Nielsen and Spolsky on Vista and Office 2007

Jakob Nielsen’s latest Alertbox column has a brief discussion (Tab usability guidelines, point 9) of upper vs title vs sentence case, and I’m pleased to see that:

“Microsoft’s Vista User Experience guidelines recommend sentence case (in which you capitalize only the first character of the first word)…

In fact, Microsoft’s UE guidelines aren’t half bad (shame about the OS). And, of course, Microsoft should make it easier for Joel Spolsky to open their boxes:

“A box that many people can’t figure out how to open without a Google search is an unusually pathetic failure of design. As the line goes from Billy Madison: ‘I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.’”

Maybe then the future will turn out OK. Believe.

The story so far: from page to TV to cut scenes

All new media start by imitating those that went before them. Early radio was long-distance music hall entertainment. Film was moving pictures, and they still call it that. TV started out as radio with pictures.

The web is now going through its second phase of imitation.

During the first phase, it mimicked books and other paper documents, and we still talk about page views, home pages, and other concepts borrowed from traditional publishing.

In its second phase, which we’re plodding through right now, the web is made to imitate radio and TV as well: webcasts, podcasts, YouTube, iTunes, etc. Here’s a new medium that’s imitating all of the old ones at once: print, radio, TV and film.

But it looks as though the web is finally outgrowing the hand-me-downs. More and more companies, from advertising agencies to retailers, are learning that the web isn’t a giant billboard, a TV ad or an interminable mail order catalogue.

Remember “interactive”? The thing that made the web special to start with? Before it turned into something as exciting as those “interactive menus” that old DVDs list among their special features? Well, interactive is back in a big way.

Because people (you can call them consumers, or audience segments, if you must) — especially the 25–40% who game — have less and less time for the display model, for TV, for things that just wash over them. That they can’t influence. Sites, for instance, that say, “Sit still! Listen! Stop fidgeting! Watch! Don’t do that! This is our brand! Don’t touch it!”

Don’t touch it? How tangible, how useful is that?

So here’s your good deed for today: go tell an e-commerce manager that her checkout is a lonely corridor crawl. And while you’re at it, have a word with her agency’s creative director too and whisper that his ads are cut scenes, really, that most of us skip.

Why games are good for you (Bring on the “Orange Box”)

Are games good for you? Or bad for society? Will they make you a better, more knowledgeable, more productive citizen? More violent and competitive? Will they help you win that job, so that instead of you the other guy starves? It matters, Citizens!

Right at the start of Half-Life 2, as another commuter train pulls into City 17, there’s this scene where a cop tells you to pick up a can. If you don’t, he’ll beat you until you either die and restart or pick up the can.

During that 15-second episode you learn three things: how to press the “Use” key to pick up objects, that the police are scum, and that your only options at this stage are blind obedience or death.

But, being an optimist, you only die once.

You restart and this time you pick up the can, because you’ve learned yet another thing. This is the sequel to Half-Life: you will find a crowbar, eventually.

Given time, or historically speaking, there’s always a third option besides obedience and death. And that’s one of the reasons why games are good for you.

In: utility, desirability. On the way out: usability

I’ve been catching up on the history of the web, interaction design and customer experience lately, so there’s a lot of related books lying about the house: Moggridge’s Designing Interactions, Accidental Empires by R. Cringely, Don Norman’s Emotional Design, Where Wizards Stay up Late, Weaving the Web by Sir Tim himself, etc. etc. (I like switching books like others flick between channels, authors don’t get interrupted often enough, and sometimes there’s a strobing effect that produces ideas…).

But then Owen and ER came to visit and Owen said I should watch what I’m reading or I might turn into a usability expert. Which would be a terrible fate.

Because, in the grim world of usability, it’s all about tasks that you have to perform, as efficiently as possible. In usability, people never just show up, play around, wander about or say, “So. Tell me.” They’ve always got tasks to perform, the poor things. Jakob don’t play.

The good news is that usability is going out of style. While utility and desirability are in. It’s taken long enough but apparently everyone now agrees that, in products and services, even on the web, useful is actually more important than usable. Then there’s the revelation, in a recent Forrester report, that boring is bad. And finally there are Jesse James Garrett’s comments in last week’s interview with e-consultancy’s Richard Maven:

People want products that have a personality and to have a sense of who the product is. Traditional usability is not designed to address that, so we have found ourselves looking more to traditional techniques from marketing and branding…

It adds up. Does anyone else get the feeling that usability (how) is getting squeezed out between usefulness (why) and branding (who)?