Farewell to Mews

Monday 26th Apr 2010

My immediate reaction is ‘No! I’m glad to be out of there!’ but I had many happy times there and there are so many memories attached to it, so yes, there will be some things I miss. But what?

I used to live here.

Certainly not the light. That flat was really fucking dingy — magnolia paint, small windows and dark beige carpets all over. It even had carpet in the bathroom. Yes. In the bathroom. What kind of utterly insane idea is that? No shower either. Just a crappy too-small-for-anything bath. The landlord’s idea of getting yourself clean was clearly sitting in a glorified trough of water tainted with your own dirt in a dingy windowless room with a carpet to absorb any splashes and provide ideal festering territory for any fucking bacterial or fungal infestation you care to imagine. Yeah, sounds great doesn’t it? Really fucking homely. Get me World of Interiors on the line, they’ll want this for their fucking cover article. Did I mention that there were no windows? Yes, it had this extractor fan in the ceiling that would come on with the light, never really actually doing anything other than providing a check in a box on some regulatory form and making a fuck of a lot of noise. Turns out it vented into the loft anyway, so it’s probably a good job it didn’t work properly. It was shit. I won’t miss the bathroom.

And let’s not forget the kitchen. Cupboards so shallow that the doors wouldn’t shut if you dared to put anything as enormously huge as a dinner plate in them. A dinner plate! Fancy that, people wanting to eat off plates designed to be eaten off! Even then, the cupboards on the wall were put in so that you couldn’t actually open the window properly. In a kitchen. You can’t open your kitchen window. Woo-fucking-hoo. Oh and of course despite the kitchen being microscopic the landlord had decided to install a full size massive stainless steel behemoth of a kitchen sink, right in the middle of what would have been a useful counter. No thoughts of, “Oh, if I put this sink in the corner, there’d be room for a dishwasher, or a freezer, or anything”. No, instead they’d made sure the only space left for a washing machine was right next to every single fucking copper pipe that came out of the boiler. Yes, in our flat the spin cycle was a fucking symphony, with the roar of the damn thing blasting out of every radiator in the damn flat. Really good planning that. I won’t miss the kitchen.

Is there anything I do actually miss? It’s hard to tell. I don’t think I could miss anything if I was to compare it to the new flat, but there are a few things I did quite like at the old place — the view was often interesting, I could hear the sea some nights, and the place did look rather fancy from the outside. But the new place has so many things to recommend it — it’s bigger, lighter, airier, easier to clean (wooden floors!), it has a proper shower, it has a balcony, it’s right in the centre of town and is really, really near the pub I was already thinking of as my local. Now it really is my local. I hear the landlord has added an extra crate of my favourite beer to his order. Bliss.

And in case I ever want to see the old place again, I have thousands of photos featuring it in various ways. Thousands. And just before we moved, I took some more and made a panorama.

This was the view from my desk.

It is quite an interesting view. It was always nice when the starlings came over, they’d cover the rooves opposite and fill the air with their noise, then fwoosh they’d be gone. I never did get around to filming them.

Maybe that’s what I’ll miss.

Makers and tinkerers

Tuesday 6th Apr 2010

You know the kind of thing, the web is full of these little homilies about how little Johnny played with the family computer and learned to program on it and wow look at him now, he’s a big strong programmer! The assumption seems to be that unless you’ve got a computer to fiddle about with as a child you’ll never grow up to be creative with computers, or be creative at all.

Well, you know, I call bullshit on this. I didn’t have a computer until I was 17, and I still consider myself pretty damn privileged to have got that. There were computers at school that I played around with, but when something belongs to someone else (and has to be used by classes) you tend to be limited in your tinkering — i.e. you don’t want to break it. So we didn’t have a computer. We didn’t have much that would class as ‘consumer electronics’ anyway — my Dad is an engineer and I now wonder whether he didn’t want any of this stuff in the house because it would (inevitably) go wrong and he’d have to fix it.

Still, it all seemed perfectly normal. I had lots of paper — Dad brought home these stacks of z-fold computer paper covered in numbers, leftovers from some monthly reports they had to run at work — and I’d spend hours drawing on the blank reverse side. I had Lego, boy did I have Lego. Most of my childhood and a big chunk of my teens was dominated by the stuff — I had whole systems devoted to building things just right. Then the rest of the time was spent outside, building things with mud and sticks, splashing around in streams or running around in the woods looking for caves. I found a good one once, and then could never find it again. I still wonder where it was.

