UI musings
In the past, I wrote vigorously and often about UI. I knocked heads long ago about the superiority of GUIs to character-based interfaces, and even long before that about the advantages of OLTP (which we called “real-time” then) over batch processing. In the latter 1990s, I put a lot of time and effort into search, better alerts-management, and context-sensitivity in general. And recently I’ve focused a lot of my research on analytics, often with a theme of “Yeah, yeah, the server-side stuff is cool — but let’s talk about how people actually interact with this stuff.”
Still, I feel something has been lacking, probably because there just are so many different UI subjects to talk about. So here are some quick-hit thoughts on UIs. The first ones are from my Computerworld column running next Monday, which is called (with apologies to Sports Illustrated columnist Peter King), Six Things I Think I Think About UIs.
1. “A good GUI interface” is the most important feature a product can have. In many cases, the GUI is the feature set, whether we’re talking about operational apps, BI, or IT administration tools. For example, when I looked into the security market a few years ago, it turned out that Checkpoint’s rise to dominate the firewall market in the late 1990s came about because it had a good GUI rules-administration interface, while otherwise equal or superior competitors didn’t.
2. Web UIs are now, finally, much superior to the client/server systems they replaced. That wasn’t true until recently. But now they’ve leapfrogged client/server a little bit in pure GUI functionality. (I somehow like this article on the technology, even though I’m not sure what I learned from it.) And they’re always been way ahead in application navigability.
3. BI look-and-feel is on the upswing. Business Objects is a good example of this. They brought their thin client products up to client/server GUI standards. They fiddled around in usability labs with screen real estate and so on to polish the dashboard UIs further. And then they went out and bought what is now Crystal Excelsius.
4. Portal technology is headed for a boom. I have a whole whitepaper in the works on that one.
5. Natural-language interfaces are advancing too slowly. Unfortunately, big vendors remain clueless about language-based UIs. Enterprise search is a fiasco. Most single-site web search is even worse; in almost every case, it’s inferior to just googling on search string + site name. As for natural language/voice command/control and navigation – we’re nowhere, Inquira and Sybase AnswersAnywhere notwithstanding. (I bet you can’t name a single user of either product off the top of your head. To tell the truth, I can’t either, except that I’m pretty sure Inquira powers the websites of a couple big-name cellular providers.)
6. Microsoft Office is a huge question mark. Office is facing a huge, if slow-moving, threat from open source. And the product has basically been stagnant for years, in that few users have cared much about any of the newer features.
Microsoft’s stated and obviously sincere strategy is to make Office an important window in the world of database applications. The Proclarity acquisition this week is surely part of that. So are the moves to make XML important in live documents, which dovetail nicely with the XML file formats of Office 2007.
EDIT: See also: You can start to imagine a world of Office as a business application platform,” Witts said.
7. In particular, Excel is a huge question mark. On the one hand, the BI industry is doing ever more to make Excel into a viable BI client. On the other hand, they’re trying to replace Excel as the data storage engine of choice — and in some cases even as the client — for budgeting/planning/etc. It does seem to me as if server-based planning is sweeping the enterprise world. So where does that leave Excel? Will it ultimately be anything more than a glorified calculator?
8. Home UIs are challenging work ones. Back when I consulted a lot to AOL in the late 1990s, I (correctly, it turns out) warned them that their client’s lack of functionality in areas such as email and browsing would get them into big trouble, because users’ expectations were being set higher at work. Now the reverse is at times true. Home bandwidth has caught up with work bandwidth, and webmail is in some ways better than Outlook. Meanwhile, a few websites out there are actually pretty usable, annoying clutter notwithstanding — and most of them are focused on consumer shopping, e.g. Amazon, Land’s End, et al.
9. Usability labs are crucial. Back in the 1990s, usability labs were new. Microsoft and Lotus and Borland had good ones, and Oracle hired Dan Rosenberg away from Borland to set up theirs. Other than that, there mainly were third-party consulting firms, or very primitive inhouse operations.
