getwired.com A little bit of this. A little bit of that.

For most of my career at Microsoft, I worked as a Program Manager on Windows Setup. No, not the Windows installer. Windows Setup – the tools and technologies that took a computer either from an earlier version of Windows or a bare PC, to an installation of Windows. But in this role, I still had to deal with the ramifications of how Windows applications were installed, and often would see the work of other teams incorporated into Windows setup – often teams that you wouldn’t assume would need to be there during setup (and sometimes, you’d be right).

In our weekly Monday meeting at work today, we got to talking about the Windows 8 App Store, and how the rigid rules for Metro Apps in it will mean certain things we’ve all become used to with Windows applications will be no more. For example, application product keys, duct-taped custom product activation/licensing experiences, customizable installs (install feature “a”, but not feature “b”), installation directories, MSI’s, etc – all will be gone.

Personally, I think that’s great.

Through my travels throughout Microsoft - in particular when I went to other teams and talked with them (as well as when I talked with corporations and ISV partners), there were two common traits about how “setup” (the thing that put a team’s binaries down on the system) was built.

1. It was an afterthought – rarely did a team take two steps back and rethink how their application was installed. Why would you? It’s a cost sink that doesn’t show return (unless frustrated users come into your value equation).
2. It was the thing you put on the “new guy” – rarely was setup held in any high esteem.
3. It was the La Brea Tar Pits of any “to-do” items that the app might ever need – hence, the “sanitation engineers” of Windows.

Windows Setup itself was an extreme example. But even if you take Office into account, it’s painful to look back at how complex setup applications are/were. Recently in most applications, I believe there has been a general tendency to minimize the setup screens, minimize the configuration during or just after setup, etc.

During the exercise to overhaul Windows Longhorn setup (I don’t call what I worked on Vista, FWIW), we caught unbelievable grief from within the Windows organization because we were hard-locking the locations for Program Files and the Windows directory This had, for several versions, been configurable – handy if you’re the kind of masochist who wants to install two versions of Windows in the SAME partition. I should see if I still have some of the flame emails I received. Nothing showed me we were doing the right thing quite like cheesed-off geeks. How much time and effort we had put into supporting this, version after version, as a complete edge case. Nerd porn. It had some utility, but really… how many consumers and enterprises (the people who pay for Windows) ever used that?

Windows itself lost the whole “Add/Remove Windows Components” during setup as well when Vista shipped. Again – killing a feature that very few users used, but that added weight to setup, to the setup experience, and to user complexity.

For me, when I see that Windows 8 Metro-style apps won’t include the custom “glue” they’ve had for many years (including the incredibly complex MSI infrastructure), it makes me excited for the future. Fewer moving parts to cut fingers, less duct-tape code that doesn’t really need to be there. Less garbage to worry about.

This is my office phone.

See the red light? Most people who know me know that the best way to reach me is always my cell phone or email (or Twitter). But that red light marks purgatory for those who didn’t know.

You see, office phones and I just don’t get along. I’ve tried, really I have. But these “designed by an electrical engineer” phones have always driven me nuts. Right up there with fax machines and printers, the needlessly complicated “work phone” has always driven me nuts. The user interface makes me feel stupid. It feels like it lowers my IQ every time I try to use one (and I know it’s not just me) – and no two office phones are ever the same!

I saw the red light today, and thought, “I really should make sure there’s nothing important in there”. So I searched the Internet for directions to the device. Almost everything came back as handsets for sale (hmm…), no documentation. I could, admittedly, ask a peer here how to check it, but then I’d feel even more stupid. I mean, I worked on Windows. I’m not an idiot. I even know this is far from being a really complex office phone, but how the heck do you check voicemail? I just want to check voicemail!

I think my iPhone has broken me to use overly complex user interfaces. I use my iPhone, my iPad, and even my Nest thermostat, and appreciate the elegance and simplicity of what they do – but more importantly, what they don’t do. With this phone, it’s impossible to figure out how to use the “Feature” button or check voicemail without an instruction manual. It’s completely unclear what “HFAI” is (High Fructose Amplification Input? High Fidelity Analog Input?), or if I should be worried that I don’t have an indicator light to tell me if my HFAI is working or plugged in. I have no idea. Voicemail is important enough on this device to include an indicator light. But no one-click access to voicemail through a button labeled, oh, I don’t know… “Voicemail”?

A few weeks ago, I saw a non-technical person using a technical piece of software. They tried something. It didn’t work the way they expected. Their response?

“What did I do?”

Technology that doesn’t work as we expect it to innately makes us feel stupid – like we screwed up. We should try harder, we should just know better.

If you want your end-user to get things done faster and easier, drive your product by understanding their real scenarios – how they’ll use the device. Design it to just work in those scenarios. If you design a device, or a piece of hardware or software to simply bubble up your features to the end user, without anticipating how it will be used over a day, week, month or lifecycle of the device, you’re trivializing the tasks that your end user wants to accomplish – and you’re going to make them feel stupid.

If you’ve read my blog or followed me on Twitter for long, you know that I love to analyze patterns in spam and scams. Over most of 2010 and 2011, spammers (in particular the porn spammers in late 2012) were very prolific. I believe recent controls put in place are helping to regulate the amount of spam on Twitter to a better degree than before.

However, last week, something happened that exposed a weak point in whatever algorithm Twitter is using right now. On March 30, I had three new followers all within a very short period of time. Take a look:

At first glance, they look benign enough. Though all three used names and pictures of women, none of them used gratuitous cleavage (a tactic I’ve mentioned before that spammers often use, but can make them easily smacked down as spam).

But a couple of things still bothered me with all of them. First off, they all had gibberish characters at the tail end of their usernames (arguably, “Lilly” here could be a lawyer). Gibberish characters or common patterns (in this case, first name + 4 characters) are all great warning signs. Second, they all followed me within a matter of a few hours.

