James's Weblog

Well, I’m back from the CHI 2006 conference in Montreal. I stayed at the Hyatt Regency, which the conference organizers recommended, but I later discovered there were hotels just as close to the convention hall that had better rooms, better service, and that were cheaper too.

Things I didn’t like about the Hyatt Regency in Montreal:

• The light switches were in non-standard locations. Rather than having the switches for the main area and for the entryway arranged side-by-side as usual, the switches were arranged vertically.
• The only light switch to the bathroom was on the outside. It confounded me every time.
• The bathroom was not laid out well. The towel rack was on the opposite side from the sink, so after washing my hands, I had to drip water across the floor before I could dry them off.
• The shower faucet confused me. It took me a couple of minutes without my glasses to notice that it’s the small ridge along the top that points to the temperature, not the handle itself like in my shower at home. (Incidentally, the valve in the faucet broke the morning of my return flight, so it was broken in more than ways than one.)
• The hotel room’s alarm clock used Comic Sans for its labels. Good gravy. I immediately knew I’d hate it.
• The alarm clock had no buttons to adjust the hour for the current time or for the alarm time; there were only minute adjustment buttons. (To make matters worse—and this wasn’t really the hotel’s fault—but its time was off by 12 hours when I got the room. It’s a good thing I noticed!)
• The alarm clock was a radio alarm clock, and the volume knob controlled only the radio; it didn’t control the normal alarm chirp, which happened to be way too quiet.
• Hyatt charged money for Internet access, and it’s hard to find the rate from the hotel’s internal website. Just to get to the pricing page, I first needed to try to sign up for service and to accept a license agreement. And even once there, the pricing page was hard to understand, listing prices in a seemingly random order. (Luckily, the Hyatt apparently blocked just web traffic; ssh access was unrestricted, so I used Remote Desktop through an ssh tunnel to do everything I needed.)
• They didn’t leave chocolates on my pillows.
• There was a plate in the hallway by my door when I arrived, and it was there for the following three nights. I swear it got closer to my door every night.
• Half of the television stations were in French, and the ones that were in English had mostly American programming.

In contrast, the hotel that Jeff Wong stayed at was cheaper, had free Internet service, was large and spacious, and even had a kitchen and fridge.

One nice thing about the Hyatt was that it was connected to the convention hall by way of an underground shopping mall, so I could get to the conference without going into the outside cold. Still, it wasn’t so cold in Montreal that it was a big advantage, and I’d rather have seen more of the city anyway. I didn’t get to look at any of the stores either, since almost everything was closed outside of the conference hours.

Scroll to the bottom of the CHI 2006 sponsor list. How sad. Not only is VMware the only “friend of CHI”, but they don’t have our company logo and don’t even give us a hyperlink!

(That’s the pessimist’s view; the optimist’s perspective is sometimes you sometimes can get way more bang for your buck.)

A funny thing can happen when a product priced at several thousand dollars suddenly becomes free: usability polish can become really important. It’s a bit unintuitive; you’d probably expect expensive products would get more attention toward fixing usability problems. After all, there’s money on the line, right? Surely users would be more critical.

Well, yes and no.

• A thousand-dollar-product has a significantly smaller audience than a free product. Consequently, there are simply far fewer eyes looking at the product that would notice (and more importantly, care about) a font or widget that doesn’t look or feel right. There are far fewer people randomly bashing on their keyboards and falling into some crazy corner case.
• If the audience is small enough, the road to consultingware is a tempting path: only fix problems when a customer complains. Why spend lots of effort trying to guess ahead of time what issues people might have? Being lazy and fixing issues on demand doesn’t have the penalty of wasted effort.
• The audience consists of a different demographic. People spending thousands of dollars on a software product are more likely to know what they’re buying and to know what they’re doing, and consequently they probably will need less hand-holding from the user interface. (This doesn’t apply when the purchasers aren’t the same people as the users, although in those cases a product is more likely to be unusable for other reasons: the people spending the money simply don’t have enough information to know when they’re being sold a usability lemon.)

The other important detail is that there’s money on the line for free products too. When a free product is meant to be vehicle for brand promotion, you’d better put on a good face for the public and make its UI look good.

From the CHI 2006 submission guidelines (PDF):

Be careful with the use of gender-specific pronouns (he, she) and other gender-specific words (chairman, manpower, man-months). Use inclusive language (e.g., she or he, they, chair, staff, staff-hours, person-years) that is gender-neutral. If necessary, you may be able to use “he” and “she” in alternating sentences, so that the two genders occur equally often.

Sigh. Not that I don’t believe in gender equality, but alternating genders across sentences is supremely stupid, unless your goal is to ruin otherwise perfectly good sentence and paragraph flow (and comprehensibility). You’d think an organization trying to improve human interaction would have better sense. Or maybe some people purposely want to disrupt readability so they can draw attention to themselves: “Hey, look at us, we aren’t sexist! Aren’t we great?”

I have a better idea: Okay, English doesn’t have neutered word forms, but we can make some up. Better yet, let’s make up some transgendered words.

• he/she: ’e
• him/her: herm (which could double as an abbreviation for “hermaphrodite”)
• his/hers: herms

A couple of weeks ago I read about a scam anti-virus program sold by some no-name software company. The software reported false positives to induce hapless people into thinking that they were infected with something and to buy their useless product. A few days ago, Mark Russinovich of Sysinternals wrote about bogus spyware removers.

I’m so disgusted that I wonder if there should be a programming ethics board that allows programmers to become certified or licensed voluntarily. Shouldn’t people writing so-called anti-virus software take some form of Hippocratic Oath? Such a system wouldn’t be too different from the driver signing that Microsoft does, except it’d be a general system for individual developers, not for particular binaries. Hobbyists still would be able to create, distribute, and sell unlicensed programs, but anyone wanting to establish trust could advertise that they’re licensed. A signing authority could verify that licenses are active and authentic. Obtaining a license could require verification of developers’ personal information, allowing them to be identified and accountable if they break the code (pun intended). Qualification exams even could test for recognition of buffer overflows and other unsafe practices.

On the other hand, what would the punishment be? If the licensing fee is too low, it might be worthwhile for dishonest developers to obtain licenses just to break them. If the licensing fee is too high, no one would participate. And, of course, it’s unclear how to distinguish between intentionally malicious code and simply negligent code.