UX Debunked?
September 21, 2010
The consumerization of information technology focuses attention on what I call toaster attributes. The idea is that anyone with a piece of bread can usually figure out how to insert the bread and burn it to a greater or lesser degree. I have encountered toasters I couldn’t figure out. I ignored them and just ate the bread, usually with jam. Life requires adaptive behavior.
Source: http://masquerademasks.sultaninfo.com/fancyfeathermasquerademasks/ May be detected as malware.
“Can Experience Be Designed?” struck me as germane to search, content processing, and a number of information tasks. The write up contains some useful information and left me thinking that much of the content applies to search. Let me highlight a passage that resonated with me:
Everybody is a user, so is everybody a user experience designer? Since everybody is a user, everybody has an opinion on how his experience should be. And many are very eager to utter their opinions really strongly. But that doesn’t mean that every user is a designer. Asking for salt doesn’t make you a cook. The user has his own opinion, the user experience designer deals with different opinions and tries to find the best compromise. Good compromises are not in the middle, they are higher than the initial options: good compromises are synthetic (If your options are cowardly or foolhardy, the synthesis is courageous).
Taking complex functions and making them usable by lots of people is difficult. At lunch today (September 19, 2010), my son and I talked about the complexity lurking under the surface of our iPads. Most people can use the gizmos, but the innards are a mystery to many and almost unrepairable. The UX or user experience allows the iPad to be used to do “something”. Making access easy and keeping the ham handed user from killing the system with an inadvertent keystone or touch is a challenging task.
Casual engineering will not deliver sustainable user experience. Lousy quality won’t either. In fact the list of hurdles a product must get over or around is long and some items on the list are fuzzy. Other challenges may not be on the list at all.
What’s this have to do with search? The article identifies issues that permeate search and content processing marketing. The marketing is misleading if not a falsehood. My hunch is that the UX bandwagon seems easier to achieve than search systems that deliver what the user needs with a minimum of fuss and muss.
Recent search innovations like Google Instant or the hoo hah about predictive search are irrelevant to me. Some innovations are like the medieval masques. Hiding reality allows some folks to have a good time.
Reality, however, is more persistent than the UX whether placed on a mobile device or the pock marked face of an Elizabethan rake.
Stephen E Arnold, September 21, 2010
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Another Google Issue
September 19, 2010
Short honk: I don’t have much to say about this series of news stories and their write ups. I thought Google’s Summer of Anguish was over. Guess not. Why? Check out these titles. You may want to read the stories, but I just skimmed them:
- Google Engineer Fired for Spying on Teenagers
- Ex-Googler Allegedly Spied on User E-Mails, Chats
- Google Fires Engineer for Privacy Breach
Not even a gentle honk from Harrod’s Creek. Maybe this will be an endless summer for the Google?
Stephen E Arnold, September 19, 2010
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Discovery Interfaces: The Next Generation
September 15, 2010
The development and enhancement of open source Online Public Access Catalog Services (OPACS) have become extremely valuable. The Catalogue and Index Blog “Discovery Interfaces (Next Generation)” provides readers with a glimpse of the type of interfaces that the British Library uses. The discovery interfaces have been designed to “offer improved access to contents.” These interfaces in many ways are similar to traditional Online Public Access Catalog Services but they go a step further and offer users some notable enhancements. The article notes the products “provide modern web interfaces that can compete with commercial offerings such as Amazon and the BBC.” A few extra additions are improved visual presentation and additional options besides those included in the local catalogue. Many of the listed product systems help to improve the search and find capabilities of library systems which in turn give users access to a larger and more detailed pool of information. “Finding a needle in a haystack” seems to have gotten a little easier for researchers.
Stephen E Arnold, September 15, 2010
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iPad, Search, and Home
August 29, 2010
Will the tablet application kill search? Probably not. What the tablet seems to be doing is changing the behavior in the home. I was surprised.
Called everything from a portable computer to an e-reader the iPad has created quite a buzz. People everywhere are bringing home their new iPad and figuring out what the little gadget really has to offer. According to the article “iPad users keep their toy at home” a recent survey conducted by Cooper and Murphy Webb uncovered some interesting results about the new gadget and how UK owners are using it.
For the survey, 1,034 UK iPad owners were interviewed. Of those surveyed 27 percent said that they do not take their iPad out of the house while 35 percent of those interviewed admitted that they rarely take the gadget outside of the home. Most people complained that the shiny screen on the gadget was hard to make out in the bright sunlight. Surprisingly many of the respondents noted that they used their iPad more for entertainment, mostly games than anything else. It beat out game consoles for the title of “primary entertainment device.” A whopping 37 percent went so far as to say that they liked their iPad more than their gaming consoles. It seemed that the majority of these owners were impressed with the gaming capabilities of their new gadget rather than the ability to browse the Internet or read books.
