Somewhere a radio is playing; frequency-modulated static over the sleepy drawl of a late-night DJ and the songs of decades long gone.  Nothing stirs in the house, just me and the tap-tap-tap of fingers on keys.

It is a moment outside time in a place adrift from the world.

But tomorrow the streets will be clear and the dance will begin again, leaving only the trickles of snow that linger in shadows and the endless radio haze.

Except that… they’re not glass.

They’re plastic.

Somehow I have lived out all my life so far convinced that these were tiny, fragile glass bottles that had to be meticulously placed in the cupboard to avoid your floor being permanently green.  Until, grabbing a bag of flour from my baking cupboard without paying attention, one of these bottles fell to the floor — and bounced.

Sometimes it’s the simplest design decisions that can avert disaster and bring a smile (in this case, of relief) to people’s faces.

Do I actually want to know what 281 people are doing?

But in doing so, I thought for probably the first time about the direction Facebook has taken with regards to friendships and viewing friends’ updates.

Firstly, unlike Twitter, when someone you know “friends” you on Facebook, the socially acceptable thing to do is to accept.  Rather than saying “it’s great that you’re interested in me, but I’m not as interested in you, so I won’t ‘follow’ you back,” Facebook mandates a two-way interest.  So if someone “friends” you, you either have to ignore them (and feel slightly guilty about it) or commit yourself to seeing their updates.

Secondly, Facebook is becoming less of a place to catch up with friends, and more of an identity service (which has been accelerated with the new Timeline profiles).  Your Facebook profile defines you; tells others who you are and who you know.  This adds to the impetus to “friend” people you don’t really care about that much — you’re not so much expressing an interest in another person as defining who you are.  And that, of course, also lumbers you with looking at their updates all the time.

It’s obvious that this is a common issue, and rather than backpedal or restrict the way Facebook wants to take its service, their response has been to add complex filtering options that let you block specific users and apps, view only updates from various groups, and recently, adding an automated filter that tries to guess which updates you’ll want to see.

Personally, I prefer using Facebook via the API (using SuccessWhale) which avoids the automated filter, but I must still block the updates of people I don’t care much about manually.  I’d quite like to cull my Facebook friends list down to just those whose updates I actually care about.  But is doing so a reasonable way of reducing my information overload — or willingly damaging an identity that I spent the last four years trying to curate?

As is my unfortunate habit, I spent some of today checking out how work had progressed on the GNOME-shell and Ubuntu Unity desktop environments.  (I enjoyed the eye candy for around three hours before reverting to the UI of least resistance.)  Various complexities in their interfaces irritate me and seem to have provoked the wrath of a community of largely experienced computer users.  This got me thinking about how I would go back the other way, and design a desktop environment for absolute novice computer users — one without many of the frustrations of modern software.

The Gnome-Shell Interface

My ideas, roughly distilled into a sort of ‘design manifesto’, are:

1. One activity at a time.  Here I actually agree with Gnome-shell and Unity’s focus on  full-screen applications, avoiding unrelated yet overlapping windows.
2. Never hide the means to change activities.  Both Gnome-shell and Unity hide their application switcher during normal use, requiring at least a mouse movement or a click to get it back.
3. Don’t change state with mouse position.  Novice computer users often have trouble controlling the mouse.  Unity’s auto-hiding dock and Gnome-shell’s “hot corner” could prove frustrating, particularly the latter which completely changes the display when hit.
4. No system trays.  The distinction between the taskbar and system tray is not well-defined and can be confusing.  Gnome-shell is a particularly bad offender here, with not one but two tray-like areas.
5. No notifications (unless they help).  Pop-ups confuse and scare novice users.  If at all possible, the app should use a sane default rather than asking a question, and do nothing rather than displaying information.  If a pop-up does appear, it should be helpful and clearly worded.
6. Stateless apps and background services.  The user wants to get their e-mail. Reading e-mail is a legitimate activity, but leaving a mail client open so that they are notified of new mail is not.  Use background services so that it doesn’t matter which apps are running.
7. Zero tolerance on UI clutter.  While UX people like me may sometimes deplore clutter and idolise minimalism on aesthetic grounds, for the novice user, every bit of clutter is something that they feel like they should know how to use.
8. Explain things clearly.  Keep words to a minimum, but ensure that the user always feels confident that they know what clicking a given element will do.
9. Undo everywhere.  Offer an “undo” option wherever possible.  If you’re dealing with small but important items (such as e-mail), consider offering a non-destructive way of getting e-mail out of the user’s face — “archive” instead of “delete”.
10. Use icons and words together.  Novice computer users may be young or old, and users of any age may have poor vision or may not speak the language in which the interface was written.  These may result in users finding either icons or words easier to understand on a control.  Providing both, by using clear iconography and simple text together, helps to alleviate this problem.

