Since December of last year, I’ve been working on this comic. The point was to just start making comics – even if they are crudely drawn (and boy, are they). I decided to take conversations from IM, twitter, real life, etc. and make crudely drawn depictions of the people involved. The result can be described as “stick figures with no anti-aliasing”.

The most recent strip, as of this writing.

The art is all done in the Windows 7 version of Paint, which has posed a few challenges – but I’m just telling myself it adds character to the strips. You guys believe that, right? The website was also drawn in paint, but spliced up in Photoshop. So far, the only people who’ve seen the comics are the ones who make appearances in a strip. Now, anyone who subscribes to my RSS feed gets the link about 5 minutes before it goes public on twitter / facebook. Fun!

You can follow the comic’s twitter account @icanwebcomictoo. Hopefully I can get an RSS feed for the comic up in a few days.

And when you click delete on an article, you get the following prompt.

As the annotations illustrate, theres a fair distance to move between the delete link of a page near the bottom and the buttons to accept/cancel the prompt. My first idea was to simply move the prompt beside the article you’re deleting with some fancy javascript popup. It might look something like this:

However popups are slightly annoying, they may cover some other content (in this case, the ads for Instapaper subscriptions – which the people in charge likely won’t want hidden), and this still requires you to move the mouse – though a considerably shorter distance. So back to the drawing board I went. Solution two was to change what’s displayed in the “Source – Date – Share – Edit – Delete” area to an in-line prompt:

This way, if the user really did want to delete that page, all they have to do is click again – the “Yes, delete it” link is directly underneath where the “Delete” link was. Now my choice of colours/font is rough, but the idea is clear. After clicking yes, the section for that page would be removed from the list. After clicking no, the prompt would go away (possibly via a nice animation) and the previous “Source – Date – Share – Edit – Delete” display would return. Note two choices I did make though:

1. Using actions instead of simple Yes/No responses. This makes it clear to the user what they’ll be doing when they click one of the choices. Additionally, it may become clear what they are being promted to do just by reading their options.
2. Normally, the positive action (in this case “Yes, delete it”) is the first option on the left, and the negative action is on the right. This is how I arranged the responses in my first solution. In this one, I reversed the responses so that the user could click again without having to move their mouse if they did intend to delete the page. However, this may break some mental models – which would likely make the trade-off not worth it. Usability testing here may be required.

And that’s it! If you have other ideas, or thoughts on the ones I suggested – leave ‘em in the comments.

Today’s example of intuition-to-principle comes to us from Instapaper. I got on the Instapaper bandwagon a bit later than most people – as in I started using it last week. So as I’m playing around with it today, I wanted to delete one of the articles I had saved and subsequently finished reading. Now, to their credit, what happens next  isn’t entirely a bad thing. When you delete an article instead of archiving it, a little message window pops up asking you if you want to ‘permanently remove this item from your account’. This is a good thing, but what sucks is the placement of the pop up.

Because Instapaper is using what seems to be a simple javascript alert to accomplish this, the alert appears in the middle of your browser window. This accomplishes the task of letting the user decide to cancel deletion, but in a disruptive manner. Why is it disruptive? Not only does the alert prevent you from continuing until you deal with it, but you have to move your cursor from the item you were deleting, to the prompt. It may not seem like the biggest deal, but when you’re deleting lots of items, the time it takes to mouse back and forth gets annoying quick.

The fun part of all this, is I’m not the first person to discover the fact that the time it takes to move your mouse around the screen can degrade a user’s experience. Fitts’s law, according to wikipedia, ‘is a model of human movement in human–computer interaction and ergonomics that predicts that the time required to rapidly move to a target area is a function of the distance to and the size of the target’.

Designers have been keeping Fitts’s law in mind for a while now, because a reduction in time taken to perform a task causes an increase in perceived efficiency and ease-of-use.  So as it turns out, you don’t need to know every design principle in order to enhance the user experience of a product, but know a few here and there can help you explain why there is a need to change in the first place.

