Why does remember me tend to work so universally poorly? WordPress for example, is a particularly irritating case, logging me out seemingly at random. Some sites manage to get it right, facebook almost never logs me out. Is there some subtle issue with cookie management that most sites manage to get wrong?

Coupled with this, what’s the basis for remember me only lasting a few weeks? Is this a legitimate security feature? I don’t really see the basis for it. If I check remember me, I want the site to remember me until I am old and grey (or at least until 2038).

There’s an interesting discussion on reddit right now about the design of a certain computer retailer website in Australia and whether this was a legitimate example of poor design. It’s interesting to me because I actually bought a PCMCIA network card from those guys a long time ago and their customer service was so horrible that I swore never to do business with them again. Yet 4 years later, they’re still clearly in business and seem to have tripled the number of stores they own. So I think it’s an interesting question to ask of whether their website really is as poorly designed as the initial poster assumed it was.

Lets get the preliminary obvious things out of the way: The site has horrible aesthetics, a total disregard for correct color theory and horrendous usability problems (including PDF price lists, ugh). But as someone pointed out in the discussion thread, the stores also have lines going out the door every single day. To paraphrase Abraham Maslow, when all you have is Dream Weaver, everything looks like a web design problem and just because the site has a web design problem does not mean that it has a design problem.

Lets say you had a journeyman web designer in to do a complete overhaul of the site. Nothing fancy, no high concept flash based monstrosity, just some simple, well laid out minimalistic, tasteful HTML and CSS. Would this be a better design?

Lets say this web designer was also a part time analytics dabbler as well and he knew the importance of not only doing good design but justifying it as well. He manages to prove that user engagement with the site is up, the bounce rate is lower and informal customer surveys indicate they love the new website. Surely this must be a better design right?

Being the paranoid web designer that he is though, he’s prepared yet more information to make his case: He points to how annual revenue increased 60% year on year even after controlling for other sources of growth. Mining the customer records indicates a significant increase of first time purchasers and a larger average orders per customer, all of which can be reasonably conclusively linked to the new word of mouth marketing and better navigation of the new website. Based on a reasonable set of accounting assumptions, the investment on a new website yielded a stunning 50,000% ROI. Satisfied that the designer has convincingly demonstrated the utility of his role, he sits back, utterly unable to comprehend any counter argument to how the previous website could be considered not be considered an example of bad design.

And yes, at this point, I would probably agree with him. If a mythical competent web designer fell into their laps, then there would be no excuse for them to keep the design of their old site. But here’s the thing, I’ve interacted with the owners of this company, they’re a family of stingy Asians (in the totally non-pejorative sense). These are not the types of people who would a) meet and b) appreciate a competent web designer. To imagine the preceding set of events happening, you first have to imagine a completely different type of business which is founded on a completely different business model and would be arguably as successful as the one they have now.

I’m not arguing that the site has good design, just that I’m open to the possibility that it’s not obviously bad design given the context and circumstances.

iPhone applications provide an unwitting peek at what companies believe is the real purpose of their product. Because of the limited form factor of the iPhone, developers are forced to release cut down versions of apps and what features they choose to include tells a lot about their priorities.

For example, the youtube iPhone app does not even suggest that comments exist wheras it devotes significant space to “similar videos”. Clearly, youtube believes their business success lies in encouraging people to browse through more videos. This is reflected in their benign neglect of the web based commenting system which I think has the potential to be one of the more interesting arenas on the web if it were handled well.

The facebook iPhone app features prominently the ability to take pictures and upload them directly to your profile as well as a well integrated commenting feature. Chat as well is featured heavily in the facebook app. Curiously enough, events are completely missing from the app (although not the web interface) which I regard as a major limitation. Also missing is the ability to forward messages or do anything other than a straight reply. Facebook mail has the potential to become the de facto email replacement but it seems relatively clear that this is an area that Facebook is not super interested in as there have only been a trickle of new functionality related to it’s messaging service.

Google maps allows you to plot a route via car but it doesn’t include the walking or public transit modes that it has on it’s website. Even more annoyingly, it doesn’t have the ability to dynamically change your route to a location as you move around which makes it effectively useless as a GPS navigation system.

Some of these insights would have been obvious without looking at the iPhone app version of websites but I think it does place these distinctions in starker contrast. It doesn’t just have to be the iPhone either, looking at any reduced functionality version of a site can give you a sense of what their developers regarded as essential and optional.

About an hour ago, it was annouced that Paul Krugman was just awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics. Jumping onto wikipedia to confirm, I soon succumbed to the problem with Wikipedia and ended up reading up again about mechanism design.

I remember first finding out about mechanism design almost exactly one year ago, when the 2007 Nobel Economics Prize was announced. Mechanism design is a simple idea: If you make some radically simplifying assumptions about people’s desires and methods, you can predict how they will go about behaving under certain scenarios. If you then know *enough* about how people will behave, you can structure the *rules* of the system to cause certain outcomes. For example, whether an auction is blind or non-blind can have an impact on how much people bid. What Hurwicz, Maskin & Myerson had done was to build powerful analytical tools to formalise this intuition and present it in a highly rigid, mathematical manner.

