Tag Archives: Software

Towards a Simpler Desktop

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In one of my pre­vi­ous blog posts, “Design­ing for Grand­dad”, I exam­ined some of the user inter­face fea­tures that cause my grand­fa­ther issues when using his com­puter, and left a few hang­ing ques­tions as to how we soft­ware design­ers can make our apps less con­fus­ing to the novice com­puter user.

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.

 

Gnome-Shell Screenshot

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:

 

Simple Desktop Environment - Taskbar & Notifications

 

The sec­ond shows the mail app with exam­ple messages:

 

Simple Desktop Environment - E-mail App

 

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.

Designing for Granddad

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Slate’s recent arti­cle, “2011 Was a Ter­ri­ble Year for Tech”, coins the term “mom-bomb” for the moment that tech­nol­ogy jour­nal­ists declare a gad­get so easy-to-use that it is actu­ally use­ful to peo­ple who aren’t tech­nol­ogy journalists:

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:
    Windows 7 Camera AutoPlay DialogDo 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:

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

    New-Look Google Menu
    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:

Facebook User Interface

 

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!

Of Software and Magic

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Light­ning crack­les through my hind-brain, adeno­sine recep­tors light­ing up in sequence as caf­feine mol­e­cules fin­ish their long jour­ney from the hill­sides of South Amer­ica to the grey mass of pro­teins from which spawn con­scious­ness. My eyes open wider, and with them my mind. Fin­gers flicker and dance across the keys of mankind’s most arcane device. Thoughts, ideas, visions flash across my mind, pat­terns form­ing for just mil­lisec­onds. Then they explode through neural path­ways, twist­ing and con­tort­ing mus­cles that touch keys across the tiny por­tion of the real world that is still required for man and machine to work in har­mony. Then on again, elec­tri­cal pulses once more, com­plet­ing the jour­ney from pat­tern in flesh to pat­tern in silicon.

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.

In Praise of Partimage

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For weeks now, I’ve been attempt­ing to wran­gle Syman­tec Ghost, the cor­po­rate cousin of Nor­ton Ghost, to back up and restore the con­tents of a par­ti­tion on a RAID. I’ve fought with device dri­vers, man­u­ally built Win­dows PE images using WAIK with Symantec’s out­dated instruc­tions, fought off con­tin­ual pes­ter­ing from a prob­a­bly well-meaning call cen­tre oper­a­tive, and sig­nif­i­cantly con­tributed to the drinks coaster industry.

Pile of Useless Boot CDs

In des­per­a­tion, I won­dered if a sim­ple dd from a Linux LiveCD would do the job, and the help­ful folk at the UNIX/Linux Stack Exchange pointed me at var­i­ous par­tim­age–based backup/recovery dis­tros such as Clonezilla and PING.

Sur­prise sur­prise… they worked out of the box with no has­sle whatsoever.

PartImage Running Successfully

Now they may have a few issues — PING, for exam­ple, has a par­tic­u­larly odd inter­pre­ta­tion of the func­tion of the “Can­cel” but­ton on occa­sion — but they do the job, for free, in min­utes, com­pared to the hun­dreds of pounds and weeks of my time I unsuc­cess­fully put into try­ing to use their com­mer­cial equivalent.

The slow, steady rise of open source soft­ware has never given us “The Year of Linux on the Desk­top”, but it has vastly increased the num­ber of times that I think “there must be some advan­tage to this com­mer­cial pro­gram that jus­ti­fies its cost” before quickly real­is­ing that no, there really isn’t.

SuccessWhale is Terrifying: VPS Edition

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Just under two years ago, my Suc­cess­Whale Twit­ter client was gain­ing new users at a steady rate and, as I noticed with alarm, was about to blow through my then-limited band­width allowance.

I’ve since relo­cated all my web stuff to Dreamhost, tak­ing advan­tage of their unlim­ited band­width offer­ing to plow through 10 GB and more a month. But now I’m com­ing up against the last remain­ing limit of my shared host­ing — mem­ory usage.

