Jakob Nielsen: Windows 8 Usability Disappointing

Wow, I haven't read an article by Jakob Nielsen since my early days at Amazon, when he was one of the few usability gurus of any note. Some senior folks at Amazon held him in high regard so I often received links to his articles from them.

As more and more designers made their voices heard online and as user interface design became an exalted art form, one to which companies ascribed serious competitive advantage, I lost track of Nielsen. Many designers wrote harsh rebukes of his ideas, some legitimate, others seemingly out of glee in taking down the guy with the biggest name at the time.

I stopped reading his articles one day and just never started up again as happens with so many sites. He isn't linked or mentioned much among people I read and follow online, and in the attention economy, a lack of people distributing your ideas leaves you out beyond even the margins.

But a few people have linked to Nielsen's latest article about Windows 8 usability, and it makes some good points about Windows 8's usability shortcomings, one of which I noted before from my 30 minutes playing with a Surface. Nielsen points out some fundamental problems with the Metro interface style.

As a footnote, and to anticipate any arguments that he's a Mac zealot, Nielsen notes that he switched from Mac to using Windows years ago and is still using Windows 7.

I'll have to flip through a few of the articles he's written in the years I stopped following him, if for nothing else than for nostalgia's sake. Considering how much sites have evolved over the years, his site still looks exactly the same as I remember it, a fair representation of his design philosophy: usable if a bit plain or even ugly.

Chip Kelly's spread offense

Chris Brown does a great job breaking down Chip Kelly's vaunted Oregon spread offense. Of course I'll be rooting for Stanford this Saturday night in their matchup against Oregon, but I confess to a huge crush on Kelly's spread-offense. Football strategy innovation is rarer than you'd expect given the huge financial incentives to winning, but every so often, someone like a Dick Lebeau or a Bill Walsh comes along and comes up with something new, like the zone blitz or the West Coast offense, and it's a beautiful thing.

Hear Kelly explain his spread-offense, the logic seems elegantly simple.

At its most fundamental, Kelly's system is a carefully organized, carefully practiced method for forcing defenses to defend the whole field, and then exploiting those areas left exposed. And the first tool Kelly uses is a surprising one: math.

"If there are two high safeties [i.e., players responsible for deep pass defense], mathematically there can only be five defenders in the box. With one high safety, there can be six in the box. If there is no high safety, there can be seven in the box," Kelly explained at the 2011 spring Nike Coach of the Year Clinic. The easiest case is if the defense plays with two deep defenders: "With two high safeties, we should run the ball most of the time. We have five blockers and they have five defenders."

When a team brings that extra defender into the box, the calculus for the offense changes. "If the defense has one high safety and six defenders in the box, the quarterback has to be involved in the play," Kelly explained. "He has to read one of the defenders, in effect blocking him. We can block five defenders and read the sixth one." Marcus Mariota, Oregon's dynamic freshman quarterback, has been an excellent blocker without hitting anyone at all.

Football is really simple, in some ways. On offense, the advantage is that they know what play is going to be run and the defense doesn't. But it's somewhat offset by the fact that the offense has one player, the quarterback, who isn't blocking or running a route, giving the defense one extra person to defend (this is one reason why quarterbacks that can run, like Michael Vick or RGIII, are so dangerous; they force the defense to assign at least one defender to shadow the QB, neutralizing that man advantage).

Kelly's spread-offense tries to neutralize the man disadvantage by putting the offense in situations that give them as few defenders to manage as possible, analogous to a power play in hockey. And by playing fast, like no huddle offenses in the pros, they prevent defenses from swapping in personnel for specific packages, further putting the defense at a disadvantage.

I, for one, hope Kelly gets a long, extended look in the NFL, enough time to try to bring some of that innovation to the pro grame.

