Use It or Lose It

So, thanks to my father’s generocity, this week I was paid–in the form of a new computer–for what would have been a pro-bono web site for one my family’s many enterprises. And it actually turned out to be more exciting than I thought. A computer is just a computer, right? We all have to upgrade, but it’s basically the same thing. But every once in a while, something comes along that changes the way I work and reminds me of the value of proper tools.

In this case, I was upgrading from a PowerMac G5, a big hunky desktop machine. I don’t know why I thought I’d need all of those card slots or hard drive bays. Maybe I just bought it as a doorstop for my ego. Anyway, over the years I only ever added RAM to it. So when choosing a new machine, the number of card slots didn’t enter into it. The decision really came down to portability vs. screen real estate, and even though my life is in mobile turmoil right now, I opted for screen real estate.

Four days with the new machine and I’m utterly convinced I’ve made the right choice. I bought a 24″ iMac, and I now have a luxurious 7.1 megapixel LCD landscape in front of me. It feels like my productivity has doubled. It’s similar to the way I felt when Exposé came out. The main screen is 1920×1200, and I think that makes the biggest difference for me. But the secondary screen (my old 20″ LCD) is also indispensable, because I can now give my e-mail, IM, and a full calendar the space they deserve.

That’s the thing: More space really changes the way I work. For example, if I keep iCal open on my secondary screen, it becomes the virtual equivalent of tacking a calendar to the wall. That is very, very valuable. It means that I can rely on iCal because I don’t have to find and open it each time I want to add to it. It means that I can actually use iCal now. Because I can just glance at it. I can rely on iCal always being there. So the secondary screen becomes the screen at which I glance while I’m working on other things. It’s the screen of passive interruption–the communication center. I can be interrupted, but without the real work around. Psychologically, even with the ease Exposé, that makes a big difference to me. It’s counterintuitive, but more space seems to allow me to focus better.

My secondary screen is the virtual cork board above my virtual desk, and I think that over the next couple years, as the desktop metaphor finally dies out, its replacement will have to have this functionality in some form.

Anyway, I’m grateful to have this new machine and the productivity boost that comes with it. (thanks, Dad!)

YouTube: August 2005

August 2007

Here’s some real estate speculation for you. In the last post I focused changes to YouTube’s toolbar over two years. In this one, I want to talk more broadly about the whole page and how it has changed since August 2005. This is less about particular vocabulary, white space, and other details, and more about the audience and the content.

What was removed?

• New user hand holding – before, a big box in the most valuable part of the page introduced the site, with one sentence dedicated to each of Watch, Upload, and Share. This box is entirely gone. Today, watching is self-explanatory, especially thanks to the big video that automatically loads in the top right corner. Upload has moved to a prominent button in the top right (with an arrow graphic), and Share is just intuitively obvious in the “Broadcast Yourself” tagline and in the content itself.
• The tag cloud – early YouTube had a cloud of recent video tags. Tags were hot back then. I could go on about tag clouds and their failures, but I’m guessing it came down to three things: 1) they tell without showing — and on a video sharing site, why not just show? 2) they are rarely clicked, and 3) they are visually cluttered. Beyond the tag cloud, YouTube also removed the list of tags from the Featured Videos metadata. Good riddance — a category, title, and humane description work better.
• Excessive tabs and links – See my previous post
• Recent users online – This is when YouTube thought they were a social network. We see a list of 8 recent users, along with counts of videos, favorites, and friends for each of them. This was removed for obvious scaling reasons: after a community grows beyond, say, 500 users, this just isn’t interesting information for anyone.
• Sign up promotion – a bold yellow box, in a very valuable spot, beckons you to sign up. It’s not very convincing, though. Chances are, you’re going to sign up only when you’re trying to do something else. You’re not signing up for the sake of signing up. So why push the issue? Instead, the new YouTube has a login box in the right column, and a small “sign up” link on the top right in case you really can’t wait.
• Video of the month contest – This has been replaced by all kinds of slicker cross-promoted contents and ads.

What was added?

