Is Comcast Helping Scammers?

Comcast wants to fight scammers, but they're inadvertently going to help them.

Comcast, like all Internet service providers, is directly impacted by so-called botnets, machines that have been hijacked by viruses and other malware to serve as robots in the service of scammers. The botnets are useful to the scammers because it allows them to send spam and launch attacks from many locations instead of a single location, which makes them much harder to catch and shut down.

Comcast's idea is to inflict popup ads on their customers that appear to be compromised. which provide them with information. According the the AP article, the ad says "Comcast has detected that there may be a virus on your computer(s). For information on how to clean your computer(s), please visit the Comcast Anti-Virus Center."

There are a couple of problems with this:

• To the extent that it works, it trains people that popup ads that claim to be helping you clean your computer are legitimate. The problem is that, with this sole exception, none of them are.
• It trains people that clicking on a link in an unexpected popup ad is an ok thing to do, when it almost never is.
• It trains people that something like this can be trusted, when it's very easy to fake it.

I don't like the popup in any event, but, if they're going to do it, I think there are a couple of things they must do:

• The popup shouldn't look at all like an ad and it certainly shouldn't mimic any OS feature.
• The popup should contain no (that's zero) links in it. Just to be clear: None. Instead, the ad should say "... please visit comcast.com in your browser and click on the xyz link ..." Train people not to click on links like that and train people that the only way to know for sure that they're actually on the comcast site is to go to comcast themselves, not to trust a link.
• The popup should not have any button in it. No close button. Nothing to click on at all. Just "Close this window after you've read it." Don't train people to click buttons in unexpected popups.

And how about thinking if there's a better way to attack the whole problem, like doing something in concert with Microsoft and Apple (OS vendors), or Microsoft, Mozilla, and Google (browser vendors).

Heads I Win, Tails You Lose

I couldn't believe this question that I ran into on the T-Mobile site:

Which would you choose?

Android Annoyances, Yet ...

I had the opportunity to use a Google I/O phone for about a week. I found a lot of things not to like about Android, but I'm getting an Android phone anyway.

The I/O phone is the same HTC phone that is supposedly shipping later this month as the T-Mobile myTouch and is also known as the HTC Ion. It's a great phone -- rock solid hardware, quality touchscreen and buttons, a great shape for my pocket.

Google's Android operating system is pretty good too. I had played with Android briefly before, but this is the first time that I'd spent any significant time with it. Overall, I'd rate Android as comparable to the iPhone. There are some things I like better, some things I don't like as much. Here are some of the big things that I think are wrong with Android:

• To turn the speakerphone on during a call, you have to press the Menu button, then choose speakerphone from the menu which shows 9 items. Since a big reason you might want to turn on the speakerphone is that you're driving, this should be an operation you can perform without looking at the screen. My suggestion: Pressing and holding the Menu button during a call turns on/off the speakerphone.
• To get the numeric touchpad during a call, you have to drag up the touchpad, an awkward action when you're in the midst of a call (or driving). My suggestion: The menu button shows the touchpad. At the bottom of the touchpad is a More button which shows the other, less frequently-used menu items. Or, the menu button could cycle between neither, touchpad, menu, then back to neither.
• The voice dialing is worthless. What's the point of voice dialing, if you have to look at the phone to see whether it recognized the name?
• Did I mention that voice dialing is worthless? To start it, you have to unlock the phone and run an application. Why doesn't the button on my Bluetooth headset work like it does on most phones?
• The messages that appear when you get a second call when you're on a call already don't actually tell you what to do. This is particularly odd since they did such a nice job with the main call UI. I figured out that the green (answer) button switches between calls, but what about the other functions, like hanging up the first call to take the second? There's no need to be subtle.
• You can't put a button on the home screen that makes a phone call -- you can only put a Contact, so making a phone call is a minimum of two steps (after unlocking the phone). Fortunately, the third-party app AnyCut fixes this.
• The Gmail application can't be configured to work with more than one email account. I know I'm far from alone in having multiple email accounts.
• Android does include a separate Email application for other accounts. But, the second application isn't nearly as good, even when using a Gmail account. Setup is far from ideal. Although it automatically configures Gmail and Hotmail accounts, other accounts require you to select either POP3 or IMAP and provide server settings. I was not able to configure a Google Apps account properly, but apparently it does work. Why don't they provide a third option for Google Apps or, better, recognize Google Apps domains automatically?
• When you save bookmarks to the home page, they all look alike. If the site has a large favicon associated with it, why doesn't it use that, like Google Chrome does? Or enlarge the small favicon? Fortunately, the third-party app Bookmark 2 has this one taken care of. It's not very elegant, but, for the most part, setting up home page bookmarks is something one does infrequently.
• Why are the backgrounds of all the home screens the same? It would be great to be able to make them different as a means of instant orientation. Also, why are there only three home screens?
• Android has a very nice predictive text feature while you're typing. It makes the touchscreen keyboard bearable. But, it doesn't work everywhere -- like when you're typing an email message.
• When you swipe, sometimes things stay selected afterwards. I think they're not really selected -- it just looks like it. This one's just a bug.

