Before I went to John Mayer’s concert last night I listened to the playlist “John Mayer- Where The List Is” on You Tube. Well things were quite simple: I toggled on/off of the Autoplay and Shuffle buttons, I skipped a song by clicking >| , cool.
This morning I searched for the same playlist again, but I couldn’t find the any of these icons! Weird, I went back to my book (on Kindle lol) and totally forgot about the playlist thing. In the middle of my reading I felt tired so I moved my eyes from small Kindle to the screen, I suddenly noticed something: a thick dark gray bar at the bottom of the YouTube page showing all the buttons and title of playing song. I can also reach all songs in the playlist by clicking on an up arrow.
I’m neutral to this feature, I think it’s good actually, but let’s take a look at a similar example.
Hulu-- http://www.hulu.com/
TuDou.com -- http://www.tudou.com/
What's the difference between their playlists and YouTube's? Theirs are closer to the player itself. In Fitts Law, the closer and bigger your target area is, the faster the users can perform the action and the fewer opportunities the users get confused.
That's it.
Friday, July 30, 2010
Thursday, July 29, 2010
[Cars] DON'T LIKE IT AT ALL
I really don’t think the concept of “cars” was well designed. How do you control an object well if you can’t see the front, the back, the bottom of it? You scratch you car when parking, you bump into a pole when reversing, you drive on the sidewalk when making a right turn. Car accidents happen for reasons—sometimes they are not accidents at all.
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
[Comcast Remote Control] Miss the good old days
I miss the good old days that you turn on the TV and you watch TV. The design of remote control or TV system or all the connections between them is way too complicated. And Comcast can be the best/worst example.
The remote control is a nightmare; it includes all the poor design that we teach in the textbooks. I bought a used Hitachi HDTV from my friend Gary and I was really excited about replacing my 11” RCA lol. Anyways, after I programmed the remote control, I pressed “All On” button was ready to enjoy the on demand series; hmmm all I got was black screen. Alright, then, debugging: channel 3, check; NTSC, check; scanning channels maybe? DTV maybe? Channel 14 then? I spent 2 hours calling Gary and other friends, and Googling, no solutions. The 11” RCA worked so the cable worked fine. “Not again” I thought, cuz 2 days ago I’d already spent 1 hour figuring out the channel 3 stuff after I accidently switched it to some other channels. I almost returned the TV back to Gary, and then I noticed the TV box was…errrr… not what it’s supposed to be. So I pressed “cable”, then “power”, and viola, it gave me all the on demand series again. Yay!!!
What happened is the remote control has no “error preventable” function. Preventing errors is a basic design principle of products, for example you cannot plug in your USB stick into the HDMI spot cuz they have different shapes; this prevents you from charging your iPod 12 hours for getting nothing. When I hit “All On” I thought I turned on everything, but actually I didn’t. I turned the TV on but turned the TV box OFF at the same time. It happened because when I switched the cable cord from my RCA to the new TV, the power of the TV box was still on. And it’s hard to tell the difference of on and off status from the machine display. OMG and this took 2 hours away from my life??? I really don’t like this. Maybe you IT guys or boys or mechanics can figure this out easily, but NOT ME.
The remote control is a nightmare; it includes all the poor design that we teach in the textbooks. I bought a used Hitachi HDTV from my friend Gary and I was really excited about replacing my 11” RCA lol. Anyways, after I programmed the remote control, I pressed “All On” button was ready to enjoy the on demand series; hmmm all I got was black screen. Alright, then, debugging: channel 3, check; NTSC, check; scanning channels maybe? DTV maybe? Channel 14 then? I spent 2 hours calling Gary and other friends, and Googling, no solutions. The 11” RCA worked so the cable worked fine. “Not again” I thought, cuz 2 days ago I’d already spent 1 hour figuring out the channel 3 stuff after I accidently switched it to some other channels. I almost returned the TV back to Gary, and then I noticed the TV box was…errrr… not what it’s supposed to be. So I pressed “cable”, then “power”, and viola, it gave me all the on demand series again. Yay!!!
What happened is the remote control has no “error preventable” function. Preventing errors is a basic design principle of products, for example you cannot plug in your USB stick into the HDMI spot cuz they have different shapes; this prevents you from charging your iPod 12 hours for getting nothing. When I hit “All On” I thought I turned on everything, but actually I didn’t. I turned the TV on but turned the TV box OFF at the same time. It happened because when I switched the cable cord from my RCA to the new TV, the power of the TV box was still on. And it’s hard to tell the difference of on and off status from the machine display. OMG and this took 2 hours away from my life??? I really don’t like this. Maybe you IT guys or boys or mechanics can figure this out easily, but NOT ME.
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
[Facebook] Friend Suggestions
I really love the recent changes on FB. I think they improved the algorithm and interaction design a lot and they really care about what the users need.
FB is a networking/social website. They have a feature called friend suggestion. This feature offers several different interface, which allows users to friend other users they might want to connect with. Sometimes FB provides reasons/explanations why they suggest these friends, but sometimes they don't. In some sense this feature is useful, but to some users, well, like me, is not convincing. In academic it is called "intrusive". For example, sound is more intrusive than visual image. The GPS uses an intrusive way to remind drivers to turn right at the next intersection, but the users can definitely check the route details while waiting for the red light. When we apply this to FB friend suggestion, we can say that the intrusive action is more "effective", but not really "convincing". Take myself for instance, I had no idea why FB insisted to suggest a friend to me while there's almost no common friends between us.
On the other hand, if I actively find a user who have many common friends or interests, I would be really interested in knowing the reasons. For example, when I typed Jeff in the search box, the top 3 results are my Jeff friends, but I also found some other Jeffs who I might know; one is my ex-coworker (8 mutual friends) and the other 2 went to the same grad school with me. It's weird that FB didn't suggest those friends to me before, but it's also very awesome that I found these friend BY MYSELF :p. This really impressed me cuz it helps me connect to people I really want to network with.
I'm not saying the friend suggestion is not useful, actually I think it is an essential component on FB. But it's also really cool to throw the "control" back to users. I think FB is playing smart.
FB is a networking/social website. They have a feature called friend suggestion. This feature offers several different interface, which allows users to friend other users they might want to connect with. Sometimes FB provides reasons/explanations why they suggest these friends, but sometimes they don't. In some sense this feature is useful, but to some users, well, like me, is not convincing. In academic it is called "intrusive". For example, sound is more intrusive than visual image. The GPS uses an intrusive way to remind drivers to turn right at the next intersection, but the users can definitely check the route details while waiting for the red light. When we apply this to FB friend suggestion, we can say that the intrusive action is more "effective", but not really "convincing". Take myself for instance, I had no idea why FB insisted to suggest a friend to me while there's almost no common friends between us.
On the other hand, if I actively find a user who have many common friends or interests, I would be really interested in knowing the reasons. For example, when I typed Jeff in the search box, the top 3 results are my Jeff friends, but I also found some other Jeffs who I might know; one is my ex-coworker (8 mutual friends) and the other 2 went to the same grad school with me. It's weird that FB didn't suggest those friends to me before, but it's also very awesome that I found these friend BY MYSELF :p. This really impressed me cuz it helps me connect to people I really want to network with.
I'm not saying the friend suggestion is not useful, actually I think it is an essential component on FB. But it's also really cool to throw the "control" back to users. I think FB is playing smart.
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