Graduations of MTB Fail

1. You have to put a foot down for balance. Also know as 'dip'

When we ride technical trails like the Tapeworm in Renton we count dips. You get minus one point for every time you have to put down a foot for balance a plus one point for every obstacle you ride that you could have ridden around. My personal best (twice) is no dips and all but one obstacles. Not because I could not ride it, but because I always overlook it.

2. Don’t lose bike. Both feed down.

This has happened for me too many times to count, however, the most clear example of this kind of fail is on the steep technical rock sections of Tiger. There are sections which I have never seen anyone actually manage to ride up. But you also don’t really fall. You just head at it and eventually have to give up and put both feed down.

3. Lose the bike but don’t fall

My best example of this kind of fail was on a ride at Paradise. It was dark, I did not have a light, I was alone, cold, and really just wanted to go home. I took a shortcut and my bike got stuck in mud and disappeared under me. I walked through the air, landed on my feet, ran a bit and stopped. Picked the bike up and rode on.

4. Lose bike and you are on the ground but don’t get hurt.

This happened to me riding downhill on Mount Hood. It was Sunday, race day, and I went down on my first practice run but I did not realize just how much till much later. It felt like a category 3 fail, but after my second practice run when I pulled up to the camp, and started taking my gear off, I noticed that I had dirt on all of my left leg and all of my left arm. I would like to thank our sponsor 661. Without 661, this would have been a category 5 or 6 fail.

5. Fall and get flesh wounds

This has happened a lot for me but is best exemplified by a cross country ride at Duthie Hill. Well, it was a night of mostly cross country, but we also did this intermediate jump line and I tried a line I normally don’t take and paid for it. My left leg and arm were quite bloody but nothing serious. Just flesh wounds. Took a bit of paper towels to be ready for dinner but all good fun. Still have the scars.

6. Fall and get hurt and you are limping for more than a day but less than a week. Bruises.

It was a Thursday night ride. It was dark. Autumn. Steep. One of my favorite spots near Seattle and someone had dropped in before me and I thought I could catch them so I let go of the brakes. My front tire got caught in a root and I went down hard, my left leg caught between the frame and the handlebars. By Saturday evening I could sort of walk normally again. By Sunday morning I felt alright. As of this writing, two weeks later my leg is still blue and yellow from the bruises but the hurt has gone away.

7. It really hurts. You aren't out of riding, but walking or lifting things is annoying for a couple of weeks

Port Angeles (PGA) Downhill. Race run. I let go and go too fast through a rocky section. I go down. Slide through the rocks and my knee protection slides down. I got up again as if this had been a category 5 fail but fell twice more during that run. Turned out I had gotten really badly hurt on the top of my knees and I had a terrible time driving the four hours home and did not walk normally for at least three weeks. Worst thing is I had another category 7 fail at PGA earlier in the season where I really hurt my left arm.

8. You are out for a bit. Can ride with pain killers, may have permanent nerve damage

Ever extended yourself beyond what you should be doing? I have. Duthie hill. Had been practicing on Semper Dirticus jump line and wanted more. Went to the DWB jump line and dropped in. The first part is easy and forgiving but the first big step down is preceded by three small bumps and I just could not get enough speed to do the step down. Eventually I figure the bumps out and did the step down. I was super excited. Whoo'ed as I went through the air and was just happy so I did it again and again. On the third time down I was so happy that I forgot to pay attention and just continued over the next double, came in super nose heavy and crashed very very hard on my front. My gear took most of the impact but my front right upper leg got badly injured. Eventually a big something appeared on my leg, filled with some kind of fluid. It has since gone away but I have almost no sense left in my upper right leg. This was a Tuesday. On Friday I went to Port Angeles for my first time down hilling ever and got the category 7 fail on my left arm in practice. I was out that Saturday but raced Sunday. Not a good week for riding in my book although making that step down felt good.

9. Break something and you cannot ride for a while. May need surgery

I have fortunately not ever been in this category but Larry whom I ride with broke his collarbone at Whistler, Eric has broken his foot, Al has broken both his collarbones, and Clinton is due for surgery on his arm soon. So not at all unlikely. I will try to remain rubbery as I will much rather have a category 8 or 7 fail than a 9 or above.

