the prime user

Being there - Context is king

2011-12-05T15:40:00.000-08:00

Being there is important: we often try to walk a mile in our customers’ shoes, but usually this is just a thought exercise conducted from the comfort of our offices. Sometimes the customer comes to our office (or usability lab). Rarely, we go to theirs.

But context is extremely important to the success or failure of a workflow, feature, or product. Take for instance the great innovation of composite LED lights for traffic signals: they don’t burn out all at once, they use far less power, and are very bright.

However they don’t melt snow. So in snowy places the lights are becoming useless in the winter, causing accidents, and requiring manual cleaning by road crews. Are the accidents and cleaning crews worth the cost savings of the bulbs?

Understanding the situations our products will be used in is what Design Research is all about: ensuring that our scenarios represent our customers real usage patterns and contexts, including all of the messy little details.

Desirable, useful, usable, as a customer engagement model

2011-11-18T14:14:00.000-08:00

User experience is tricky to get right.

We have heard for a long time that our products must be Desirable, Usable, and Useful to customers, but we don’t often think about these things as being phases of customer engagement. Usefulness is often described as being the most important aspect of the triumvirate, but why is that? One reason is because it is the last test a product must face, if it is going to have any longevity.

Desirable: whether due to beautiful design, compelling value proposition, or peer pressure, wanting it has to come first
Usable: then, the user gets to try it. But if the user can’t reliably make it work, they won’t be able to apply it to their needs
Useful: If users are able to make it work, then they can start to see if it fits with their needs, habits, and work

Each stage in the process is a hurdle for the customer as well as the product. Successful products have to do all three excellently, to have lasting value to customers and to the business.

Of course prior to all of this, the traditional marketing funnel is in play, with all of it's issues and pitfalls.

Ownership in a digital world; or "is it mine?"

2011-07-13T10:29:00.000-07:00

So I have to say it again. Why "buy" media anymore? Why not just buy a license to play it as many times as I want? I guess Spotify is somewhat following this model.

My computer crashed before I could backup my Amazon mp3/ iTunes / [insert name], media. Now what? Beg customer service to download it again? But I already paid for it, and it's no cost to them to let me download it again!

Is this about carrying inventory and paying for data "warehouse" space? Is it about bandwidth to download the song again? Not really since 1) hard drive space and bandwidth is cheap, and 2) they only need to store one copy of the file, and can sell it as many times as they want.

Perhaps this is to drive the use of Amazon's cloud service, which will never go down or delete anything. ;)

The new "haves" & "have-nots": ads on everything

2011-05-27T13:22:00.000-07:00

SiFi writers have been foretelling it for sometime, but the new lower priced Kindle with screen saver advertisements, is the first mega main stream technology to be discounted based on built-in advertisements.

Apple recently obtained a patent for presenting ads that can't be canceled, or that force the user to answer a question before proceeding: How about a half priced iPhone with home screen ads? What if your refrigerator was deeply discounted but had a screen that constantly showed ads? What if the ads were based on what you were actually running low on?

What will the world look like when the trade off is not whether to buy the technology, but whether to pay extra for tech without ads? Or pay a hacker to remove them.

How about when people in emerging markets can afford any kind of tech, as long as it's subsidized with ads...

The journey

2011-04-08T11:43:00.000-07:00

As the Japanese poet Basho said, the journey is the goal. Of course we hope that our users accomplish what they intended, but the feeling of progress is perhaps equally important.

The goal-gradient hypothesis says that people will expend more effort as they approach their goal: Research done in the 1930’s showed that rats ran faster as they approached the end of the maze, and a recent marketing study showed that customers who received a 12-stamp coffee card with 2 preexisting “bonus” stamps, completed the 10 required purchases faster than customers who received a “regular” 10-stamp card.

Other research on progress indicators in computer interfaces, showed much lower user satisfaction if a progress bar stalls at 75% complete than if it stalls earlier at 15%. And if the bar accelerates as it gets closer toward the end, even better!

What does all of this mean for user experience design? If we can give the user a feeling of progress and of moving through a series of steps toward their goal, we can promote increased satisfaction. This could mean showing progress steps in situations that have typically not had progress shown, or front-loading progress indicators with smaller or more frequent “steps”, so that progress is quicker toward the end.

Promotion is not the same as discoverability

2011-03-09T11:53:00.000-08:00

Bill Wyman -
Discoverer & Rolling Stone

Discoverability is being bandied about lately by program management and upper executives. But in the timeless words of Inigo Montoya, I do not think that word means what you think it means.

