FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 2 · GEEK FACTOR: 
TiVo saved my marriage!
Ok, maybe that's a bit of an exaggeration. It dawned on me the other day, though, that it's been a long time since there have been any fights in our household over whose TV show we're going to watch. Even better, in those increasingly rare moments where my wife and I do both get to sit down and watch TV, we always get to watch something we like, as opposed to whatever happens to be on.
As quickly as I've already taken it for granted, time-shifting is really the ultimate convenience (and usability feature). The two most sought after commodities in our culture are time and money, and time is the only one that's truly irreplaceable.
The funny thing, though, is that TiVo and podcasting seem to be getting most of the credit for time-shifting, when we already have one of the most amazing time-shifting devices of all, the internet. Somehow, since TV and radio always tied us down, we've found the freedom remarkable, but the internet has time-shifted virtually everything we do. We can shop, do research, or catch up with friends whenever we have a spare moment, even if it's at 3am.
It's amazing how, just over a decade into its mass-adoption, we already take almost everything about the internet for granted. The ability of the worldwide web and, increasingly, all mass media, to be both time-shifted and place-shifted (with the advent of smaller laptops, PC-based media centers, etc.) has barely begun, and it will continue to revolutionize much more than just how we watch TV.
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WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 31 · GEEK FACTOR: 
Make your technology work harder, not your users
Being a programmer by blood and a psychologist by training, I still tend to have the bad habits of a coder, even when I should know better. For example, if I build a website function, I tend to be stubborn about how that function gets used. Now, like any good developer, I anticipate the obvious abuses and try to provide decent alternatives and errors, but the problem is that I automatically assume that any function other than what I intended is an "abuse".
Case in point: a client's site has two search methods: (1) an advanced search that allows for cities, dates, etc. and (2) a simple search that just handles keywords. Pretty standard stuff. Inevitably, though, someone will try to enter a city into the keyword box, and wind up with no results. Now, there are legitimate technological reasons for why this happens, and the fix is difficult, but the reality is that it just bugs me that people do this when there's a perfectly good "City" box on the other form.
Of course, by avoiding the difficult fix, we tend to supplement the problem with easy fixes. Add a header to tell users that it's just for "keywords" or even put a description telling them to search for cities on the advanced form. The problem is that, on top of taking up screen real-estate and hurting the usability of the site, these messages just ultimately make the users work harder. Typing a city name into a search box on an events site is a reasonable thing to, whether or not I personally approve of it.
At the end of the day, whenever possible, it's our job as developers to make the technology do the heavy lifting. Even smart users (and, granted, some days that feels like an oxymoron) shouldn't be made to think too hard, or they'll ultimately give up and go home.
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MONDAY, JANUARY 29 · GEEK FACTOR:
What's a geek factor?
From a usability standpoint, it occurs to me that some readers may wonder about the functional value of the "Geek Factor" that accompanies every debabblog post. Just like Google's PageRank, the Geek Factor is a complex algorithm with thousands of variables that no mere mortal can hope to understand. The algorithm is housed in my brain and the variables include how much sleep I got and whether I had flaxseed cereal with organic blueberries or Captain Crunch and Red Bull for breakfast.
Originally, when the debabblog consisted entirely of "debabbled" posts that defined web-related terms, the Geek Factor was a measure of how difficult or complex the topic was, or sometimes how confused the world seemed to be about it (ex. Web 2.0). Nowadays, the Geek Factor may represent one of three things: (1) difficulty of the subject, (2) geekiness of the subject, or (3) a number that looks pretty to me at the time.
So, the short answer is, while there's probably some shred of meaning left in the Geek Factor, I'm not sure it provides any great value. Mostly, I still have a bit of designer in my genetic code, and I think it looks cool. I will say that the coveted Geek Factor 4 is very rare (I didn't even grant it to this post), so approach those with caution.
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FRIDAY, JANUARY 26 · GEEK FACTOR: 
Interfaces: Star Trek (TNG) control panels
Welcome to part two in my ongoing saga of science-fiction inspired interfaces. I'd like to say that this is a deep exploration of how futurism, when removed from technological constraints, reveals the essence of usability, but mostly it's just a reflection of the fact that I watch too much TV.
I should say that, when I talk Trek, I'm usually talking about Star Trek: The Next Generation (ST:TNG to some of us). Being born in 1970, I'm a child of all things 80's, and for that I make no apologies.
One aspect of Star Trek that always amazed me was how much reliance the relatively distant future still had on control panels. Even in the 24th century, people sit in chairs and tap on keys. In ST:TNG's case, the keys are all touchscreen monitors, and the entire ship is more or less controlled by giant iPhones.
The really intersting thing is that, no matter how complex the command, everything seems to be doable in about two keystrokes. This is where the real technological magic must come into play. Of course, we can't see the keystrokes, so this usability miracle is hidden from us, but I've come to the conclusion that it works something like this: (1) the Captain gives a command, (2) the computer translates the command into big, shiny buttons, and (3) someone pushes those buttons.
