Nuo Yan : 6. Usability

Begin making improvements on SDK documentations before losing your developers

Nuo Yan — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 20:28:00 GMT

SDK documentation is the most official documentation and support material for developers to learn how to use the Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) the platform provides. The quality of SDK documentation directly affects the willingness and difficulty of the developers to create applications on that certain platform. However, in the current market, it's just so hard to find perfect SDK documentations. Most developers have to rely on extra information such as books and technical communities to do their development. What are missing from the SDK documentations? Why the developers don't like about the documentations? I think the lack of sample code, the lack of integration, and lack of innovation are some of the main reasons.

Lack of Sample Code

Many SDK documentations only explain what the APIs are, the methods and properties, and how to use them. But there aren't significant amount of sample code to show exactly how to use those APIs.

For example, let's look at the documentation of the ConfigurationManager class (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.windowsmobile.configuration.configurationmanager.aspx) in the Managed Windows Mobile Class Library. Suppose you are not an expert in developing device applications using .NET Compact Framework, can you figure out how to use the ConfigurationManager programmatically in a very short time? I guess not. It's not your fault, but the absent of some sample code. Though in this particular case there is a particular section in the Windows Mobile SDK which contains many sample applications, that doesn't help enough. Code segments are very necessary to be included along with the API descriptions.

But then let's look at the Address.AddressLine Property in the Live Search API Reference (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb251813.aspx). In this case, thanks to the large amount of sample code, I'm positive that developers can get the idea very soon, because I personally do and I never developed any single application using Live Search APIs before.

The developers will still be able to figure out how to use the APIs without good sample code segments after some time, but if the sample is there, then the developers will be able to figure it out immediately. This shows the importance, the value, and the "magic" of the code segments that most current SDK documentations don't have, which is quite unfortunate.

Lack of Integration

Every single API is documented, but unfortunately, nobody knows how to use them together from the documentation.

Sample applications and starter kits do solve part of this problem and provide valuable information to the developers on how to use different APIs together. But looking at a sample application or starter kit with more than 500 lines of code just to know how to use two simple APIs together doesn't seem efficient.

I don't know whether there can be any good way to completely solve this problem, but creating more topics on how to use some of the APIs together seems to be a good idea, because these topics will be of high value. An SDK documentation certainly needs to have some low value contents to cover everything, but users need high value documentation, and the high value part is the set of contents that they will use and appreciate the most.

Users don't need information in using all the combinations of the single APIs (that will be huge amount of contents to create, but low value). The creator of the documentation should do enough user research to understand what combinations of APIs are of the highest demand, then create topics on how to use those APIs together. I bet the developers will like that. Well, don't trust me, your user research will tell everything.

Lack of Innovation

Every SDK documentation in the market looks similar in format and style. Every SDK documentation looks like a dictionary. As I mentioned above, it's necessary for an SDK documentation to include every public API the platform offers, but the documentation can be a lot more flexible in addition to that. The creators focused too much on trying to document every API and fix every bug, but invested too little on researching the users and finding new and innovative ways to present the information.

Then what are such innovative ways? There are a lot; and there are a lot that I don't know. As mentioned above, providing some topics of using certain combinations of APIs (of highest demand) is one possible way to improve the usability and value of the documentation. In addition, I'm also thinking about the way the contents being presented can be improved so that when a developer needs help on a task (note, a task, not an API), information such as the APIs he may use, samples, alternative approaches, etc should be available to the developer. Then the developer can grab the information he needs very easily, and complete the task easier than ever.

Creating high value SDK documentations is the same as creating high quality software products. Users are very important in the process. Formal user studies are very necessary in creating documentations, to determine what innovations can be done to best satisfy users' needs.

Such improvements need a lot of work to be done, and that's why we haven't seen this happen yet. But again, developers don't only need a "dictionary", they need innovative and high value support contents that ultimately help them finish their work. SDK documentation creators should really realize and understand this. But since the demand is there, I'm positive that I can see some innovations on SDK documentations in the future.

The good thing

The good thing is that every major company creating SDK documentations also provides community support materials such as webcasts, blogs, and forums to assist developers. In the mean time, if such community support can be continued, and at the same time adding more code segments to existing topics, creating more high value topics in addition to the dictionary of APIs, begin to do formal user studies on documentation, and do some useful innovations, then the whole customer (developer) experience will be a lot better. As an Independent Software Vendor programming on many different platforms, I really hope I can see that happen as early as possible.

