Wither our post?

Around 5pm today I decided that I couldn’t keep up with what had become a wildly distorted debate that had its roots in a post I made last week regarding the set-up experience I and my colleagues had on the Microsoft Surface.

In the original post, I wrote about the comical event it was in getting our new Surface unit plugged in and the touch-screen interface launched. I made a point to say that my critique was limited to just the set-up experience – that once launched, the Microsoft Surface unit offered a really stunning user experience. But by 5pm today that discussion had become so chock full of “web-muck” (the online equivalent of the telephone game, where the original message gets lost in the transmission) that it was becoming a huge distraction. So like a ship captain desperate to jettison a fouled cargo, I took it down. No one asked me to, I was just overwhelmed with 20,000+ people wanting red-meat in the tireless Apple vs. PC debate.

To those many thousands of  people who asked some really insightful questions about the Surface experience, I’ll happily post a “real-life demo” of the unit itself (from “on” to “off”) and the application we developed for it next week. As I’ve said, I really love the product and I’m excited to be doing more work on it in the future.

To those impassioned souls who accused me of being everything from a “Microsoft Apologist” to “M$ fanboy” to a “complete idiot”, let me just lay out some facts here:

Fact 1: I’ve been working on a Mac since 1989, I own 2 iMac’s (including the old “flower” model), 3 iPod’s (including a 2nd generation one that’s still singing) AppleTV and an original, day-1 iPhone. We also have a HP laptop at home.

Fact 2: I wrote a blog post based on the faulty impression that our experience was what other Surface customers would also encounter.  I got a call from a guy named Jason who works at Microsoft, who first thanked me for pointing out some areas of improvement to their new product, told me he thought my post was funny, and then pointed out that our experience in fact wasn’t what Microsoft intended. Turns out, in fact, that our experience will most likely be unique, in that all customers should either receive an installation service or two days of training. He directed me to the online Surface “Eco-System Partners” site for additional help, info and community. I thanked him for the call, and we hung up.

Fact 3: By 5pm today, the “web-muck” had grown so thick around the original post (“Microsoft Surface is a useless table”, and other hyperbole) that I took it down and replaced it with this second post. It explains the circumstances around how we came by our experience, and why it is unique. And it being unique, how that undermines much of the first post.

I really, really appreciate the debate about usability – I love the fact that there are thousands of others actively engaged in it as well, and with equal or even greater passion than me. But it doesn’t have to devolve into the Montagues vs. Capulets (happy birthday Mr. Shakespeare!) – or the Hatfields vs. McCoy’s. We live in a multi-tech world, and we seek to create quality user-experiences on whatever platform we work (which so far has included the Internet, the iPhone, the Surface and – coming soon – Google Android, among others). In our office we love our Mac’s. We love our Microsoft Surface. We love running MS Office on our OSX machines.

We also love all this traffic to our previously sleepy blog page – come back next week to get the tour of the Surface app!

Skin Deep Usability, Take 2

My post last week on the  poor set-up experience we had in getting our new Microsoft Surface running has struck a chord. Until last week, our sleepy little company blog could count on about 20 hits a day (thanks Mom!), and as of today we’ve gotten over 20,000.

I should have known what a potent potion I was brewing – world’s biggest technology company + hot new product + usability = lots of opinion.

But I’d like to make 2 things clear to this new, enormous audience -

1) the Surface unit itself is a fantastic touch-screen computing experience (as you can see in this short video), the usability of which is as highly polished as the iPhone – my critique was limited to the one-time set-up of the unit alone.

2) the poor set-up experience I described was the result of a simple error – had the use case that Microsoft envisioned happened correctly, I would never have had to struggle to find the power supply input.

Turns out that Microsoft offers the Surface in two flavors – “Commercial” & “Developer”. The “Commercial” model is designed for businesses that order multiple units to run the same application in different locations, and at $12,500 it comes with a comprehensive installation service as part of the purchase agreement. The “Developer” option delivers essentially the same piece of hardware , but at $2,500 more it comes with additional SDK licenses and 2 full days of training in Seattle for a Designer & Developer. Additional instructions come with this unit, as well as an invitation to an online community complete with helpful instructional videos and articles. It is clearly designed for the use-case we were.

You can see how this makes sense — many units, you just need someone to deploy them in many locations and then teach the people at those locations how to turn it off an on. Just one unit, they train you how to be become an expert operator.

The person who purchased our Surface ordered the “Commercial” unit, but then scheduled the installation service to be performed at the business conference where we were going to unveil the Surface and our application 2-weeks later. Thus, we were delivered a unit designed to be set-up by someone else, in another time and place.