My current client would like to "increase the discoverability" of a feature that no user would seek. Discoverability is not the same as promotion:

If the user is looking for something and can’t find it, that could be a discoverability issue.
If the user is not looking for something and you interrupt them with a pop up about a site feature, that is promotion (or an awareness campaign).

My friend Scott Berkun has a nice write up on his site about how hard it is to chase discoverability, since everything can't be equally discoverable...

The user illusion vs. scenario based design

2011-01-20T14:48:00.000-08:00

This is not a post about the Tor Nørretranders book of the same title, which is also great. This is about how we now tend to design users, instead of systems. It's about the fact that you can't design an experience for a person.

Johan Redström says there really is no such thing as a user :

A central problem with [the move toward user experience design] is the confusion between what we are designing and who is going to use it--the shift towards user design. Trying to optimise fit on basis of knowledge about use and users, we risk trapping people in a situation where the use of our designs has been overdetermined and where there is not enough space left to act and improvise.

At Microsoft now there is a push for PMs to use "scenario based design", which is is really a post-personas approach to creating a characterization of a user stepping through a detailed use case. The idea being that if your model of the user includes a design-relevant workflow, even if it is made up, you'll be able to design better software than if you didn't think about the user at all.

The pitfall here is that we can never really know how people are going to use a product. Even with a a strong underpinning of data about users, your imagined workflow just has to smack of plausibility, and your software team will build it.

The much lauded "fast ship, fast fail" approach of Google and others, is much more realistic with regard to what we can know about how people use a product: it has to be natural. It has to be real. Always be launching and testing. The downside is, it is costly to keep shipping and changing, and it tends to churn your UX for your users.

What is the solution? Walking a mile in the users shoes, and lo-fi prototyping: as you learn things, increase the fidelity of your prototypes to match your knowledge. Do it organically, and do it in the real world.

Design miracles & magic don't happen on their own

2011-01-09T11:13:00.000-08:00

Most teams jump into detailed solutions immediately when working on a new product or redesign: It feels like it has a more tangible timeline and deliverables. Features are produced and potential customer problems seem to be solved.

But often it ends poorly as product teams try to jam more features into an unstuctured system.

Jacob Burghardt, http://www.flashbulbinteraction.com/WTS.html

The solution to this is more time for visioning and brainstorming, and a grounding in user scenarios and data for decisions. Also asking broad and critical questions of value and UX strategy at the beginning of the project:

How are people currently solving their problems or doing their work now, without our product?
Why would they want to use this product, and what are their goals?
What are the triggers for someone to start using our product, or what were they doing just before using it?

People don’t care about usability at Christmas

2010-09-01T11:12:00.000-07:00

http://www.google.com/trends?q=usability

It also looks like people aren’t searching for usability as much as they used to, but the picture is not much different for Innovation.

…And after checking a few other queries, it looks like nobody is searching for anything over the December holidays: one more thing to be thankful for I guess: people taking a hiatus from staring at computers.

The redesigned Google News: Now with more Popular!

2010-07-07T13:19:00.000-07:00

It used to be a pleasure to jump in and quickly scan Google News a couple of times a day. It was a cogent summary of all news, organized by real topics, all on one page.

But the new version of GN is a disorganized mess of "Recent" "Most Popular" and "Top". It also now has extensive personalization as well as the ability to promote and demote sources.

Simultaneously way over thunk, and way dumbed-down, if that is even possible.

I am seeing some outcry and I have a few connections at the big G so maybe they'll hear their users and decide to do something differently.

Come on guys!

Don't call it a pivot table

2010-06-06T15:38:00.000-07:00

This is a wicked-lovely visual approach to a complex data set, even if you don't love to scream UN GOL!

It's flexible enough to show only the available data (no finals yet, so no teams, etc). Of course with a reliance on color it would never work for accessibility, but it could be made to.

Have a look and tell your interaction designer to step up!

"Like most, you've come to our website for information, but...

2010-05-26T10:31:00.000-07:00

...we've filled it with surprises! Go Find the Surprises!" Clearly Steve Wynn loves his smarmy voice.

And all I wanted was to book a room at the Wynn, but now I'm really excited to get sidetracked!

Microsoft FixIt Center - like Windows Update, but fixes stuff

2010-04-16T11:42:00.000-07:00

Yesterday the Customer Service and Support group at Microsoft launched FixIt Center, a cool new application that automates the process of solving problems on your computer.

