Dubroy.com/blog

An article I wrote called Doing Today’s Job with Yesterday’s Tools is up at Boxes and Arrows. Here’s the summary:

Where is the software that can help us cope with the massive amounts of information that we deal with on a daily basis? Patrick Dubroy points out the usability problems with current personal information management techniques, and makes some suggestions about how to improve the situation.

I wrote the article to help myself clarify my thoughts on the subject of information management. I doesn’t go into much technical detail; it’s more of a 10,000-foot view of the problem. Please check it out, Digg/Del.icio.us/link it, and by all means, leave a comment or email me if you have any thoughts.

One of the more annoying things about working with computers these days is having to remember a bazillion username/password combinations. There have been several attempts in the last few years at creating a viable single sign-on system, but none of them have been successful.

I think it’s mostly just been a social problem. Either people don’t want to trust their identity to a single authority like Microsoft, or else it’s just a chicken-egg thing. For whatever reason, these services have just not managed to gain any traction.

Now OpenID seems to be gaining some momentum. In short, OpenID is “an open, decentralized, free framework for user-centric digital identity.” The idea is that instead of logging into all your web sites with a separate username and password, you instead just use your OpenID, which is just some URI that identifies you — for example, http://pdubroy.myopenid.com, or http://dubroy.com/patrick. The site then makes a request to that URI, to confirm that you are that person. In the worst case, you still have to enter a username and password for every site that you log into, but the username and password are always the same. But if your OpenID provider keeps you logged in via a cookie, then you only have to enter your password once, no matter how many sites you log into.

OpenID began with LiveJournal, which immediately gave it a decently-sized user base. Then, a few weeks ago, Microsoft announced that they would be integrating OpenID support into Vista. Now AOL has announced that every AOL/AIM account now has an OpenID URI. So, it definitely looks like OpenID might be getting enough support to actually be useful.

It’s not all rosy though. Many people have pointed out that the OpenID process is very susceptible to phishing attacks; but that’s a problem we’re going to have to solve somehow anyways, and I think the proposed solutions are pretty decent.

There’s a good article on UXmatters about the increasing difficulty of keeping a handle on all our digital information. I’ve mostly thought about this as a short term, immediate problem: how can I make my life easier now? But of course, there is also the question of how we are going to manage all this information going forward. Are we going to be able to access photos and email that are 20 years old?

Luckily, I think the two points of view (immediate vs. long-term) are basically the same problem. If we can make it easier to navigate, manipulate, and share our information now, then it will be easier to access in the future. Again, it basically comes back to the core ideas of the semantic web (from the W3C):

The Semantic Web is about two things. It is about common formats for integration and combination of data drawn from diverse sources, where on the original Web mainly concentrated on the interchange of documents. It is also about language for recording how the data relates to real world objects. That allows a person, or a machine, to start off in one database, and then move through an unending set of databases which are connected not by wires but by being about the same thing.

For the longest time, I saw this as being a separate problem from personal information management. But our personal information is increasingly becoming part of the web, and I see now that it’s really all the same problem.

I just ran across this article that talks about what Blake Ross (one of the Firefox guys) is up to next. It actually sounds similar to some of the ideas I have been playing around with:

“Right now, people want to shuffle around content,” he says, “but the world’s fused together by a collection of hacks.” Something that should be simple, say, getting photos from a digital camera onto the Web, is a Sisyphean task for most people. “Step back and ask, ‘What’s wrong with this picture?’” Ross says.

The article describes his new project, Parakey. It seems to be an easier way to share information online — a kind of web OS that will be seamlessly linked to your desktop. There is a client the runs on your machine, and it keeps track of all kinds of information: photos, emails, etc. You can access the information through a web interface, and easily share it with other people. At least that’s the impression I get.

This touches on one of my main complaints about the current software world: we have all these specialized applications for dealing with different kinds of information, with incompatible data models and inconsistent features. It sounds like Parakey is taking the “one app to rule them all” approach, and I think any solution that requires people to switch away from Flickr, Gmail, and MySpace to some other half-baked equivalents is not going to be successful. I hope I’m wrong about Parakey though.

