Excel Help: Ultra Frustrating

Although I love Excel like the brother I never had, its help capabilities have been bothering me lately. And, obviously, you want to know why, right?? So, let's say that I want to get help on a function... and to use a real-life example I encountered, let's say it's the INDIRECT function.

First, I type the function. As I type, a pop-up tells me that INDIRECT "returns the reference specified by a text string." That's slightly helpful, but it doesn't really tell me how to use the function properly. So, I finish typing the word and look to see what its arguments are.


This doesn't help. So, having written code in a past life, my next action is to put my cursor inside the word "indirect" and press F1. Unfortunately for me, this doesn't do much, because the program just launches the default help screen.


So, I diligently type "INDIRECT."



Why doesn't it just show me help on INDIRECT, the function name which I obviously typed? When searching for help. Two seconds ago!

So now this workflow has gone from one-keystroke contextual help to search to browsing, which is definitely degrading my experience. However, I'm a pretty calm guy, so I click "Lookup and reference functions (Reference)." [Note: It's lucky for me that I at least have an idea of what INDIRECT does, or I might not even think this page had relevant search results. What if I searched for a function that was under stats, but I expected it to be under math (two seperate sections)?]

Anyway, I'm now brought to this page, where I can scroll down to INDIRECT and finally get some details.


If you've been keeping track, that's like four screens and a bunch of typing to get to information that should've just come up when I hit F1. Deep sigh, Excel!! But I'll still use you...

I Love Crushed Red Pepper, But Not All Things Which Contain It

I was using the office bottle of crushed red pepper recently, and I went to twist the top off because I assumed the "filter" thing would be attached to the bottle (as it was on every other bottle of crushed red pepper I've ever seen).

Well, I was wrong. The filter was attached to the lid. So, I had to screw the cap back on and then figure out how to pop the secondary lid open.

Then, as if to prove this was a real usability issue and not just me being ridiculous, my co-worker did the exact same thing. Obviously, this elevated the situation to blog-worthy!

Minorly Annoying iPod USB Cable

So I realize posting about iTunes 8, then not posting for a while, then posting something annoying about the iPod may make me come off as an anti-Apple person... but that's not really the case. I would classify myself as Apple-neutral. That being said, on to commentary:

Every time I plug in my iPod USB cable, I look to see which way it's oriented. The plug has an Apple logo on one side and a USB icon on the other side, and even though I know which way is supposed to face up, I always go to plug it in Apple-side up.

Couldn't they have just omitted the USB logo? Then instead of having to remember which image faces up, I'd only have to remember "the image faces up."

Initial Reaction to iTunes 8

So, I just installed the new version of iTunes, and my first reaction is: Blech.

First off, Apple's created a new Grid view, which they've made the default. This view has visceral impact similar to the Cover Flow (which I'm on record as loving), but without any organizational aids. I mean, this is a computer program -- the idea is to use computer affordances to help me organize and scan a large music library, but this view is basically like laying all my CD cases in a big square face up on my floor. Not helpful at all.

Cover Flow allows the user to visually focus on a selected album while rapidly scrolling through the library; Grid is just like, boom, here's everything. Also, Cover Flow reserves screen real estate for a detailed view of the selected item, while Grid does not. Finally, the scroll in Grid view is annoying: it's a really big scroll with no animation, so it's easy to lose one's place in the giant matrix of album covers.

But wait! There are other sorts for the Grid view. Like the Artist sort, which uses album covers to represent the artists. Couldn't Apple facilitate some kind of link-up with the iTunes store to download artist images? It worked for last.fm, and they even went for user-uploaded content.

Next comes the Genre sort and wow. This is epic. Apparently there are some stock images to represent different genres so the ridiculous grid can strut its stuff. However, the stock images are... comical at best. Let me describe the five genres I have tags for (I tag genre very rigidly so that the tags match up with my main directory structure).

1. Electronic: blue and green text in a "clubby" looking font with what appears to be a Windows XP screen saver firing off behind it.
2. Hip-Hop: wow wow wow wow wow. This one features the word "Hip-Hop" in gold-plated, diamond-encrusted letters over a texture that could well be a truck grill. I won't even write a joke about it.
3. Jazz: Ok, this one actually looks decent, but only because they tried to rip off a Blue Note record cover.
4. Rock: Includes the word "Rock" in a diner font written on a guitar pick tucked into the strings of a guitar. This would probably be appropriate if I listened to more Chuck Berry and less Efterklang.
5. Funk: This, my fifth and final genre tag, apparently isn't impressive enough to have a default image. So iTunes fills in with a Bamboos record cover, presumably since that's the first funk record in my library alphabetically.
   

Then comes a Composers view, which would maybe be useful for pure classical libraries... but for me, I can confidently say I will never use it. For example, when would I want to sort Portishead's "Third" by which subset of the band wrote each song? It seems like a pretty esoteric view for most libraries.