Once installed, you select the appropriate troubleshooter, which scans and fixes known problems. If you don't have a "known" problem you're out of luck, but chances are very good that your problem has already been identified...

It runs on XP, Vista, and Windows 7. I'm telling my dad to install it today. ;)

CNET has an early review, and so does Ghacks and downloadsquad.

IDEO Human Centered Design Toolkit

2010-03-31T14:22:00.000-07:00

One of my User Centered Design students from HCDE 518 forwarded IDEO’s excellent new resource: Human Centered Design Toolkit. It’s a how-to guide primarily targeted toward NGO’s and companies who don’t have experience doing UCD or field research.

Having read Prahalad's Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid many years ago, and having managed UCD in an emerging market, I have a soft spot for any company that attempts to focus on this area and shares best practices.

Although the IDEO Human Centered Design Toolkit would be a great starting point for many organizations, it gives just enough detail to be useful, and not quite enough to be effective without training. And so as my friend Aditya Dev Sood at CKS says, it's a brilliant IDEO marketing tool as well.

I have some specific issues with the Desirable, Feasable, Viable success dimensions in the “Intro” and “Deliver” sections:

Desirable, seems to collapse the typical UX triumvirate of Usable, Useful, Desirable into one somewhat fleeting notion of "likeable".
The Viable ($) and Feasable (tech) dimensions are both on the business side of the equation, not the customer.
Defining Viable=$ (or even if defined by other value based criteria), seems to overlook the philanthropic nature of much of the work going on at BOP (Gates Foundation, PATH, etc)

All in all it's a great primer, and even for the experienced UCD / HCD person there is plenty to be learned about IDEO's approach.

What do people want to be "automatic"?

2010-03-10T23:24:00.000-08:00

There is certainly no limit to studying crowd search behavior, patterns, and interests, including recent epidemiological flu searching.

While entering a search I was interrupted just after typing "automatic". The suggestions provided by Google (presumably based on unedited user data) were really interesting!

So I decided to try Bing and see what the difference was--even more interesting!

Looks like Google users are a little more wild and crazy: love letters and automatic shotguns, but slightly lazy, looking for "automatic wealth".

The Bing user is clearly skewed more toward the geek, with automatic updates, automatic data processing, and airliners.net (what do aviation photos have to do with “automatic”?). Bing users seem to have achieved wealth, or at least have pools, but may live in colder climates if they need to automatically start their cars. Hmmm. And they obviously want to "see how Live Search has evolved". Right, so they're all Microsofties.

I certainly could have used Google Trends or Insights for Search to get more detail, but this was fast and easy. Try it for your favorite search term ;)

Top web UX advances

2010-01-07T16:17:00.000-08:00

One of my students from HCDE 518 - User Centered Design recently asked for my take on the top three UX improvements on the web over the last 6-8 years. Here was my off the cuff response:

An application style web interface (web 2.0), giving us a speedier, more integrated (both within and between sites), and overall better interaction. Just say no to click / refresh.

Recommender systems, social bookmarking, social tagging: helping us make sense of all the junk we create and put on the web, and make better purchase decisions, together, while shopping alone.

Structured data: XML standards & adoption, metadata: we now have much more syndicated data, displayed inline, in context, that is more searchable, more shareable, etc.

Search algorithms. For finding stuff, yes, but also for page design / content. Junk web pages used to abound on the web and get lots of hits. Not anymore thanks to Google making everyone chase SEO, and therefore indirectly setting standards for what a good page is.

A more user oriented approach to web product development. Times are changing, and it's no longer ok to develop in a vacuum. A big hooray for the slow march of progress for users.

US cellphone market: welcome to earth

2009-12-16T10:38:00.000-08:00

Reading reports of how the Google's Nexus phone store is going to change the face of the US cellphone market made me balk a little: the rest of the world buys their phones and can switch carriers whenever they want. In the US, we're locked in to the carrier but have cheap phones. Which is better?

Clearly, like the rest of my technology, I want it to be mine free and clear. But I'm from the US, have disposable income, and like my toys geeky style. Most of the rest of the world has no money, use, or bandwidth for an expensive smartphone.

Google wants to sell ads and shake up the telcos/carriers. And if they have an idea to lock the user into ads similar to what Apple has patented, they could practically GIVE the phone away... Hmmm.

Dumb is the new smart

2009-12-03T14:53:00.001-08:00

So perhaps you saw my previous post about the cloud being the new mainframe. If the people at Pano Logic have anything to do with it, they'll make dumb terminals hip again, by removing everything from the PC, even the CPU, and making the server do all the work.