Kylie Minogue – In Your Eyes
Beck – Everyone’s Gotta Learn Sometime
Daft Punk – Harder, Better, Faster, Strong (The Neptunes Remix)
The Brothers Johnson – Strawberry Letter #23
New Order – Bizarre Love Triangle
DJ Mehdi – Lucky Boy
Duck Sauce – Barbra Streisand
FantomenK – The Massacre
FantomenK – CPU Mood
DJ Mehdi – Signatune (T. Bangalter Edit)
Depeche Mode – In Chains
Depeche Mode – In Sympathy
Deadmau5 – Meowingtons Enables Hax
Stimming – Melodica
Daft Punk – Derezzed
Midnight Juggernauts – Vital Signs
Midnight Juggernauts – Shadows
Midnight Juggernauts – Fire Below
Digitalism – Blitz
Digitalism – Stratosphere
Luciana – I Like That
Masta Mic – Best DNB Beatbox
Masta Mic – New Beatbox
Masta Mic – Halloweeen Beatbox

This playlist is available on YouTube here. If you like the songs, buy them! I can’t guaruntee how long the videos in this playlist will stick around either.

I like the idea of not having to open up another IM client to talk to my friends who use Google Talk instead of Windows Live Messenger. Until Microsoft actually implements cross-protocol IM like they said they were going to back in the day, I stick with using both Google Talk inside of Gmail and Windows Live Messenger.

The Problem

The problem I have though, is that I don’t like my instant messengers beeping at me when I get messages. I prefer visual cues, like how Windows Live Messenger makes the taskbar icon flash. Unfortunately, Google Talk in Gmail does not do this! Back in the days of XP and Vista, the problem was solved by changing the title of the page from “Gmail – …” to “New message from contact” or something to that effect. This would cause a sort of blinking animation in the task bar – as Firefox’s taskbar icon title just shows the title of whatever site you’re currently on.

However, since Windows 7 doesn’t display window titles in the task bar by default – and I rather like this setting – I have no good means of determining when a message has arrived for me. Sure, due to the translucent nature of my window decorations, sometimes I notice the blinking title bar anyway – but its not reliable.

The Idea

Gmail Labs rolls out new features that users can opt into all the time! If one of these new features were to make the browser icon in the toolbar flash when a new message arrives – similar to Windows Live Messenger does – the problem could be solved. However, I’m not entirely sure that’s something a browser lets you do, so unfortunately a plug-in might be required. Either way, the people behind Gmail Labs are smart, and I’m sure they can solve the problem as long as they’re aware the problem exists!

This is part 2 of my post on Ignite Waterloo 4. For part 1, click here!

Alright people, lets continue talking about more of the awesome 5-minute presentations I witnessed on last Thursday!

Doug Moen: The 3-D Printer Revolution

Doug brought us the terrifying topic of 3D printers, what they are, how they work, and why they’ll spell our doom. Okay, I might have exaggerated that last one, but seriously – these things are creepy. A 3D printer is basically a device that can print three dimensional objects – layer by layer. Imagine if you took rapid horizontal cross sections of an object, and then stacked them ontop of each other? Thats sort of what a 3D printer does, but instead of a stack, you something very closely approximating the original object. The best worst part? There are 3D printers that can print the requisite pieces to make a new 3D printer. That’s right, our technology is self replicating. Its only a matter of time before Skynet is formed and we’re all doomed. Doug is associated with KwartzLab, a local hackerspace. I couldn’t find his twitter handle, but you might be able to get a hold him through KwartzLab!

Brydon Gilliss: Change the World

Brydon (twitter: @Brydon) gave a talk that was hilarious, entertaining, and rather enlightening. You see, Brydon realized that by drinking beer, he was slowly killing the environment. Apparently, not much glass from a beer bottle is actually recycled. So Brydon looked to solve this problem, one pint at a time. By installing a beer fridge, ordering a keg of beer a month, and storing said keg inside his beer fridge, Brydon knocked his beer consumption price to about 2 dollars a beer, with zero beer bottles (after initial setup costs). Now I can’t say how, but he also mentioned that you might be able to get local breweries to give you a better price on kegs.

Jonathan Fritz: Intellectual Property and Bill C-32

Jon (twitter: @jonathanmfritz) spoke about the pesky Bill C-32 and the problems it brings to Canadians who want to back up their media in a digital form. Apparently Bill C-32 would prevent you from backing up your media if there is any from of Digital Rights Management on it – even if you legally own a copy of the media and are just trying to watch it on your PC, iPad, etc. Jon also attempted to decipher some of the legalese surrounding copyright, how long it lasts, and what it means for new artists. Jon mentioned that he only broached the tip of this topic’s iceberg and encouraged the audience to get in touch with him to learn more! So if you want to know more, check out that handy twitter ID I supplied to get in touch!