Both West­min­ster Hub­ble, which con­stantly crawls MPs’ social net­works and RSS feeds, and an increas­ingly com­plex Suc­cess­Whale, churn through a ton of mem­ory. I don’t have a nice scary graph for this one, but at peak times, I’d esti­mate that my web server kills over half my PHP processes due to excess mem­ory use. That means Only Dream­ing basi­cally goes down, while Suc­cess­Whale throws errors around if it even loads at all.

It looks like I’m left tak­ing the expen­sive plunge of mov­ing my host­ing to a VPS rather than a shared solu­tion, which is a jump I’m ner­vous to make, espe­cially since none of my web prop­er­ties make me any money. Most wor­ry­ing of all is that VPS prices tend to vary by avail­able mem­ory, and I don’t actu­ally know how much mem­ory all my stuff would take up if it were allowed free rein. And nor do I have any way of find­ing out, bar jump­ing ship to a VPS and tak­ing advan­tage of free trial weeks.

So, dear lazy­web, do you have any expe­ri­ence with this sort of thing? And can any­one rec­c­om­mend a good (cheap!) VPS host that ful­fils the fol­low­ing criteria:

  • LAMP stack with “P” being both PHP and Python (or *BSD instead of Linux)
  • Full shell access
  • Unlim­ited (or at least 100 GB) bandwidth
  • Unlim­ited (or at least 10 GB) disk space
  • At least 20 MySQL databases
  • IMAP mail­boxes & mail forwarding

I’ve been rec­om­mended lin­ode by a friend which seems great for tin­ker­ing, though the price scales up rapidly with RAM use and I’m not sure I want to deal with the has­sle of set­ting up Apache, MySQL etc. by myself. And there’s Dreamhost’s own offer­ing, which would be vir­tu­ally zero-hassle to switch to, but prob­a­bly isn’t the cheap­est around.

So, cit­i­zens of the inter­web, I seek your advice!

Announcing: SuccessWhale version 2.0!

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Ladies and Gen­tle­men of the Inter­net, I am pleased to announce that Suc­cess­Whale ver­sion 2.0 has just been released and is now live on SuccessWhale.com.

Suc­cess­Whale is a web-based client for Twit­ter and Face­book, writ­ten in PHP, JavaScript and MySQL. It offers a multi-column view that allows users to merge together infor­ma­tion from all their con­nected accounts and view it at a glance from any web browser.

The big changes between ver­sion 1.1.2 and 2.0 are:

  • Face­book support
  • Sup­port for mul­ti­ple Twit­ter (and Face­book) accounts
  • As many columns as you want
  • Columns that com­bine mul­ti­ple feeds
  • Light­boxed images from Twit­pic and yFrog
  • New themes
  • Numer­ous bug fixes!

You can see a screen­shot of it in action below:

SuccessWhale Screenshot

I would par­tic­u­larly like to thank Alex Hut­ter, Hugo Day, Erica Ren­ton and Rg Enzon, whose help in find­ing bugs and sug­gest­ing new fea­tures has been instru­men­tal in bring­ing Suc­cess­Whale up to ver­sion 2.0 today.

Suc­cess­Whale is an open source project, and the source code is licenced under the GPL v3.

UI Through the Eyes of a Child (Part 1/n?)

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My son is at the age where every ques­tion starts with “why” and every­thing, no mat­ter how obvi­ous, is to be ques­tioned.  I reg­u­larly get asked about var­i­ous iconog­ra­phy and bits of user inter­face that seem intu­itive to me, but to some­one with­out many years of expe­ri­ence are clearly not.  Through his eyes, I am begin­ning to under­stand the issues faced by new users of com­put­ers, mobile phones, and so on.

When play­ing with Google Maps, for exam­ple, he clicked on one of the stars I’d used to mark places we often go.  Up popped the bub­ble with the place’s name:

Google Maps screenshot with location bubble“What’s that arrow for?”