As the  helpful Jason McConnell from Microsoft explained to me on a phone call earlier today, “Your blog post took us all by surprise – it was valid from your perspective, and funny, but it shouldn’t ever have happened.” He then added that  one part of my post that they are looking at addressing is with the initial set-up screen – “We want to add some goodness right there – the user shouldn’t have to wait to be greeted with some of the excitement of the product”.

As with any brand-new product, there are bound to be hiccups. It is reasonable to argue that our use-case wasn’t that far-fetched, that someone along the way should have helped us realize we were going off-path, or that the documentation should have been sufficient to set the unit up without assistance.  That didn’t happen, but with anything as complex as the Surface – and as necessarily big an organization as Microsoft is – it isn’t surprising that this slipped throught the cracks.

However, I really do appreciate the folks at Microsoft taking the time and care to reach out to me and find how they can improve their delivery process and ensure a similar tale isn’t told in the future. And, as I want to stress again, I really do appreciate the fantastic usabilty experience that they have produced with the Surface product. It is a great platform that will be exciting to watch develop in the future.

And thank you for reading our sleepy blog – come back next week when we talk about our love of Tito’s Burrito’s in Morristown, NJ!

Skin Deep Usability

Sorry, this post has been updated. You can see the new post here.

http://kinesismomentum.wordpress.com/2009/04/25/wither-our-post/

iPhone 3.0: A Life Saver?

By Jeff Zimmerman

Anyone who’s been in a room with me longer than 5 minutes knows that I am unabashedly and incurably obsessed with my iPhone. It almost instantly became inextricably integrated into my life. The new anytime/anywhere Internet quickly turned me into a junkie, and I didn’t understand the severity of my addiction until I found myself fighting off the shakes and nausea from connectivity withdrawal during a cross-country flight.

Naturally, when Apple previewed iPhone software 3.0 a couple of weeks ago, I was there, feverishly refreshing live feeds on the gadget blogs. Most of the improvements were evolutionary, which doesn’t bother me. I don’t need to be wowed every year. The additions in iPhone 3.0 are mostly obvious but welcome nonetheless. I was, however, intrigued by the possibilities opened up by one particular feature.

iPhone software 3.0 will allow third party devices to interact with an iPhone or iPod touch via Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, or Apple’s 30-pin connector. At first, I thought “big deal, move along”, but then LifeScan demoed a glucose monitoring app for diabetics (about 43:30 into the presentation). The app collects blood glucose readings from enabled meters and plots them over time. It can also contact someone (a parent, spouse, doctor, etc.) if a reading is outside the safe zone and suggest insulin doses based on what someone is planning to eat.

I thought MY life depended on my iPhone. Integration with medical devices has the potential to improve people’s health and quality of life quite substantially. While considering possibilities, my mind went to my mother and my aunt who both suffer from heart problems.

My mother suffered a heart attack last June. Afterward, she had to monitor her exercise routine and heart rate, ensuring that it stays in the right range for the right amount of time. Initially, she was worried and frustrated because it was difficult for her to know if she was hitting and maintaining the right heart rate. To help her manage this (and give her something to listen to at the gym), we got her an iPod touch and Nike+ receiver. The receiver attaches to her shoe and sends information about her pace and distance to the iPod. When she synchs the iPod, iTunes uploads the information to nikeplus.com. There, she can compare routines and chart her progress over time. This eased some of her concerns by enabling her to compare routines she was doing on her own to those she was doing with rehab nurses at the hospital.

Nike+ app running on an iPod touch and nikeplus.com workout information

She also wears a heart monitor while exercising but has to track her heart rate manually. The device only saves information from your last reading. An iPod touch running iPhone 3.0 could theoretically communicate with her heart monitor and track it for her. It could plot her heart rate against her pace, showing that her heart was getting stronger as she became capable of walking faster and/or longer. During a routine, it could interrupt the music to tell her that her heart rate was too high. She and her cardiologist could look at the data and tweak her routine more regularly. It would virtually eliminate guesswork, which could speed up recovery time.

My aunt has a pacemaker with a defibrillator. The intricate machine requires regular maintenance checks with the manufacturer over a land phone line. A few minutes on the phone per week to maintain a device that is saving your life is hardly something to complain about, but the process isn’t perfect. Sometimes the reading is incomplete because the phone connection was bad. She cannot do the reading if she is not near a land phone line because cell phones create too much interference. If an iPhone could communicate with the pacemaker, it could gather the data and send it to the manufacturer over the Internet or cell network, eliminating these inconveniences.