• Videos being watched right now – Certainly more interesting than list of recent users. This is a dynamic Flash piece that flips through recent videos until you roll over something.
• Promoted Videos and Ads – The revenue has to come from somewhere, right? And now that Diddy is out there with his camcorder, now that the networks have gotten hip to this, the cross promotions are flying all over the place. August 2007’s YouTube features the presidential debates (YouChoose), a huge promo video for UFC on Pay Per View, and a series of promoted videos across the top of the home page (how much do these cost?).
• Video ratings – the five star system. People love their stars. As if being featured or having a high view count is not enough. Most videos on the front page of YouTube have four or five stars. But some of the most watched videos have poor ratings because they’re controversial. So effectively, stars are more a measure of controversy than quality.
• Tabbed video listing – It isn’t just about featured videos anymore. You can choose to see Most Viewed, Most Discussed, and Top Favorites as well. These other three categories tend to have a lot of overlap, so it’s good that YouTube doesn’t waste time showing more than one of them at a time. On the other hand, what’s the difference between Most Viewed and Most Discussed, from the user’s perspective? Does anyone care?
• “What’s New” box – something for the returning users? A post from the YouTube corporate blog. A promotion for mobile videos (iPhone!)
• Popular Videos for Mobile Devices box – YouTube is very proud of their iPhone partnership, and they should be.

Overall, they’ve made huge improvements, if that wasn’t obvious from the page grabs. The data/ink ratio is so much higher, and the information hierarchy is more clear (the old YouTube had too many elements with similar priorities). Even the promotions are mostly pure content, so you hardly notice you’re being promoted on!

The Internet Archive is great for looking at web site usability changes over time. Lets just look at one part of one site: the toolbar on YouTube.com.

December 2005

August 2006

February 2007

August 2007

The changes are not subtle. This is over a period of two years, as the site grew from a niche into one of the biggest sites in the world. So I’m going to try to read between the lines, imagining some of the lessons learned by YouTube over the last couple years.

• Notice the rise and fall of administrative debris. After the toolbar was initially introduced (not long before December 2005), it had to pass through a painful bloat phase before reaching relative simplicity.
• In the early days, they may have needed the “watch and share your videos worldwide” tagline. By August 2006, YouTube was confidently mainstream—or their site had reached self-explanatory usability nirvana—so they shortened the tagline. I’m wondering if they ever needed the old tagline at all. But in general, it seems that as a company becomes more well-known, their logo can get very small, and the content itself becomes the logo and tagline (OK, some logos stay huge anyway). The content and interface become the identifying mark. The interface is the brand, and the logo is just there so you know what to call the interface.
• YouTube may have had ambitions about being a strong social network at first, but today it’s very clearly video centered. The “User Search” option is gone, the “Friends” tab is gone, and the Community tab is about group videos, not friends or individual users. My question is, did they even need those features in 2005? Was the “Friends” tab key to their viral growth, or was it always a bad idea?
• They finally found the right place for the search box: front and center, and highlighted by a darker background. Just between Feburary and August 2007, they’ve been able to shrink the height of the toolbar tremendously. I bet search is the most common function on YouTube after watching videos. “Did you see the latest Spiderman dance video?”
• The word “Home” on YouTube means home from YouTube’s perspective, not from the user’s perspective! It means “Our home page where we put the stuff we want you to see.” It does not mean “The place where all my stuff is,” as it does on Facebook.
• As a result, all of the “My Stuff” link cruft does not belong under the Home tab. A series of “My”s followed by one word make my eyes glaze over, anyway: the “My Account” page, which has sections for all of the relevant My items, is much simpler. By August 2006, “My Account” is among the utility links. As a side note, given that Home means YouTube’s Home and not My Home, shouldn’t “My Account” really be called “Your Account”?
• In fact, the home tab doesn’t even need to be a tab! Click the logo. In fact, if you hover over today’s logo, the word “Home” appears to its right. What if the logo were a tab, as with Amazon or Apple? The logo-as-tab is kind of irrational (what are the other tabs, if not part of Amazon?), but it works.
• It’s hard to see from my site grabs, but today’s tabs are slightly bigger than the tabs of 2005, now that there are fewer of them.
• “Groups” becomes “Community” — and that’s good, because Groups could be groups of anything. Communities are groups of people.
• “My Subscriptions” was folded into the “Channels” tab. On YouTube, a channel is a subscription to someone’s videos. But channels make me think of TV channels, and today’s TV channels are centered around subject areas (”Categories”), not people. Without clicking, I couldn’t have told you the difference between Categories and Channels. These areas must be for frequent/return visitors.
• Feb 2007: What is a QuickList, anyway? Obviously no one took the bait, and now it’s gone.
• A brief try at “Upload Videos” (Feb 2007) goes back to “Upload” (Aug 2007), “Search Videos” (Dec 2005) becomes “Search” (Aug 2006), and “Viewing History” (Aug 2006) is just “History” (Feb 2007). In fact, any word referring to videos or viewing is redundantly obvious and wisely removed.

