I spent a few hours last week upping my geek cred by playing some old school Dungeons & Dragons with some neighbors of mine. I haven’t played D&D for maybe 15 years so it was fun to get back to tossing D20 and discussing the relative merits of make believe weapons and armor. The character I played wasn’t I would call my “style” being that what I generally said to describe what he (Tikruk) wanted do with two simple words “Tikruk smash!”. Not exactly a “cerebral” character.

A thread on a small, private message board I’m part of revealed rare but intense personality fault of mine today. Essentially the thread started by someone asking me if they could see an old piece of work of mine that’s no longer online. Some random guy who tends to be a pain the ass then jumped in and remarked that he didn’t think my application was very usable. Now mind you, this person had at best seen screenshots of the application in a thread I had posted approximately 4 years ago on an entirely different message board.

So I went off on him. I went fully off-the-scale off.

It’s a fact, when faced with an unproved assault of perceived assault I immediately go nuclear. All of the DEFCON levels race past in an instant and the strongest action I can take at the time is taken. I believe my first response kicked off the ad hominem attacks and there at least half a dozen more responses that mostly just escalated.

This isn’t part of my personality I’m proud of - but I am proud to say that I refuse to go back and edit any of my posts. I may have made them all in a fit of white hot rage, but I did mean every word of them.

Recently I’ve had a very strange revelation about when I was younger. I was very much stuck in my own head. I wasn’t really present a lot of time. I took what I knew, what I was doing, and who I was with and wrapped it around me like a little cocoon. Music, of all things, is what made me realize this.

I recently have started to really get into late 90s trip-hop - Massive Attack, Portishead, that sort of stuff. It feels oddly enough, like when I got into The Beach Boys and Queen as a kid. There’s this huge body of work that is just dropped in my lap. It’s like buying the DVD collection of a TV show you’ve never seen before; you just chew it all down as fast as you can in a binge of entertainment. The thing is, this time I was actually around for when the material was new. Hell, I even heard some of it. But it wasn’t my “thing” so I ignored it.

Food has also help strengthen this revelation. I have always been a picky eater and an even more picky “tryer”. I just wouldn’t try new foods, particularly if they had some ingredient I didn’t like in it (mayonnaise being the worst). I’ve been wearing that predilection down slowly over the years, but I think I just about broke it a few weeks ago while I was in San Francisco. A client of mine took me out to lunch at a sushi place and insisted that he order. Since his wife is Japanese and he knew the chef that seemed like a good idea but it meant that I would be eating a lot of stuff I had never touched (the only sushi I had eaten before was tuna, spicy tuna, and eel rolls). Somehow just before lunch I just made it right with myself that I would just eat whatever I was given and that’s exactly what I did. Even the rolls dripping with mayonnaise. And I like every bit of it.

It’s nice being right here, right now… it sounds awesome and tastes even better.

First a rather mundane thing. I love my phone. No, not my iPhone (I do love that though) - but my real “landline” phone. I love it because it is no longer a landline at all. We just moved the office phones over to RingCentral and for less than your standard wireless phone plan we have a virtual PBX and three VoIP lines. The virtual PBX is easily programmable and you manage it entirely on the web. The VoIP lines deliver absolutely beautiful audio - and we’re not even using phones! Heck we’re not even using RingCentral’s softphone software! They will happily give you all of the SIP information so you can use any SIP-compatible softphone you like! (I’m currently playing with X-Lite, a free offering from CounterPath and while ugly, it seems to kick ass in every other metric).

The other thing I wanted to mention was a thought I had today about convergence and how it seems to be this big lofty goal of a lot of pieces of software and hardware. The problem is that our definition of “everything” seems to be expanding all the time. Think about it… a few years ago YouTube and Facebook didn’t exist, yet now any “convergence” device or application is found wanting if it doesn’t tie them.

It seems to me that more important than single devices or applications that do everything are interchangeable formats. Ways that these new and different worlds of information can talk together. These technologies are often simple (such as JSON) and use existing standards (like REST). This is a good thing and honestly, I’m finding that interoperability gets me a lot more interested these days than convergence. Let me decide what bits I want to stick together and give me to tools to do it!

Just a random thought that popped into my head… it seems like a lot of products have that initial polish down pat but then end up failing once you really start to live with it. Case in point, my office phone. Yes, I can make phone calls, and yes the speakerphone in it actually works quite well for a portable phone. The problems come down to the stuff you don’t do everyday and thus forget how they work. Muting the phone for example requires pressing a series of 3 buttons (menu, down, select - I think). The problem is that doing anything with the menu key means there’s a good chance you will accidentally hang up on the person you are talking to due to the chiclet-like nature of the buttons and the fact that it doesn’t really stand out from the other “meta” face buttons on the phone.

If you used this feature everyday it would become second nature I’m sure - but I think the only people who would do that are receptionists (who have much better phones generally) or the people who made the phone. This problem seems to infect software UIs as well, but at least with software we can iterate our designs fairly easily.

It seems to me that a good way to create a UI from a scientific standpoint would be to start with a very basic and naive UI - one with all of the features display at once. Then let users play - and analyize the distribution of the use of the features. This would give you a glut of statistics about the features including the most important features and the most common grouping of the features (which ones were used with which other ones). From there it’s just a matter of changing the design accordingly.

I know Microsoft and others have tried this approach with their old “learning menus” from the office suite circa 2002 I believe - but I think their approach of putting those changes into the actual users hands was misguided. They were committing the common programmer sin of heaping the responsibility onto the user (Joel on Software has a great rant about this - I’ll see if I can dig it up later). Instead, the base setup for the software should be made to handle and work well for the vast majority of users. It’s hard work that requires a certain amount of dialing down of ones ego, but at least you don’t have to re-tool a factory to iterate the interface.