Want a usability expert? Try a kid.

I had to laugh a little bit about "usability experts" the last time I visited with my sister and her daughters. As I was creating a movie and a website with my nine-year old niece using iMovie and iWeb, we very quickly ran into several problems, including:

  1. I had to "explain" to her why I couldn't drag and drop some content into iMovie. ("But it's right there Uncle Al, why can't I move it into iMovie?")
  2. Sometimes the proper window didn't automatically receive focus, and she started typing into another window. This problem was exascerbated because the window that had focus isn't highlighted very much compared to windows that don't have input focus.
  3. The highlight color in iWeb was hard to see, so it wasn't apparent that text was already highlighted, so my niece would re-select text that was already selected.

There were quite a few more things that were wrong with both application experiences, including fundamental issues with the Mac OS X user interface, but I didn't bother to write them all down. I just remembered this experience as I was working with another Mac application today.

I'm not saying that a young child can help with the rules of your business application, but if you're curious as to whether your latest user interface (UI) design is a very good idea, do yourself a favor, and test it on a kid.


How to set a song rating on your iPod or iPhone

Wow, I'm such an iPod/iPhone/iTunes dummy, it took me over a year to realize that I could change the rating of a song from my iPhone.

You can set the rating of a song from your iPod or iPhone when the song is playing. To set or change the rating of the song, just tap the widget in the upper-right corner of the screen that looks like an icon of a bulleted list. The icon I've circled in the upper-right corner of this iPhone image is what I'm referring to:

Tapping this widget takes you to the "back side" of the song window, and at the top of this window you can set the song rating. If you haven't already set the rating for the song you're currently looking at, you'll see a row of five dots above the song. But if you have already set the rating for this song (presumably through iTunes), you'll see one or more stars here along with those dots. Here's what my window looks like for the BeeGees song Staying Alive, with the rating area circled in red:

(You're welcome to give it a different rating, but for me, three stars is just about right. :)

To set/change the rating for the current song, just tap one of the dots in this list. As you can see, you can give each song a rating between zero stars and five stars.

The cool thing about this feature is that it automatically syncs back with iTunes when you connect your iPod or iPhone back to your home computer. I assumed that this feature wasn't allowed on an iPod or iPhone because synchronization is typically a hard programming problem, but kudos to Apple here, they made this available.

The difference between Google and Bing, demonstrated by Jessica Biel

I guess timing really is everything, and an image is worth a thousand words.

Tonight I was poking on Google and Bing, trying to see the differences in their search results, when a friend wrote me about a movie named Stealth, starring Jessica Biel. Having spent most of the afternoon at a swimming pool on my off day today, the first thing my mind thinks of is to search both sites for what I think is one of the most famous pictures of Ms. Biel, one where she's sitting on a sink.

Don't do this at work(!)

As a disclaimer, let me first make very this clear: Don't attempt this search while at work.

Given that disclaimer, if you do an image search at both Google and Bing for the phrase "jessica biel sink", I think you'll see that Google is clearly still the king. Google returns the correct image 11 times out of 20 results, while Bing returns it only once, way down on the bottom of a very long search results page.

For the insanely lazy people out there, here are the direct links to the search results:

Just to be sure I wasn't missing something, I tried this search with the "safe search" feature turned on and off at each site, and Google was the clear winner in each case.

I'm not sure if this is a great test of the two search engines, but seeing the results visually, you can see the differences dramatically.

Book publishing with Drupal

Cool ... for anyone interested in online book publishing, Drupal offers a "book" content type that does a lot of the "magic" of page linking for you, creating links like next, previous, and up. If you're collaborating on a book, it also offers access control and permission features, which is also very cool.

As of Drupal version 6.x, I find the Drupal navigation system to be a little cumbersome, so if you're looking to get started with it, I recommend this Drupal help page on Book publishing. Also, if you're not familiar with it, the admin_menu module helps to simplify Drupal's administration menu system quite a bit.

Chrome "early access" release for Mac OS X

Just poking around the internet, I see that Google is providing an "early release" of the Chrome browser for Mac OS X. They have several warnings about privacy concerns, but if you'd like to see what's coming, it might be worth a look. I just took it for a spin, and while it seems pretty basic, it didn't crash, and it seems pretty quick.

The "tabs on the top" approach is preferred by both Chrome and Apple's Safari 4. This does give the UI a slightly cleaner feel, but it seems a little awkward to click and grab a tab at the top of a window to move the browser.

Justice Department investigating Silicon Valley hiring

I just read an article on the New York Times website that the Justice Department is beginning an antitrust investigation into the hiring practices of some of the best-known companies in Silicon Valley, including Google, Apple, Yahoo, Genentech, and even spreading out to Microsoft.

In the article they refer to anything from a "gentleman's agreement" regarding hiring, where partners informally agreed not to recruit from each other, to some companies having a "hands off" list they would provide to recruiters. I'm sure "recruiting" is different from "hiring", best the general idea was probably not to actively recruit from "partners".

In the consulting industry we didn't have a hands-off list, but we did have written agreements with our customers saying, "We won't hire from you, and you won't hire from us." In the consulting world, you don't want your customers to even think about hiring your employees, and you don't want to get into a situation where their employees want to work for you, and this formal agreement took care of all those hiring issues right away.

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