Now I do my banking with RBC, and have signed up to use their online banking. I don’t want to make this a Canada vs. America thing (though it is all too easy given that the country names are right there as part of the bank), but I can only conclude that this is yet another reason why America is better than Canada (USA! USA! USA!). The other two are Amazon and pizza.

It’s about the time of the month when I have a batch of bills that come due, and I always dread logging in and trying to navigate the wonky interface to accomplish this really simple task.

I think that the opening page is a pretty good indication of the experience you’re in for when you try to use this service:

So far so good, right? Awesome. A reasonable person would expect that the kind of things that belong in this menu are actions, things you’d want to do, things that the helpful RBC internet elves could assist you with, maybe signing in to banking, getting in touch with a representative, finding a branch.

Or, apparently, this is Canadian – English for “What Country is Your Account In?”

While you can do quite a lot within the service, it seems less like a designed system and more like a mish-mosh of different functionalities and modules held together with spit and duct tape. There’s a lot of jumping around and between different interfaces and areas of online banking and never any clear sign of where you are (or how you’ve got there and how you can get back). This is an especially scary thing for an online banking site. With no clear path back, I use the browser back button (which is somewhat of a no-no in web apps) and inevitably end up getting asked if I want to send the form again. Until I check my balance, I’m never quite sure if I’ve ended up sending Fido (my mobile carrier) twice what I owe them. And even sending them once what I owe them pains me because that’s already more than it’s worth.

A game that I like to play is called “Nest the Tabs” I click around for a while and see how many nested tab navigation menus I can rack up. My record in this game is four:

Pretty good, huh?

Perhaps the biggest flaw with the service is its flakiness. Most sessions end not with my logging out but with an error message like this:

… which is so frustrating! It’s not temporary if it happens over and over again, and there’s no information on this page that tells me why the error happened or what I can do to resolve it or better yet, avoid running into it again.

It’s bad enough to receive this kind of error and lose your work flow if you’re checking email or uploading photos … but when your finances are at stake, it can be truly terrifying! What if this happened in the middle of a funds transfer? Not only are the effects of this acute, but it also contributes to a general mistrust of the system, and thus the company as a whole.

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”

Sometimes, I am just floored by the elegance and truthfulness of this quote, when, using some piece of technology, I stop and wonder “how the heck is this working?”  And I think that, at least on some conceptual level, I often know how the technology is working … and this makes it all the more amazing that I still don’t believe that it’s doing what I can clearly see it is doing. Sometimes I resort to just thinking that we are indeed all stuck in the Matrix and that it’s all just some kind of simulation (at which point, I think, that there must be some computer somewhere that is actually running the simulation, at which point I just curl up in my cubicle underneath my desk and start whimpering, which my boss hates!)

Using Google Maps on my cell phone the other day to get some directions, I had one of these moments (the awe kind, not the whimpering kind). But it wasn’t merely that I was able to figure out how to get from Point A to Point B via public transport — I’ve been using Google Maps now for quite a while and I’m kind of used to it (but I never take it for granted!) — it was how I was able to get these instructions … very, very easily. I had this fleeting, preternatural sense of connection to my device, like it was anticipating what I intended to do and all but did it for me. What I started typing it finished on my behalf; just as I recognized the need to provide the application with additional information, it presented me with an interface to do this. For such a mundane interaction, it was an oddly spiritual experience.

And with this, as someone who is interested in the design of user interfaces and user-centered technology, I’d like to provide a front-end-centric corollary to Mr. Clarke’s excellent quote:

“Any thoughtfully designed technology is indistinguishable from magic”

There’s a subtle — but important — difference to the kind of magic referred to in these two quotes.

The magic arising from sufficiently advanced technology might be the kind practiced by an illusionist: you observe something happening — right there in front of your eyes —  yet you don’t believe that what you’re seeing is true, and can’t comprehend how the illusion is effected . The magic arising from thoughtfully designed technology, however … it’s a bit more subtle. It trades in the exhibitionism of an illusionist for the serene omniscience of an oracle. He’s been waiting for you, and he knows why you’re here. He knows your past and he can predict your future.

Take the #24 up Crowchild, get off at 32nd Ave. And quickly, this next bus will be early.

Surprisingly, my anger wasn’t directed at the network for being slow or at Parallels for taking entirely too long to boot up or shut down. It wasn’t because I lost work, because my computer inexplicably froze up on me or forced me to restart because it had some updates to install.It was at a piece of software I explicitly elected to use, though there were other options available. And, perhaps most surprising of all, this piece of software is from Apple, who’s products I generally find enjoyable to use.

I am fucking pissed at iMovie ‘09.