Cultural inertia and startup costs

This article (h/t to Marginal Revolution) asks why Japanese style toilets ("washlets") haven't spread to the U.S. Most people in the U.S. know these as bidets. Steve Scheer, President of toilet startup Brondell, has his thoughts on why Americans haven't switched over to this superior cleansing technology:

“For Americans here in the US, the biggest issues are personal experience with these products and a major reluctance to discuss bathroom issues or change ingrained habits. You wouldn’t imagine how many people giggle nervously or say “gross” when we try to educate them about the advantages of the bidet seat, yet these are the same people that are still using paper – a much inferior way to cleanse oneself.”

We have a family gift exchange every Christmas, and one year I was assigned my dad. I asked what he wanted, and he and my stepmom combined to ask for one of these aftermarket toilet washlet seats that they could attach to their existing toilet. It cost about $400, and they still use and love it. Logically, you can't argue with the results. I've had to babysit and change a few babies in my day, and it's always funny to think about how much more meticulous we are about cleaning baby butts than adult ones. It's rare to downgrade our results on such daily processes as we shift from infant life to adulthood, but that's just what's happened on this front.

Two big obstacles exist. One, which Scheer hints at, is the cultural inertia. Plenty of superior technologies and habits, like eating habits, are ingrained by exposure during childhood. As another example, the Segway always seemed to me doomed by the simple fact that people looked so ridiculous riding them. If we'd all grown up riding those around, who knows?

But a second obstacle, as with the Segway, is the startup cost. Products that promise to save you money in the long run but cost you more up front always are a hard sell to consumers who cannot help but blanch at a big single payment.

Scheer probably knows this, but he'd have a better shot at getting his products installed by default in apartment complexes, much like DVR's took off after they switched from being stand-alone boxes to ones that came directly from cable and satellite providers.

In the meantime, there's always this hybrid technology with nearly universal acclaim among customers that can be had with much lower startup costs.

Louis C.K.

I saw Louis C.K. do a standup set at Louis Davies Symphony Hall tonight. This was a stop on the tour that earned some fame when Louis C.K. announced he'd sell tickets only off of his website, at a fixed price of $45 a ticket. No ticket brokers allowed, and scalping the tickets above face value would be grounds for having your tickets revoked.

I'm not sure how seats were assigned, but I did log in first thing when the tickets went on sale to snag some for his first date in San Francisco. Some time later, I received an email with a link to print out my tickets, and I set them aside for the interim months before the show date.

Marie went to the theater straight from work, and as I was waiting in a cab line to get myself to the venue, she sent me a text: "Nice seats".

I arrived at the Symphony Hall and was pleasantly surprised to find us sitting in the second row, dead center. Furtively, I took this quick pic with my iPhone near the end of his set. Sitting close to the stage doesn't always matter, but for some types of performances, it does, like opera or theater or standup comedy, where the facial expressions convey much of the emotional through line. Louis C.K. (I'll keep referring to him by his full name as writing simply Louis or C.K. feels odd) didn't have any projection screens behind him to blow up his face, so I was happy to be able to see his goofy impressions up close.

Obviously, he's riding a wave of momentum right now, from the standup special he sold off of his website for $5 to his critically acclaimed, amazing self-titled TV show. It's for those reasons I'd like to think he was so self-assured on stage tonight. No flop sweat, no nervous tics. In fact, I can't ever remember a comedian that seemed so utterly relaxed on stage. Some comedians, like Chris Rock, seem to be on cocaine during their performances, and that live wire energy is core to their persona.

Since Louis C.K. plays a version of himself on his TV show, and since he often builds both his TV show and standup material around his persona as a sad sack divorced, balding, overweight middle-aged man, it's easy to confuse Louis C.K. the actual real-life standup comedian with his TV persona.

So it was supremely satisfying in a "revenge of those once less fortunate" way to see him stroll on stage and then be in utter command of the audience and his material from start to finish. He never  had any nervous breaks, throat-clearing pauses, or moments of frustration with either himself or the audience. No sweat under the spotlight, no moments when he lost his way and had to go for a drink of water to collect himself. When he wandered off of a joke for a detour joke and forgot which way he'd come, he seemed almost amused and talked his way back to the main route. He tried a bit about Jews that he wasn't happy with and flipped it into a joke: "I'm going to add on some extra material at the end to make up for this Jewish bit, don't worry, it didn't really...yeah..."