Well, I’m still not convinced that very many inhouse usability labs accomplish much. But I do know that whether it’s inhouse or third-party, you must use a lab if you’re serious about offering a competitive product.
10. Rules-based interfaces are too primitive. This isn’t really an interface issue so much as a functionality one — but as noted above, the two are inseparable. True declarative rules interfaces, which function with the same flexibility as 1980s-era expert system shells, are way too rare. Executing a set of rules in a set linear order is not the same thing at all.
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Enterprise applications, Online and mobile services, Usability and UI | 2 Comments |
Microsoft underscores its core paradigm
In a recent column called Three Views From the Top of the Software World (I generally don’t pick my titles, but that was as good as any), I opined that the big vendors had three fundamentally different paradigms from which they viewed enterprise software:
In the IBMOracle view, data — a.k.a. information — is king. IT’s job is to manage the data powerfully, reliably and (not always the top priority) cost-effectively. …
Microsoft’s vision, however, is quite different. It’s first and foremost about empowering people, at least to the extent that making them better corporate employees can be regarded as empowerment. …
While IBMOracle talks about information and Microsoft talks about people, SAP talks about business processes. …
Shortly after I wrote that, Microsoft came out with a sterling example of my claim. They told a story about composite apps. At SAP, composite apps are a business process story. At Oracle, they’re probably a business process story too. But at Microsoft? Read for yourself, in Microsoft’s own words:
The core vision behind what we are doing is Roles Based Productivity. To deliver on this vision, you have to start with “People” and really connect them up to their “work” (i.e. process). In the real world most people’s work is split across multiple applications and the “seams” show. Web Services is the foundational infrastructure that helps us get rid of the “seams”.
I don’t want to suggest I see something wrong with this. All three views are valid, and none of the vendors cited is too extreme (any more) about neglecting the other viewpoints. Still, I think this isn’t just semantics, but rather a fundamental difference in worldviews.
| Categories: Enterprise applications, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP | 12 Comments |
Credibility in cyberspace
As you can tell, I’m not in the habit of posting about the blogosphere itself, but I’ll make an exception in response to an over-the-top post by Robert Scoble. If read literally, it suggests that nobody should ever post anything in a blog unless it’s also suitable to appear in the news section of a credible publication.
As is obvious from his own blog, Scoble doesn’t really believe that. A blog is a medium for news or analysis or anecdotes or random blatherings or any combination of those things (and that’s not an exhaustive list of the possibilities). On the other hand, if one deletes the bolded part, Scoble may well believe the rest — and I may well agree with him.
Opinion columns, and other kinds of analytic publications, are tricky things. My first post-academic job was the most heavily regulated kind of opinion writing there is — stock analysis. Everything we published in those pre-Web days went through two rounds of editing. The first editor was a normal copy editor like any publication might have. The second was a special “supervisory analyst” who had taken a special SEC accreditation examination, to ensure that we didn’t violate any rules. Sometimes I’d argue with her for 10 minutes about one phrase, or to get her to leave in one joke.
But for all that expense, concern, and process, it seemed those rules really boiled down to two commandments:
1. Thou shalt not express an opinion that is not well-founded in your factual research. (In particular, don’t make anything sound like a fact unless you’ve really verified it to that level.)
2. Thou shalt not rely upon forbidden sources of information. (That’s an insider trading prohibition fairly specific to the investment arena.)
I think these rules, or just the first one, should apply to almost all reporting and commentary. Do they? Of course not. Just consider Rush Limbaugh’s radio show, for example, or the mercifully cancelled CNN show Crossfire, or for that matter Fox News (which has as its president Republican political operative Roger Ailes).
