Usability Fail - Confirm Then Swipe

I consider a fundamental goal of software, and technology in general, to make people's lives easier. To simplify, automate, and perform useful functions. When the above holds true, technology is a success. When technology gets in the way, is a hassle to use, or does not otherwise improve an existing process - it is a failing and does not have purpose.

First, a success story. Trader Joe's is a very pleasant place to shop, all the way through. The checkout process is one reason for this great experience. The first time I went to one was several years ago, and I was pleasantly surprised during checkout.

The Card Swipe device:

1. Made it immediately obvious that I could swipe my card at any time
2. Allowed me to enter DEBIT, PIN, Cashback options, all before the cashier had even finished scanning my items
3. Provided a final confirmation once all items were scanned

This is pure win, on all levels. I have true respect for the makers of this device. Others get 2 & 3, but some fail to make it obvious to the user that they can swipe early. No one likes waiting in line - this helps people wait in line for less time - both the person using the card swipe, as well as anyone behind them.

Imagine my surprise when my local Market Basket got new card swipe devices a year or two ago, and they did not share this amazing feature. On the contrary - it required the exact opposite. Enter the "Confirm Then Swipe", a giant usability fail.

Here is a basic rundown of the Bad Card Swipe Device (TM):

1. You must wait until the cashier has scanned the final item
2. The cashier then usually asks credit or debit.
3. The cashier reminds you to "Confirm then swipe"
4. You confirm the amount
5. You can then swipe your card
6. Debit PIN
7. Oops - you got your PIN wrong, try it again 
8. Final confirmation (?)

What went wrong for a device with such a basic purpose to have been made this way? Is it short-sightedness of the developer? Is it due to the other vendor holding software patents? (more on software patents another day...) Whatever the cause - it really bums me out. How many wasted words are there on a daily basis, just to explain to the customers that they must confirm first? (plus the time that could have been saved if the swiping process was completed while items were still being scanned) How much time is lost by the patrons due to this every day? Per Year? This should not be the case, but sadly it is.

Thoughts on OpenID

I've had an OpenID for over two years now, since I joined StackOverflow during the beta. A lot has probably happened since then. If memory serves correct, at least one OpenID provider went out of business. Others may have changed ownership - and new ones have surely emerged.

How have my first 2 years with OpenID been? Well, I've only set it up on a whopping 2 websites, both of which are technically oriented. I have recently started seeing OpenID as an option on a few more websites, but not a lot.

I attempted to set it up on a third (DZone), and although it allowed me to login, I could not verify my account, or join it to my non-OpenID account. This is probably just an issue with DZone, but if it was important enough, I would hope it'd be resolved.

What implications are there to third party authentication such as OpenID over time? (say, 5-10 years). Quite a lot can happen to a company in that timeframe. Especially tech companies.

Is it easy to switch OpenID providers? It seems like that is limited by whether every site you use supports adding a second OpenID or not. That may be a requirement of participating, I have no idea - so far, the two I care about have supported this.

What happens if my OpenID provider, say, starts getting hosted in China. What happens if my OpenID provider goes down for good? Will I ever be able to reclaim my account?

What happens, for instance, if my OpenID provider's SSL certificate expires? I can't get to my websites unless I accept an expired cert?

For the record - back in August (when first typing this), the MyOpenID login page was doing just this - showing expired certificate messages. Even though it wasn't apparently needed for authentication (because rest assured - I reject expired certs), it was still alarming. I hadn't even seen the domain name before - which was also worrisome.

This is what got me pondering OpenID. The concept is nice, but is it succeeding?

I am glad Google is a provider - would OpenID be at all usable still if they weren't? I at least feel safe that my Google account isn't going anywhere anytime soon. Also, it is rather convenient as I'm usually logged into gmail and just need to confirm to login.

I am curious what others think. Do you use Open ID? Do you think it is succeeding - is it convenient, or a pain? What provider(s) do you use? What websites use Open ID for the sole authentication system?

November month in writing: week 1 summary

One week down - three to go. This year I am aiming to write my posts a day early, scheduling them for 8:00 AM the following day. That worked last week - but I am off to a late start this week. Fortunately, as of this writing, I already have the next two days' posts finished and scheduled to appear.

• Tuesday will be some thoughts on Open ID
• Wednesday will be a usability post
• Thursday - goal is to discuss JRE bundling for Java on the Desktop
• Friday will remain a mystery

As for last week, I felt OK but didn't think I wrote as much as I wanted to. Hopefully I can find room for a recent software experience and maybe a tutorial in the coming week or so.