No way to join the social – Is the lack of global languages support on Zune a problem, or not at all?

Nuo Yan — Fri, 16 May 2008 17:39:00 GMT

It’s been a pretty long time since the first generation of Zune came out. Microsoft wants to attract us as potential users to join the social – they made pretty good media sharing and community features so that to distinct from similar products made by other companies.

However, Zune has a very serious usability problem that even though a huge amount of users have been complaining all the time, it’s never been solved. It is the lack of support for most of the global languages.

It’s true that Zune has not yet been available globally. However, the assumption of people in North America only listen to English, French, and Spanish songs just does not make sense. There’re people originally from almost anywhere in the world reside in North America temporarily or permanently. They speak different languages and they have their entertainment needs as well. They listen to English songs, but they also listen to songs on their own languages.

You will be able to see the demand of global languages support by just doing a simple search on the Internet. You will see a huge number of complains from the date the first generation of Zune came out all the way up to the present time.

The users do not even need Microsoft to have Zune menus displayed in their languages. They just need Zune to have the ability to show their song information correctly on the device. Technically, this is really a simple task for Microsoft to do. So it’s become a do-or-not-do decision for Microsoft. But provided the fact that until the newly released version 2.5, Zune still doesn’t support most global languages, I guess Microsoft made the not-do decision. But I still hope in the upcoming third generation, they can do it.

If you now think that Microsoft has done nothing about this issue, you are wrong. In order for the users to solve this design or usability problem, Microsoft published a Knowledge Base article (http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/928210/en-us?sd=zune). It simply asks the user to change all the song information in other languages to their equivalent English representation. Well, does anybody like to find some spare time to translate and change the name, album, and artist information of 10,000 songs in the media library? Or do you, as a user, want to just simply buy an ipod, iriver, or Creative zen? Microsoft tried to ask the customers to solve their own design issues. This will not work out in this user centric era!

As the result, people have songs in foreign languages are in a frustrating situation. They may like their Zunes; they may like the social; but they don’t want to see the boxes showing in the device instead of the correct characters or languages anymore! Finally, they decide to switch, they either buy a much cheaper music player but supports 20 languages including their own, or go to use an ipod.

Microsoft should really do something to solve this – provided it’s really just a matter of whether or not putting some font files in the system partition with just a little extra work.

Xiaonei and Facebook - Huge differences, but who cares?

Nuo Yan — Mon, 12 May 2008 18:01:00 GMT

Xiaonei, which is called “the Facebook of China,” has a very similar user interface as Facebook. It provides similar but simplified functionalities. While western media often compare the two and discuss about the potential competitions they may have, I don’t think in recent time there will be any big competition between them.

In many senses Xiaonei and Facebook do the same thing. They are both social network systems and are both platforms designed mainly for people who already know each other to get connected or reconnected. However, there’s really a long way to go for both of them to have a real competition with each other.

Xiaonei has absolute advantage in China. They started in as early as 2005 and accumulated a huge number of Chinese users. According to the recent news reports, they also raised a lot of money. But Facebook, on the other hand, has not even officially entered China (or just started to do so). As the result, even with the assumption Facebook gets started to enter the big Chinese market, they still need a lot of efforts to get the users to them. And many Xiaonei users may even think that Facebook copies Xiaonei, since they’ve never known Facebook before.

However, Facebook currently has absolute advantage in technology. Although Xiaonei looks really like Facebook, they don’t get the same underlying technology, even for basic features. Every single software system has problems and bugs, but Xiaonei still has enough technical problems (bugs) to give users a bad experience. They need a long way to go to be technically comparable to Facebook. As a user, I hope Xiaonei will invest more to the development team and create software with better quality. In addition to the quality issue, Facebook makes itself an open platform. They provide Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to third party. Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) can develop their own applications or plug-ins for Facebook. By doing so, the contents of Facebook have been dramatically enriched. This also help creates a better user experience.

Now you may realize why I make the point that Xiaonei and Facebook will not even in competition in a short time. They both have advantages that the other can’t catch up in a short time. Xiaonei will get more and more users and eventually succeed within China, while Facebook will continue their success in other parts of the world. I, as a user of both systems, just hope both of them can get better and provide us a great user experience. I hope Xiaonei can continually improve their technology; and Facebook can continue their efforts on globalization.

It will be fun to see what the situation is again in 5 years.

