Tag: ux

Defaults Matter

We tout decicions and not options. We laud people who make it work, simply and efficiently. So how do we decide what the default decisions should be?

I was looking at a new plugin for an affiliate program, and it set up the links based on region. The way this plugin worked, if you don’t have an account specifically for that country, the plugin author had it set to use his ID if the user didn’t enter one. This is a small issue, in that the user may, unwittingly, be letting the dev earn money of their site. It’s also just not permitted. You don’t put up links or ads on someone else’s site without them checking a box to allow it, it’s gauche and against the .ORG guidelines.

Without knowing the issues of the affiliate app, I pushed back, and was surprised that the plugin dev was doing this because if he didn’t, the code would break. The affiliate program didn’t have a fallback to show a default location if you didn’t have an ID for that area, it just errored out. Thankfully, this developer and I worked out a solution. If there was no ID for the region, the plugin wouldn’t display the affiliate links. There was also a checkbox “Use the developer’s affiliate code in regions where you don’t have one!” that explained this would help feed and clothe the dev.

Another example. A plugin made a shortcode to play MP3s, and by default if you don’t have an MP3, it played one of him from his domain. Besides the fact that you’ll crash your server if you get popular enough, the fallback for that should be for the shortcode to output “Oh noes! No MP3 picked!”

This got me thinking about how we determine the defaults for anything. We pick what we want to support most, we guess at what people will use most, and we test what we can think of. But that isn’t easy at all. Start factoring in upgrades. You add a new feature and you want people to use it, so you turn it on to aid discovery (Jetpack does this). Not everyone likes that and gets mad that the first thing they have to do is disable it! So you think about alert boxes “Hey, you upgraded and there’s a new thing!” but then people hate dismissing those alerts.

Picking the right defaults for your intended audience matters. The affiliate code guy knew about an error if he didn’t do that, and compensated in a way that would be seamless for the users, but a little unethical (I felt) because it took advantage of their ignorance to make money for him. I’m kind of hip on educating the masses. The shortcode guy just didn’t think about the long-term ramifications. Neither actually meant to be harmful, but both were thinking about their users and their familiarity with things. Both were cognizant of the fact that a product not working because of incomplete settings should not break.

Determining your default settings is a race between education and simplification. It should be as simple and straightforward as possible to make things easier for the new users. At the same time, it should be made totally obvious in straightforward ways what the defaults can be changed to. This can be done with help screens in your plugins, but also in the welcome pages and the in-line explanations of setup. You can hide aspects of the code from users until they’ve finished pre-requisites.

Defaults are the one place where you have to actually try to know what the users will be thinking, so don’t worry if you get it wrong. You can always iterate.

9 May, 2014
LastPass? LostPass!

ModemLoper came up with the name.

So here’s a frustrating experience. My office uses LastPass to share passwords for things. Secret things. They send me an ‘invite’ for the Enterprise account with my company email. I go to log in with the first-time password thing, and it says I need to make a new password. Sure, because email isn’t secure, so I make a new password the same way I have for the last year. I open up 1Password, make a new account there (LastPass – Work) with the login as my.email@myoffice.com and generate a password. So I have a password stored there you see. I then copy that password and paste it in, twice, to change the password.

I want to note some things here. I did not have a message about how my master password was super important at this time. In fact, it just said to enter it twice. Also remember this was for an ENTERPRISE account. Not a normal user. Okay?

So I do that, it says yay log in now! I take the same password, paste it in, no go. Oh, okay, maybe a butterfly farted. I’ll just reset it. Guess what I can’t do? The password ‘Hint’ was useless, since my password was along the lines of dyEno4FfW4EsED and I’d set the hint to “1Password” like you often do. Also there’s no ’email me my password’ or ‘reset my password’ thing I can use. Probably because email isn’t secure. The email where they’d emailed me a temp password just before to create my Enterprise account.

