Of special note is that they weren’t involved in isolated activity, the majority were involved in at least two other friends’ activity.

As usual, the boys and girls cluster by gender, but even there, the cross border communications continued. The boys battled colourful foes or arrays of objects, the girls shared pictures, games and stories, with a few sharing across the gender divide on occasion.

As with many generations before them, they share the cultural pass-time tools of their time with each other; whether comics, games, music, toys, etc These days it’s through smartphones, in a few more years it’ll be via Google Glass-like objects and gestural movements.

Our common perception of mobile commuting activity is that people operate in isolation, and that smart phone use in public is anti-social.

That may be a common assumption but it’s certainly not the rule.

Increasingly, however, I notice that mobile use is publicly shared and socially connective, across more situations. The use of a device shouldn’t cause us to assume separation from the people in our space. I think we’re even more engaged with our surroundings than people reading a newspaper (whatever that is these days) or book (increasingly, also on our devices).

When considering how we interact with our devices it is unwise to assume it’s not a shared activity. As with any research, its unwise to rush to a conclusion on earlier assumptions.

Here’s my stop. Off to work!

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Wait, that’s a lie; in fact I actually like complaining. I like looking at a problem or some sort of sub-optimal condition and say, if you just changed that bit, if you just dropped that thingummy, it would be so much easier for the people who come into contact with it. I make a living from telling people what is’t optimal in their product, service, website and then offer suggestions based on research, information from users, and solutions other people have come up with. I’m a bit like an iron, smoothing out the wrinkles of experience. *groan*

So, you might say, complaining is my job. Yes, I like complaining. I spent 15 minutes on the phone with Apple yesterday whinging about how even though it let me type spaces in my password, didn’t flag it was an issue in the error checking, and accepted my entry; it still failed my login attempts because my pass had spaces which they didn’t record. I’ve never met a coder who hadn’t read the XKCD Password Strength comic so there’s no excuse for not testing predictable use cases. Really.

But this post isn’t about Apple, it’s about a different music service.

Yes, I like complaining; I just hate having to complain about tiny issues that shouldn’t happen. You can therefore understand my frustration when I see a company who are otherwise

• quite receptive to user feedback
• seem to have empathy for their customers
• have thought through their consumer offering so deeply

not see the value in what is the smallest piece of copywriting available to a company. So much value, for so many letters. I do have to shudder a bit. I can’t believe I’m the first one to see this as a problem, but a problem that can cost the company in reputation and wasted effort.

Even a credit card statement has copywriting

Whenever you use your credit card for a purchase, the bank records it with a short string of text to appear in your statement. Most often it has the company name in it, it might have a country code and it often has some sort of location info. Everyone knows the purpose is to help you remember what you paid for and track a payment to that company in your records. If you have a dispute, you can find it. If you’ve been overcharged, you can see it. If you need to prove proof of purchase, it is very helpful.

Click to zoom my statement

I have to confess, I am often slack in checking through my statements, but have learned it is useful to do so a few months after an overseas trip to see if anyone skimmed my card while I was away. While doing so I discovered this unusual entry, highlighted in this image at left (click it for a larger version). Scrolling down the list I bet you have no trouble discerning where most of the payments might come from, except for one. Most have information that, even if you’ve never been to Sydney, would be enough to understand where that purchase was made. A few are very local, but an internet search for that name would give you a pretty clear indication where you spent your money. Easy.

Except for one, “Premium X 1 541 Premium Au“. Sounds innocuous does it? Hmmm; no, not very. I then looked back to see that it had been happening for months and I really had no idea where it came from and naturally suspected fraud. The letter “X” really had me worried I’d been unwittingly subscribed to some nasty site doing shady or illegal stuff. I immediately rolled out the fraud function on the banking site and ticked all the ones I could find with this name, reported it as fraud and received a nice letter from the bank telling me I was credited each disputed transaction. 

Job done.                  I thought.