To me, the lit­tle right-pointing arrow on that Google Maps bub­ble is a clear indi­ca­tion of “more infor­ma­tion is avail­able if you click this”.  But to Joseph it clearly wasn’t — and why should it be?  Why does an arrow sug­gest more infor­ma­tion?  It’s being used to point some­where (con­cep­tu­ally off-screen) that you might want to go, like a sign­post, but it doesn’t itself imply that you will find infor­ma­tion that way.  And why point­ing right? Because we live in a cul­ture that writes left-to-right, and we expect things to go from more gen­eral to more spe­cific in that direc­tion.  Is a right-pointing arrow as intu­itive to an Ara­bic or Chi­nese speaker?

An offline exam­ple came a few hours later at my par­ents’ house.  They have a new oven, which like most oth­ers has a “mode” dial and a “tem­per­a­ture” dial.  Both had icons above them.  The tem­per­a­ture dial had a ther­mome­ter, which was imme­di­ately intu­itive to Joseph — pre­sum­ably through pre­vi­ously hav­ing seen pic­tures of ther­mome­ters, as in this day and age the tem­per­a­ture is mea­sured by apps and web­sites, not a thermometer.

But the icon for the mode dial (which I’m afraid I didn’t pho­to­graph) looked a bit like a square around everyone’s favourite “load­ing” ani­mated GIF:

Oven Mode Symbol“What does that mean?” Joseph asked.

I couldn’t give an answer to that.  It was there because the other dial had an icon, and aes­thet­i­cally they had to put some­thing on this one.  But it didn’t imply “mode” — the other sym­bols around the dial did that.  “This one’s a light, this one looks a bit like grill flames, this one’s got a fan; okay, that sets the mode.”

This is another thing I’ve seen in many user inter­faces — and prob­a­bly a few of my own. To the design­ers it might have looked pretty; a focus group might have sat around and said “okay, I guess we can see how that means mode”.  But it’s basi­cally clut­ter — a UI ele­ment that means noth­ing and does nothing.

In con­clu­sion, when try­ing to design a truly intu­itive inter­face, ensure that it is tested by peo­ple who aren’t expe­ri­enced at using sim­i­lar prod­ucts.  Ide­ally, it would appear, give it to a three-year-old and see what ques­tions they ask.

Previewing Android’s New Market

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Google has a new ver­sion of the Android Mar­ket app on the way, and just like every other tech blog in the world, here’s a preview.

Android Market - Home    Android Market - Games

The home page has taken inspi­ra­tion from Win­dows Phone 7’s tile inter­face, mak­ing the brows­ing expe­ri­ence visu­ally richer and much more inter­est­ing to flick through. Each app cat­e­gory has its own home-screen in this style, like the Games one shown above-right. While they’re an improve­ment terms of aes­thet­ics, I’m not con­vinced it’s an improve­ment in usabil­ity. There’s less visual sep­a­ra­tion between tiles than on Win­dows Phone, mean­ing that large flashy app logos tend to drown out the more use­ful cat­e­gory but­tons. It’s a lit­tle con­fus­ing, too, that “Staff Picks” and “Editor’s Picks” receive home-screen but­tons, while other lists must be swiped between.

The avail­able lists have, hand­ily, been expanded. As well as the two men­tioned above, the exist­ing “Top Paid” and “Top Free” lists are joined by “Top Gross­ing”, “Top New Paid”, “Top New Free” and “Trend­ing”. It’s not imme­di­ately appar­ent what the cri­te­ria are for each, but it at least allows more options for app discovery.

Android Market - "Top Free" List    Android Market - App Page

The apps within each list and cat­e­gory are arranged more mun­danely than the home screens, in sev­eral columns depend­ing on the screen ori­en­ta­tion. You get to see more apps at once than before, at the expense of being able to see their full names. Inci­den­tally, the local­i­sa­tion could use some work — I infer from the con­tents that tab at the top of the above-left image says “Prin­ci­pales novedades gra­tu­itas”, but the tabs don’t get larger for lan­guages that aren’t quite as suc­cinct as English.

Above-right, the indi­vid­ual app pages now pri­ori­tise large screen­shots and offer built-in shar­ing options, but oth­er­wise offer the same fea­tures as before.