I needed to do some editing of a video I shot for a tutorial. A colleague of mine suggested using a product called Ultra Video Splitter from company called Aone; my e-mail esponse to him was this:

Thanks, Xxxx – I’m probably going to take a shot at it using iMovie – as it’s software I’ve been meaning to learn how to use for quite a while and this would be the perfect opportunity! I’ll let you know what I come up with ……

Dan

It’s true; I’d never used iMovie before, mostly because I never had a reason to have to use it. And here was the perfect opportunity. I’ve had good experience with Apple products in the past, and I didn’t mind investing time in learning a tool that could potentially come in handy in the future. Besides, Apple sh*t is cool, right? Way cooler than some Windows shareware app.

The good part, is that within about half an hour of clicking around, after hovering over buttons to bring up tooltips and countless Apple-Zs, I knew my way around the interface and had a good mental model of how all the parts fit together. Apple tends to be very good at designing simple, learnable interfaces with plenty of scaffolding to enable first-time users like myself to find their way around.

My goal was very simple. To comb through about 45 minutes of video, splice out ~20 interesting clips, and make a separate video file out of each. I went through the video, Favorite-ing about twenty sections and made ‘clips’ out of them to add to my movie. All without looking at a single sentence of an instruction manual. Bravo to me for being so smart, and kudos to Apple for building an application which requires zero instruction for a newbie to get up and running.

But from here, things went downhill. Fast.

First off, I realized that I couldn’t only export one clip at a time.  You’re only able to export the whole movie (i.e. the sum of all the clips plus whatever transitions are in between them). This was kind of confounding, and I spent a bit of time Googling around before resigning myself to a wonky workaround: duplicating my twenty-clip project twenty times, and then deleting all but one clip in each of the projects, so that when I export, I got just one clip in the movie. *Sigh*.

My test case then was to just create one duplicate project with one clip, and to see how the resultant video came out. To my dismay, I found that the video I was exporting was of significantly lower quality than the source. Back to the Google. Without knowing too much about video editing and codecs, from what I read, In concluded that this is is just apparently the way iMovie works, nothing I can do about it.  But I would be taking these video clips and using them in a Camtasia presentation, which would compress them even more, so starting with degraded-quality clips was not an option. Time to check out the other application recommended by my colleague. *Sigh*.

One issue though – I’d spent about three hours going through the video and hand-selecting the bits that I needed, and I didn’t want to have to go through the video again in another program and repeat this laborious process. Surely there must be some way to export the chapters I’ve created or information about the Favorites I’d earmarked? File -> Export? Hello? Share? Where are you, menu item?!? I tried ‘Export to Final Cut XML’ or something and the xml  file which was produced didn’t seem to have units or tags that I could make any sense of. Fair enough – that one was kind of a stretch. But still …. *sigh*.

Looks like I was going to have to do this the old-fashioned way. Here was my plan: I was going to take out a piece of paper (there must be some around here somewhere) and some kind of writing instrument, and record onto the paper with the writing instrument, the time, in seconds, that each one of these clips starts and ends. Then, with this presumably inferior recommended software open, I would then take aforementioned piece of paper, read back the numbers, and create a parallel set of clips within the new software, then export these to seperate videos. Simple, right? A pain in the ass, sure, and a waste of time, sure, but what could go wrong?

As it turns out, it’s not that easy to figure out where in the movie each of my twenty clips started and stopped. iMovie does not tell you the location in minutes and seconds of the playhead. Let me repeat that, this time in bold , red letters:

Nowhere in iMovie ‘09 is there any indicator of time. Everything is relative to everything else, but it’s not possible to determine where anything is in absolute terms.

What is the implication of this? The implication of this is that any work done in iMovie ‘09 is essentially locked in iMovie and, other than exporting a video, there is no way to get this information (even in an ‘analog’ fashion), to any other application.  How so … very … Apple!

(if anyone who reads this knows a way to either export marker information or to see an absolute timeline in iMovie ‘09, please tell me and I’ll gladly whimper away with my tail between my legs).

why? Why? WHY? Who thought this was a good idea? Who would object or be inconvenienced by having this information appear in the “Playhead Information” that follows the scrubber? I just don’t get it. It really frustrates me.

But the deeper question is, why do I still really really want to use iMovie as opposed to the other software (which, after a really contrived process, I was able to utilize)? Why do I want so badly to want to like this software, and to want to use it?

So my revelation out of this long, tedious retelling of this event is that Apple is kind of like a selfish, flaky friend. You know the kind I’m talking about – the kind of friend that’s great to be with when you’re actually hanging out with them, but the second you ask for a favor, or suggest an activity that they’re not too keen on, you get shot down, because … c’mon … who’s really in charge here? We all know that Apple is wearing the pants in this relationship.

