This is one of my favorite usability stories which I may have initially told in a different post, but it applies here. When I started word processing graduate school papers in the early 80's, I used a Commodore 64; I had to buy the word processing program separately and had a Commodore floppy drive, which was used to load the program and then to save workfiles on a separate floppy disk.
Without thinking or reading the floppy disk manual (which I still have in some moving box), I had inserted my word processing software disk and was about to insert my data disk, when I read this warning: "DO NOT EJECT THE DISK WITH THE GREEN LIGHT SHOWING". The green light was a power indicator. The tech writer must have intended to say was not to eject the data disk while it was still being written to (probably a flicking amber light). There was also a warning against shutting down the drive with the disk in it. So did that mean my software disk was toast, caught between the devil and the deep blue sea? I quickly decided that the documentation was misleading; otherwise, the floppy drive was utterly unusable. Still, I held my breath the first time I ejected my software disk.
This is a big lesson in usability: the initial response to the human interface, including documentation, frames one's experience. And for me, that includes indicator lights. I once remember being the DBA/system administrator behind the National Archives' milrecs application. There had been no transition with my predecessor but I soon saw an amber light on the server hosting the data warehouse. I was confident that this was problematic; researching the issue, I learned that one of the disks was dead on the RAID-5 device. In essence, this is like driving your car with your spare tire; you need to replace the tire ASAP or your vehicle becomes inoperable. If another disk pops, your RAID storage becomes unusable.
One of the things that first-time users need to know is how to process the indicator statuses; what do different colors mean, what about flickering indicators, etc.? To what extent are they consistent from other experiences? For example, my cellphone displays red while in the process of charging; I also see a red indicator when the cellphone is running low on battery. What happens when a battery is fully charged? Does the indicator go out? Do I need to guard against overcharging?
To a certain extent, we may have other experience contexts, e.g., traffic lights: green go, red stop, yellow warning. To the extent we may infer from other contexts, the light choices may be more natural.
When I got my Gooloo power bank, the instructions really didn't address my initial learning experience. I do know that often with battery-operating devices using rechargeable batteries, including laptops or cellphones, one often must initially charge the unit before using it (unplugged). What I initially experienced was a blinking blue light, vs. say a steady red light in charging my cellphone. Blinking might be an indicator meaning an error condition or charging in process. There is a discussion buried in the documentation of multiple indicator lights on the top of the devices which indicate 4 stages of charging (when the stage is complete, its color turns steady) and when fully charged, the lights go off. Charging is done by USB, which you can interface with household current with the use of an adapter (which you can buy with $5 at Walmart), which I use all the time for charging my cellphone. In this case, I didn't know the context of using a blue light; maybe it was signifying a problem with a charging process. It does explain elsewhere it might take 15 minutes to charge in a car or up to 2-3 hours via USB connection to household electricity. My issue is that this information should occur at the start of the document vs. the reader having to comb through the document.
Sunday, June 26, 2016
Monday, June 20, 2016
My 3 PCs and Maintenance Issues
I bought my first PC/compatible while I was a professor in the late 80's. Most of my graduate school papers were actually typed via a Commodore 64, but I wrote my dissertation using Samna in a 2-PC department faculty lab available to department student employees if faculty weren't using them (I was a teaching fellow and didn't have the budget to buy my own). Each faculty member now had a PC in his office. I had backups of my dissertation document, which is a good thing because once Samna went crazy and corrupted my workfile floppy disk. I ended up losing a week's worth of work since the last usable backup. I did have use of an office PC for my three faculty appointments, but I bought my first PC clone in Milwaukee (roughly $2800 for a desktop). I later bought a bulky portable with a handle on the end because I remember needing to do work during a Boston academic conference. I don't recall what happened to them (repair issues?), but quite frankly after Windows 3, I needed more RAM to do stuff and bought a second desktop. Then in the late 90's, I did a lot of road warrior work and bought my first modern notebook computer. I've probably bought a new replacement every 2 or 3 years.
In maybe 2-3 cases, I've had the worst experience with coffee spills. I never kept a coffee cup near the PC, but even a minor splatter on the keyboard could render the notebook all but useless. [In another case, with my one and only Sony, the power button no longer worked after 8 months. I tried to send it to a laptap repair shop, but they refused to accept it.]
At some point I wanted to have a backup PC just in case I had to cope with an outage (email, work, etc.) I had one HP notebook with a dying hard drive, and I bought a new notebook (making more sense to get more RAM, hard drive, newer Windows vs. sinking more money into repairing an obsoleted PC). As the backup PC eventually failed I replaced it with a cheap desktop.