Using the tool that I built to check out accounts, I looked their profiles up.

“Armanda”:

“Lilly”:

“Annamarie”:

Now something definitely smelled bad. Created minutes apart, last August, with almost no interactivity in the account? Definite silent spam drones. Often spammers will “age” twitter accounts, so they don’t appear quite as eager as accounts that are created and immediately begin to prolifically spam. These had been created a while ago, laid dormant, and still hardly tweeted at all. Hiding in plain sight.

Looking at their accounts, the few tweets across them all mentioned one of two domains; either usapersonalingurylawyers.com or reminiscingvisions.com, both hosted within the 173.192.0.0 – 173.193.255.255 IP address range owned by hosting provider SoftLayer.

The first URL was simply a blog post talking about personal injury lawyers, and why you should get one. The second was similar, but featured this video:

More intriguingly, I now noticed that at the bottom of each of these pages, the site designer had included a social widget bar, including Facebook (no likes), Twitter (quite a few Tweets), and G+ (no +1′s). Twitter places a lovely hyperlink on theirs, so you can click back to Twitter and see who has tweeted about it.

Sure enough, when I clicked back from the first domain, I saw all of these Twitter accounts that had talked about it (the list went on for quite a while):

Same with the second site:

All following the same approach, all with drone accounts that looked legit if you looked quickly. I decided that someone with this similar MO had to be trying the obvious. I looked up the domain name of the law firm in that video, the Michigan law firm of Schulman and Associates (schulmanandassociates.com), and searched Twitter for that. Same deal:

Every account that had mentioned any one of these three links was a drone. Dozens and dozens of them, all following users, and responding to tweets, based upon the keyword “lawyer”. Simple keyword spamming, but done in such a broad way that the spam doesn’t appear obvious, and might not even get these accounts caught on the first try (normally).

I can’t be certain who did this on behalf of the law firm, but I believe strongly that Twitter should investigate who did this work for the law firm, as well as suspending all of these drone accounts. While I’m not a lawyer, I did speak with one, and he had concerns that depending on how this would be viewed by State Bar of Michigan, this might raise solicitation ethics concerns as well.

In my last blog post, I discussed the different user interface approaches that Apple is currently taking across all of its platforms. Four platforms, four slightly different answers.

There is, I believe, a rational explanation for each of them – and most importantly, a rational reason for all four to at this point at least, not have a completely identical experience.

In a recent meeting at work, we discussed Metro and WinRT as they related to an article that a peer was working on. The problem comes up in the use of “Metro” as an adjective used throughout Microsoft to describe many things now – not all of which are equivalent. That is, Windows Phone 7 “features” Metro, as does the Xbox now, Windows 8 soon, and numerous other apps (including Visual Studio 11?!) have been denoted as featuring Metro. Moreover, “Metro-style” has more precisely been used to describe the new style of applications within Windows 8.

A fundamental problem here is overuse, (and potentially abuse) of the term “Metro”. Metro isn’t a thing. It’s not an API. It is, in many ways, a state of being. It is, like Kanban, a design approach to completing a manufacturing task, pioneered by Toyota. Though Metro may have it’s own unique framework on each platform that it runs upon, the core thrust of Metro is always consistent. Clean layout, a focus on typography and how (and when) information is displayed to the end user.

In the past, Microsoft was criticized for not making Tablet PC optimized for pen input. Truth is, Microsoft did redesign components of Windows for pen – but it completely failed to build a software platform for developers to make the most of, never clearly delineated the value for consumers to buy the devices, or for them to push developers to build pen-enabled apps. I’ll talk about all of this in a future post. But the important thing to understand is, as we went over in  my last post, how designing for touch, multi-touch, and mouse/trackpad, are done at Apple – and I think this is critical. The interface for tablets and the interface for desktops, though ever so slowly converging, are still completely different.

My chief criticism about the new desktop and Metro apps as they are currently implemented on Windows 8 is that neither provides enough mouse affordance. Simply put, they were designed for touch/multitouch – not for mouse/trackpad. I’ve said this several times on Twitter, and I’ve usually had more people agree with me than disagree with me, but I’ve had a few naysayers. Let me explain what I mean.

Consider Windows 1.0-Windows 7.0. As the UX evolved, it became incredibly obvious (especially given almost 30 years of mouse-driven GUIs) what elements on the screen were mouse targets. These affordances innately look like things you can push, scroll, click, or grab, or that, like menus, we had learned to accomodate en masse (see the areas in the image below that I’ve highlighted in a lovely shade of teal).

I can’t find the quote at the moment, but I seem to recall a Windows 8 video or soundbite where one of the Microsoft execs giving a demo said something to the effect that Windows 8 featured a user interface that you simply “want to touch”. On a tablet, and on Windows Phone (7 or  8 when we get there), this is fine and obvious – because intrinsically everyone with one of those devices has touch support built-in. Almost all of the glowing reviews I’ve seen for Windows 8 appeared to be from reviewers who were using tablets – but most of my peers who have, as I have, tried it on a desktop without touch (since it is what most of us have), it didn’t have that same great feeling that those glowing reviewers shared.

Simply put, things become fuzzier when using Windows 8 on a desktop system without touch. Likely you’ve seen it, and perhaps it’s not a fair thing to discuss in some people’s eyes, but the video Chris Pirillo took of his dad trying to use Windows 8 with a mouse, I believe, drives my point home painfully well. The removal of the Start “orb” is a great example of a mouse affordance that has been eliminated. As a result, when touch is not available, it is not apparent how to even go “back” to the Start Page (you’ve removed the one old affordance to even get to the entirely new launch experience). While flicking about with your finger on a touch device will eventually land you back at the Start Page, using a mouse requires far more exploration, and the removal of the key user interface element that users expect in order to even launch apps.