And I’ll put up with it (I suspect other people will too), with all the abuse, with the selfishness, just for the chance to use the software — even on its own terms. Doesn’t matter if Apple shows up late, or forgets about my birthday, I’ll take what I can get, because, when things are good, they’re really good! And when things don’t go so well, I’m willing to cut him some slack, because man, he is cool … I’m surprised he even wants to hang out with me at all. And when other people try to tell me how he’s kind of a douche, and that I’ve got lots of other good, reliable (albeit less cool) people I could be spending my time with, I’ll defend him, but I won’t be able to explain why. You could call it “Cupertino Syndrome.”

On the one hand, this experience was incredibly infuriating, and on the other, it’s completely unsurprising. This is what Apple does, over and over again. Mac. iPod. iPhone. iMovie. You name it. When you buy into something Apple, you’re not only buying into that thing – you’re buying into a whole ecosystem of (sometimes really expensive) stuff to support it and to work well with it. And for most of the people, most of the time, it does work well, very well, in fact. And for many people — myself included — on the average, it’s worth it. By excluding so many features from their software, those features that are included are all the more easier to use. As an interaction designer (and a human), I appreciate this simplicity.

Now that I know the limitations of iMovie ‘09, I probably won’t use it again for doing any kind of substantial video editing. But I will always look back fondly on the good times we shared together, and appreciate him for all of the good qualities, such as learnability, a snazzy user interface and some cool visual effects.

And I thought I read somewhere  that they had a ‘Timeline’ feature back in iMovie ‘06 ….

Thankfully, it’s not just me doing this; there’s a whole team devoted to this task (several, depending on who you ask ). And one of the best ways to stay on top of this tidal wave of new developments is to be able to leverage the collective knowledge of the team, each member contributing their own $.02 on whatever topic of interest, from which, when taken together, one can get a rough sense of where’ the industry is at, and where it’s going. To do this, though, requires a robust, flexible system to manage and categorize this constantly-updated stream of information, and I’ve found that the legacy corporate, Web 0.2 system we currently have in place was just not cutting the mustard. In fact, it was hurting our team, and thus, by extension (IMHO), our business.

So I spent some time poking around the interwebs to see what a viable (hopefully, free) alternative would be. I took a look at several open-source content managements systems – Plone, Drupal, Joomla – and found them to be very powerful, but with a somewhat steep learning curve, and probably overkill for what I needed. I didn’t want to spend weeks just getting up to speed with a system, when I knew, in the back of my mind that there was one tool out there – one dead easy to use, robust, flexible, jack-of-all-trades,  all-around awesome tool that could fulfill about 80% of functionality I was looking for. I’m talking, of course, about of Wordpress.

To make a long story short, after a couple weeks of back and forth with our internal tools and IT teams, a bit of convincing on the part of my manager and others in our organization, I finally have a working Wordpress blog running behind our corporate firewall; it is – albeit slowly – being adopted by my colleagues (a team of about ten), and has, after a trial period, fully replaced our previous blog (which was powered by our massive company-wide dinosaur of a content management system).

I’d like to spend a bit of time talking about some of the challenges I faced and the workarounds I found, for anyone who hopes to do the same:

Convicing People of Worth

Time == money, and with ROI being the acronym on everyone’s lips (well, WTF is on mine sometimes), it’s important to have some good reasons why a blog is worth the investment in time and effort it takes to set one up. Though, seriously, with Wordpress’ famous five-minute installation, unless you’re making serious bank, this can’t take more than a couple dollars of your time! What enabled me to sell others on it was the fact that it could be used not only as a blog but also as a powerful content management system, in which posts can be tagged and categorized, and then later retrieved at the outset of a project. So figuring out what anyone ever said about, say, social media is as easy as clicking on the Social Media category. 

This is, of course, assuming that everyone does a good job of categorizing their posts. But a little work up front can pay off a lot down the road when it comes time to draw on this accumulated corpus of knowledge. On this note, it’s really important to come up a priori with a suitable taxonomy of categories which suit the breadth of topics relevant in your industry.  You can always change them later, but a good starter set is important so that no post gets lost in the mix.

Cost

Wordpress is free, you say (it’s GPL-ed, which doesn’t restrict its commercial use). There is no cost. Well, there are costs, but they’re not immediately obvious. It costs money to run servers, to pay for service contracts, to back up your data. I thought that running a blog would be as easy as plugging a Mac Mini into a port in the wall, but it’s really important to make sure that the server you’re running it on is maintained properly. So while Wordpress itself is technically free, it’s worth plunking down whatever is required to avoid having a server crash and losing months of valuable links and insights.

