This user’s experienceby Matt Henderson, since 2003

The Quicken Loans corporation accidentally sent out this email to all of their registered email addresses yesterday; an email obviously meant for internal purposes. Read it carefully.

Notice that the subject is “Opt-out Functionality”, so presumably they’re testing some system functionality related to users opting out of their newsletters.

From reading the text, it seems they’re testing the passage of data from one organization (Omniture) to another (Responsys) with the purpose of what? re-marketing!

Some goodies arrive in the mail today from the good’ol US of A, and I’m excited to show them to you.

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I love the Nespresso coffee system. In fact, Nespresso almost does for coffee what Apple does for electronics and digital. Elegant, well-designed coffee makers, combined with a convenient and clean capsule system, and supported by a fast, online ordering system results in a great user experience, and a near-perfect coffee every time.

But, as with all things, there’s still room for improvement.

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I’ve tried just about every video encoding product for MacOS X, and always keep returning to the venerable HandBrake.

Why haven’t I just stuck with HandBrake in the first place? One reason — its UI for batch converting videos sucks. Unlike all other products, you can’t just drag a bunch of videos into HandBrake. No, you have to chose them one at a time, and manually add them to the HandBrake queue.

Why haven’t I stuck with one of the other products? Because none of them have presets that are as good as HandBrake’s, and I couldn’t be bothered to learn the FFMPEG syntax. For example, all the presets in something like RoadMovie will change the resolution of the encoded video. HandBrake’s “Normal” preset will preserve the video’s original dimensions.

This weekend, with the help of Super-Makalu Justin Driscoll (@jdriscoll), I finally created a batch processing system, based on HandBrake. This article documents the setup.

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It’s been an unfortunate week of customer support around the board.

Last year, I purchased 11 licenses of the Backblaze online backup product for Makalu. Even then, the experience of working with the Backblaze people was a little odd; for example, I had to go through the process of getting a quote from the sales guy, which turned out to be precisely 11 times the cost of a consumer single-license. Whatever.

We moved forward, had our corporate account setup, installed the software, and begin receiving monthly usage reports from Backblaze.

A year later, we’ve decided that we can get by with four, rather than 11 licenses. (Dropbox has made Backblaze redundant for us, to a certain extent.)

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Anthony Tseng runs a blog called “User Experience Movement”, publishing “insights and techniques that improve how users use interfaces”. He’s got a degree in cognitive science, with a specialization in human-computer interaction. In short, he’s a guy interested in making the world a better place for us users, and has the academic chops to make it happen.

Anthony also happens to sell a set of wire-framing templates for Fireworks, Illustrator and OmniGraffle that a colleague requested I purchase.

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I’m looking forward to a future in which I no longer need to do business with dinosaur enterprise software companies like PGP, and their recent acquirer, Symantec.

My encryption needs have always been simple — I’d like to selectively encrypt files that I keep on a company-accessible server, and I’d like to be able to occasionally encrypt the text of an email message. I could do this easily with earlier versions of PGP — around version 6, and back when PGP felt like small company.

But then they turned their sights on the enterprise, and everything has gone downhill since.

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This post is about a critical problem that I’m having with MarketCircle’s Daylite product, and is mainly written for Google, so that other people who may have similar problems in the future will hopefully find a solution here.

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For future reference, here are some photos of the Makalu Interactive office in beautiful Marbella, Spain. (These are samples from a photo set on Flickr, in case you want to see more.)

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Speaking of convoluted user interfaces, check out the Auto-Lock setting in Skype for iPhone:

Take a big breath, and read this slowly — “Don’t Auto-Lock” is “On”. Disabling Auto-Lock will prevent screen locking during a Skype call.

So, do I currently have Auto-Lock disabled by having this setting “On”? Or would I turn this off to disable the enabled “Don’t Auto-Lock”? Jeebus.

Why couldn’t these people have simply labeled this setting “Auto-Lock” and having the default setting to “Off”?

This article at 9to5 Mac talks about the number the apps available on each leading mobile platform. To put things in perspective, they show a chart:

What’s the problem here? The wrong chart type is being used.

1. First, the x-coordinate data points aren’t evenly distributed. March 10 is nine months away from June 09, while March 11 is five months away from Oct 10. That relative time distance can’t be understood, visually, in a bar chart.

