I like a good brain challenge, anything really that makes me think. Puzzles, optimization solutions, etc. They even say that performing such challenges daily help you keep your brain at it’s peak capacity.

When I need information however, a challenge is the last thing I want. I want to get the information and move on because the information is not the goal, it is a tool towards another goal entirely.

This morning I needed to call the storage facility where I’ve been keeping a bunch of stuff. I fire up their website, do a postal code search, and am presented with a list of facilities. And the phone number is…

… another link. Clicking the link takes me to a page with facility information including the phone numbers. But why have the additional step? If there is a link for phone numbers then simply show the phone numbers. Unless of course you want your site to be seen as a scratch-off lottery ticket. This becomes even more important as mobile devices are becoming increasingly popular as another cycle back to the web server can take an additional 30 seconds or longer.

The same principle holds true for a lot of community websites: user groups, code camps, conferences, etc. If a GPS-able meeting address isn’t on the homepage, you’re doing a disservice to your visitors, and especially those in the car on the way to your event. I wouldn’t know anything about being lost in an unfamiliar town while trying to find a venue because the website failed to list their important address and contact information though.

Contact information is fundamental and should be quick and easy to access

Of all the parties thrown during Microsoft PDC 2009 in Los Angeles, one of the best was the PDC Underground party at the Congo Room in LA Live. Invitation only, plenty of heavy hitters, free open bar, great music. Rock star kind of stuff. The trouble with the Conga Room though started before folks even got to the Conga Room.

To be quite honest I hate lines, and I frequently go out of my way to avoid them. I’d rather be last and sit in a seat than stand in line awkwardly fidgeting because I’m bored and there is no social convention for what to do when you’re just waiting in a queue. For PDC Underground however I waited in line. They were giving away free t-shirts to the first 100 people and nothing says ‘Conference’ like a free t-shirt.

The problem was that it was a non-standard line. By non-standard I mean that there wasn’t enough room for all 1,400 registered PDC Underground attendees to wait in front of The Conga room without impacting the foot traffic headed to the Staples Center next door for a game. So they split the line, first into two parts, and then into three.

Every since we begin socializing with our peers in kindergarten or elementary school we’re taught that lines should stay together. Teachers would prod us to keep up with the line if we fell behind. You can’t have a broken line. At LA Live however they broke the line. The first 40 or so got to wait in front of the venue. The next group were huddled across the walkway next to a restaurant. Anyone who came after that was moved to a third group behind the restaurant, barely visible from the second group. I don’t know what the restaurant was, but it smelled greasy as I waited below a kitchen exhaust vent.

As people arrived they instinctively went to the end of the line, the first line, including me. I was told that this wasn’t the end of the line. After quickly cycling through the five stages of grief in my head because this most clearly was the end of the line, I was pointed to the second line. While I waited in the second line, I watched person after person repeat the same understandable mistake I had made, and I watched them cycle through grief as well. The social convention had been broken. It wasn’t a line, it was dashes.

A few hours ago I closed TweetDeck. At least I thought I had. I had clicked the red ‘X’ at the upper right hand corner which we all know closes an application in Windows. A few minutes later I was surprised to hear the familiar chirp indicating that one of my notification columns had been updated. I again cycled through all five stages of grief. I silently rationalized: “I closed the app” “red ‘X’ means close” “I closed the app.” When I opened Task Manager however TweetDeck.exe was still running and chewing up over 100MB of memory. “How could this be?” I thought, “I clicked the red ‘X’!” As it turned out, TweetDeck doesn’t follow social convention and actually close when you tell it to. It just disappears. Quite the slight-of-hand illusionist.

Do not deviate from the socially expected behavior in your applications.

We know them well: friends, family, co-workers, bosses, spouses, those people around us who can’t seem to focus on one thing for more than a few seconds. I should know, I…. oh look at the kitty!

But recent studies have suggested that it isn’t in fact that these individuals are unable to focus, it’s that they are extremely bored. When something really gets them mentally stimulated or they are challenged, they are then able to focus on it for extremely long amounts of time.