Similarly, when in the Start Page, the user interface does encourage you to touch it – which, again, is fine if you can. But on the typical desktop – any machine upgraded from Windows 7 – the likelihood of touch support being present is incredibly low. As a result of the Metro design of the Start Page, it is apparent that not all of your apps are visible on the screen, but it is not apparent how to scroll over to see them – until you notice the scroll bar on the bottom of the screen. I personally believe that when on the Start Page, mouse movement left or right towards the edges of the screen should induce scrolling that direction – but it does not – at least it does not on any machines I’ve tested. The Charms bar is incredibly hard to coax out of hiding with a mouse, since the mouse targets are so small. I believe that simply bumping the right side of the screen with the mouse should present the Charms bar.

Where we see Apple taking the already minimalist phone experience and upsizing it to work on the tablet, and gently introduce new metaphors and gestures to Mac OS X, Microsoft has left Phone alone (for now, though it may well become a sub-category of Windows 8), but has completely redesigned Windows, and the core user interface elements of it, to be touch-first, and full-screen. In effect, they have redesigned almost the entire OS to suit tablets, and then foisted that same model – almost unmodified, onto the desktop.

Personally, while I’d like it to work, the experience just doesn’t work smoothly for me. Users should not have to learn significant keyboard shortcuts to use Windows 8 on a “touchless” desktop. They won’t. Asking a user to memorize a litany of keyboard shortcuts is not that different from asking a user new to Windows 3.1 to use the GUI with only the keyboard, and not a mouse. Doable, but an exercise in frustration that doesn’t end up with user joy.

Moreover, I believe (and I’m at odds with many here, too) that primary touch for a desktop system doesn’t make a ton of sense. If we’re talking occasional use for some games, or for photo manipulation, perhaps. But to have a knowledge worker’s arm reaching out to a screen all day for most user interactions? It makes my arm muscles hurt just thinking about it.

As I told a peer, the goal of any input device should be making you all but forget that you are using it. This was the case for most of us with the mouse, but is not in Windows 8 for mouse-bound users.

It’s not that dissimilar to the Metro design elements as the Xbox currently uses them (for navigation). When using the controller to navigate the Xbox, it is similar to the Apple TV. When using the Kinect, you can also use the same back/forward, with a “palm up, and hold” motion (which can take a bit of patience). While this may have some viability in the living room, it doesn’t work well at the moment when a user is seated. So the premise of using one’s Kinect to navigate to Hulu Plus or Netflix is foiled by the need to, realistically, stand up and use the Kinect just to navigate menus. While this may change in the future, I contend that the idea of “large gestures” as I call them, where your arms are representing movements that your fingers or a mouse would traditionally do, aren’t perfect – but are useful. However, you still will wind up sometimes using a secondary gesture (like the existing Xbox controller to navigate) or the Windows Phone 7 Xbox Companion for games and apps that aren’t voice or Kinect enabled. Voice is indeed a potential option for some command and control tasks – we’ll come back to voice in that future post I promised – not now. I think in many ways Metro does work on the Xbox, but I’m not as certain that Kinect is the vehicle to drive it across the board – you still have to think about it – give it consideration as you are performing tasks. The gestures can feel “heavy” to perform, since you have to get the UI ready to accept the gesture, then perform the gesture, and wait for it to be accepted. Kinect isn’t yet ready to be a primary input device – but given time and enhancements (Kinect 1.5 for Windows is on it’s way soon!) it could be. Time will tell.

Personally, I don’t think Metro on Windows 8 touch-based devices – tablets – is a bad idea at all. If your head isn’t wrapped around the way iOS works in the way my head is, I think it could work even better than iOS. On tablets, and even sub-sized down to Windows Phone 7/8, the design approach works quite well in a sort of “well duh!” manner. But on the desktop, or mouse/trackpad only devices? I’m not so certain that Metro as it exists is situated for success.

That said, if Windows 8 were my idea, what would I do differently?

1. Detect the presence or non-presence of touch support at setup time.
2. If touch is present, use the existing experience that focuses more on the Metro/WinRT realm, and less on the desktop.
3. If touch is not present, use an approach which melds old and new – legacy Start Menu, but Metro apps running on the desktop in a manner not that different from the  way a full-screen HTML Application (HTA) would have on earlier versions of Windows.

This is the first in what I hope to be a series of blog posts about user interfaces; where we are, where we’re going, and where we’re likely not going.

Yesterday, as I was pondering this blog post, I thought about where we’ve come with user interfaces. Today, PC users often point to the iPad as not being “ready for business”, yet the same thing happened when the PC poked its way into the world of typewriters and mainframes/minicomputers, and surely happened when the typewriter itself first came on scene in the 1800′s.

What we call “the office” today has morphed time and time again over the last 150 or so years, due to new technology coming on the scene, and changing how we work, and how we approach business problems (and computing at home).

Through almost the entirety of the 20th Century, office devices were driven through the use of a keyboard, eventually growing an appendage (the mouse), replacing paper with a digital display (CRT), and replacing the single document interface of the typewriter with overlapping windows in the Mac, then Windows (dismissing the Xerox Star and others which never succeeded in the market).

Several companies have attempted to make digital ink (a stylus/text recognition) or voice first class input mechanisms many times over the last 30 or so years. I’ll likely discuss in a future piece why neither of those have really gone anywhere, and why I doubt they will get adopted – or at least to the level that those companies might have hoped for.

As we look at cell phones, and then smartphones until the iPhone arrived (again, panning the Newton – a device which I owned, yet would still call a failure), the simple keyboard/display/pointer metaphor was pushed to the limit. With Windows CE-based Pocket PCs and RIM Blackberry devices both continuing the trend – the former with a stylus-based pointer, the latter with a trackball. One key device that did anything out of the ordinary was the Palm organizer (with their own unique method of text input). I contend that Palm devices got a huge adoption curve because of what they could do – but they stalled and never reached mainstream use because they required such massive mental reprogramming to take advantage of. I know that’s why I never bought one – it reminded me too much of my Newton, which I had high hopes for, but had such horrible text recognition that you couldn’t ever hope to annotate in any significant volume and be able to use the result later.

