Computation. Contemplation. Conversation. By Takashi Toyooka.
[politics]
Last week, George Bush was quoted as saying, "this notion that the United States is getting ready to attack Iran is simply ridiculous. Having said that, all options are on the table."
Well, I'm glad to hear that the Bush administration is not closing its mind to ridiculous options.
[diversions]
I believe I've come to the conclusion that one of the creepiest things about H.R. Giger's Alien is the fact that it has a chin.
[diversions]
I thought the third chapter would be the last in this series, but I must add a fourth chapter, because, dropping the whole signage question, I thought of the best possible solution.
The best interface would have been a big, round, green button with a diameter of at least 5cm and a light inside it. The button should be mounted on the door, directly in front of the passenger, around chest-level for a short person. The light inside the button would go on (and perhaps flash) when the door is active and ready to be opened. No more light mounted over the person's head.
Imagine the kind of button you would see on a video game machine, like my drawing here. The button is bright and friendly and begging to be pushed. Little kids will run up and push it over and over until their parents beg them to stop.
Here is a user interface that needs no explanation whatsoever. It's perfect.
[diversions]
Frabjous day!
Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind has been released on DVD! Woohoooo!! "Nausicaa" is my favourite Miyazaki film. I've been waiting for this day! There are two language tracks, English and Japanese. The English features science fiction luminaries like Patrick Stewart and Edward James Olmos. So, it's a dub; I'm not sure if it also has a subtitle option.
Of course, the biggest question on my mind is, how does the translation compare with the one I did myself. Well, I've taken a look at a bit of it, and so far, it's pretty good! Some things were not translated literally, whereas I thought they could have been, so I find it a bit puzzling. Other lines were done very, very well. I'll say more about it once I've had a chance to view the whole thing.
[politics]
I'm perceiving, to my surprise, a bit of clumsiness by the Martin government in handling the whole ballistic missile defence issue. The Telegraph is reporting that Paul Martin secretly informed Washington about the decision before it was made public. Why, that would probably have been just around the time (or maybe just before) Frank McKenna blurted that Canada was already part of the missile defence program.
Well, I'm sure this is a complex question to which an answer of "yes we are in" or "no, we are out" are such simplifications as to be both incorrect. Or both correct. Hence the difficulties in presenting a suitably dumbed-down message to the public. Frankly, I think that, without actually changing their decision, they could have made a slightly more nuanced announcement that would have been at once: closer to the truth; not such a sharp rejection to the Americans; still acceptable to increasingly skeptical Canadians.
The whole way in which the news came out is rather puzzling. Was Frank McKenna acting on his own when he stated what he did, or was it all orchestrated? If so, it would have been one of the strangest political dances played out.
No doubt part of the reason for this announcement was to placate the left-wing opposition NDP and Bloc Quebecois. The budget was perceived as leaning right. Stephen Harper surprised everyone by basically endorsing the budget even before Goodale had finished his presentation speech. What the-?
Although, I don't think it's likely that a strong stance on BMD is likely to change how the NDP and BQ will vote on the budget, and that's the biggest worry on the government's mind. Or, at least, it would have been, had Harper not come out so strongly in favour of it.
It's a strange world...
[diversions]
Yes, I do intend to finish this series. Here is where it all began. [Edit, Feb 25 23:47 Okay, for backwards navigability, here is part two.] Today, I get to write about the hilarity that ensued from the incomprehensible instructions that were originally posted.
It was with a mixture of pity and silent frustration I watched poor passengers struggle with the new mechanism. Often people were just baffled by the closed door in front of them. A lot of people didn't even notice there was a sign with instructions. In usability, knowing your users is paramount. Here, the very people who need the instructions most are likely to be flustered and will not read anything with more than three words, and smaller than a 50 point font.
Not long after the introduction of these buses, I began seeing words scrawled on the doors. They said, "touch here," and had arrows pointing towards the general location of the beam of light. Maybe they were written by bus drivers, tired of explaining the system and tired of delays. I felt this to be a vindication of my own idea. There was no hand symbol, but they followed the principles that led me to my design: forget about the mechanism; use few words; elicit the right behaviour. It gave me a great deal of dark satisfaction to see those homemade signs.