Melanie Baker: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse

Melanie (twitter: @melle) debriefed us on how to survive the zombie apocalypse. Apparently, Plants vs. Zombies is not a very good indication of what to expect. Some key pointers were that most literature on the topic is mostly useless, and that common sense and a certain level of physical fitness would help you just as much. Lessons learned? Aim for the head, destroy the brain, water is good (slows down the zombies, natch) and Batman will still be around to help!

Wow, Those Sounded Great!

They were great! And I didn’t even touch on all of presentations, all of which were really interesting and thought provoking. I’m glad to have been able to share some of my experiences from the event, but the best way to learn about this stuff isn’t to read about it on blogs (but please, don’t stop visiting my blog!) but to come out to these events yourself! I’m just doing my part to get people out to awesome events like these. Hopefully I’ll see you at Ignite Waterloo 5!

Update [2010-11-24]: The videos have been posted! Find ‘em here. Thanks again to Philip Bast!

First of all, you may be asking what is Ignite? Ignite conferences are a series of 5 minute talks on anything, accompanied by slide shows that auto advance every 15 seconds. Their mantra is “enlighten us but make it quick”. Sound interesting? Keep reading.

There have been three Ignite Events in Waterloo  (aptly labelled Ignite Waterloo 1-3). I had tickets to the last one, but I ended up bailing the day of due to illness. I now wish I’d just sucked it up and gone anyways.

I showed up around 6 o’clock when doors opened, and got a chance to chat with Mark Connolly who is one of two the co-creators of uxWaterloo. About an hour later I grabbed some seats for my good friends Jon and Tyler, and started snapping pictures of the crowd. At 7:30 my friends had arrived and the presentations started! I’m not going to highlight them all (the full list is available here), but once the videos get uploaded to YouTube by Philip Bast (the volunteer videographer for the event), I’ll update this post with links!

Mike Shanks: Combining Passions

Mike (twitter: @mikepgww) gave a talk on comining passions. In his case, he wanted to combine his passion for running, with his passion for drinking beer. Apparently, there are like minded individuals who participate in something called the beer mile. This involves chugging a beer, then running a quarter-mile, chugging another beer, then running another quarter-mile, a beer, a quarter-mile, abeeraquartermile and you’re done. Mike walked us through this process, including such descriptive phrases as “Shit! Beer is carbonated”, “burpin’ around the corner”, and “Shit! Beer is still carbonated!”

Sean Puckett: The Smart Camera

Sean (web: http://photi.ca) presented us with the evolution of the camera from a dumb instrument – one that does only what its user asks of it – to a device combined with the power of 1/10th of a super computer, and a connection to the internet. Turns out 1/10th of a super computer is a whole hell of a lot, and a connection to the internet affords you “the whole of human knowledge”, allowing you to do crazy things like live translation of text written in one alphabet to another, or take a picture of someone and find out who they are, or overlay information about whatever you’re looking (folks in the biz call this augmented reality, I’m told).

Cari Howard: Garbage In, Nothing Out: It Doesn’t Go Away!

Cari (twitter: @ariesamazon) informed us of the fact that the Waterloo region’s land fills have about 20 years left. 20 years. Thats not a lot of time. After that, where are we going to put our garbage? She implored us to reduce and reuse before recycling. Turns out that even though recycling is a good thing, its not nearly as efficient as reducing or reusing your goods. Also interesting, was some details she shared on future technologies to deal with waste disposal. The short version is they use something called a plasma torch to shoot a bolt of lightning into the garbage. This apparently produces no harmful waste except some gases, which can fortunately be collected and used to charge your next bolt of lightning! Very cool.

Linda Carson: Art: WTF?

Linda Carson (twitter: @lccarson) went to art school so we didn’t have to. This amazingly titled presentation began with a picture of Damien Hirst’s For the Love of God. This, as Linda told us is a type of art called a vanitas. A vanitas is, as I understand it, a piece of art meant to remind us of our mortality. It started out with depictions of skulls, then depiction of skulls in ways that you can only see them from a certain angle. Then partially butchered animal carcasses, then partially butchered human carcasses. Then, in 1987 (I was totally born that year!) Canadian artist Jana Sterbak created a vanitas of a woman wearing a dress made of meat. Sound familiar? Yep. Lady Gaga was not just being strange, she was referencing years of art history. At the very end of her talk, she told us what I told you at the start: Linda Carson went to art school so we didn’t have to.

Oh God There Were More?

