Amir Khella

Back when I was a research assistant at the Human Computer Interaction Lab in Maryland, a very interesting study was carried by Kent Norman on the acts of rage against computers. Kent surveyed people and asked them to “vent” their feelings and frustrations with their computers and software. The results showed that people screamed, swore, hit, and even killed their machines out of frustration and anger. For a full flavor of the acts of violence, follow the link to the full study below.

What was particularly interesting to me was the difference in opinions between Mac users and Windows users: Windows users blamed Microsoft for anything that goes wrong with their PC, even when it’s not Microsoft’s fault. On the other hand, Mac users forgave Apple even when it’s Apple’s fault. Back then, I wasn’t a Mac user (I’ve been a faithful PC user until Vista came out), so I grabbed a friend of mine who owned a Mac and asked him: “What’s so special about the Mac that makes you more forgiving?”.

“You know when you are driving back home through the rush hour traffic, after a long day at work, and your car suddenly gets rear ended by another driver. You stop your car, you go down and you’re ready to yell and fight with the other driver. And the other person gets off the car, and it’s this really hot chick, beautiful, well dressed, smiling at you with innocence and kindly apologizing. You can’t help but to smile back, tell her that it’s no big deal, get back in your car and drive back home. It may actually put you in a good mood that such a beautiful person has been nice to you today. That’s how I feel about my Mac!”

This person’s answer revealed to me the importance of a product’s look and behavior to users. It may even eclipse in importance its ability to function properly, or give users all what they need. We are mostly emotional creatures, and we like those who treat us well. Next time your product displays an error message, make sure it smiles, it apologizes, and qualifies as a hot chick

Related links:

• Study on computer rage
• Kent Norman
• The Human Computer Interaction Lab at Maryland

Over the previous couple of months, I’ve had the opportunity to work with Pluggd on creating the next user experience for their publishing platform. The product just came out of stealth mode yesterday and so far the buzz has been positive. Pluggd was also rebranded as Delve Networks and has now a more ambitious goal of indexing online videos and enable users to search inside them.

Photo Courtesy of TechCrunch

There has been many challenges in designing Delve’s media library, mostly around building the right workflow for filtering and tagging that allows publishers to quickly organize and find their media. But most importantly, we tried to create a design that people will love spending their time with. When we started tackling the challenge of creating the UI for the media library as an online asset manager, I looked at Delve’s competitors and used their products. The common feeling that I got from almost every one of them is that I am not having fun using their products, and I want to get the job done as fast as possible in order to leave it behind. And that was a big goal for us: To create an environment where people would like to stay and have fun working in, even when the task may not be fun in the first place. From the look and feel of the application, to streamlining tasks within the core UI components and avoiding pop-ups, users are presented with an interface that’s designed to keep them in the flow of their tasks and make it easy for them to go from one task to another.

One of the concepts that we introduced in the media library is establishing a bridge between the current task and the next one. A typical publisher workflow is to upload videos, tag them, edit their metadata, add videos to existing channels or new ones, edit the metadata on the channels then publish them. Some of these tasks are related to videos, and some are related to channels, hence it was intuitive to separate video management from channel management. But it was also important to provide a bridge that links the video management workflow to channel management. To create this bridge, a mini-channel list was inserted in the media library to enable users to create channels, add videos to them, and switch to the channels screen to manage the new channels and their content. The same panel that’s shown in mini-mode in the video screen is resized to its full height in the channels screen. This enables users to take a piece of the existing interface to the next task and proceed from a familiar ground.

Finally, the subtlety of the UI and the elegance of its colors (styled by Aaron Jasinski) achieves a nice degree of transparency, and almost sits quietly in the background, enabling users to focus on what’s most important to them: their media files.

A year ago, I walked into my manager’s office and told him that I was quitting. I was probably more surprised at my decision than he was. I just changed teams, and I couldn’t have been happier with the new team: every person was cooperative, positive, and respectful. My decision wasn’t based on any rationalization, but on a gut feeling and some strange bio-feedback: The minute I was stepping into the office, my heart would start pounding hard, and I would start gasping for air. I went to see my doctor, did all the tests that he recommended, and found nothing wrong with my heart or my health. Yet I kept getting these symptoms over and over.

I couldn’t understand what was wrong with me: I had a very comfortable job, working in a great company, getting paid a six figure salary and offered tons of benefits. There was no reason for me to be dissatisfied with my life, and yet I was. In fact, for someone who moved from a country where I was getting paid annually less than I was getting paid here monthly, it would be insane to give up such opportunity.

One morning, I looked myself in the mirror, and asked myself if I were to do what I was about to do that day if it were the last day of my life. I didn’t just say it, I felt it. During the following hours, I started seeing many messages, what one might call omens, that left no doubt in my heart that I am about to make the right decision.

