Reflections on Moggridge, chapters 1 & 2

If Bill Moggridge’s Designing Interactions hadn’t been written, we’d need to invent it. It’s a historical account/textbook/resource for interactive designers, and will perhaps will someday be on a par with Philip Meggs’ History of Graphic Design for being a definitive text in its subject area.

What parent can’t relate to Moggridge’s discussion of buying his 13-yr-old son a digital watch from Japan, chock-full of features, but ultimately so unusable by mere mortals (expert or not) that his wife eventually took a sledgehammer to it? I remember my then-8-yr-old daughter asking patiently for the upgrade to her Sims game, her excitement when I brought it home (in a fit of motherly guilt as I was working way too many hours, in school, and dealing with a terminally ill family member), and ultimate disappointment when it wouldn’t install, giving some sort of useless error message no matter what we tried.

 

Quark: where’s it headed?

Watching Quark, Inc. feels like watching a trainwreck in slow motion. I first learned this software in 1997, as the company I worked for was considering switching from PageMaker (or PageWrecker, as some of us referred to it for its propensity to crash). By 1999 I was teaching Quark at a local technical college, alongside PageMaker and later InDesign. I soon became familiar with the company’s bad customer service,

 

Adobe turns the tables on Microsoft

Is this a tit-for-tat response to Microsoft Expressions Studio? Or an attempt to extend the .pdf platform? According to this article, it appears that Adobe is going dinosaur-slash-cow-tipping against the Office suite.

http://www.wired.com/software/coolapps/news/2007/08/adobe_officedocs

 

Tales from Adobe CS3 installation hell

An unsettling but potentially liberating thought has been slowly but stubbornly boiling its way to the surface of my consciousness for the past week. What if the same technological progress that has employed me for the last eight years progresses me right out of a job?

Last weekend, Vaun shared the mini-websites with me that he created in Kathy’s spring content creation class. He reported that learning Dreamweaver proved daunting, so he switched to iWeb. Kathy pronounced the resulting code dreadful, but it occurred to me that better code-writing capabilities are no doubt inevitable as web-based content-creation software improves. So, much as we progressed from the late-90s html code-head mentality, to Dreamweaver’s GUI interface, we are now seeing blogging/web design software so easy a caveman could do it (or some such ridiculous metaphor).

Having set up a blog @ blogspot in the fall, I was pleasantly surprised at the better capabilities of WordPress, and the ease of learning the interface. My new allegiance lasted all of a week, however, as I begin to hear my streaming media classmates sing the praises of Vox.

Contrast the satisfaction with web-based blogging software to my installation nightmare this week with Adobe Creative Suite 3 software. Needing to install said software for an upcoming project, I eagerly bought the suite at the UW Bookstore’s unbelievable price of $300 for the Design Suite Premium (retail: $1800, typical academic price: $600).

Friday morning at 8 am I began the install process. My c: drive on my main home computer was fuller than I liked, so I spent an hour deleting and moving files, then ran disk defragmentation. Meanwhile I decided to begin installing on my laptop, since you can have the software installed (but not launched) on two computers while staying within the license agreement. Began the install process on my one-year-old laptop, which took over an hour. At the end, the installer cheerfully told me that installation of Acrobat 8 Professional failed, without further information: no error code or suggestion. I attempted to reinstall just the one missing component, which annoyingly ran through the entire “shared component” install routine for an hour, then failed again. Now I was hosed, because the install process automatically un-installed Acrobat 7 Professional, and I would be unable to use a software on which I depend on a daily basis.

 Irritated, I returned to my cleaned-up desktop computer to install. It took a good 90 minutes on this computer, and at the end, the installer ominously reported that “shared components” and “Design Premium CS3″ were unable to install, though all the actual software appeared installed (Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Flash, InDesign, Illustrator, and Acrobat). Launching Photoshop CS3 proved an exercise in futility: it would launch momentarily, only to tell me that I did not have a valid license and would need to either contact my IT department or reinstall the software. Heart sinking, I realized I couldn’t launch any of the components, and now had no access to Acrobat on either system, since it nuked the version 7 install on this computer as well.