With almost 30 years of common mouse-driven computing behind us, we arrive in 2012. Recently, I’ve been watching what Microsoft has been doing with Windows Phone 7, then Xbox, and soon Windows 8 – the great push for “Metro” design language across every platform they offer. I’m not yet certain I’m a fan – of either Metro, or “Metro everywhere”. But that’s the topic of conversation for my next post – so I’ll stay on track.

The iPhone’s arrival 5 years ago changed the way that many of us interact with technology. Instead of multiple windows vying for attention, and a pointing device and keyboard being required to complete tasks, our finger(s) became the implement, the software the mechanism, for getting things done on devices – and a single application interface (harkening back to the typewriter or pen and paper in some senses) became the approach Apple enforced. This was likely done for many reasons; to simplify the interface and focus a user on a single task at a time, as well as to enforce a mechanism where power could be conserved by shutting down all non-critical tasks, thereby making the most of the limited ARM processor and limited battery capacity available.

This stands in stark contrast to even today’s Mac, where overlapping windows are still quite the norm, despite Lion delivering a framework for full-screen applications driven primarily through gestures – but not on-screen gestures. No, the Mac does not support primary gesturing directly to the screen (nor do I hope it ever does), it solely supports trackpad or Magic Mouse-based secondary gestures. The terms primary gesturing and secondary gesturing are not common, but they are terms that I have adapted to suit the scenario where the user is gesturing on the surface displaying the content itself (primary), or secondary being input from a secondary surface such as a trackpad or pseudo-trackpad due to screen distance from the user, as is the case with the Mac and Apple TV – and as I will contend in my next post, with Windows 8.

Consider the table below. I’ve gone through and considered some of the user interface constraints across the principal 4 Apple user interface paradigms. Specifically, note the default orientation for each device, the primary method(s) of input, typical distance from the user, and use of gestures.

We’ve seen Apple slowly, gently, expand gestures from the original two-finger scrolling gesture on Mac OS X and early pinch gestures on iOS to become much much more. But the utility of these gestures is somewhat hampered when the gesture is a secondary gesture as it always is on a Mac or would be on an Apple TV if the device supported gestures. It’s also hampered by simple real estate. There isn’t enough room on an Apple Magic Trackpad for 5 fingers, on a Magic Mouse for 4 fingers, or on an iPhone for even 3 fingers. This is why we see the largest breadth of gestures on the iPad.

But just as important to note is how the Apple TV much more closely mimics the Mac. Devices with secondary gestures must use cursors to represent the location of input on the screen. On the Mac, this is an actual cursor. On the Apple TV, it is a visual highlight around the currently selected element. The Apple TV supports both it’s own (mediocre) remote that is simply an up/down backwards/forwards selector, or the remote app for iOS, which turns your iOS device into a secondary gesture appliance – but there’s a problem here. First, the iOS remote app is always in portrait, and the Apple TV itself is always in landscape – meaning that unless one of them changes, it’s always going to be a weird paradox where secondary gestures beyond backwards/forwards will always be a struggle.

The iPad, in many senses, is Apple’s most accommodating platform. It easily switches both apps and the entire OS shell between landscape or portrait modes, supports many intrinsic gestures for direct manipulation of the shell (task switching, app switching, five-finger home screen access), and most significantly, due to it’s larger gesturing surface, supports the use of more fingers for input simultaneously than the Mac (4 fingers), iPhone (2 fingers) or Apple TV (no fingers, or 2 fingers, depending on which remote you’re using). The iPad is also realistically the smallest screen size that a typical human can place both hands across simultaneously in landscape mode to enable typing (it’s a challenge – and why I still use my Apple Bluetooth keyboard while typing on the iPad).

I’ve seen many people say that Apple TV should use Siri or other voice commands, or Kinect-like “body gesturing”. Both of those have foibles that I’ll talk about in the future. Given the simple tasks that Apple TV will incorporate – even when it does have third-party apps, which I expect it to at some point, the current simple remote, or improvements to the iOS remote app will likely suffice for a long time. Taking this in mind with the continued evolution of AirPlay mirroring, which treats the Apple TV as a dumb terminal, further negating the need for an over-engineered remote, voice commands, or gesturing, and it continues to say that Apple won’t go nuts and build entirely new user interface methods just for the Apple TV.

Lion truly began the move to incorporate some of iOS’ best user interface elements into OS X itself. A breadth of gestures, full-screen application capabilities, and a new (improved?) App launcher tried to gently begin assimilating the two user interfaces.

I recently had a journalist ask me if Apple wasn’t going far enough with Mountain Lion, if it wasn’t moving fast enough at combining the user interfaces from iOS and OS X together. I couldn’t really disagree more. iOS on iPhone and iPad is designed for a completely different user experience than the Mac. If you just jam them together, you completely trash the Mac experience just to say you did it (you can probably guess which way my Windows 8 post is likely to go at this point).

The Mac supports multi-windowing because it always has. Because it’s easy. Because there’s an insane amount of real estate to offer. Mac Apps have still generally tended to be pretty cleanly designed, but not in the way iOS apps are. iOS apps on the iPhone/iPod Touch were designed to provide the information you need at a glance, and provide mechanisms to expose more information as you need it. But an iPhone app must be (by design) more focused than an iPad app. iPad apps that are simply up-sized iPhone apps are horrible. They don’t make the most of the platform, and don’t help the user get anything more done than if they just had an iPhone. Conversely, Mac Apps can’t just be shimmed down to the iPad. You must take the iPad into account when designing the application. The fact that real typing can occur, that a user can use it as their primary device in many scenarios, the large amount of screen real-estate available, and the fact that up to 10 fingers (and no mouse) could be involved at once. Finally, when or if we see Apps on the Apple TV, they’ll need different design consideration altogether. Unlike the Mac, iPhone, and iPad, the Apple TV is more often than not a multi-user device. Two or more users at a time. It also has no direct gesturing, nor is it likely to. Instead, Apps running natively on the Apple TV will tend to be about direct content consumption, with forward/backward  or up/down gestures being the most logical accepted navigation methods.