But it then appeared again this month. So the fraud report hadn’t shut it off, just refunded my query. I guess it would have cost more to investigate than to simply refund and move onto bigger fish. OK. So I went into procrastinate, ahem, research mode and fired up both Google and DuckDuckGo (yeah, I know, don’t get me started…) to get to the bottom of Premium X.

After some research I discovered there were others who experienced this same issue. I had to use only a portion of the entry to find them, and I can’t guarantee the result will be in your results list because of the way Google “helps” you find relevant results through filter bubbling and tracking  but there they were. In among the area code searches, and beer keg products and pregnancy services (??) there was the one lone entry.

little details have HUGE value

Spotify Community. Then the bells went off and a quick search showed there was no “Spotify” entry in my statement. The search result pointed to a list in the help section of the accounts section of the discussion forum of the  Spotify community listing describing how the charges appear on your credit card.  Obviously the first thing I read when subscribing to a music service. *sarcasm*.

Spotify thought “Premium x 1 541 Premium Au” was sufficient to tell me I was paying for my  subscription to Spotify. They missed the opportunity that I could say “Ah, yeah, Spotify! I love Spotify” when I’m looking at my credit card statements. “What great value!” I could think to myself. “I got ten times that value this week alone!”, I could warmly gush. Instead: “What the?? oh, right. No, that’s Spotify; I think. Better check. Shame it sounds dodgy.” is what I get to think. or what I did last week, which was: “F#@*! My card got skimmed somewhere and now I’m in deep with a dodgy service it’ll take ages to rectify!“. Not a desirable impression and a bad outcome for some very easy copywriting. A little attention to detail. A touch of though on the brand value.

Instead of making the credit card entry something like “Spotify Premium 1 541 AU”, which everyone who subscribed to Spotify would clearly understand, they chose to:

• create an entry that sounds like a pr0n site or a chat line service
• add a line deep in the site explaining what the entry would look like when you see it a month or two later
• field questions in the support forum explaining the difference
• assume people want to search the Spotify site to find what it’s called in their credit card statement
• assume people would seek the answer from Spotify and not their bank or search engines
• manage several (hundreds?) fraud cases a month as people panic when they see “Premium X 1 541 Premium” on their credit card statements.

At some point, someone had to make all those choices. Someone had to say, “Lets explain the credit card entry” instead of “Let’s remove the need for supporting that stupid name and change it to something meaningful, and reduce overheads”. It is a clear example of how a small item, a label on a statement, can have an adverse and negative impact on a service or brand. As previously mentioned, it’s the little things that matter. It’s not the epic fails that infuriate, often it’s the little issues, that compound to form an overall impression. As Bukowski wrote: “it’s the continuing series of small tragedies that send a man to the madhouse“.

When offering a service, make sure your little things are something worthy of praise on Little Big Details, rather than of a small tragedy, diminishing your value in your customer/visitor/client’s eyes. Your customers will respect and appreciate your attention to their details.

</rant>

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A friend told me that it is now listed as a “Popular Video” on the front page of WP TV, so I thought I’d take advantage of the SEO love while I can. I apologise for the video being Flash and not HTML5, but if you visit the site you can also download the H264 version from the site.

I plan to add the text descriptions and transcript as soon as I can. Apologies in advance for WordPress.tv not thinking that was important.

Please be kind in your comments. I know I have room for improvement, and constructive comments are welcome. Yes, I will be umming a lot less next time. For convenience, I have also re-embeded the slide share slides in the hopes  you can run the two of them together.

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Please take 7 and a half minutes out of your day to fill your heart with this passionate film.

Thank you Shane Koyczan for this breathtaking film.

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From pieces like this one claiming Windows 8 is an opportunity for Apple, to reviews panning the Microsoft Surface with RT, the tide has turned, from excitement and enthusiasm for Microsoft taking such a bold step, to opprobrium and ridicule for getting some things wrong with the latest release of their operating system.