Eventually, most of those light-beam mechanisms were replaced with a couple of completely different and more obvious systems, one of which is pictured here on the right. Again, I apologize for the poor focus. The French translates as "to open door, wait for green light, then push bar." Now, to be clear, the bar is still a trigger for a mechanical door; the passenger is not merely using the bar to push the door open himself.
This is a much better mechanism. It has more of what I call immediacy. A bright yellow bar right in front of the passenger, hand-sized and just screaming, "hold me!" Some people will trigger it accidentally because they happened to be holding the bar as the bus came to a stop. This is a good thing. Needless to say, an invisible beam of light has zero immediacy.
Another system that replaced the light-beam was a pressure sensor in a slightly recessed area of the floor, just inside the door. This is the same as the mechanism that was used in older, non-low-floor buses, so were very familiar, and rarely caused confusion.
Well, this was supposed to conclude my musings about bus usability, but the other day, I thought of the best possible door-opening mechanism ever. It's dead obvious, easy to use, and needs no instructions. It should be usable in any industrialized country in the world, and probably most developing countries. I'll unveil it in part four...
[meta]
Hey, Blogger has finally implemented a method to allow people without accounts to post comments! Just go to the permanent link below, "Post a Comment", then hit the "Other" radiobutton under the text field, and enter whatever name you want in the "Name" field.
[personal]
Today I cancelled my cable television service. I've been very effectively weaning myself off it for the last few weeks. Somehow it was really easy. I guess it helped that I had my new high-speed internet to distract me.
By the way, it's a source of some amazement to me that CPAC broadcasts live on the internet.
[personal]
I was intending to do more laps each time I go, but I unintentionally ended up doing exactly the same number of laps today as last time. At least my leg didn't cramp up.
100 free, 100 breast, 300 free, 100 breast, 100 free, 50 breast.
[computers]
Okay, yes, I am a geek. I have a lot of junk lying around, and I like putting computers together, installing things, trying things out, and generally mucking about. However, that doesn't mean that if one of my computers suddenly goes belly-up, I then jump with joy at the chance to diagnose the problem and possibly swap hardware or reinstall software. Especially if that computer is vital to my livelihood. I mean, my internet connection.
So, the background of this story is that a couple of weeks ago, as I mentioned on this blog, I received a brand new ADSL modem for high-speed internet, and I reorganized my home network to operate with it. I retired my old gateway and server, Arrakis (pictured on the left), who served me so well for the last five years or so. A couple of responsibilities could now be taken up by the modem itself, while the rest were to be shared between Trantor and a new machine I called Pern.
It took me the better part of that weekend setting up Pern. And at the end, I was triumphant! I had my network humming, with Windows and Linux machines playing (relatively) nice with each other, and everyone talking to the internet at the blazing speed of 3 Mbps. Below are some images of that battle and my victory (Note these are all Flickr links):
Right, so Pern had apparently been running faithfully for the last two weeks. And I've been meaning to take a backup of all the setting-up that I did, so that if an emergency occurred, I could restore it fairly easily. But I hadn't, yet. Now, what should happen today, but I take a look at Pern and notice a slew of horrific error messages that indicate some serious hard drive problems. It seems the nice "Caviar 2200," pictured above, was completely dead; I'm not sure how long it's been in this state. But all this time, Pern has been doing the computer equivalent of a car coasting down a hill with an empty gas tank. And no brakes. With a brick wall at the bottom of the hill.
So it is that now, after an evening completely co-opted by an unhappy computer, I can claim another identical victory again. I yanked Arrakis' hard drive, which had become idle, and gave it to Pern. I had no backup, so I had to reinstall everything and set up everything from memory. I'm proud to say it took less than three hours. Part of that was simply waiting for the pokey CD-ROM drive; it is only a 486, after all.
Oh, I didn't take any pictures today. I wasn't in a mood to be documenting things nicely. 'Til now anyways.
I suppose I'd be in worse shape if I didn't have my piles of junk to draw from; I wouldn't be posting this right now. I'd probably be asleep.
Wait a minute, did I say I'd be in worse shape?
[politics]
Indeed, politics is theatre. And some little men from some small towns are better at it than others.
[personal]
My newspaper subscription has been cancelled! Today they tried to intice me by sending me their daily editions, free of charge, as a promotion (I'd only been subscribing to the weekend editions). The last time they did this, my pile of recyclables very quickly turned into a mountain of recyclables. It's quite a bother when you're on the 20th floor of a high-rise. So their offer, ironically, spurred me to action, and I cancelled immediately.
