Radiotracker’s UI

On the 3rd December the German IT magazine CHIP offered the program RadioTracker as part of their advent calendar with free downloads. They advertised it as a program to record music from online radio stations. My roommate was interested enough to try it, even more after he saw that its regular price is 39,90$. He started the installer and was unpleasantly surprised how long it took to install this piece of software on his laptop. It installed a C++ library without asking him or offering any alternative, required a system restart and took too long to load. My roommate began already to lose his patience, when he was presented with a similar interface as you see from this screenshot, but without the already available textual lists:

Initially, there were only genres to choose from and a button labeled “Start recording”, but the context was missing – recording what(song, radio station)? The rest of the icons, tabs and controls were scattered all over the place, as you can see above. He accidentally clicked on a tab at the bottom and asked me for help, as he couldn’t find a way to go back. We both stared at the interface and were not able to do anything meaningful with this software. Its clear that with such variety of options and “clever” UI decisions, we were simply overloaded and placed under pressure. After pressing the “Start recording button” the list on the left slowly began to fill itself. Before we even knew, it seemed like we started recording from multiple radio stations, which was not the effect we wanted. After stopping the recording process, we were not able to even find, where the recorded files are. An uninstall followed.

What can be learned from this story?
The user interface is the first thing people see(apart from the installation), when they try using new software. Making it hard to understand or learn, puts your software at risk. New things are always accompanied by an acceptance period, which should pass as smoothly as possible. Placing more UI components doesn’t increase the subjective value of the software, the user just gets more confused. There is no emphasis of important parts by this software – is it a recorder, a player, a music organizer, burner or media converter? You can’t tell immediately. It tries to be all-in-one and I think that it fails greatly.

It also tries to define its own UI standards, which aren’t found in other software(which makes it hard to learn). There is no menu with “File”, “Edit” etc. Apart from the minimize, maximize and close buttons we see three other buttons, whose meaning is questionable. There are buttons “Stop recording” and “Stop all” and its not clear what is the difference, except that the first remains above the list, the second below. Tabs exist at the upper and bottom part of the screen, making switching harder through increased mouse movements. The options stay at the bottom of the screen, as if they are not important…

Conclusion
If this is the best selling radio recorder in Germany, UK, France and Japan as they claim at their website, I’m truly worried. I hope that they hear at least the complaints of their customers and take appropriate actions. But if they aren’t interested how people actually use the software, and which options are more often used than others, they won’t be able to make a difference.

The global economy

Global view
In a global world, location is getting more and more meaningless. We saw the continuation of this trend in 2009. No matter where a business is located, it can communicate with and attract clients from the other part of the globe. There are cultural differences, but they are a base to find our commonalities, to better understand our behaviors, actions and most importantly – way of thinking.

No matter where people are, they want to be connected with like-minded personalities and feel as part of something bigger than themselves. Everyone gets excited about new connections and opportunities. Americans for example are firm believers in the principle “equality of opportunity”, as they believe that all people should be treated the same. This principle is partially valid only in the USA. On a global scale, it’s clear that people in developing countries aren’t so competitive. In the long term this leads to more and more know-how and capital concentration in developed countries and less and less in developing ones. This spiral clearly shows the enlarging gap in future perspectives of different regions and countries. Episodic injections from outside just can’t compensate for today’s situation. Does this mean that many people have lost the competetiveness race in advance? And will never even have the opportunity to show what they are capable of? This is just lost, unused human potential around the globe, which to me is even a greater problem than the high percentage of unused production capacities(e.g. machines).

There are “hot zones”, where people immigrate and “cold zones”, which people try to leave. The first are a symbol of better life opportunities, the second of deadlock. One EU paper wrote about the danger that Eastern Europe will be almost uninhabited by the year 2050 showing the seriousness of this problem. Can all “hot zones” accomodate most people from “cold zones”? I doubt so, but if this trend continues, some countries may be forced to close their borders on the map. I still remember one of my german geography teachers saying, that decentralization and development of all german states as opposed to one spot is a huge benefit. This principle is broken in my country and this results in a high people relocation percentage and high pressure over some bigger towns.

