Usability Thinking
Junction of Engineering, Design, and Usability. By Moses Ting
Don’t Make Me Sign Up
Jul 19th
If you’re product is truly desired and has a good purpose, people will sign up to use it no matter what. But don’t force your visitors to sign up just to look at the capabilities of your site, that’s just plain annoying. Here’s a quick example of Kapitall.com:
I’m visiting, so let me try out the product. I neither want to give you my information, read the terms and conditions document, nor want to sign up for your newsletter. So don’t block me from your supposedly great product with a modal dialog. I’d rather go straight into demoing the product, then sign up when I want to use it.
What shape would a hybrid be?
Jun 29th
There’s been a growing recognition & usage of the term T-Shaped people. What’s a T-Shaped person you ask? Well, to summarize, a T-Shaped person is an individual that has a depth of experience/skills in one specific area, but also has a breath of knowledge in a number of other fields. The depth is represented by the vertical strike, and the breath is marked by the horizontal line.
Well, I had a conversation last night regarding how I’m a hybrid of an engineer and a designer, so what shape would I be? The letter T won’t work here because I have two verticals of experience/skills. Possible candidates are the letters of N, U, H, and X:
- N – There are two verticals, cross linked between by a diagonal slash. The diagonal slash forms a continuous pathway between the two verticals, sort of suggesting that one discipline picks up when and where the other one ends.
- U – There are also two verticals, but they are linked with a curved pathway. The parallel characteristics at the top of the U suggests that the separate disciplines will forever remain separated. But the curved link at the bottom of the U suggests that the two disciplines can bend and become one. (Wow, that’s pretty powerful).
- H – The two verticals are joined by a straight horizontal bar in the middle. This reminds me a bit of the interpretation of the T. However, the horizontal bar of the H is terminated at the two verticals, which kinda suggests that one cannot extend beyond the two dominate disciplines. Whereas the T’s vertical bar can technically extend indefinitely, thus suggesting potential for infinite growth of breath. H also stands for Hybrid, but that’s not that great of a reason.
- X – The two verticals aren’t actually verticals, but intersecting diagonals. This is a pretty good illustration of how a true hybrid operates on a regular basis. Whatever it is that I’m doing, I often switch between my logical engineer brain (left) and my creative designer brain (right), so I can examine the subject/problem/issue with different angles. Also, the openness of the line endings suggests potential for growth in all directions – a very good characteristic for a hybrid believer. We’re constantly striving to become better in each of our disciplines, but it’s the cross-linking of the two disciplines that makes us special.
So, which letter should be used to represent the hybrid individual? My vote goes to either U or X, with a strong preference for X. (It’s kinda funny how UX stands for usability experience, which is one of my favorite subjects). Here’s a bit more reasoning for my preference of X over U:
- The crossing of the X is at the middle, and that suggests frequent switching between the two disciplines/mindsets. Whereas, the U shape suggests more of a sequential order. When it comes to UI development, I would try to engineer a great solution, but at the same time keep my mind constantly on designing for the end user. It’s not engineer then design, or vice versa. It’s engineer and design, at the same time.
- As I mentioned earlier, the way the lines on the X points openly towards different directions suggests potential for open growth. No matter how much each of those points extend – grow in a specific discipline – the two disciplines will always be connected at the center and integral to each other. Whereas with the U, growth comes in two parallel verticals. This suggests that the more growth happens in each discipline, the lesser impact the connection has on the two verticals. Just think of a U with really really long verticals, you’ll get the idea.
I wonder what other hybrids out there might think, and which letter they prefer. Maybe we can start a movement here, something to achieve recognition for hybrid individuals in a specialization-preferred world.
Double Click to Context Menu
Jun 29th
It’s really amazing to see the amount of work and thought that goes into the creation of a solid web browser. There’s a whole lot of talk about speed, namely JavaScript engines such as V8, SpiderMonkey, and SquirrelFish that boasts browser performance. But what about browser usability? Speed is great, but most people couldn’t tell the difference between 0.15 and 0.25 seconds worth of rendering time. (I think I can, maybe.) However, most people will notice things like:
- Placement of menus + toolbars
- Easy/difficult to manage settings (firefox’s settings have become difficult to manage from earlier versions)
- Ordering of options on the context menu
- Ease of navigation
Most of the list above has to do with the usability of the browser itself. I will happily trade ease of use for .10 seconds of speed improvement, on 354 days out of the year.