In the next few weeks, I’ll be posting an article that’s a bit more clear about my ideas: what I think is broken about today’s software, and how I think we might fix it.

Interesting: the guys at Humanized have added an option for their new Enso Launcher to behave modally (instead of quasimodally, which is the default).

This is interesting because they believe really strongly that modes are bad. In fact, “Modes cause misery” is commandment #8 in their company philosophy:

There exists a mortal enemy to your habits and your train of thought: it’s called a mode. If an interface has modes, then the same gesture that you’ve habituated performs completely different actions depending on which mode the system is in. For instance, take your Caps Lock key; have you ever accidentally pressed it unknowingly, only to find that everything you type LOOKS LIKE THIS?

When that happens, all that habituation you’ve built up about how to type on a keyboard gets subverted: it’s like your computer has suddenly turned into a completely different interface with a different set of behaviors. And that derails your train of thought, because you’re suddenly confused about why your habits aren’t producing what you expect them to.

When you think about it, almost everything that frustrates us about interfaces is due to a mode. That’s why good interfaces have as few as possible.

The alternative approach is to use a quasi-mode: a mode that only sticks as long as you hold down a particular key (Enso used Caps Lock). That way, all you have to do to exit the mode is to stop whatever you are doing.

They added the modal (aka “sticky”) option due to lots of user feedback. Now I know they have to make money, and I’m not saying they shouldn’t listen to their users, but sometimes people don’t know what they want. I think that for certain products, especially ones that are more revolutionary than evolutionary, you need to stick to your guns and have faith that people will learn to love your product as you originally designed it.

Continuing on this general theme of “what is old is new again” (or maybe “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose”)…I thought I’d link up a couple of my favourite articles about the traditional WIMP (windows, icons, menus, pointer) interface.

First up: The Xerox Star: A Retrospective. This article was written in 1989 by engineers, formerly of Xerox PARC, who worked on the Xerox Star. The article is basically them standing up and saying, “Um, all those wonderful features of the Mac — windows, icons, mouse, direct manipulation, the desktop metaphor — yeah, we invented them 10 years ago. Just so you know.” It’s a really interesting read, for a couple reasons. First, it’s amazing to see how little things have changed in the 25 years since the Star was released. But also, it’s cool to see the reasoning behind all of those interface techniques. And you realize that a lot of those reasons just aren’t valid anymore, so maybe it’s time to rethink the WIMP interface.

Which is what The Anti-Mac Interface is all about. Written by Don Gentner and Jakob Nielsen in ‘96, it’s an exploration of what might result if you rejected everything that the Mac interface is built upon (which is why it’s useful to read the Xerox Star paper first):

Physicists and mathematicians often stretch their imaginations by considering what the world would be like if some of their basic assumptions and principles were violated. … This has led to new concepts such as non-Euclidean geometry, positrons, antimatter, and antigravity. At the least, violating basic assumptions is a useful mental exercise, but a surprising number of the resulting concepts have provided useful descriptions of the real world.

Both papers are well worth a read.

One of the cooler things I’ve seen in a while: Tim O’Reilly writes about Yahoo! Pipes, a new service that’s like Unix pipes for the web. In Tim’s words:

It’s a service that generalizes the idea of the mashup, providing a drag and drop editor that allows you to connect internet data sources, process them, and redirect the output.

Like I said in my comment yesterday, I think that once we get over the hype of Web 2.0, people are going to be looking for better ways to hook all this stuff together. Nobody wants to maintain dozens of accounts just to keep track of all their data. Being able to connect all these sites intelligently is basically what the semantic web is all about, and Yahoo! Pipes looks to be a significant step towards making the semantic web comprehensible and usable by regular people.

Nope, not Marty and Doc; I’m talking about the returning popularity of the command line interface.

Over at 43 Folders, Merlin gives a demonstration of Stikkit. Merlin gives an example of Stikkit’s “magic words” — commands that Stikkit parses from each note. After my post on Humanized’s Enso, I’m starting to notice a trend here — it looks like the command line is making a comeback. A post at Lifehacker earlier this month noted that search boxes are also command line interfaces.

Just as with Enso, the question I’m asking is — do we really want to go back to a command line interface?