At this point I tweeted obscenities. I have an account but I can’t use it. I can’t reset the password. I can’t recover the password. I don’t have a ‘One Time’ use password because I never got to the point where it let me create that sort of thing. Ditto with ‘reverting’ my vault. There was nothing to revert to so I couldn’t do that. The official answer was to delete my account and start over. There was more swearing. Most of it public use of the F-word on Twitter.

But I did delete the account, made a new one, and this time it said “Hey, this master password thing is super important!” and took me to a second screen where I have to re-enter it. Oh, and yes, I used the same password I’d made before. It worked this time. My coworker resent the invite to join our Enterprise account. I do so, set up Two Factor Authentication, trust my laptop, and he shared the folders.

As I spell out the drama to him, I realize that this may be happening because I didn’t have an account before. That is, I went ahead and used the account and password from the email. Don’t believe me that they sent a clear-text password? Here:

I redacted the account, even though you could guess it. Four hours pass. I get a tweet from the LastPass CEO:

https://twitter.com/joesiegrist/status/403649508715667456

to which I replied:

https://twitter.com/ipstenu/status/403649761212784640

Everything’s fine now, and my takeaway from this is ‘Make an account before joining an Enterprise’ because clearly their ‘sign up through your enterprise’ thing is buggy. The whole interface is a little janky, and I find that their statement of how they cannot possibly reset your password to be weird:

Recovery for LastPass is not the same as other services you may have previously used – due to our encryption technology, LastPass does not know your Master Password, so we cannot look it up, send it to you, or reset it for you. This means your data remains secure from threats, but also means that there are limited options when you forget your Master Password.

I gather they mean “There’s no way to change your password without knowing your current password.” And really this is the ultimate security, isn’t it? No one but you can change it without knowing your master password. The problem with this, and really all these things, is that if I have one master password, it must be easy for me to memorize and remember at the drop of a hat.

Which means my master password is my least secure password. Check the sticky notes on my monitor.

24 February, 2014
Why I Hate Facebook

I do, you know. I hate it for a couple reasons, but the primary one is the user interface sucks. It’s just horrible. And since I’ve apparently turned Friday into my free, shortform, random topic day, let me explain to you why.

Ignores My Settings

I cannot tell you how many times I’ve gone to my timeline and seen garbage from last week. “What the hell?” I would shout, and look to see that my timeline is ordered by something called “Top Stories.” Interesting, because I know for a 100% fact that I set it to “Most Recent.” But no, no, Facebook changed it. So I change it back:

And don’t ask me how many times I’ve had to turn chat OFF.

Click Don’t Matter

This is worse on iOS where I have to click twice on every single link, but it’s bad on the sort order, which is not a link but a drop down. Only since it’s right above the post in my timeline, I have to wiggle my mouse around until I magically click the right place for it to work. Using Facebook on my iPhone means I have to use their app, which behaves radically differently from the normal app, so thanks. Now I have to learn everything twice.

Unfollow Does not Mean What You Think It Means

If I comment in a thread, I follow it. Okay. I can see why you do that, and while I’d like an option to default that to off, I’m not going to argue. But when I make a comment, sometimes I click ‘Unfollow’ right away, because I just wanted to say one thing, or post “Congratulations on your baby!” and move on. That’s the end of it, right?

Nope. Every time someone ‘likes’ my comment, I get a notification. Every. Smegging. Time. I’m witty. Lots of people like my comments, or find them helpful, or whatever. That means I get a lot of BS notifications I don’t give a horse’s patootie about.

Wrong location For VERY important information

Do you know how to ‘tell’ if a post can be shared? Some can, some can’t you see. Let me help. This post is public and can be shared:

This post is friends only and cannot be shared:

Different icons, different meanings. Where are these icons? At the bottom of the post. Why is that a problem, you may ask? After all, the share button is down there too! Not everyone shares with share buttons. A lot of people will copy what someone says on FB to a blog. If they don’t happen to scroll down (which, let’s face it, a lot of us don’t), and don’t happen to know magically that a globe is public and a group of little people is a friends-only thing, they’ll copy the post content, paste it to their website, and share with the world.

