Hypertext anyone? (Kindle disappointments)

Just before Christmas, I bought a Kindle device (the one with free 3G as well as WiFi). There are many good things about it, not least the fact that thanks to its capacity I can slip far more books into my jacket pocket for a train journey than I could previously carry in a large suitcase.

What is proving increasingly disappointing is the lack of internal links in many of the books available. You might expect that this would only apply to very cheap or free Kindle versions of out-of-copyright texts. But no, publishers are selling brand-new Kindle versions of their books with not a link in sight.

The Tuning of Place: Sociable Spaces and Pervasive Digital Media is a very interesting book by Richard Coyne published by MIT Press. Richard crosses the boundaries between pervasive media, design, architecture and many other fields, so Vitruvius, equal temperament, clocks, and Henri Lefebvre all make their appearance in a fascinating argument sustained over 240 pages.

Enjoying reading the hardback edition from my university’s library I thought I would buy the Kindle edition from Amazon. There are no hyperlinks between the endnote numbers in the text and the notes at the end. This makes the Kindle book far less useful than the paper version, especially given that there are forty-five pages of endnotes.

This is not really acceptable. Amazon have offered to refund my money and I shall take up their offer. They say:

‘Kindle supports titles with linked footnotes. Unfortunately there are some titles in our catalogue, including The Tuning of Place, where this functionality is not active due to the technical nature of the underlying file.’

It seems to me that a major publisher like MIT Press has no business producing a semi-functional electronic book. The T in MIT stands for Technology, I believe...

Disc player has less memory than goldfish

Back in March I noted a number of interaction design faults in the PURE Chronos CD Series II DAB/FM/CD/MP3 Stereo Clock Radio. Most of them were minor irritations. Now I have discovered something really stupid.

The machine plays CDs, but retains no memory of where it was when it stopped playing.

Here is a typical scenario...

You are listening to a CD. In this illustration, track 6 is about to play.

You switch to the Radio (using the Source button).

You switch back to the CD. For quite a while nothing happens, as it takes about a second for CD-playing to reload.

The machine starts playing the CD at the beginning of Track 1! All memory of the fact that we were at the beginning of Track 6 has been lost.

How stupid is that? How little storage would it require for the machine to keep track of the position on the CD when it left off? How much effort would it have taken to make this work usably? 

I can guess the explanation for this nonsense: the different devices within the machine are not really part of an integrated system but discrete modules which operate ignoring what each other device is doing. But that is not really good enough for a machine that cost £88.05 (equals $134 or €101 at today’s exchange rate). 

Consumer devices are generally stupid when it comes to remembering where they are on a CD, DVD or Blu-Ray disc – I’ll be coming back to this. This Pure machine is another example of bad practice.

Information and junk

JISC, the Joint Information Systems Committee, runs a very useful service called JISCmail which enables the academic community to set up, manage and interact with a whole range of email lists. I regularly use it to correspond with the PhD-Design, Computer Arts and many other groups.

Unfortunately, ‘designers’ have recently been at work. A number of useful aspects of the previous site have disappeared, some in direct contravention of established Web practice. For example, it is no longer possible to tell which lists one has recently visited because the differential colouring for visited links is suppressed.

The front page has been invaded by an enormous graphic, 710x400 pixels, occupying more than one third of the available area in a typical browser view. This periodically changes, creating visual distraction while delivering a minute amount of useful information about other JISC services.

The JISCmail page with disastrous giant graphic.

Sanity restored: the same page after blocking graphics in the browser options.

There is no visible option to turn off graphics – it is necessary to dig around in the preferences of the browser in order to suppress them for this site.

Designers (I speak as one) can be the enemy of usability.

Interacting with Pure Chronos CD radio

PURE Chronos CD Series II DAB/FM/CD/MP3 Stereo Clock Radio.

I recently bought a combined CD player and DAB/FM radio to use in the kitchen. It has an alarm function too but that was not a priority.

It works well, makes a good sound, and even has a little remote so if we wanted we could control it without leaving the sink or the cooker. It was easy to set up – you just turn it on and it sets itself up, setting itself to the right time and date and tuning in to all the available stations. So these criticisms of its interaction design should not be taken to mean it is a bad product – they are minor irritations.

1. Location of the on button. The machine has a low energy standby mode, so the usual way to turn it on or off is to press the button marked Standby which is a toggle between standby and on. Why is it in one of the least accessible parts of the front panel (bottom-right of the eight-button set)?! You have to carefully guide your finger past the big round knob in the middle, taking care not to hit the button immediately above.
2. Delay in response of the on button. The machine is in standby. You press the Standby button. Nothing happens – it takes up to three seconds for the display to change and for sound to emerge. This breaks all the rules of providing immediate feedback for user-reassurance. It could surely flash the display (which is permanently on in standby mode), make a tiny beep, or something...? The total lack of action for a moment is disturbing and creates an aura of doubt around the product as a whole.
3. Location of the volume button. By contrast to the on button, pride of place is given to the Volume button (top-left of the eight-button panel). This might seem reasonable on the grounds that you may want to suddenly turn the radio down if the phone rings or a friend calls round, but in fact you hardly ever need this button. Why? Because the big round knob in the middle is the volume control. You only ever need to press the volume button if you had previously selected another mode and want to return to Volume. This switchover is something that the machine does anyway after quite a short time-out while any other mode is selected. So there really is no need for the volume button to have the most accessible location on the panel.
4. Selecting stations. To change stations requires a three-fold interaction: (1) press Stations (2) turn the central knob until the name of the chosen station appears below the current station in the display (3) press the central knob inwards. This seems excessive, and is certainly something you have to read the manual to discover – surely no one would intuit the idea of using a large rotatable knob as a push-button? 
5. Selecting presets. Choosing a preset is very similar to choosing a station. But with one incomprehensible difference. When you choose Stations, the station shown, from which you can navigate left or right using the central knob, is the current one. But when you choose Presets, the station shown is not the current one but the first. I can only imagine that the programming of the interface does not include checking whether the currently chosen station is in the presets list so the machine cannot behave as it obviously should, directly analogous to using the Stations control.

This is a nice machine in the Pure range [external link] designed by Imagination Technologies [external link] in the UK. With a tiny bit more care in interaction design it would be even better.

Tag cloud becomes a motif

The tag cloud becomes a motif. BBC News 19 February 2010.

It is not necessary to have the concept of a tag cloud or word cloud to think of scaling words in relation to the number of their appearances in a text, but you can be pretty sure that the look of this display behind Gordon Brown is symptomatic of a fashion derived from the current presence of tag clouds on so many websites.

Presumably it is not really based on analysis of a text, but just represents the owners’ perception of the importance of each of the terms.

A gallery of tag clouds is here [external link].

Think Interact begins

This blog will allow me to keep a record of my own thoughts on interaction – which one day I might put into organised form.

Also to accumulate links to other people's material relevant to current and historic interactivity.