If I were Google, I'd be thinking about the same thing.

Some other interesting cloud machines:
Nimbus, and CherryPal

Technology usage in still life

2009-12-01T10:11:00.000-08:00

It is amazing how images of technology in use try to imply importance and productivity, as if staring intently at a laptop screen means that you are working and influential. I wonder if people in Bophuthatswana would infer the same thing, just by looking at a picture of a guy with a laptop. Perhaps he's watching a movie or looking at something lasciviously.

It reminds me of pagers in the 80's, when just having one signified you were high tech. But by the early 90's it signified that you were someone else's tool.

Obviously 20 years from now we will think these technology images are quaint, but I had a glimpse today, and thought I'd share.

A/B testing: not the "gold standard"

2009-10-26T14:09:00.001-07:00

Yes, the Huffington Post uses it. Yes, Google created a tool called Website Optimizer that facilitates the testing and analysis process.

But unlike Jakob Nielson, I think A/B testing is expensive in the long run. Why? Most people don't want the better website of A or B, they want the best overall...

And although A/B testing is great at using the natural / live user base of your site, and it should give to an accurate picture of user behavior if you have enough traffic, it gives no insight into the causes of the issues: you might have to create an infinite number of versions to find the best one, and even if you find it you'll be guessing as to what makes it best.
Do your A/B testing after some traditional qualitative usability iterations, so you can understand how the A and B designs are helping or hindering your users.

Otherwise you may be simply choosing the better of two evils...

User Experience is a young discipline

2009-08-26T14:02:00.000-07:00

...And has been for 25 years.

Seriously, if another senior UX person tells me that UX is still in it's infancy, I'm going to ask, how long does it take before companies start to realize that they can't compete on features alone? How long before they realize that the product is the most salient part of the relationship with the customer? That overt marketing messages do not engender satisfying experiences.

Company, don't tell me you love me. Show me you love me. Show me in the way you built my product.

Computers aren't biased, guns don't kill

2009-07-09T08:55:00.000-07:00

First let me say I love google news. I hit it twice a day at least. I love the unbiased mix of global news sources and the scanability.

Strangely, at the bottom of the redesigned Google News, it says

"The selection and placement of stories on this page were determined automatically by a computer program."

Hmm, I wonder if there was a problem at some point, or some hurt feelings.

But in any case, it's strikes me as odd that a company full of smart people would make a disclaiming statement like this, as if humans were not behind the algorithms and code that determines what gets displayed. Or perhaps the implication is that the algorithms are so simple, that they could not be biased?

Bowman, it's not about Data vs. Design

2009-05-19T10:59:00.000-07:00

A coworker of mine while at Google, Doug Bowman, recently jumped to Twitter, and let fly an arrow at Google regarding the overuse of user data to make design decisions. Unfortunately it's misguided.

Data is good for design. Data type mismatch is bad for anything. The right level of abstraction equals the right tool for the right job:

Using analytics to make design decisions is like using raw sales numbers to justify green for your new product logo. And, it requires that you ship the product again to test if the color change worked, which can be costly.

Here are the flaws:

You think you can control for all of the variables, but you can't: "we didn't change anything but the button color, so that must be why people started buying!"
Customers may respond poorly to churning the UI: changing the UI to see if there is an effect, may cause users to leave your unpredictable UI.
You must "test" again with the same metrics to know if it worked: requires you to ship the product again. Sometimes costly.

Oh, and it pisses your design employees off apparently.

What Google needs to do is stop trying to make small design decisions with broad metrics, and instead isolate the variables, frame the question they are tying to answer, and use the right method.

Wyland uses thousands of gallons of paint on Earth Day

2009-04-23T14:40:00.000-07:00

In one of the most ridiculous acts of blindness to the Earth on Earth Day, artist Wyland sprayed several thousand gallons of paint on top of the LA Arena, to create an image of the Earth.

Was it low VOC paint? Will it eventually wash off into the water? Are paint manufacturing methods considered "green"?

It may sound silly, but Earth Day is all about asking these questions, and stopping with the silly publicity stunts.

@Apple: stop the proprietary headphone thing

2009-03-16T14:50:00.000-07:00

It's pretty obvious at this point that the only reason you are creating products that require your own headphones, is to perpetuate the white headphone ads, and gain free product recognition when people see others using the white headphones.

