Friday, May 16, 2003

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Just watched The Matrix Reloaded on a departmental outing (i.e., I went in order to be a good sport, not because I was dying to see it). I just have one question: where do they get their food? 11:26:31 PM    comment []

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NYT: 'Young people who would never purchase Nazi regalia think nothing of sporting T-shirts emblazoned with the Communist hammer and sickle. Yet, as Applebaum shows, the Soviet killing machine was certainly equal to its Nazi counterpart." I've wonder the same thing. 11:23:47 PM    comment []

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Feature complexity and mental models required of users Like many email readers, MS Outlook has always had the option of using a Preview Pane, so that you don't even have to explicitly open a message (which generally involves a double-click and a new MDI window on-screen) in order to read it. Works great for short messages. Outlook also has a host of nifty miscellaneous features--not closely related to the core mission of creating, sending, receiving and reading email--such as sending a message with Voting Buttons (e.g, "I will attend the summer picnic" YES/NO). It turns out that the interaction of this last feature with the Preview Pane two has a problem, as a colleague and I discovered the other day. I heard said colleague muttering "I never get the voting buttons". I had just gotten the same company-wide invite, so I knew the buttons were there. I turned and offered to help. Sure enough, the problem was that she was reading the message through the preview pane, which does not display the voting buttons. And her mental model of the software was not sophisticated enough to prompt her to think "Okay, there are supposed to be voting buttons, but I don't see them. Maybe that means I need to fully open up the message to see them." The foregoing is meant mostly as an observation on the implications of complexity (feature-richness), not really a critique. I don't have an obvious solution. Perhaps you could do something like this...When the user clicks reply to a message which has features that don't work without a full open, and they have not performed a full open, at least once, warn them to that effect. But of course that solution involves yet more complexity under the covers. Plus possibly irritating those advanced users who know what they are doing in replying w/o doing a full open... 11:23:38 PM    comment []