What I am trying to say here is that americans can’t live in isolation. If they don’t try to somehow improve their surroundings, they may be faced with very high unemployment rates worldwide, which will soon backfire on them. This isn’t a year 2001 anymore. If you don’t care about your neighbours, they will ignore you too, when you most need them. There is no reason to grump and pretend that nothing happens. Its in the interest of all to be competitive and to actively contribute to the future of our planet.

Local view
I live in small EU country, which still seems to live in lethargy and somehow ignores the fact that it should compete with everyone else. In the past years it lost much of its attractiveness probably exactly for this reason. There were no investigation, clear development priorities, motivation or clear social politics. I remember a german politician, who said: “The political effectiveness of a government is measured by how it treats its most heavily affected people”. They weren’t treated. Those same people rove like ghosts and grub rubbish in bunkers. Their number grows and grows and everyone is pretending again that nothing happened. You may say that in other countries people feel similar while living in tents. My observation is that such people without future are becoming a serious problem, unused potential and victims of inhuman behaviour. Many of them commit suicide, because of not having opportunities or because they are at their wits’ end.

Its clear that people can’t think of something else than survival, when they are forced to survive. If it goes this way, my country will remain unattractive, its market will shrink more and more, which will again support people’s thoughts that business can’t be made here and scare them to search for survival outside. Probably 1/3 live there, many of them do not see perspective in coming back, even in a world recession. Perspective is a key word here, because short term reliefs are not an option in an uncertain world.

Personal view
We are humans before everything else. Even if you are a carpenter, a cook, a car driver or even a web designer, you are first of all human. You can’t just close your eyes for the world’s problems. Educate people, make them more competitive, stimulate their creativity and proactivity. It’s only you that can show a strong character and try to make good gestures to people in your surroundings without being selfish. This will always pay back in one or another form. Don’t be human only on Christmas and New Year.

Models and documentation

Models are everywhere and everyone has interest to convince us that we should follow them. But if you know why you follow a particular model, you have a better chance to achieve the effect you are looking for. Deciding which parts of the model you include and which you exclude, returns the control back to you. It also leads to better understanding of the model. If you omit something and it was mistake, the next time you’ll know why it was a mistake as opposed to doing something just because everyone else does it in the same way.

The motivation for this post came from models, which exist since 1999 and are taught in university even ten years later to be “right”. Unfortunately models change sooner than people change. What worked ten years ago, might not work today, which means that the model should be adapted or discarded. I see a real danger here, which consists of simply teaching people old “deprecated” things and convincing them in their truth. At the very least this is wasted time, at the very best it generates false impressions that people “know their stuff”. My point is that if you teach someone to old models, you take him the time away to learn the new ones. In a certain sense, this is two times wronger than it could be.

I only follow models if I see a direct advantage in doing so. Sometimes there are smaller indirect advantages too, but I think that they couldn’t be a convincing point, only an extension of someone else’s partially specified idea to sell you something. Some models work in a particular domain and when that domain changes, they are considered useless. Imagine a company using a “recommended” collaboration software. What worked for another company might not work for them. Different domain – different requirements.

Documentation facilitates understanding, especially if you come back to your project after months. You may find that without it, you can’t understand what you thought just a couple of months ago. You are slowed down, use more resources for the same tasks and lose your nerves as a quick path to a variety of illnesses. I see a documentation is a mental model of how you describe logically a complex system. Using a natural language instead of a specialist language, you can make your work more understandable even to people, which don’t know the domain jargon. Even if you plan to work alone on a project, it always makes sense to document everything as clear as possible. You’ll stand much better later, when other people join.

Many people see documentation as a way to slow down the project and to avoid doing the real implementation work. If your main goal is building functionality instead of preserving maintainability, this is probably true. Web applications are getting very complex, so I think that the code maintainability should be the very first priority. It is the base on which you build later on. A roof without a proper base often falls apart – a major reason why projects begin from null again. This decision might be taken early in the planning phase to keep costs down as much as possible, which is especially important in a down economy.