The iPad was designed to be a direct competitor with the traditional PC but survey results show that the device is not quite ready for that. Of those surveyed 55 percent admitted that they still enjoyed surfing on their laptop or desktop rather than the iPad. The survey results showed that though users enjoy the new iPad it has not becoming their primary computer device. Though the features and animation are impressive the device with its small screen and limited processor does not overshadow the PC. The survey results show that the tablet does offer users some impressive features but before it can be crowned the “PC killer” it has to able to dominate the techno world.
The iPad expands the nature of search. It does not kill search in our opinion.
April Holmes, August 29, 2010
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Adobe and Its Digital Clay Bricks: No Search Needed
August 25, 2010
Former Ziffer John C. Dvorak (the real Dvorak and podcast personality) posted “Adobe Has the Right Stuff.” In the write up, Mr. Dvorak points out that Adobe has some competition-killers like Photoshop and the company has an opportunity to roll out some interesting new money makers such as a Linux-centric content creation center.
I don’t agree.
I am not too interested in graphics, although I know that is Adobe’s cash cow. I do know that Adobe has been unable to deliver acceptable search and retrieval across its own content for as long as I can remember. The company has floundered from search vendor to search vendor and still seems unable to make a snappy, intuitive search system available. Federation across Adobe’s wacky line up of sites is not working for me. Anyone remember Lextek International in Acrobat 6? Didn’t think so?
Adobe’s patent application US2010/0185599 underscores how Adobe’s own approach to content is designed to allow other vendors to index content created by an Adobe application. Adobe has worked hard to convince publishers to standardize on the Adobe platform, not the evil empire’s Quark system or even more expensive, bespoke solutions from specialist firms.
Adobe is rooted in print production and approaches many problems from the print angle of attack. Our tests of Adobe’s rich media applications reveals unstable, buggy and unpredictable behavior. Performance problems plague Adobe products even when the applications run on zippy, multi-core processors.
How’s that Adobe Premier interface grab you? At my age of 66, I can’t read the darned labels. What happened to black text on white background. I sort of can see the color video content. I don’t need it to “jump” at me. And the state shifting controls? Those are a wonder to behold. When Sony Vegas is easier to use that an Adobe product, I know something is off center.
Our view is that Adobe is trying to maintain its position in the market, and it is going to have an increasingly difficult time. Here are the points we noted in our recent review of Adobe:
- Security. Adobe products are potential challenges for enterprise system administrators. I love PDFs with embedded excutables but after a decade no control to permit a specific number of PDF openings by a user in a password protected PDF.
- User experience. Sure, a Photoshop or Illustrator professional can use Adobe products, but this is the equivalent of learning that Oracle’s database is a piece of cake from an Oracle system administrator. Ordinary folks may have a different view of usability. I can’t even read the interface for Adobe’s new products with its wacky gray background and tiny white type. Am I alone?
- Stability. Maybe Photoshop doesn’t crash as often, but there are some exciting moments with Adobe’s video production software. Lots. Of. Exciting. Moments.
- Focus. Adobe has kicked Framemaker under the bus. I abandoned Version 9.0 for Version 7.0. Adobe has lost track of who uses what products for what purpose. The Linux version of Framemaker sucked, and Framemaker once ran natively on Solaris.
- Production. Professionals from magazine make ready shops to printers have learned to live with Postscript, InDesign, and PDFs. I am not sure I am happy with my hard won knowledge because quite a few of the issues have to do with careless programming by contractors or staff in far off lands than what is required to create a content object. Let me give one example that bedeviled me yesterday: Color matching across Adobe’s own products and into whizzy digital printers. Hello, hello. Anyone at Adobe actually do this type of work for real?
In short, search is a core function. Adobe has never gotten it right either on its Web sites, in its products Help function, or in its “content objects”. If you can make information findable, that’s sort of a core weakness, and it is a key indicator of how many “content” issues Adobe has not handled in an elegant, effective manner.
Bottom-line: Revenue growth will be an interesting challenge for Adobe’s management team. I just rolled back to Photoshop Version 7.1 on one production machine. The interface is usable, not logical, but closer to the real world in which I work. Search. Long walk ahead. Linux support. Adobe has to spend a lot of money to keep its sail boats in trim. I don’t think the company has the cash or the technical resources at this time. In short, Adobe is more vulnerable than some perceive.
