natasha's corner

I must have moved the camera at just the right time to get this interesting artifact from my iPhone. I wonder what this reveals about how the iPhone camera works…

I’ve been on Facebook for a long time – pretty much since it first started – and it’s been interesting to observe the evolution of my “friends” list.

The first wave were people I met in college because that’s who Facebook was originally available to.

Then they opened it up to high schools, but that didn’t affect me since I no longer knew anyone in high school at that point. However, around the same time came the second wave, which were people I met in school, mostly high school.

Not too long after, Facebook was opened up to everyone. This created the third wave of people I met at or through work.

Now, I am seeing the fourth wave of Facebook friends – family. I’m not sure what caused this particular wave, but it’s probably just a snowball effect. One person adds some family members, those family members add others based on the friends list of the person who added them, and it continues expanding until every family member is connected to every other one.

It makes me wonder what, if anything, the fifth wave will be. It seems like all groups of people I know have been covered, but then, if you asked me a year ago, I’d tell you that Facebook was just for college and school friends. I would never have thought that my boss, his boss, and his boss’s boss would be my Facebook friends or that my cousin in Israel would get in touch through Facebook after not having seen her for 10 years.

I look forward to seeing how this evolves or devolves in the future.

Anyone working in User Experience knows that it’s important to understand the context of your users’ environment and to design around that. For instance, an application designed for a busy police station where the users are constantly interrupted by unrelated tasks would take all those interruptions into consideration and help the users work around them. The latest The Daily WTF article is a perfect example of how external factors can affect a system.

To summarize, there was a minor glitch in an old punch card-based reporting application that was found by an accountant. The developer assigned to fix it tried everything he could think of, to no avail. Finally, he vowed to stay through the night until he had it figured out. During his late night, a cleaning lady came in.

“Sorry,” the cleaning lady said, picking up the hand broom she’d dropped. The developer’s attention turned to her while she swept up some dirt into a small pile. Nonchalantly, she reached into the punch card bin and swept the dirt onto one of the cards, picked it up and carried it to the trash, and threw away the card with the dirt.

This example illustrates the need for prevention poka-yoke devices, as discussed by Robert Hoekman, Jr. in his book Designing the Obvious.

Prevention devices are those that prevent errors from ever occurring. The hole in the rim of the sink that keeps it from overflowing is a prevention device. The user can leave the water running all he wants to – the sink will never overflow.

The punch-card-as-a-dirt-pan issue should have been prevented with some sort of poka-yoke device. Maybe they could have made the punch cards usable for one purpose only. Or, at the very least, make them a bit less accessible to the cleaning personnel. If your system depends on some outside factor, you better make damn well sure that you can count on that outside factor being used only the way that it’s intended to be used.


p.s. Robert also has a new book out, Designing the Moment, which I haven’t read yet, but look forward to reading.

In an e-mail I got after registering for the UI13 conference (6/17/2008):

“We will ship your Flip Camcorder no later than June 27, 2008.”

On the UI13 website:

“[W]e’ll mail you your camcorder in early July.”

And finally, in an e-mail sent today:

“We expect to ship your Flip no later than the week of July 21st.”

I know I shouldn’t complain because it’s a gift, yet I can’t help but be annoyed.

I take recommendations seriously. If I’m going to recommend something to someone, I have to be willing to accept the consequences if they end up not liking what I recommended. I usually worry that if someone doesn’t like what I recommend it means either a) I have bad taste, or b) I really don’t know that person as well as I thought I did. Neither of those is a very appealing thing to have to admit.

Some people, though, don’t overthink recommendations quite as much as I do.

I went to Borders today to look for a new book to read, since I haven’t been able to finish the last 3 that I’ve started. Some kind of iPhone-induced mental block, I guess. As I was browsing the “Buy 1, Get 1 50% Off” table, a man glanced at the books I was holding for consideration and said to me:

“Excuse me. May I recommend this book [pointing at Water for Elephants]?”

“Actually, I’ve already read it.”

“What did you think?”

“It was great!”

He smiled and walked away to go pay for the books he was holding. This isn’t the first time I’ve witnessed this kind of spontaneous recommendation. Several months ago, I was at the same table, browsing for books, when a man recommended I read 1491 based on the books I was holding. I did end up buying it and I really enjoyed reading it, even though it’s probably not something I’d have picked out on my own.

The great thing about these types of recommendations is that you know the people must feel really passionately about the book they recommend. Otherwise, why would they bother mentioning it to a stranger?

The other great thing is that in my case, both of the recommendations were spot-on with very little information to go on. This really exemplifies the difference between people and computers. Consider the Netflix recommendation engine, for instance. It looks at all the movies and genres you’ve rated, compares them with other members’ ratings, and recommends movies that people with similar tastes to yours have enjoyed but that you have not yet rated.* Compare that with the book recommendations from strangers where all they had to go on were a couple books in my hand and their own previous experience. There is no algorithm. People just make the connection instantaneously, based on their own instincts. That’s something a computer will never be able to do.

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* At least that’s how I imagine it works. I think that’s pretty close to reality, though.