Barriers to entry

People, much like large corporations, are slow to change behavior, and it is an awful lot to ask of people to change everyday behaviors to accommodate a new technology, especially if the value of that technology is not immediately apparent. One way to mitigate the negative side-effects of technology upgrades  is to make the new system feature-for-feature backwards compatible with the old one, so that no additional work is required to get an equal level of value. Kind of like snapping out the table cloth from off a table without disturbing any of the place settings.

For example, our old blog was really convenient in that you could register for email updates whenever a new entry was posted, and it was also possible to post new entries via email. Wordpress does not come out of the box with a subscribe-via-email feature (I like using one called Subscribe2 ) but, assuming you have a mail server at your disposal, you can set it up — with a little bit of effort — to handle posting via email. I never was able to get this feature up and running, but I found that the Press This posting bookmarklet, which comes out of the box in Wordpress 2.6, makes posting a pretty painless operation, as it integrates right into your browser toolbar.

Even with these backwards-compatible features in place, there was still some attrition when we moved from our old blog to the new one. So the moral of the story is, make it as easy as possible for people to post.

Also, as a corollary, go out of  your way to help your co-workers become familiar with Wordpress! It’s definitely user-friendly software (and fun!) but some features are not immediately obvious on first use.  Helping show people the ropes is an effort that will definitely pay off in the long run; if people are frustrated or confused from the outset, they’ll be even less inclined to get on board.

Security

Security is always an issue in big corporations, and there were definitely a lot of questions as to the security of Wordpress. We’re running the blog behind our corporate firewall, so that definitely helps lock it down some. There are also Wordpress plugins available to help with LDAP authentication if that’s a requirement. We never were quite able to get this plugin to work with our LDAP server, and eventually gave up, but with a bit more work, I think it would be possible.

While by default, anyone can read a blog you’ve set up with Wordpress, in order to be an author, Wordpress requires a user to have a login. There is a setting to allow people to register themselves (and the admin sets the default privileges of self-registered users – i.e. can they publish posts or only contribute content?). What I found well, though, was to manually create a login for everyone I knew I wanted to be able to post to the blog. I felt that by taking this initial step (as opposed to asking people to register themselves), it would make things that much easier for everyone to try out Wordpress.  

One other advantage of  a single person creating a username for everyone at once, is that it affords a consistency that could make certain things easier down the road. For example – Wordpress is flexible in that you can change almost anything about your account except your username. Once you create that username, the only way to change it is to delete your account and create a new one. So, by explicitly choosing a certain username for each of my teammates (specifically the id which is used on the company wide intranet), I have left open the possibility to leverage LDAP authentication when we get that plugin working. If everyone were to create their own username, with no enforced format, there is no guarantee that this username would be compatible with another form of authentication if it became a requirement.

Multiple Blogs

As discussed above, because Wordpress is only nominally ‘free’, there was some question as to whether it was worth the investment if this tool was just meeting the needs of a single (i.e. my) team. In general, I would imagine that corporate IT is looking for solutions that can scale, and is not interested in investing time, effort and money in one-off solutions that just serve a small subset of their serviced population.

Case in point: as I was discussing setting up a Wordpress blog with our tools team, there was another team within my organization who was talking about tweaking and contorting our corporate CMS to fit its needs of a dynamic,  update-able site where they could publish their perspective on design trends. After sitting down and determining what their needs were, I suggested that Wordpress is just the tool for them. As it turns out, it was.

Fortunately, once you have a Wordpress installation and database set up, it is dead-easy to set up additional blogs. We have three running off of the same database. And each one is its own unique identity, fully autonomous and administered by a different person on a different team.

***

This article by Cory Doctorow about the inherent tension between corporate IT and tech-savvy users really struck a chord with me, as it echoed a lot of the feelings I had and challenges I faced while working on this project. I agree with it completely, and think that it is a sad state of things when the users of corporate IT (specifically those who are advocating change) are seen as “heretics”;  they  should be seen as scouts, out there in the trenches scoping out new vantage points and competitive edges.

I think that tools like Wordpress can provide that edge. And this is just one example of an ecosystem of incredibly powerful, free (or cheap) tools out there. Especially when compared with the unusable legacy systems that cost orders of magnitude more money to operate, train and maintain, the benefit of these tools is self-evident, and the potential they have to positively impact practices in the workplace is limitless. Policy may come from the top down, but change has to come from the bottom up.

Despite my current gig as a designer, I’ve had an opportunity with DIYcity to reach way back to my computer science B.S. and get my hands dirty with some Java programming, which has been a nice change.