When I moved to WV, my new place was furnished, so I put my desktop in storage with most of my stuff. I had hired some helpers, but the unload was done without me (work schedule). Long story short, my laptop shorted out (a splatter victim which ultimately shorted out). Now actually years back I had started using laptop stands and external keyboards and mice to minimize the risk of coffee incidents, but I had misplaced my stand during the move and had a freakish splatter accident.
I went to my storage unit, and the movers had buried it somewhere in the filled unit, and I didn't want to spent hours in freezing weather (outside unit) pulling everything out. There was a Sam's Club about 3 miles from my new work location, which is where I bought my current workhorse notebook maybe 18 months back. I wasn't going to buy a second backup PC. When I moved into my current SC unfurnished apartment, I had my helpers bring the desktop in (other stuff went back into storage).
But try as I might, I could not get the desktop to start up. Had it died while in storage (not climate-controlled)? For months, I debated hauling the dead desktop to the dumpster. In the meanwhile I bought an inexpensive notebook as a backup to replace the desktop.
This may seem unrelated but years earlier I had licensed copies of Rollback RX for my PCs. Rollback RX basically allowed you to go back to a prior manual or automated daily snapshot (e.g., something happens and your PC won't start up). I ran into chronic issues with Rollback RX on my new workhorse notebook. I think I had to go back to do a factory-level reset (meaning all of my data and applications were lost and had to be reinstalled from backups) something like 4 times in the first 2 months. I began to suspect Rollback RX was causing my instability issues and did not reinstall the last time--and haven't had a similar problem since then.
Going back to the dead disktop: I don't know if it was an artifact of wiring, but in a final check putting plugs in different sockets and I noticed a flicker of life in the desktop. I managed to get to boot but I had major stability issues, and Rollback RX wasn't helping. I deinstalled Rollback RX and/or went through a factory-level reset, and the desktop has been stable since.
So that's how I ended up with two existing backup PCs. I also have several layers of redundancy including external drives, Google Drive, and Dropbox. I mostly go on the backup PC's to update securities, applications, and Microsoft patches. And that provides a context for the following issues I experienced over the weekend.
What's truly odd is that I run into different technical problems on the 3 PC's. I noticed that Windows had delivered updates to my workhorse notebook over the weekend. So I decided to do maintenance on the two backup PC's.
The backup notebook experienced an issue I've had to resolve multiple times over the years. Somehow the Windows Software Distribution folder has been corrupted. The standard remedy is to stop the Windows update and BITS services, drop the software distribution folder, and restart services. In this case, the Windows update seemed to be stuck at about 8% for hours. Granted, a number of times you need to give patches some time to download, but even after hours and reboots, no progress. For some reason the software distribution folder was sticky to delete, even after checking services down. I eventually succeeded after a series of reboots, started up the services and probably within 90 minutes the patches in question were downloaded and installed.
The desktop issue didn't deal with the patching so much as something I had noticed but had not resolved: the Start Menu was not working. There were workarounds for the most part. For example, in Windows 10, I was used to going to the Start Menu to access Settings for checking on Updates. I subsequently discovered Win-I could bring up Settings. At some point I was getting a message to the effect that there was a critical issue with the Start Menu and I needed to sign out then sign back in so the problem could be resolved. It didn't happen. I did some digging and found a Microsoft reference to downloading and running a start menu troubleshooter. Long story short; I got some unusable cryptic error message on problems with Windows shell experience host and cortana. I searched a number of posts and forums with suggestions on running certain Powershell scripts, even creating a new Windows user.
What turned out to be the problem was the installation of Dropbox. (I believe that I ran across this solution, which suggested Dropbox and/or Avast were often at fault.) Once I uninstalled Dropbox and rebooted, I was able to use the start menu as expected. It's not immediately obvious why Dropbox is an issue because it hasn't been for my notebook PC's.
In maybe 2-3 cases, I've had the worst experience with coffee spills. I never kept a coffee cup near the PC, but even a minor splatter on the keyboard could render the notebook all but useless. [In another case, with my one and only Sony, the power button no longer worked after 8 months. I tried to send it to a laptap repair shop, but they refused to accept it.]
At some point I wanted to have a backup PC just in case I had to cope with an outage (email, work, etc.) I had one HP notebook with a dying hard drive, and I bought a new notebook (making more sense to get more RAM, hard drive, newer Windows vs. sinking more money into repairing an obsoleted PC). As the backup PC eventually failed I replaced it with a cheap desktop.