This is certainly a relief for me: it explains why I slept through math class yet stayed up all night taking apart my father’s expensive stereo system. Software on the other hand should not behave this way.

As I type this, I have the Zune desktop software in it’s compact state. Unfortunately, this also means I’ve told the window that it should stay on top of other windows no matter what I’m doing. It’s there, constantly staring at me as though I am electronically stimulating it in unimaginable ways. I assure you I am not. I’m not that kind of boy.

The user is the only one who gets to choose what windows go where.

If you want to keep your window on top, at least give the user an option to turn it off. And stealing focus? Huge faux pas! Never ever ever ever ever ever ever ev… sorry, I got focused.

Followup: I did finally get the compact Zune window to go away. I had to click on the Zune icon in the taskbar. Kind've odd since that only works about half the time now in Windows 7.

Clowns are funny. They do very nonsensical things, and yet we know it’s part of the act and we laugh along. We should all laugh more BTW. If you need help with that, try to watch this video without laughing.

In software however, things should make sense to the user. Take for instance Microsoft Outlook. It’s calendering software among other things and therefore I had a belief that it understood things like dates, times, time zones, daylight saving time, holidays, etc. One would only hope, right?

As it turns out, this isn’t entirely accurate as shown in the above screenshot. At the time of the risqué screen capture I happened to be on the west coast while the holidays were added apparently for east coast time. The result is a nonsensical mess that seems to indicate that New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day are officially an east coast holiday that should only be celebrated on the west coast by posers wearing denim jackets airbrushed with Bob Saget’s picture.

All day events are all day events regardless of the time zone, right? Not always, but in the case of holidays the result is a frustrating mess.

If it doesn’t make sense to the users, it doesn’t make sense.

I have a Zune. When I’m working away on my computer I usually have the Zune desktop software up and running. After moving my music collection to my new laptop, I started receiving the following error message:

The problem with said message is that there is no way in the Zune UI to go and find a similar song to download or otherwise clean it up. Why not? I’ve clearly been told that there may be another version of the song in the Zune Marketplace. Zune knows what song it is, and it also knows what it has on the server. Why is there no option to have the Zune software resolve the issue for me automatically?

Instead, I have to delete the song from my collection, and then go find it myself in the Zune Marketplace. It’s usually right where I got it in the first place. It also doesn’t help that the Zune platform is incredibly slow.

Nonetheless, this is a common issue in software, where software has the knowledge and capability of solving a problem, and doesn’t.

If you have the power to resolve a problem, do it!

I hate technology. There, I said it, and it’s true. I curse at technology like a bar back in Louisiana. But to be quite honest, I love technology too. At least, I love the potential of technology. So far however, technology has failed to live up to it’s potential much like my middle school teachers said of me. Of course if they’d taught something a little more advanced and stimulating... I mean, Calculus? I’m not in diapers! BOOOORING!

We’ve created languages and architecture patterns and frameworks and even tooling to support them, and yet the user experience on a lot of websites and software solutions look like they were developed by handicapped monkeys. The experience is akin to a root canal. They’re killing kittens.

Case in point: I once worked for a very large financial services company that decided to wrap it’s legacy systems with web application because they couldn’t practically add features to the core anymore. The project was supposed to take six months. After a year and a half of what can only be described as Javabation, in which time they only were able to complete 25% of the required functionality, they finally started showing it to clients. Much to their surprise they couldn’t make a single sale. The reason? While the application provided some pretty neat functionality, it looked like a dog threw up into a blender and the aforementioned handicapped monkeys used rifles loaded with the aforementioned blended dog vomit to lay out the site. The navigation was unclear, the forms were non-intuitive, and even the graphical design was poor.

Once realizing their mistake, they brought me in and tasked me with fixing the site. Only after the UI was made more presentable could they positively engage a client and make the first sale.

At the end of the day, software is nothing more than the user experience it provides.

Unless your software requires absolutely no human interaction, the user experience and user interaction matter. Failing to adequately design these important aspects means a loss for your metrics, whether it’s visitor count, ad clicks, sales, whatever.

Be the UX!