When it comes down to it, usability matters a lot to me. And I personally am becoming more drawn to and reliant on the Opera Browser for my browsing needs. There are tons of little usability enhancements that I love, one of which is the fact that when you double-click on a word or a paragraph, the context menu shows up automatically. Such as this example from when I was parading through the NYTimes homepage, and I wanted to find out more about President Obama. All I had to do was double-click on Obama, and, BAM, up comes the context menu providing me immediate search access. No need to double-click and then right click.
It’s a shame that Opera doesn’t get as much attention as Firefox, Safari, or Chrome. But that might be a good thing, because it makes me feel special to be in a selective group of devoted Opera users.
Which is it?
Jun 25th
As a usability junkie, one thing that bothers me frequently is the feedback message you get after an incorrect login. The message typically goes something like this:
The message is 99% similar to Your Email or Password is incorrect. Well thanks, but which it is? Is it my email (username)? Or is it my password? That error message doesn’t help me at all. As a software engineer, I know it’s not that difficult to determine which of the two is incorrect. I can:
- Check for the existence of the username/email submitted. If it exists, go to #2. If not, then say “Username is incorrect.”
- Check the correctness of the submitted password. If it’s correct, then login. If not, then say “Password is incorrect.”
Done. Not that hard at all.
On the flip side, there are counter arguments against providing this sort of feedback (thanks to my buddy Steve who pointed them out to me):
- You wouldn’t want to confirm the existence of a user, because then it can be bombarded with password attempts for account access.
- You wouldn’t want to confirm the existence of an email address, because then it can be added to spamming lists.
- In API’s, most authentication methods are authenticate(username, password) that returns a True or False. So you wouldn’t be able to determine the existence of a user. (But I think this is just due to laziness.)
Counter arguments #2 and #3 do not hold much weight. #2 can be addressed by spam filters. Who among us do not receive a single piece of spam? #3 is just a byproduct of laziness, I think. #1 is the important one because technically speaking, it’s a very difficult problem to address. The system admin might be able to implement some sort of lockout-after-X-attempts system, but that has the danger of locking out the actual user when the bombardment is performed by a perpetrator. The admin can then move into IP-specific-lockout solutions, but those can be bypassed as well. So ultimately, it becomes a tradeoff question:
What usability aspects can be bypassed in exchange for a simpler security scheme?
Designer + Engineer
Jun 21st
I was chatting with a designer friend of mine and I thought the following snippet from our conversation was great. It went something like:
[As a designer,] having an engineer’s mind helps. Because I have this need to ask the question of “why doesn’t it work” and then I try and go fix it. That’s how engineers think. What’s the problem and what’s the solution? So there’s some objectivity to the subjectivity to design.
I really proud myself on being a whole-minded individual – having a balanced utilization of the right side and the left side of my brain. I have a number of thoughts regarding this designer + engineer hybridization, and I will continue to publish them here in the future.
ESPN’s World Cup UI
Jun 17th
Not sure if anyone has noticed this, but the User Interface (UI) created by ESPN for the World Cup 2010 games are amazing. Here’s a screenshot:
The part that I love the most is the overlay of goals, cards, and player exchanges on the timeline. Clicking on a goal will trigger the video player to play a clip of the goal. This is a great example of sexy aggregation of data and multimedia.
Root Cause for Corrupted .NET Framework
Jun 17th
This article attempts to address the .NET Framework Windows Update failures that numerous individuals have been seeing. Namely, there’s been numerous posts (here, here) regarding failed Windows Update packages of KB979906, KB979909, and KB982168. And also a recent post on Microsoft Support’s website regarding error code “0×643″ or “1603″ when installing an update for .NET Framework 1.0, 1.1, 2.0, 3.0, or 3.5.
So, here it goes.
While on a GoToMeeting with an engineer and an escalation engineer from the giant software company that publishes not Linux nor OS X, we were able to determine a root cause of the .NET issue my company was seeing at a number of our client’s Windows XP machines.