DIYcity’s first project, released a couple of weeks back, was called DIYtraffic. It is a traffic monitoring system  that takes input from Yahoo!’s traffic API, and pumps it out over a Twitter feed (see traffic_chicago’s feed for an example). The cool thing about the system, is that it’s set up to be super-extensible, so the same framework can be appropriated for any city, any traffic feed and any output source (twitter, sms, facebook,etc.) assuming you’re up for writing a bit of code Working on this project, I got a chance to play with the Twitter API (an experience which was at times frustrating, at times awe-inspiring), and also put into practice whichever best practices of object-oriented software programming I remembered (or could learn about with a quick Google search).

Just today, DIYcity has released our second app called SickCity – real time disease tracking. You can check out the live, running version of it up at sickcity.org. Basically, we’re tracking Twitter for the mention of illness terms (such as “feeling ill”, “flu”, “head cold”, “food poisoning”) located within a particular city. Kind of like Google Flu Trends, but more local (city instead of state scale), more extensible (tracking multiple conditions), and more organic (someone may tweet about having a cold but not do a Google Search on it – but of course the opposite holds true as well . Hey, it’s a start. This app was built primarily by Paul Watson, with design input / support from John, Clint McMahon and myself.

Twitter’s incredible. Kind of like a Google News for people.

Walking into Chicago Public Library after work to pick up a book (I had no idea that you could get these things anywhere other than Amazon!), I saw a sign which said something to the effect of “The library auditorium will be open as of 10 a.m. for people to gather and watch the presidential inauguration.”

That’s neat, I thought. I would have liked to have been there.

You see, I watched the inauguration while I was at work. My co-workers were gathered in the break room watching a grainy tv broadcast. I was at my desk, watching a live, high-quality video feed from CNN augmented by a stream of mostly tacky or trite, but occasionally funny,  comments from the Facebook peanut gallery. (Great partnership, by the way; first time I actually saw the value in that social networking service.)

Fitting, perhaps, at the dawn of this new administration, in these times of purported Change, to be watching an event a thousand miles away, in real time, ‘accompanied’ by all of my ‘friends,’ who are scattered throughout the country, and indeed the world.  Does this ability of shifting time and place not represent the peak of technological achievement?

Well, yes it does …. I guess. The confluence of technologies such as the internet, streaming digital video and social networking have indeed given us the power to partially transcend the constraints of time and space, consuming information and communicating with people at our own convenience, regardless of the temporal and spatial gaps which divide us.

But to chalk this all up as an absolute and unqualified positive is conveniently (if not naively) leaving something out of the picture. Upon reading that sign on the door of the Chicago Public Library, I couldn’t help but feel a twinge of regret. Regret that technology enabled me to behold this event in such a personalized manner. Regret that I wasn’t there to witness this historic occasion in that auditorium filled with complete strangers, all bound together by nothing other than the fact that they all happen to reside in the same city. There’s something magical in that — the kind of magic that can’t be captured in a use case or a experience definition document.

Among the many wondrous things achieved by technology, the lowest common denominator may be that it makes our lives more convenient. Technologies like telephony or video-conferencing allow us to shift place, and talk to someone who’d never otherwise be able to see us or hear our voice. Recording technologies help us shift time, committing audio, video or some combination of the two to an archive which can be subsequently played back at will, regardless of whether it was recorded one minute or one hundred years prior. I’d argue that mobile technologies have facilitated something I call decision-shifting; no longer must we commit any appreciable amount ahead of time physically meeting at a particular time our place when we are but a text message or short phone call away from a last-minute change of plans.

So what’s the harm in all this ?

Perhaps this is too grave a word to use for what can be considered a somewhat frivolous concern. But what other term can be used to describe how technology like the microwave has impacted the tradition associated with a proper sit-down family dinner, how TiVo has affected the ceremony surrounding the weekly viewing of a favorite TV show among friends, or how email has all but taken every last bit of romance out of written correspondence.

I don’t say these things as a hater; I am a user and proponent of these technologies, and it is indeed my livelihood to further advance technology to better suit the needs of those who utilize it. But as a professional trained in human-computer interaction, I nevertheless think it is important to recognize how they impact us, on both an individual and a societal level. I don’t plan on halting my use of these time- and place-shifting technologies because of the barely audible din of social fabric slowly ripping apart, but  events like the one I’ve described here do give me pause, and a chance evaluate how my notions of sanctity have changed as a result of living in a whenever, wherever society.

**************************************************

Note: Apologies, reader, if, based on the title, you thought this article would be about something more exciting, like intergalactic travel or time-porting. Actally, I don’t even know what time-porting is, so you’re s.o.l. there.  Don’t ever check this blog for posts about time-porting, in fact, because it will likely just be a bunch of gibberish.