Many columnists fail to live up to these standards. Some of the most famous firings from large newpaper staffs have been of columnists, not ordinary reporters. Scoble’s bashing of Andrew Orlowski is — er, it’s well-founded. Newspaper sports sections often assign reporting and analytic duties to the same person, who may supplement his income by doing radio or TV gigs; such people are often entertainers much more than they are serious analysts or honest reporters (as some readers may have already guessed, I’m thinking most specifically of Ron Borges of The Boston Globe). Other columnists manage to combine analysis, expert wordsmithing, and high-quality reporting. Political columnist (and former partisan Republican speechwriter) William Safire, for example, won a Pulitzer Prize for what amounted to reporting on the subject of Billy Carter.
Now that I’ve meandered for a while, let me mosey on back toward the question raised in Scoble’s post. What tests of credibility should we impose on bloggers in the area of (enterprise) technology? I think what Scoble proposes about sourcing, linking, etc. are way too restrictive, and in some cases even silly. One should never post anything unless one has a named, on-the-record source?? C’mon. Some of the best investigative reporting is based on anonymous sourcing, very carefully confirmed. (Here’s an example of me taking this route.) Indeed, sometimes a reviewer or analyst is able to come to an informed conclusion based solely on his or her own judgment or experience, without contacting anybody else to be told what to think. Analysis may overlap with journalism, but it’s not the same thing.
Here are some of the tests I apply, implicitly or explicitly, to make sure I’m comfortable with my own work:
- Did I state or imply stronger conclusions than my evidence and analysis support? (That’s really just Rule 1 from above.)
- Did I acknowledge or indicate why somebody might disagree with me? Or, if I didn’t, do I think a halfway intelligent reader should be able to figure it out for herself? If I’m sufficiently clear in my writing, the latter criterion should automatically be met. And if it’s clear why somebody would disagree with me, I can rightfully be more opinionated and passionate than might otherwise be prudent.
- Have I disclosed my major (real or apparent) biases or conflicts of interest?
- Do I appear to claim credit for somebody else’s ideas?
- Is it clear what I’m saying, and why?
And I guess those are the criteria I apply to other bloggers and columnists as well.
By the way — Robert Scoble generally passes my tests. But Andrew Orlowski does not.
| Categories: About this blog | 2 Comments |
The tech industry notices that the Republicans are bad for it
Michael Kanellos reports that Silicon Valley is down on the Bush Administration, largely because of its lack of support for private or public technology research.
Well, duh. I endorsed John Kerry in a Computerworld column before the 2004 election. And anybody who’s seen the antiscientific attitudes of the Bush Administration in biological and environmental sciences shouldn’t be surprised that IT is getting short shrift too.
| Categories: Public policy and privacy | 1 Comment |
Goodmail, Esther Dyson, Andrew Orlowski, etc.
Esther Dyson weighed in in the New York Times on Goodmail-like services. Andrew Orlowski of The Register responded with his usual clueless misogyny.
Orlowski doesn’t just gratuitously bash Esther; whenever possible, he goes after Ann Winblad too. One hilariously stupid instance is this one, in which he fabricated a marriage between Ann and her business partner John Hummer. Hmm, Mitchell Kertzman is there now too. My mind is reeling at the possible menage’-a-trois possibilities …
Esther’s opinion, which I first heard her express almost 20 years ago, is this: Senders should pay readers for the time they spend in looking at email. And you know what? She’s right. Advertisers in broadcast, web, and print media pay us for our attention, by subsidizing the content we consume. So do event sponsors. Almost everything you read or hear about the technology industry is subsidized in one way or another by somebody who would like to sell something. (E.g., if you’re reading this free blog, I may be interested in selling you consulting services.)
Now to Orlowski’s response. Most of it was the kind of ad hominem trash he loves to dish out, especially but not exclusively about smart women such as Esther Dyson and Ann Winblad. Besides that, the main substance I found was “Think of the poor people who can’t afford to pay to send email?!” Well, Andrew — who are they writing to? Whoever it is, those recipients do NOT have to charge them for sending mail, whether that recipient is their mother, their electric company, or you. If you want to open your mailbox to, say, everything that comes in from the poor country of Nigeria, there’s nothing stopping you. (And you can still apply spam filters if you like.) Personally, I find that I get email from the occasional Third-World businessman or professor, but no starving Guatemalan peasant has ever found the time or motivation to send me a personal letter.