Documentation also supports communication, which shouldn’t be neglected when a variety of personalities works together. If exposed to all team members, it could be questioned and improved and serve as a foundation for discussion, brainstorming and innovation. If you see it as an enemy instead of a friend, you might regret it in later project phases. Many people recommend writing docs in advance, because later you will most certainly forget to come back to document the ideas you just implemented.

Switching senses

If you are like me, you probably strive to consume your carefully selected daily information dosage. But have you actually “measured” how much you can comprehend?

Reading is slow…
If I’m reading a book, I can almost never reach more than 150 pages at the end of the day. This is somehow my “cognitive limit” by best available focus conditions. I am eager deep inside to find out what comes next, and I feel like I can’t catch up with a traveling train. But I have to wait and concentrate on the present thoughts, not on future ones. If I can’t wait for a particular topic, the only solution is to “skip” pages. Of course you may not “get” the full meaning then, because of some dependency with the previous chapters. Clearly, this is a compromise.

…so people prefer to scan
Scanning only for valuable content is what I sometimes do (you caught me!), if I feel that a book is “padded”. There are plenty of such books written to communicate a higher subjective value to the reader through an increased page count. Writers, editors etc. are paid for more pages, not necessary for a better content. The result is a book that makes you tired with long sentences, unclear semantics and links to graphics you saw 3 pages before. Slow, slow, slow. I’m glad you even read this.

Listening is less tiring
When I get tired of reading at the end of the day, I usually switch to my auditory senses to continue my journey. With the rise of podcasts, there is plenty to listen to. Listening requires the same level of concentration, if not even more. You can easily go back and forward between pages, but you hardly want to hear the same words repeatedly after you find that needle (timeline says 2:18) in the haystack. A good resource on podcasts I started with is 100 Best Small Business Podcasts 2009, although few listed there are of real value to me. Lately I like Inside Personal Growth, because of the discussions with a wide variety of authors, who most always have a viewpoint to provoke your thoughts.

Why an article about this?
I think that gathering information and life-long learning could shape you and your decisions in life. It can also help you:

• better understand why you do particular things
• inspect ways to transfer knowledge from other fields into your area of expertise
• be aware of new trends etc.

Remember that knowledge is there to be shared. Otherwise you prevent someone’s progress.

SEO or CEO

Recently I went to a web design forum, where I listened to a presentation about SEO (search engine optimization). I still couldn’t believe that many people see SEO as a profession, rather than as a property of the web design job. They are so agape, talk about abilities, surveys, mathematical rationale, the “golden rules” and so on. I could hardly swallow such a big morsel.

Most professions are created out of a problem to serve as an excuse for people who say “I’m not a (driver, accountant etc.)!”. This shouldn’t be the case. Think about it as broadening your horizon, not as a burden. A web designer has in fact many things to care about. But a good web designer takes care of the people, who visit the page, not just the robots. If your site is valuable for people, they’ll come back, generate more traffic and as a result the website will see increased ranking results. In short: If the site has many visitors, the SEO works automatically. Optimizing the other way around is a pure waste of time. Guess who has a longer lifetime – the search engine spider (whose algorithms are changed every couple of months) or a human life. If you optimize for spiders, you have to deal with that constantly, and when you stop, you will lose your hardly gained results. Generating content for humans will be read long after multiple spider versions are out of use. Not to mention that it will improve other people’s lives, not stupid spider’s, crawler’s, robot’s or whatever they are called. It’s a shame that we have more words for something, which (still) can’t analyze meaning.

SEO doesn’t create anything persistent. It’s not like making a graphic design out of a concept or a web design. SEO creates something temporary and unstable. If you don’t want to leave anything behind you, do SEO and nothing more during your whole life. What happens if you do SEO for a particular search engine (e.g. Google) and it suddenly disappears? Your valuable results are gone forever. Pity that you lost your time.