I’ve mocked up a couple of interfaces to show a desktop environment that adheres to these principles.  The first shows the “desktop”, taskbar and an example notification:

The second shows the mail app with example messages:

Is there anything you particularly like or hate about the mockups or the design principles behind them?  Bear in mind that if you consider yourself tech-savvy or a software designer yourself, you’re probably not the target audience for this desktop environment — pretend to be your mother or grandfather for a minute and see how you feel about the suggestions I’ve made.

I’m happy to go further with these designs if you think it’s useful, and of course your own ideas and suggestions are more than welcome.  The comments section is yours!

For anyone wondering, the mockups in this post were generated with Mockingbird, an excellent UI mocking web-app.

But all three main parties now label themselves as “Progressive”. (I suppose “regressive” isn’t much of a vote-winner.)  The minor parties mostly have limited agendas that make it impossible to support them to the exclusion of all others.  Who, then, do I vote for? The truth is probably that none of the UK’s political parties are as progressive as I would like, but more than that — a politician being progressive on my behalf isn’t really what I want at all.

I want to design the future.

Then I want to engineer the future.

Then I want to sit back and think “bloody hell, we made that.”

That’s what gets me out of bed and halfway across the county five mornings a week, what keeps me sketching interfaces and gets me through design meetings, what keeps me coding and soldering and getting covered in grease and salt-spray.

I’m not pretending that I could engineer the future of this country by myself, or that I should have any more of a say than the other sixty million of us, but I’d like to at least have some input besides a simple vote.  As far as I’m aware, there exist only two ways of having this kind of input — sell your soul for a career in politics, or be ignored on e-petitions.

All of this leads me to the conclusion that having our voice heard and our experience utilised on our own terms is not something that a nation state can offer its citizens.  Our voices are heard and our experience utilised by our families and friends; at our places of work — tribes of a few hundred people at most — but not on a national scale

Is there some useful way for citizens to help engineer their future at the state level, or are we relegated to having that kind of influence only in our hundred-strong social tribes?  Are there any countries that are significantly better at this than ours, countries that progress with heavy citizen involvement?  Am I dreaming of an impossible society, and most importantly of all, should I go to bed and sleep it off instead of filling the internet with my ranting?

He begins by praising the gadget’s intuitive interface and its easy setup process, but eventually he finds that mere description doesn’t adequately convey the product’s momentous simplicity. That’s when he drops the mom bomb: This thing is so easy that even my mom could use it.

I’m blessed with parents that, by and large, ‘get’ technology.  Their VCR never flashed 12:00 (and now they have a DVD recorder); they both have Android phones that they can happily e-mail from.  My grandparents are a different story, of course.  Two of them have almost never used a computer, but my Granddad has a nice new shiny one and uses it regularly.  But as the article points out, what tech journalists and we tech-savvy users think is simple and ‘user-friendly’ often falls far short of the ‘mom (or granddad) test’.

A few observations spring to mind:

• Moving photos from a digital camera to a computer is one of the simplest tasks non-‘tech-savvy’ users often want to do.  But when you plug in a digital camera, Windows 7 helpfully pops up this dialog:
  Do I want to “Import Pictures and Videos” using Windows, or using Windows Live Photo Gallery?  What’s the difference?  Do I want to “Copy pictures to [my] computer”?  Do I want to “Download images”? Where will the photos go?  Will they still be on the camera?  I just want to see my photos, so I click “Open device to view files”, but what the heck is “DCIM”?
• I set Google as his browser homepage, and since then, he has been getting his news not from the BBC News bookmark I created, but using the ‘News’ link on Google’s own menu that appears at the top of its pages:
  
  

  
  …which is great, except that Google can change that menu at any time.  And of course they are doing exactly that:
  
  

  
  To my granddad, and many other novice internet users, the distinction between bookmarks — which only change if you want them to — and web page navigation menus — which can change at the webmaster’s whim — is not necessarily clear.

• Even simple mouse commands can be unclear and difficult.  In the example above, Google’s instruction to find the new menu is to ‘roll over’ the logo.  When the novice user figures out that means ‘hover the cursor over’, they’re greeted with a JavaScript popup which will disappear again if their cursor accidentally wanders too far from the popup.

It’s my family duty to be tech support, and occasionally I am called upon to fix things that have actually gone wrong.  But more often than not, I am called upon to try to rationalise a simple task that is unexpectedly complex to perform.  This complexity has usually arisen because the software’s developers and most vocal users are so immersed in common UI paradigms that they just don’t notice that the complexity exists.  For the novice user, on the other hand, even your software’s installation wizard is complexity they’d rather not deal with.