Feedback is important. Whether in the context of personal relationships, professional careers, or user interface design, it’s important for people to know how they’re doing and what’s going on in some one else’s head (or on some server). In fact, I can think of very few situations where more feedback would be a bad thing. But two pop immediately to mind:

1. Complex surgical techniques – I’d rather be knocked out and spared the detail of every artery being clipped or slice being made
2. Piloting an aircraft – It should be placating, but it always just annoys me more when the pilot tells me what the “folks in the tower” tell him.

But in the world of streaming video, feedback is definitely a good thing. There’s nothing worse than catching only every other choppy word of your favorite Fall Out Boy music video, or having your screen freeze up on you as some ancient truth is to be revealed on the season finale of Lost. Streaming video services have adopted differing mechanisms to inform the user about status information which affects the video watching experience. I’ll look at three of them (Hulu, Netflix and YouTube) here, and discuss which features are helpful, which are frustrating, and which make me wish that i’d stop being such a cheapskate and just get cable and hook up my damned television already so I don’t have to watch all my tv through the web

Hulu

The Hulu video streaming user interface is nice and simple. It’s got a play/pause button. The time elapsed and total time of the video are shown, and the current location in the video is handled visually by a lightly shaded bar filling up the timeline. Mousing over the timeline will show you what the timecode of that location is, and a click will then skip to that timecode (this is how seeking is handled, no fast forward or rewind buttons). Note the three white dots – they represent commercials – which are mandatory to watch. So, if I try to be sneaky and skip past one of the dots, then before starting playback at my requested location, it will stream any commercials I’ve skipped over.

This screenshot shows what the interface looks like while the video is playing:

Note that the timeline doesn’t actually give any indication of how much video has been stored up in memory; the only information you see is where the video is currently playing. When your network connection slows or you otherwise run out of buffered video, the video just starts choking, pausing and playing as more bandwidth becomes available, without giving any visual indicator to the user as to what’s going on and how to solve it. You could always pause the video:

This screenshot shows what the video looks like in the paused state. Notice the icon that shows up on screenwhich indicates how much video has been buffered. In theory, this is a great feature, but in practice it ends up being very useful as the qualititative display gives no actual information as to the worth of each of those bars. Is each bar worth a a couple of seconds of video? A minute? When will it be ’safe’ to play? What does it mean when the buffer is full? The user interface does not provide the answer to any of these questions. Also, I kind of cringe at the use of the term Buffer, as it’s kind of a techy term.  Users aren’t idiots and I’m sure everyone knows what a buffer actually is, but it just seems like the kind of word that should appear in the code, not in the UI.

YouTube

Most people are probably pretty familiar with the YouTube interface (whether they’re conscious of it or not) so I won’t go into much detail about the user interface, other than to say that it’s actually quite similar to Hulu’s:

Play/pause button, click to seek.  The one feature in which the YouTube interface excels is that, unlike Hulu, it seems to buffer video by default, and not only when you have it paused. Also, this information is displayed clearly and unambiguously to the user in the form of a ghosted bar filling up the timeline as video is downloaded and buffered.

Note that this buffering-ahead happens both while the video is playing (above), and also while it is paused:

This affords a really nice use case of just putting the player on pause when your internet connection slows and waiting until the red bar has filled in substantially before resuming playback.

The one thing that’s really nifty about this visualization is that it it overlays three important pieces of information -how long the video is, where I currently am in the video, and how much future video has been downloaded – into one place and references them all in the same terms. Contrast this with Hulu’s representation of a buffer occupying a completel seperate and logically dislocated part of the screen from the timeline of the video progress.

Now – Hulu may actually be buffering video ahead while it is playing, but because it doesn’t give me any indicator of this (and seems to freeze up a lot more often than YouTube ), I have no reason to believe that it is looking out for me like YouTube does.

Similar to Hulu, but without the commercial interruptions, you can click anywhere in the timeline to seek and start playing from that point. If the video for that part has not yet been downloaded, it will start buffering from there:

Finally, one last feature that is small but nice, and missing from Hulu, is the little icon that appears on the video to represent “I’ve run out of buffered video to play for you, but I’m working on it!” As a user, this shows me that the system realizes what has happened here, and is working hard to remedy the situation. In Hulu, when you run out of [invisible] buffered video, the playback just chokes. No courtesy indicator, nothing. Just Jack Donaghy frozen in midsentence, about to say something incredibly funny which will undoubtedly end up humiliating Liz Lemon in some subtle yet effective way.

Netflix

Of the three services I’ve covered in this post, Netflix is the only one that is paid, and I think that the robustness and intelligence of their video player reflects this premium.

First of, it does a series of checks  before even starting playback to determine, among other things, at what quality to play your video:

I have no idea what it’s doing or how it’s working, but it’s using language I can understand (i.e. no talk of buffers and whatnot) and I get the overwhelming sense that this Netflix player knows what its doing and is going through a lot of trouble to ensure a good playback experience for me.

