Some nice Twitter visualisation from the NY Times. (Although the score doesn't seem to update as it ought to, in Firefox at least.)

A couple of years ago, I bemoaned the inconsistency of our presentation of bookmarks and places.

Last week I had cause to revisit the issue (for much the same reason as before—updating the OpenSolaris UI spec), hoping that things would have improved and I wouldn't have to suggest too many tweaks to the OpenSolaris layout to keep things nice and consistent.

Unfortunately, it doesn't look like much has changed though, really, which is kind of disappointing. (Especially as seeing this bug marked as resolved had built up my hopes a little...)

Caveat: as in my original post, the latest release of Ubuntu (8.10, GNOME 2.24.1) was the closest I had to a community build when I was doing the comparison. So things may really be a little better or worse than they appear here, or may have been fixed in 2.25/2.26.

So I hacked up a quick diagram showing all the menus and sidebars where bookmarks and places appear, and aligned them on the "Home Folder" entry since that was about the only one that was consistently placed. Here's what I came up with:

The plusses:

• The two Places menus on the panel (one in the menubar applet, one in the main menu applet) are now identical, at least in Ubuntu. This is good to see, although most users won't see both at the same time anyway.
• The Go and Places menus in Nautilus (browser mode and spatial mode respectively) are pretty consistent with each other too.

The minuses:

• Inconsistent appearance/placement of mounted media, Computer, Desktop, Templates, File System, and CD/DVD Creator between sidebars and menus.

Of course, it would be wrong to complain without offering any proposals, and I'll get to that—just haven't got time today. The current draft of the OpenSolaris 2009.04 UI spec does include my first quick attempt, but that's currently based more on "least amount of work to fix" rather than "what might be most useful"... and we all know that's not really the way to do it, right kids? :)

Not liking the new British coins all that much, I have to say.

Apart from the fact they look a lot like the cardboard money that I used to have in my toy cash register many years ago, they don't look very friendly to tourists who might have little or no English, and/or just bad eyesight. I'd have thought the first rule of currency design would be to use biggish numbers, not just (in some cases, tiny) words?

I wasn't at CHI this year so I don't know how this is likely to pan out, but one of the follow-up actions from the Usability and free/libre/open source software SIG: HCI expertise and design rationale was apparently to create this wiki. Will be keeping an eye on it to see what occurs...

What happens when you let developers design user interfaces :)

This just in:

For details and information how to apply, see www.openusability.org/studentprojects.

I do wish mobile phone companies (well, Nokia in particular) would print model numbers somewhere on all their handsets. I've had three different ones now, and every time I go to buy an accessory, I can never remember which one I've got. (I think I currently have a 3100, and Julie has a 3220... but it could quite conceivably be the other way around. Or neither.)

I don't know who designed the heating system in our house, but they could do with attending a usability course or two.

We have a gas combi boiler, which has three controls. One is a master on/off switch, with two settings-- "off" and "radiators" (according to the icons). The second is a thermostat, with no numerical legend, just another "radiator" icon. The third is a 24-hour timer with those annoying tiny pins you have to pop in and out, which also has its own three-setting on/off switch (on, off and timed).

On top of that, there's a thermostat in the hall with temperature markings on it, and a lever beside the hot tank to switch between "radiators and water" and "water only". Add to that the variable controls on the radiators themselves, and it certainly becomes quite a challenge to decide what to adjust when you're feeling a bit chilly.

Anyway, right now we have it set to "water only", and all the radiators are off, as it's 25C+ outside most days at the moment. This morning, I went for a shower (which takes the water from the hot tank), and there was no hot water.... the combi boiler hadn't come on in the early hours like it was supposed to. Went downstairs, checked the gas supply on the cooker... fine. Switched the timer switch from 'timed' to 'on', which should light the gas immediately... nothing. Tried switching the boiler off and back on again... nothing. Pressed the Reset button... nothing. The boiler doesn't have a pilot light, so I knew that wasn't the problem. And the front is screwed on, which suggested I shouldn't really try poking around in it.

Was on the verge of calling a heating engineer when I decided that the only control I hadn't played with was the thermostat in the hall, which was set to a reasonable enough 24C (well, "reasonable" if you disregard the fact that the radiators aren't turned on anyway). Turned it down... nothing. Turned it up, and... click, the boiler lit up. That's right, in our house you can't have hot water unless the radiator-controlling thermostat is set to something above room temperature, even when the radiators have been turned off for months. Marvellous.

Update: As somebody pointed out, the fact that I have a hot tank means the boiler isn't actually a combi, it just looks like one :) Doesn't really affect the gist of the tale though, so I won't bother editing it out...

Kudos to the Thunderbird team for adding a neck-saving feature (maybe it's been there forever, but I've only just encountered it tonight)... an alert that pops up when you try to send a mail using the keyboard shortcut rather than clicking Send. How I've laughed in the past whenever I've sent incomplete/embarrassing/borderline-litigious emails by mistake (usually when trying to use some other keyboard shortcut, followed by Enter) before I'd counted to ten and rewritten them :)

Now, you could well argue that it's a poor shortcut (Cmd-Enter on Mac, presumably Ctrl-Enter on others) that's easy to hit by mistake. But it's kind of a standard one these days, so the warning is appreciated in the meantime until they pick a better one.

Heh... those of you who remember Jakob Nielsen's infamous Why Frames Suck article might find this Ajax spoof amusing...

From the Microsoft Office UI blog:

Q: What is "Send a Smile?"

A: There's a general philosophy Microsoft has been embracing more and more in all of our beta products, which is that people should be able to send one-off comments as easily as possible, while they're "in the moment." Windows XP had a "Comments?" link in every dialog box that let you tell us if the dialog was stupid. Previous versions of Office had the same thing.

Send-a-Smile is a related tool that goes a bit further. Anywhere, anytime, someone can click a "smiley face" to tell us they like something or a "frowny face" to tell us they don't like something. We get a lot of context (with the user's permission of course), including a screenshot, sometimes a short movie of the last 30 seconds, related documents, etc. There's another tool called the Office Feedback Tool (also known as "Ebert") which does a similar thing but with Thumbs Up and Thumbs Down.

All of these tools work on the principal that if someone has to open a newsreader, log onto a newsgroup, type a long message, and send it, we'll lose a lot of valuable feedback just due to complacency. The idea is to reduce the barrier to entry for sending comments so that we get more data from the "heat of the moment."

And of course, we have all sorts of tools that help us sort an analyze the feedback on the back-end.

I really like even the simple "Comments?" idea, and it would be cool if GNOME/JDS could do something similar in its development releases. It would probably need some sort of toolkit support so it could be easily added to any window or dialog, and easily turned off for the final builds. And of course, the hard part would be analysing all that data. But from the user's point of view, it would be pretty unobtrusive, and would probably capture that Kodak Moment a lot better than having to go and file a bug report. (Plus, of course, people don't file bug reports about cool stuff that Just Worked.)

Happy World Usability Day!

Jakob's latest AlertBox concerns Weblog Usability: The Top Ten Design Mistakes.

A nice little essay from Scott Berkun: Why Software Sucks (and What to Do About It).