So, let's say that Captain Picard gives the following order: "Set a course for Starbase 211. Engage". This produces the following buttons:
Of course, this raises the question: why have the buttons at all? From the psychological standpoint, the crew has to have something to do and feel good about. It's also, presumably, a little dangerous to have everything you say turn into reality, so someone has to push a big button to make it happen. Of course, the really important commands, like "Tea. Earl Grey. Hot." require no button-pushing at all.
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WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 24 · GEEK FACTOR: 
Babble: Chase wants you to Gt $ fstr
There's a billboard for Chase Bank that I keep driving past on I-90 that drives me crazy. Actually, I'm amazed that there aren't more billboard-related highway deaths, but that's a topic for another time. Except for a tiny Chase logo at the bottom, the billboard simply says:
Gt $ fstr
Of course, the intent of the message is that Chase is going to make us all rich: "Get money faster". The problem is that, at least by genetic predisposition, I'm a coder, and sometimes I think a bit too much for my own good.
Originally, the slightly dormant FoxPro part of my brain kicked in and I read that as "'Gt' is contained in 'fstr'", which of course isn't true, so the whole billboard evaluated to just "False". Yep, the first time I read the billboard I actually saw "False" - Chase Bank. Not the greatest marketing message. Then, the C++ part of my brain kicked in and I thought that maybe fStr was a file handler. That didn't really help with the rest of the message, but "GT" in ColdFusion is shorthand for "Greater Than" (since HTML doesn't take kindly to the > character), so my cross-language translation came out roughly to "Greater than is contained in [some file]". Sorry, Chase Bank, I'm not buying that, whatever it is.
I have no idea what the moral of this story is, other than revealing that I'm all kinds of crazy. I think the point is that all of us can be a bit too clever for own good sometimes. Somebody in marketing at Chase wanted to get my attention, and they did, but even if I was normal and impressed with their cleverness, I still wouldn't be opening an account there. In fact, I probably had to drive past the billboard half-a-dozen times before I even saw the Chase bank logo. Marketing babble is no better than technobabble, and we could all stand to simplify our messages.
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MONDAY, JANUARY 22 · GEEK FACTOR:
TECH cocktail 3 - Thursday, January 25th
I'd like to remind all Chicago-area techies that the next TECH cocktail is coming up this Thursday. It's a really high-energy crowd and a great mix of people, including entrepreneurs, bloggers, podcasters, digital artists, etc. It's free and open to just about anyone with an interest in technology, but visit the site and RSVP first.
 Before I launched my consulting practice last year, I took some time to reacquaint myself with the Chicago tech scene and had the opportunity to connect with quite a few groups and associations. There are a lot of good groups out there and I'm an active member of the Illinois IT Association, but I still find that the Chicago technology crowd can be a little insular. Maybe we Midwesterners are just too used to keeping to ourselves, and yes, we techies don't always have the greatest social skills, but we also haven't fostered the tech community here in Chicago like some cities have.
TECH cocktail has been a big step towards tapping into the energy and excitement of Chicago's tech community, and it's a great introduction for anyone new to the scene or interested in local start-ups and entrepreneurial opportunities. I highly recommend it and hope to see you there!
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FRIDAY, JANUARY 19 · GEEK FACTOR:
Splogs debabbled
I just realized the other day that I haven't done a good, old-fashioned "debabbled" entry in quite a while. Since the debabblog is finally starting to take off, and all things blog-related are fresh on my mind, I thought I'd talk about one of the internet's latest plagues: splogs.
 No, "splog" isn't a sound effect for a Batman fight. If it were, though, the picture to the right is how I imagine it would look. Does this help you at all? Probably not, but it's Friday and that's the kind of thing that happens.
Splog is actually shorthand for "spam blog", and it's essentially a blog created to spam the search engines and trick them into pulling visitors its way. Some splogs are just pages full of spam content, usually keywords and links to trick search engines. Other splogs are what are known as "scrapers", which means that their authors (or a program written by them) go out to other blogs and "scrape" content off of them, building a blog out of other people's work. There's another word for this: it's called "stealing".
Fortunately, most blog audiences can tell stolen content from original content and tend to reward legitimate bloggers accordingly. Unfortunately, splogs contribute to what's becoming a huge amount of internet pollution; bad or copied content that ultimately just clogs up search engines and makes good content harder to find.
One final note: spam blogs shouldn't be confused with blog spam. Blog spam usually refers to spam content (most often advertisements and links) left on legitimate blogs, generally in the form of user comments.
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Free "geek guide"
The first official debabblog geek guide: Speaking geek to customers, a guide to communicating technology to non-techies.
What's a debabblog?
We geeks have always prided ourselves on being incomprehensible, and the rapid pace of the internet has elevated technobabble to an art form. My goal in this blog is simple: to help "debabble" the web, from the latest jargon to usability issues to business trends.
Who writes this stuff?
My name is Peter Meyers, and I'm a geek. To make a long story short: I started coding at age 9, got a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology, was an executive at a successful internet start-up, and now have my own consulting firm, Tminus2.
©2007 Tminus2 Consulting |
