Doing Words

Choice is more often a feeling than an action

// October 29th, 2007 // 0 Comments // platform, Products

Duncan Riley is copping some criticism on Techcrunch over his opinion that OS X Leopard’s widgets are newsworthy enough to report on.

I think it’s an interesting feature of Leopard, but not really significant to the widget sector (is it a sector yet? covered by TC.

Unlike most other widget platforms, OS X’s widgets are hidden in a Widget app that you need to open first, reducing the number of views/user. They aren’t cross-platform, and Leopard’s market share is only a slice of the total OS X installed base. I don’t know what share of the total OS market OS X enjoys, but it must be small. Growing faster than other OSes, likely, but from a very low base.

Microsoft, with it stated aim of being the Internet OS – and its long-developed habit of copying Apple’s interfaces – may eventually copy this ‘create your own widget from the browser’ feature, but at MSFT’s current rate of innovation, count on seeing that some time >2020, by which time it’ll be Mozilla-based browsers, not IE, that will have dominant market share.

The other thing to consider is what percentage of users will make their own widget given the opportunity to do so. My experience working on personalisable homepages for portals suggests that while everyone ticks “yes” when you ask them whether they want their own personalisable homepage, when the product goes live, most of those yes-tickers will never take the time to personalise their homepage. My observations suggest that ease-of-use has no bearing on that result – it doesn’t matter if it’s one button on the toolbar away.

Personalisation is like fast-food – knowing that the fast-food franchise lets you choose your own fillings gets you in the door rather than the competitor’s door. But 98% of us choose the off-the-shelf burger after we walk in and view the menu because it’s quicker, easier, and we figure whoever decided that pickles and ketchup go together must know what they’re doing. Mistakenly…

We think we want choice, but what we really want is the feeling that we could choose if we wanted to.

Choice is more often a feeling than an action

// October 29th, 2007 // 0 Comments // platform, Products

Duncan Riley is copping some criticism on Techcrunch over his opinion that OS X Leopard’s widgets are newsworthy enough to report on.

I think it’s an interesting feature of Leopard, but not really significant to the widget sector (is it a sector yet? covered by TC.

Unlike most other widget platforms, OS X’s widgets are hidden in a Widget app that you need to open first, reducing the number of views/user. They aren’t cross-platform, and Leopard’s market share is only a slice of the total OS X installed base. I don’t know what share of the total OS market OS X enjoys, but it must be small. Growing faster than other OSes, likely, but from a very low base.

Microsoft, with it stated aim of being the Internet OS – and its long-developed habit of copying Apple’s interfaces – may eventually copy this ‘create your own widget from the browser’ feature, but at MSFT’s current rate of innovation, count on seeing that some time >2020, by which time it’ll be Mozilla-based browsers, not IE, that will have dominant market share.

The other thing to consider is what percentage of users will make their own widget given the opportunity to do so. My experience working on personalisable homepages for portals suggests that while everyone ticks “yes” when you ask them whether they want their own personalisable homepage, when the product goes live, most of those yes-tickers will never take the time to personalise their homepage. My observations suggest that ease-of-use has no bearing on that result – it doesn’t matter if it’s one button on the toolbar away.

Personalisation is like fast-food – knowing that the fast-food franchise lets you choose your own fillings gets you in the door rather than the competitor’s door. But 98% of us choose the off-the-shelf burger after we walk in and view the menu because it’s quicker, easier, and we figure whoever decided that pickles and ketchup go together must know what they’re doing. Mistakenly…

We think we want choice, but what we really want is the feeling that we could choose if we wanted to.

New Google Maps feature: massive privacy invasion

// May 30th, 2007 // 0 Comments // Privacy

Only in the US is there a geek market large enough to have even the faintest
hope of making a profit out of serving people 3-D photo maps, though I remain sceptical that Google can ever make this pay. Not that “make it pay” is a common goal for most Google development teams.

In my testing, I found that flying around the streets of San Francisco was a little bit nausea-inducing much of the time; either spinning out of control with injudicious mouse movements or getting completely lost by the time I’d navigated the intersection. Even those with an unshakeable internal compass (who presumably don’t need maps like the rest of us anyway) may be slightly creeped-out by flying through a frozen moment in time, like a scene from Twilight Zone – people, vehicles and objects frozen forever in time (or at least
until the next update of the database).