So what would my fees be? Without thinking it over at great length, they might be something like this:
Free — friends, acquaintances, family, return mail from tech support, etc.
Free — some news mailing lists
$.01 — other commercial mailing lists, if I opted in
$.25 — unsoliticited email from commercial vendors I have relationships with
$.50 — everybody else
I imagine the cost to senders would be roughly double the prices quoted above, which is OK.
One beauty of this system is that it would immediately turn spam into a matter of pure financial theft. I.e., you wouldn’t be able to spam unless you got somebody else to pay the email delivery charges, presumably by hijacking their computer and/or identity. Most users would have safeguards in place that made them go through security hoops if they wanted to send true spammishly large volumes of mail. And just as online theft isn’t really that big a problem today, this new form of online theft would probably also be a much smaller problem than spam now is.
Implementation of course isn’t easy. The trickiest part would probably be assigning prices to different senders, then adjusting the prices for different senders, and having the senders be automatically notified of the price adjustments. There’s also an antifraud problem, of a sort; if people are paid to get junk mail, they might make efforts to get lots and lots and lots of it to pad their bank accounts. (Wouldn’t that be just a wonderful recreation for smart teenage boys?)
But the technical issues, while non-trivial, are all solvable (or at least controllable — this scheme would indeed add more complexity that could then annoyingly malfunction). So what about adoption? Here’s one scheme that might work — email service providers might compete on the basis of not only being free, but of actually rebating cash to their users. This gets around what could otherwise be a bottleneck, namely the reluctance of consumer service providers such as AOL to share revenue with their customers.
What about nefarious uses? E.g., the government of China is all too eager to control information coming into the country, and this could be another tool. Hmm. I don’t have a fast answer. But I have even less of an answer as to what good would be done is this regard by refraining from using the technology in the rest of the world. After all, they can adopt it themselves if they want.
OK. I’m on board. How do we make this happen?
| Categories: Online and mobile services, Privacy, censorship, and freedom, Public policy and privacy, Security and anti-spam | 14 Comments |
Cheap PCs for developing countries
The possibilities for getting cheap PCs into developing countries keeps growing. The Register has a series of articles on the alternatives.
The machines are getting cheap enough that it’s not a question of whether they should be all over even the poorest countries, but rather exactly how this should be accomplished. Electricity is a non-issue in some cases, more of a challenge in others. And actual internet access of course also needs to be provided.
But in essence — a few years from now, every schoolchild in the world should have access to most of the world’s educational information.
Except to the extent, of course, that her country’s leaders censor it out …
| Categories: Economic development, Hardware, Public policy and privacy | Leave a Comment |
The laptop security nightmare
Keeping data on laptops secure against theft of the laptops is a nightmare.
But the diskless PC is a strong answer. Then all you have to keep secure is a small data module. Not only is that much easier because of the physical form factor, but it also is vastly easier to encrypt.
Yes, I’m repeating myself.
| Categories: Diskless PCs, Hardware | 1 Comment |
Path to the diskless PC?
Jimmy Daniels of RealTechNews writes about Robson Flash Cache technology, as an add-on to conventional PCs. But at the bottom he gets to what I think the core point, which is that it would be better to use flash to replace hard drives altogether.
Apparently Microsoft is pushing some kind of flash caching. Good for them, especially since — as I’ve previously noted — the move to diskless PCs will not necessarily be to their advantage. Maybe we’ll get to the promised land via some kind of intermediate path.
| Categories: Diskless PCs, Hardware | Leave a Comment |
I promised a bunch of links on privacy issues
As promised in my column in today’s Computerworld, I’m throwing up a bunch of links on privacy issues. Let me confess that I’m finding these in the last moment by searching, and these are not necessarily articles I’ve carefully read through or analyzed myself. (It turns out I didn’t bookmark anything when I first read about these various subjects.)