10. Fully or semi paralyzed. You will probably never ride again.

I have fortunately never hear about anyone to whom this happened on a mountain bike. Its probably because of the protection we wear. Again I would like to thank our sponsor 661 for saving my bacon on more than one occasion. I have seen this happen for people on skis and rock climbing, but when I flew 8 feet through the air and landed on my head against a big log, I walked away pretty much unharmed because I was wearing a 661 helmet.

11. Death

Death happens a whole lot less in mountain biking than it does in for instance rock climbing and mountaineering. I think this is due to two factors. We are never that far off the ground so the impacts are smaller, and we typically wear a decent amount of protection. Personally I wear a lot of protection, but even some of my 529 team mates who do not wear a whole lot of protection, still wear a helmet, kneepads, and some body armor when racing downhill.

So Tired of Zombies

Went to Portland. Walked around Powell’s bookstore. Saw way too many books about Zombies. My theory is that a zombie outbreak is near and that the government is preparing us to deal with it through mainstream culture propaganda. And my opinion is that if you don’t know how to deal with zombies by now, its your own fault. Now stop publishing the manuals already.

For reference:Destroy their heads. It does not make sense that mindless creatures die when their heads are destroyed, but that is the rule. Shoot them in the head, chop it off, cleave it, or burn them whole.

Bring machete, stakes, hammer, and guns. Shotguns are preferable, hand guns require more precision and you will be under stress. Eventually you will run out of ammunition and that is where the machete and stakes + hammer come into play. You want to rely on the machete to chop heads off or in rare but lucky cases where you are on the other side of a wire fence, use the stakes + hammer to execute the zombies.

Last word of advice: don’t get bitten, and don’t get sentimental. If your loved ones gets bitten, they are dead. Kill them. Unless the invasion is Haitian zombies there is most likely no cure. Haitian zombies can get cured by killing the witch doctor. If you feel lucky and think its an epidemic, tie your loved ones down really really really well and leave them. Survive, find a cure, survive some more, and cure them.

Now before you go any further, make sure to read up on Vampires and Werewolves. Same theory, same opinion.

Office on Windows Live

I am impressed. Genuinely and profoundly impressed. The Office integration into Windows live is solid. Read all about it here: http://www.windowslive.com/Connect/Post/d3371a41-150b-4a5f-ac19-f5fbc045b472?ocid=WI_CL_12152

Yes, I work for Microsoft and specifically in Office but rest assured that as a true MS employee I am probably more critical of MS than anyone on the outside. Given how much people dislike Microsoft I am very hesitant to call something great unless I seriously believe I would think the same did I not work for the company.

Office on Windows live is solid and very cool. The editors are great. Being able to share and edit a OneNote with friends is fantastic. I am going to use this a whole lot.

Enjoy

1,2, or 1.5 languages?

Friend of mine recently told me he admired my ability to switch between languages without notice. He is American. I don’t find switching languages, sometimes mid sentence, to be strange. I am not American.

The interesting thing to me is not the ability to speak more than one language or being able to mix, but that some phrases always are said in your non-native language. Like the word “nice” being adopted in Danish: “Det er for nice” –> “It’s too nice” –> “it’s awesome”.

For a lot of the world that is our current language. A mixed bag. BUt it’s not new. There is a reason there are so many French words in English (magnificent, marvelous)

This Korean pop video illustrates how a lot of us non-Americans think and speak.

2NE1 - CAN'T NOBODY [HD]

Great Video Experiment

Go to http://www.thewildernessdowntown.com/ and spend 3 minutes. When they ask you for the address of the place you grew up, provide it.

I haven’t been back for years and it was amazing to see my childhood town incorporated into the video.

I think that is one of the better ways to draw in people I have seen in a long while.

I think I might watch it again.

Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior

Sway is a great book not unlike Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational. It further details that we are irrational beings and I cannot help but like the book because it affirms me in my long held beliefs. Yes, like most other people, I listen more to opinions which I already agree with, than with opinions that I don’t agree with. The entire news industry is based on that behavior. The authors of Sway call that the diagnosis bias.