I tried out two new services over the last couple days, Highrise (contact management web app) and GrandCentral (a “one phone number for life” VoIP call-forwarding service). I’m not going to review them here, but I noticed that both services make the false, tired assumption that either my address book is static or their copy of it is authoritative. They provide a way for me to send them my entire address book, but it’s designed as a one-time operation. So either my address book never changes, or their copy of it is all-holy. I don’t want to single out these two apps, though; this is a serious problem. Skype, Adium, LinkedIn, Facebook, you name it. Many many more apps are culpable. And it seems ironic that, in 2007, the Internet is creating more data disparity for me across everyday applications, not less. I thought this was supposed to be the great connector of people and data?

Web applications are partly to blame. Highrise offers import/export options for vCards. To their credit, they do delete obvious duplicates when you re-import set of vCards. But that’s not syncing, it’s just dupe detection, and it still assumes that Highrise’s copy of the contacts is authoritative (their copy always “wins” on an import). I want to sync! I don’t even want to manually initiate it. I just want the network to assimilate my changes automatically. Unfortunately, as much as we all love JavaScript these days, this isn’t something you can do inside a browser window. But moving this data around manually is a 100% waste of time, so when I sign up for Highrise, I’m signing up for that time waste. I believe there is no customer for whom the import and export function for address books is a benefit.

We need syncing. We need to smoothly merge versions of our data from different contexts.

One answer is to store things in fewer places, but that’s unrealistic in 2007, unless my plan is to quit the Internet entirely. Fact of life: My digital data is dispersed all over the place. I have bookmarks in five different web browsers on two computers. And my address book is so dynamic that the authoritative copy is in my head and in a stack of business cards in my desk drawer, and the digital copy on my Mac is rarely up to date. But when I do bother to update it, I want to do that operation only once. I want to be able to make updates in different contexts; it really shouldn’t matter.

So why is syncing so hard? Part of the problem is that most software doesn’t remember my actions, it only stores the data I acted upon. So later, when I sync, the computer tries to compare one address book copy with another, but it often can’t decide how to merge the two. I have to explain my intentions again: I want this copy, I don’t want that copy, because this is the copy I changed most recently. Were a dated change log in place on both ends, fine-grained version control, the computer would already know what I intended in the first place. But developers have historically faced a lot of space limitations when programming, as computer memory and hard drive space were once a huge premium. So metadata still seems luxurious to some. Or it seems unrelated to the problem at hand; an afterthought. But notice that developer tools have long been able to sync: multi-user version control systems for code have been around forever.

I think the real trouble is that syncing is dangerous for software companies. Some see syncing as a potential recurring revenue stream, so they see little incentive in opening things up. Apple will let me sync—if I sign up for their .Mac service. Cell phone companies offer a centralized over-the-air backup service for my address book…so smooth syncing would eat into their subscriber base. I recently heard of a phone company that’s been able to monetize the sync operation itself: $2.99 a shot, for me to move the data a couple feet between phone and computer.

Syncing would also make it easier for me to switch to the competition. Companies would much rather hold my data hostage with artificial barriers like proprietary data formats and closed APIs. I’m part of probably 15 social networks right now, and all of them sovereign states who pretend the others don’t exist. Apple has been so successful not because they play well with others, but because they’re creating and selling all of the devices you’ll ever want to sync between. It’s magical to see all of these devices talking to each other so smoothly, isn’t it? Yet there never was a technical limitation to it!

It makes Apple a lot of money, but it’s not an open solution and they can’t possibly sustain it for a long time. Every company goes through cycles (see Sony), so we can never rely on one to come through for us. So what can we do to bring the Apple magic into the larger space of web apps, cell phones, and MP3 players?

