racoma.com.phJ. Angelo Racoma on technology, economics, writing, problogging, and getting things done

Last I wrote about mobile phones it was about my Nokia 1112 (which I reviewed here), the basic but decent mobile phone I’ve been using for almost a year now. Looks like I’m not alone in opting for basic, no-frills phones. Jeremy Wagstaff writes of a recent experience one Loose Wire.

The Nokia 1100, according to Wikipedia, is the world’s best selling handset, having shifted 200 million units. It seems to cost about $20, often less, and has a battery life of about 400 hours. And, crucially for my friend, sports two important features: It makes and receives calls and SMS. Beyond that, in the words of Bryan Ferry, there’s nothing. (Well, actually there’s WAP, but who uses that?)

The point about the Nokia 1100 is that it’s a phone. It doesn’t pretend to be anything else (except a flashlight, if you press and hold the “c” key down (presumably “c” stands for torCh or flasChlight or “come into the light where I can see you, Mildred”.) It’s designed for conditions in developing countries—dustproof keyboard, non-slip sides—but for many of us that could describe an ordinary day in the office (dusty, slippery, in need of illumination).

For my PIM and mobile Internet needs, I use my laptop!

Here’s one UI peeve of mine. It’s when a web application—or any software for that matter—asks you for something, and gives you no option otherwise.

Take for instance tagged.com. After signing in with your desired username, password and other details, it will then ask you for your web mail credentials (in my case Gmail) so it can send invites to everyone on your list (read: spam everyone!).

One correction. Initially, one would think that the point of submitting your webmail credetnials is for Tagged to check if any of your contacts is already on their database. It’s in the wording, after all:

Enter your password and we’ll search your address book for friends on Tagged.

However, it appears that my first hunch is correct. The point of this is for you to allow Tagged to spam EVERYONE on your contact list. See here.

What bugs me is that they don’t give users the option to NOT harvest your mail contacts. First thing that popped in my mind was this could be a phishing site. Had I not known better, I would have just keyed in my Gmail password. I wonder how many users had been fooled into doing just that.

Tagged should have given me the option of skipping this step, much like other social networks. I would rather just invite friends after I’ve tested the waters and determined whether the service is worth sending email invites/solicitations to people.

I have (finally) updated to the latest version of WordPress, 2.1.2. Now I’m thinking of overhauling the site’s look. I’ve been favoring the Blogging Pro theme, which was recently released to the public by my former colleagues at the Bloggy Network (actually we’re still working pretty closely together on some projects). Check out Study Driving. After a couple of theme changes (including Cutline and Torn), I’ve settled with the pleasing three-column layout that is the BP theme.

Now, I’ve always strived to keep the J Spot as simple and straightforward as possible, and with the best possible usability in mind (I try). However, sometimes I think the narrow theme (optimized for 800px) gets too constricting.

What would you say to a blog overhaul?

I won’t exactly throw away everything and build up from scratch. I mean that’s bad for SEO. I’ll likely still be applying the same elements (text, navigation links, etc.) but over a new layout. I’ll be experimenting with a new look sometime within the day (while my FTP client does some WP uploading/upgrading across a bunch of other sites).

Jhay Rocas has already done it. His blog used to sport the same Hemmed theme. Now he’s using the Blogging Pro theme. (And incidentally, his blog is now more popular than mine, according to use.com.ph ).

Then again, I’d still prefer a mid to large font theme like the one fellow blogheralderLorelle on WP uses. I probably need to tweak Elena’s (of Design Disease) BP design a bit.

I’d love to hear from you.

I’m a fan of usable sites. In fact, I’m part of a local group of usability advocates—Usability PH. If you’re wondering what the heck usability is, I can cite the Wikipedia definition here.

Usability is a term used to denote the ease with which people can employ a particular tool or other human-made object in order to achieve a particular goal. Usability can also refer to the methods of measuring usability and the study of the principles behind an object’s perceived efficiency or elegance.

Usability usually pertains to how efficiently a product (or software, or just about anything) can be used, how easily one can learn to use it, and how satisfying it is. So you can imagine your favorite gadget to be usable if it satisfies these three criteria—that is, if you were easily able to learn how to work it, and if you’re satisfied overall.