Despite these complaints (and there are additional, less important ones), I'm planning to get a myTouch. For my purposes, it's better than the iPhone. I don't care about the iPhone's big advantages, like handling music really well. I have an iPod Touch for iPhone games (including the ones I'm writing). And, I think the myTouch is a better phone, though I know in these days of text messaging, actual phone usage seems to get short shrift.

Google has a good track record of updating their products and they already shipped one major upgrade in the first six months. I have confidence they'll fix these problems and, unlike older phones, I'll get the fixes and new features automatically. And, the fact is that my list of annoyances for the iPhone is just as long.

The final trump card is that the T-Mobile rate plan is $30 a month cheaper than the equivalent plan on AT&T. And that's not counting the fact that calls to my family are free on T-Mobile, so the AT&T plan might well turn out to be $40 or $50 a month higher. Over two years, that's an extra $720+ for the iPhone.

But, all this brings up the biggest issue that irks me about this phone: I can't buy one yet.

Updated: I had said that the Email application didn't work with Google Apps accounts. Apparently, it does, but the setup could be improved.

Ignore All Data

"Data eventually becomes a crutch for every decision, paralyzing the company and preventing it from making any daring design decisions."
         -- Douglas Bowman, Creative Director, Twitter (formerly Google)

"We let the math and the data govern how things look and feel."
         -- Marissa Mayer, VP, Search Products & User Experience, Google

These quotes are from an interesting article in Sunday's New York Times. Marrisa Mayer is a very smart woman, so it's disappointing how dumb that quote makes her look. I don't want to jump into the middle of this argument (oops, I already did), but the fact is that, despite the title to this post, neither of them is right. Real data about usage can be really useful, but over-relying on data can be a disaster. Over and over again, I've seen companies (and UX consulting clients) so buried in data they they couldn't figure anything out.

The data might tell you where users clicked, but it won't tell you why. The data might tell you whether users accomplished a task, but it won't tell you if they were happy . The data might tell you whether users clicked more or less on ads, but it won't tell you how they felt about the advertisers.

More importantly, the data might tell you what's broken, but it won't give you any hints as to how to fix it. No matter what the data tells you, it can't give you inspiration to boldly go new places (yes, the new Star Trek movie just came out).

I'll admit that I probably should have titled this post "Ignore Most Data" but that's not as provocative.

Data can be amazingly misleading.  It's garbage in--garbage out, but the garbage going in is the questions. Unless you really know what questions you should be asking for, what you should be looking for in the data, what options you should be considering, and what the differences are -- unless you really understand the feel of what you're trying to figure out -- all the data in the world is worthless.

And guess what? If you know all that stuff, if you understand the feel of what you have and the feel of what you want, you're 80% of the way toward figuring out what you should be doing. And 80% of the way is pretty good.

Does Mint Want Unhappy Customers?

Imagine you go into a cheese shop trying to buy some cheese. You just want some Cheddar. You ask if they have it, but they won't tell you. Instead, they want you to sign up -- give them your name, contact information, bank and credit card accounts, and only then will they answer your question. OK. You do it, you give them all that information and then the answer is, no, they don't have any Cheddar, they've never carried it, and have no idea if they'll ever carry it. But they'll make a note of it as a suggestion.

Sounds preposterous, doesn't it? Well, it's Mint.com, a site which touts themselves as "the best free way to manage your money." But, if Mint doesn't support your bank, they can't very well help you manage your money, can they? They can't support you as a customer -- they shouldn't want you as a customer. But, they'd rather you go through the bother of signing up to discover you wasted your time because there's no way to find out if your bank is supported before you sign up.

But, wait, it gets worse. Mint seems to think this is a good idea. Their support staff argues that they can still help you with your other financial institutions and that tracking some of your financial institutions is better than tracking none. What?! The number one financial institution that most people have is their bank (or credit union). If they don't support your bank, Mint is probably useless to you. They should realize that. But, even if that wasn't the case, Microsoft Money or Quicken probably does support your bank, so tracking just some of your financial institutions is certainly not better than tracking all of them in Money or Quicken.

Does Mint really want unhappy customers? Apparently so, but it's a bad business practice.

If there are customers you can't make happy, you should send them away and you should send them away as early as you can. Don't spend your time and resources or waste their time if you know you can't make them happy. Send them to a competitor who can make them happy.