When I moved to WV, my new place was furnished, so I put my desktop in storage with most of my stuff. I had hired some helpers, but the unload was done without me (work schedule). Long story short, my laptop shorted out (a splatter victim which ultimately shorted out). Now actually years back I had started using laptop stands and external keyboards and mice to minimize the risk of coffee incidents, but I had misplaced my stand during the move and had a freakish splatter accident.
I went to my storage unit, and the movers had buried it somewhere in the filled unit, and I didn't want to spent hours in freezing weather (outside unit) pulling everything out. There was a Sam's Club about 3 miles from my new work location, which is where I bought my current workhorse notebook maybe 18 months back. I wasn't going to buy a second backup PC. When I moved into my current SC unfurnished apartment, I had my helpers bring the desktop in (other stuff went back into storage).
But try as I might, I could not get the desktop to start up. Had it died while in storage (not climate-controlled)? For months, I debated hauling the dead desktop to the dumpster. In the meanwhile I bought an inexpensive notebook as a backup to replace the desktop.
This may seem unrelated but years earlier I had licensed copies of Rollback RX for my PCs. Rollback RX basically allowed you to go back to a prior manual or automated daily snapshot (e.g., something happens and your PC won't start up). I ran into chronic issues with Rollback RX on my new workhorse notebook. I think I had to go back to do a factory-level reset (meaning all of my data and applications were lost and had to be reinstalled from backups) something like 4 times in the first 2 months. I began to suspect Rollback RX was causing my instability issues and did not reinstall the last time--and haven't had a similar problem since then.
Going back to the dead disktop: I don't know if it was an artifact of wiring, but in a final check putting plugs in different sockets and I noticed a flicker of life in the desktop. I managed to get to boot but I had major stability issues, and Rollback RX wasn't helping. I deinstalled Rollback RX and/or went through a factory-level reset, and the desktop has been stable since.
So that's how I ended up with two existing backup PCs. I also have several layers of redundancy including external drives, Google Drive, and Dropbox. I mostly go on the backup PC's to update securities, applications, and Microsoft patches. And that provides a context for the following issues I experienced over the weekend.
What's truly odd is that I run into different technical problems on the 3 PC's. I noticed that Windows had delivered updates to my workhorse notebook over the weekend. So I decided to do maintenance on the two backup PC's.
The backup notebook experienced an issue I've had to resolve multiple times over the years. Somehow the Windows Software Distribution folder has been corrupted. The standard remedy is to stop the Windows update and BITS services, drop the software distribution folder, and restart services. In this case, the Windows update seemed to be stuck at about 8% for hours. Granted, a number of times you need to give patches some time to download, but even after hours and reboots, no progress. For some reason the software distribution folder was sticky to delete, even after checking services down. I eventually succeeded after a series of reboots, started up the services and probably within 90 minutes the patches in question were downloaded and installed.
The desktop issue didn't deal with the patching so much as something I had noticed but had not resolved: the Start Menu was not working. There were workarounds for the most part. For example, in Windows 10, I was used to going to the Start Menu to access Settings for checking on Updates. I subsequently discovered Win-I could bring up Settings. At some point I was getting a message to the effect that there was a critical issue with the Start Menu and I needed to sign out then sign back in so the problem could be resolved. It didn't happen. I did some digging and found a Microsoft reference to downloading and running a start menu troubleshooter. Long story short; I got some unusable cryptic error message on problems with Windows shell experience host and cortana. I searched a number of posts and forums with suggestions on running certain Powershell scripts, even creating a new Windows user.
What turned out to be the problem was the installation of Dropbox. (I believe that I ran across this solution, which suggested Dropbox and/or Avast were often at fault.) Once I uninstalled Dropbox and rebooted, I was able to use the start menu as expected. It's not immediately obvious why Dropbox is an issue because it hasn't been for my notebook PC's.
Saturday, June 4, 2016
Reminders and Google Calendar
[* update 6/26/16]
I've used Remember the Milk over the last few years (note for this discussion I'm referring to PC vs. smartphone applications). I've used this service to track various recurring tasks, like paying monthly bills and taking certain meds, and it has a module which integrates with Google Calendar. For some reason, and I submitted a problem ticket on this with RTM, my recurring tasks stopped at the beginning of the month. In the meanwhile, I looked for a workaround.
Google of course has a Tasks product integrated with Calendar. But it really doesn't have recurring tasks functionality. I could use it for something like maintaining a honey do list of jobs around my home. Of course, you could create a recurring event like for birthdays and anniversaries in Google Calendar, but events are not generally tracked. For example, if my appliance bill is due on the 20th of the month, I can set up an event, even have Google send me a scheduled notification. But what I really want is a reminder which explicitly is checked off if and when I pay the bill, like in RTM. I can easily scan to see if there are open/overdue tasks/reminders.