You did it first with the iPhone, and now with the new iPod Shuffle. Stop!

It's anti-competitive, and bad for your users:

The headphones don't fit everyone's ears
They fall out when exercising
They don't have the best sound quality

Can I go out and buy a better set of headphones? It's not easy, and you are making bank on it!

Windows home server - everything in its right place

2009-03-03T19:58:00.000-08:00

Back up your home machine(s) automagically, stream music and movies to your Media Center or Xbox, and generally offload your storage to your big local cloud? Hell yes.

Not to mention remote access to pictures, music, and files for your friends and family. Cool.

The new Power Pack 1 update to Windows Home Server was released a few months ago, and I must say, improves the product tremendously and fixes a few bugs.

Silly iTunes: if it's DRM, why can't I download it again?

2009-02-02T15:57:00.000-08:00

Look, Apple knows who I am. For better or worse, they know that I downloaded the song Car Wash by Rose Royce. They know that I can't share it with other people becasue it's digitally rights managed (DRM).

Why can't I download it again? Really. Why?

Even if it's not DRM, I already paid for it, and could copy it many times and share it with many people, so what difference does it make if I download it again?

Google, the great Peeping Tom

2008-12-09T13:38:00.001-08:00

Undeniably the streets are public places, but the voyeuristic Google streetview product--now available in almost every backyard--is a bit over the top.

Sure Google blots out faces and licence plate numbers, but the best argument I have heard for the loss of privacy is related to the general expectation that our actions and daily situations are ephemeral: http://thenoisychannel.com/2008/11/25/ephemeral-conversation-is-dying/. There should be no such thing as a peeping tom law if everything visible from the street is fair game. Hey buddy, take a picture, it lasts longer. Well Google is taking a lot of pictures.

Sure the product has merits but it's really an overt play on the basic voyeuristic tendency in all of us: “hey, I can see your house from up here!”

Social networking chaos: 55+ web services

2008-12-04T08:30:00.000-08:00

In case you haven't noticed, there is a deluge of Social Networking services in the wilds of the internet. Some have location awareness, alerting you when friends are nearby (Loopt). Some have a corporate focus (Yammer). Some are scrapers of internet content (Spoke, Reunion.com, etc). Some have all the users (Facebook). And some are dying a slow death (Classmates.com).

Whatever the features and benefits are, it actually seems harder to manage my connections with friends, since I have so many of them now...

"Standard" SNS:
Plaxo, Frendster, hi5, MySpace, Twitter, Facebook, Plurk, Pownce, Spoink, Utterli, FriendFeed, 12seconds, Bebo, Orkut, MocoSpace, Classmates, Reunion.com, Tagged, Skyrock, Ning, SixDegrees, cafe mom, Moli, Tickle, Dodgeball, Signal Patterns
Mobile oriented:
Loopt, Zyb, JuiceCaster, mig33, bluepulse, Rabble, Whrrl (application), BrightKite, Plazes, Gypsii, FindMeOn (application), Buddy Beacon (application), Where (application), Whereaboutz (application), myrimis
Non US focused:
Rakawa, Yaari, Hyves, Xiaonei , Aki-Aki, Nexopia, Cyworld
Business oriented:
Linked-In, Yammer, Xing, Spoke
Blogging oriented:
Tumblr, Xanga, LiveJournal, Yahoo360, Blogger, Live Groups
SNS services, applications, & backend:
KickApps

Nespresso: so proprietary I can't buy pods

2008-11-18T11:10:00.000-08:00

So, in addition to the now ubiquitous Starbucks "office" machines, we have a cool little Nespresso pod machine at work. I thought it might be great to order my own stash of decaf pods, but there is positively no place to find them, not even on the Nespresso website.

In fact like many marketing and promotional websites, the Nespresso site is great at "building the magic", but lousy on followthrough: there is no way to buy, and no information on how to buy, unless you visit the home page. And as we post search engine revolution people know, every page needs to be your home page now.

After giving up and going to the Nespresso home page, the purchase process requires registration, which includes entering the serial number of your Nespresso machine. My god, I'm ordering coffee pods, not nuclear reactor parts. This is worse than the Gevalia club.

So, I gave up. Forget it. I'll support Starbucks over Nestle, since I hear bad things about Nestle anyway.

Hey interactive agencies, you're in the product business!

2008-09-28T18:56:00.000-07:00

Interactive agencies such as Avenue A / Razorfish, Grey Interactive, etc. Are still living in the old media days, and haven't quite come around to thinking of themselves as being in the product creation business, even when they have 30 developers on staff.