My definition of SEO is PVC – provide valuable content. Content is best understood, when it is descriptive and unambiguously written. I don’t support countless word repetitions or “tricks” which work only in the short term (until implemented by all other sites). I always try to think about my sites in the long term. I don’t want everything to work just now, but also in years, no matter what new versions of technologies might come. SEO is clearly not for me. I’d rather be a CEO.

Tag soup – 5$

Tag clouds help users make a choice among many categories. Sometimes they are referred as tag soups to describe the mix of ingredients. We know that too many cooks can spoil the soup but what about too many ingredients? The use of tag soups is highly controversial and not always desirable. Here I try to describe their advantages and disadvantages through my own point of view.

Advantages

• Users can quickly determine the relative importance of a particular topic, because they have a base to compare with.
• Content is accessed directly as opposed to a simple search, which is slower.
• Trends and interesting information are easily discovered.
• Categories are search engine friendly and may increase traffic, because of higher search engine rankings.

Disadvantages

• In most cases they consume too much screen space.
• They look as if a child from the second grade spilled some text over the page and tried to solve the puzzle.
• The choice of too many category options clearly overwhelms the user. I would consider reducing them to the smallest reasonable number.
• The variety of font sizes makes the tag soup almost unreadable. I would consider reducing them to the smallest reasonable number.
• Less important, but valuable information may remain undiscovered.
• A higher inbound traffic doesn’t make a statement if users actually find what they are looking for, especially if many other sites use the same technique.
• Search engines think that a tag overuse is equal to abuse.

As you can see, I think that tag clouds should be used sparingly, if at all. Content will always be king, not tags. Where appropriate, a good search can replace many of the downsides of using tag soups.

Yahoo Mail Classic interface changes

I have been a long-time user of the classic version of Yahoo Mail and I have seen recently some interface changes, which are (from my point of view) unnecessary or not intuitive. I have included a screenshot of my mail account to show what I mean. Today I was shocked to find that the “Compose” button wasn’t there, which immediately put me under pressure. I just wanted to quickly write an email and send it. Because I couldn’t find that button, I thought it should be among the other links on the left or placed above the list of emails. I found again nothing. The button has disappeared and has been replaced with “Check Mail”, so I thought they must have disabled temporary the option for sending emails. Because I was searching for the “Compose” label, I couldn’t find anything. The problem was that Yahoo introduced a “New” button for writing emails, but I had a quite hard time to figure that out. This is a clear interface problem. “New” doesn’t say anything, it’s just not descriptive enough.

I previously refreshed the page, when I wanted to check for new emails, now I have a special button for that, which is on the left of “New” and therefore read first. Sounds like checking email after you are in your inbox (and emails are automatically checked) should be the most important activity. Again, a clear interface problem. I hope that the Yahoo engineers solve these problems soon.

Blog advertisement trend

Lately, I am seeing more and more blog writers enter in networks like BuySellAdds to sell advertisements seeking how to monetize their work. Having ads is undoubtedly beneficial, but some bloggers have around 10 or more on their pages, making them slow, and carrying the accent to the advertisements than to the content. Another group has seen this effect and tries to compensate for it with placement of larger, more impressive graphics in their content areas. The result is one big mess of graphics, which relies more on the “WOW” effect or SEO, then on real content. Have you seen on large portal sites like Yahoo, MSN etc. 10 advertisements staring at you? They have just the right amount, and will not overdo it, or they will lose real visitors. There is always reason not to do something and lessons to learn. Just because everyone is on the network and making money, doesn’t mean you should follow. Always think on consequences in advance or you may pay a higher than expected price.

Dependencies rule our lives

Do you feel free? Can you scream loud “I am free!”? This post is dedicated to the things that quietly rule our lives and determine our subjective degree of freedom. It has nothing to do with the blog theme, so I place it in the “Main” category. I’m comming periodically to the same thoughts (that rule my life), so I decided to share them with you. What do I mean by dependencies? These are the things, that define our physical and mental relation to something or someone. While most of us may be physically free, our thoughts can still be easily manipulated. Dependencies are just that – they enslave our beliefs and actions. They determine our life and take our freedom away. Many people ask themselves, why can’t they easily change after their 40th year. It’s not that they can’t. The problem is that they became dependent on too many things, to be able to think on something else. Their thoughts and actions are conquered and they can go only in one direction. The most important human freedom – the flexibility to choose a path is gone. There are bills to pay, children to take care of, work to be done etc, etc. This is only a mot of all available dependencies.

