Real users

The other day I was reading an interesting article from the depths of the internet about 'real users', the vast majority of computer users and how they are different from the rest of us.

It was from 2003, some website developer was talking about how on his ISP's home page there was a link to a 'search' page, which had a list of links to that era's top search engines, like Yahoo, and MetaCrawler and so on, sites that have all but disappeared now. The article went on to say that when it was time to revamp the site, the developer got rid of the search page and just replaced it with a google search windowy thing or something, if people really wanted to use Yahoo, or Metacrawler they'd know the URL by now and could just type that into the address bar.

When they changed the website, there was a avalanche of complaints from customers who liked the old 'search page', and who couldn't find Yahoo anymore, it was like it had ceased to exist. The developer couldn't quite understand it, but it seemed the vast majority of people who used their ISP, had set the ISP homepage as their homepage and were otherwise completely lost if they couldn't just click through to search.

They are the real users of computers, people who don't quite understand the way it works or even think they need to understand they way it works.

In the comments people added their own stories of woe, stories of encounters with 'real users' who used computers every day, but didn't quite 'get' it.

Like people who don't use the address bar in their browser, they only ever get to things through having google as their homepage, and just entering everything there. The very existence of a URL is a mystery to them. This still happens, in 2008 the technology blogReadWriteWeb was lamenting how the vast majority or respondents in some market research don't use the address bar.

Even in February 2010 ReadWriteWeb did an article that had the words Facebook and Login in the title, magic google juice flowed and it became the top result when you search google for 'Facebook login'. People arrived at as site that wasn't Facebook and complained they couldn't login, three thousand or so people leaving comments along the lines of

Ok If I have to I will comment,I love facebook so right now just want to log in if thats ok with you..lol Keep up the good work...

They were completely lost.

I've grown up with computers and the internet, I have a little bit of a blind spot for how other people can not have the same understanding. The other day I was asked "What's the difference between Chrome and the internet?" Sure there are gentle answers to such questions, but all I could do was pat their hand and say "Don't you worry your pretty little head."

'Real users' get scared on Microsoft Word when you put on to make nonprinting characters visible. They're having problems with the layout, so you click the icon to see what's going on, and suddenly they protest, "No, I don't want that!", so you patiently click them off, and mystically explain that there's a few tabs there and a section break where it shouldn't be. The 'real user' looks at you in utter disbelief, wondering how you can possibly know such things.

There's something in that "No, I don't want that!" cry, it reminds me of the sort of thing my three year old niece would say.

'Real users' get confused when you move the icons around on their desktop, or if an icon gets obscured by some other window in front of it. If they can't see it, it has ceased to exist. Its like playing peekaboo with a six month old nephew "Where's teddy gone?", "There he is... behind the cushion that I just put in front of him."

Hmm, a six month old can figure this out, why can't 'real users'? What's wrong with them?

I kind of understand, in the early eighties, about eight hours after we first acquired an Amstrad CPC 464, I remember my brother playing 3D Monster Chase, I watched him for hours, my brain/eyes couldn't understand what was going on on screen, its seemed like some kind of coloured bowtie matching puzzle game, rather than the low-tech Doom clone game that it was. It was a few days before I could comprehend the image as a 3D scene.

'Real users' haven't had that epiphany yet, of realising that Windows are representations layers of panes that can be moved about. 'Real users' don't get that nonprinting characters are helpful and don't print.

The thing is, 'real users' can be spectacularly successful in their endeavors. Just pressing enter lots of times to get to a new page in Word doesn't seem to affect the success of their careers. Sure it may mess up the rest of the document if you need to change something on the first page, but that can be fixed easily.

If people knew about manual page breaks then documents wouldn't need to be 'fixed easily'.

The success of Windows and Vista comes down to making computers dead easy to use, so real users can get churning out poorly laid out documents quicker, without having to learn the ropes. Google's success was in getting to porn just by typing the one word then clicking, without having to remember any of that "http://www." business.

As someone who isn't a 'real user', a geek possibly, it dismay's me that rather than making 'real users' understand things and expand their mind's instead life just gets easier for them.

But no no, the vast majority of people are real-users.

In most offices, when you stand up and look around, most people you see are real users. They're working hard, getting stuff done, but they don't know what they're doing really.

High end audio at Best Buy

As promised earlier, this weekend I made the epic journey to the new Best Buy store at the Lakeside retail park in Thurrock.

We made up a rhyme, "so much that I want to buy, that I cannot justify". Right now, at my stage in life I am skint and the only thing I can justify spending money is a mains lead for my old WD 500gb external hard drive. Alas modern drives of that capacity just run off usb, and have no additional power requirements. Best Buy had no spare mains lead department.

