If you wanted to design a navigation scheme intended to confuse, you might begin by making the interface mazelike. The maze would put you in a little room with a number of doors leading this way and that. The doors’ labels are usually short, cryptic, or iconic, and they may change or disappear,^[1] depending on where you’ve been. You cannot see what is on the other side of a door except by going through it, and when you have gone through, you may or may not be able to see the room you’ve just left. There may not be a way to get directly back at all. Some rooms may contain maps to part or all of the system of rooms, but you have to keep track of the relationship between the map representation and the rooms you are presented with; furthermore, maps are not well suited to situations best represented by three-dimensional networks. The rooms in this description correspond to computer interface windows and web sites, and the doors are the tabs, menus, or links that are provided to bring you to other windows or sites.

As legends and stories from ancient times inform us, humans always have been notoriously bad at mazes. If we could handle them easily, they wouldn’t be used as puzzles and traps. When using a complex program, I often find, deep in a submenu, a command or a check box that solves a problem I am having. When I run into the same problem a few weeks later, I cannot remember how I got to the box with the solution. We are not good at remembering long sequences of turnings, which is why mazes make good puzzles and why our present navigational schemes, used both within computers and on the web, often flummox the user. Many complaints about present systems are complaints about trying to navigate. Partial solutions, such as “favorite locations” in browsers, have been created.^[2] But what we are truly better at is remembering landmarks and positional cues, traits that evolution has bred into us and traits we can take advantage of in interface design.

^[2] This works until you have so many that you cannot remember what they all are; then you need a “favorites of favorites” or another scheme to keep track of them.

Why I blogged this: everyone remembers how to find things in different ways. Some people think their ‘mess’ is actually organised. Others organise by colours. Some of these issues span into my research interest of how spatial representaations can increase/decrease the way we perceive the activities of others. For example, if a buddy’s location is indicated on a topographic, spatial map, would this make you feel a different connection to if they were represented in a hierarchical list?

This probably works with a Macbook Pro too, and with Feature Pack 1.

This is an interaction model that I believe will pave the way to more usable automatic, mobile location disclosure interfaces. If access were controlled by allowed-lists, the interactions required to select who can see what, and when, is multi-faceted, which causes a whole load of problems, including users perceiving the system to be more complex, therefore abandoning use altogether.

Under this model, when users want to blur their exact location, they simply create a larger bounding box around their current location. Who cares if people know you’re ’somewhere’ in the city? During times when you feel more social, you simply reduce the size of the box. If your buddies know you well enough, they should be able to infer where you’re likely to be even if they don’t know your exact location. Then, the good ol’ phone call comes in and the system becomes a context-setter and conversation starter…

Link to poster’s paper.

My 4th Ph.D. progress report is up - check it out in the documents/papers section. The report itself shouldn’t be that interesting to most of you, but please look at the interface mockups and get back to me with any comments (shown below). I’ll be implementing these soon so wouldn’t mind some feedback.

Three interface designs, to be implemented and compared in the first experiments. Absolute, spatial, map-based, allows deception and disclosure ’blurriness’ radius (top); distance-based, doesn’t allow deception but privacy alleviation through ambiguity (middle); spatial, distorted distances, allows deception and disclosure ’blurriness’ radius (bottom).

Just stumbled upon this new way to pay. Why haven’t I seen such a life-changing product yet? When is it coming to the UK?

Visa payWave allows your Visa Micro Tag to be read only when in close proximity (1-2 inches) to a secure reader that accepts Visa payWave payments. After waving your Visa Micro Tag in front of it, the reader will indicate that your information has been received and is being processed through the secure Visa network.

I’ve been programming with the W910i recently. Theoretically, it should be a great phone to work with. Plenty of optional APIs included, has a J2ME accessible accelerometer, BUT, Bluetooth keeps failing randomly with the following error message (in console output, testing in Java Developer mode using Sony Ericsson Device Explorer/Connection Proxy):

[Java/OJEX] bt.core[Util.raiseBluetoothConnectionException] FAILED_NOINFO

I’m using a separate thread that keeps making a serial profile connection (BTSPP://) to a GPS device that outputs in NMEA-0183 format. During random times (sometimes 20 secs, sometimes 5 mins) the thread locks up and any attempt to access it locks up that thread too. It must be to do with some of the bugs listed here - even after updating my firmware using the auto update within the device it’s not fixed. There seems to be no fix available anywhere!

I’m going to do a more simpler test later to see if it’s my code, but I doubt it will make any difference.

This is just a warning for those fellow developers out there tearing their hair out. For now, I’m sticking with Nokia phones and my Sparkfun accelerometer… Just need to re-solder that power connection!

“No connection to server Could not contact the navizon server. please check internet connection”

I couldn’t find the solution with a quick Google search, but I fixed it! Try changing your password to something simpler. I don’t think it likes special characters. Works for me. The “moving mode” and buddy tracking is particularly interesting!

• Day 1: this feels so weird! If I don’t move the mouse fast enough, it feels like I’m on a surface of viscous syrup. Changing the tracking to ‘fast’ in the Keyboard & Mouse prefs pane doesn’t seem to make a difference at all.
• Day 2: I’ve gotten used to it. Wow. That’s unexpected - I guess this demonstrates ergonomic adaptability. Which means we as designers must be careful - to take advantage of this as less as possible - which is the only way to drive forward the development of more usable systems.

Other apps that might make the mouse feel more like in Windows: USB Overdrive and ControllerMate.

And it’s not that the Mac version that I’m using (v. 16) is any worse than the Windows version either. I’ve tried both - and the Mac version seems to be running under some kind of X emulation, resulting in the UI sluggishness. This is after they claim version 16 has native Intel support on Macs. Next on my wishlist - do a cocoa port!

Other than the UI, the underlying statistical feature set is huge, something that I don’t think has been matched elsewhere. It’s a shame they haven’t hired a usability expert.

For now, I have to grit my teeth and use workarounds to do things that should be recognised as being important, and implemented already. Let’s get this paper finished, somehow…

Rant over.

Edit: SPSS Inc. are looking for a UI designer. I guess they’ve noticed too!

I’ve tried Apple’s Mail application a few times before - the responsiveness of a native application to handle your emails cannot be replicated with a web application. One thing I have never figured out how to do is an easy way to select a different from address when composing a new mail. Outlook did this, Gmail allows this, but I couldn’t figure out how to do it in Mail.

Well, after searching around again, the solution goes like this..

Open Mail.app -> Preferences -> Accounts -> Choose your account -> in the “Email Address” data entry field, add your aliases, separated by a comma. Save your account.

You can even create faux accounts for this purpose. I had to do that for my .Mac aliases, because the “Email Address” data entry field is not active (it’s grayed out) on my default .Mac account name email address.

Now, when you compose a new email, your aliases will be in the “Account:” drop-down menu.

Apple really should have documented this a bit easier, or even made it obvious in the UI. I’m sure I’m not the only one who couldn’t find this…