Yes, and they were all good. In fact, the ones I’ve covered here are only a sampling from the first half of the presentations! I’ll try and get more reviews up here, but this post is long enough for now. Stay tuned for part 2!

Update [2010-11-23]: Part 2 has been posted, and is available for your reading pleasure here.

Update [2010-11-24]: The videos have been posted! Find ‘em here. Thanks again to Philip Bast!

It was a very interesting talk – which I may get into in more detail in another blog post – but my interest was piqued on another topic before our guest speaker even took the stage. While waiting for everyone to take their seats I was socializing with a few of the other attendees. In advance, if either of the two ladies I was speaking to tonight end up reading this – I’m very sorry I forgot your names!

During some light conversation about our interests in user experience related fields – one of these ladies (we’ll call her Alice) wanted to add the other (we’ll call her Brenda) to LinkedIn. Alice asked Brenda if she was on LinkedIn, and after Brenda said yes, Alice proceeded to pull out her BlackBerry to look Brenda up.

It was at this point that I asked them “won’t it be interesting when your phone will have opened up LinkedIn and already searched for Brenda because it heard our conversation?”. We all kind of laughed, and commented on how that technology was not quite ready for that yet with big smiles. Phones reacting to your conversations? Sorcery I say!

However ridiculous this concept sounds, we might not be that far off.

Technologies such as Microsoft’s Xbox 360 Kinect have (as I’ve heard) very intelligent voice detection – to the point where it knows the difference between the voices of the users in the room. It’s not a stretch to imagine Microsoft putting similar technology into their newly launched Windows Phone 7 to enable this very sort of thing. It would be a very interesting shift in user experience design for applications to know what you want to do before you’ve decided to do it.

This is a guest post by Dana Harrison. Check up on his other activities at The Linux Experiment and his other posts on audiophonik.

Hi, all!  You may have noticed already by reading my slightly different name, or perhaps you’ve heard of me over on the wildly popular site I co-founded, The Linux Experiment, but I am not the usual Phil.  My name is Dana, and I’m a young professional working in Information Systems for a large insurance company.  I work with Phil and also had the pleasure of founding The Linux Experiment with him.  This is my third guest post for audiophonik.

This time around, Phil has asked me to do another review for an application available on Google’s Android platform: the shiny and efficient ChompSMS, now running on (yay!) Android 2.1 as my carrier – Rogers – has finally pushed out this update to my HTC Magic+ hardware.

ChompSMS: Sounds tasty

ChompSMS is an Android-only (and decidedly rather handy) replacement to the built-in ‘Messages’ application used for sending and receiving MMS / SMS / pretty much any other kind of MS / on the Android platform.  To give you an idea of how stone-age their own messaging application is, I can’t notice any change between its current iteration – on Android 2.1 – and the one that was on my phone last week, using Android 1.5.  I’m almost tempted to root my phone and slap on Froyo, just to see if there’s any difference in the stock messaging app.

Old and busted...

...new hotness.

ChompSMS is supposed to offer a lot of new features and generally ‘beef up’ the stock messaging options available on Google Android, and comes with a huge list of things it supposedly does better than Google.  Among them:

• The UI has been changed to mirror that of the iOS platform – which I could really do without, but it looks better than stock
• The ability to send SMS / MMS over the ‘ChompSMS’ network with the purchase of ‘credits’, for a much cheaper rate than your provider
• A host of new notification options for you to choose how you’re notified about received (or even sent!) messages

Now, that’s certainly a lot to claim: let’s see how ChompSMS stacks up against its supposed abilities.

Finger-Chompin’ good

Now, I can honestly say that I haven’t personally purchased credits or paid for ChompSMS in any way.  While it does tout itself as a ‘free program’, there is a premium version available for a few bucks that will remove the streaming advertisements from the program’s main window.  In all honesty, they’re pretty out of the way, but I have accidentally tapped on one or two while attempting to select the top name on my messaging list, mostly due to my own poor motor skills.  If ads are the sort of thing that really piss you off though, go for the paid version; I’m seriously considering it.

The first three things with which I immediately fell in love using ChompSMS are as follows:

1) Notification options

Seriously, this should just be available in the stock version of the Android messaging application, but apparently Google has not yet looked that far into the future and gleaned that much information from its search engine users.  ChompSMS grants me the ability to use either my LED (located near the earpiece) OR the trackball (which pulses white) – or BOTH! – to notify me of texts.  On top of that, I can even select what colour I want the LED to flash, and it’s much easier to select any of my usual songs as a notification sound – no silly messing about with folders on the SD card.