Problem
The problem that our company is being plagued with is that our .NET application does not open correctly on our user’s machines. The typical error has to do with failures to bind to .NET 2.0 assemblies, because they are not available on the system. When this occurs on our user’s machines, we have observed failed Windows Updates on these users’ machines. Namely:
- KB979909 – Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 and .NET Framework 2.0 SP2 Security Update for Windows 2000, Windows Server 2003, and Windows XP x86
- KB982168 – Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 Update for Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP x86
Most of our affected users are running Windows XP. And a screenshot of the failed Windows Update is shown below:
Root Cause
I worked with the two engineers on an affected user’s laptop, and was able to determine the root cause of our application’s failure to launch — the inability to bind to .NET 2.0 assemblies). BTW, the two engineers were amazing, kudos to their responsiveness and commitment to solving the issue. Our application’s failure to launch is confirmed to be a result of failed .NET updates on the affected machine. The explanation is as follows:
- It so happens that there were two running processes (bxlaui.exe and bxlartd.exe) in the background, which locks assemblies in the .NET Global Assembly Cache (GAC). Note that these processes might be might be initiated by a Windows Startup executable item called bbxlcmd. This command can be found by going to the System Configuration Utility (Start > Run > msconfig), and clicking on the Startup tab.
And the two processes are shown here:
- Now when .Net updates are pushed onto the machines, the updates attempt to update the assemblies in the GAC. However, because the two processes are holding onto (locking) the assemblies, the updates fail. The typical error message you will see in the update installation logs is similar to:
06/12/10 03:02:34 DDSet_Error: Failed to install assembly C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\System.configuration.dll. IAssemblyCache->InstallAssembly() returned -2147024891. 06/12/10 03:02:34 DDSet_Error: Failed to install assembly 'C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\System.configuration.dll' because of system error: Access is denied.
Note that the update installations files are typically located within the user’s temp directory (Start > Run > %temp%), and are prefixed with dd_NET-FrameworkXX.txt.
- At this point, the Windows updates tries to rollback because of the failure. However, the rollback mechanism on the updates did not rollback successfully. So rather than restoring the assemblies to their previous state, the assemblies somehow are entirely removed from the system.
- With the assemblies now missing, our application is unable to bind to them and therefore fails to initialize.
Note that this affects the 2.0 version of the .NET Framework assemblies, as those are the assemblies that the running processes hold onto.
Troubleshooting
In order for the .NET Framework Updates to execute properly, the .NET assemblies that were “locked” must be freed. You can do this by manually terminating the two processes (bxlaui.exe and bxlartd.exe) from the Task Manager. You can also use process explorer to determine which process is holding onto a .Net Assembly, and terminate those. And now reinstall the necessary .NET Frameworks for your system. For us, we simply installed the standalone version of the dotnetfx35.exe.
Here’s process explorer showing the two Bloomberg processes holding onto the .NET 2.0 System.Web.Services assembly.
There are also several tools to help determine whether the .NET Framework on a machine is corrupted, and whether the corruption is similar to the issue mentioned above:
- .NET Framework Verification Tool (link)
- Collect .NET Framework Installation/Update logs with this collection tool. Look for Access Denied error messages in the collected logs. Note that the following command can also be invoked from the command prompt to check for locked assemblies:
cacls c:\windows\assembly\* /T
Additional Details
- From what I’ve seen, those two processes are triggered by a startup item. This item was called bbxlcmd.exe and can be accessed by found using the Configuration Utility (Start > Run > msconfig) and selecting the Startup tab. If this item is checked, then that means the two processes will start automatically when Windows starts. Which means the assemblies will be locked when Windows tries to automatically update the .NET Framework.
- Note that it does not have to be System.Configuration.dll that is shown in the access denied error message. From what I’ve seen, it really depends on which assembly is updated first. I’ve come across System.Data.dll, System.Web.Services.dll, etc…
- Note that because Bloomberg software uses the .NET 2.0 assemblies, it is the .NET 2.0 update that fails during the 3.5 Framework installation. When you take a look at the installation logs, you might see a file called dd_dotnetfx35error.txt that contains the following:
[06/14/10,14:49:23] Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0a: [2] Error: Installation failed for component Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0a. MSI returned error code 1603 [06/14/10,14:50:17] WapUI: [2] DepCheck indicates Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0a is not installed.
This is an indication that .NET Framework 2.0 SP2 (that’s what the a stands for) is not available on the system, which further supports the fact that the .NET 2.0 assemblies are removed from the system.
Final Note
So, hopefully this article was able to shed some light to the mysterious .NET issues and the failed Windows Updates. Note that I cannot 100% be sure that only the Bloomberg processes mentioned above are the culprits that are holding onto .NET assemblies. But when .NET Framework updates/reinstallation failes, be sure to:
- Check to determine if/what processes are holding onto (locking) the .NET assemblies in the GAC. These processes should never be holding onto the GAC assemblies anyway, this is a no-no.
- Terminate the processes found.
- Determine the software that initiated those processes, see if you can prevent them from starting up automatically.
- Contact the software company and tell them that their processes should not be locking up assemblies in the GAC.