Stephen E Arnold, August 25, 2010
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Exclusive Interview: Satish Gannu, Cisco Systems Inc.
August 24, 2010
I made my way to San Jose, California, to find out about Cisco Systems and its rich media initiatives. Once I located Cisco Way, the company’s influence in the heart of Silicon Valley, I knew I would be able to connect with Satish Gannu, a director of engineering in Cisco’s Media Experience and Analytics Business Unit. Mr. Gannu leads the development team responsible for Cisco Pulse, a method for harnessing the collective expertise of an organization’s workforce. The idea is to apply next generation technology to the work place in order to make it quick and easy for employees to find the people and information they need to get their work done “in an instant.”
I had heard that Mr. Gannu is exploring the impact of video proliferation in the enterprise. Rich media require industrial-strength, smart network devices and software, both business sectors in which Cisco is one of the world’s leading vendors. I met with Mr. Gannu is Cisco Building 17 Cafeteria (appropriate because Mr. Gannu has worked at Cisco for 17 years). Before tackling rich media, he served as Director of Engineering in Cisco’s Security Technology Group. I did some poking around with my Overflight intelligence system and picked up signals that he is responsible for media transcoding, a technology that can bring some vendors’ network devices to their knees. Cisco’s high performance systems handle rich media. Mr. Gannu spearheads Cisco’s search and speech-to-text activities. He is giving a spotlight presentation at the October 7-8, 2010, Lucene Revolution Conference in Boston, Massachusetts. The conference is sponsored by Lucid Imagination.
Satish Gannu, Director of Engineering, Cisco Systems Inc.
The full text of my interview with Mr. Gannu appears below:
Thanks for taking the time to talk with me?
No problem.
I think of Cisco as a vendor of sophisticated networking and infrastructure systems and software? Why is Cisco interested in search?
We set off to do the Pulse project in order to turn people’s communications in to a mechanism for finding the right people in your company. For finding people, we asked how do people communicate what they know? People communicate what they know through documents — web page, or an email, or a Word document, or a PDF, and now, Video. Video is big for Cisco
Videos are difficult to consume or even find. The question we wanted to answer was, “Could we build a business-savvy recommendation engine. We wanted to develop a way to learn from user behavior and then recommend videos to people, not just in an organization but in other settings as well. We wanted to make videos more available for people to consume. Video is the next big thing in digital information, from You Tube coming to enterprise world. In many ways, video represents a paradigm shift. Video content takes a a lot of storage space. We think that video is also difficult to consume, difficult to find. In search, we’ve always worked from document-based view. We are now expanding the idea of a document from text to rich media. We want to make video findable, browseable, and searchable. Obviously the network infrastructure must be up to the task. So rich media is a total indexing and search challenge.
Is there a publicly-accessible source of information about Cisco’s Pulse project?
Yes. I will email you the link and you may insert it in this interview. [Click here for the Pulse information.]
No problem. Are you using open source search technology at Cisco.
Yes, we believe a lot in the wisdom of the crowds. The idea that a community and some of the best minds can work together to develop and enhance search technology is appealing to us. We also like the principle that we should not invent something that is already available.
I know you acquired Jabber. Is it open source?
Yes, in late 2008 we purchased Cisco bought the company called Jabber. The engineers had developed a presence and messaging protocol and software. Cisco is also active in the Open Social Platform.
Would you briefly describe Open Social?
Sure. “Open Social” is a platform with a set of APIs developed by a community of social networking developers and vendors to structure and expose social data over the network, at opensocial.org. We’ve adopted Open Social to expose the social data interfaces in our product for use by our customers, leveraging both the standardization and the innovation of this process to make corporate data available within organizations in a predictable, easy-to use platform.
Why are you interested in Lucene/Solr?
We talked to multiple companies, and we decided that Lucene and Solr were the best search options. As I said, we didn’t want to reinvent the wheel. We looked at available Lucene builds. We read the books. Then we started working with Lucid. Our hands on testing actually validated the software. We learned how mature it is. The road map for things which are coming up was important to us.
What do you mean?
Well, we had some specific ideas in mind. For example, we wanted to do certain extensions on top of basic Lucene. With the road map, open source gives us an an opportunity to do our own intellectual property on the top of Lucene/Solr.
Like video?
Yes, but I don’t want to get into too much detail. Lucene for video search is different. With rich media sources we worry about how transcribe it, and then we have to get into how the system can implement relevancy and things like that.
One assumption we made is how people speak at a rate of two to three words per second. So when we were doing tagging, we could calculate the length of the transcript and size of the document.