Android Market - My Apps

Less wel­come is that the “My Apps” page — which must be vis­ited to per­form upgrades — is now hid­den behind a menu option. That said, it’s visu­ally improved, and when updat­ing mul­ti­ple apps at once it now per­forms the down­loads and installs one at a time, hope­fully pre­vent­ing a num­ber of instal­la­tion fail­ures that used to result when two or more apps hit the “install” phase simultaneously.

The Google Mobile blog promises movies and books inte­grated with the Mar­ket for US cus­tomers, which may explain why I didn’t see these options on my UK phone. There is also a rumour that rooted devices will be unable to play movies from Google’s ser­vice due to licenc­ing restrictions.

Oh, and the best thing about the new Mar­ket ver­sion? You don’t have to wait for it to be rolled out to your phone in a few weeks’ time. Pro­vided you have non-Market appli­ca­tion installs sup­ported, you can down­load the APK right here.

IE6, WordPress, and Dick Moves

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For years, anti-IE6 sen­ti­ment on the inter­net has been ris­ing — and justly so. It’s ten years old, and cares so lit­tle for stan­dards that web devel­op­ers often have to code for it specif­i­cally. Quite rea­son­ably, they — we — are a bit fed up with that. Suc­ces­sive ver­sions of Inter­net Explorer have become much bet­ter at stan­dards sup­port, and it would be great if every IE user would just upgrade to IE9 tomorrow.

But life isn’t like that, espe­cially not in the world of cor­po­rate IT.

Par­tic­u­larly infu­ri­at­ing for those with no choice over their browser are the pop-ups that tell us to “upgrade our browser for the best expe­ri­ence”, or worse still, land­ing pages that flat-out deny access to any­one not using a mod­ern browser. The IE6 users of the world agree with you! We don’t like the browser much either. But to rub our faces in it is kind of a dick move.

image

With ver­sion 3.2, Word­Press is incor­po­rat­ing one of these “upgrade your browser” pop­ups along­side an acknowl­edge­ment that their admin dash­board may no longer work. I’m sure the many cor­po­rate blog­gers who have no choice but to use Word­Press from IE6 won’t be too happy about that move, but even for the rest of us just try­ing to get to our site dash­board from work, it’s annoy­ing. Much as we hate those pop­ups, our own sites (at least, their admin areas) will now be dis­play­ing them.

Word­Press’ announce­ment con­tains a handy sam­ple e-mail to send to your boss or sysadmin:

Hi there. The com­puter I use at [where you use the com­puter] is equipped with an out-of-date web browser. Inter­net Explorer 6 was cre­ated 10 years ago, before mod­ern web stan­dards, and does not sup­port mod­ern web appli­ca­tions. More and more sites and appli­ca­tions are drop­ping sup­port for IE6, includ­ing the new ver­sion of Word­Press. Even Microsoft, the mak­ers of IE6, are count­ing down until IE6 goes the way of the dinosaur (see http://www.ie6countdown.com/ for more infor­ma­tion). Can you please install an updated ver­sion of IE or any mod­ern browser (see http://browsehappy.com for more infor­ma­tion) on the avail­able com­put­ers? Thank you very much.

I get the feel­ing that the Word­Press team haven’t spent a lot of time behind the cor­po­rate firewall.

Luck­ily, my com­pany has within the last year upgraded to IE8. But many oth­ers are not so lucky. From me a year ago, that sam­ple e-mail would have had to look more like this:

Hi there. The com­puter I use at [where you use the com­puter] is equipped with an out-of-date web browser. […] Could the Min­istry of Defence please spend tens or hun­dreds of thou­sands of pounds of pub­lic money check­ing and vet­ting a new browser, so that I can access a cou­ple of web apps that are by no stretch of the imag­i­na­tion business-critical? Could this browser then be added to the list of those allowed on our net­works? To my own com­pany, please could you spend a sim­i­lar sum of money test­ing this soft­ware, deploy­ing it to our PCs, check­ing our cor­po­rate soft­ware for com­pat­i­bil­ity, mod­i­fy­ing it where nec­es­sary, pur­chas­ing newer ver­sions of our core busi­ness tools, and deal­ing with users’ tech­ni­cal sup­port calls over the fol­low­ing months? I’m sure this can all be hap­pily afforded within our boun­teous over­heads. Thank you very much.