Usability Issue - Windows Security Center

Nuo Yan — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 22:08:00 GMT

My friend went to China for a 3-month vacation last December. Just now she asked me to help turn on her computer and send her a file in her computer. Since the computer hasn't been on for two months, the first notification I got when I logged in was a security notification said Windows Defender needed to be updated.

I clicked the balloon notification, and it guided me to the Windows Security Center. Then I noticed that Spyware and other malware protection is out of date, so I clicked Update Now.

Then a small dialog box pops up, as shown in the figure.

There isn't any problem so far. But if you look at the small dialog box, there are two buttons on it: "Cancel" and "Close".

As a user, I feel confused about the "Close" button. I clearly know by intuition that pressing the "Cancel" button will cancel the update process and return to Windows Security Center. But what does "Close" do? Does it just close the pop up dialog box and continue the updating process? Or does it end the updating process as well?

It's just confusing.

There can be many ways to solve the problem, such as changing "Close" to "Minimize". It may be worth to survey some users about this problem to know if the general users consider this a problem. At least I personally consider it an usability issue.

Usability Issue - My Keyboard's "Logout" Button

Nuo Yan — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 01:37:00 GMT

There are three shortcut buttons on my keyboard which are linked to the calculator, logout command, and sleep command respectively. They are next to each other. I like this design since these shortcut buttons have saved me a lot of times for these activities, especially for the calculator.

However, one day when I try to use the calculator, I mistakenly pressed the "logout" button. My system immediately logs out without double checking with me. I didn't lost my work, but logging back-in and open up the applications I need takes time.

I consider this as a usability issue. The three buttons are placed very close to each other, so there will be chances for the users to accidently press the wrong button. Actions like "logout" and "sleep" are not like just launching a program, a double check with the user is a quite necessary routine.

The User Interface or Experience Designers of the keyboard should realize about this; design usability studies to test the users; and make improvements. The usability study should be detailed enough to test every possible interaction between the user and the interface. For example, it shouldn't only testing whether the user can find the button which executes the logout activity, but also need to test the scenario that the action has been done by accident. In this case, a relatively long term test by the users may also help in collecting more valuable feedbacks.

Usability Issue in Windows Recycle Bin on the Desktop

Nuo Yan — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 04:33:00 GMT

If you put a Recycle Bin on the desktop, you might empty it by right clicking it and click "Empty Recycle Bin" form the menu.

But you may have noticed that there is another option in the menu called "Delete" which is for deleting the Recycle Bin shortcut from the desktop.

I saw many people mistakenly clicking the "Delete" menu item instead of the correct "Empty Recycle Bin" for emptying the trash, so I consider this as a usability issue for this design.

One way to solve this issue is to replace the "Delete" menu item with other names such as "Remove this shortcut." Currently I don't have any better idea.

Privacy, Privacy, Privacy...

Nuo Yan — Tue, 01 May 2007 16:05:00 GMT

Not a very long time ago I studied Human Computer Interaction for a quarter. Not saying how much I learned in the class, even after the course I still keep noticing useability issues of everything in my everyday life.

Last week I went to a ticket office to buy a ticket for a show. There was a line with many people waiting. The sales person in the ticket counter asked the same question loudly to every single one: "What's your address and phone number, please?"

First of all, many of us may concern about why they are collecting such personal information. In ohter words, how they will use the information. Some may also concern about the security of the information stored in their systems. For example, whether they will disclose the information to any third party or not. As the result, at least they should explicitly state they would use the information properly and would not disclose to any third party.

Second, they asked everyone for personal information in speaking, which means all others in the line could hear the information. This is actually disclosing their personal information to many third parties. Nobody knows what others in the line do. Any people in the line can simply record the voice containing personal information to a mobile or portable device, then use or distribute/disclose the information illegally in the future.

In such situation, I guess a lot of people would not provide their real address and phone number. Then from the ticket company's point of view, many of the personal information they collected would be invalid. Then they cannot do what they intended to do with such information.

A Better Design

1. Privacy and disclosure statements are necessary.

2. In such privacy and disclosure statements, must explicitly state how the information will be used.

3. Provide a form for everyone to fillout, including their address and phone number, and explicitly print the privacy and disclosure statements on the form.

By doing so, though there must still be people who don't want to write their true information, at least all people are doing the ticket-buying process with comfort. They don't have to worry about how others in the line will hear their personal information. And similarly, they can at least assume the company will use the information properly, as stated in the explicit privacy and disclosure statements on the form.