I’m not so naive to think anything I put online is ever fully ‘private.’ But I’m intelligent, experienced, and I work in IT. I understand the world around me, and how the digital world shares data. If it’s online, someone will see it, share it, and make it public. Not everyone gets that, and they get upset.

How could Facebook fix this? Put at the top of the post “Friends Only!” or “Public Post” so it’s clear right away.

Bad Colors

Did you know you can embed Facebook posts in WordPress?

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151997270514795&set=a.10150154582169795.302445.251152514794&type=1

That’s my high school celebrating soccer season. The link for embedding FB? Grey. Pale grey. In the image below, I’m hovering over it. It’s still grey. If I didn’t know better, I’d think it was plain text!

There should be a color change when you hover over a link, a noticable color change.

But wait, there’s more!

I’m sure there is, but at over 600 words, lets call this a day. What annoys you about Facebook’s user interface?

29 November, 2013
Speaking of Redesign Thoughts…

I caught this one on Twitter (and promptly forgot to blog about it in the 3.3 support craze).

Thibaut Ninove, a Web & UI designer from Belgium, talks about pixels, web, design, standards and other topics on his blog, Dots & Thoughts. He’s got a good one I know I’ve groused about before. Why not put the ‘add media’ icon on the post edit bar?

It’s there if you go into the fullscreen view after all:

So clearly the hard work with the graphic is already done, and this would just be a case of moving it down a bit. The only reason I can think of to leave it one-out is that, pre 3.3, there were multiple buttons depending on the type of media, and that would have been kludgy. Now that the uploader is ‘fixed’ (it’s my favorite thing about 3.3), maybe 3.4 should move that in?

Credit: My 2 cents about the WordPress 3.3 post editor | Dots & Thoughts.

14 December, 2011
WordPress Sidebars as Menus: Part 3
Who knew I’d be making a series of posts!? Part the Third is all about ‘per page sidebars.’ Inspiration struck as I was finally able to visualize how I’d want it to look, and it’s stupid simple.

First and foremost, it’s hidden by default in the Screen Options. This is important, since while I totally agree to use decisions, not options, this is something people need options for, but at the same time it is not something everyone will use. The fact that there aren’t more plugins that do it is paramount in that deduction. I know of two, after all, and one requires you to think. A lot. And while thinking isn’t bad, when you’re new, you want things to be straight forward and make sense. As subjective as that can be.

My idea is that by default, you use the default sidebars. Assuming you’ve defined them as I detailed out in my previous post, let’s play pretend…

Assumptions
1. I’m using the TwentyEleven theme with the following widget areas: Main Sidebar, Footer Area One, Footer Area Two, Footer Area Three, Showcase
2. I’m using a Static Front Page
3. I want a special sidebar only on that static front page
4. My theme uses a reasonable number of sidebars (i.e. 10 or less)
5. I’ve already setup my defined sidebar sets as follows:
  - Primary (for use on Main Sidebar)
  - Showcase
  - Footer left (for use on Footer Area One)
  - Footer middle (for use on Footer Area Two)
  - Footer right (for use on Footer Area Three)
  - Front Page Footer Left (for use on Footer Area One on the static front page only)
What’s that!? Front Page Footer Left? How ever will I define that? Where do I define it? If I only want that sidebar set (Chip, that’s for you) to show up on one page, I could either figure out how to select a page on the Widget/Sidebar editor, or I could do it on the Page Editor. For the purpose of this post, we’re doing it on the page.

Why? Well, it’s a split decision, and without any studies to back it up one way or the other, I suspect that people think ‘You know, I wrote this page, and I want a special sidebar here.’ and not ‘I wrote this special sidebar and want it to show up there on that page.’ My use of this/that and here/there were very purposeful. You think about the sidebars you want while you’re on the page they’re intended for. Therefore, you should define the sidebars on that page. The same argument could be made the other way, I’m aware of this. Just go with me for now.