I dug out my CS2 disk to begin reinstalling Acrobat 7 and continued researching the support database and user-to-user forums. Called to submit a technical support claim, but gave up after 30 minutes of annoying hold music. Filed one online, which required me to submit my Adobe ID, and it automatically submitted a claim with my CS1 serial number, which it did not allow me to edit (I have a fully registered CS2 version as well, so something’s messed up in their database). No doubt when I receive a response eventually, it’s going to tell me my 90 days of free support is expired, without giving me the chance to explain that this is an attempt to upgrade to the newest version. Meanwhile, the support documents revealed that a previous install of the Photoshop CS3 beta might be keeping the software from installing properly, and that if using the Windows uninstall utility failed to fully remove it (and that was the case on my desktop, since it still showed up after repeated uninstalls), a long series of risky reg-edits would need to be performed after backing up all data. Ha! Those Adobe guys have a sense of humor.

I wasted an entire 12 hours attempting to install, reinstall, and uninstall the software. Keep in mind that these are up-to-date computers running Windows XP Professional, and my husband and I are intermediate-grade techies. The frustration took me back to my sys-admin days at the UW and Teltone, where anxious supervisors would hover wondering when we’d be back up (time being money, and all). It’s difficult to predict how long troubleshooting and fixing will take, and when you’re in it, it feels like a big black time-sucking hole.

I couldn’t help but contrast this entire experience with the ease of using WordPress. Install issues? None, because the software’s hosted remotely. Ease of use? Since the success of the blogspots, wordpresses, and voxes of the world depend on it, they’re writing the book on usability. Much as I love, promote, teach, and use Adobe products, their products are often unintuitive to learn (says she who has taught 6000 classroom hours and 1000+ students).

I’m convinced that part of the vicious cycle of new features is that the users/techies who have the ear of applications engineers are already experts, and those conversations probably start a self-perpetuating feedback loop where the engineers believe they’re serving the entire market without adequate consideration of how the Next Cool Thing should be implemented. I’ve often wished application engineers and human-factors experts would watch my students learn the software, coming as they do from a wide variety of backgrounds, technical prowess, and aptitude.

The web-based applications seem to to a much more satisfying job of Usability First. The snobby tech-head (and mea culpa, at times I’ve been one) may find it ego-reinforcing to talk in a language that regular mortals don’t get, but looking round the river bend, I think there may be pressure to improve usability rising from this lower end of the design spectrum. 

And hence, if design software becomes truly intuitive and easy to learn, I may be out of a job.

 PS–there, in this post I’ve managed to do a total flip-flop from my previous post explaining why I oppose web-based software licensing. Twelve hours of installation nightmare will do that to ya.

 

notes from San Jose

So I spent two days with 250 other Adobe certified instructors from around the world, and got to rub shoulders with a number of Adobe employees.

The only piece of information we’re allowed to share is that Creative Suite 3 will be announced March 27. This was subsequently reported in the media this week.

It was interesting to talk to trainers coming from the Macromedia side of the house, as Macromedia had run their training partner organization quite differently than Adobe, and now those trainers are part of the Adobe Solutions Network.

Based on conversations I had with other trainers, the market for providing training is currently quite good. Many of them are busier than they’d like and are looking to hire staff. (To work as an ACI, you need to pass an expert-level product exam and have a teaching certificate. Most people get these through Comp TIAA, but state-issued teaching certificates such as I have are also accepted. Those would be minimal qualifications, by the way. You also need high-level knowledge of the product and the ability to teach.)

I learned from the other trainers about an Adobe product called Captivate which I’d been previously unaware of. This product enables training professionals to “quickly create interactive, engaging training content without learning Flash or hiring a professional developer” (according to the website). There are other tools out there, but several trainers told me they really like this one. So I plan to check it out. Adobe sells an online conferencing tool called Connect (formerly Macromedia Breeze) which my colleagues also gave high marks to; it sounded like many of them were using Captivate and Connect together.

I’m unable to reveal any details of the products we saw, but the public beta of Photoshop CS3 should provide some hints. I’ll say this: Adobe will probably remain my favorite software company for the foreseeable future.

 

the Adobe CS3 icons

So this week’s reading about HCI (human-computer interface) brings to mind the tempest brewing over Adobe’s redesigned icons for the upcoming CS3 (Creative Suite 3). When the original Creative Suite debuted, the beloved Venus icon from Illustrator was replaced with a flower, and the eye icon from Photoshop was replaced with a feather. (InDesign already had a butterfly metaphor, which was retained but updated). Go Live, Adobe’s web design program (which has a very small market share compared to industry leader Dreamweaver), got a star metaphor.