I tried experimenting with a recurring tasks app which integrates with Google Tasks. It was not clear from app documentation about the update window, but I only saw a 3-week fill.
On further Googling, I saw references to integrated reminder functionality across different products like Google Keep, Indox, and Calender, replicating functionality on the smartphone side. But I didn't see a selection button for reminders vs. recurring events.
It turns out there's a conceptual piece of the puzzle which may not all that obvious; I came across a discussion in Google product forums where the Google analyst found herself saying the same thing multiple times. To provide context, I have 3 calendars under my account, presumably by default, a personal event calendar I normally interact with, birthdays and tasks. It turns out that task and reminder calendars must be toggled (I believe the default is tasks)., So, for example, if the task calendar is showing, you would switch to the reminder calendar by a pull-down menu to the right of the task calendar icon. (Personally I would have implemented a radio/checkmark option with both task and reminder calendar names showing.)
Once you toggle on the reminder calendar, entering/modifying reminders is straightfoward. For example, I might set up all-day reminders for taking my meds/vitamins. I left-click inside the day bubble to define the task and edit to set the recurring schedule.
[* update 6/26/16] I had several unproductive encounters with RTM tech support: basically, how can we replicate the problem? I mean, how do you get any simpler than say I have 4 daily tasks, and when I check today's tasks, I see none listed? No follow-up.
What I have noticed in my Google Calendar RTM plug-in is when I complete the first overdue task, the next day's task of the same type pops up in my window. When I check the overdue tasks, it doesn't list the tasks separately for outstanding dates but the task with a date displaying the earliest overdue date. I still think this is counterintuitive. So, for example, if I lapsed for 2 days, today's date tasks will surface 2 days from now but will never appear in today's tasks.
I've used Remember the Milk over the last few years (note for this discussion I'm referring to PC vs. smartphone applications). I've used this service to track various recurring tasks, like paying monthly bills and taking certain meds, and it has a module which integrates with Google Calendar. For some reason, and I submitted a problem ticket on this with RTM, my recurring tasks stopped at the beginning of the month. In the meanwhile, I looked for a workaround.
Google of course has a Tasks product integrated with Calendar. But it really doesn't have recurring tasks functionality. I could use it for something like maintaining a honey do list of jobs around my home. Of course, you could create a recurring event like for birthdays and anniversaries in Google Calendar, but events are not generally tracked. For example, if my appliance bill is due on the 20th of the month, I can set up an event, even have Google send me a scheduled notification. But what I really want is a reminder which explicitly is checked off if and when I pay the bill, like in RTM. I can easily scan to see if there are open/overdue tasks/reminders.
I tried experimenting with a recurring tasks app which integrates with Google Tasks. It was not clear from app documentation about the update window, but I only saw a 3-week fill.
On further Googling, I saw references to integrated reminder functionality across different products like Google Keep, Indox, and Calender, replicating functionality on the smartphone side. But I didn't see a selection button for reminders vs. recurring events.
It turns out there's a conceptual piece of the puzzle which may not all that obvious; I came across a discussion in Google product forums where the Google analyst found herself saying the same thing multiple times. To provide context, I have 3 calendars under my account, presumably by default, a personal event calendar I normally interact with, birthdays and tasks. It turns out that task and reminder calendars must be toggled (I believe the default is tasks)., So, for example, if the task calendar is showing, you would switch to the reminder calendar by a pull-down menu to the right of the task calendar icon. (Personally I would have implemented a radio/checkmark option with both task and reminder calendar names showing.)
Once you toggle on the reminder calendar, entering/modifying reminders is straightfoward. For example, I might set up all-day reminders for taking my meds/vitamins. I left-click inside the day bubble to define the task and edit to set the recurring schedule.
[* update 6/26/16] I had several unproductive encounters with RTM tech support: basically, how can we replicate the problem? I mean, how do you get any simpler than say I have 4 daily tasks, and when I check today's tasks, I see none listed? No follow-up.
What I have noticed in my Google Calendar RTM plug-in is when I complete the first overdue task, the next day's task of the same type pops up in my window. When I check the overdue tasks, it doesn't list the tasks separately for outstanding dates but the task with a date displaying the earliest overdue date. I still think this is counterintuitive. So, for example, if I lapsed for 2 days, today's date tasks will surface 2 days from now but will never appear in today's tasks.
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