I grew up in a world where there were plenty of ‘open systems’ and I made lots of things and imagined lots of things. There were plenty of closed systems too, like the class computer, but they didn’t get in the way, instead they offered an insight into what could be possible, given access to the right things. Finding and securing that access in itself is a problem to be solved, and however much you insist it will, the Apple EULAs and the like making it illegal to ‘tinker’ won’t be much of a barrier to anyone determined enough. Phone phreaking was and is illegal, but I bet a load of people working in modern telecoms have done it and learned a lot from it.

My point is this. If your creativity, your ability to make something, to play and tinker, is dependent on a specific device or on having permission, then you’re not a maker or a tinkerer. You’re already a drone. None of these things held me back when I was a kid, and yes, I got into trouble for it from time to time (my Mom’s flowerbeds were never the same after I built that ace canal system through them) but they taught me a hell of a lot. To argue that one class of consumer devices will stifle creativity is nonsense. To argue that the costs of getting setup to build apps for the thing is too high is to ignore how expensive the equivalent gadgets were in the ’80s. You don’t need money to grow up creative, you need other, more valuable things, like free time, safe environments and supportive parents, and even those things only help. The key thing is to want to make things. Some people do, and others don’t.

And I am so buying one.

The antithesis of all we hope to achieve

Saturday 13th Mar 2010

I get the USGS website up. Scan around. Ah, “Maps, Imagery and Publications”. That looks like it’s the right one. Main nav, too. Click. Ooh, lots of options. “Get aerial photos”. That’s what I need. Click. Hmm. Now I have to choose based on a mix of bureaucratic criteria. OK, “Historical photographs” looks like what I’m after. Click. Uhh. Ah! “Search and download”. Oh, it’s a link down the page. Oh dear, something in CamelCase. EarthExplorer and something about a dataset. Sigh. OK, if you must. Click. Ooh, 4 messages! For me? Oh, you shouldn’t have. Gosh, could they have put a few more acronyms in there? Wanna see it? Cliquez ici. Though by default it looks more like this.

So, ignoring the left hand nav, I type in what I’m after, ‘New York’. OK, I’ve met this pattern before, it’s a bit clumsy, but I click the search next to that box and I get, yes, places that match. It’s pre-validation. Fine. I leave all the other options as they are, and click the big search up at the right. Click.

“You must select at least one dataset before continuing”

Huh? What? Click OK. I scan around. For the first time notice the numbers on the headings. It’s not left-hand nav on the left. It looks like it, it’s laid out like it, so I ignored it because I’d already got to the page I wanted, right? No, they must have realised it was broken and decided that sticking numbers on would solve it, which it didn’t, not one bit. People aren’t going to notice that something says “2” and look for “1” on an interface like this — there’s simply so much noise that anything that doesn’t look important and doesn’t immediately make sense will be ignored. It’s not a conscious decision, it’s just the way our eye-brain systems work. So, I get it now, you want me to pick some of these things. Where’s “Select all”? There isn’t one? OK. There are plus expandy-things. Click. Checkboxes. Click. Er, what the fuck?

In Safari and Firefox I’ve got popups set to open in a new tab so it just looks like it opens a whole new page with a big, unstyled, scary-looking form. Then it’s gone! Woah! It’s a popup that opens, gives you a glimpse of unpleasantness, then closes itself again! What is this? It’s like some diabolical taunt. It happens every, time, you, click, a, checkbox. Click. Wait. Click. Wait. Click. Wait. Click. Wait… on and on….

And what’s with those checkboxes? I neither know nor care what ASAS, DOQ, NAPP, NHAP, SLAR or the rest are. I just want an aerial photo of New York. It reminds me of trying to find images on NASA’s site, and it insists you know what shuttle mission the photo was taken on — begging the response, “Well if I knew that I probably wouldn’t even be searching for it…”. Utterly, utterly ridiculous. Still, I make sure that I click all the ones that are free. I didn’t see any that said you have to pay for them, but still, this isn’t a commercial project I’m doing, so I don’t want to fork out image library prices for it just yet.

So I’ve clicked 20. I figure that’ll be enough to get some kind of result, but that’s time I’m just not going to get back, people. It’s painful. I click the big search link again. No error this time. Woohoo. Oh. “Results summary”. It’s a table, with all those checkbox labels, and “0 of ?” next to each one. Oh, it’s going to refresh every 10 seconds and tell me how many results there are! Fancy that. I wait until it looks like it’s done. There are links at the bottom for “Results” or “Redefine criteria”. Redefine criteria? After all that? Not on your life. Click results. A couple of things, but the table shows there must be quite a few, so that “Results” link apparently only shows you the first thing in the table, not all of them. That’s annoying. Fully expecting everything to have been lost and have to start again, I click “Back” in the browser. Oh, it’s still there, phew. That’s the only nice surprise I’ve had with this dreadful system so far. Each line in the table has a link next to it, so I open each of those in new tabs. There’s a promising image! At last! Click “Show”. Oh. No, that just shows where it is on a map — surely redundant for a photo of Manhattan Island? Ah, there’s a download link. Click. Oh.