Those icons were tweaked in CS2 (created with xray photography), and looked like this:

Users had mixed feelings about these icons, but Adobe’s decision to release the products on a synchronized schedule as a suite certainly argued for an overall branding strategy.

In much the same fashion, Adobe’s 2005 purchase of Macromedia and resulting integration of the (now confusingly large) product line created the need for a consistent branding strategy.

Here’s where it gets interesting. Adobe has traditionally been very secretive about upcoming releases, but decided to break tradition and join the public beta craze with Photoshop CS3. Designers who downloaded the beta noticed a new “PS” icon, and many concluded it must be only for the beta, because it was so minimalist and (some argued) poorly designed.

Lo and behold, John Nack’s Adobe blog revealed that these icons are going to ship with the product, and published a link to the remainder of the icons, which can be seen here.

The design user community’s response has been overwhelmingly negative. On a good day, designers make Simon Conwell look generous, and they resoundingly gave a thumbs-down to the new design.

Reasons included the following: the two-letter abbreviations force users to perform recall rather than recognition, since the letters must first be interpreted, unlike a symbol. The squares do not differentiate products and therefore don’t help the user. The colors do not map via product line (Dreamweaver is one one side of the wheel, Go Live on the other–both are web design tools). The icons may not be accessible to colorblind users. Many two-letter abbreviations might have two meanings: PS could refer to Photoshop or PostScript. The second letter is sometimes lowercase, sometimes small capital.

As an experiment, without comment, I put the wheel up for my design students who are learning the Adobe and Macromedia products, and asked for their feedback.

A sampling of comments: it looks like alphabet soup, how are we to remember what the abbreviations stand for, it resembles the periodic table (which in fact is the metaphor Adobe used), I like the color wheel, why aren’t the symbols superimposed on the squares to provide reference, how will I differentiate the icons in the taskbar, why do products such as Flash and Acrobat retain their symbols. My students did solve the mystery of the lowercase vs. small caps: small caps are used for acronyms (FH=Freehand), while lowercase indicates the first two letters (Au=Audition).

One commenter to John Nack’s blog (Brian Ellis, 12/28/06–you’ll have to search John’s page for his comments, as I couldn’t link directly to them) did a heuristic analysis which gets to the heart of HCI.

Anyway, I thought the icon redesign makes a wonderful case study for usability analysis. Can’t wait to see if the Adobe designers consider the feedback and redesign the icons before the product is released (rumored to be between April and June, so it’s very late in the cycle to incorporate changes). It’s worth considering that all this pre-release feedback wouldn’t have happened without the public beta. Seems to validate the idea that the it’s difficult for insiders to accurately analyze design usability. Team members are just too close to the project.

 

Social Aspects of New Media Technologies, pt. 2

We can see why the internet is so compelling, under uses & gratifications theory. It easily outperforms TV in at least three of the four gratifications. Entertainment? Far more choices, on demand. Personal relationships? TV strikes me as more of an impediment than a gratifier in personal relationships, while the internet allows people to connect with old friends, find romance, and participate in worldwide listserves based on personal or professional interests. Surveillance? Both media offer extensive opportunities to be aware of local, regional, national or international events of interest, but the internet allows individuals to express opinion, and perhaps more easily get involved.

The critical mass piece got me wondering, how long until traditional “paper” banking is entirely obsoleted by online banking? How will slow adopters/low resource individuals be served?

The diffusion of innovation steps look a lot like those used in advertising. First consumers must be made aware, then persuaded, the item purchased, and their decision confirmed.

Something I’m troubled by with much of the technology we’re currently surrounded by is the increasing speed of obsolescence. (Is there a companion graph to level of diffusion called level of dissolution?) The entired lifespan of VHS was about 25 years; recently I went through our family’s collection of home movies and Disney tapes. The home movies will need to be recorded to a newer media; the Disney tapes, which a few years ago were worth as much as $200 each as collector items–well, I’m not sure what to do with them. How about all those digital .jpg pictures we’ve all been snapping the past few years? All the information in .pdf’s? Adobe Systems, Inc. recently introduced a file format called .pdf x/a, the “a” standing for archive. They committed to support the file format for 50 years. But given corporate mergers, bankruptcy, etc., how can we really know if this file format will survive that long?