I try to organize my thoughts on dependency types on the following lines, trying to give some examples to illustrate better what I mean. Some common dependencies are:

Your work place
You fear that if you don’t do your job well, you may get fired and lose your income. The inability to buy indispensable goods makes you dependent on your job and your boss. Although you may not like your job, you can never take this decision to leave. You are dependent.

Things you do
Try to imagine what is the possibility for you to willingly discard the work you’ve done in the last week and begin from null again. That is, you invested your emotions, time and energy in this work. You are dependent on it.

Friends, relatives, parents, strangers (humans)
This category is large. All people around you influence you more or less. Listening to and accepting what they have to say, makes you dependent on their thoughts. That’s why questioning everything you hear is a good alternative to have a less biased mind. If you hear the same opinion 10 times, you are far more ready to accept it for truth, although it can be far from that. If someone tells you that you are stupid or incapable, never make the mistake to listen to this person again. Free your mind.

Debt (banks)
The more debt you have, the easier banks operate with your life. Once there, you can hardly come out of the spiral. Banks and creditors like it, to have you pay higher interest rates.

Water, food, air, electricity, petrol (resources)
In order to exist, you need multiple resources. Their lack makes you immediately dependent. With the time you are ready to give more and more from everything you have for even а few amount of them. Without water and food you may survive only a week. You’ll just forget everything else you wanted for little food. The food determines and controls fully your actions and thoughts. Without a clean air, you’ll become ill and dependent on medicines and doctors. Let’s say you can’t find a better doctor. Then you are dependent on his/her service quality, which may not necessary help you. Without electricity you don’t have light, you can’t operate electronic devices and do simple things you have previously taken for granted. Without electricity, you have no access to knowledge(except reading printed media during the bright day). Traffic lights won’t be working and car driving would be very dangerous. In fact, electricity shortage makes people look for new renewable sources to prevent this from happening(and make us less dependent). You know what would happen if petrol sources are depleted.

Everyday things
Consider your bank debit card. If you want to withdraw money from your account, you are dependent on a bank’s cash machine. In turn, the machine is dependent on money availability, electricity and mechanics, in short on the people who take care about it(which may just enjoy their break). If you can’t withdraw money, you can’t fly to Costa Rica – you are dependent.

If you buy a monthly bus card, it may be for a particular bus line. Every time you go out, you must think about ways, how to make the most effective use of your card. You are dependent on the route of this bus line.

Coffee, tea, cigarettes, alcohol, drugs
These are very common human weaknesses, which we allow to take part in (and out of) our lives. By the end of his life, an average smoker has lost a couple of years in continuous smoking. The result of this dependency is a lost time (loss of opportunities) and introduction of illnesses (decreased quality of life). Alcohol dependency makes people aggressive and unable to take responsibility for their own actions.

Company acquisitions
Many small companies allow to be acquired by big ones. But that does not necessary guarantee them a brightr future. If the company-mother gets into trouble, the daughter will be affected too. A fresh example is Opel’s dependency on General Motors, which may have driven the first to bankruptcy without the help of the german government. My point is that many great companies allowed to be bought, became dependent and ended unpopular.

TV, radio, internet (mass media)
We believe what we hear every day. Because today’s news were like yesterday’s, we assume they should be true. TVs are incredible manipulators of human thoughts; we saw this last by the introduction of the global crisis. In fact, I think that mass media even accelerated the delivery of bad news to the average news consumer. News have just united some common negative information from yesterday, now and tomorrow and presented them as an impressive “trend” package to the audience. In this case mass media is equal to mass panic maker. We stopped buying, became distrustful and highly dependent on these news. Stock prices follow news the same way.