We go to edit the page and first turn on manage sidebars(You can now see what other options I have going on.):

That gives me a brand new post meta box:

See why I said ‘reasonable number of sidebars’? This could get way out of hand, way fast. You may also note that they all default to … (Default). Well go back to my other idea of having a selection of where to use a sidebar and this makes sense. If you define a sidebar area back there, then that’s the assumed Default sidebar. When you want a specific page to have a totally different sidebar, we should store this information on the page, not in the sidebar/widget like we do today with Widget Logic, etc.

I can use the drop down boxes to show all the available sidebar sets:

Boom. I’m set for this page.

However. This doesn’t solve a big problem: What if I want a special sidebar for specific categories or archives? I’m still doodling on that one, but my first thought is what if certain ‘names’ were reserved. So if I made a sidebar named ‘categories’ it would automagically be used for categories, working on the same concept of the template hierarchy. All things being equal, it defaults to what you picked on the Widgets page.

By the way, these are the original doodles:
8 December, 2011
WordPress Sidebars as Menus: Part 2

Happy Thanksgiving. Here are some more ideas, partly based on the comments left in post #1. At the bottom is a gallery of all the various mockups, and feel free to download, tweak, etc.

Instead of a big Sidebar Locations box in upper left, what if you made location an element in the Sidebars themselves (Primary, Test)?

This has the location selection in the Sidebar Area itself. I’m not sure if I like the multiple saves, but if you have a long Sidebar Area, it seems sensible I made the space a big bigger with the idea that plugins could hook in and add things. More on that in a minute. You’ll also notice that there’s a scrollbar for the ‘Available Widgets’. Yeah, we lose drag/drop with this scenario, and while I agree D&D is very cool, it’s starting to get unmanageable when you want to drag a widget over to the area halfway down the screen. My grandmother said it was impossible for her to scroll in two directions (over and down) while holding down the mouse button. Mind you, she’s a 90-year-old with glaucoma.

Here’s what the dropdown looks like. Obviously we’re on Twenty Eleven here. The ‘blank’ is for ‘none’ which, on reflection, may need to become ‘(none)’ instead. It’s obvious to me that blank == none, but I’m not sure how new users would feel about that. Yes, my rounded corners suck.

Again, my colors and icons suck here, but this is a large pointer finger hovering over Custom Menu being told “Use this to….” My (minor) concern with this is that Akismet, for example, has the description of … Akismet. Singularly useless. You’d think it’d be better. But they’re not the only ones who slacked off on descriptions, so some of these will suck. Still, color it any which way and a hover-up will provide information.

The major concern I have, again, is accessibility. I’m hoping that this has already been hashed out before and we don’t have to invent something all new to allow screen readers to parse what things are for. That would be a deal breaker to me.

Here is the ‘new’ screen, complete with directions and a button.

By the way, since I suck at gradients, I opted not to make ‘Create Sidebar’ in the button, but that’s a nice idea too. Of course, with Jane’s recent post about the square button, that works too. I spun up a inverse of that, since it mimics the blue background and looks ‘obvious’ to me.

I LOVE the idea of a visual guide to where the sidebars are. Makes me think of Stephanie Leary’s layout fiddling with IDs:http://sillybean.net/downloads/widget-admin-ui-altered-with-ID.png (Trac ticket #18334:http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/18334 – some other cool ideas there, too.)

I love Stephanie’s idea too, but. I really didn’t like the ‘uneven’ feel of her screen (not her fault, it’s just CSS layouts drive people to drink). Her’s works because you see where the widgets are going to go. I would want to have it be a wireframe. This is one idea for where to show the description, though I’m not really sold on it.

I know that Jane mentioned per-page widgets as a priority (maybe in IRC?), but we’ll have to wait until after the core team meet up to see what they decide on as goals.

On the other hand, I really like my idea for Sidebar Logic. If you’ve used Widget Logic, you get the idea. Put in the PHP to say ‘This Sidebar shows up on the Main Sidebar area IF these parameters are met.’ It’s not as ‘per page’ as Jane probably had in mind, though, and I’d like to see it avoid the need for PHP, but on the other hand, I’d love to see something plugged in there.

That’s all I have for you today, but here’s the Gallery, as promised!

24 November, 2011