“Sign in using your USGS registered user name and password”

Well, let’s have a look at the registration form, where I will “begin by initiating the registration process”. Jeez, just try and make it sound unappealing, why don’t you? I can barely wait. Here goes. Username, password, retype password and… secret question? It’s the usual set of questions your bank might ask, mother’s maiden name, first school and all that. I’m sorry, USGS, but I’m not giving you information like that. So I pick the first and give a stock answer. Next. No, sorry, “Submit and continue”. Submit to us, worthless human! Click.

Oh. Good lord!

For crying out loud! I question why they need any of this information, even first name and surname. I haven’t bought anything yet, nor am I intending to — remember that I only selected free images? I don’t want, or need, anything shipped. I could appreciate why they’d want to know where the image will be used, but to make that compulsory? Huh? This form is a nightmare — there’s no thought put into what the user wants or needs to do, it looks like it’s driven by what some department of USGS would like to know. If any of this is needed, ask for it when it is needed, and remember who the customer is. I didn’t have to give my bank this much information!

That’s not all, either, there’s a strong implication here that this is page 1 from a lengthy and typing-filled registration process. Now I understand the use of “initiate” to link to the registration process, as the idea of completing it is a distant, forlorn hope.

I give up. I’ll find an image elsewhere.

If anyone from USGS is reading, I’m a highly experienced online designer — user experience, usability and making things easy and beautiful to use are my things. My rates are quite reasonable too. Hint, hint.

Expert mode

Sunday 28th Feb 2010

Computer interfaces have come an awfully long way in the past 30 years. In fact, most of the time when we use a computer we don’t even realise we’re doing so — it’s become a cliché gotcha moment to ask a member of the public how many computers they use in a day. Often they’d mention the one at work or maybe the one they use at home to check their email, at which point our gleeful smug-faced twat of a presenter would trounce them with the fact that computers are everywhere, even in that triple-decaf skinny sub mocha dry venti soy latte they’re holding! Aha! Ahaa! Gotcha!

Tedious all round. But I’ll save my ranty tangent for another post. Computers are all over the place (though not yet in coffee) and we use them often without thinking. That’s because most of them have simple task-based user interfaces; A car may have a computer to run fuel management, aircon, ABS, amazing oh-god-is-that-true-AI traction control systems and more, but since our UI of the thing is the same as we’re used to — wheel, pedals, a couple of switches maybe — that even though it’s one of the most amazing computers we’ll ever use we just don’t notice it or realise it’s there.

Command-shift-wtf

So what about the traditional idea of a computer, the thing with the screen and the keyboard that lets you get to Facebook, online shopping and porn? That’s most definitely a computer, but the UI is anything but natural or transparent. Windows, Mac OS, Linux, whatever you choose to use, they all have roughly the same kind of interface. There is (supposedly) a desktop metaphor, a bizarre storage method — lumps of data called files and a hierarchical, often recursive, taxonomic system that apparently lives only for depth-first searches and goes by the folksy 1950s-office name of folders. Add to that the disconnected method of interacting with and changing these systems, a mouse, which translates forward and backward motion to an up-down axis on the screen, and a keyboard which, rather than for just typing words, also allows for a cryptic range of modal commands requiring the user to essentially play chords of keys to get the computer to do something with, usually, no visual feedback that it’s done anything at all. These chords are also not discoverable, meaning that there’s nothing in the interface that suggests they exist, and frankly, how would anyone guess? Command-shift-R? What? I press three keys?

Still, there are a fair few people who’ve been using these computers a while, and all these systems seem, if not natural, then at least familiar. I’m one of these people. I’ve used computers of various sorts since I was about 14 and despite all the screeching bores going on about how one system is so much better than the other, there’s not much to choose between them. In fact, most people find them equally difficult, unpleasant and confusing; they’re made to feel pretty fucking stupid when trying to use a traditional computer to do even the most basic things. This is not a good thing.

