I bought a couple of audio lectures on Sounds True, a company that publishes awesome woo-woo stuff I’m into.
Sounds True no download all
I’m super excited to listen, but what a buzz kill it was to find out I could not just hit, “Download all”, leave my computer, come back, and, tada! Nope. I had to sit there, click “Go to Files”, download, wait, and repeat.
Sounds Cumbersome? It is. Not an enlightening experience, guys.
I’m setting up my timezone for a webcast in Webex:
Webex time zones
The time zones are listed in order in time difference from Greenwich Mean Time, like GMT -1, GMT +1, etc. Except, I don’t necessarily know right off the top of my head what that is for my city or time zone. I try to find Seattle, but the cities aren’t in alphabetical order. I try to look up my own GMT, but that’s not what this list is organized by. The only option, really, is to scroll up and down. Awesome.
I’m heading to LA at the end of this month (July) to Buddhist Geeks 11, and I’m going all out baller style booking rooms at the Motel 6 nearby. I love their full description.
In case you didn’t catch it, clicking on the “Full Description” link reveals the same text. The.same.text. Yes, awesome, so helpful. Thank you Motel 6.
Despite some effort to resist, I fell for a Living Social deal for 7 days of gluten-free vegan meals, delivered to my doorstep! (It was out of morbid curiosity, alright? Oh… ok, who am I kidding. I do dig the gluten-free vegan stuff. Hold your hippie jokes until the end.)
I went on the website to redeem. Holy mother of all instructions. I had to memorize all of this or open a new window and refer back to this for instruction on each step of the way. Like Mr. Anderson would say, “Whoa”.
Got it?
Options are awesome. Jake Gyllanhaal or Sam Worthington? Gaspard Ulliel or Takeshi Kaneshiro? E! All of the above, please. (After all, there are seven days in a week.)
Except, sometimes too many options lead to a lot of confusion. To wit: Shuttle Express wants me to choose just one pickup location. But alas, which one? I don’t know, committing to one doesn’t restrict me from all the other choices. It’s like a Congressman’s dream!
Pick up location options, lots of em.
Now if I put in my zip code here… can I still choose another one? Should I be able to?
Once a week I have to use Internet Explorer for something that pays my bill, so it’s pretty important, but I don’t look forward to it. Every single time, I get this lovely Welcome Screen. There are two options: 1) “Next”, to explore new features in Internet Explorer 8, and 2) “Ask me later”. I choose “Ask me later” because that’s the lesser of two evil. God knows how long “Next” would take, and I just want to get in and get out and be done. Unfortunately, “Ask me later” would inevitably come up again the next week.
Why isn’t there a “Never Ask Me Again” option? Sometimes, that can be the most polite option.
Where's the "Go Away and Never Come Back" option?
I’m checking in for my mom. She’s flying to Vietnam through Vancouver BC and Hong Kong. The ticket was bought through Continental.
Step 1: I click on “Check in here” link from confirmation email.
Step 2: Denied! It tells me the flight is operated by another carrier, so go bother them. Alright. But I see the “Flight Check In” button is active, so I don’t know if I should trust the text, and also out of curiosity, I click on it.
Step 3: Ah ha! It says my flight is operated by United! So it knows something about my itinerary. Indeed the second leg is operated by United, can I check in to that? Who knows? But maybe there is hope that I can check in after all? I’ll keep clicking!
Step 4: The flight is scheduled at 1:25pm. As soon as I land on the page, I get a red message scorning me that check-ins only start 24 hours before the flight. That’s okay! It’s the night before, I should be well within that time block. Right? Right? I also see the option beneath to put in my e-ticket number, so I’ll go for it with zeal, though I’m dates and confused (oh come on that was kinda funny).
Step 5: When I click the button to check in, the same page keeps refreshing and tells me I need to come back and check in when it’s within 24 hours. It *is* within 24 hours on my planet. How about yours, United?
Step 6: Dead-end at United/Continental. I try checking in to Air Canada, since that’s the company that operates the first leg of the trip. I put in the info they require. I don’t read the text on the right hand side, but as we will find out, I should have to save me some heart burn.
Step 7: I keep putting in Seattle, or SEA, that’s the code for the airport here. To no avail. The page does not budge. The red message keeps taunting me telling me to enter my departure city. I did! I’m feeling like Wolverine, when he’s mad.
Finally, I decided to put in USA, and ah ha! A list of cities pop up for me to pick. It turns out there are only selected cities I can check in from and Seattle is not one of them. If so, when I put in the correct airport code that’s not on the list, why not tell me so? Why make me second guess the SeaTac Airport code? Why make me second guess if I spelled S-E-A correctly? Why make me stumble upon the answer?
It feels like years have passed since I tried to do what I thought was a simple task of checking in. The Wolverine claws are itching to come out!
So I’m voting for Seattle’s hottest geek (which, by the way, apparently are all men). Before I can do that, I have to tell Seattle Weekly to please not text or email me. But it ain’t so easy. As you can see in the screen shot, clicking on “No Thanks” doesn’t uncheck any options. It’s a redundant button. If I uncheck everything, by definition, it’s No Thanks. If I check No Thanks, all the other options should uncheck themselves. Grr.
No thanks. No, really. No thanks.
There’ve been a plethora of reaction and analysis of the Apple subscription plan, from pros and cons to anywhere along that spectrum.
I don’t know enough—or as much as the tech pundits do—to dissect, slice, dice, julienne, and fry all the possible implications. I am for sure worried about the common concerns, like not being able to read all the Kindle books I’ve bought, or not being able to stream Netflix on my iPad or iPhone.
Until that happens, I’ve taken the sideline to see how things unfold as the tech world scrambles over itself.
