licentious radio

Friday, February 1, 2002
[4:30:43 PM]

Fitts's Law: The rest of the story. Few people remember that Stalin was trying to develop three-armed soldiers. Even fewer people know that the project was -- technically -- a tremendous success. Stalin did, in fact, manage to create a whole army of three-armed soldiers.

Unfortunately, Russian army uniforms only have two sleeves, so the third arm was of little use. After Stalin complained that the three-armed soldiers always looked frumpy (with the third arm stuffed inside the shirt), all the soldiers were eliminated. (You can tell this is a Russian joke.)

The good news is that one escaped. When he reached the West, a helpful German Hausfrau sewed him up a three-armed shirt. He said, "Hey, it Fitts!" And that's how he got his name.

Later, Fitts became obsessed with productivity in human-computer interaction. Being three-armed, he was a strong proponent of the mouse, and did a huge amount of empirical scientific research to prove how much more productive you are with a mouse. "You can get to the edge in no time!" (Those were the days of nine-inch monitors.)

Unfortunately for the rest of us, Fitts was very shy about his three-armed condition, so he was never seen in public, or some especially clever HCI scientist might have been lead to question Fitts's Law.

[Political Correctness Compliancy Statement: "Hausfrau" was chosen purely for the alliteration with "helpful". I have a note from my mother indicating my literary alliterative propensities. (I'm stretching the "literary" part. I'm a registered aliterate in nine states and the District of Columbia.)]

[12:11:27 PM]
It's not this hard.... I was looking for a compact flash ethernet adaptor.

I went to outpost.com (grateful to fry's for returning my money.). I typed "compact flash ethernet" into the search engine, and got a list of everything with "compact", "flash", or "ethernet". What noise. It wasn't even a long list....

I bought the "sleeve" for my ipaq at an office depot store, so I tried officedepot.com. Typed the same thing into the search engine. Instead of products, it gave me a stupid Ask Jeeves screen. "Do I want to know about..." and a list of choices that didn't include what I was looking for.

<flame>Ask Jeeves is surely the stupidest search engine on the planet. When I see a website with Ask Jeeves, I can't help thinking there are some mighty stupid people working there.</flame> Then again, maybe there are situations where Ask Jeeves actually works. And I certainly sympathize. Adding a search engine to your site is ridiculously painful -- if you want one that works without lots of trouble.

Just for the record....

Have excellent product categories, display categories on the results page before individual products. Watch what people are searching for, and map their keywords to the right places. Also have "anti-keywords", so random words in product descriptions don't put noise in the search results. At least if you don't get matches, run the search words through a spelling checker.

The product categories can be many levels deep. But when people drill down through the categories, be smart about how many categories, subcategories, and products you list. For example, if you're at a level with only two sub-categories, show the sub-sub-categories, as well. Don't waste people's time.

Give people some idea of how many products and categories are underneath a given link. "12 subcategories with 200 products". It would be ridiculous to calculate those numbers for every page view. You would have to calculate them whenever you add/remove products.

Have good "See also" categories so that drilling down can get you to the right place, even if you start out down the wrong path.

Generally speaking....

Search works if the user can guess your vocabulary, and the vocabulary is sufficiently precise. You assist that with the keyword mapping and the anti-keywords.

Drill-down works if the user can understand the distinctions in your categories. You assist that by having good categories, and "see also" links.

In a book's index, you can include words that you think are in the user's vocabulary. On a website where you've gone to all the trouble of organizing keywords and other metadata, you could give users direct access via an index.

[11:49:42 AM]
I returned something to fry's. I only buy things there that I know will work, and that I'm sure I want. This is because it is known that returning things to fry's is a freaking nightmare. It was OK. It took seven Fry's employees. One to point me to the one to handle the return, one to watch the pointer. One to approve the return. Two to run the cash register to give me money back. One to approve giving me the money.

The secret: show up before 10:30. By the time I was out the door, so was the line to return things. (Slight exxageration.)