the way content from all other applications did, Google content opened in the same tab, obliterating iGoogle (this was actually one of my most common paths out of iGoogle — I would do a search or read a blog post in my RSS feed and simply move on, forgetting I had ever been in iGoogle). Not only did it open in the same tab, but in the cases of gmail and Google reader it presented me with just the content of the email or feed, and none of the usual functionalities of moving to other emails or feeds.

Having failed in the useful stakes, I tried to make iGoogle fun by creating a ‘fun’ tab and adding some dingbats and crosswords and such; I also kept the original funny cat picture that it came with. I set the background to be the solar system (though I did think the one that had the sun rise and set in tune with local time was kind of fun) and tried really hard to be engaged. The only thing out of the whole lot that I liked was the funny cat picture, and I actually get my fill of those by subscribing to ICanHasCheezburger. Again, it isn’t iGoogle’s fault that I couldn’t find a cryptic crossword, but when you have to work too hard to have fun, well, it isn’t fun anymore.

One of the fundamental principles of usability is that if there is a conventional way to do something (like the top right-hand search box, for example), then you better be making a usability improvement if you break that convention, and it better be a significant improvement, or the convention being broken just overshadows whatever you are trying to do. I think it is the same with people — if you want people to change their usual habits, you need to have a compelling incentive for them to do so. If iGoogle really did create a one-stop-shop for all my web things, if it had a good interface, or even just if it was fun it could have formed a new habit for me. However, it fails on all these counts, and I have to say if I go back, it will only be to look at the cat pictures.

Google docs is a service that allows those with a Google account to edit, store, and share Microsoft-like documents online (or export them to a Microsoft format and use them as usual offline). Now, I am all for anything that can reasonably save me from the torture that was the write-up of my masters, when MS word redefined some of my pictures as millions of page breaks when I put page numbers into my thesis (I suspect the character combination used to represent a page break is something that could conceivably appear in a jpeg file), but I don’t think Google’s word processor is it — and I suspect this holds true for the other document editors as well (certainly I have recently read one report of a catastrophic crash of the presentation-making software).

I’m going to speak about the word processor in Google Docs rather than the rest of the suite, because I have the most experience with it. At first glance it appears very much to be a stripped down word processor, not unlike the blog editor I am using right now. On the face of it, this should be enough for the majority of users, based on the 80/20 rule. Sadly, though, this is not the case. There are some areas where Google’s word processor has missed the opportunity to improve over Word, such as picture placement, which is horrible in Word and merely average in Google Docs. There are some areas where Google Docs is limited by what HTML can offer, for example the limited customisability of lists, and the inability to add drawings (for diagrams for example). There are other ways in which Google Docs could have capitalised on its HTML capabilities and hasn’t, for example not opening hyperlinks when you click on them (ideally in another window or another tab). I don’t know what kind of a limitation it is that forces Google Docs to open everything in a new tab, but that is also fairly seriously irksome (and would be even more so if using an un-tabbed browser). And for me, the lack of integration with bibliographic software is a real problem (though I am aware that this is a specialised usage).

The thing that concerns me most about Google Docs, though, is writing any kind of work-related document under Google’s privacy umbrella. I have Google email, and Google pictures, I write a couple of Google blogs, and I have lists of books I want to read and movies I want to see in Google documents. I actually don’t think there is any such thing as total privacy on the web, and I don’t mind Google sucking up my personal information — I am the only person that can affect. I am less comfortable, though uploading documents related to my work (which is not even all that confidentail but which affects people other than me) to a site with this in the Terms Of Use (TOU):

“You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Service. By submitting, posting or displaying the Content you give Google a worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through the Service for the sole purpose of enabling Google to provide you with the Service in accordance with its Privacy Policy.” (link).

Given that the Google Docs privacy policy incorporates the Google privacy policy, and the Google Privacy policy is subject to change — with your consent, if your privacy is reduced, though I am guessing it would be Hobson’s choice (accept the new terms or go elsewhere) — and given that it takes three weeks to expunge account details if you terminate your account…I am simply not comfortable storing work-related material on the servers of a commercial company whose interests could run counter to that of my employer. Maybe this makes me a paranoid luddite who should be wearing a tinfoil cap, but when it comes to information about my employer I am finicky (even though I doubt they would care).

This is not to say that there aren’t some wonderful features of Google Docs, however. The autosave is excellent and functional, and I wish MS had done this well with their autosave (saving to avoid lost work is a mechanical, repetitive task and should be done by a machine). This autosave is coupled with excellent versioning, so if it autosaves something you later decide you don’t want, you can go back to the earlier version. I haven’t tried the sharing features, but it would be hard for them to be worse than Microsoft Word (and with the versioning, it is likely that they are better). There are two big drawcards for Google Docs, though: It’s free, and it’s online. For me, these are the reasons I use Google Docs at all. I can access it from anywhere just by clicking on a link in my email, and I keep lists of books I want to read and movies I want to see that I can add to from anywhere.

Google Docs is great for information you want to keep online, but if you’re looking for a more fully functional free document package, or one that isn’t online, I recommend OpenOffice.

The idea behind Digg is interesting enough, get a community of people rating and commenting on news. Like any other community, Digg has its norms and social mores, unfortunately, however, they are not my social norms or mores. As per the 23 things, I signed up to Digg, and let the links roll in (and they certainly did roll — at last count I had 209 unread Digg links in my feed reader). Anecdotally, most of what Digg is feeding me is either techtips (most of them to do with the iPhone) or college boy humour (’10 ways to get kinky in the kitchen’, ‘look what happens when some girl tries to eat a tablespoon of cinnamon’, ‘catfight in the girls locker’ room…that sort of thing). I haven’t done a watertight analysis of this, but on first second and third glance, it seems to be fairly accurate. In fact, the most interesting thing Digg has presented me with is this Stephen Pinker article about swearing (be warned, this paper includes explicit examples of bad language), which piqued an old interest in socio- and psycholinguistics.