The three main topics covered in the book are Loss aversion, Value Attribution, and Diagnosis bias.

Loss Aversion

We value what we have more than what we could get. If the price of eggs go up the sales fall 2.5 times as much as the sales would increase with a comparatively fall in price.

Value Attribution

We imbue objects and people with qualities base on first impressions. That is why you want to be well dressed for that job interview.

Diagnosis bias

We label people. Most interestingly, we act our labels. In order to succeed at work, its in your best interest to be labeled a ‘rock star’ because then you will start acting like one. Yes, smiling also makes you happy. At least as much as being happy makes you smile.

Links

The book website

SWAY- The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior - Ori Brafman and Rom Brafman

Amazon

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0385524382?ie=UTF8&tag=iwillteachyou-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0385524382

A couple of reviews/Summaries

http://psychcentral.com/lib/2008/sway-the-irresistible-pull-of-irrational-behavior/

http://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/blog/a-fantastic-book-on-behavioral-psychology-sway/#

Iphone screen broken. Is it more valuable now?

The day after the ipad was announced, my iphone tried to commit suicide. I synched it with my PC and it decided it was time to start from scratch and would not synch. Instead all content got erased. I had to basically format it and start all over.

Yesterday, my iphone decided it was not enough and leapt out of my hand onto the concrete floor and the screen broke.

The touch screen still works just fine although you can feel the seams as you use it

I am at Interactions10 in Savannah, GA and had been to two great talks about how our relationship with objects change over time. Richard Banks presented a talk called “The 40 year old tweet” on how we imbue meaning into objects that reminds us of special occasions or periods of our lives and went on to talk about how we also have that relationship with at least some digital objects. Matt Cottam presented a talk on “Heirloom Electronics” in which he discussed how time adds patina to objects and how that seems to make them more valuable to us. Both great talks.

Today I have taken extra special care of my iphone.

I am afraid I might break it more, so I take it out of my pocket more slowly than before. I touch it more gently so I don’t break the screen more.

I have also started to notice new things. Like the button in the middle. It is obviously not part of the glass surface, but I had never thought about that before. Also, the phone has become more a thing in itself. I suddenly look at it differently, it means something new. Before it was just a glittery tecno object with little soul, its only purpose being a portal to the contacts and information made possible by the applications. Now, it draws attention to itself and I look at it without turning it on. Examine it even, and I have begun thinking about other ways to make it more personal. Maybe i will try some acid or some burning on the back of it to see what it can take?

I  guess I will try to fix the screen because after all, even though it’s got a lot more personality now, it is no longer able to really serve its original and primary purpose, but if I end up buying a new one, I think I will keep this one around, if for nothing else, as a reminder of my trip to Savannah.

Definition of memorable

Memorable is the difference between expected experience and actual experience.

Really bad and really good experiences stand out because they were far from what we expected. On the other hand you can used to a lot. Once you have eaten at 5 star restaurants a lot, they stop being special, and if you are a plumber, then things other people would find gross, are just everyday work to you.

Usability does not matter…

…anymore than Security and Performance

I am not going to ever have another argument about whether usability is important. That is so 1990’ies. I will walk away from every such discussion saving my breath.

I just needed to get this off my chest.

I think we are almost over the “is design important” discussion and soon, hopefully within the next 5 years or so, we will also be over the “does it really matter to establish an emotional connection to people in your product design” question. I am looking forward to that day.

Till then, still lots of convincing to be done.

I hate ‘users’

Users are Humans, not users. The word ‘user’ is looking at people through a product lens as if their purpose in life is to use that particular product. But users are not users. Users are human beings of flesh and blood who behave in predictably irrational ways, with real goals and dreams and jobs and most importantly of all, with other things going on in their life than using our product.

It can be a bitter pill to swallow when you pour your heart into your work, your oeuvre, the application that will solve these users every need and then being told that your application is less important, a lot less important to these people that you could hope and wish for.