The important thing here is that, as I noted recently, each platform presents its own opportunities, and as a result apps on each must be uniquely designed to make the most of the platform they are running on, without compromising the platform or the value proposition that your app was designed to deliver.

Apple may be pooling engineering resources across these four platforms, and it may be taking elements from one and putting them into another. But I believe Apple is doing what it does best (yes, even with the recent much maligned Apple TV launcher redesign), and slowly, considerately, taking these changes into account, not just declaring one user interface paradigm the winner, and trying to make it work across all four platforms. Usually when you do that – when you try to make one size fit all – you wind up with one or two platforms wearing a user interface that doesn’t fit.

When the Nest Learning Thermostat first came out, I went through a couple of different modes of thought. Let me walk you through them.

1. Bewilderment – I read the initial news about the thermostat and thought, “Tony left Apple and made… a thermostat?”
2. Excitement – I realized that the design team had followed what appeared to be an Apple-like philosophy of simplicity and task-based design.
3. Disappointment – I realized that it was $249, which was a little more than I wanted to pay (see below for more on that) and besides, I had brought home an off-the-shelf “smart thermostat” only to have to take it back for a couple of reasons I’ll outline in a bit too. Suffice it to say, my house didn’t have the type of power supply that most smart thermostats (but not the Nest) require.
4. Confusion – I learned that I could in fact use the Nest in my house, even without that dedicated power line.
5. Abandonment – I just decided that, for the time, I couldn’t justify the price.

But fate has a way of changing your mind. In the next two weeks, two important things happened. First, I received my energy bill (electric& gas). Second, my current thermostat (the one I had put back up after I tried to replace it with a WiFi enabled one), broke.

Let’s talk about that bill. We have gas forced air heat and electric A/C. So as the seasons turn, it’s more gas than electric in the winter (and I imagine more electric than gas in the summer, though we likely won’t need the A/C like we used to in Texas – most houses in Washington don’t even have A/C). My wife and I have had the conversations about heat & energy costs many times. She tends to like it warmer, I tend to like it cheaper. That bill, in November for October, if I recall, was abusive (the next few weren’t much better).

So let’s talk about that thermostat that broke. It was a reasonable model, a 7 day “programmable” model. It wasn’t original to our 20 year old house, but wasn’t new. The day it “went”, it decided to keep running and running and running… I went downstairs and even with it set to 71, it was about 86 degrees Fahrenheit in the house. I immediately disconnected it. Looking online, I saw this was a common (fatal) malady to this model.

I swear I hadn’t killed it when I put it back up. Or if I did, I didn’t do it intentionally.

I thought about going back to buy another basic thermostat, but my mind lit up about the Nest again. Maybe it would help reduce our spending by running in a more logical pattern without requiring the ridiculous passive/aggressive “programming” that most 3/5/7 day models do. I talked with my wife, and we decided it might be worth it. That WiFi thermostat I had bought and returned because it didn’t have what is commonly called a “C Wire”, which is just an always available power lead. Normally, the wires to your thermostat are only completing a circuit when the HVAC systems are running – completing the circuit is how the thermostat tells HVAC systems to do something. That unit offered one real bonus, which was WiFi access for programming and logging of temperature. It was over $100, and had the same basic design we’ve come to expect with 20 years of programmable thermostats. Perfectly <meh>. Uninspired, component-driven design.

When I thought about that unit, then, the Nest seemed expensive, but isn’t honestly that bad when you consider how expensive the off the shelf thermostat was, and the fact that I’d have to pay somebody $100+ bucks to pull a C Wire in order to power it – but I wouldn’t if I bought the Nest (guys will go to great lengths to try and justify a gadget).

So I went to order it. Only they were out. Nest stocked briefly at Best Buy, but what had apparently been anticipated to be three months worth of inventory sold out in a little over a week.

I went through every video on their site, learning about it, and decided to put my name on a waitlist, and created a Nest account, in anticipation. This is the account you use to interact with your Nest over the Internet from a Web browser, iPhone, or iPad. After a while (I figured it’d be a while, as I surely wasn’t early on the list), I got an email inviting me to order one if I was still interested. I had almost decided against it, but the chintzy $40 5-day programmable that I had bought to run the house in the meantime just looked so awful, and wasn’t doing anything to save us money (as my bill last week can show).

I have to say, Nest’s entire experience is incredibly professional. Prompt emails, fast Twitter responses, reasonably fast shipping, and a nifty, almost idiot-proof, compatibility test page. For a small company, they’re trying really hard to make a big dent.

The Nest arrived yesterday, and against my better judgement, I decided to install it – as the wall needs patching – unfortunately that’s going to often be the case when you’re replacing a rectangular thermostat that has likely been haphazardly installed with a much smaller round unit.

The packaging of the Nest isn’t a complete mirror of an Apple experience, but it’s close. No styrofoam, almost all recyclable packaging, with a thin plastic shipping cover for the thermostat and an Apple-like acetate package with two well-laid-out documents – one for installation, one for use. Unusually, the unit also includes a small, well-designed screwdriver with several replaceable heads. It also includes two optional mounting plates – one square, one rectangular – that you can use to cover up your wall from the damage likely left by your old thermostat if you’d like. I didn’t like how these seemed to spoil the look of the Nest, so I didn’t use one. Instead, we patched the wall a bit, and will patch and paint more in the coming week.

When you get started with an iPhone or iPad, you don’t have to deal with poorly documented household circuitry. Unfortunately, you do when you deal with a thermostat.