The connection between a standup comedian and his audience is tighter than that between almost any performer and their audience. Every joke is a moment of judgment, to be adjudicated by the dispensation of either laughter or silence, and so a standup set is a series of dozens and dozens of judgments rendered one after the other in rapid succession. It's the reason why a comedian who flails on stage stirs up such sympathy discomfort in the audience. When comedians feels themselves struggling, the audience feels complicit in withholding laughter. It causes the audience to feel an odd mixture of guilt and disgust at having been put in such a situation, and some comedians react badly when things are going bad and turn on the audience, trying to shift all responsibility for the fiasco on the people sitting in the darkness.

Watching Louis C.K. tonight, I felt none of that nervous tension. He was so collected and controlled that the emotional wire connecting comedian and audience put us in a state of relaxed anticipation.

More than that, the audience was thoroughly on his side from the start. Given how he's forgone higher budgets to retain creative control over his TV show and how he's spent the past year offering up his great material for low prices (DRM-free in the case of downloadable content) through his website, Louis C.K. has become a beloved figure. He was admired before for being a great comedian (I have no hesitation in declaring him the best standup comedian working right now), but he has engendered a real deep affection from his fans now.

Lastly, he's clearly in a better place in his life, and his material reflected that. He admitted that he'd come into his own. He waved a selective circle over his entire body with his hand and said, "This doesn't work too great at age eighteen, but at 45, with some more income, this is not bad." He spoke with some satisfaction about his relationship with his ex-wife ("You know what's great about divorce? It's forever. Marriage is for as long as you can stand it, but divorce is forever. I'm not telling you not to get married, if you love someone you should go ahead and get married, but then get a divorce.") and his children ("I'm a great dad, very listening, kind, and you know why? I get to say goodbye to them every week.")

But don't mistake for this happy state of affairs for toothless comedy. The joy of his material is still how he manages to bring you to the border of what seems inappropriate and then make it feel logical and safe to just hop right over it with him, but it comes from a happier and more enlightened age. He spent time making fun of his own ridiculousness, like his incidences of road rage, and put it in some sociological context (as in Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment, being in an automobile changes us into homicidal assholes). He managed to counsel us to be more tolerant to each other (notably towards gays) while still making us laugh, like some folksy philosopher king. And he was able to wrap it up with a perfect little sequence he called "of course...but maybe...". It was the perfect encapsulation of his comedic ethos.

The best comedians are our keenest and most honest observers of the human condition, like Chris Rock on relations between the races or between men and women. Louis C.K., riding a wave of success, is heading not into a middle-age crisis but a middle-age coronation, and in doing so while continuing to put out so much great material, is showing us that one doesn't have to be an angry failure to dispense wisdom as the court jester.

Microblogging as therapy

We all have those friends who post too frequently to Facebook, in ways that feel like overly transparent grasps at affirmation.

Perhaps we should be showing them more empathy. A new research paper from researchers at Wharton (PDF) argues that less emotionally stable people use more emotional status updates or tweets to help regulate their emotional well-being.

The current research investigates both the causes and consequence of online social network use. Low emotionally stable individuals experience emotions more intensely and have difficulty regulating their emotions on their own. Consequently, we suggest that they use the microblogging feature on online social networks (e.g., Tweets or Facebook status updates) to help regulate their emotions. Accordingly, we find that less emotionally stable individuals microblog more frequently and share their emotions more when doing so, a tendency that is not observed offline. Further, such sharing, paired with the potential to receive social support, helps boost their well-being.

So the next time a friend posts a status update that feels like a plea for help, maybe that's exactly what it is, and maybe your LIke is a cheap form of therapy. Free consumer surplus! Maybe all of Anil Dash's favoriting should be seen as a social service.