Tag Archive for 'software'

This computer is no friend of mine…

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on December 28, 2010
in Analysis and Opinion
. 2 Comments

Recently I had occasion to observe a medical expert, a senior professor at a major hospital, as he tried to access a patient’s medical information on the hospital’s computer network. This took a while, and he turned to me and said “As you can see, this computer is no friend of mine”. He then added, apologetically, “Now, if only my grandson were here, he could do this in no time”.

Obviously the doctor was of the pre-computer generation, and many would dismiss his difficulty as a natural result of his age. But as I thought it over, it occurred to me that the man before me is a top notch expert in a field of modern medicine, which is far more complicated than computer operation; his skill and wisdom were well above most people’s. And he was not trying to do any AI programming in machine language; he was in fact looking for data on a system designed to provide that very data. There was absolutely no reason why he should apologize; no, if the computer system did not lend itself to effortless achievement of its purpose by such an intelligent user, it is whoever devised the system who should apologize to him!

The perception – which many older users would agree with – that the computer is not a friend, is a warning sign to computer software designers. The population in the West is aging, and our computers should take that into account; whatever makes a grandfather less at ease than a grandson, the system should be designed to work around it. Quite possibly, in fact, we need a new User Interface paradigm altogether – one that people of all the age groups we have in the world would feel equally at ease with. If the standard Windows-based computer fails to give this feeling to a major population segment, then we need something other that Windows (and its equivalents on other platforms). I hope someone is thinking about it up at Redmond!

The importance of Desktop Search

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on October 1, 2010
in Individual Solutions
. 0 Comments

A manager recently described to me his system for handling his incoming email, which he viewed as quite inadequate. He would go through his voluminous new mail each day, then move it all to one folder. At least he wasn’t keeping it in the Inbox like the “I’ve got 6,000 messages in my Inbox” crowd; but his problem was that when he’d need to find a message again he often couldn’t.

Some people solve the problem by maintaining a carefully defined folder hierarchy to archive old messages; for others, this just doesn’t match the way they work. But even if you do have a good filing system, after a while there are just too many messages, and you can forget who sent you the one you’re looking for, or where it would fit. The fact is that knowledge workers spend 15% of their work time on searching for information (according to a Basex study made in 2008). Another fact is that they don’t always find the stuff, even if they know with certainty that it’s on their hard disk, within the clutter of documents, files and mail messages they’d stored there themselves.

This is a serious problem. Knowledge work is often an exercise in associative thinking: you vaguely recollect that someone had once sent you a message with an attachment that had a nugget of valuable information for your current task; you find it, and it points you to another source, or suggests another search… whereas if you can’t find the first item you may miss a key point. And nothing is more maddening than knowing the data is in there, and having no idea how to get to it – like the manager I was talking to.

Enter Desktop Search tools. This is the class of software tools that do for your hard disk what Google does for the web. Not surprisingly, Google makes one of them (Google Desktop); there are many others, some new, some old. The first one, though, is long gone: I remember fondly Alta Vista Personal, from the folks that gave us the first really good web search engine. Windows 7 also claims to have such capability, but so far I haven’t found it very effective; I prefer to get a tool from someone who specializes in the tool’s domain.

My favorite for some years now has been X1 Search, a truly powerful tool that combines full text Boolean search with a built-in preview for most any kind of file. This tool can find in one second any appearance of a search expression anywhere on my disk – in files, mails, contacts, attachments, files within zip archives… and while I do keep a rough hierarchy of subject folders, I don’t even bother to use it; searching is faster and more certain. With this tool, I have total mastery over my stored information; without it I’d be totally handicapped in my work. If you’re into any kind of serious knowledge work, you must have this, or a similar, tool; check out what’s available here. It will cut down a chunk of those 15% of wasted time…

The demise of Google Wave

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on August 8, 2010
in Analysis and Opinion
. 1 Comment

When Google announced Wave, that innovative Email / IM / Collaboration product, I’d found it very exciting. I was happy to see in it many concepts I’ve been awaiting for a long time, notably a very nicely done “threaded inbox” paradigm. Still, after playing with it a little I began to refer to it in my lectures on Information Overload as “The jury is still out on whether this will reduce the overload or increase it”.