At home I currently have no broadband internet, I can only survive by going to a nearby friend's flat and using their wifi. If only there were a way to boost my friend's wifi, so I could use it from the other end of the corridor. At Best Buy I put this problem to their Geek Squad and as I'd previously predicted they sucked their teeth and said no.

With these issued addressed, I thought I'd have a look at their hi-fi and home cinema set ups as suggested at last week's bloggers meetup.

The first thing that struck me was their Loewe tv set up. It set my teeth on edge and made me sick a little in my mouth.

I've had dealings Loewe tvs before, in one of the setup menus there's some kind of image enhance setting that sounds great, but it fucks the picture. Its hard to describe how, but it does something to the lighting and motion that makes anything you watch look like it was done in a cheap American sit-com studio blue screen.

It doesn't matter what you're watch, James Bond or Avatar, it just looks crap, un-movie-like.

What pains me more is that people don't notice or object.

Its like when widescreen tellys and movies first came on the market, and in shops and home people would watch stuff with the wrong aspect ratio, so it was stretched or squashed - distorted, and folk would shrug, "its widescreen, its supposed to be like that"

No, its wrong. Its like you've broken the movie. Would you play a 33rpm record at 45rpm?

It amazes me that any shop anywhere manages to sell Loewe tvs.

At Best Buy they had several demonstration rooms for hi-fi, high end audio and home cinema.

A few times when I was young my pa took me to hi-fi shops, they were quiet, dusty places, lots of wood panelled speakers and turntables decked in smoked perspex. People studying specifications and quietly asking attendants if they could listen to certain systems.

When I worked at Linn Products and Roksan Audio, again, listening to things was a quiet and patient experience, setting up the system, listening to a piece of music, adjusting or changing the system, then listening again, comparing contrasting, adjusting and deciding.

Not so at Best Buy, demonstration rooms blasting out blockbuster movies, endless arrays of speakers blaring out whatever kids listen to these days.

My ears aren't delicate flowered but I couldn't bear to stand in the demoroom for more than a few seconds before retiring. It was just too stressful and unrelaxing.

Is a fight scene from Transformers 2 really the best thing for demonstration surround sound, or is it just designed to bewilder and confuse customers so they buy any old crap and escape as quickly as possible?

One of the demonstration room was kitted out with the walls decked with every single speaker they sold. Do you know how speakers work? They have a cone that moves in and out, to reproduce sound, how the cone moves is precisely controlled by the amplifier/ preamp playing whatever mp3/CD/record you're listening to. The waves of sound pressure come from the speaker, bouncing off walls and the floor and ceiling to varying degrees until they reach your ears. This is something people rarely need to consider, except if you work testing high end audio or if you are about to spend a lot of money on speakers. By a lot of money, I mean anything more than what you earn in a week.

Anyhoo, these waves of sound pressure will bounce off smooth surfaces and get absorbed by soft or furry surfaces, like carpets, curtains and sofas. Try listening to music with they curtains in your room open or closed, the music will sound different. Try standing in the corner and speaking and then moving into the middle of the room and doing the same, you'll sound very different. Imagine if the walls moved freely, this is essentially what happens if you have loads of speakers in one room and only listen to two at a time.

For each speaker for any room there will be a sweet setup, the distance its positioned from the walls, the angle it's toed in at, the distance it is from its partners.

In Best Buy you can't listen to any speakers or any sound system and make an accurate judgement about which sound better than others. No matter how much money you throw at them when you get those speakers home they're going to sound completely different to how they did at the store.

They may very likely sound better than they did in the store, they couldn't sound much worse. Best Buy's setup seems design to get the worst performance out speakers on the home cinema side of the store.

I might have got the wrong end of the stick with the speaker, mind, that in the demonstration room with hundreds decked out on the walls, you're not supposed to listen to them, and its merely just to see what they looked like. If that's the case then I apologise for the ranting of the previous few paragraphs.

Oddly though, on the other side of the building they get it right. In the games console demonstration room, the speakers are set up perfectly, the screen is set up great. They're doing it right. Pick any game you want to play, and you can have a go in the best gaming, video and audio environment I've seen in a long while.

It only half makes sense. In the gaming room, they're doing it right, but not trying to sell speakers or tvs, and in the home cinema/audio room, where they are trying to sell hardware, they're doing it wrong.

I fear there's nothing I can do to help them.
Sent using BlackBerry® from Orange

New blog design ahoy

Got bored of the old one, then I was listening to a thing on Radio4 about The FACE magazine, and thought I'd strip my blog design down to black and white, to give it a more stark look.

Hopefully I'll include more photies in the future, and make them all black and white halftone images, and it'll all look cool.