Free software will help us; the political incentives are different there. Reverse-engineering will help crack the data monopolies, as well. This information wants to be free, and I believe the network will eventually destroy any false barriers. There are free phone projects in the works, and we’ve already seen open source iPod firmware replacements. The world is entirely hackable; so now we need to create more open standards for syncing all of this structure data, and start getting these free software projects talking to each other. No company would dare to do this, so it could be the next huge leap in the free software movement.

Karl at the DeCordova

Karl teaches me a lot about how “real people” use computers, and it’s fascinating. As a dancer, he has a kind of body intelligence that is spell-binding to watch, because it is beautiful and because I know I could never do it. I think his brain developed toward movement very early, and mine toward BASIC, so he has an extreme muscle memory that is very powerful and expressive. His favorite thing right now is mouse gestures, but I think the mouse is ultimately too simple of an input device for him. I believe there’s a missing interface paradigm and set of applications that could extend the self-expression of a mover just as Word extends self-expression of a writer. Marginalized and underfunded as dance may be, I’m learning that there are a lot of movers in the world, and that, as far as I can tell, few of them end up in computer science. The people writing code, myself included, are really writers and linguists—they’re stuck in their own heads. So anyone who wants to interact with or program computers with their whole body is, for the most part, out of luck.

The gamers are, of course, ahead of the interface curve. The Wiimote represents the biggest advance in input devices in a decade, I think, but it only tracks the movement of one limb, and on the software end it’s only scratching the surface. The current games emulate existing real world movement (golf, bowling)—they don’t let you code with movement, there’s no room to create new movement vocabularies. I’m ready for that; I think Karl is, too.

Along these lines, I saw Aza Raskin’s excellent talk “Death of the Desktop” at SXSW and he demoed two things that represent good steps away from the 25-year-old “desktop.” Why should the desktop die? Not because it’s old; because it is 3D: things are hidden and they should not be. We spend all day moving windows around. We spend all day looking for these files and applications that should just be right in front of our noses. Anything that is not direct content manipulation, Raskin posits, is wasted effort. Exposé helps, but doesn’t get us all the way there. And sure, you can boost your productivity by getting 2 or 3 monitors on your desk, but Raskin has a couple alternatives.

For today’s users, Raskin recommends Enso, his company’s Spotlight/Quicksilver app for Windows. It executes simple commands typed while the caps lock key is held down. It’s a CLI on crack. Good stuff, and in his demo he killed Explorer.exe just to show his app in place of the desktop, running on a blank screen.

But the real goodies came later in the talk, when Raskin demoed a Zoomable User Interface. It’s not really a product, but it’s cool! A ZUI is just a plane, often infinite, with all of your content on it: photos, documents, web pages, whatever. No desktop, no file browser per se, no icons, no “open” or “save” commands—just directly manipulable content everywhere you look. And as you work with your content, you develop a cognitive map of the content plane, so you can find things easily—eg. if I’m at my video album from SXSW, I’ll know that my recipes are generally to the left, and my new voicemails are up and to the far left.

Spore screenshot

But once again, the gamers are already way ahead of the operating system designers, training today’s children to use tomorrow’s laptops. Game designers have the luxury of creating entirely sovereign environments for their games, so they have a lot of flexibility. Many games are already ZUIs, both 2D and 3D. Will Wright’s Spore has a beautiful 3D ZUI. Raskin still hasn’t convinced me that 3D UIs are cognitively a bad idea; I think it really depends on the input device. Mice are not good for navigating 3D content, but something soon may be.

One day, maybe we’ll settle on one or two.

• “Blink lunch in a flash” (Chase Blink)
• “Place Speedpass Here” (Mobil SpeedPass)
• “Tap N Go” (MasterCard PayPass)
• “Hold Your Card” (we made that up at Zipcar, but many people use it today)
• “Touch in and out” (London Transport’s Oyster Card)
• “Tap your card on the card target” (MBTA CharlieCard)
• “Wave your card in front of the reader” (massport Parking Passport)
• “scan your card” / “swipe your card” – obsolete, refers to older technologies, but these are sometimes used when people talk about RFID theft: Slashdot, Reddit, Japan Today