Non-expert users aren’t always stupid

I’ve always worked for companies that make websites or online tools that the ‘general population’ are going to be using — people who aren’t trained in the ways of traditional computers, and frequently have little interest in learning more about them. These are people who have other things going on in their lives and (one assumes) have a high degree of competency in whatever it is they do. Indeed, for some of our projects, we knew for damn sure that the target audience were highly intelligent and capable people, leaders in their fields and often internationally reknowned. Of course, we also knew that a hell of a lot of our users were stupid as hell and probably shouldn’t be trusted to tie their own shoelaces, let alone operate a cooker or drive a car. But still.

Clever or not, almost none of these people were very good when it came to computers. Designing an online application for something is a big enough task on its own, but when you’ve got the computer itself making things confusing and perhaps even preventing the user getting anywhere near your work you’ve got frustration enough to make you spit feathers. We often talked of an expert mode for computers. This was an idealised system by which the computer would start with a super basic and simplified UI: no confusing functionality, distracting icons, technical jargon or anything else, something perfect for task-orientated (or technically disinterested) users, which could open up like some glittering flower to reveal all the technical gubbins when expert mode was enabled.

It’s never happened. We’ve never had a computer like this. Thinking about it, it’s not surprising why. It’s hard enough designing one UI for a computer, but to design two? Two interfaces that have to interrelate and give access to the same systems and controls? Not only that, but one where errors, feedback and responses from the system and the broader networks have to be handled intelligently and appropriately. Also, what happens if your hapless user accidentally activates expert mode? Suddenly their world would become hideously complicated. It’s not impossible, but there’s not much of an economic incentive to make such a thing.

Security should be the easiest part

Besides, if you’re going to design a computer, you need to consider some important technical issues first, a lot of which seem to have been missed over the years. The internet is infested with virus laden PCs, connected up to and controlled by botnets organised and run by criminal gangs. These PCs don’t belong to criminals, they belong to ordinary people who don’t know there’s something wrong. If the computer is actually behaving strangely, they have no idea that it is, because, to them, computers always behave strangely — in fact, their computer could have been infested with viruses from the first moment they hooked it up to the internet with that modem PC World mis-sold them. The one with the default username and password and a stupidly opaque UI for getting into the damn thing to change it, assuming you even know there’s such a thing as a username and password and that such a thing is even important. Yes, that one. My parents have one of those. It’s shit.

An analogy

If you put an average person in a kitchen stocked with food, jars of seasoning, cooking appliances and all that, but nothing was labelled and some of the jars contained poison and a couple of the appliances could explode if you didn’t turn them on just right, would you expect a good result? No. You’d expect something bad to happen. Yet this is what we’re doing with computers. You’re giving someone access to an information device that they’re going to want to use for online banking, shopping, communication, socialising and all that, and yet quite easily it could expose all their personal information to complete strangers and make them unwitting accomplices to massive international criminal networks.

No user-serviceable parts inside

So where am I going with all this? Well, mainly I’m just ranting that computers-are-a-bit-shit-really, but a lot of these issues have come to the fore because of the iPad. OK, it’s still early days, but I think that the closed, all-in-one device with curated apps is exactly the kind of computer many people need. There was an awful lot of screeching and howling about how Apple controls what apps go onto the device, and how it’s all DRM, and this will bring about the end of technical innovation and that the youth of today will somehow be prevented from learning programming. Well that’s only so much bullshit. If it gets people online in a safe, technically mediated manner, this is a good thing. The saga with ReadWriteWeb and all the Facebook users turning up and typing in their Facebook credentials because it was the first result on Google for a search for “Facebook login” just shows that the open, normal, technically-literate assumptions of computers and the internet don’t work for most people. Just give them a Facebook App they download from the App Store — it is Facebook, it’s not going to be another site they’ve found by accident, it is safe, because it’s been vetted, and while it won’t get them Farmville (yet) it’ll get them poking-that and liking-this or whatever it is they do with a minimum of fuss, because that’s what they want to do, and they should be able to do it without getting phished.

A philosophical fear

The fears that kids won’t learn about programming or computers because they’ve only got a closed-system computer at home just aren’t valid. I grew up with no computer at home, and somehow managed it. How? Well, there’s this thing called school, and there were all sorts of different computers there, from crapola RM Nimbus machines to the latest Acorn Archimedes, which, I must point out, was in the art department and was pretty much instrumental in me becoming a digital designer. This was in the 1980s in a smalltown school in a rural area in the north of England. For any country where iPads and iPhones are popular I hardly imagine the schools are going to have fewer computers than the one I went to.

I say we need a bunch of different types of closed-system computers for people to just use and a whole load of open-system computers that people can develop on and play with. We’ve got the second thing, we just need to add the first. The iPad is the start of that, but don’t expect Apple to be the only player.