Don’t get me wrong. Not thinking about the people who are going to use your product in some way is just fundamentally wrong. But on the other hand, when we talk about User Centered Design today, it sounds as old fashioned and as inhumane as Business process reengineering.

Do I have an alternative? Sure, it is about building on Don Norman’s concept of activity centered design, having the right understanding of how human works, and Dan Ariely and  Dan Lockton both add significantly to that understanding, and then we must talk to actual people who will use actually the product, and we must keep talking to these people throughout the product cycle.

But really, it starts much simpler than that. Instead of saying “what will the users want?” say “what will the people who are going to user our product want?”. It is a small change, just a few more words, but I find it really changes how you think.

 

All of this may seem a little abstract. A friend of mine pointed me to this Argentinean example of adapting to real people.

Summary: In Argentine Pepsi is pronounced Pecsi by a significant number of people. Pepsi embraces that and launches Pecsi.

I love it. Instead of trying to reinforce the name, they change it to what people call it anyway and play on it.

Useful? yes. Usable? yes. Desirable? not so much…

 

Today Seattle Times ran a story on what can only be described as sloppy work by the Seattle street department. See the picture above for an example of a curb that had to be remade three times. The first question that comes to mind is how anyone would walk away from a piece of work like that straight faced. And the second question is how often something similar happens in software products or other products.

The article is an instructional piece on what can go wrong when the culture of a group is mismanaged. But it is also a great piece on when the designers and the crew do not communicate and when neither is willing to give in and listen.

I don’t think a lot of bad code is actually shipped, but I do think there is quite a few products where the various pieces of code fit together about as well as the curb stones in the picture above.

I also think that the Seattle Street department is not the only one marred by designs from less than fully informed designers:

Homeowners couldn't get out of their driveways without scraping the bottom of their cars after a new sidewalk was installed in December 2007 in the 8200 block of Ravenna Avenue Northeast. Bookman said the problem stemmed from poor design. The project designer was a relatively young, new hire who left the department shortly after the work was completed, he said.

Dan Ariely -Predictably Irrational

I have been wanting to write a book review on Dan Ariely’s excellent book Predictably Irrational for a while now. Instead I will just say that is is a fantastic book that is absolutely worth reading for anyone and especially any designer and link to a few Ted Links.

A blog post on Ted by Dan Ariely about behavioral economics:http://blog.ted.com/2009/05/dan_ariely_2008.php

And two talks that cover some of the fundamentals of the book: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/dan_ariely_asks_are_we_in_control_of_our_own_decisions.html and http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/dan_ariely_on_our_buggy_moral_code.html

All I can really say is that this book has given me a language to talk about and data to back up my long held skeptics about rationality.

Got 10-40 Servers? Want Free Software?

Sign up for a 1:1 interview with the System Center Essentials team and receive your choice of a Microsoft product from the available list.

Who?

IT administrators/engineers/managers in mid market
companies with 10-40 servers.

What?

Participate in a 90 minute 1:1 interview with the System
Center essentials team.

How?

E-mail sobitar@microsoft.com or sign up at the Microsoft System Center booth in the orange area in the MT area. Or catch us at Twitter @MS_ITPro_UX

Find us at Teched

Are you an IT Pro and at TechEd 2009 in LA? Then sign up for our Server & System Center User Interface study

Here is how to find us. We are in the orange section of the Technical Learning Center. The Technical Learning Center is where all the Microsoft booths are next to the expo.

We are here:

Go the left when you come in towards the orange section

 

And find Christian. I will most likely wear a white Microsoft t-shirt.

The back of the T-shirt says “@MS_ITPro_UX” which is the twitter name we are posting under.

  

I am always happy to talk, especially about your experience with our Server and System Center products, so if you see me, come chat.

Are you an IT Pro and at TechEd 2009 in LA?

Help make Windows Server and System Center products better. Participate in this study at TechEd, help us, and get a little gift of appreciation.

Where & When
TechEd in LA May 11-15th

Location Update: please see Find us at Teched

How long will it take
This will take about an hour. Since we are scheduling this add-hoc, we have many open spots and at the time of day that suits you. Contact us (see below) and let’s set something up.