2) Truncated message strings

On top of the fact that it just handles message strings more beautifully – much more intuitively than the stock application – one issue I ran into several times with the stock application is the fact that, well, some of my message strings get rather unwieldy, and I don’t want to have to delete texts to use my application.  For example: before erasing my phone for the big Android 2.1 update, I had over 3000 some messages with my girlfriend that I didn’t particularly want to get rid of.  Trouble is, every time I opened her string in the messaging application, it would take forever to load all of those messages.

This is where ChompSMS comes in handy: it only loads the last ‘so many’ (I say this because I haven’t counted) messages immediately, with the option to ‘open older messages’ at the top of the string in button form.  As it turns out, this has been a total lifesaver in that I’m now not waiting forever for my messages to come up, and the application itself actually has a smaller footprint as it’s not loading every single text in the history of mankind into memory.

3) Replies from the lock screen

This is honestly a no-brainer.  The quick ability to reply as soon as a message comes in – even right from the lock screen – is just about the handiest and simplest thing they could have thought of.

The ugly

The only things I’ll complain about with ChompSMS are as follows:

1) It shouldn’t have to mirror the Apple iOS UI for texts in order to remain functional and pretty.  They should really try to ramp up development of their own, better-than-Google-and-Apple UI to distinguish themselves from the rest of the garbage out there.

2) I hate ads. Honestly, you would think they make enough from people purchasing their damn ‘credits’ to send texts over their network to be able to remove ads from the free version of their program; I’m totally torn about whether or not I want to shell out a few bucks for a messaging application, or just remove it and use the stock one again.  Or just toss a few Google ads on your site – nobody would even mind!

The closing statement

All in all, ChompSMS is almost a necessity for someone who texts as much as me – I almost regularly come close to my 1000-text-per-month cap on my plan with Rogers, but am usually careful not to get too close to the top because I know how much they love to bleed me for money.  If you’re a more recreational, or less frequent, texter then I would imagine you can stick with the stock application and be just fine, as long as you’ve paired it with something like Swype.

Go to your Market, get ChompSMS, and be happy – you will thank me later.  Here’s a handy QR code for Android users!

In my opinion, the change room is the most important part because that’s where I ultimately decide if I am going to spend money at the shop or not. Shops whose change rooms made this process easier got more of my money – unless their products were complete crap of course.

What struck me as interesting is that without knowing it, I’d been conducting a usability study on the user experience of shoppers – where in this case the user was the customer at a particular shop. As a result of this impromptu study I put together a list of qualities a good change room should have based on my own experiences hopping around from shop to shop.

The list is as follows:

Have mirrors in each change room.

This is such an easy one. Your want to see how they look, but they might not want everyone else in the store or change room area to see.

Have an change room area separate from the rest of the store.

Lots of people come to clothes stores with a friend, or in groups. When a shopper does decide to come out of the change room to get opinions, they probably only want them from their entourage – not the rest of the store.

Have mirrors in the change room area.

Sometimes what you’re trying on looks great in the change room, but once you see it out in the open or a member of your entourage points out a problem, it’s nice to have a mirror to double check. Additionally, it provides a clear point of congregation for shoppers and their entourage. Placed carefully, change room area mirrors can direct traffic so people aren’t standing around in awkward spots in the area looking at each other.

Have seating in your change room area.

It can be a pain when you’re waiting around for your fellow shopper to come out and show you the items they’re trying on. Especially when they have a bunch to try on. Providing seating for the members of a shopper’s entourage is a courtesy that I thoroughly enjoy when I get dragged out to shop with other people.

Have a place to hang clothes.

When you come into a change room with multiple items, it’s nice to have a hook to hang all the  items so you can look at them one by one. Having multiple hooks helps the shopper keep track of the items they like and don’t like as well.

Have a place to set the clothes down.

I’ve been in far too many change rooms where they do provide a spot to hang clothes, but what’s all you get. A bench provides a nice place to set things  because lets face it, putting clothes on the ground in these rooms feels a bit bad. Also, it can be pain to re-hang everything, especially those items you’re not even going to buy. Don’t want them? Toss ‘em on the bench.

This list is not at all exhaustive,  but the best change rooms – and by extension the best stores – I’ve been in have implemented most or all of these ideas, and are the ones I continue to shop at. Just remember, even the best change room can’t make up for crappy products!