The iPhone could also alert her doctor of anything out of the ordinary occurs – like using the defibrillator – allowing the doctor to detect problems earlier and monitor them more closely. It could contact my uncle and emergency care with her location (thanks to GPS) if she collapses. It could monitor the pacemaker’s battery level, prolonging the need for surgery to replace it.

Obviously, this is just speculation based not on medical knowledge but on others’ experiences with ongoing health issues. Maybe some of what I’m thinking is already out there. I also have no idea whether or not these devices can interact with computers or other mobile devices to do anything like I’m imagining. However, I can guess that most other systems in place will not be as easy as the iPhone’s. With the new iPhone software, the medical community has the potential to use technology to improve people’s lives, and I sincerely hope they embrace this opportunity.

April Fool’s Day on the Internet

By Dominic Custodio

April Fool’s day has come and gone. With the usual spattering of tame office pranks (office manager getting rick roll’d on the lobby TV…I swear I was just an accomplice) and the much-talked about onslaught of the Conficker worm on computers around the world turning out to be a non-event, things were actually quite normal on April 1st.

Not of course, if you were making the rounds on the web. The internet was rife with pranks and jokes – some subtle, many in-your-face – and it was hard to escape with even the biggest web names and the normally “corporate” companies joining in on the madness. What better way to use the information super-highway then to spread mayhem and confusion? Jokes ranged from school-yard antics to the high-brow, but a couple, actually provided food for thought about current trends, and if not, at least some interesting and controversial design. Two in particular, caught my eye:

A Newspaper moves to Twitter: Every joke has a sliver of truth behind it as they say. With the print edition of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer gasping its last breath only a few weeks ago and the paper moving completely online, The Guardian was hitting close to home when they wrote their fake announcement about canceling their print edition and moving it all to Twitter. Sample posts from their new offering made it clear what was up (“1940: W Churchill giving speech NOW – “we shall fight on the beaches … we shall never surrender” check YouTube later for the rest) but the Guardian’s playful jab at Twitter had quite a few readers fooled. Commenting users toyed with idea; indeed, with all the newspaper closings recently, there was a nugget of plausibility there.

Print has a lot of competition these days with digital penetrating our daily lives: blogs, tweets, RSS feeds, not to mention digital readers like Kindle delivering daily editions of newspapers to the paper-saving/eco-minded masses. Print will find its niche, but the Internet has definitely changed how it operates. It is in fact reinventing itself by taking on the qualities of the web in interesting ways. Time Magazine, for example, launched an experimental magazine called Mine that allows users to pick and choose content, much like what you would do with your iGoogle or MyYahoo page. After choosing from a couple of themes (Fashion, Sports, etc.) your content would be compiled into your own personalized magazine, delivered also in your choice of print or digital format. I signed up for free a while back and am curious to see how it turns out.

As for a 140 character per story newspaper? That’s tough to imagine – for the mean time at least. For now, the joke remains an interesting marker of changing times.

What happened to my site?:  Sites often use a single page containing a fake press release or announcement to play these jokes. It’s safe and relatively harmless. Companies like Google and Qualcomm recently, go a bit further with full sections of fake content safely tucked away from their real site. But the few, brave ones go all out and drastically change the user experience of the whole site – with interesting ramifications. YouTube flipped everything upside down for example. The programmers, thankfully, left an easily readable link to revert back to the old layout, avoiding a potential firestorm (btw if for some odd reason you actually LIKE viewing upside down text and videos, add “&flip=1” to any YouTube URL).

There was less uproar on YouTube compared to what was going on over at Reddit. Reddit took a dig at rival news aggregator Digg, (no pun intended) by switching the whole site’s interface to Digg’s layout, leaving the page essentially broken. Many users were baffled and ultimately annoyed as you can see in the picture below.

Digg’s layout (the pop-up is their April Fool’s prank)

Reddit copying Digg’s look. And disgruntled users.

A joke taken too far? With the layout mangled and users looking to other users for the solution, it definitely left a sour taste with some. Taking out usability, even for one day is a risky move, and while it won’t alienate your loyal fan base, it might be enough to turn-off fickle users.

Final words: Many pranks confirm trends and induct names/things/ideas into popular culture. Many are just plain silly fun and give your company a human face. And then some may be too controversial for their own benefit. Something to think about the next time you go joking around online.

Interested in how other sites around the world handled the April 1st? A comprehensive compilation can be found here.

Enjoy!