Hate Life, Will Travel

Served to me this morning:

Before we talk about the secret of youth, can we talk about why you have four eyes and two mouths?

I dog on myself for not writing enough, but I’ve been charting it for a while now and it’s not volume, or even hours logged, it’s where it goes. Here’s a day:

- 200 words at USSM
- got gmail inbox from 3600 unread to <1700
- …during which I wrote ~500 words of email to friends I’d neglected lately, making myself feel better
- Wrote 400 word mini-essay on gmail and usability here on HLWT
- more USSM
- 1500+ novel words

I crank out a couple thousand words on days where I don’t make progress on my fiction. Maybe I need to be a little bit kinder to myself.

Today I found myself digging out from two weeks of not reading/answering emails on my gmail account, which is publicly exposed and used for signups etc etc.

What I really wanted to do is this: sort by sender to see which newsletters/notifications are responsible for the massive bulk of unread emails, create filters/etc to deal with them, delete, move on. Nope! Not there. At all. Can’t be done.

It took me a little while to wrap my head around this. I’d always figured that the reason I couldn’t do it was that it was concealed functionality.

Where this really got interesting for me that if you look for ways to do this, you find that there many complaints about exactly this problem, and the conversations are fascinating insights into how usability fails. It reminded me of my job in many ways.

“I want to be able to do x.”
“Gmail doesn’t support that, but you can do a from:sender.”
“Yes, I get that. I want to be able to do this thing.”
“I don’t see why you’d ever want to do that.”
“I need to do this thing.”
“Have you considered up setting up filters for all your contacts and then looking at unlabeled emails?”
“I need to do this thing.”
“You can have all your gmail sent to somewhere else that supports sorting…”
“You’re not helping me do the one thing I want to do.”

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had conversations like that at work. It’s why use cases are so valuable in specs: “this user has to be able to accomplish this task” clearly sets out how someone needs to be able to do something and how. You get to argue that out in the definition and design phase, rather than after release.

Here’s the maxim of usability design I’d like to have drummed into everyone’s head:
No one’s intended use is wrong.

If someone’s on Expedia and wants to do a multi-origin, multi-destination search and we can’t do that, I can say “we can’t do that, for technical reasons that you don’t care about.” Or I can say “the best workaround we have is this, which takes extra steps…” Or “ah! I see what you want to do, here’s another tool that will do that.” And if their response is “that’s cumbersome” that’s their right.

No one should ever say “that’s a dumb thing to do.” It’s not. Someone’s trying to do it to accomplish something important, and they’re frustrated. They have a need that’s unfulfilled, and they’re asking for help. Help them, or acknowledge your failure. But mostly, help them.

Hooked up the PS2 yesterday to try it. I like it so far, though the first hour or so is pretty much a cut scene. Or “RPG on rails” even, where there’s no real choice about anything. The first two hours, really. Actually, it still hasn’t opened up yet entirely, but I do get to shop a little, which is nice.

I think if they’d released it for (say) the Wii with little or no modification it’d be a contender for game of the year (and not win). If you’re into Japanese-style RPGs, it’ll be one of the best games ever.

The funny thing though is that it has game mechanics that are incomprehensible to me, and I’ve been playing games pretty much continuously since Asteroids on the Atari 2600. There were whole sections of exposition where something would be explained to me and I’d just start laughing. At one point, after an entirely nonsensical jargon-filled little speech, I had a dialogue choice between “I understand” and “Can you go over that again?”

I wanted to be able to pick “Whatever, I’ll just go look on the Internet for better documentation.”

I’m worried that my cavalier attitude will end up ruining the game for me: I’ll find some level boss two-thirds of the way in that can only be beaten if I’ve cross-fused the right trio of spirit personas or whatever. More than one game’s been tossed aside only to find out later that it’s the collectible-card mini-game I hated that could have earned the armor that lets you finish the game.

It’s snowing in Seattle again. I work on the 15th* floor of my building, which has a decent view (of Bellevue!).

Today, I came around a corner to our little “neighborhood” of EU people and outside the snow fell upwards. And kept falling up.

And while rationally I thought “sure, there’s some weird wind thing going on” I also felt, deep inside, that I was dreaming or the world had come unhinged.

* not actually the 15th, as there’s no 13th

In table form

                       Works             Does not work
Dropbox                  X
Live Sync                                      X

… and actual means I don’t know what.

However, on her fifth studio album, Middle Cyclone, she literally becomes a force of nature: Case sings opener “This Tornado Loves You” from the point of view of an actual tornado, tearing up trailer parks and cutting a 65-mile swath in search for its beloved: “I carved your name across three counties,” she sings defiantly as the guitars whip around her and the snare patters frantically, suggesting destruction can be a demonstration of love.

Stephen M. Deusner

Shouldn’t Pitchfork, as the indier-than-thou center of the music universe, be awash in English major editors who get all twitchy at this stuff?