the (un)real thoughts of realbt

While everyone is busy talking about getting the new 3G iPhone, I’m happy to stick with my 4 year old off-contract Audiovox cell phone with no data plan. This is largely because I barely pay $30 per month for it including more minutes than I ever consume. On the other hand, it would be nice to have a new phone that didn’t suffer from some of the annoying quirks mine does.

A couple examples:

• If I happen to receive a text message while typing one, the message I am writing is interrupted and lost.
• Setting an alarm takes about twice as many clicks as it should. The interface for changing the date and time is terribly cumbersome.
• If I press OK in my address book instead of send when trying to place a call, it reverts to the main screen. After 4 years, I still make this mistake because the OK button is located in the middle of the arrow keys used for scrolling through entries.
• When my text message inbox/outbox fills up, the phone requires I delete all the messages. There is no way to make it automatically purge old messages as the mailbox fills up.
• If I change the volume during a phone call, I have to wait nearly 3 seconds before I can push any other buttons on the phone. This is annoying if I’m calling a number that requires me to press ‘1′ for English, etc…, and my volume is too low. This seems to be linked with the way the phone handles modal dialogs (on a phone? that can’t be a good idea.). Whenever it raises one of these alerts, all other functions stop responding on the phone until it disappears and you can’t press a button to get rid of it sooner — it’s the longest 3 seconds of your life.

Despite all of this, I can’t justify the cost of the iPhone and Rogers call plans just yet. And knowing that there are very few really good phones on the market, I’m reluctant to replace it with something else.

I think it’s time cell phone manufacturers paid a visit to Alan Cooper.

I have complained before about Acrobat Reader’s poor usability. Tonight, I want to point out another flaw in the way Acrobat deals with PDF links from within a web browser.

For example, if you search Google and find a PDF link, click on it, and Acrobat opens as an embedded window within your web browser, then Acrobat will attempt to conserve bandwidth by not downloading the full PDF but only rendering the contents that you are viewing. This makes sense for people on slow connections with large PDF documents. However, there’s no point doing this if the connection is fast enough. It really makes browsing the PDF almost unusable in a variety of situations.

Because content is only downloaded as it’s needed, you often have to wait between pages for the content to download and be rendered. If this were a PDF stored in entirety on your hard drive, this time would be unnoticeable. It only gets worse if you try skipping around in the document; you will suffer from serious lag (no matter how fast your connection) waiting for the download thread(s) to synchronize and render the content you are actually trying to view.

Now try searching the PDF loaded within your web browser. You will see that Acrobat (via the browser) makes numerous connections to the web server to retrieve content. My suspicion is that there is one round trip per page of the PDF document, as if it were rendering it one page at a time. For a large PDF document of a couple hundred pages, it makes it impossible to perform a text search on the document in a reasonable amount of time. It can easily take up to a second to search 1 or 2 pages when uncached. It would make much more sense to download the entire PDF, then perform a text search, which happens in less than a few seconds even for PDF documents of several hundred pages.

Ultimately, this leads the savvy web user to click ‘back’, save the PDF link to the disk, and then open it externally in Acrobat to make navigation and searching fast. The trouble is, average users probably don’t know they can do this. Or even how. They may not be able to understand the association between the slow search and viewing the document within the web browser; and if they do, they may not know how to get around this.

This is a classic usability problem that drives me crazy on a regular basis.

I think I’ve written about this before. But I’m going to do it again with a different spin.

Why are traditional media web sites (CTV, CNN, the Globe and Mail, Canada.com, etc.) always the worst? They are quite possibly the most poorly thought out, the least accessible, and the most annoying to read of any industry of major web sites.

Apart from the fact that they are too cluttered (often trying to make their front pages look like their newspaper’s front page, forgetting the fact that we’re dealing with monitors not newsprint), they often have annoying little slide shows or “interactive” stories exploiting (and I chose that word quite deliberately) Flash.

Let’s choose, for example, CBC’s interactive food safety map. I hate to pick on CBC, because I think they are among the best at maintaining a well-designed web presence, however, this is an excellent example of what I’m writing about.

Problem #1: how is this interactive? I can click on a picture and then see text relating to it. Is this really what interactive means? Maybe my expectations are too high.

Problem #2: why couldn’t this have been presented as a list with an image and some text broken into sections/categories. They could have even had one category per page and made a “slide show” using real HTML pages, eliminating Flash altogether. Maybe this interactive map is just a way of disguising their lack of real content.

Problem #3: how can people who can’t read embedded Flash text read this? It is entirely unaccessible. What makes it most frustrating is that there is no good reason for using Flash.

Problem #4: Flash. Okay, so this is the common problem among everything I have said already. I think the important thing to understand about Flash is thus: Flash is an acceptable web site component only when you are trying to present content that is otherwise ill-suited for a web browser environment. These include: games, movies (think YouTube), and other multimedia content unfit for HTML. This does not include advertising or any other means for presenting otherwise static content.

Problem #5: it’s annoying to use. I have to click to bring up the content I want. Click again to hide it. Click again to bring up the next set. It scores very low on my usability scale and does not ever make me want to view an interactive tidbit at CBC (regardless of how much I like CBC) again.

When I see things like this happen, it makes me wonder if it’s the web designers who are trying to show-off their fancy Flash skills because they’re bored of designing conservative web sites for their media companies, or if it’s mid- to high-level managers trying to make their respective media companies keep up with the Jones’ because “everyone is doing Flash.” I would really like to know.

I find the reply flag on email in Outlook only somewhat useful. But regardless, it would still be nice if it was consistent.

When using Outlook Web Access (OWA) to connect to the Exchange server at work, the reply flag on an email is set immediately after I click the ‘reply’ or ‘reply all’ button. Even if I cancel the message, the email is still flagged incorrectly. Why? Is it so hard to make it consistent?

This makes a pseudo-useful feature even less useful due to unreliability. If I can’t trust it, why would I pay attention to it?

Do you use Adobe Acrobat Reader on Windows? Note this doesn’t seem to be the case with Acroread on Linux; I can’t speak for it on Mac OS.

In any case, the Hand Tool, which is the default selected mouse tool when you launch Acrobat, serves two uses regrettably. First, it enables one to drag the document within the viewing pane (left/right, up/down) — essentially, anything one can accomplish with the scroll bars, you can do with the hand tool by dragging the document around. It’s a nice shortcut.

The second use (and the source of my frustration) of the Hand Tool is the zoom function. When the Hand Tool is over content within the document (text, images, etc. — from what I can tell, anything other than the margin) it zooms the viewing scope of the document. For example, if I am at 100% zoom and I click with the Hand Tool when it’s in zoom mode, it may jump to 125%.

The problem is that I don’t want it at 125%. I want it at 100%, which is why I previously zoomed to that level.

The Hand Tool mouse pointer changes depending on mode (click/drag/move, click/zoom) so one can tell what action one is about to commit. However, should one click on the document when the Acrobat window is not in focus, the click registers in the current mode: if the click is over a margin, it acts as a click/drag/move, which is fine since it will have no real noticeable affect on the document. However, if the click is over content, it acts as a click/zoom. The problem is that you can’t tell what mode you’re in when the Acrobat window isn’t in focus. The mouse pointer is simply a mouse pointer, with no Hand Tool mouse pointer changing depending on where the cursor tracks.

This is very annoying. Inevitably, I end up zooming in my Acrobat document when I merely want to bring the window into focus.

This is a perfect example of why the default tool selected in an application shouldn’t serve two uses like this. Keep it simple and consistent. This is particularly bad when Acrobat is supposed to be an easy application for non-techies to be able to use.