Why
In order to make the best possible products for managing IT infrastructure it is crucial that we understand how you work in real life, what the real scenarios are, and where you want to go with your systems and processes. This particular activity is about impacting the future versions of Windows Server and System Center. It is about getting the common 'stuff' right and we need your help.

Who are we
We are User Researchers and User Experience Designers from Microsoft who work on Windows Server and on System Center products. We are currently working on WS2008 R2, SCE, SCCM, Service Manager and other similar products.

How to sign up
Most communication of this will happen via twitter @MS_ITPro_UX. You can sign up with either of the following tweets:

@MS_ITPro_UX TechEd study. Interested, contact me at TechED

@MS_ITPro_UX TechEd study. Interested, contact me at TechED. Monday, Tuesday, Thursday

The latter means those are the days you are most likely to be available. You can also give us a time you would like.

You can also contact us on email: chagelsr AT Microsoft DOT com. Please put “TechED Study” in the subject and give us the same information as above. Should we just contact you while at TechEd or is there a specific timeslot you are interested in. We will of course not send your email to anyone else.

You can also just come by the Windows Management Technologies Booth and we will make sure to post where we will be and you can sign up there.

And as a small thank you…
As a thank you for your time we will offer you a piece of Microsoft software. You will be able to select it from a list of pre-selected software. The only caveat is that in order to get the software you have to be a US citizen or have US Social Security Number. This is for Tax purposes. You are very welcome to sign up for this study without getting the gratuity.

People who influenced how I think about design

There are a great many people whom have influenced how I think about design but there are two people whom I think have influenced me more than anyone when it comes to what design is rather than how to think about specific problems.

Victor Papanek

Victor Papanek, introduced to me by John Paulin in a class on accessible software, has given me the notion that as designers we have a moral imperative to make the world better.

One story about Papanek that forever changed my thinking is about car bumpers.

In the 1950’ies a lot of people died in traffic accidents due to poorly constructed cars. Someone would drive into a tree and the bumper would just fold and the people in the car would die. Congress held a hearing with the car manufacturers asking them to improve their cars to bring down the death toll. Congress got answers along the lines of “no, can’t do that”, “it is impossible to build a bumper that will withstand more than 15mph for a price that won’t make cars too expensive” and similar explanations playing on congress’ fear of curbing this booming industry. As the congress and industry people were leaving the building, walking down the stairs, a car came driving up on the pavement and slammed front first into the side of the building. Out got the driver, Victor Papanek, unhurt. Congress men stormed over to see this perculiar sight and learned that Papanek had built a bumper of 2 layers of 10 cent cans that could withstand a crash, as it just did, of 25 mph. The congress men turned around, went back into session and were a lot less lenient on the car company representatives.

I haven’t been able to actually verify the story, but nonetheless, it taught me that as designers we should never accept commonly held beliefs and it is our role to show the world what is really possible. We change the world by making and showing.

Donald Schön

For my thesis my professor, Peter Carstensen, suggested I read Donald Schön’s book The Reflective Practitioner. This was a mind opening book that shaped how I have come to think about design as an activity. We learn by having what Schön calls a ‘dialog with the material’ a phrase I have adopted and used many times to describe the design process.

In design we do not just iterate. We step into the problem and work in the problem, then we step out to gain perspective, challenge the problem and our assumptions and then step into the problem again with a fresh perspective and work in a changed direction. This is also why the practice of design crit is so fundamental to design. It is a help from peers to pull you out of the inner workings of a design to gain a new perspective, new insight about the problem before you dive back into the glory guts of the details.

The Substance of Style

This is really for another post, but it all started with Claudia Kotchak’s talk on bringing design into the DNA of Proctor and Gamble. In that talk Kotchak mentions Virginia Postrel’s book The Substance of Style. I just finished reading it and I highly recommend it. It is a fairly easy read, I mostly read it on the subway while on vacation in New York, and it is thought provoking. How you will be provoked depends on where you are coming from I suppose.