The Nest team has done an exceptional job of handling the “wild west” that exists behind thermostats in this country. It’s not perfect, but it’s close. I made two errors as I hooked mine up, and I had an old wire simply labeled “R”, not “Rc” or “Rh” (see the picture of the backplate on the upper right of this page. A little searching on the Web and then on their support site told me that it didn’t matter which I used, Nest would bridge them if it needed to. Awesome.

Once I had the wires hooked up, I connected the main body, and it powered up (cute little Nest boot logo and everything). The setup experience was beautiful. The minimalist user interface is clean and well thought out. I regret that I’ll never need to set up the wireless again, as the neat rotary-dial user interface they’ve built is very iPod-like, and remarkably easy to use. After it connected to the wireless, it asked me if I wanted to associate it with my Nest account (showing it on the screen). No username, no password to enter. How wonderful – somewhere along the way, they had set it up for my account. Surely you could change it, but that it was configured by default was a nice touch. I said yes, and finished initial setup.

Like I said, along the way, I made two errors – once most of setup had completed, it visually showed me a picture on screen what the wires looked like behind. My A/C wasn’t showing up – but because of the picture, I could see I had errantly connected it to the wrong lead. Fixing that quickly, it identified that I had something plugged in to the AUX/W2, but nothing plugged in to W1 – it told me to move that wire to W1. Fixed that, good to go.

I set the temperature I wanted it to be at, then set it again before we went to bed. The idea with the Nest is that for a few days, you treat it like a classic “manual” thermostat, and it learns your heating patterns (it then learns cooling patterns, if applicable, when that time arrives). Eventually, it figures out the optimal temperature and schedule for you and your family. You can manually set it to an “Away” mode, and it features a near and far-mode proximity sensor. The near-mode is to wave your hand over and see the current setting without turning the dial. The far-mode is to watch for activity. If it doesn’t see activity for a period of time, it sets itself to “Auto-Away” mode. All of these things combine to help save energy and money over a manual thermostat that winds up being stuck at one or two settings for a day or days at a time, or even a poorly configured “programmable” thermostat. You can check or change the temperature of your Nest over the Web, or using cleanly designed, native apps for the iPhone and iPad (as well as Android, though I’ve not tried that). You can also set it to Away mode, if you forgot to before you left for a trip, or turn the heat back up if a cold front hits while you’re traveling and your pets are home.

While it has only been up for one day, there are several things I really like about my Nest:

1. Installing it was a breeze – even when I made mistakes
2. The design is beautiful
3. It just works
4. The apps and Web site are easy to use, and do what they say – without trying to be some insane home automation solution

While I’ll have to wait until next month to post any financial analysis as to whether it made a difference or not in our bill, the other thing I’ve already noticed about the Nest is how much less it runs the HVAC equipment. The old thermostats we had seemed to trigger off/on intervals much more frequently than the Nest does – it just seems like it was running the equipment way more often (and today, for the record, was pretty cold – it was down to freezing last night).

One note on the C Wire – while Nest says the device will work without it in almost all cases, it does some interesting tricks to pull enough electricity through to charge the unit’s battery (yes, it’s basically an iPod Touch at some levels) and still run the WiFi. Most HVAC equipment doesn’t mind what it does to do that (it switches off and on at a very fast frequency that doesn’t trigger most HVAC equipment). In a small number of cases, the HVAC equipment won’t  be happy with that, and you’ll need a C Wire to be pulled through. As for me, it worked fine.

I really like the device, and I have to say I’m a fan (pun not intended) of the company. They’ve built a really unique new experience at a cost point that, while still premium and not an easy expense for many to justify, it might be able to earn back in time. Plus, it just looks good and works amazingly well.

I’m not a fan of most home automation because the user experiences are designed by geeks, for geeks, and require an aberrant amount of programming (and brain twisting) to make the most of. Not the case with Nest at all. It just works.

The other day, I was on a panel of 4 pundits where an audience member asked whether we felt Microsoft would approve a Metro app that was data heavy. The visual I got was a data grid application, something perhaps written in Access, VB, FoxPro, or some other visual designer at a time when raw data access was thought to be a good thing.

I spoke pretty candidly about the fact that if you’re making the effort to port to Windows 8 (or to the iPad, for that matter), you’re doing your users a disservice to bring these old apps (as I somewhat theatrically noted) “kicking and screaming from the past onto your tablets”.

If an organization is investing in tablet hardware (iPad or Windows 8 – it doesn’t matter), and you’re just “porting” your apps over without taking the time to stop and consider how users actually use the applications to get their job done, and how you can make that task more efficient through your redesign, then you need to ask yourself 1) Why are you porting, and 2) Why are you trying to use tablets and touch?

In Windows, it is my belief that data grids and input heavy form-based applications unfortunately became a common go-to UX paradigm. It wasn’t that they were efficient for users (they aren’t), it wasn’t that they helped users get more done fast (they don’t). It was the fact that you had a database on the backend, and a need for users to put data into it. As a result, raw input from forms into a database became the norm.

Stop doing that. Really. Stop it.

Whether your organization is examining the iPad, Windows 8, or even both of them (consider it carefully, as the design approach to apps on each is fundamentally different), take a chance to think (ahem) outside of the box. Take advantage of the design aesthetic of the platform you’re looking at porting to, and follow those design guidelines. Make the most of touch affordances, sensors, and the screen real-estate that you have allotted to your application. Be vary wary of writing your application in a non-native approach. If you don’t design to the platform, it will be very apparent every time a user tries to use the application.

To that end, the touch-first interface of Windows 8 (and the touch-only interface of iOS – there is no mouse) mean that you need to think carefully about design, positioning of UI elements, and workflow in a way that you likely never have before in an internal application.

That’s a good thing.

It shouldn’t have ever been acceptable to give design and workflow – how a user actually performs tasks with the application – the short shrift. But somewhere along the way, it did. In a time where we’re all trying to pinch pennies and make the most of our technology investments, actually taking the time to design an application to save users time can result in literal savings over just “throwing something together”, or pulling forward the application that had been thrown together several years ago.