As an Apple user and advocate for nearly two decades, I was always comfortable gloating that Apple seemed to get the User Interface right more often than not, even when the underlying operating system was a little flaky at times, to say the least. The interface always improved, even when the OS continued to fail.

Remember System 7.5? ’nuff said.

As a result, I was waiting to be disappointed by Windows 8, after all the Zune, Kin and Vista debacles of the past. It seemed they were on a trajectory of hubris and pride and not understanding the user, making bold assumptions based not on what many people experienced and needed. Many examples of engineered  not designed, products carrying the arrogance of scant attention to user needs or people’s expectations.

But Windows 8 looked good. It had great ideas, a lovely modern and clean appearance, novel interaction design models, beautiful typography, layout and features. It is a bold step in a new direction where shadows, textures and shapes are no longer required and computing interfaces looked like they lived on computers again. For once in almost 2 decades I started thinking about buying Microsoft, probably an MS Surface, started thinking of Microsoft as a company truly interested in real User Experience and design. They were making Apple look “old school” and backwards; childish and pedestrian. Although MS was supposed to be the “enemy”, I was looking forward to using Win8 and giving it a fair shake, with my own money, and not just as a UX research tool!

It was disappointing to see all these reviews starting out fairly optimistic, then turning downright hostile, in the face of this bold step Microsoft were taking. It made me recall all the hostility Apple received when they launched both the iPhone and the iPad. All those computer users telling us these devices had nor real use case, weren’t “professional-grade” devices, would never take off. People laughed at the “huge” iPhone form factor, the lack of applications in the Apple Store, and poor network connectivity. Every new release had a new crisis, from cracked screens through arrogant antenna bug fixes to dodgy space-shifting Maps. That these products were considered silly, that only dedicated fanbois would be interested in them, not “real people”.

well…

I hope Microsoft proves us wrong, just like Apple proved their critics wrong, and they stay the course; releasing useful updates, keeping the vision but listening to user needs, adapting to requirements and expectations, building carefully and with due consideration. I would love to see real competition in the operating system space, including increased activity in Ubuntu, so that all operating system ideas can build off each other for the greater benefit of users trying to enjoy their tools, getting more out of them.

An interesting space to watch for 2013.

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©Neil Guanlao http://www.neiguanlao.com/

Last week I had the pleasure of attending WordCamp Sydney 2012 and presented for the first time in a while. It was on a subject near to my heart, inclusive design. The biggest thrill for me was being able to present early and against someone I though would claim the entire crowd, Kimanzi T Constable who was following the keynote in the larger lecture hall. I still had a decent and enthusiastic crowd who posed some good questions. It was great to get  the preso over at the start of the conference so I could relax and enjoy the rest of the conference, which I did, thoroughly.

The entire event is archived at Eventifier, which is well worth investigating in itself, as it collects public traces of your event through the content shared on twitter via hashtags, and there are better writers than I who chose to write about the presentations they saw there.

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One of the presenters was guiding some people through what it takes to create a WordPress Theme. For the uninitiated, a WordPress theme is the part that sits between the WordPress application (which is a Content Management System) and the user’s browser, to pull the content and page elements together for the webpage.

Dee Teal mentioned there are courses available on teamTreehouse for Web Design, Web Development and iOS development. It’s a great service where you pay by the month and take as much tuition as you can handle. It’s a great service but if you’re uncertain of your commitment level before paying anything, I have a few free suggestions below to dip your toe in to ignite your developmental spark.

Before you start though it is useful to understand a few basics about coding for the web.

Markup, style sheets and scripting

Before starting any course on web development it is important to know the difference between the types of code required for building websites. The three main standards are based on page structure markup, presentational language and functional scripting. This is expressed as HTML, CSS and Javascript (ore more accurately, ECMAscript, the “official” version of Javascript), which are all interpreted by the browser to display webpages. This is of course a simplistic view, but it does cover all three elements, structure, presentation, function.

