Archive for August 2008
Speaking out with stickers
Mako’s recent post about a laptop sticker reminded me of an experience I had riding the London Underground earlier this year. On my way home from work one day, as I was thinking about other things, I happened to read the text on one of the many advertisements posted inside the train car. While gender offences in advertising are regrettably common, this one was so overt that it caught my attention and made me feel embarrassed at reading it.
The text, next to the smirking face of a man, reads in full:
Chris had a long face. The wife wanted a new family car and this had the potential to blow a huge hole in his finances, not to mention the other plans he had for his money.
A little bird told him to get down to Cargiant where he bought a quality used car that kept the wife more than happy and saved himself a tidy little sum in the process. Just enough for a weekend in Paris…
…with the girlfriend, tweet, tweet!
“Chris” beams at us with a joy that could only come from the combined pleasures of pacifying his wife, protecting “his” money from her, and spending the savings on casual infidelity. Was it simply ignorant, or a failed attempt at humour? Either way, the message was not one I was glad to receive.
At the time, all I thought to do was complain to the company, who offer a feedback form on their website. If only I’d had a pocketful of clever stickers, like the ones offered by Sticker Giant (whose name is curiously similar to that of the advertiser) or the more unassuming Sticker Sisters.
After all, it would be much more effective to send a message to other readers of the advert as well as its creators. I felt embarrassed when I saw it because it made me wonder whether the people around me considered this to be normal and acceptable content. Seeing an angry sticker on it would have let me know that I was not alone in my objection. Stickers are good for more than just graffiti.
Ubuntu Developer Week
Daniel “Holy” Holbach has announced Ubuntu Developer Week starting Monday, 1st September. This is a fantastic opportunity for anyone interested in Ubuntu development to get a first-hand look at what developers are working on and learn how to get involved. The previous one was a huge success, and I hope this one will be even more so.
For my part, I’ll be hosting a Q&A session “Ask Matt” on Friday, at Daniel’s request. I’ll do my best to answer anything which comes up, but am particularly interested in questions about community-oriented development, the software technologies used in Ubuntu, and what we do at Canonical.
Is it cold in here, or is it me?
Ubuntu Intrepid enters feature freeze today, marked by the frenzied rush to land barely-finished features. Intrepid users are surely living up to the title by installing the latest updates. Perhaps the most unexpected of these is the 2.6.27 kernel. Crikey!
If you aren’t sillybrave enough to have upgraded already, try the 2.6.27-based daily installation media due out tomorrow and see how it works on your system. Remember to report any regressions you find.
Ease of use is a feature
It may be an undervalued one, though. Like many other examples of good design, the best user interfaces go largely unnoticed by their users. If a user consciously notices the UI, as something separate from the task at hand, it could probably be improved.
Ease of use is a frequent topic of discussion in Ubuntu. For example, one of the primary reasons why we chose the GNOME desktop for Ubuntu is that the GNOME project was making great strides in this area, as exemplified by the GNOME Usability Project and its Human Interface Guidelines or HIG. Nearly four years later, usability is still a key consideration whenever we discuss alternative applications. Ubuntu users don’t often consciously notice if their system has good usability characteristics, though. By definition, it’s behaving as expected, and it’s human nature that this usually goes unnoticed.
Facebook is another example of this phenomenon. Like Ubuntu, Facebook was a relative latecomer in its space. There were already plenty of social networking sites at the time, some with millions of users. Today, Facebook is winning, with over 90 million users and one of the most visited sites on the web. They did a number of things right, notably their strategy to make Facebook an application platform, but one of them was usability. Their site looked and worked like a single application throughout, rather than a loosely connected universe of ugly pages. They’ve recently launched a redesign which aims to make it even simpler and more consistent, showing that they’ve maintained this focus so far. They’re even running it in parallel with the old design to measure its impact.
How about Ubuntu? Most of the software in Ubuntu is developed by other communities, but many of the applications which originated in Ubuntu exist for the sole purpose of making it easier to use: gnome-app-install (Add/Remove), Update Manager, Ubiquity (our desktop installer), Jockey (our driver manager) and UFW (our work-in-progress firewall) primarily provide a simpler interface to functionality provided by underlying tools. A system programmer wouldn’t say that they add much in the way of features, but they enable casual users to do things they couldn’t do before.
Where could we do better? I’m interested not only in specific usability improvements, but in how we can improve our overall approach to ensure that we continuously improve. The first step is to figure out how to measure how well we’re doing, and be able to try out new ideas.
How can we, as a community of users and developers, do effective usability testing, and collaborate with upstream projects to process the results? I have some ideas, which I’ll write about separately.
Are we there yet?
The gap between our digital lives and our physical lives is narrowing. The data we collect and publish about ourselves appears sooner and sooner after the event itself: camera and mobile phones upload photos directly to the web, text blurbs about our activity are published instantaneously via text message, acquaintances made in person soon appear in your online social networks, our conversations are enriched by instantaneous question and answer sessions with vast archives of human knowledge and opinion.
Everything we want to share, and some things we don’t, will be shared more and more immediately as technology improves. What happens as this gap approaches zero? How will it change our lives?
Your physical activities will be perceived in real-time by watchers in your social network, wherever they are. Intermittent connections like voice calls and written messages will be replaced by continuous flows of information between people.
How will we process this information? Will we give our sensory organs over entirely to computer input, and let them combine physical and digital into a seamless reality? Or will they come to us, presenting information in the physical world in ways which fit naturally into our lives?
To paraphrase William Gibson, our future lives are already here: we just can’t conveniently access them yet.
Adventures in wireless
My ThinkPad T61 came with a 3G modem (Sierra Wireless MC8775), but until recently, I hadn’t tried to get it to work. With the introduction of Network Manager 0.7 in Ubuntu Intrepid, I decided to give it a try.
Some research and experimentation were required, but it’s now working. I’ve documented the process in the Ubuntu Wiki.
I look forward to exploring my new freedom of connectivity on my next trip.
Joining the crowd
It looks like this blogging business isn’t going away. There’s only one thing for it: start a blog. I hope that it will help me to practice free and unrehearsed expression, and to remember to read others’ blogs.
I’m using wordpress on a single recommendation, and I hope that I can get all of my posts back out of this thing in case I decide to use something else.
Watch this space for musings on technology, cognition, social behavior and whatever else comes.