Well, the jury is back. A year later, Google announces it will phase out Wave. It just didn’t catch…

It’s tempting to claim it was ahead of its time, thus blaming the users for shortsightedness. The truth, I suspect, is that it wasn’t ahead of its time – it was ahead of the hardware, not the computer hardware, but the brain’s. The Wave interface was an explosive riot of information, color and visual detail; and the use model was likewise very overwhelming, with multiple conversations going on in parallel on the screen in many modalities. It was sort of like everyone shouting at once… while waving pictures and screening videos at the same time. Despite claims to the contrary, human brains are just not up to such a level of parallel input processing and multitasking. It was simply too much… or so I think; I’d love to hear your thoughts on the matter.

Google Wave User Interface

Screenshot courtesy marketingfacts, shared on flickr under CC license.

This is a pity, because had Google limited the wizardry to just part of the functionality – say, a superb media-rich threaded email program without real time messaging and retroactive editing – it could have ended up with a very nice email client. Which they still might, since they say they will port some of the functionality to their other products.

Still, we owe the Google team our respect for what was a truly exuberant experiment in pushing collaboration to new realms. I can’t wait to see what they will think of next!…

How to avoid email mania without annoying your customers

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on June 18, 2010
in Individual Solutions
. 0 Comments

Here is a question I was asked by an attendee at one of my lectures. I was teaching the importance of not using email like Instant Messenger, of reading it only a few times a day in preset slots. The guy wanted to know how can he do this, when his customers expect him to respond instantly? Won’t they be annoyed (to use a mild term)? He would prefer to suffer than to upset his customers!

He certainly had a point. In my experience if you cut your email reading just like that, cold turkey, some of your correspondents will in fact go ballistic: What? You received my email ten minutes ago and haven’t already replied!?!? Interestingly, this has nothing to do with urgency; you’ll get this response whether you’re a brain surgeon on call or a student on vacation. So what can you do?

The answer is, you don’t “Just do it”; you plan it and communicate it and make provision for the obsessive expectations of Blackberry-toting colleagues. At a minimum, if you expect an adverse reaction, you can put in your sig a blurb like: “In the interest of staying sane and productive, I only read email twice a day; I try to reply within one business day”.

That approach may placate some of your customers – after all, they have a direct interest in your staying productive for their benefit! But there will always be the slightly hyperactive types who react with “OMG, what if I need this guy urgently? What if my life/business/happiness depended on his seeing my message right away?!” For these, you need to do one more thing: provide a method to reach you immediately in urgent cases. This should be a bit more laborious than clicking “Send”, to prevent its abuse; but the customer will feel much better if they know that should they need you immediately, they won’t be frustrated.

The simplest method of doing this is to provide a cellular phone number to these people, either on a one by one basis or simply by including it in your sig. You may also need to clarify to them that they should feel free to use the phone (you’ll be surprised, but not all people feel OK with that). A more sophisticated method is provided by the elegant solution called AwayFind, which you can see here. You sign on to use it, and then you add to your sig something like “I check email twice daily; to reach me sooner, click here: https://awayfind.com/johnsmith”. Clicking the link takes your correspondent to a web form where they fill a brief message; you will be notified of this to your cellphone immediately. Away Find does a lot more than that – it allows you to configure it to alert you of incoming email that you do need to know of immediately, based on various criteria, so you too can have peace of mind while staying away from the 24×7 mail checking addiction.

So, to sum it up: read your mail in batch mode in preset slots, and give your customers, bless them, a workaround for really urgent stuff. That way you are happy and effective, and they can still get to you as needed. If they can’t accept that, maybe you picked the wrong customers?