The fun folks from Immersive Media have crews of drones (presumably associate producers) in white vans kitted with 360-degree photo cameras, slowly crawling through every major intersection in the US, building a navigable database of images that can be overlaid (presumably at great expense) on mapping data that Google has licensed from Sanborn and NAVTEQ (at less expense, since it’s legacy data.)

I expect it’ll be a matter of hours before people are blogging about all the weird sh*t they’ve discovered while zooming in on all the people caught on street corners.

Drug dealers prospecting, crimes in progress, lovers soon to become ex-, partners cheating on other partners, businessmen captured with the opposition in mid-betrayal, an eventually, no doubt, a chubby middle-aged guy who dies of a heart attack crossing the street shortly after the Immersive Media van trundles past, leaving as his last legacy on this mortal coil a blurry, poorly-exposed shot of him juggling an over-full briefcase, an extra-tall latte and that last
fatal cigarette on the way to an office never reached. A mourning wife bookmarking the URL sent by a web-savvy nephew in the weeks after the funeral, returning again and again to that haphazard moment, never closing the browser or even allowing the screensaver to kick in for fear that when she returns, it will be gone. Then one day, of course, it will be gone; deleted as randomly as it was captured by another refresh from another trundling white van.

But hey; it’s not all bad news. It can’t be long before someone hacks together something that lets you add speech bubbles to the photos and share them with other Google Maps users!

New Google Maps feature: massive privacy invasion

// May 30th, 2007 // 0 Comments // Other news

Only in the US is there a geek market large enough to have even the faintest
hope of making a profit out of serving people 3-D photo maps, though I remain sceptical that Google can ever make this pay. Not that “make it pay” is a common goal for most Google development teams.

In my testing, I found that flying around the streets of San Francisco was a little bit nausea-inducing much of the time; either spinning out of control with injudicious mouse movements or getting completely lost by the time I’d navigated the intersection. Even those with an unshakeable internal compass (who presumably don’t need maps like the rest of us anyway) may be slightly creeped-out by flying through a frozen moment in time, like a scene from Twilight Zone – people, vehicles and objects frozen forever in time (or at least
until the next update of the database).

The fun folks from Immersive Media have crews of drones (presumably associate producers) in white vans kitted with 360-degree photo cameras, slowly crawling through every major intersection in the US, building a navigable database of images that can be overlaid (presumably at great expense) on mapping data that Google has licensed from Sanborn and NAVTEQ (at less expense, since it’s legacy data.)

I expect it’ll be a matter of hours before people are blogging about all the weird sh*t they’ve discovered while zooming in on all the people caught on street corners.

Drug dealers prospecting, crimes in progress, lovers soon to become ex-, partners cheating on other partners, businessmen captured with the opposition in mid-betrayal, an eventually, no doubt, a chubby middle-aged guy who dies of a heart attack crossing the street shortly after the Immersive Media van trundles past, leaving as his last legacy on this mortal coil a blurry, poorly-exposed shot of him juggling an over-full briefcase, an extra-tall latte and that last
fatal cigarette on the way to an office never reached. A mourning wife bookmarking the URL sent by a web-savvy nephew in the weeks after the funeral, returning again and again to that haphazard moment, never closing the browser or even allowing the screensaver to kick in for fear that when she returns, it will be gone. Then one day, of course, it will be gone; deleted as randomly as it was captured by another refresh from another trundling white van.

But hey; it’s not all bad news. It can’t be long before someone hacks together something that lets you add speech bubbles to the photos and share them with other Google Maps users!

How to be simple, and why

// May 23rd, 2007 // 0 Comments // strategy

I was invited to present some findings to the management team of a business this morning, and gave the group one memorable story to take away.

A process they’d been pinning the business on since 2002 had grown so weedy with neglect that it now takes 47 steps to complete. But wait…

In the course of those steps there are four points at which, if you skip a step or make a mistake, your work is lost and you must start again.

During the process you need to have five programs open, plus at least two instances of Internet Explorer (one browser-based tool won’t work properly with Firefox) You also need to use at least one of four Word macros.

During the process, you use a browser interface that includes features nobody knows how to use, features that aren’t enabled, and other features that don’t work.

There is even an error message that pops up towards the end of the process which is incorrect, and can be safely ignored… as long as you don’t get into the habit of ignoring any other error messages.

There are two people who spend much of their working day repeating this process, up to ten times each, per day. Imagine what it must be like to be one of those people!

The Laws Of Simplicity is an awesome book in these situations.

(Tip of that hat to Scott)