Usability in the Real World

“Jim, can you help me with something?”

Teresa was working in her home office, as she often does in the evening after getting home from work.  She’s in a big project crunch right now and things are calmer at home, and she’s a good thinker and worker in the evening (unlike me who is definitely an early bird).

Like a knight in shining armor, I rode to her rescue. 

She was in her e-mail system, uploading a Word document she had created.

“It’s taking a long time.  It must be a big file.  Why is it so big?  It only has a couple pictures in it.”

I checked the file size.  It was 13M – even if the upload finished, her e-mail system would reject it.  For a four-page document with a single picture in it (created in SmartDraw).  I right-clicked on the image, and, yes, it was an embedded object.  I looked at the SmartDraw file and it was over 5M by itself.  The image was not very complex.  It was a process flow with some gradient-filled shapes and some embedded clip-art.  Five megs.  For a simple drawing.  Thirteen megs in Word.

I knew just what to do.

In SmartDraw, select all, copy.  In Word, delete linked drawing, paste special, enhanced metafile.  Voila.  Document was down to under 500K – still large, but manageable.

“What did you just do?” 

So, I walked through the process again.

“Why should I have to do that?”

Exactly.

Teresa is one of the smartest people I know, she is absolutely the best manager I have ever known, and she’s quite tech-savvy and has been using software for years – all the way back to punched cards.  She’s used Microsoft Office for as long as it has been out.  She was VP and GM of the multimedia company I worked for (that’s where we met).

“How would a normal person at home ever accomplish this?  Why do you know what to do?”

She is right on.  No one should have to know these sacred incantations to accomplish a very simple and very common task.  Embed a graphic from a graphics program into a document in a word processor and e-mail it to a work colleague.  A task that’s been around since the dawn of time (or at least the dawn of the Apple Lisa or Xerox PARC).

Why do I know how?  I’ve been developing functional specifications to explain user interface designs for years and years.  A functional spec is a complex document with lots of embedded graphics, both raster- and vector-based, from lots of other tools like Paint Shop Pro, PhotoShop, Visio, and Illustrator.

I gave up pasting embedded objects long ago.  Neat idea that never really worked.  I always keep the source documents separate from the destination documents.  And I always go through some sort of conversion step to make the source palatable to the destination.  (For another example, for a raster graphic, I make a flattened copy, reduce its color depth, copy; then in word, I paste special and choose device independent bitmap.)  And every release of office, there are small changes to how pasting works that I have to update my conversion work flow.

I get the result I want: high fidelity images (on screen and print) that are resizable and flow with text that don’t create a huge document file on disk.  And I’ve taught many other people the ways of the force.

We shouldn’t have to do this.  Period.

Later that night, “Jim, can you fetch my printout off the laser printer?”

The PowerPoint she printed has some slides with screen-shots of an IT application.  They didn’t print.  Everything else but the screen-shots printed.

“Why?”

Well, it’s likely the way PowerPoint prints its slides along with an interaction with the PCL print driver… Ugh, another sacred incantation.

“Why doesn’t software just work?”

I feel the burden of blame for the total wreck that all software has become.  I know how to do this better.  Why can’t I fix it all?

Maybe I can at least have an impact on the software that Rockwell Automation creates.  And maybe I’ll take some comfort in that.  But everyone who uses software applications has dozens of real world stories like this. 

I’m pretty sure that, in most cases, the software grows more complex faster than the usability improvements can keep up with.  We can do more with software today than when there were time-shares and punched cards, but we have to know more too.  I just don’t see that changing any time soon.  But it’s worth trying.  In fact, that quest is what gives me passion for my work.

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