The fact is, customers who you cannot service are going to go away sooner or later -- your goal should be to make sure they don't go away mad.

Ignite Seattle Looks Promising (and I'm giving a talk)

I'm talking at Ignite Seattle on Wednesday. It's about UX, but it's pretty different than any UX talk you've seen before -- and it's only 5 minutes long. Here's the blurb:

Worst Case User Experience: Alzheimer's
When the time came to move my father-in-law into an Alzheimer’s facility, I approached the problem as I approach any technical problem -- I needed to meet the needs of the user, even if he didn’t know them and couldn’t express them. I crafted an experience (a UX) for him in his new home which meets those needs and I worked to make sure that the actual move itself did the same.

Obviously, I think my talk will be interesting and entertaining, but, from the titles and descriptions, it promises to be a great evening.

Here's the full lineup:

8:30 - First Set of Talks 
Hillel Cooperman (@hillel) - The Secret Underground World of Lego
Dawn Rutherford (@dawnoftheread) - Public Library Hacking
Roy Leban (@royleban) - Worst Case User Experience: Alzheimer’s
Shelly Farnham (@ShellyShelly) Community Genius: Leveraging Community to Increase your Creative Powers
Dominic Muren (@dmuren) - Humblefacturing a Sustainable Electronic Future
Jen Zug (@jenzug) - The Sanity Hacks of a Stay At Home Mom
Ken Beegle (@kbeegle) - Decoding Sticks and Waves
Maya Bisineer (@thinkmaya) - Geek Girl - A life Story
Scott Berkun (Scottberkun.com)- How and Why to Give an Ignite Talk

9:45 PM - Second Set of Talks
Scotto Moore (Scotto.org)- Intangible Method
Secret Guest Speaker from Ignite Portland
Mike Tykka - The Invention of the Wheel
Jason Preston (@Jasonp107) - Goodbye Tolstoy: How to say anything in 140 characters or less
Chris DiBona (@cdibona) - The Coolness of Telemedicine
Ron Burk - The Psychology of Incompetence
Katherine Hernandez (@ipodtouchgirl) - The Mac Spy
Jamie Gower JamieGower.com) - I Am %0.0002 Cyborg
Beth Goza (@bethgo) - Knitting in Code

Matching User Experiences

At Thursday's UX Office Hours , a funny thing happened -- somebody came in wanting to talk about user experience. The reason I say that's funny is that, most of the time, people come in wanting to talk about their user interfaces, not their user experience. They bring in mockups, screen snapshots, prototypes, and actual products and web sites. And they want to know what to do to make it better. Almost always, I have to pop the conversation up a level, to talk about what they want to accomplish for their users, rather than how they should move pixels around. Part of what I try to do is to educate people so that, when they walk out, they're better equipped to move forward. So, what's the difference between UI and UX?

In a nutshell, you want to give your users a good user experience. A good experience means they'll be able to accomplish what they want, they'll be happy with your product, etc. One of the ways to get a good user experience is to have a good user interface. You might think that makes no sense -- how can it be that UI is only one of the ways to provide a good UX? What other ways can there possibly be? Well, here are a few:

• Provide functionality or content that your users can't find anywhere else, that they absolutely need
• Do things automatically for your users, so they don't have to see any UI
• Build a system that is fast, that, once learned, allows your users to do things faster than they can anywhere else
• Same, but replace "fast" with "better" in some context specific to your business
• Pay your users money (yes, this is real -- look at Google AdSense, Amazon Associates, or Ebay)

And what should you do? You should work to understand your users and then do those things that will give them the experience that you think will accomplish your business objectives.

Back to the guy who came in yesterday. It was a great discussion and I hope I was able to help him better understand what he needed to do. One slightly surprising thing was that his company has two very distinct classes of users and he was trying to figure out how to craft an experience that met both of their needs. Unlike a system like Ebay, where buyers and sellers are largely similar people, or Monster, where the point of the site is for job seekers and job posters to interact with each other, his two classes of users weren't similar and weren't going to be interacting with each other. I told him that he should build two completely separate UIs for these two groups, that to try to build one interface would end up serving nobody well. After he left, I thought of some great examples:

• Google provides completely different experiences for people placing ads, for people putting ads on their sites, and, of course, for people seeing ads on the net.
• Amazon Associates provides a completely different experience for associates than they do users who see associates' links.
  

While his business is different from these, the same rules apply. And the bar for the quality of the UI is different for these different classes of users -- the interface for people creating and placing ads,or creating associate links is so much less important than what the people seeing ads or an associate link get. The first group of people are making money, so they're incented and a bad UI won't stop them from using the service. But, if the ad or link UI is wrong, nobody will make any money.

To provide the best product for your users, you want to create an experience that matches them. Sometimes, that means figuring out the classes of users you have and building different experiences for them.