That’s helpful. What are the primary benefits of using Lucene/Solr?
One of our particular interests is figuring out how we can make it easy for people in an organization to find a person with expertise or information in a particular field. At Cisco, then, how our systems help users find people with specific expertise is core to our product.
So open source gives us the advantage of understanding what the software is doing. Then we can build on top of those capabilities., That’s how we determine what, which one to choose for.
Does the Lucene/Solr community provide useful developments?
Yes, that’s the wisdom of the crowds. In fact, the community is one of the reasons open source is thriving. In my opinion, the community is a big positive for us. In our group, we use open social too. At Cisco, we are part of the enterprise Open Social consortium, and we play an active role in it. We also publish an open source API.
I encourage my team be active participants in that and contribute. Many at Cisco are contributing certain extensions. We have added these on top of open social. We are giving our perspective to the community from our Pulse learnings. We are doing the same type of things for for Lucene/Solr.
My view is that if useful open source code is out there, everyone can make the best utilization of it. And if a developer is using open source, there is the opportunity for making some enhancement on top of the existing code. It is possible to create your own intellectual property around open source too.
How has Lucid Imagination contributed to your success in working with Solr/Lucene?
We are not Lucene experts. We needed to know whether it’s possible, not possible, what are the caveats. The insight, which we got from consulting with Lucid Imagination helped open our eyes to the possibilities. That clinical knowledge is essential.
What have you learned about open source?
That’s a good question. Open source doesn’t always come for free. We need to keep that in mind. One can get open source software. Like other software, one needs to maintain it and keep it up to date.
Where’s Lucid fit in?
Without Lucid We would have to send an email to the community, and wait for somebody to respond. Now I ping Lucid.
Can you give me an example?
Of course. If I have 20,000 users, I can have 100 million terms in one shard. If I need to scale this to 100,000 users and put up five shards, how do I handle these shards so that each is localized? What is the method for determining relevancy of hits in a result set? I get technical input from Lucid on these types of issues.
When someone asks you why you don’t use a commercial search solution, what do you tell them?
I get this question a lot. In my opinion, the commercial search systems are often in a black box. We occasionally want to have use this type of system. In fact, we do have a couple of other related products which use commercial search technologies.
But for us, analysis of context is the core. Context is what the search is about. And when you look at the code, we realized, how we use this functionality is central to our work. How we find people is one example of what we need. We need an open system. For a central function, the code cannot be a black box. Open source meets our need.
Thank you. How can a reader contact you?
My email is sgannu at cisco dot com.
Stephen E Arnold, August 24, 2010
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The Future of MBA Textbooks
August 23, 2010
The motion picture for Finance 201 will be hitting the iPad in 2015, maybe sooner. The future is becoming less cloudy for US graduate school education. The traditional book—a clunky, environmentally hostile dog—is a goner. The first step away from textbooks is to convert grad school content into a comic book. Once this is underway, it will be a short step to making a college textbook into an app and then a full-scale, kick back, pass-the-popcorn event.
You can read about the comic book part in “Graphic Novel Replaces Business School Textbook.” The USA Today story reported:
In addition to telling a story with pictures and text bubbles as a traditional comic book would, Short’s book also has paragraphs of text on certain pages, which allows the author to create a richer discussion of content than a normal comic book would, Moliterno said. On the other hand, he noted that it’s difficult to skip around in the textbook because it follows a narrative arc, and confines the professor to framing a course entirely around the book.
Expository content in the style of Maxim magazine will certainly work for MBAs. Look at the wonderful work these folks have done at Enron, Tyco, and other firms. Next up? Brain surgery and nuclear physics. Why should learning be difficult. How will MBA style education deliver an Enron-type of power generation facility? That will be exciting. Let’s keep information simple. One “real” consulting firm specializes in making complexities simple. Works really well I bet. Yep, user experience is taking precedent over content or learning.
Stephen E Arnold, August 23, 2010
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Research in Motion and Aggressive Mobile BlackPad
August 21, 2010
I struggle to locate emails on my BlackBerry. I struggled to buy a working app on the BlackBerry store. I now struggle with a news story that links Research in Motion to Crusher Tank software and luxury car maker BMW. I rented a BMW once, and I gave up trying to get the radio to work and set the air conditioning. I cannot wait to see a table with a combination of BMW technology and Crusher Tank software.
What do you make of “RIM Said to Plan Crusher Tank Technology for Tablet Computer”? As you can see from the photo on the splash page of this blog, even my Microsoft SharePoint engineer, Tess the Boxer, can use the Apple iPad. Will she be able to handle RIM’s forthcoming tablet?