The cor­po­rate upgrade process is long and slow, and lit­tle can be done about that. We already hate IE6 — popup ban­ners telling us that have to upgrade it to use your site don’t make us hate IE6 more, they make us hate your site more. Please, please, stop it.

A Place for Google Plus?

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“Google+”, Google’s new stab at social net­work­ing, is doing the rounds of tech news sites today. So what’s it like — if you scored an invite, should you be using it, and if you haven’t yet, are you miss­ing out?

If you’ve used Face­book — and let’s face it, you have — Google+‘s inter­face will be imme­di­ately intu­itive. A long feed of sta­tuses and shared links, the abil­ity to com­ment, re-share and “+1″ (i.e. like). It does pho­tos and videos, inte­grat­ing with Picasa. It does check-ins, inte­grat­ing with Lat­i­tude. It does text and video chat, inte­grat­ing with Google Talk. You’re prob­a­bly not sur­prised by any of this.

It’s most un-Facebook-like fea­ture is its “Cir­cles” — groups of peo­ple that you can share with eas­ily. This is pos­si­ble with Face­book groups, but there it’s the excep­tion rather than the rule. Google clearly intends for your Cir­cles to define the way you share, chat, and use Google+.

Google+ Circles Manager

Google+ Cir­cles Manager

If this is sound­ing a lot like Dias­pora to you, well… it is. Aside from the dis­trib­uted nature of Dias­pora, it’s vir­tu­ally iden­ti­cal — includ­ing the slow invite pro­ce­dure that causes it to be a vir­tual ghost town at the moment. Only time will tell if it suf­fers from the same prob­lem, the root cause of which being that it is not the world’s first social network.

It has some great ideas, and if nobody were mem­bers of Twit­ter or Face­book already, it would be easy to say “yeah, this is great, let’s all use this”. But Google+ requires effort — time taken to invite friends, curate your groups, set up shar­ing pref­er­ences. It’s a rea­son­able amount of effort to invest for peo­ple that aren’t sure if their friends are going to use it too.

But the biggest, most impor­tant issue is that it doesn’t, at present, inte­grate. With any­thing. Now it is still under heavy devel­op­ment; I’m sure inte­grat­ing with other ser­vices will come soon. But right now, it doesn’t talk to Twit­ter. It doesn’t talk to Face­book. It doesn’t have a pub­lic API to talk to third-party apps. I, and many other users, are so heav­ily invested in Twit­ter and Face­book that the tran­si­tion to Google+ has to be seam­less — it has to work along­side the other net­works, with­out any extra effort, oth­er­wise it’s just not worth the bother.

To make the point, this is how the net­works and apps that I cur­rently use inter­act: (yes, I was that bored)

Graph of my interaction with Social Networks

Graph of my inter­ac­tion with Social Networks

There’s not space on there for some­thing that accepts sta­tus updates, unless it’s sup­ported by Suc­cess­Whale or Tweet­Deck. There’s no space for some­thing that accepts check-ins, unless it syncs with Foursquare. No space for any­thing to use my pic­tures unless it can get them itself from Flickr. No space for another chat sys­tem unless I can use it from Pid­gin or Skype.

I don’t mean to be neg­a­tive to Google+ — it’s a good ser­vice which I’m sure, given time, will become great. One day it may be the new Face­book, a social net­work­ing behe­moth that all oth­ers aim for and com­pare them­selves to. And it actu­ally cares some­what about pri­vacy (for now), which would in my opin­ion make it a prefer­able king of the social net­works. Its UI is great; com­bin­ing Google’s char­ac­ter­is­tic min­i­mal­ism with some actual great design rather than just util­i­tar­ian blocks of colour.

Google+ for Android - Main FeedGoogle+ for Android - Friends & Circles

But for $deity’s sake, Google, give this thing a pub­lic API. As Twit­ter realised five years ago, the API is as impor­tant as — if not more impor­tant than — the ser­vice itself. Let us mix it up in weird and won­der­ful ways with the ser­vices we’re already using, and Google+ will instantly lose most of its bar­rier to entry.