Wherever your tablet path takes you – take the time to stop and consider design. And don’t try to pull your legacy applications forward. Either make the most of the platform – or stay on your current one instead.

Natural. A harmless word. As someone who grew up in Montana, if you used “natural” in a word-association test, the response I’d give you is probably Glacier National Park.

But natural isn’t a harmless word anymore. Unlike the word organic, which (though overloaded in meaning) has a very explicit definition when it comes to food, the word natural means everything, yet means nothing at the same time.

At a simplistic level, the word natural means “from nature”. However, unless it’s something that fell from outer space (arguably, not nature), even the most twisted chemical or genetic experiments can be construed as “from nature”. And so it is.

I’ve said before, “Products that sell themselves as green seldom are.”

The same is true of natural. “Products that sell themselves as natural seldom are.”

When you see “natural” on a box, it is a ploy. It’s marketing. Nothing more. Whether on food or a consumer packaged good, it is a gimmick to catch your eye, to make you feel better – it’s no different than the use of the words “healthy” or “nutritious”. Without more information, it’s just marketing.

Products that are labeled as natural can contain genetically modified ingredients – and they likely do, given the massive amount of genetically engineered soy and corn used in our nation’s foot system – much of it subsidized by our government. “Natural” products can also contain petrochemicals (or, very commonly, soy processed with petrochemicals - be aware of this, almost all soy protein products in the US that are not organic are processed in this manner, using hexane), insect-derived artificial colorings, pesticides or herbicides, meats that have been raised with antibiotics (both to increase their weight and minimize loss due to animal-borne disease in CAFOs)…

In fact, there is pretty much nothing that “natural” food can’t contain. As Gawker put it so poignantly, “the term “all natural” doesn’t mean jack shit“.

There’s another old saying that, “what you all call organic, we used to just call ‘food’“. That’s true. But what you used to call food wasn’t chock full of chemical goodness as today’s “food” generally is, built from genetically modified seeds intended to lock farmers into an annual subscription of seed/feed/weed intellectual property licensing where the sellers of these technologies were more interested in raising the annual yield of agribusiness than raising the annual yield of crops – or, heaven forbid, delivering the maximum nutrition and sustainability so our farmers can actually keep growing food for centuries, or provide consumers with maximum nutritional value, or minimal cancer risk.

My wife and I have had many conversations, frustrated because we feel so strange about believing that organic is a better way of life, that society has this weird aberrant belief now that it’s not only acceptable, but that it’s normal to eat foods that have been so modified on the way to your mouth that they don’t, in any way, resemble the foods of the past from a nutritional, toxicity, or long-term health risk perspective.

We spend billions as a society trying to find a cure for cancer, on chemotherapy treatments for it, yet don’t take a deep breath, and consider for a second what we are doing to ourselves with the food we eat.

I’m not elated that most of the world elects to make these choices to eat incredibly processed foods. But it’s everyone’s own prerogative to eat how they see fit.

However, I’m sick and tired of the word “natural”, and frankly, I believe that it should be illegal to use on marketing or packaging of any kind of product -be it food or packaged good. It serves no purpose other than to deceive consumers. It is a lie – a farce. Natural means nothing. Manufacturers selling products as “natural” are fakers. Natural fakers.

Privacy. It’s a good idea, right? But what the heck is it?

For quite some time, I was a paranoid nutjob about Google. It irritated the bejeezus out of me that I knew how diligently they tracked everything, aggregated everything, and could really identify me in a digital crowd. Eventually, I rationalized that it wasn’t really a big deal to me that Google knew when I was sick, when I needed repair for my VW (or that it knew what kind of VW I drove), or that it knew where I lived (the origin of many of my maps searches), where I was going (the restaurants, friends, or businesses I visit via Google Maps), what I read (Google Reader), and more. Yes, I was the frog in the boiling pot, comfy at the 190 degree mark as we approach a privacy boiling point and near “the creepy line” as Eric Schmidt might say. It’s gotten even better as Google beats their Google+ drum and works to more closely intertwine their properties, and what each of them knows about you, to refine their advertising.

There is a valiant effort that some are fighting for on the Internet today, a noble cause. The idea? “Do Not Track”, also sometimes referred to as “DNT”. Earlier today a study made the rounds that said most consumers have no idea what DNT is. No kidding. I’ve worked in/around the Internet and security for years, and I can’t define it – at least not as the name stands today. More importantly, I can tell you (and I’ve said for a while) that DNT can’t ever work. At least not the way a consumer would think it would.

Why? To begin with, the Web itself is stateless. HTTP, the protocol underlying the Web, has no idea who you are from pageview to pageview. The whole idea behind cookies (sometimes called “magic cookies” by some) as Netscape first created them was to try and glue some state to a stateless protocol/medium. By allowing sites to stick small nuggets of identifying info to your system, it allowed sites to identify you from page to page (so you can conduct e-commerce transactions like checkout) or from visit to visit (so you don’t have to log in every time. Handy, eh? If cookies were all there was to tracking anymore, we could just say “Do Not Track” by disabling cookies on a site-by-site basis, or disabling them altogether. But that’s not it anymore.

As the Internet moved from this wild and crazy world where people didn’t care about losing money to one where they at least needed to feign a business strategy, advertising (for better or worse) became a key mechanism to make revenue. Funny thing about ads, though. They suck as a money-making mechanism if they’re not targeted accurately. Google, criticized early on (ironically as Twitter is today) for not having a clear business plan, latched on to advertising and is inarguably an advertising, not a search company today. The data you provide to Google in your searches helps them tune the advertising. As does every visit you make to a site hosting Google Analytics. (You didn’t think Google gave that away to other Web sites in order to be altruistic, did you?) A benign little cookie or two helps Google track you as you skip across the Internet.