Simplicity: a concept in itself, and not a lack of something else

Many people equate usability to simplicity, and I cannot help but agree. Something usable should be simple enough to use that you shouldn’t have to RTFM. However, this does not mean something should be dumbed down and feature-less. To better illustrate, let me cite what Joel Spolsky writes on his blog.

Devotees of simplicity will bring up 37signals and the Apple iPod as anecdotal proof that Simple Sells. I would argue that in both these cases, success is a result of a combination of things: building an audience, evangelism, clean and spare design, emotional appeal, aesthetics, fast response time, direct and instant user feedback, program models which correspond to the user model resulting in high usability, and putting the user in control, all of which are features of one sort, in the sense that they are benefits that customers like and pay for, but none of which can really be described as “simplicity.” For example, the iPod has the feature of being beautiful, which the Creative Zen Ultra Nomad Jukebox doesn’t have, so I’ll take an iPod, please. In the case of the iPod, the way beauty is provided happens to be through a clean and simple design, but it doesn’t have to be. The Hummer is aesthetically appealing precisely because it’s ugly and complicated.

So Joel says that aesthetics is a matter of taste. The iPod’s elegance lies in its simplicity. However, other objects may be beautiful because of how complicated they are. Just like mechanical watches, with all the gears, cogs, tourbillons, and whatnot. However, Joel goes on to say that the concept of simplicity does not mean you have to take out features to make something usable.

I think it is a misattribution to say, for example, that the iPod is successful because it lacks features. If you start to believe that, you’ll believe, among other things, that you should take out features to increase your product’s success. With six years of experience running my own software company I can tell you that nothing we have ever done at Fog Creek has increased our revenue more than releasing a new version with more features. Nothing.

Strike a balance

However, I would like to disagree to some extent. Too many features might just confuse users. And actually Joel wrote about that just recently, when he posted about Windows Vista’s having too many shutdown options. So I guess it has to be a balance in design. Something should have enough features, but useful features. And the product’s design should be simple enough not to give the common end-user headaches having to wade through tons of features, but also intelligent enough to be able to give the more advanced ones access to the extended feature set.

It’s just like OS X having a straightforward UI for everybody, but access to the terminal for advanced users who want to tweak just about everything.

It’s a complicated concept to think about, I know, but being an end user I appreciate elegance in design. That’s why I work better on my old PowerBook than my newer, supposedly faster Compaq Presario. That’s why I went for the iPod Video when there are other, cheaper MP3 players that can do much more. It’s about efficiency, elegance and satisfaction.

It’s that simple.

It finally happened. jangelo.i.ph is now no longer under my control—or at least a considerable level of control, like before. It has now been auto-upgraded to Calliope version 2, and I no longer have direct access to the base CMS. This is one of the very reasons I decided to move into my own domain and host my own blogging software back in April of 2006—I wanted to maintain control. The prospect of an upgrade had been looming at that time so I decided it was time to gradually let go.

For a while, the most part of 2005, I was part of the team that developed i.PH into what it is now (Calliope version 2)—or so I think—but it’s now time to say goodbye. I actually said my goodbyes earlier, when I first considered moving to racoma . net, and then eventually to racoma.com.ph.

Hopefully, I’ll be able to complete the move within the weekend, and finally say bye bye to jangelo.i.ph. Well, I’m not totally abandoning the site, but it’s more like keeping it as archives. You do know why I’m contemplating this move. I had been part of the i.PH development team during my short stint with dotPH, and I’d been privvy to the planned upgrades. Well, I can say they’re cool and all that, but still I prefer to have full control over my blog installation. And I’m not so interested in friendster-type social networking schemes. I’d rather go for good design and usability. And you do know that by “design” I do not mean only “style.”

Why?

In designing and conceptualizing a blog and blogging platform, I have a few ideas, and they basically revolve around usability (take out the clutter and the uglifying elements). Snazzy features are good, but they’re not essential. If the core functions of an application cannot easily be learned and used, then that degrades the value of the application. If a site cannot be navigated efficiently and effectively, then that just makes the user want to hit that CLOSE button as soon as possible.

Calliope is now no longer a publishing/blogging platform. It has evolved (or mutated?) into a mashup of social networking, publishing, and multimedia linking/hosting/aggregating applications. First and foremost, that’s not what I’m looking for. If you’ve read any good Web app and Web 2.0 ebooks lately, you would’ve realized that it’s the small, independent, but very useful apps that succeed today, not those that try to do everything. And frankly, I think it has lost much of the potential I originally thought it had. For one, there’s the timing factor—when you make people wait for so long for you to tweak something to perfection, chances are they’ll move on to the next great thing.