But it gets even better! Because it’s checked my internet connection, it can predict how much it must pre-buffer so that my video playback doesn’t run out and get choked up. And it communicates this to me in clear terms, and even tells me how long I’ll have to wait until everything is sorted out:

I really like the fact that Netflix quanitifies this wait time for me. I can decide now whether I want to go make some popcorn, check the news, or use the bathroom!

The only complaint that I really have with the Netflix client is around this initial check. If it deems that you have a slow connection then it decides that it will give you a low quality feed, and there is no feedback as to what quality this feed is or a choice to bump up to a higher-quality feed – say, after you close down network-hogging applications or shut off other computers which may be using some bandwidth. While I appreciate the fact that the player makes a lot of complex decisions on my behalf, it’s also rather annoying to be locked into a low-quality (almost un-watchable) feed when I’d much rather be given the choice to wait for a higher-quality feed to start buffering up.

The real forte of the Netflix video playback client is its ability to make bandwidth calculations (on the backend) and the thoughtfulness with which it keeps the user informed (on the front end) of what’s gone wrong and how long he or she will have to wait until it’s righted. There’s lots of examples within the Netflix player of these kinds of super-informative messages which provide multiple modes of representation of it’s current state:

If your bandwidth drops suddenly and throws off Netflix’s initial calculation of how much video needs to be pre-buffered to ensure a seamless watching experience, the above dialog is displayed. This shows the amount buffered both as a visual representation and as a percentage done, and also shows the estimated start time as a numerical value (time) which actually has some worth in human terms!

And like YouTube, Netflix will buffer ahead when the video is paused, though the representation is somewhat subtle:

Theoretically, if they did their calculations properly in the first part , then this extra buffering is somewhat superfluous, but it comes for free and is a good feature to have in case of unexpected bandwidth fluctuations.

Conclusion

Of the three playback interfaces, I think that Netflix is by far the most informative, the most flexible, and handles best in a variety of network conditions. I guess you get what you pay for . 

Here are the features that make a video streaming user interface great:

Buffer ahead - the system should always be trying to buffer more video, whether the video is currently playing or in a paused state. The paused buffer-ahead feature makes it easy for the user to adjust to poor network conditions.

Make state visible - if the system is buffering ahead, make sure that this is visible to the user. The buffering information should use the same visual representation as the timeline.  Also, it is important for the system to indicate when it is working so the user doesn’t feel left in the dust when the video freezes up. This translates to a kind of empathy for the user and tells them ”i know things are f-ed up right now, user, and i’m trying to fix it”.

Show actionable information  - it is important that the information displayed to the user is understandable and actionable. e.g. the system could display the amount of time left in the buffer as a shade of color from blue to green but this is meaningless to the user. When this information is put into minutes and seconds, the user can decide whether there’s enough time to get a snack, leave the room, etc.

Use relevant terms – use words and phrases a user will understand, and state any information in a manner that is relative to video-watching. The benefits of using relevant terms goes beyond just understandability; it can actually create a sense that the system is looking out for and taking care of the user throughout the experience.

In an effort to be a non-wasteful, environmentally-conscious individual, I recently decided that I would not buy a new iPod touch if my old iPod — my very old iPod — was still working. Unfortunately, it is It doesn’t have touch (well, barely, if you count the touch wheel), and it doesn’t have Wi-Fi connectivity. Hell, it doesn’t even have a dock connector! But it’s swell-looking, feels good in the palm, kind of has a retro vibe to it (circa 2003), and I must admit to a bit of vanity here – I’m kind of psyched that I got on the iPod bandwagon before Apple become such a phenom and iPods were relegated to a commodity, like a toaster or walkman.

So I thought I’d dig it out of the shoebox where it’s been resiging for the past year or so, and put it back into rotation. I admit that nowadays, in the age of Pandora and Last.fm I don’t use iTunes very much any more. When I do, it’s just to play music that I’ve uploaded to my library. But I decided that it’d be great to listen to Podcasts on the walk to and from work.

I’ve listened to almost all of the TedTalks which are absolutely incredible and inspiring (audio podcast here), so I thought I’d poke around the interwebs for something new. I really listening to NPR, and one of my favorite shows there is This American Life. I just assumed that they would have a podcast, so I did a search on it in the iTunes Music Store. Sure enough there was a podcast, which was free to subscribe to (you have to pay for back-episodes!).