Not only is Digg full of college boy humour and tech-tips, I have also had the rather uncomfortable experience of someone I don’t know becoming my fan, claiming he likes what I am doing on Digg (which is precisely nothing). I know this is part of social networking, but on a site that already feels as hostile as Digg, someone being my fan is downright creepy.

So why is Digg the way it is? What has shaped the community? Part of the issue here is that Digg reflects the wider online community, men use the internet more often than women, and for longer. Moreover, younger people (PDF) are more likely to engage in social activities on the web — so young men are likely to be the primary users of a service like Digg because they are the primary users of social services online.

Having said that, Digg sublty encourages this demographic trend with its user interface. When I signed up, I was asked to choose my gender (which actually should be irrelevant on a site like Digg, but I assume they’re selling my eyeballs to an advertiser and gender matters there). The problem is not actually being asked my gender, the problem is the options I was offered: ‘Fellow’ and ‘Bird’. This is an example of where relying on fun to create a good user experience can be really risky: some people would find this fun, but I find the suggestion that males are ‘fellows’ (which has associations of jolly-goodness and even academia) and females are birds (near-brainless, decorative and flighty) pretty insulting–imagine, for example, that the options were ‘ladies’ and ‘roosters’ (or some synonym thereof).

This gender-naming slight is not the only thing about Digg that may discourage women, though: The main topics on Digg are ‘World & Business’, ‘Technology‘, ‘Science‘, ‘Entertainment’, ‘Gaming‘, ‘Sports‘, ‘Offbeat News’ and ‘Comedy Videos’, four of which are traditionally male dominated, and none of which are traditionally female dominated (I’m not going to get into whether things should be male or female dominated, I’m only talking about things as they are). If a news item you are interested in posting doesn’t fit into a Digg category, you are not welcome to post it to Digg.

These are just two of a number of ways Digg works to bias their user base further in favour of the typical internet user — young and male, and the popularity contest nature of Digg means that this culture is self-reinforcing. To be honest, though, whatever Digg wants to do with their user base is fine, provided they are aware they are doing it. It does mean, however, that this will not be a way I get my news in the future (as the 23 Things task suggested I might). I might occasionally visit and read the music section, which has many interesting articles about copyright, but I am certainly deleting my account, and unsubscribing from the RSS feed — Digg is not for me (clearly some of my colleagues feel the same way — see here, here and here), and the culture there makes that abundantly clear.

I decided to use WordPress for this blog for two reasons:

1. I wanted to try out a different piece of software, and I already know blogger
2. This is a professional blog, and everyone uses WordPress for their professional blogs, right?

I have to say, I’m somewhat disappointed by WordPress. It is techie software, and it shows. Now, sure, I am a techie. I have two degrees in computer science, and I have worked on web software intermittently for the past six years. I am also a usability person, and I am someone who wants life to be easy where it doesn’t need to be difficult, which is why I was not impressed to have to figure out format strings in PHP (or even know that WordPress is written in PHP) to set the format for the timestamp on this blog. I was also not impressed that I had to do the math myself to figure out the time difference between my location and UTC. Sure, I can do all of this (and tough cookies if I couldn’t), but why should I have to? These are things that it is easy for a programmer to build in, but that cost WordPress users time every time they set up a blog (or change their settings).

Even more disappointing was the discovery that unless I was willing to pay, I could use one of the WordPress themes (with whatever minor modifications the theme author allows), or I could use a different hosting service. Not only would I have to pay to customise the appearance of this blog, I am required to know CSS–there is no WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) sandbox, nor any easily readable stylesheets. If you’re not a techie, and you don’t want to learn CSS, I really hope you like one of the existing themes, because pretty much all you are going to be able to change is the picture on your blog.

Now, to be fair, Blogger has only recently added some of the WYSIWYG CSS features, and is owned by Google, (considered to be the great privacy bogeyman of our age by some), so perhaps I am expecting a bit much of a smaller company. Not only are some of the toys in Blogger recent, there are a couple of things in WordPress that seem nicer at first taste, notably the text editor I am typing in now (more than 3 style edits in blogger and you are for sure going to need to edit the HTML), and the fact that the make-a-link dialog doesn’t grab control of my browser (which is a real pain if you forgot to copy that web address before you clicked the ‘make me a link’ button). WordPress also offered me more up-front publicity options than Blogger did, but Blogger may have changed since the last time I set up a blog (about three years ago).

Unless WordPress wows me with some feature I haven’t yet seen, though (and remember this is only day one), Blogger is a winner for me–it is easier to use, it is easier and cheaper (read: free) to customise, and it integrates well with Google’s other services (making it easy to add pictures and other multimedia to your blog, and keeping you logged in when you are logged in to gmail, for example). I would urge anyone concerned with the privacy ‘risk’ of blogging with Blogger to consider whether they really want to blog at all; nothing on the internet is ever really private (and that includes your email, unless you run your own server and PGP encryption).

I have to assume that the kudos associated with WordPress comes partly from its early entry into the market, and partly from the techie requirements it imposes on its users–Blogger is the gauche new WYSIWYG kid on the blog, meaning everyone can blog* . Frankly, at the end of the day, I would rather use blog software that lets everyone blog, because it is easier for me to use as well.

* And what is wrong with everyone blogging, if they want to? You don’t have to read it. However, if you’re still really worried about being an everyone blogger, you can always get your own domain name and customise that Blogger look out of existence.