They view websites, mobile applications, and interactive media, all as simple marketing vehicles. Having worked at Google and Microsoft.com, I can tell you that these things are very much products. Mis-categorizing what you are working on tends to shortchange the process and discipline necessary to ship a great product and tends to constrain the possibilities.

And after a lengthy discussion with the head of a large agency based here in Seattle, I've noticed that agencies seem to overlook important job roles such as Interaction Design, and have old-school organizational issues such as a separate "creative" team and UX team. No designers on a UX team?? Is UX team is allowed to be "creative"??

iPhone: The only thing worse than an ambiguous error message...

2008-08-22T11:49:00.000-07:00

...is an error message with incorrect resolution steps.

I'm trying to download a song from iTunes, I keep getting the error message "There is not enough space to download this song. Please delete some photos or videos." However, I can still take pictures to my heart's content, so obviously there is some room left.

After deleting 125 pictures (at an average size of 1.1MB each), there is still not enough room for a 5MB song?? After reading that it might be the 3rd party apps I deleted Pandora, the only app installed. Sill not enough room!

Silly.

The cloud is the new mainframe...

2008-08-15T09:45:00.000-07:00

...And your PC is now a dumb terminal to the cloud. Well, smart terminal, but terminal nonetheless. It's funny how things come full circle. Disk & email storage quotas, etc.

Google has the potential to do great things by making the dumb terminal cool again, since it's cheaper for the end user, and there are 380 million people who live on $1/day.

If you think about the bottom of the pyramid, there is huge potential for "free" apps (or ad driven) and cheap computing power fueled by economies of scale.

Innovative design solution for mobility

2008-08-08T13:08:00.000-07:00

What if you wanted to make a remote controlled ball? What about a ball robot?

It would be hard to allow free motion while ensuring control: you can't mount stuff on the outside; and if you put stuff on the inside, you can't really have cameras or sensors without making the thing transparent, which wouldn't last too long rolling on concrete.

The people at Rotundus came up with an elegant solution that uses very little power and very few moving parts!

There is a central axis with a pendulum. When the pendulum is held forward the ball rolls forward. When the pendulum is held right or left it rolls in that direction. The system also allows for mounting of cameras on the outside edges of the central axis, due to their stability.

How do you spell latency? iPhone 2.0 update!

2008-08-08T10:36:00.000-07:00

Not sure what Apple did in the latest firmware/software release, but looking at the changes, there should not be any reason why I am sometimes waiting 10 seconds now to create a new email, or switch modes, etc. At times I'm having to wait 2 seconds between typing characters.

It seems that I am not alone in having speed issues with the new stuff.

Socially enabled ideation

2008-07-24T14:04:00.000-07:00

In an effort to move the locus of innovation out to the customer in the old school spirit of Participatory Design, many companies including Dell and Salesforce.com are building online tools that create communities of customers that do the brainstorming for the company in a massively parallel format.

Dell's Ideastorm and Salesforce Ideas, which is being used by Starbucks for My Starbucks Idea, are all examples of this trend. The products use customer voting and the wisdom of groups to bubble the best ideas to the top.

Hey airlines, add a fuel surcharge and be done with it

2008-07-18T14:01:00.000-07:00

Fedex gets around the ups and the downs of the energy and natural resources issues by slapping a Fuel Surcharge right on every invoice.

Airlines already separate out airport taxes and landing fees, so why don't they separate out the fuel cost? This key profitability issue could be put right up front allowing the airlines to compete on more important dimensions.

Now you could say that successful fuel hedging such as Southwest's, would not be as important if all of the airlines had a flat fuel surcharge, but if nothing else it would get consumers to understand and differentiate on other variables.

Today's free UI help: water dispenser UI

2008-07-18T13:45:00.000-07:00

People love our new water dispenser at Google Seattle, it's tall enough for a Camelbak bottle, and really fast at dispensing cold water.

But look at how many instructions are on the top of the thing (see photo).

For cold water press and hold the big blue button in the center. No Problem!

For hot water

Press and hold the red button until the light starts blinking
Release red button
Before the light stops blinking, press the big blue button (formerly cold) to dispense hot water.

For room temperature water

Press the green button until it starts blinking
[same as hot]

So, why can't I just press and hold the red or green button to dispense hot or room temp. water? Why make me press the blue (cold water) button again?

Oh, that's right, because I'm changing the mode of the big blue button. Great.