When I walked out of the company that day, I felt light. I didn’t know what I was going to do next, and I didn’t care. I drove home with Castaneda’s sentence resonating in my mind: "I have told you that to choose a path you must be free from fear and ambition."

The following week, my dear friend Aaron Jasinski emailed me and told me that he knows someone who’s looking for a good UX designer to help with a new startup idea. A week later, I was sitting in a coffee shop with Aaron and Kevin Merritt who pitched me a vision for an application that lets people create databases with the same ease and freedom that they fill out a spreadsheet in Excel. Since I don’t believe in coincidences, I told Kevin that I would help him with the product. During the following nine months, I had the most fun in my entire life, designing the user interface and interaction for blist, working with one of the most accomplished entrepreneurs in Seattle. blist went out of stealth mode with a bang, and everyone praised its slickness and ease of use. It wasn’t a surprise to me because it was a pure labor of love! In products, as much as in food, you can taste love from the first "byte". What was a surprise to me was how my design work on blist was more effective than any PR or marketing work I would have done. Founders and CEOs started calling me, and I had hard time picking the next project to work on: every one had an interesting challenge, and I wanted to help every single company and make more users happy. And in making them happy, I am having the most fulfilling time of my life: When I go to bed at night, I can’t wait to wake up and do what I do one more day: Whether it’s designing a new user experience, or improving an existing one.

What brought these memories back was not just that it’s been a year since I quit Microsoft. A week ago, precisely a year from the day I walked into my manager’s office and told him I am leaving, the product I was working on was shut down.

The reason I am sharing this story is that every day, I meet entrepreneurs whom I admire for their determination and commitment to solve hard problems and make a big difference by doing things differently. I also meet people who are worried about what they would face "out there" if they leave their comfort zone and do something different. People who are longing for change, and yet are afraid of the slightest change. But at some point, we need to take that leap of faith, answering that voice deep inside, knowing that it doesn’t matter what we’ll face on that journey, and it doesn’t matter so much what we’ll accomplish. What really matters is who we’ll meet on the road, and who we’ll become at the end of it.

Today, I stopped by the King County library to drop off some CDs and books, and noticed that they finally finished working on the new automated system for the book drop-off. I haven’t been there since they finished it, but I noticed whenever I drove by that there has been recently lines of people standing by these machines. Since this was a new behavior, I thought that these people are just excited about the new system and they are all checking it out.

When I reached the machine, it all made sense.

Here is how it works:

- You press a button for a little door to slide up, revealing a mechanical belt that’s ready to take your books.

- The images on the screen show you that you need to put your book in a certain way on the belt for the scanner to be able to scan it: Face up with barcode aligned to the right side of the door.

- Then you need to wait for a red light (that I could hardly see in the unusually sunny daylight - Probably a design decision based on average weather in the area) to turn green for me to be able to put the next book in there. If you attempt to put the book before the light turns green, the whole system will come to a halt until you remove that item.

It took me three trials to scan a book before I was approached by a gentleman, whom I thought was standing there to look at how people use the machine to be able to use it himself, who started showing me how to use the machine, taking my books from my hand and sliding them into the machine one at a time, orienting them the right way, and waiting for the dim green light to proceed.

I am not sure what prompted the library to make this change (I can imagine people claiming they dropped off books that were never received by the library), but I feel frustrated that such bad solution had to be pushed into people’s workflow.

This situation somehow reminded me of my first experience with office 97, when Clippy showed up to help me with the simple task of writing a letter.

The lessons:

1- Some problems are better stay unsolved, than to be solved the wrong way.

2- If your solution needs someone to teach users how to use it, then you may be introducing more problems than what you are trying to solve.

blist, one of the great companies that I am fortunate to be designing the UI and interaction for, delivered an impressive presentation at DEMO ‘08.
blist’s mission is to create the world’s easiest database and targets mainstream users who traditionally used spreadsheets to create shallow databases and lists. In blist, users can create a database the same way they create a table in a spreadsheet. By providing a rich interactive user interface where users can drag and drop data types to create columns and a variety of rich editors in each cell that enable users to enter new values or pick from an existing list of values, users can create a full- fledged, strongly typed table in few minutes.
One of the great benefits that blist gives users is the ability to ask great questions. After all, what’s the use of a database if you can’t ask a lot of questions easily? blist has a simple drag and drop user interface that enables users to easily construct complex queries that would otherwise require a good understanding of boolean logic and SQL query language. In blist, every query creates a lens that helps you filter your data and see it through a different, well, lens
Without further due, here is Kevin Merritt, presenting blist at DEMO.

[Update] blist is the #1 watched video on DEMO’s website!

This site is about user experience and product design. Here you will find my thoughts and ramblings about design and software. You’ll also find links to my artwork gallery, and my projects from my previous life.