Stuff'n'nonsense #3

I don't really feel much like blogging today. Today can be pretty much summed up with the acronym wombat: waste of money, brains and time. But still, I'll share with you the goodness I've found around the Net today.

But first, some news. We confirmed yesterday that there will be no more Ferox shows at Taste for the foreseeable future. We're going ahead with the April 29 show as planned, but after that, we'll be looking for other venues. Taste gave us a great start last April, but it's time to find somewhere else. We'll let you know as soon as we have anything definite.

• 50 years of space today. The Russians still regard it as a priority, unlike the West. And check out how they boasted about it back then. Meanwhile, our space program is more concerned with prog rock - Jethro Tull frontman Ian Anderson will be doing a live duet with an astronaut. That's cool, and all, but hardly earth-shattering.
• So why aren't we doing anything in space? Because we're spending abso-bloody-lutely everything we've got on the military. Check out this little chart. Don't need schools, hospitals, roads, scientific research, or any of that Commie crap - we need MORE WEAPONS!
  The military accounts for 20% of the American budget, and it's going up year on year. That's about 1.4 trillion dollars. (I can't even say that out loud without doing a Dr Evil face, it's such an absurd number.) Coincidentally, the US budget deficit increased by 1.4 trillion dollars last year...
  To put that in perspective, the US accounts for over 40% of the entire world's military spending. That's six times more than China. Eleven times more than the UK. Twelve times more than Russia. Over one thousand times more than Libya.
  I honestly can't conceive of a situation where anyone would need that much military power, unless they seriously expected to take on the whole of the rest of the world in a slam-bang knock-down fight to the finish. And if that happened, it would go nuclear anyway, and it wouldn't matter who won.
  If you want to reduce government spending, then the tea partiers should start here. And here's The Economist agreeing with me.
  (P.S. Note to the UK. Why the hell do we need to be spending that much on our military? We are the third biggest spender. Do we really need to be outspending Russia, for crying out loud? Get rid of the war toys, and fix the damn country's real problems. We're not the Empire any more.)
• Okay, enough of that. Let's get weird. You're probably aware of angler fish, possibly the ugliest creatures on the planet. But did you have any idea how totally weird the male angler fish is? He kisses the female, his lips turn to glue, his face melts, and... no, I'm not going to spoil the surprise with what happens next. You'll have to click through, but believe me, it is possibly the grossest thing in the entire animal kingdom.
• Writers - you'll love this. The Periodic Table of Storytelling. All the cliches, beautifully categorised. Print it out, and put it by your desk.
• Book time. Cory Doctorow's Eastern Standard Tribe. If you click that, you can get it for free. Whee! Best bit of the book for me was this:
  "It's all about being an advocate for the user. I observe what users do, and how they do it, figure out what they're trying to to, and then boss the engineers around, trying to get them to remove the barriers they've erected because engineers are all high-functioning autistics who have no idea how normal people do stuff."
  That's what I used to do, before some bastard turned me into a sales and marketing guy. (That means you still observe the users, but the engineers tell you to fuck off, because it's only marketing, and nobody likes marketing.)
• And how's about this for a book? If it's the way comics are going, I like it. Nemesis, the Motion Comic.
• And lastly, wtf has happened to Facebook? You now can't like, share or comment anything which didn't originate from Facebook itself. Check out the screenshot - there's no way to interact with that post!
  So if you're posting from Twitter or su.pr or some other feed system, or using a "share on Facebook" link on a site, nobody can respond to what you write. I'm really hoping that's a glitch, because that seriously reduces the number of potential conversations, which seems to be totally against the spirit of social media.

I'll end with this little snippet from Freda. My tribe. I love you all.

However your life develops after you come together with your tribe, you can be assured that its members will stand at your side. On the surface, your tribe may seem to be nothing more than a loose-knit group of friends and acquaintances to whom you ally yourself. Yet when you look deeper, you will discover that your tribe grounds you and provides you with a sense of community that ultimately fulfills many of your most basic human needs.

It's too simple

This is probably the funniest thing I've seen from The Onion in ages. If you haven't seen it, watch it before reading the rest of this post.



Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard

There is, however, a serious point here about user interface design. This is something that's on my mind every day, as we grapple with the complexities of making it easy to create movies. What everybody's after is "add more features, and make it simpler". Which sounds logical and sensible, but it ain't.

A simple user interface sounds like an obvious solution, but as the video demonstrates (by reductio ad absurdum, admittedly) it doesn't work that way. Some things are sufficiently complex that you need a certain complexity of user interface to make them work. By reducing the number of controls in the user interface, you make it appear simple, but at the cost of burying functions too deeply.

It's just maths. Let's say you have 27 functions you want to perform. At one extreme, you could have 27 buttons, each of which performs the desired function. The end result is an aircraft cockpit, which looks scary and intimidating.



At the other, you could have 3 buttons. You could get to each of those 27 functions with just 3 clicks. Which is obviously better, right? Wrong. It's fine once you learn the menu sequence (press 1 to get menu 1, then press 2 to get submenu 1-2, then press 2 again to get function 5). But the only way to get familiar with the device is to go through all three main menus and all nine sub-menus, and remember what's on each and how to get there.

You could do the same with a single button, but you could activate it in three ways. Short press, long press, and double-tap. Now to get function 5 you'd press, hold, press. One button has to be even easier, right? You get where I'm going. Yes, it would be a beautifully clean interface, but completely unusable. You laugh. But isn't that what we so often do with icons on our interfaces? Left-click, right-click, double-click, middle-click, hover over, drag, CTRL-drag, SHIFT-drag, CTRL-ALT-SHIFT-right-click...? (And yes, I'm guilty of that particular UI design sin too.)

The fact is, some tasks are fundamentally complex, and you need an interface with sufficient complexity to do what you need to do. You simplify the interface by simplifying the task, either by removing features or automating them. I mean, it's great that we no longer have manual advance/retard levers or manual chokes on cars. We've automated those functions pretty well perfectly, and so that's two controls we don't need. And let's face it, who really needs a rev counter on an automatic? All well and good. My mum's Nissan is a triumph of simplicity.

But, of course, this may not be what the user wants, or needs. Take this blog, for example. It has basic word-processing functions, but I can't put a table in it. (Yeah, I could probably write one in raw HTML, but I can't do what I can do in Word or OpenOffice.) It won't let me select the icon I want for a bulleted list. It's restricted the functionality in favour of ease of use.

To be fair, 99% of the time, it's perfectly adequate, so I have no real complaints. All I really want to do on my blog is write words, and intersperse them with pictures and videos, and add in the occasional link. I can express myself quite adequately. But when it comes to a task as complex as making a movie, the basic functionality required to create something close to what I want is enormous. The medium is so rich that it requires a lot of user input, and that requires a rich user interface. And that, I suggest, means a relatively complex user interface.

Fundamentally, the user needs to learn the task. On something as simple as an iPod, the task can more or less be broken down to "select some music" and "play it". On a mobile phone, there may be many tasks, but they're all mostly simple, atomic tasks, and the main design challenge is to make it easy for the user to find how to get to them. But making a movie is a huge mess of complex, interrelated tasks, and no matter how simple you make the user interface, unless you understand what those tasks are, and what's involved in them, and how to get the results you want, you'll never understand what you're supposed to do.


It's what they call "necessary complexity". One of the things that killed Google Lively was that it was so simple it didn't work. Even though they did what all the design gurus said was sensible, they ended up with something that was harder to control than WoW and less fun. As it says in that article (do read it, it's good):

So, ideally the interaction interface needs to be of an order of complexity that is coupled to the order of complexity of the number and type of possible tasks. If it rises above that or falls below that, performing tasks becomes harder. Performing tasks with an oversimplified interaction-interface is like trying to make coffee with one hand tied behind your back.

Getting the balance right is hard. Damn hard. With Moviestorm, we find that some people find it trivially easy, while others find it really hard. Some find it so feature-rich it's bewildering, others complain it doesn't do what they want. The middle ground risks satisfying nobody. Powerful, complex tools risk being usable only by the few. But simple isn't always the right answer either. As the Macbook Wheel shows, "simple" can easily end up meaning "hard to use", "unsatisfying", and "inadequate". "Simple" is not the Holy Grail. It's really not.

"Clear and well structured" - now that's a whole different paradigm.