Which was great, it was fabulous and it was directly in line with what I was working on. I too was looking for how to understand the intersection between the rules of the system and people’s behaviour. But mechanism design was a formal, analytical and bottom up approach that only captured a tiny part of the hugely complex, social context of the real world. Which made me really wonder: How come I had never even heard of people trying to study this from a more holistic manner?

Let me give a simple example: The implicit rules I was brought up with for group discussion was that if you had a point to make, you raised your hand. The moderator of the group would then pick who had their hand up for longest. This was a *horrible* way to conduct group discussions because by the time they reached you, the group had moved on and the point you were trying to make was half an hour in the past. It didn’t hit home to me just how bad it was until I attended a philosophy discussion group which added just a tiny bit more process into the system.

To make a point directly related to the current point, you raised a single finger. To make a completely new point, you raised an entire hand. All the fingers got to go before any of the hands but as a finger, you were not allowed to speak more than 30 seconds and it was very poor form to meander too far off the original topic. As a result, digressions were quickly but efficiently resolved and the level of the conversation in the room was markedly more efficient.

The rules were slightly different and, as a result, the conversation was *better*. But when I was asked to *explain* why it’s better, the best I could do was to piece together ad hoc bits of common sense that I knew at the time. What I was seeking was some sort of framework that I couldn’t fit my explaination into.What was really surprising to me was how hard it was to find such a thing. Wherever I looked, nobody seemed to be studying this kind of thing. So part of this blog post is an appeal to people to point me to others who are doing the same kind of work because it’s still hard for me to believe that something so big and so obvious could have received so little study. My work has been so interdisciplinary I can only surface skim over a lot of different fields and it may well be I’ve completely missed an entire area of research.

So this is the message that I’ve been trying to craft for the last 2 years: Rules matter when you’re designing social systems and right now, people don’t have anything but intuition and rules of thumb to guide them. Mechanism design is awesome but it’s impossible to use in any practical sense. Without some sort of way of thinking about how rules should be structured, each system is at the whims of the individual talent of the designer. What’s more, without such a framework in place, it’s difficult for people to even recognise the aspects of mechanism design and clever and innovative designs are not propogated. This, to me is a situation which needs to change and it needs to change quickly.

Why don’t we apply the collaborative filtering approach to finding the right job candidate?

Here’s a simple model of how it could work for say, a network engineer:

Any and every potential candidate is invited to submit potential questions to ask which they think could seperate out a good network engineer from a bad network engineer over the course of a 24 hour period.

Once these questions are accumulated, all candidates are split into two groups and given one hour to use a collaborative voting system to determine which questions they feel are the best ones.

Each group gives the top n questions to the other group and they both have 3 hours to complete the test.

Each group now collaboratively marks the other group. A right answer is one which concurs with the answers of those who got the most right answers. In the end, the top 5 people with the highest score from each group are selected for a in depth interview.

Is this approach better than the typical HR keyword search based weeding approach? Is it robust enough to efficiently weed out the poor candidates while pushing the good ones to be great? It seems like an interesting experiment to me.

Why is universal undo supported by so few text editors? When I close a file, the text editor erases my entire undo history. Being able to undo a file all the way to the very first keystroke I typed in would be a really compelling feature to me.

In fact, what I want source control to be still is a giant unified universal undo for my project. Don’t bother me with releases and versioning, just log my actions on a per keystroke level and let me revert back to the second before I fucked up.

I understand the technical challenges of implementing this and how more formal version control scales better to more complex projects but I still crave the ability to mark a folder as being under universal undo with a super lightweight mechanism.

How do we apply HCI and UCD processes to blogging?

Faceted blogging was a HCI inspired idea, what else?

Would personas help?

<rant>

My mother had to match my clothes when I was a kid, and even then, she was only marginally successful. I would still somehow manage to slip out the door wearing nothing but a bright red T-shirt and oversized Power Rangers boxer shorts. My problem was that I loved so many things, and so many colors, that I wanted to wear all of them, all the time.

I have read of many graphic designers who mix with a color palette before making a brand. I believe the people behind Pierce Transit’s “look” were just the sort of designers. There is no problem with that, but I’m afraid that those who dressed up Tacoma, Washington’s buses did so like a 3rd grader with a low attention span.

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So I finally broke down and got an iPhone today and I have to say, so far, I’m not enormously impressed with the fit and finish of the user interface. This being my very first Apple product, I really didn’t know what were reasonable expectations but Apple has built it’s brand on producing polished, solid interfaces.

Don’t get me wrong, the interface is gorgeous and has a lot of cool tricks but there’s certain areas where the underlying lack of care shone through. The problems started from the moment after unboxing when registering for the very first time. iTunes software is required for registration but nothing was provided in the box. Downloading it was a trivial task for me but it was still an annoyance to have to download it.

Right at the *very* start of the registration process, there’s a series of relatively technical and fairly unimportant questions which really, I didn’t know what the hell I was supposed to answer and making me do that up front is just plain bad UI design. On the grand scheme of things, this is a relatively minor thing but first impressions count for a lot and, IMHO, Apple dropped the ball on this one.

Designing the Bumblebee Labs Theme

When it comes to this sort of thing, I usually take the lazy way out. There are so many designers vastly better (both technically and visually) than I am out there, spending all day making kick-ass-fabulous wordpress themes, it would just be a shame to not take advantage of them. I’d almost consider it doing them a favor.

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