And may I mention that the upgrade broke all the permalinks and search-engine optimizations I had done to my jangelo.i.ph? That sucks.

Some observations

You’ve been pressing me for a review, Mikey. Yuga has posted his on PTB. Now here are some of my initial thoughts, which I’ve held off writing about and publishing for quite some time, until now that I realized I’ve lost jangelo.i.ph already.

I wouldn’t delve much into the features and details of the new-and-improved Calliope, but I’m writing about the general feel, as I see it.

• Usability. Usability isn’t quite the strongest suit of Calliope. I’m an advanced user and I had a hard time learning and getting used to the original Calliope version 1 concept—and I had to, because it was then part of my job. Now I’m having a hard time adjusting to the new version 2 concept. And for all the snazzy features the upgraded site now has, users still cannot rearrange sidebar contents using a drag-and-drop interface—something the WordPress Widgets plugin has allowed for quite some time now. In fact, one can not rearrange sidebar contents at all with Calliope, as originally promised. Sigh.

• Speed. Sadly, not everyone is on broadband in this country. I’m one of the more fortunate people who enjoy 512 Kbps plus speeds at the comfort of my own home, and I’ve got a relatively new computer. However, my patience still gets tested whenever I try to load up my old i.PH site and most other i.PH sites, and also when I try to change some aspect of the layout using the Calliope interface. That’s why I preferred directly editing the code in plaintext. That may be old school, but gets things done faster for me. However, even novices, for whom the GUI-updating mechanism of i.PH was intended, might find the wait too long for comfort. Hey, I’ve been hearing reports that i.PH sites take five effing minutes to load on some dialup ISPs. And I don’t think it’s the actual connection speed that’s the problem, since loading times still go past my patience threshold even on broadband. The sites are just plain heavy. Period.

• Flexibility. The reason I wanted direct access to the CMS (then Blog:CMS and now WordPress) is because I’m not just any regular blog user. I want to be able to edit my blog the way I want it, from using custom layouts to adding custom design elements, to doing away with the crappy, heavy sIFR fonts and being able to implement other basic stuff. I understand not everyone is comfortable with doing this, but I do remember direct access to the themes’ code was supposed to be part of the plan (at least for paying clients). But then again, I think it’s the Calliope front-end that’s supposed to be the selling factor of i.PH so this would probably never happen. Also, there are a host of other customizations I had on my old site that I was hoping would be part of the default features—basically on-site SE optimizations, and that leads to the following point.

• SEO. I’m not really a hardcore SEO fan, but I do believe that on-site optimization helps usability as much as it helps SEO, particularly in terms of navigability and structure. For instance, I cite two points here.

• Permalinks. Static links are important. Make ‘em too long (like the loooong alphanumeric ones some ASP-based CMSes put out) or too short (like the default WordPress ?p=123, etc.) or too non-descriptive and both the search engines and users would have a difficulty finding your content. Friendly permalinks (using .htaccess rewrites) are just a click away on WordPress. And here’s one really big gripe I have with the Calliope upgrade—all my permalinks have been changed (since Blog:CMS and WordPress use different permalink structures by default). Now all the pages indexed by Google, Yahoo! and other engines would just direct readers to the frontpage and not the actual article.
• The title tag. I have a thing against blog posts and articles that don’t display the exact article title on my browser’s title bar. It’s bad enough that search engines get to index your content using just your blog title on the results (and not the more relevant post title), but it’s also bad when you’re bookmarking a single post. Fixing this is as simple as using the proper <title></title> tag on each static or archive page. Search engines love this. People also do! It’s easier to find when you have a ton of windows or tags open, and it’s definitely better when bookmarking locally or on social bookmarking sites.
  

A web app is only as powerful as a user can use it.

It all boils down to whether one is comfortable with using the Web app. And sadly, I’m not comfortable with Calliope as much as I try to want myself to like it.

Maybe when we get to doing the FGD that i.PH has been asking about for quite some time now, we can get to resolve these things.

I’m still keeping jangelo.i.ph alive, though—but just as as an archive site for my old content.