But this isn’t just Google. Everybody does it. Yahoo. Microsoft. Facebook. Adobe. Countless companies have tools to track you where you go. Think “tossing your cookies” will make you safe? Nope. Panopticlick, from the EFF should demonstrate how impossibly unique your system is among the millions it has tested. Trust me. You’re trackable, even if you opt out of cookies. Combine the identifiers that Panopticlick uses and your IP address (whether uniquely yours, that of your home network router, or your corporate edge) and there’s plenty to identify you.

It’s naive to ever refer to any effort to mediate privacy on the Internet as “do not track”. While we may be able to coerce some large Internet players into actually letting us opt out of tracking to a degree, it won’t happen everywhere, and it won’t ever be clear enough for a non-technical user to understand. This is the privacy equivalent of the dancing pigs problem. A novice user is not clear on what sites they should, or should not, enter personally identifiable information (PII) on, or why they should, or should not, let sites track their activity. With enough work, any site on the Internet (just like Facebook and Google) can tell whether or not you’re a dog (and more).

Rather than driving efforts like DNT, which fundamentally cannot occur (in the manner users think those words mean “do not track”), we’d do a lot better as an industry to drive standards that delineate what types of information a specific site or tracking engine like Google Analytics or Adobe’s Omniture products can collect on you. But even if you throw those back at users, they’ll be overwhelmed. Perhaps the best angle is to reinforce that no activity on the Internet is totally anonymous, and no matter how hard you try, you cannot ever completely prevent being tracked.

Growing up in Montana, “the backpacker’s credo” was gospel. This saying, “pack it in, pack it out”, applies to how important it is to take anything you bring with you to a campsite back out with you. Nobody wants to take a 15 mile hike to a gorgeous lake hidden in the mountains only to see someone’s beer six-pack ring or Snickers wrapper on the ground. Not only does it spoil the scene, but litter is far from ideal for the wildlife.

I think that growing up where I did also instilled a respect for nature that it seems unfortunately too many Americans – especially those in charge of energy companies today, really never established.

When humankind first discovered petroleum, and refined it in to gasoline, diesel, and all the other yummy byproducts you can derive from it, petroleum was easy to find and extract. However, the amount of energy stored in our planet as extractable petroleum is finite, no matter how hard we wish it to be otherwise. So, like a child looking for hidden eggs at Easter, the process gets harder and harder, and the energy required to extract it becomes closer and closer to the amount of energy you can extract. Like older boys looking for those last eggs, the process can also get a bit rough. While extracting petroleum has never really been as easy as the opening scene of the Beverly Hillbillies alluded to, it’s getting harder and harder, and it’s getting more and more awkward for the US to depend on oil from countries that we have political interests in not supporting. As a result, we’ve turned to some processes that I believe are fine if shortsightedness is alright, and you don’t care what they do to the planet for future generations.

Extracting petroleum and natural gas has often meant not only pollution from burned hydrocarbons, but pollution during the extraction, refinement, and transport processes. As we’ve turned to fuels derived from shales, and processes such as hydraulic fracturing “fracking”, which involves the injection of obscene amounts of water, “fracking fluid” (a substance so bad that the companies involved won’t tell anyone what’s actually in it) and additional components into the ground repeatedly to generate tectonic events (or larger, as people in Ohio are learning). This process allows natural gas and other fuels to be released for use. Thing is, though – this process isn’t permanent, and these toxic cocktails don’t stay where you put them. They leak, leach, and spill. Combined with the amount of water that they use – and often regurgitate in a toxic cocktail form to be “stored” in retention ponds, as well as the energy involved, it’s not hard to take issues with the natural gas industry’s claim of providing “clean” natural gas. It may be cleaner than some fuels when you burn it, but like petroleum extracted from the tar sands of Canada, or when our government used to turn a blind eye to mining pollution, it’s a very dirty, costly process, with long-term consequences as it is extracted. Rivers in several locations have become so toxic that fish and other wildlife can’t survive – yet fracking isn’t stopped since it has all but gotten federal blessing to excrete all over the Clean Water Act.

I’m no fan of fracturing, or of high-risk deep water drilling, or even burning coal. But our culture (American, in particular) has become so deluded that “the energy fairy will save us” that we keep buying more and more fossil fuels, disregarding the cost to our planet, and how ugly this process is going to get before we’re screwed. We’ve gone numb to how gasoline arrives in our cars, natural gas arrives in our homes, or food arrives on our plates.

Whether you believe in global warming or not, I have to wonder how anyone can ignore this kind of pollution. It’s not good for us today, it’s not good for our environment in the future, and frankly, like the blind eye that our government has turned to the genetic modification of food and the biological consequences of relying on a single source for seeds, it is something that we should honestly consider a national security issue. During World War II, during the energy crisis of the 1970′s, we sucked it up, and as a nation, adjusted how we consume energy. Throwing cash at potential renewables is one option, sure. But those have to be executed better than most that this administration has tried so far. More importantly, we need to figure out a conscious approach to reducing our fuel use as individuals, and as a nation. Like an unwatched 6-year old with a box of Twinkies, it’s a dangerous situation. Keep burning it at the rate we are today, tolerating the increasingly dirty and dangerous processes energy companies are using to extract it, and it won’t matter what we do tomorrow.

Whether you believe that our presence on this planet today is divine, or a statistical quirk, it doesn’t matter. We’re here. But unless we take that first step to reduce our energy use, and stop letting energy companies extract fuels at whatever financial or ecological cost they are willing to gamble on, things will get worse, and we’re pretty much SOL. More deep-water ocean spills. More pipeline explosions. More river die-offs. Significant drinking water source compromise (as water becomes more scarce as petroleum before it).

Be the change you want to see in the world. For me, I’m beginning to work from home more often, and find every other way I can to reduce our energy use as a family. It seems futile at the moment, but if we all do nothing, we’ll wish we had before it was too late.