The UI Observatory

Last month, my wife and I attended the O’Reilly Design Conference in San Francisco. The conference offered great keynotes and presentations, and the venue — Fort Mason Center — was spectacular.

O’Reilly has compiled a list of the event’s keynote videos and speaker slides. Some slide decks can be downloaded directly from that page, while others are hosted on Speaker Deck or SlideShare. The workflows for downloading the decks from the latter two sites create surprisingly different user experiences.

Speaker Deck: “Click. Done!”

On Speaker Deck, the prominent “Share” section contains a Download PDF button. Click that button, and the PDF file instantly opens in the browser, from where you can easily save it to your computer. Alternatively, you can right-click on the Download button and directly download the file via the context menu.

Clean, quick, easy. Nice!

SlideShare: “No account? Not signed-in? No PDF!”

SlideShare’s Download button is just as easy to find.

Click it, though, and instead of just starting the download, you see a dialog box about “Clippings.” At this point, I was just trying to download the file, so I chose to “[c]ontinue to [the] download.”

Clicking the link underneath the button does start the download — if, that is, you are signed into SlideShare. If you aren’t, you are requested to log into the site.

That, of course, also means that if you don’t yet have an account for SlideShare, you have to sign up for the site before being able to download any of the slide decks. At least the triggered download will start automatically once you’ve completed the login procedure.

Cumbersome by design

You can often hear designers and users complain about LinkedIn’s user interface, and it is LinkedIn that owns SlideShare. This simple download workflow is a good example for a less-than-stellar design decision.

Note how the clippings dialog box does not have a “Don’t ask me again” checkbox. And indeed: every time you decide to download a slide deck, that process will be interrupted by having to make the decision fore or against clippings. Every single time.

Worse yet, even if you adopt that feature by clicking Start clipping, and clipping a flew slides “just to be sure,” the dialog box will still appear whenever you click Download. In other words, even when the dialog box has done its duty, it will still come back time and again.

Who controls the content that you own?

This odd behavior aside, there’s a deeper, more philosophical issue to think about here.

Websites like SlideShare or Speaker Deck don’t own their users’ works, they just host them.

What does it say about a company, then, that they require you to have an account with them before you can access hosted content that, say, a conference speaker has made available? Why did Speaker Deck decide to make this process as painless as possible, while SlideShare uses it to attract new users? What would SlideShare lose by allowing a direct download without requiring visitors to log in?

And finally, does a conference speaker’s choice of provider reflect back on that speaker, because this download process might be perceived as being part of the overall presentation experience?

That said, from this conference attendee’s point of view, the most desirable option for this workflow actually is finding a direct download link to the PDF files right on the conference website. It doesn’t get much more efficient and convenient than that.

Two-factor authentication is a great method for making logins more secure.¹ Although this system is straightforward, I’ve occasionally made a pretty stupid error while using it. Thankfully, it’s an error that can be easily prevented with a simple fix.

Most of the websites, for which I have set up two-factor authentication, send authentication codes to my phone. For privacy reasons, I have configured my phone to notify me of incoming text messages; the notifications will not display the messages’ content, though. That way, if I leave the phone on my desk, someone who walks by can see that I received a message, but won’t be able to read what it’s about.

The numbers, from which the codes are sent, usually are six digits long. The authentication codes are six digits long, too. You can already guess where this is going.

If I don’t pay attention, I sometimes enter the phone number instead of the actual authentication code, because that’s what catches my eyes when I look at the notification. On one occasion, I was so distracted that I actually panicked about being locked out from one of my accounts. Until it dawned on me what I had done wrong.

It would be very easy to prevent this error. All it takes is a comparison of the entered code with the phone number. If the system finds a match between the user’s entry and a phone number, it would display a message to make the user aware of their mis-hap.

This simple fix would go a long way in keeping users’ heart rate and blood pressure within healthy limits.

About 18 months ago, my wonderful wife and I cut our TV cable. A sleek Apple TV replaced the unwieldy Comcast box, and we now get most of our content from Netflix, hulu, and PBS. We save money, have fewer ads to endure, and when it comes to the user experience, the Apple TV is far ahead of Xfinity. If it weren’t for live football games and Formula 1 races, we wouldn’t miss a thing.²

One aspect of the user interface has been bugging me since we made the switch, though. The next-generation Apple TV, which will likely be announced next week, will hopefully address that problem.

Eventually, it’s almost like old-fashioned TV, but without the channel numbers

Almost everything on the Apple TV is on-demand. To watch a TV show or movie, you browse or search for it, or pick something from you-might-also-like-this suggestions. Alternatively, you can save titles to a personal watch list for later viewing.

And here’s that major problem: Every channel on the Apple TV has its own, dedicated front-end for browsing and searching, for suggestions, and for a watch list for just that one channel.

Not every title is available on every channel, of course, so if you want to watch a specific movie, chances are that you will have to search in multiple channels until you find what you’re looking for. Similarly, if you want to access a title from a watch list, you need to remember in which channel you saved it. If you don’t, you’ll have to step through multiple channels to find the watch list that it’s on.

Let’s say I’d like to watch François Truffaut’s masterpiece, “The 400 Blows:” Yeah, I’ve seen that somewhere on the Apple TV. Didn’t I save that to a watch list? Let me check Netflix… Nah. iTunes Movies, maybe? Nope. hulu? Uh-uh. OK, let me search for that, then — wait, now was it available on Netflix, or hulu, or where the heck did I see that?!

You get the idea.

Of course, you could consult a site like CanIStream.it, but that would make the overall process even more cumbersome. What I would really like to see in the upcoming Apple TV update, are central screens for unified search and watch list that operate globally on all channels.

One search, one watch list, to rule them all

If I feel like watching an episode of one of my favorite TV shows, I don’t want to have to hunt for it across channels. I want to deal with just a single unified search form: I hit a dedicated button on the remote, enter the title, run the search, and get a list of all options for watching that show right now — regardless of whether it’s served via Netflix subscription, paid iTunes rental, or free PBS series.

The same applies to watch lists: I don’t want to have to juggle multiple lists. Just let me save interesting titles to a single unified watch list. Make it explorable via genre, actors, directors, etc., and tie in some additional information from sources like IMDB or Rotten Tomatoes. Better yet, support multiple lists so each family member can have their own.

Obviously, content providers will not like this approach. Why, for example, would I buy or rent a movie from iTunes, if I can watch the exact same title for free on another channel? And yet, from a user’s perspective, the Apple TV would be so much easier to use if search and watch lists would be unified.

There are rumors that the next Apple TV will support Siri voice control. That could make for a fascinating approach if Siri “becomes” that single-point-of-access global search and watch list.