Scott Bush

As the hours count down to the end of 2008, I’ll take a moment to reflect on the year. Over­all, I won’t be sad to see 2008 in the rear view. In many ways, it was a try­ing year both per­son­ally and pro­fes­sion­ally. There were some excep­tions to this, of course, but I say: bring on 2009!

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When I pur­chased my Mac­Book Pro (my PowerBook’s video card scram­bled after 5 years of faith­ful ser­vice), I received a “free” first-generation iPod Touch. Sim­ply put, it is an amaz­ing machine. Hav­ing eschewed the iPhone for its high total cost of own­er­ship, I was glad to finally have a device that allowed access the App Store, e-mail on the go, games, a browser, etc.

Despite the other fea­tures, the iPod was still pri­mar­ily about play­ing music. When I’m sit­ting at my desk at work lis­ten­ing to music, I want to be able to eas­ily con­trol that music. That’s when I real­ized my new iPod, for all its glossy, touchy glo­ri­ous­ness, lacked some­thing its older sib­lings had.

Phys­i­cal buttons.

For those with­out an iPod Touch, let me be clear. It has two phys­i­cal but­tons: the “home” but­ton at the bot­tom and a “power” but­ton, for lack of a bet­ter term, at the top (this but­ton tog­gles between wake and sleep modes.) Pre­vi­ous iPods had the unmis­tak­able “click­wheel,” which was a com­bi­na­tion of four “but­tons” (top, bot­tom, left, and right) arrayed within a touch-sensitive cir­cle. Another “select” but­ton occu­pies the mid­dle of the circle.

You can see from the image at the right that these phys­i­cal but­tons are mapped to com­mands: menu, skip back, skip for­ward, and play/pause. While it can be argued that an inter­face com­posed entirely of “soft but­tons” like the iPod Touch is more advanced, usabil­ity of such inter­faces suf­fers in the con­text of the device’s pri­mary pur­pose: play­ing music.

Let’s exam­ine a use case: me, sit­ting at my desk work­ing with one ear­bud plugged in so I can rock out and not be totally obliv­i­ous to what’s going on around me. A song comes on—whether from a Genius playlist, one of my own, or just a ran­dom track while shuffling—that I want to skip; a very com­mon occur­rence for me and prob­a­bly every­one else.

As you can see, it takes four times as many actions (swipes, drags, presses, etc.) to accom­plish the same goal on an iPod Touch (and holds true for iPhones) as it does on a clickwheel-based iPod. And, the same is true of adjust­ing the vol­ume, an equally com­mon task.

In addi­tion to the sce­nario described above, there is the issue of mak­ing adjust­ments only by feel. Tac­tile response to the shapes of but­tons and ori­en­ta­tion of the iPod in your pocket allows you to skip tracks, etc. with­out look­ing at the iPod itself. Doing so with an iPod Touch is impossible.

Luck­ily the second-generation iPod Touch addresses one of these issues: phys­i­cal but­tons for vol­ume con­trol. You can see the but­tons in this image from Engad­get. That improve­ment alone resolves half of the prob­lems I described here. And I cer­tainly won’t be giv­ing up my iPod Touch, with its array of games, cool apps, wi-fi, web browser, etc. But I hope that these con­sid­er­a­tions are given some thought by Apple for future gen­er­a­tions of iPods. That, or a third-party man­u­fac­turer like Grif­fin or Belkin will whip up a $15 acces­sory to add music– and volume-control but­tons to iPod Touches via the dock con­nec­tor. How’s that for a good idea? Please send royalties.

Over at our family’s blog, we’ve posted our annual hol­i­day let­ter. I also wrote a bit about the design con­sid­er­a­tions of the let­ter, so it’s worth check­ing out.

I saw this on the front page of KOMO 4 News’ web­site:

“Dri­vers appeared to be com­pletely caught off guard by the snow Thurs­day morn­ing, aban­don­ing vehi­cles on SR-520 as traf­fic grid­locked. Some dri­vers were turn­ing around and dri­ving the wrong way on the high­way in an attempt to get back home.” (empha­sis mine.)

Oh boy, where to start? First, the local news has been crow­ing about the impend­ing arma-snow-geddon for days. It even drove the Belle­vue, Seat­tle, Edmonds (and prob­a­bly other) school dis­tricts to call a snow day on Wednes­day when–at least in Belle­vue–there was no snow.

Sec­ond, when were peo­ple ever taught that dri­ving THE WRONG WAY ON THE FREEWAY was accept­able? C’mon, use your head. “Gee, traffic’s really bad so maybe if I drive the oppo­site way into oncom­ing traf­fic in the snow, I’ll be okay and won’t cause any prob­lems.” Peo­ple like that need to have an acci­dent, prefer­ably into a tree or side of the road. Just don’t do it! Pull over and leave your car, sure… some­times you just have to do that. But drive the wrong way… no.

And tonight it’ll all freeze and we’ll get the same thing all over again tomorrow.

Yes­ter­day I was test­ing ways to cre­ate an ICS file (it’s a cal­en­dar file) that can be sent out in an e-mail so recip­i­ents can sim­ply click an attach­ment to add the event to their ICS file-aware cal­en­dar appli­ca­tion, such as Out­look, iCal, Google cal­en­dar, etc. When I popped into Gmail to see how it han­dled the file, I noticed a strange text ad:

I’ve com­mented on AdWord odd­i­ties in the past, and my first thought was, “what the heck, how’d this slip past some Google engi­neer?” Nat­u­rally, I was intrigued and clicked. To my sur­prise, it was a real site: test.com, which is a web-based soft­ware company.

This intrigu­ing ad prompts the ques­tion: is this a good way to write a PPC ad? First, the rea­son it appeared: Google’s context-based ad dis­play parsed my mes­sage, whose sub­ject included the word “test.” Violá, an ad for a prod­uct or ser­vice about test­ing appears. Sec­ond, the ad itself. Text ads have a head­line, two lines of text, and a dis­play URL. This one sim­ply said test three time with what appeared to be a test URL. It cer­tainly caught my eye because I thought it was a mis­take. It was so curi­ous to me that I had to click it to see what it was. In that sense it was successful—certainly more so than one that said “Afford­able soft­ware test­ing” as a head­line. But since I’m not in the mar­ket for that ser­vice, the click was wasted. It cost test.com some money with no hope for any return. Of course, with­out see­ing their cam­paign data it’s hard to know what sort of suc­cess they’re hav­ing but I have to believe a good por­tion of their clicks (and there­for cost) come from peo­ple like me intrigued by the ad. So is that a valu­able ad? I don’t think so.