Goals for this month:

• Finish reading two books (not succeeding so far)
• Finish tracking down a Hudson / Opera issue and hopefully submit a patch
• Finish converting more of my drafts into completed posts

Distributed Source Control Rocks

Hudson core still uses Subversion, and the java.net svn server is kind of slow. I needed to do some diffs when investigating a fix for an issue I encountered. I had to wait a couple of minutes for every single diff I wanted (from the log, not local diff).

It just so happened it was related to Prototype, a popular Javascript library, which is hosted on GitHub. I took a look on that end as well. I cloned a local repository - simple, fast, and instantaneous SCM operations.

I'm still a Git / Mercurial newbie... but it's obvious that if you're a remote user, centralized vs distributed source control isn't even a fair comparison. It's that much better.

News and Links Nov 6 2010

Marco Arment had a great post about technology - Developers don’t rush to new platforms. Everyone considering getting new smartphones or tablets should definitely read this. It's short and to the point.

I've been looking at our database performance at work recently, so I've been digging around a lot of MySQL and related database info this week and found this blog - EXPLAIN EXTENDED. In particular, this week's post:
10 things in MySQL (that won’t work as expected) - I'll be subscribing to this one, and maybe you should too if you use MySQL.

iOS 4.2 went to GM seed this week. That should mean 4.2 will release for iPads next week if no criticals problems are found. I can't wait.

Seven Languages in Seven Weeks: A Pragmatic Guide to Learning Programming Languages by Bruce Tate is now out. I can't wait to read it! I better make some progress on "Release It!"...

Browser Benchmarks November 5 2010

It's been a few months since I last benchmarked web browsers, so I figured it was time for an update. There's just something innately fun about running benchmarks. These are first and foremost for my curiosity and amusement, not because I think it matters if Browser A is 0.3% faster at Sunspider than Browser B. However, at least last time there were very measurable gaps in performance and results of each browser - more than I would have thought.

This time I'm going to separate the results of official stable browser releases and beta releases.

Browser releases continue to be frequent, and I don't think it is going to slow down. Chrome in particular appears to now plan on major releases every 6 weeks. Last benchmark was Chrome 5 - this time it's Chrome 7. Opera has some modest improvements with 10.63, Firefox 4 is on beta 6 now, up from beta 1. IE 9 Platform Preview has also gone through some more iterations (though it is hard to find)

System specs are the same as last time, except for new video card drivers, which may affect 3d accelerated HTML5 tests.

Environment:

• Intel Core i5 750 @ 3.36GHz (Turbo Disabled)
• 4GB RAM
• 80GB Intel SSD (G1)
• ATI Radeon HD 4850 (Catalyst 10.10 drivers)
• Windows 7 64-bit Home Premium

Fresh boot. No other apps or system tray programs running aside from Microsoft Security Essentials.
Each browser was run by itself, with only one tab for the benchmark itself.

I'll start with Sunspider again. Only this time with Sunspider 0.9.1 (I didn't realize that was available last time):

• Chrome 7.0.517.41 - 208.3ms +/- 0.5% [Full Result]
• Opera 10.63 - 224.4ms +/-0.5% [Full Result]
• Safari 5.02 - 291.3ms +/- 0.6% [Full Result]
• Firefox 3.6.12 - 638.1ms +/- 2.9% [Full Result]
• IE8 - 3614.1ms +/- 0.2% [Full Result]

 Separately, beta browsers:

• IE9 Platform Preview 6 - 249.1ms +/- 1.0% [Full Result]
• Firefox 4 Beta 6 - 364.4ms +/- 3.5 % [Full Result]

No real surprises - Chrome continues to lead, but IE9 and Firefox 4 betas are catching up to the 3 leaders. There is much less spread than last time.

I also decided to run The Kraken, a new benchmark the Mozilla team released in September.This will be the only benchmark Firefox 4 beta will overtake the others in. I am curious how accurate of a representation this benchmark will be of the future.

• Opera 10.63 - 10515.7ms +/- 0.5% [Full Result]
• Chrome 7.0.517.41 -12046.8ms +/- 0.4% [Full Result]
• Firefox 3.6.12 - 14467.1ms +/- 0.1% [Full Result]
• Safari 5.02 - 14589.5ms +/- 0.1% [Full Result]
• IE8 - I did not wait for this to finish.

Separately, beta browsers:

• Firefox 4 Beta 6 - 9768.9ms +/- 0.1% [Full Result] 
• IE9 Platform Preview 6 - 21015.6ms +/- 0.2% [Full Result]

Firefox 4 beta 6 leads Opera 10.63 by a slight margin. Chrome trails by a bit more, followed by Safari and Firefox 3.