I do have one curiosity, though, about how this affects “the average user”. As much as I’ve tried to put myself in the shoes of an average user, I have a hunch I’m not one, or at least in Apple’s eye. One night, I captured a picture of my parents sitting on the couch, my mom playing on her iPhone, and my dad browsing for news on an iPad, and it dawned on me that they might be considered more “average” than me.
My mom and dad on their iPhone and iPad
After all, they’re not going to jailbreak and root anything. They’re not going to try to run Android as a dual boot. They just need to be able to turn their devices on and off, and send a picture, a message, or read the news. While I am trying to squeeze all the features out of my devices, demanding and constantly asking “What more can you do for me?”, I don’t think it’s the same for my parents. They don’t think of their devices as something to hack and do surgery on.
What do these devices mean for an average user? Specifically, how do they read news and magazines? Curious about this, I went to the App Store and looked up what I consider the quintessential average user—busy moms and busy women who still want to stay current with all the trends, tips and tricks for that much promised Best Life—Oprah fans.
Here are some comments about the Oprah Magazine app for February 2011:
“I have subscribed to O Magazine since the beginning 10 years ago. I love this new app! I have the January and February issue on my IPad. I have one suggestion. Make the app a subscription price instead of $3.99 per issue. I now trying to decide to cancel my magazine subscription or download monthly to my iPad.”
“Give us an annual subscription price and I’d gladly sign up and go green. A reluctant 4 stars for a 5 star app.”
“It could be 5 stars if new issues was [sic] and “in-app” purchase rather than purchase one app every month. “
“Please please please make make this a subscription and load it into one app.”
What I see here is a clear desire to have content from a trusted source in the easiest way possible: one app, one subscription. As I mentioned, I have no idea how this will pan out, and for the sakes of all my Kindle books, I hope Gruber’s right: “You’ll seldom go wrong betting on Apple doing something that’s good for Apple and good for its users — no matter what the ramifications for everyone else.”
I am–for most professional intents and purposes–a User Experience Designer. That’s the job title on my business card and LinkedIn profile. That’s how I’m introduced. I go to UX conferences, I read UX books, go to UX Happy Hours, and generally have a good time with UX people. Some days it feels as if I eat, sleep, dream, and soak in UX bath salts.
Yet, I’ve always had trouble with the term “User Experience”, and especially the implication that one can design a specific experience for someone else. It inevitably conjures up images of Winston Smith’s primal urges and the dystopian question whether androids dream of electric sheep.
Take a deep breath, sit back. Grab your favorite drink, and let me take you through a roundabout way of explaining why I feel this way. The TL;DR version will be at the end.
In my night job, I teach yoga. Last night, in my Intro to Yoga class I introduced a concept called svadhyaya, translated from Sanskrit as self-study, self-inquiry, or self-reflection. (For fellow etymology nerds out there, sva = self, dhyaya is from the verb dhyai, “to contemplate, to call to mind”.)
“So, self-study, like, spiritually?”, a student asked.
“Possibly”, I replied, “What about noticing where your feet and knees and shoulders are? And how you’re breathing right now?” Being aware of where you are in space and what you’re doing is also a fine way to self-reflect. This habit, with practice, and over time, can show up elsewhere outside the yoga mat. You’ll start to notice when you’re slumping at our desk, or that your breath shortens when someone cuts us off in traffic.
If being aware of where your toes are turns out to be useful in other parts of your life, great. ”But, I don’t pretend to know how you should reflect spiritually. That is your personal experience.” I told her.
I see a lot of yoga teachers talking about feelings and emotions with their students, and I’m not that brave. It’s not my business to tell someone how to “feel”. If I suggest that you ought to feel divine bliss in a yoga pose, and you’re actually in pain and feeling shitty, both of us are imposing someone else’s reality on ourselves, and how fun is that?
In other words, my user experience is not your user experience.
The only thing I can do when I teach yoga is to make sure the surface is even, the floor is clean, and you feel safe, so that you can confidently work on getting strong and flexible or whatever it is that you need from yoga.
Similarly, in design, it’s my business to do everything I can to create, provide and fine-tune all the factors necessary for a functional and beautiful product. It’s my job to make sure that my design is useful and understandable and all these things.
But, as Kim Goodwin, author of Designing for the Digital Age said:
Since each person brings her own attitudes, behaviors, and perceptions to any situation, no designer can determine exactly what experience someone has.” – pg 5, Designing for the Digital Age.
We don’t have to look to far to see evidence of this. For some people, the iPhone and iOS devices provide a superior user experience. For others, it’s Android. For yet some others, it’s Windows Phone. I love my Mac to a disturbing degree, but I’m sure there are those who will enrage at the sight of the glowing fruit that I love to fondle.
For a non techy example (and for you foodies): while I love a juicy Portabella sandwich, a boyfriend I once had won’t touch a fork that’s been in the same zipcode as a mushroom.
I think of myself as an Interaction Designer, but I don’t mind (so much, anymore) when I get called a User Experience Designer. I get that we need a word to rally around and to communicate, and there’s no reason to be pedantic about the semantics. I’ve come to fully accept it. But, I’m also aware that the user experience is likely never going to be 100% my own doing.
TL;DR: We can’t really design an “experience”, since everyone’s experience is based on their attitudes, behaviors, perceptions, and choice of fruit. The best we can do is to set up the environment in which a person’s experience can be optimized.
“It is interesting reading your reactions. Your five predecessors were, by design, based on a similar predication: a contingent affirmation that was meant to create a profound attachment to the rest of your species, facilitating the function of the One.
While the others experienced this in a general way, your experience is far more specific. Vis-à-vis: love.”