Archives for November 2012

Fitts law was created in a different world, a time of mouse not thumb. This doesn’t mean that the concepts are not useful.

Instead of measuring from the current cursor position to the next position we are dealing with the origin that depends on where the hands are held, and maybe where the outstretched digit is reaching.

What about the modern UX trend wrt touch devices. The fact that we can now interact with objects themselves vs. other representations.

– Instead of touching a button to bump up the volume, move the volume dial

– Instead of selecting a radio button and tapping the “save”, just select the item

– Instead of having an image of the map, have it be an embedded map entity that you can interact with.

The list goes on and on. People enjoy bringing skeuomorphism into the mix too.

My favorite app experiences know how to balance Fitts law and the world of tactile. One example is an eBook reader. It is natural to try to mimic books, and that is how you get actions such as turning the page. Very discoverable and it fits in nicely.

However, swiping to get from page to page is not how I like to move around in a book. I much prefer using my right thumb to quickly tap to move to the next page. Maybe not as discoverable, but a much simpler gesture… you don’t have to take your hand off to make the gesture and then putting it back again. Changing pages is something you do constantly, so optimizing that action is important.

Thus, a nice marriage of different ways to do the same thing.

A huge percentage of my body is made of the ultimate life giving H₂O. Thus, it has always surprised me that I have never wanted to drink water.

Of course, I consume it via other drinks and food, and I absolutely love a Mango Lassi, or a Strawberry shake, a Ribena or even a Dr. Pepper. Foofy drinks are my favorite (alcoholic too!).

If you know me, you know that I have a thing with food. I am extremely picky. As a child at one point I went down to only wanting a handful of suppers (fish fingers!) and when a company stopped making “brunchies” a third of my diet disappeared 🙂

As I grew, my relationship with food has been a frustrating one, and it has resulted in me poisoning myself for years, and messing with me mentally. I would hate being at a friends house and not feeling like I could eat the food, ultimately feeling shame. People naturally try to push you “come on! try it! you will like it!” Folks only mean well, and most people will give something a try and it won’t be a big deal. Even as an adult, I have been the person who has chewed food and managed to transfer it to a napkin. Every time this happens I feel ashamed and childish. WHY DOES THIS HAPPEN TO ME.

Some Clarity

I am trying not to give myself such a hard time now. It all started after I became a parent, and I studied various parenting books. My two children are very different, and as I try to understand each of them I am finding that I am understanding more of myself.

In books such as this I have realized that asking a child version of myself to “just eat that thing” just didn’t work for me. I can relate it to a time where we tried the “cry it out” method on our oldest child. Many parents told us “just give it a week and they are fine…. it’s better for them in the long run!” Our child didn’t just cry though, he would end up vomiting in his crib. It just didn’t work for us and him.

Later, when we had our second, we got very clear evidence that no two children are alike, and in fact siblings from the joining of DNA from the same parents can result in a very different outcome.

But things can change

So, it turns out that I have a thing about food. Does this mean that can’t change? As I have found out, it very much can change. One of the problems has been that I have been tricking myself for far too long.

I said earlier that I didn’t like water. I didn’t like the taste (which is funny since there is a lack of taste if anything). I would find that if I did try to drink it I wouldn’t drink as much, whereas I would guzzle some orange juice.

Living in America, land of the free refills, it was easy to double down on the super size soda.

I now contend that my feelings towards water was a trick to get sugar into my system. I would often “feel thirsty” when I think I was really feeling “like some sugar please. PLEASE.”

In fact, I think sugar has been my poison. Not just in sweets, but also as carbs. Almost all of my “favorite” foods have been carbs, and I went from a mix to more and more “well, lets start with the carbs first” forgetting the other bits.

I am embarrassed to admit this, but I have never consumed for nutrition, but more so for pleasure or just out of necessity (again my issues with food would give me a certain hatred towards it at times).

As I write this I have a large glass of water to my right. I still have my coffee (but go for black these days… something I never thought I would do… I used to go all in with lots of milk and sugar of course in the past), but water is my go to. No more soda.

Man, I feel so much better these days. Turns out, it’s good to not hate water.

I am enjoying my second Black Friday in retail (I work for Walmart Labs Mobile, and we create apps for the global Walmart community). This is game time for us, and along with the nervous stress you get a lot of the joy. You want to be in the big game.

I am new to retail, so it has been a fun learning experience to see what it is all about, and I have been able to meet amazing retailers. I wanted to tell one simple story about thinking through a problem with a retailer.

Today is a run up to Black Friday in the US, and we have been releasing new deals throughout the day, a bunch of them exclusive deals via our apps (iPhone, iPad, Android).

If you are a retailer in the store, how may you role these out? Maybe you would have a special shelf at the front of the store, and for the first run you put out the Furby’s (until they quickly sell out). Then for the second run you put out the TVs, and then the Waffle Irons…. you get the picture. The problem though is that if items don’t sell out, then you may have created a bottleneck in that area of the store. For Black Friday in our stores for example we place the specials all over the place so customers can get some space (which is tough with the number of them in the store!).

Now, let’s move over to the online world. In the eCommerce platform we have a notion of a “shelf” too, which houses product. The natural solution would be to slowly add new products to the magic shelf as the day progresses, and then any items that are not sold off can hang out there. Great!

Well, maybe not so great when it comes to scaling up the solution. We have a crap ton (technical term) of online users hitting us at the same time. Caching is our friend, and the friend of caching is immutable data. It isn’t just for data sets in your code.

To help us out here, we actually setup multiple shelves for each event.

Shelf #1 @ 7am: Furby

Shelf #2 @ 9am: Furby and TVs

Shelf #3 @ 11am: Furby and TVs and Waffle Irons

And so on. Our apps and experiences have pointers to these shelves, so all we need to do is change the pointer, and the apps see the other shelf. The advantage here is that the apps never have to think about reloading a shelf, as the high level product data is the same (there are details within that matter such as product availability but the structure of shelf -> [ products ] is static).

It is a little more work for the merchants to setup as they need to duplicate the product info, and we thank the merchants for doing that work…. but it means that through the immutability we can scale much easier, and the clients can be so much simpler.

The moral of the story for me has been, how can we make as many of our data structures immutable, which often means thinking about the problem differently to how you may do so in a physical store.

After all, as a wise person said:

The basic goal of a database is to maintain the illusion that there is only one copy, only one person changes it at a time, everyone always sees the most current copy, and it is instantly fast. This is impossible to achieve.
This is especially impossible when millions of people are accessing and updating trillions of data elements from all over the world.
The task of database design, therefore, is to come as close to this illusion as possible using hundreds of interlocking algorithmic tricks.