1. Your Google searches can be used against you as evidence in court. Prosecutors won a murder conviction against Robert Petrick for killing is wife in part by showing that, using his computer(s), somebody had Googled on a lot of murder-related terms, and visited a series of websites that gave information potentially useful in a murder of the kind actually committed. This information was gathered from his hard drive; it was not turned over by Google. Here’s another article on the Petrick case.
2. Search Engine Watch has extensive discussion on actual search engine privacy. It was inspired by the Federal government’s requests to the major search engines for general data (nothing personally identifiable) about child porn in search results. Google refused; MSN and Yahoo complied. EDIT: Google and the Feds are going to court, as per a 3/13 USA Today article. FURTHER EDIT: They cut a deal, as per the Reg’s cynically funny (as usual) article.
3. David Brin’s 1998 book The Transparent Society — focused on video surveillance, actually — has been highly influential in my own thinking. It appears he has an extensive web site that grew out of that discussion, but the link EDIT: IS NOW WORKING AGAIN.
4. The Register writes extensively about the British government’s attempts to institute national ID cards, biometric drivers licenses, and such like. It also writes about a number of other privacy-related issues.
5. Perhaps the most extensive single site covering Internet privacy issues is the Electronic Freedom Foundation’s.
More later, but that should be enough to get you started.
EDIT: I’ll keep adding some here.
6. One issue that probably has gotten more hype than it urgently needs is the theoretical risk of tracking consumer good usage via their embedded RFID chips. Retailers and consumer packaged goods manufacturers are being held back somewhat — or at least are being sensitive to — political and activist pressure.
7. Even the CIA is easy to trace. Never mind government and large-enterprise databanks; even web searches and other techniques open to the general, law-abiding public produce a lot of information — including the identities of many covert CIA agents and facilities. While not exactly a repressive-goverment fear point (quite the contrary, if anything), this still serves to illustrate one of my core points — information will inevitably be gathered. Hence tighter controls on the USE of information are needed now than were necessary before.
8. Lauren Gelman seems to be teaching a course on law/technology/privacy, and raises a number of specific issues in one of her blog posts.
The inevitable breaches of privacy, and what to do about them
Let’s continue the discussion of infomation privacy. Basically, governments and other large enterprises will be able to track almost everything about you — purchases, movements, medical details, communcations, even the things you think about (if you think about them long enough to search the Web for a bit of information). This trend can realistically be slowed, but it probably can’t be stopped.
Other than surrendering to 1984ish oversight, what is to be done? I see only one practical choice — the laws regulating use of information must be greatly strengthened. For example:
1. In the United States today, it is illegal to discriminate on the basis of an employee’s, job applicant’s, loan applicant’s, etc. race or sex or religion or national origin. This information is often available to companies (e.g., just by looking at the person). But even though companies have the information, they’re not allowed to use it.
2. Many safeguards against overzealous police and prosecutors take the form of limiting what information is admissible as evidence in court. If the police didn’t follow proper search procedure (in the US), tough on them; they can’t use what they found.
Indeed, it’s an almost universal myth that the Fifth Amendment to the US Constitution precludes a person being forced to give testimony. Actually, the government can very easily compel testimony. But if it does, it has to give a grant of immunity so that that testimony can not be used against the person in court — and if that means the person can’t be tried at all for a specific crime, so be it. Once again, the law allows the government to gather information which it is then precluded from using.
I think the ultimate solutions to the dangers of privacy invasion will have to in large part follow this model. For example, I’d like to see a prohibition on the legal use of “state of mind” information such as web searches, library research, and so on. If there must be exceptions to such a prohibition, they should be explicitly and narrowly carved out.