I subscribed, and as iTunes always does, it started to downloaded the latest episode. But I was confused when, upon repeatedly pressing the refresh button, no new episodes appeared – just the most recent one (called #88: Numbers)

, dated January 5th, 2009. Was there an error? Was something wrong with iTunes? Was something wrong with the internet? NPR is usually at the forefront of embracing new kinds of media, and I figured that podcasts are somewhat old-hat by now, surely this isn’t the first one they’ve put out, but this is the only one showing up in this This American Life podcast feed. I wonder if this is a cost-saving measure, or to encourage people to pay for previous episodes? Either way, it’s understandable. According to a post on the TAL website:

Last week, the economic crisis that we’ve been reporting on hit especially close to home.  A dozen colleagues from our home radio station, WBEZ Chicago, had to be laid off.  It costs the radio station around $150,000 per year just for the internet bandwidth to deliver the free podcast and web stream of This American Life. That’s not staff. Not computers. Just the bandwidth.

Wow! That’s a lot of money.

Even if there’s only one show available at a time, I consider it a gift and I’m so very excited to get to listen to TAL podcasts on the walk into work on my very old iPod. I plan on donating at least a couple of dollars so that they can keep this effort going; unsurprisingly. tough times hits public radio extra hard.

Android for the people

Originally uploaded by ante10pe

There’s nothing like the mall at Christmastime. Especially when that mall is on LONG ISLAND.

Saw this huuuuge advert hanging from the ceiling of Roosevelt Field shopping mall. There’s the little Android dude in the lower left hand banner of the banner. Is there a comparable iPhone app?

Interesting for a couple of reasons:
*Suite of services (money mgmt, advertising, location) bundled into one application.
* Brought to you by a financial services company, which, assuming you have a visa card, actually has a pretty good understanding of your spending habits (can i buy you a gigante starbucks, big brother?)
* Huge ad! Do people (normal people) see this and say “Sweet app! I definitely need to download this for my device which runs the Android operating system.” ?

Advertising of mobile phone apps is a pretty non-existent thing. Of course Visa’s got the bucks to do it. I suppose I’ve seen BofA advertise their iPhone app as well. But will other companies (not finance-related) start? Interesingly, one of Apple’s latest ad campaigns showcases off individual iPhone appsm concluding with the tag line “That’s iPhone. Solving life’s problems one app at a time.” Different approach. Will Google start mass-marketing individual Android apps?

And who’s really the audience for this? My guess is, if Android goes the way Google wants it to, most people who own a phone running Android wonlt even know or care that their phone runs that operating system. Just as now, no one can tell you that their RAZR runs linux or whatever.

G1 is an exception to this, a novelty. People don’t own an HTC device, they own a T-Mobile phone that has the new Google OS on it. iPhone is different too, because the hardware is tied so tightly to the software. Anyone with an iPhone knows that it can download apps.

Surely there was a time when people were jazzed at the prospect of a phone that ran Windows, and for which applications could be downloaded OTA and installed. Android is indeed infinitely more powerful than WinMo, and mass adoption will only make it stronger and more robust. Something about WinMo never generated the third-party development buzz that iPhone, and now Android, has.

But I think that there will always be something about the notion of downloading an application to one’s phone, that will limit its appeal to a certai demographic. And as the mass adoption of a platform increases, the total overall percentage of this adopter population decreases. As the leading edge of adopters get their information elsewhere – blogs, social networking, etc. – the efficacy of advertisements such as this one becomes highly limited. Especially when they are hung in places such as shopping malls. On Long Island

That being said, it would be neato to include a 2D barcode on there so I could download directly from my device. Easy way to track impressions, effectiveness etc.

This seems to be part of a recent trend. Not too long ago, The Library of Congress released a bunch of photos to Flickr, as have The Smithsonian Institute, and many other organizations.

This is super exciting, for many reasons. For one, I love looking at old photos; even if they depict the most mundane of subjects, they have some kind of magical quality. And now they’re more accessible than ever, in a forum that many of us have come to love (well, at least tolerate

But whenever I see batches of archival images being uploaded to the Flickrverse, the think that what excites me the most is the ability to see how the places that I’m intimately familiar with — the places I  walk by every day — have changed over time.

To this end, it doesn’t seem as if many of the archival photos have been geotagged! I understand that they couldn’t have been tagged at the time of capture (though I am entertaining thoughts of some steampunk Victorian-era global positioning device consisting of a trembling, smoking tangle of metal tubes, gears and magnifying glasses), but is there any concerted crowdsource effort to attach locations to these photos, if only at the city or state level?

In addition to the ‘quick win’ of making the geo information available to the world of web services and web 2.0 applications (imagine the possibilities!), I think it could add an additional depth of preservation to these photographs, moving them out of the hazy ether of ‘the past’ and anchoring them to a specific location in our modern world that may look very different than it did all those years ago.