Tivo: Better than documentation, a video
When I see really good instruction books, I smile.
Writing instructions on how to assembly a product is hard. Your audience is most likely coming at the situation "blind" with little experience, and there is little reason for them to invest time in becoming an expert in assembling the product because once it works, that knowledge becomes useless. Get it done and forget about it. Unless, of course, you plan on buying the same item again and again. With something like a bookcase, that isn't true.
Compare the typical furniture installation guide to what you get with furniture from Ikea. I don't think good instructions like this are an accident. I assume (can someone from Ikea confirm?) that they do usability studies: people with little experience are given the product and asked to install it as trained professionals watch them through a one-way mirror. The documentation is improved based on observations and interviews.
Now let's talk about the Apple Xserve installation process. I've installed, maybe, 6 Apple Xserve computers. The instructions frustrating. You continually keep saying to yourself, "Why would they want me to do that?" and yet, if you skip those steps you end up regretting it later, often having to start over from scratch. "Oh, now I understand. If you don't use your left elbow to support the frizenfrats, your right hand won't be free to slide the wingding into the snortplex." The design of the Apple Xserve is extremely elegant, but you don't realize it until you are done thus it is tempting to not follow the instructions precicely. If I went more than a month without installing an Xserve I would forget how to do it and feel like a newbie all over again. When you do it their way everything "just works." If only they could explain at the beginning what it would look like at the end. Word won't do justice to it. It's like explaining to a blind person what "red" looks like. I wish Apple would include a video showing how it looks and works when it's done. Demonstrate how it slides in and out of the rack so well. Then walk through the installation process, showing how the case is actually what gets attached to the rack, and the guts slide into the case. (If you've installed one of these things, you know what I mean.) After watching that, the user is no longer doing the installation "blind" and actual installation time would be dramatically reduced. Much less frustrating.
Sometimes the problem is simply fear of the unknown. People generally fear messing with the crazy, messy, wires in a home entertainment system. Consider the Tivo with its multitude connectors for video out: composite, HDMI, other acronyms I can't remember. They've put out a video that shows the installation process. I recommend people watch the video even if they don't own or plan on owning a Tivo. It's a good example of how to do a video introduction to a complicated process. The video is shot in a living-room, not a lab. Notice that the voice is friendly, plain-spoken (referring to "that cable guy"), even making commentary ("I love it when it's color coded") and using slang ("this little puppy"). It starts with an overriding premise: all connections will be "from out, to in" and this phrase is emphasized throughout. Watch it and understand.
Does your company make a product that would benefit from an installation video?
Privacy 10 years ago vs. Today
Ten years ago: Caller ID? Hell no! I'm gonna get it blocked! This is a total invasion of privacy!
Today: I refuse to order pizza delivery from that place until they get a caller-id system so I don't have to repeat my address to them every time I call in an order.
The sad part is that we now go to the "not as good food, but they use my caller-id bits" place instead of the "great food, takes forever to place my order because they don’t take advantage of caller-id" place.
I think the morale of this story is that people will gladly give up a reasonable amount of privacy if they get some value for it. Plus, in this case they are only getting the information that I would want them to have anyway. I am going to tell them my address (so they can deliver the food) and giving them my phone number is a reasonable thing in case they need to reach me to ask a question. Plus, all of this is in the phone book. If I wanted to keep it all secret I could pick up the food myself.
Banks are in a different situation. They seem to want to collect tons of information, not all of it obviously needed. When ordering a credit report from Equifax they ask for all your previous addresses, which they then use to supplement the information that they have about you. (All they really need is my SSN and full name, plus the address I want the report delivered.)
Diebold to Withdraw from E-Voting?
It appears after years of criticism, Diebold may be ready to withdraw from electronic voting entirely. The company is concerned that this relatively small and marginally profitable unit is hurting the company's overall image.Diebold Weighs Strategy for Voting Unit on Wired.com
If voting booth manufacturing is so lacking in profit, maybe all such vendors should get out of this business. In some countries the government has an independent division that runs the voting system. Just like the military is an independing branch of the government, the election commission develops voting technology, tests it, and runs the elections. It is an honorable group, held in high esteem, with very high standards.
OOPSLA request
It would be great if the annual OOPSLA conference added rock concerts and big parties every night. They could change their name to OOPSL-A-palooza.That's the way the cookie crumbles
Some days you are master of a huge data center. Other days you're just sittin' on the floor outside the "computer closet" trying to figure out why the new server won't boot.
That's just how it works.
LOTD
So Microsoft has announced that their new operating system shall be called "Windows Vista." And we are assured that the new name is not an acronym for Viruses, Infections, Spyware, Trojans and Adware.
IVR that doesn't suck
People tend to hate those Interactive Voice Response systems ("press 1 for sales... press 2 for tech support... etc.") and so do I. However I was recently impress with something that Verio does on 1-800-GET-VERIO. A man speaks the odd-numbered choices and a female speaks the even numbered choices.
This alternating voices really made it easier to concentrate on what they were saying.
It reminded me of my days on highschool radio station WJSV (90.5FM) where I was taught to always pair two strikingly constrasting voices on any program we produced. The easiest way to do this was to have one male voice and one female voice. The results was an audio presentation that was easier on the ears.
This kind of attention to detail is appreciated.
Musical Banner Pages
My cell phone has different rings for different people, and specific rings for "person not in address book" and "caller id is blocked."
What if I could upload MP3s to printers which would play different songs based on what was being printed?
- Play an old-tyme ragtime song when plain ASCII was printed
- Print a slow, limbering, elephant-like, song when someone prints something with lots of graphics
- A series of songs could play as the printer starts running out of paper: Meet Me Half Way when the paper tray is half empty, Is That All There Is when it runs out, and so on.
- And of course, be able to set your own personal MP3 for your printouts so you can hear when they are done.
Why hasn't anyone thought of this before?