This is one of the steps in my media transformation. I still need to address my video media. That's coming... slowly.
[diversions]
In the previous part of this series, I said I would next talk about OC Transpo's handling of their poor instructions for their rear door system. However, I thought I'd jump instead to my own suggestion. The bus company's final solution was to switch to a different system, which, in my opinion, is slightly better than the "beam-breaking" system.
Here it is. Pardon the sloppy image; I spent all of thirty seconds drawing it. This sign should be cut in half vertically and placed on each door so the hand appears right in the middle, right in front of the passenger.
So, one of the first things you'll notice is that there aren't even any words on it. I feel that it almost doesn't require words. However, I concede that it would be improved if the words "Touch Here / Touchez Ici" were inscribed in white lettering in the palm of the hand.
This sign abandons any idea of conveying the mechanics of the system, and simply tries to elicit the correct behaviour to open the door. Frequent users will eventually figure out how it works, but after all, it's the infrequent users who are unfamiliar with the system who need the sign to direct them.
This isn't ideal: hygenically conscious people might reach out and touch the area gingerly with one finger, and this probably will not trigger the door. If you're touching the sign from an angle, your wrist might not be positioned properly to break the beam of light.
[personal]
Finally got back to the pool. Things kept getting in the way. I almost didn't go today because I have a drumming performance, but I decided I had time after all.
I did: 200 free, 200 breast, 200 free, 100 breast, 50 free. Then my right calf started to cramp up. Owwww...
[diversions]
I develop user interfaces for a software company. Usability is therefore something I think about, not just in software, but in everyday life.
A couple of years ago, the local transit company OC Transpo introduced a new model of bus. It was low-floor, which made it more accessible to seniors and disabled people, and it had a nifty new mechanism for opening the back door. The concept was not bad, but the initial execution was horrible.
I can't show you pictures of the signs they had up originally (mercifully, they all seem to have been taken down), but this one, pictured on the left, is similar to it. Sorry about the poor focus. The original sign didn't have the arrows near the person's hand, and the green light emanated downwards, and the text was something like "To open door, wait for green light, then break beam." Possibly the worst instructions ever written.
The technical side of this is, there is a beam of light pointing downwards just on the inside of the door. When something approaches the door and interrupts that beam, the door opens. The above instructions were obviously written by a technical person who was thinking about how the mechanism worked.
Now, put yourself in the place of a passenger who is about to disembark from the bus. He is staring outside, blissfully ignorant of the sign -- and the ordeal -- ahead of him. The bus stops, and he waits. He expects the driver to open the door for him (let's presume he's not old enough to remember the days when passengers had to push the rear doors open themselves). He stares at the closed door, now getting anxious that the bus is going to take off to the next stop before he can get out. He's also conscious of the three people behind him, also itching to exit. It's a high-pressure situation. Finally, he notices the sign. "To open door..." Yes, yes. "Wait for green light..." What light? Oh, the little light that came on silently over his head. "And break beam." What the hey?
The first thing that's poor about this situation is that the instructions are too wordy. In the stress of the moment, many people are going to ignore the text because they need to get off now, and they can't be bothered to spend an extra five seconds reading. You don't have to explain that the instructions are for the door; they're posted right on the door itself. And you don't even have to tell people to wait for the green light because that's rarely going to be relevant: if the green light is off, the bus is probably moving. And jumping off a moving bus is an uncommon means of suicide. And we don't need to cater to suicidal passengers anyway.
Finally, the actual instructions: "break beam." Let's analyze these words individually. "Break," in most contexts, implies destruction of some kind. People are more accustomed to seeing this word in that immortal instruction, "in case of emergency, break glass." And "beams" are usually solid objects. What beam? Oh look! What's that yellow thing in the lower right corner of my picture? It's the door handle. What is it made of? Yes! A long metal beam.
The real kicker about the instructions is that even if you knew what they meant, the beam of light is invisible. So you're not really certain exactly where you're supposed to wave your hand.
In the next two parts, I'll talk about how OC Transpo dealt with the fiasco that no doubt followed, and then (not to toot my own horn too much, but) the solution I would have suggested.