Sure, a trained user might be faster using a CLI, but I don’t think that’s relevant for an application like Stikkit, which is really supposed to be something you use in the background. Do it really matter if you take 30 seconds or 45 seconds to schedule an appointment? For most people, no. I think it’s much more important to have applications that don’t require much thought to use.

It reminds me of the old mouse vs. keyboard paradox, described by Bruce Tognazzini:

We’ve done a cool $50 million of R & D on the Apple Human Interface. We discovered, among other things, two pertinent facts:

• Test subjects consistently report that keyboarding is faster than mousing.
• The stopwatch consistently proves mousing is faster than keyboarding.

This contradiction between user-experience and reality apparently forms the basis for many user/developers’ belief that the keyboard is faster.

The theory to explain this is phenomenon is, in a nutshell, “time flies when you’re having fun.” Reaching for the mouse and pointing to an object on the screen is such a cognitively simple task that users actually get bored, and perceive time passing slower.

I wonder if the the same effect is happening with applications like Stikkit: people feel productive, because they get to type everything into one box, instead of clicking on buttons. But, in fact, it may take longer to stop and remember the command syntax than it would to actually click on the pretty icons.

UPDATE: Thanks to a commenter on the 43f thread, I saw this article from Donald Norman: UI Breakthrough — Command Line Interfaces. He’s basically saying that yes, command-line interfaces are coming back, in the form of search. The big difference though between using a search box as a CLI, and something like Enso, is that the search is much more forgiving. I can never remember whether to type “define:copacetic”, “define copacetic”, or “copacetic definition” into Google. The beauty is, they all work. Even if Google was unable to recognize the special command in that, chances are that a regular ol’ web search would still find what I am looking for.

For a long time now, I’ve been frustrated by how hard it is to organize and manage all the little bits of digital data in my life. I have files stored on several different computers; bookmarks in Firefox and Del.icio.us; photos on my website, on Flickr, in iPhoto, and in Picasa. Finding the information is just one of the problems. What if my hard drive dies (knock wood)? And will I be able to deal with this stuff in 10 or 15 years?

For these practical (and selfish) reasons, I’m really interested in the area of information management. In fact, it’s the area I’d like to focus on when I do my master’s in HCI this fall. As I learned more about the field of HCI, I found it a little surprising that very few people seemed to be working on this problem. I mean, it seems almost too obvious that people are finding it harder and harder to cope with the vast amounts of information in their lives. But lately, I’ve started seeing lots of interesting activity in this area.

The problem is fundamentally interdisciplinary, so it’s good to see that there is interesting research being done in many different fields, like computer science, psychology, cognitive science, and information studies. Within the “traditional” domains of computer science, there is work being done in the areas of databases and artificial intelligence. The SEMEX project, from the University of Washington’s Database Research Group, is looking at system for efficiently storing, managing, and retrieving personal information. Another interesting project out of UW, from the Information School, is Keeping Found Things Found.

Both cognitive science and artificial intelligence are concerned with knowledge representation, with cog sci focusing on how people store and retrieve information, and AI focusing on how to store information to create machines that think. This knowledge representation angle is the way that I’ve been coming at the problem. How can we structure the information in a way that reflects and supports the way people think? MIT’s Haystack Project is doing some cool stuff in this area: “investigating approaches designed to let people manage their information in ways that make the most sense to them.”

Along the same lines, I saw a really cool book that is coming out soon about information foraging theory. According to Jakob Neilsen:

Information foraging is the most important concept to emerge from Human-Computer Interaction research since 1993. Developed at the Palo Alto Research Center (previously Xerox PARC) by Stuart Card, Peter Pirolli, and colleagues, information foraging uses the analogy of wild animals gathering food to analyze how humans collect information online.

It seems like most of the research that is being done into how people interact with information is focused on the web. That’s the main focus of the field of information architecture. Peter Morville is one of the gurus there; he literally wrote the book on information architecture. But I really think that a lot of the idea about web-based information can also be applied to personal information.

Anyhow, it looks like things are shaping up to get better — more and more people are researching the problems of personal information management. And more than likely, I will soon be one of those people.

(Photo by theCallowQueen on Flickr)