The Slate article is right to cite Facebook’s user interface as a particularly onerous example of software complexity.  Feeds, live updates, inboxes, hidden inboxes, walls, profiles, Timeline, comments, likes, tags — some users need and revel in that level of complexity, but a significant number just want to, say, see what their kids are up to.  I’m nervous that one day soon, my granddad will ask me to set him up with a Facebook account.  I’ll dutifully comply, log him in, and give him this:

Where does one even begin?  There are multiple feeds, multiple menus, pop-up and pop-down boxes.  How do you add one of these “status” things?  How do you add a friend?  How do I send a message to someone?  What’s public and what’s private?  Why is there so much stuff?

In the world of User Experience (UX) design, we spend so much time thinking about how software will be used and by whom — personas, use cases, red routes and all the rest.  But in the majority of software I see when working with novice users, it seems that either the novice user has not been considered, or their persona is paid lip service while the latest excitingly complicated new features are bolted onto the software.

As creators of software and of user experiences, I know we can do better than this.

Do you have any thoughts on how we can design better for the novice user?  Just want to vent about an app with a particularly poor UI, or about a relative with a particularly poor grasp of computing?  Fire away in the comments below!

A film to end on is particularly troublesome, as I’ve already given one film a rating of negative aleph omega, and the review of Dragonball Evolution probably marks the apex of the “over 9000″ running joke.  All suggestions are very much appreciated!

Suggestions so far have included:

• The Room (which Dan has been on at me to review for months now)
• The Princess Bride
• Plan 9 from Outer Space (often cited as the worst film ever made)
• Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie (possibly the most meta choice)

Any more? :)

Not only is there no way I could fit my recycling into these bins, but each and every one — ten in total — is marked with a “Contaminated” sticker, meaning that the collection people saw something they didn’t like in every bin, and refuse to collect any of them until the management company of our flat block pays the council to take them to a landfill site.

This left me with two options — dump my recycling (in its non-recyclable bin-bag) on the ground and hope that someone helpfully puts it in a recycling bin once they are emptied, or the only realistic option: put them straight in the rubbish bins myself, immediately wasting all the effort my family put into separating them from non-recyclable waste.

Now I spent a year of my life working on technology for Material Reclamation Facilities — the big sorting depots where your recycling ends up.  For better or worse (it’s a weird thing to be geeky about) I know exactly what can and cannot be recycled locally, what happens to it when it is, and what happens to any “contamination” that makes it through. For my sins, I even know what all the numbered codes on plastic bottles mean.  The net result is that my family and I are meticulous about what gets put out for recycling.  I would happily bet that none of the contamination is our fault.

But this isn’t a “boo-hoo, I have to pay and it’s not my fault” rant.  The fact of the matter is, I live in a block of 93 flats.  Someone in one of those flats is going to be too lazy to sort their recycling or take it out of plastic bags.  Someone is going to be unable to read the signs, or just to not care.  Probably not just “someone” but quite a lot of people.  It’s unavoidable.

The council system is simply broken for large flat blocks.

If a single family house gets their bin marked as “contaminated” and has to pay to have it taken away, maybe they’ll learn.  But given human nature, a block of 93 flats is always going to have contaminated bins, every single week.

Either the process needs to change, collectors need to be more tolerant of contamination, or else there’s no point giving us recycling bins at all.  Just let us put it all out for rubbish and damn the environment, because that’s what happens now, only right now it takes much longer and costs us all a lot more money.

In another time and place, perhaps I would have been a shaman, ingesting powders of strange jungle plants to achieve the same state beyond mere consciousness, the same ability to communicate with the world, that I now achieve with caffeine and a keyboard. For the creation of software is unlike any art or act of engineering that came before it, and at times it borders on magical.

The carpenter’s and the artist’s work both begin with an idea in their mind, but the end product of each one’s endeavour is a real, tangible object. What’s more, the carpenter’s chisel marks and the artist’s brush strokes become part of the work itself, forever a sign that human effort created it. But not so the magic of the programmer. We have minimised our tools as far as we can, allowing fingers to dash across keys as fast as our muscles allow, and still we yearn to do away with them entirely. Like the Chi to a T’ai Chi practicioner, the keyboard to us is a limitation on the speed we can translate thought into reality, and the more we minimise it, the more effective we are.

At the end of the craft of software, there is no finished item that can be picked up, examined for workmanship, burnt to ash. There is just a pattern of magnetic domains on a disk somewhere, an electromagnetic pattern the mirror twin of the electromagnetic pattern in a brain that spawned it. By using a strange tool and a bizarre language which few understand, we take the patterns in our heads and overlay them on the world as pure information, pure pattern-stuff.

And that, dear friends, is nothing more or less than the practice of magic.