2. What the chart is trying to communicate is relative rate of change, over particular periods of time. For that, a bar chart isn’t the most effective tool; a line chart is, since for any given span of time, a single vertical view provides the relative comparison, rather than four horizontal hops.

A line chart communicates the rate by which Android is catching up to Apple, more effectively.

Today when I launched Daylite, it alerted me to the availability of a new version. I know from experience, though, that it’s bad news to try updating Daylite, before updating Daylite Server. Since Daylite Server doesn’t have a “Check for Updates” feature, I went off to MarketCirle.com.

Frustrated that I couldn’t find a download link for the server update, until after having made like five clicks — one of which was on a “Would you like to download the Trial Version of Daylite?” box — I tweeted the following to someone in MarketCircle support (who will remain nameless, because I like them, and do appreciate their quick responses):

A challenge: Go to marketcircle.com and figure out how to download the updated version of Daylite Server. Count how many clicks. Does the path to accomplish that actually involve clicking “Daylite Trial”?

No kidding, here’s what I got back:

I did it in two. 1) Scroll down to the Blog section on the home page and click the latest post. 2) Click on the DLS download link.

So if you want to update, you scroll to the very bottom of the website, then go visit the blog. Who on earth is doing interaction design at MarketCircle?

I know from experience it’s really hard to always achieve consistency, so this is really more an exercise in conscious observation, than criticism.

This article discusses my use of Hazel on my home MacOS X server to make network transfers to my Drobo archive much faster, taking full use of my gigabit network.

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Excluding a high-school job at the Kroger grocery store, my first real job was with the Georgia Power Company, at their electrical power generation plant in Newnan, Georgia — called Plant Yates. I had a very pleasant surprise this morning, to receive an email from an old colleague there.

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Over the past few days, it’s been interesting to watch the widespread, literal appeal across Twitter that we all pray for Japan.

So how does that logic work?

One morning God decides, “I think today I’ll hit Japan with massive earthquakes and tsunamis.” There we go.

Then, due to the powers of the social networks and the #prayforjapan hashtag, he’s hit with a flood of prayers like he’s never experienced before. Taken aback, he thinks, “Oh, I never realized so many people wouldn’t be behind this thing.”

He has a change of heart, and decides to help a few folks make it through the ICU, and maybe help get the nuclear plant’s cooling system back online.

This might sound irreverent, insensitive and potentially offensive, but, honestly, wouldn’t the logic have to work something like that?

I imagine myself drowning off the side of a cruise ship, contemplating the world in which I live as I look up at a mass of people congregating hand-in-hand on the bridge, organizing themselves to collect as many others as possible to sing hymns and pray that I’ll get some help — all while sits an inflatable raft just behind them.

For those really concerned about the tragedy in Japan, there are ways in which you can actually help if you just seek them out.

As Alex and I enjoyed an afternoon tortilla at the Tinglao, we watched in weirdly terrifying humor, at this group of professionals trying to install a sign on the building next door. (“We don’t need no crane!”)

Postini is a hosted spam service, now owned by Google, which filters your mail before it arrives to your account, placing anything it considers spam into a “quarantine”. When you ask Postini to deliver an incorrectly caught good message, it gives you the option of adding the sender to a whitelist.

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President Obama was in the Oval Office when his telephone rang. “Hello, President Obama?”, a heavily accented southern voice said. “This is Archie, down here at the Rexall drug store, in Duluth, Georgia, and I am callin’ to tell y’all that we are officially declaring war on ya!”

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A nice little UI/UX test is the “Squint Test” — i.e. as you look at a screen or interface, squint or defocus your eyes, and see if you can discern the system’s structure and navigation.

Let’s say you’re a Lending Club or Bank of America customer. You’re probably going to represent one of the site’s more frequently accessing class of visitor, and so it’d be nice if logging in was one of the more efficient workflows.

To simulate the squint test, I’ve blurred both home pages. Have a look, and see if you can quickly identify the login links at Lending Club and Bank of America.

At Bank of America, if you guessed that the login is that big red block in the upper left, you’d be right.

At Lending Club, if you guessed that smallish gray button in the upper right, you’d be wrong; that says “Join Lending Club”. iIf you guessed one of those two big buttons in the middle of the home page, you’d be wrong; those are “See for yourself” and “Check your rate” (respectively).

The login, which is probably the most clicked item on the whole home page at Lending Club, is the small text item to the left of the Join button, which reads “Sign in”.