Being a designer, I wasn’t provoked by the claim that there is value in style and that surface sells. I really didn’t get provoked until the sixth and final chapter in which Virginia Postrel pre-empted my criticism of the book stating that instead of telling the world how much more design is than mere style, designers should take pride in providing value through surface modifications. It is on page 178 in the paper back. I have still not quite accepted that statement…

Honestly, I had a really hard time getting through chapter 1, chapter 2 was only a little better and it wasn’t really till chapter 4 that I felt I was actually learning something. But that may be because I really did not need convincing that design makes sense.

What the book really gave me was a language to talk about the changes from earlier periods of one style to rule them all to a modern day notion of a multitude of equally valid styles.

The book also provided me a lot of good food for thought on what design mean to identity. This is something I have been thinking quite a bit about recently and Postrel terms it well in talking about going from “I like that” to “I am like that” i.e. the style of the objects you surround yourself with are used to express who you are and what you aspire to.

Chapter 4 and 5 were probably my favorite chapters. Chapter 4 deals with the Boundaries of Design and covers issues such as city planning, committees that determine design with or without an agenda. Both are bad.

Chapter 5 is about being Smart & Pretty and how the two are combined, raising the bar for entry into any category. This is something I personally work with everyday, talking about how all applications / websites are dated i.e. presents a thinking from a given area. If for instance you produce an application that today that looks like Outlook 2003 then you are simply not meeting the barrier to entry for a modern day application.

One favorite quote from chapter 5 is

Aesthetics is pre-rational or nonrational, not irrational or antirational. (p. 171)

I think I will use that quote in a conversation soon :)

Chapter 5 also covers the cost of aesthetics and goes on to state that the (sad?) truth is that aesthetics is not often not about making more money anymore, but about staying in business. It is not an added and valued extra, but a requirement. I suppose this really only is sad if you are a designer and you thought you main value add was in style. (see, I can’t let go of that notion).

A little criticism

It does seem to me that Postrel tips over into the too post-modernist camp and states that because there is no one style that everyone follows, then everyone has many styles. I simply do not buy that. Everyone has one major style or maybe a public/work style and a private style and of course there are times when our style is adopted to the situation for instance when we attend formal events such as funerals or weddings. 

But it is worth reading, and funny

The book is filled with interesting examples. One funny example is the about the cultural context of something as simple as a color. Today blue is associated with business, but in ancient Rome it was the color of weakness and in the twelfth-century France it was the color of the monarchy. (pp 94-95).

And if you want to learn more

If you want to learn more, visit Virginia Postrel's website, read about the book:The Substance of Style. Or spend 17 minutes on this TED2004 talk on Glamour, also by Virginia Postrel.

 

All references are to the paperback. On Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Substance-Style-Aesthetic-Remaking-Consciousness/dp/0060933852

Filtering in Active Directory Administrative Center

This is the post I have wanted to write for a long time. I had to wait until the designs had been shown in public (see bottom of this post). This is also the latest in a series on filter designs.

Let’s get back to our original goal of…

…making a filtering mechanism that works well for the majority of cases. ‘Works well’ means that it is easy to use and complete enough to cover 95% of the scenarios of the people who use our products. Getting deep on Filtering

We have looked at a number of different examples of Attribute based filtering and we need something that is as good as the Zune filter yet is much more scalable.

Enter the design for Active Directory Administrative Center. This is the application in all it simple might and glory once you have navigated to a folder (called Organizational Unit in Active Directory) full of user accounts.

In the following screens we will focus in on the list area:

1. A: Title. Tells you the name of the folder and number of items in the folder or the number of items in the filter
2. B: Free text filter. Filters across most attributes
3. C: Add criteria button. Lets you add rules or attributes to your query
4. D: Saved queries.
5. E: Button for saving the current filter.

If you type in the free-text filter we filter the list as you type and update the title with (“number of matching records” of “total number of records”):

We also change the background color to indicate that the list is filtered.  Hit ESC to clear the free-text filter. CTRL+E will set focus on the free-text filter.

We added the free-text filter because most times you can get by with a quick search even when you have a couple of thousand records in a given folder. If you have more than a couple of thousand records you may need more advanced filtering. The ