Smoking Kills: when did we lose the ability to communicate?

Communication between human beings has always been an interesting topic. I heard someone saying “the spoken word is not the received word” – basically meaning that what someone means to say isn’t necessarily what the other person hears.

That’s because of filters that people listen through. What I mean by that is that we all have experiences and preconceptions about situations or people which means we actually hear something different to what the person speaking think they’ve said.

However, that aside – recently there was an incident on a Megabus on the M6 Toll road in the UK Midlands which made me question whether we have lost the ability to communicate completely.

The incident in question was that “something” happened on the bus which caused a full scale terror alert. The bus was halted on the hard shoulder, armed police and ambulances galore turned up and everyone was escorted off the bus one by one by the armed police and made to sit in a cordoned off area of the now closed motorway. The motorway remained shut for 5 hours while “investigations” continued.

Obviously this was paraded endlessly on the parasitic rolling news channels with speculation about what might or might not have happened and what you could clearly see with your own eyes on the TV screen but presenters trying to “fill” have to keep stating the bloody obvious! Worse than that they also referred to the M6 Toll as “one of the busiest motorways in the country” – which means they’ve never actually been on it!

In the end it turns out that the “something” that happened on board this bus was an electronic cigarette that someone had which was creating artificial “smoke” (which I believe is just water vapour).

I have to ask why the hell didn’t someone on the bus just ask the person with the “smoking device” what it was? Surely this whole vastly expensive and time consuming operation could have been avoided with that simple question? Perhaps the Megabus and rural Staffordshire are known priority targets?

I would say you couldn’t make it up but someone already did. A few years ago the BBC had a fantastic comedy series called “Broken News” which was a complete lampooning of the rolling news channels and the pathetic coverage of anything and everything that they give.

That show had the story of “Union Air Flight 216 from Chicago to Amsterdam” which was the subject of intense media speculation about a possible hijack. When it landed in Amsterdam it emerged that the “situation” was that someone on board had a wooden spoon.

There are some ridiculous parallels here although the bus situation response was arguably much worse. If the authorities in the spoof comedy program had responded to the situation in the same way that the UK emergency services responded to the bus incident, the entire airport would have been closed for ½ a day while they examined the spoon. That wouldn’t have been believable – well, until now!

Unfortunately, too often people don’t communicate with each other openly and honestly. If they did then all sorts of things would be far easier but I think we’re too scared of what might happen if we tell people the truth. Sadly it seems to be getting worse!

The broken news BBC page for the hijack is here http://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/brokennews/indepth/hijack.shtml

The Pina Colada Song

I was driving home the other night and a song came on the radio. It’s called “Escape (The Pina Colada Song)” by a guy called Rupert Holmes. It’s a classic (depending on your point of view) 70s song which tells the story of a couple who are bored with each other.

I have been aware of this song for a good while but it’s been some time since I heard it and this time I was paying particular attention to the words.

The first part of the song has these lyrics :-

I was tired of my lady, we'd been together too long,

like a worn-out recording, of a favourite song,

so while she lay there sleeping, I read the paper in bed,

and in the personal columns, there was this letter I read:

"If you like Pina Coladas, and getting caught in the rain,

if you're not into yoga, if you have half-a-brain,

if you’d like making love at midnight, in the dunes of the cape,

I'm the love that you've looked for, write to me and escape."

This got me thinking. There are relationships everywhere in life but in a business context, they might be with colleagues, suppliers or customers. Perhaps there is something we can learn from the song in a business context?

The song continues with :-

I didn't think about my lady, I know that sounds kind of mean,

but me and my old lady, had fallen into the same old dull routine,

so I wrote to the paper, took out a personal ad,

and though I'm nobody's poet, I thought it wasn't half-bad.

"Yes, I like Pina Coladas, and getting caught in the rain,

I'm not much into health food, I am into champagne,

I've got to meet you by tomorrow noon, and cut through all this red tape,

at a bar called O'Malley's, where we'll plan our escape."

Well, fair enough. Personally I don’t like where the song is going now. It’s not right to cheat on someone and everyone knows this, but it’s a nice tune so we’ll let it slide and use it to focus on the relationships between a customer and supplier in a business sense.

There are some interesting parallels here to the world of business where the whole situation is not morally questionable.

So in that situation, let’s imagine that we’re finding the relationship we have with an existing supplier isn’t going as well as it should. Things are looking up though because we’ve just seen an advert for a new supplier that we like the sound of. So we’ve arranged to meet them.

This is where the song starts going having some problems. It continues with :-

So I waited with high hopes, then she walked in the place.

I knew her smile in an instant, I knew the curve of her face.

It was my own lovely lady, and she said, "Oh, it's you."

And we laughed for a moment

Whoa there horsey! This is a HUGE problem! We’re in a bar for an illicit meeting with a new “supplier” and our existing “supplier” walks in. I can imagine blind panic would set in. What if the existing “supplier” sees me with the new “supplier” – we better hide quickly. We might even leave by the back door and try to reschedule our “supplier” meeting.

Ok, if we were really talking about business suppliers then there would be a bit less of a problem although,, it is conceivable that the existing supplier knows the new supplier you’re meeting with and this might cause the existing relationship to become more difficult.

In a business scenario you can imagine that this meeting would be a little awkward, but personal relationships are a lot more volatile than business relationships. So, if we go back to the original meaning of the song – I can’t really see either him or his wife reacting with “oh, it’s you” and then laughing for a moment. I think that world war 3 would instantly break out followed by a divorce!

However, the song ends nicely like this :-

"and I said, I never knew,

that you liked Pina Coladas, and getting caught in the rain,

and the feel of the ocean, and the taste of champagne,

if you like making love at midnight, in the dunes of the cape,

you're the lady I've looked for, come with me, and escape."

Luckily for them they are both much more enlightened than anyone else on the planet. They decide that actually, they just hadn’t worked hard enough at their relationship and they didn’t know all sorts of things about each other that could have helped things along.

That is where our tale ends but what can we learn from this song? Well, going back to my supplier analogy for a last time. Any relationship has ups and downs and there are always things we can do better and different. With a customer – supplier relationship it’s perhaps too easy to think “I’m fed up with that supplier, I’ll get a different one”.

This is often easy for something like printer paper or toilet rolls but there are lots of other relationships where changing supplier is much more of an upheaval. Perhaps before jumping ship completely – it would be worth talking to the supplier in more detail about what could be different and if the relationship can be improved. Remember, you will have to learn all of the foibles of a new supplier and they might be worse than the supplier you had before!

Sometimes a lack of change is disappointing

In a recent blog post I talked about how people don’t like change. Now find myself writing about the exact opposite!

I’d also like to clarify my last blog post. There are times when change is welcomed by a lot of people and in the software world that’s where the change is that something that was clearly not good enough before is improved and made to work either properly or much better. I think it’s when people are “satisfied” with the status quo that the change causes consternation.

Personally I think I’m much more open to change than most people – certainly in software and websites that I use. However, there are times when I find a lack of change disappointing. One instance of this is with smartphones.

Not very many years ago, getting a new phone was an exciting experience. For the first few weeks I would be discovering how it worked and how things were different to the last phone. Every few days I’d find a new feature or something and would think “wow, this is fantastic” but that all changed with the advent of the iPhone and Android phones.

I got my first Android phone about 3 years ago and was amazed by it. I loved installing new apps and playing about with settings to get it setup just the way I wanted (I am a techie after all!) and I’m now onto my second Android phone.

About a month ago I was excited to receive a notification on the phone to tell me that there was a system update available for me. I knew this was the latest version of the Android operating system for my phone. This was big news indeed (I did mention I’m a sad techie didn’t I?).

The problem was that I did the update and rebooted the phone and was…………. erm…………. well…………. pretty unimpressed really. It turns out that Android 4.0 looks very much like Android 2.3 that I had before. It’s a bit slicker and there are some new bits but nothing much.

This made me think about when I got my second shiny new Android phone. When I think back I remember I felt distinctly underwhelmed that time too because apart from a bigger screen and it being a bit faster, there wasn’t a fat lot of difference between that and my first Android phone.

The same can be said of a lot of devices these days. The latest iPhone or iPad might have a better display, a nicer camera or be a bit faster but apart from that, it looks and works exactly the same.

The trade off to this of course is familiarity and that means that as soon as you do get the shiny new device you can work it and know where everything is. Overall that’s probably a good thing but it has taken some of the fun out of it for me!

Usability problems – “Don’t ask me again”

Note: This is post is one in a series of usability posts. To read my explanation about what usability is click here.

Shown here is one of the dialog boxes that Microsoft Outlook presented me with today. I have setup AutoArchive on my machine so that my mail items older than 3 months get copied into an archive file where I can still get them if I need to but they won’t clog up my inbox.

The problem I have with this is with the checkbox that sits there with the legend “Don’t prompt me about this again”. This bothers me because I don’t think it’s at all clear what that means.

Does it mean :-

• Based on whichever button I click on next (Yes or No), do that every time in future without asking me. 
• Don’t ask me again but just do it anyway regardless of whether I click Yes or No. 
• Don’t ask me again and don’t auto archive anything again. 

I have found myself in exactly the same position with “Read Receipts”. Outlook will pop up a dialog box saying “Don’t ask me again” but it doesn’t say which option will be the default action.

Personally I don’t like read receipts because I might want to read the email late at night and if a read receipt was sent then I know the person knows I saw it and then I feel an obligation to reply.

That said, these days, seeing an email and reading it are two entirely different things so “Read Receipt” should perhaps been “Viewed Receipt” to be more accurate but that’s an entirely different article!

I saw the read receipt dialog box lots and lots of times and always clicked "No" without checking the "Don't ask me again" option because I was concerned that if it didn't ask me again it might automatically send a receipt to anyone that requested it. I had to Google to find out how to set the default and stop the question properly before it went away.

Microsoft has many millions of users of Outlook yet I find myself having to Google to figure out what this little dialog box actually means and what will happen if I tick the option. If I'm having this problem - how many millions of other users are having the same problem? A brief round of questions to a limited panel of users would reveal to Microsoft that this option isn’t clear and is horribly ambiguous and needs changing. 

My point in this surprisingly short rant is that software developers need to be extremely careful about ambiguous terms in their systems. If something can’t be clearly and concisely understood by your users then you might need to rethink it.

People don't like change!

This is something I encounter quite a lot in my professional life but lately I've found it in my personal life too.

In my work life I see a new feature being introduced in software and people immediately hate it. This isn't just in software I'm involved with. A classic example is Facebook. Almost as soon as Facebook announces a new feature there is a message going around about how you can protest or keep the old way of doing it.

The problem for me is that there generally isn't anything wrong with the improvement that's been implemented - it's purely that people don't like change and prefer things "as they were". I tend to find that a few weeks later, people are used to the feature, have stopped complaining about it and probably now quite like it.

It's for this reason that I think it's really important that people involved with software development don't automatically react to the public outcry of disgust about a new feature or an improvement to the user interface.

Most of the time, the changes have been debated at length and every aspect of the changes scrutinised to ensure that the change is for the better. It isn't possible for a casual user without access to all of the feedback from the different users of the system to perform this sort of analysis.

In my personal life, I have just moved house to a small village. A few days after we moved it there was a meeting of the Parish Council. We were invited to the meeting by a neighbour and we thought it would be a good way to meet the other neighbours.

When we got to the meeting we discovered that the main issue and the reason that the Parish Council was having its first meeting in more than a year was that there is a proposed wind farm within a few miles of the village.

The farmer who's land the wind farm would be on was at the meeting and seemed very well informed about the whole plan and had been to see other wind farms to understand the full implications of the proposed project.

Anyone who has travelled a lot around Europe in the past few years will have seen wind farms absolutely everywhere. Personally, I really like them. I think the turbines are graceful and interesting and the fact that they are generating clean energy is a bonus.

Unfortunately, the local residents are totally opposed to the idea. This is despite the fact that there is a large wooded area between the houses and the proposed wind farm so they won't be able to see it at all. On top of that, there is a constant background noise from a nearby main road so they won't be able to hear anything. That doesn't stop them wanting to prevent the scheme.

Sadly, these days, nobody wants coal fired or nuclear power stations but it seems they don't want wind power either - well, they probably do as long as it's not near their house!

I really think that it's a shame that more people aren't open to change. Change is inevitable in virtually every area of life one way or another and resisting it will probably just make those people much less happy than they could otherwise be. I just guess it's a good job we're not all the same!

Usability problems: thetrainline.com

Note: This is post is one in a series of usability posts. To read my explanation about what usability is click here.

Thetrainline.com website allows you to search for train times for the UK rail network. On the surface of it, the site is quite well designed and simple to use. There is one major issue that really annoys me. It won’t allow me to search for train times “in the past”.

At this point I can imagine some puzzled faces as people read this and think “why would you want to search for a train in the past”. Well, there are a few times when that would be useful. However, the problem is compounded by the fact that the website only allows searching in 15 minute time intervals.

Let’s suppose it’s 16:31 and I’m 2 minutes away from the train station on my way home. I don't know what time the next train is and want to search to find out. At 16:31 I can only search from 16:45 onwards because 16:30 is “in the past”. That means that there may be a train at 16:39 (8 minutes from now) but I’m not allowed to see that!

Given that most of us carry a web enabled device in our pocket now, it can sometimes easier to look at train times on your mobile. This is especially true when you are at a big train station like London Victoria.

The other problem this presents is that when I’m using a tablet device (like an iPad) to search for trains, I often will leave the search results page open on the tablet. This means I can easily see when and where I have to change trains and what time the next train departs. Unfortunately, iPads sometimes aren’t very clever either so when you turn an iPad on after a period of inactivity it often doesn’t just show you the copy of the page that was already on screen – it goes to get a new copy. At this point, website will tell me that I can’t perform that search as it’s in the past!

If I want to search for a train journey in the past – would it hurt to let me? I think the website should warn me that this journey is in the past but let me see it anyway. That would seem to be a sensible solution!

Ironically, a good while after I started using this website I discovered that I can search for a time in the future and then use the “Earlier” link on the results page to go back and look at trains that are considerably in the past. This proves that the site is capable of delivering this information – it’s just the front page that prevents me which is stupid!

There is a lesson that needs to be learned from this story. Developers shouldn’t put “road-blocks” in software unless they are absolutely necessary. If someone can get around a particular road-block easily or there is no real downside to letting someone perform that function then the developers should seriously question why they’re trying to prevent it being done.

There are frequently times when it is necessary to limit what websites or software can do but these times need to be carefully considered and only be put in with good reason.

What is usability and why should I care?

In life we are totally surrounded by things designed by humans. Anything from a door handle to the most sophisticated software or website has to be designed. There are good and bad designers which means there are plenty of good and bad designs. Probably more annoyingly, there are also lots of designs that don’t really fit into either the good or bad categories but rather, sit somewhere in the middle!

Usability is the art of good designed so that the end product is easily usable. If you’ve found yourself in a hotel room trying to figure out how to turn the shower on; or pushing the wrong side of a door because it’s not obvious how to open it – you have been a victim of a bad design that has a lack of usability.

As a techie I often find myself looking at things and thinking “that’s stupid” because there are bits that just don’t seem to make sense. Most often it’s simple things that annoy me because they should be easy to fix!

I realise that as a software developer, I’m setting myself up for a fall here. Someone will read this post and then beat me with it over some bit of software that I’ve created but that’s ok – at least it may start a debate.

Of course, not everyone thinks in the same way and so differences of opinion always cause disagreements about how things should work. There are sometimes functionality conflicts which mean that something has to be the way it is because of other elements in the system. Additionally, there will always be budget, resource, legacy code and other constraints that limit what is possible. However, the things I’m going to focus on in coming posts are mainly because too often simple things aren’t good enough.

Designers of anything (especially software) should always be trying their hardest to anticipate the issues users will face and think about what makes sense for someone using the system. This is often hard for a software developer because we use the software constantly during development and so may forget what the system looks like to someone seeing it for the first few times.

This blog post is intended as a primer which I will refer to each time I post a message about a usability issue that I’ve discovered.