Will the BlackPad have the durability of this Crusher tank? Source: http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_swGyNR8UhGg/SBoduyYjJPI/AAAAAAAAAI8/jBff0KtcnFQ/s1600-h/crusher2.jpg
Here’s the passage from the Bloomberg story which I hope is deadly accurate like the Crusher tank’s armaments:
The yet-to-be-announced tablet will run on software developed by QNX Software Systems, which RIM bought from Harman International Industries Inc. for $200 million in April, said the people, who didn’t want to be named because the plans haven’t been made public. QNX’s software is used in products from companies including Cisco Systems Inc., General Electric Co. and Caterpillar Inc. RIM, based in Waterloo, Ontario, is racing to introduce its tablet as rivals debut similar devices that fill the gap between smartphones and laptops. By using QNX technology, RIM could take advantage of the independent software developers who already create applications for QNX and build on the popularity of its BlackBerry smartphone with corporate customers.
I have no opinion about the issues related to access to BlackBerry email. I would imagine that Crusher tank technology can deal with almost any unpleasantness. If the technology won’t do it, maybe RIM could drive a Crusher tank over the issue, flattening it in no time.
The iDrive control device that baffled this addled goose.
I am more interested in the BMW technology.
My observations:
- The mobile heat is on for RIM from phones to tablets to far off lands which want access to email. I am not sure Apple will relate to the artistic elegance of the Crusher tank. I think the Google Math Club will find the BMW less environmentally pleasing than a Prius but well suited to speeding to meetings with various governmental entities.
- The Apple iPad seems to be a winner, and I wonder if the alleged BlackPad can capture the market segment fascinated by the tablet form factor. Apple is rumored to be readying a Mini Cooper iPad which might rain on the RIM tank parade. A flotilla of Android tablets seems to be making its way across the big blue sea with an ETA in the Fall of 2010.
- The BlackBerry application store is not quite up to Apple’s level and I think it lags the dross-riddled Android app store. BlackBerry has its consumer work cut out for itself. I still find the BlackBerry app I downloaded amusing. It would crash the mobile device. Solitaire is a tough nut to crack or BlackBerry to squish as the case may be.
To sum up, the macho positioning of the Research in Motion BlackPad is interesting. I just want to make phone calls, maybe read a book at the airport, and check some email. Do I need a BMW-infused, smart tank technology for these functions? RIM, if Bloomberg’s story is spot on, seems to hold the belief that I do indeed. (I must admit I secretly admire the Crusher tank.)
Furthermore, the word choice in this Bloomberg BlackBerry BlackPad article strikes me as somewhat ominous. The goose is frightened of the consonantal tintinnabulation.
Stephen E Arnold, August 21, 2010
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Pattern Opportunities or Distractions?
August 16, 2010
Search platform vendor Endeca unveiled its patterns, attempting to simplify search for professional and entertainment purposes. While the results are impressive, the company might be overdoing things. The patterns were detailed in a Findability.org profile, “Endeca’s Pattern Library” and showcased patterns for ranges, analytics and more. The profile also claimed, “each pattern includes a problem summary, usages, constraints and challenges, solution elements, examples, and links for further reading.” The patterns themselves are similar to skins, helping guide searches. For example, a range finder for a wine search provides range sliders for prices, flavor, vintage and other factors. By whittling down these various options, the search is supposed to be streamlined. However, in novice hands we fear these patterns are little more than novelty interfaces. Sure, you can choose a range of vintage years, but without the prior knowledge to go along with it, these patterns aren’t helping anyone. Search, in our opinion, has not made giant leaps in the last few years. It may be easier to fiddle with interface than deal with the deeper issues of relevance, precision, and recall.
Pat Roland, August 16, 2010
Will People Type Questions, Not Keywords?
August 5, 2010
In ‘Consumer Beware, Innovation in Search Benefits Google’ econsultancy.com reports that although Microsoft’s new search engine Bing has been making waves in the search market and slowly nibbling at the edges of Google’s search dominance, smaller engines still have an uphill battle when it comes to toppling Google in search. Ask.com’s Barry Diller pointed out that innovation in search often works toward Google’s advantage, regardless of whether Google does the innovating. Ask.com made headlines recently with some user interface changes that reverted the site back to its earlier question and answer format, and the site grew 18 percent, beating expectations. Will this new format continue to grow the company’s audience? Will people take the time to type in their questions or will they revert to Google’s catch-phrase entry method? We don’t want to type questions, and we think we not be lone geese.
Brett Quinn, August 5, 2010
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