There's other stuff to talk about, like the new "Genius" recommender system that tries to get you to buy more music from the iTunes store, but I'm running out of commentating energy by now. Maybe in a later post. But I will say, as much as the grid view sucks, that iTunes 8 does seem to address one of my pain points with the previous version, which is sluggish scrolling in the List view. Good job guys! Since I will totally ignore the new grid view, I guess this upgrade is a net benefit for me so far.

Short, Angsty Post About Fruit

Dole Cherry Mixed Fruit cups, to be specific. They taste great, but every time I try to open the little plastic container, the juice explodes out onto wherever I'm sitting. Yes, the problem is: too much fruit juice. Since my error rate is 100% (n=5), I'm guessing it would have been enough for one guy in the factory to try to open one, spill it, and be like "Oh, let's put slightly less juice in there so it doesn't explode."

But no one did.

Apartments

As a recent graduate of the apartment searching process, I had occasion to look at a lot of poorly-implemented real estate websites. And, after some contemplation, I'm going to pare it down to two main thoughts for this post.

First, I encountered one website that sorted its results by the apartment's zip code. Now, I didn't think this was particularly useful because there are something like forty zip codes in the greater Chicago area. So even if you know the one zip code you want, I think the arbitrariness of zip codes means you miss out on a lot of semantic information -- especially when considering a place that might be just over the border of a desirable code. Now, if a little map was shown inline with each listing, I'd be okay with this sorting method. But... it wasn't. :)

The second thing that really struck me was the way that realty places can omit important details, like the exact address or availability date, from their listings. I guess this is to make sure the customer goes through the company rather than going straight to the place themselves, which I can understand. From a design standpoint, though, those are two critical pieces of information to an apartment hunter. Leaving them out means that the company is consciously creating a less effective user experience in order to further their business goals, and the same could be said of inefficient sorts, poor filtering options, difficult visualizations or slow response times.

So, my question: Is this ethical? If you were a designer, and your client asked you to design a poor experience for their web app so that the user would be driven to their face-to-face agents, would you do it?

It's Been Too Long Since the Last Starbucks Post

I had occasion to go through a Starbucks drive-through earlier this week, and of course it raised some interesting design points. Starbucks always does, right?

First, the drive-through line itself was interestingly placed. If you were standing in the road, looking at the building, the drive-through window was on the right side. This means that cars don't have a ton of room to line up -- my commuting partner said that she's even seen the cars backed out into the road before. The design solution is pretty simple; just put the window on the other side of the building, so the cars can wrap all the way around the building.

Next came the ordering itself. My traveling companion ordered a breakfast sandwich with just egg and cheese, but the cashier read back the order as a "sausage with no sausage." In interaction design, we always preach that the designer shouldn't let the implementation model take over for the user's mental model, and this is a prime example of that phenomenon. The implementation model is how the Starbucks employee thinks of the sandwich: she refers to the sandwich in its entirety as "a sausage" and then qualifies it as "no sausage," but the user described it by listing the ingredients remaining after the sausage was removed. In this case, it's best to just go with the user's mental model -- but that's not how Starbucks rolls!

This reminds me of some problems I had with a Taco Bell back in my high school days in St. Louis. I'd want to order items sans beans, but I'd always describe them by listing the ingredients I did want... and of course, I'd always get a messed-up order. One day, I looked at the receipt and realized the cashiers didn't enter in the items by what did go on them (my mental model) -- rather, they keyed in what was removed from the default recipe. Once I figured this out, I started ordering "backwards," and I started getting correct tacos (apparently I was quite the junior interaction designer, haha).

Going back to Starbucks, there is one possible defense for their rewording of the order. It could be that they're encouraging patrons to learn the Starbucks-specific jargon that allows membership into its coffee elite. I've always been a bit impressed by the way Starbucks has leveraged design methods to create an "in-crowd" atmosphere among its expert users (even if it does come at the cost of learnability), so perhaps this is a subtle aid for newer customers to help learn the language.

In interaction design, we talk about something called a "pedagogic vector." This sounds complicated, but all it really means is that when designers have some function they want the user to learn, they attach it to a simpler function they know the user will perform. This forces an association between the two functions and helps the user expand their mental model of how the system works. A good computer example of this is keyboard shortcuts in menus: When a user sees "Save" enough times and sees the "Ctrl + S" across from it, he starts making an association, and it once he tries it out and discovers the shortcut, he learns what the underlined letter means.

In Starbucks' case, it's possible that restating the order pairs the "correct" phrasing with the novice user's naive phrasing to create a pedagogic vector that helps the user learn the jargon. Of course, it's also possible that the Starbucks cashiers are just snotty. I guess it depends on what kind of motives you want to ascribe to them. :)