A useful reference for coding is the excellent W3Schools, which allows you to play with each code type as you go. HTML is the markup language that is used to create the page structure, creating the headings, paragraphs, text content, images, and links, etc. HTML alone should be enough to convey the structure and meaning of your document.

CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets is the language that is used to manage the visual representation of a page. CSS is used to manage colours, sizes, visual style and spaces between page elements. CSS isn’t critical for the structure of a web page, but it helps convey meaning through visual style.

Finally, Javascript is the scripting language that occur in the browser. Javascript is commonly used to manipulate the document structure (a.k.a. “the DOM”, the Document Object Model) or appearance to supply functional interactivity. Examples of Javascript functionality are: menus that pop-out, forms that change as you fill them in or validate the information you type, and heading images that smoothly transition as a slide show.

Server side languages

These three coding languages above are all interpreted by the browser in the user’s computer to present structured, attractive and functional websites.

Programming languages are run on the server instead of the user’s computer, hence  ”server-side” versus “client-side” code. These languages, like WordPress’s PHP, Windows’ DotNet, and the endemic Python and Server-side Javascript, work on the server, like collecting information from a database or collating disparate elements together to build up a page from smaller elements.

Learning at your own pace

That got me thinking about all the wonderfully free stuff out there where you can start coding without any commitment or cost. A good starting point might be: Don’t fear the Internet where Jessica Hische & Russ Maschmeyer present excellently made videos about coding and mark-up that are easy to understand. You might also like to know about are Codecademy  and Learn Python the hard way. Both are free and excellent learning courses where you can move at your own speed.

Codecademy aims to get more people to understand coding and is similar to teamTreehouse in that there are stages, rewards and badges. It assumes you know nothing at all about coding and are willing to take your education in small steps. It is incredibly well written and offered in bite size lessons you can choose to snack on one at a time or plan a large,. tapas-style meal over several hours. At the moment it is mainly JavaScript but it will help you start to understand code concepts enough to be able to debug and roll your own functions. I believe there will be more courses as time progresses.

If you really want to learn a powerful and established sever-side programming language,  Learn Python the Hard Way by Zed A. Shaw is offered as a physical book, ePub, PDF and as FREE HTML. You can pay a little extra for some video lessons. It is very well written, again, with lashings of great, dry humour. It expects you to download a free coding tool to use for the lessons, which shouldn’t be too difficult if you are working with WordPress. It defines the “hard way” as writing completely from scratch, not by copying pre-existing code, and therefore learning to think about what you are doing instead of mimicking someone else’s ideas. Think of it as an Immersive language course instead of carrying around a phrase book! Not for the faint-hearted, but good if you are determined and keen to build your own programs from scratch.

These resources and courses are free, flexible, rewarding and will get you thinking in coding languages and might infect you with a desire to learn more as you build up your skills and understanding.

Finally, have a look at Coursera, an online resource that lets you take free classes from hugely respected universities like Princeton, Stanford, Penn State and others. You get course materials, lectures, assignments, and communicate with other students world-wide. You don’t get certification, but you get everything else, from an excellent source.

Whatever your interest, there’s a course with your name on it, and some of them are as free as they are excellent. Once you get some understanding, you may even consider some of the paid for courses to take your understanding further. Happy coding!

The post The year of coding appeared first on typing the void.

The maps of the ride are below, just so you can get a feel for the ride we’ll be on, and I hope to have enough energy during the rest stops to twitter a bit at twitter.com/wheelyweb.

Day one: 165km, 1617m overall elevation gain

Day two: Mount Victoria to Molong, 181km, 1200m overall gain

Day three: 118km, mostly downhill, thank f**k!

I guess it’s an understatement I’m looking forward to day three?

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Found at Bloor and Dovercourt, Toronto, outside the Tim Horton’s.

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