I should confess that I’m dependent on internet. This isn’t something that I entirely like, but it’s a way to reach information, which was not available to me before. This argument alone is not enough. But part of what I want to become has to do with internet, which also determines why I’m using it on a daily basis. I only try to find information I really need, and always follow my convictions, even if I have to ignore manipulative information.

My goal here was to make you aware of some dependencies that exist around you and to make you avoid them. The first step is to sit down and think, which of them you can overcome, to filtrate your life of the things you don’t like to do. Not all dependencies could be bad though. But a conscious decision to be dependent on something is much better than an unconscious one on everything.
I don’t want to make you dependent on my article, so I always ask my readers to break the information through their own prism and take only things they consider as useful. Hope you’ll do it this time too.

Mobile web design obstacles

Mobile web design isn’t as popular as desktop web design right now, but many people think that this will change soon. They talk about the huge market and its potential for revenue. Many telecom companies invent new smartphones with high-resolution displays, better processors and user interfaces. Apple made iPhone and awakened the consumers’ need for better touch-screen user interfaces. Despite this technology progress, mobile web development hasn’t changed radically. In the next lines I’ll try to describe, why I am sceptical to its evolution in the next decade.

Too many stakeholders
Although technology is getting better and better, there are many problems. Most important, there are far too many stakeholders involved, which influences market decisions. This is partly promoted by the marriage of telecommunication, marketing and computer branches. The pie is large and the participants are many large organizations, which chase their own revenue goals and act against the interest of consumers. There are operators, operating system developers, browser makers, advertisers etc. They all want to charge potential consumers.

Too many constraints
There are far too many different phone devices on the market, each of them with its own limitations. It is unfortunately impossible to address all devices with a given website, due to different screen sizes, processor power and capabilities. Even battery life plays a role, if you consider using loops in JavaScript-capable devices. In the past we have seen a proportional increase in display size. I think, this couldn’t last forever, or the devices will become less and less mobile. Until probably a niche between ordinary mobile phones and netbooks is introduced – borders are getting more and more blurred.

There are much more browsers on mobile devices than on the web. They use many different operating systems. The same browser name on a different OS means a different browser. This makes development of mobile websites a nightmare. Browsers are too different – they have different levels of support of XHTML, CSS and JavaScript(if even available). Before choosing the right browser to support, it is probably a good idea to choose the device(or device category) you are developing for. Developing for fewer devices can decrease the development time and keep ambiguous code to a minimum. If you target only iPhone users, that market may not be big enough(most iPhone users come from the USA). And what happens, when a newer and better device penetrates the market and all those users convert to it? Suddenly you may need a new website specific for the new device, if you are not properly using the principle of graceful degradation(or progressive enhancement, if you like positive words).

Lack of standardization
Because everyone tries to pull the strings(and standards are not of their interest), many web developers (also: advertisers) have troubles reaching a larger consumer audience. I think even if there were any standards, a simple adoption would still take a couple of years.

Too high operator taxes
Why should a user be motivated to pay again for an internet access on a small-screen mobile device, when he/she already has internet at home? You may say – to feel more mobile. Ok, but the mobile experience on a netbook/laptop could be much better. Lets say the user doesn’t have such accessories(like me). He opens the browser, types an address and sends it. A simple test on a simulator to open a 12kB website showed me that the operator will charge 0,20euro cents on the average. If you open a site of 50kB, which isn’t so much for today’s standards, you have to pay almost a euro. Only for this website. 10 sites, 10 euro. This is simply too much, and in fact I think that WiFi should be available unconditionally on every mobile device, just to circumnavigate these taxes.

Usability difficulties
Typing an internet address is only the beginning of a use of a website. How does the user interact with the website is another thing. If the display doesn’t have touch-screen, the user may need to go through all available links to reach the appropriate one. And what happens if he/she needs to fill a form? From a usability point of view, this is very hard. Even harder if you need to press the same button four times to come to a single appropriate character. So again – why should users interact with your website? What makes it so special?

All already mentioned factors will likely continue to exist in the future. At least to me, making mobile websites is not an option right now. But I may review my decision when the time is right.