Peacekeeper:

Firefox 3 appears twice because I didn't realize 3.6.12 was out at first. All browsers except Opera see gains from last time. This could be due to my updated graphics driver.

ACID3:

• Chrome 7.0.517.41 - 100/100
• Safari 5.0.2 - 100/100
• Opera 10.63 - 100/100
• Firefox 3.6.12 - 94/100
• IE8 - 20/100

Beta Browsers:

• Firefox 4 Beta 6 - 97/100
• IE9 Platform Preview 6 - 95/100 (noticeable improvement from preview 3)

CSS3 Selectors Test:

• Chrome 7.0.517.41 - Passes 574/574 tests
• Safari 5.0.2 - Passes 574/574 tests
• Opera 10.63 - Passes 574/574 tests
• Firefox 3.6.12 - Passes 574/574 tests
• IE8 - Passes 345/574 tests

Beta Browsers:

• Firefox 4 Beta 6 - Passes 574/574 tests
• IE9 Platform Preview 6 - Passes 574/574 tests

I must say, the IE9 team seems to be taking web standards pretty seriously. I recommend taking a look at their test center. This will be good for everyone. I'm not a web developer currently, so I can't say if they are truly implementing everything that's important, or just a higher amount of obscure features, but in the end it is a net win. One of the reasons I've always liked Opera is that they strive to adopt web standards.

I noticed something weird in Firefox 4 and Firefox 3.6.12 (it must be a recent thing). By default, when I type into the search box after a fresh install - nothing happens. The browser appears to now require search providers, a la IE, except it doesn't come with any by default.

UPDATE: This is why beta browsers are listed separately. I installed Firefox 3.6.12 on my work PC and it does not have this issue - neither does Firefox 4 beta 6, once it is installed The above must be a fluke. My guess is that one of the Firefox 4 betas somehow corrupted or cleared out the search engine extensions, and this also affected Firefox 3.6.12 on the same machine.

Overall the browser situation is getting better and better. When IE9 comes out, IE8 can finally start going away - it is really the only browser that I can't recommend. Most of the rest come down to personal choice. 

Do you want the absolute fastest browser, but with a few less features? Chrome.
Do you want the ultimate in customization, if you want to download some extensions? Firefox.
Do you want more features built in, and almost as fast as Chrome? Opera.
I'm not sure if there is a compelling reason to use Safari 5 on Windows, but it also isn't a bad choice.

Until next time.

Java Roadmap Disappointment

Am I the only one disappointed with the new Java 7 road map? It seems both late and lackluster.

First, let's look back at past Java releases (courtesy of the first google result I saw with actual release dates)

J2SE 1.3 2000-05-08 Kestrel
J2SE 1.4.0 2002-02-13 Merlin
J2SE 1.5.0 (5.0 to salesmen) 2004-09-29 Tiger
J2SE 6.0 (1.6.0) 2006-12-12 Mustang

What has been happening the last 4 years? Apparently a few things I didn't know about (politics, JCP, Apache Harmony, etc). Most of which I'd need to read up on a lot more before I could write about it...so I'll stick to two things. 1) Apple OS X Java thing, 2) The updated Java 7 release timeframe and scope.

On the Apple deprecating the shipping of Java with OS X - I think Ted Neward summed it up best. What is potentially most interesting is depending on how Apple handles phasing out maintaining Java on OS X, and if Oracle picks up writing a JRE for OS X. If so, will it impact the Java 7 release date? I think he has a point though - is there even a large demand for Java on the Mac? (And I say this recalling having compiled landon fuller's openjdk6 port on my Mac prior to Java6 shipping on my MBP almost 3 years ago...)

On the updated timeframe and scope given by Mark Reinhold...

I was really hoping Lamba expressions, often referred to as closures, would make it into Java 7. A mid-2011 release (another delay) without them is pretty disappointing. Java feels stagnant. The primary strength of Java for me is the tooling, not the language...but it would still be nice if the language was developing faster. Maybe it's time I started checking out some other languages that run on the JVM.

There should still be a few neat things though...looking at the list:

• invokeDynamic bytecode - should be great for all the dynamic language people running on the JVM
• related to the above...method handles. First I've heard...this requires more reading. 
• Strings in switch statements - at last
• NIO.2

Ending my rant on a positive note...I suppose there are still some cool new things. I'd install an openjdk7 build, but it would just make waiting harder :)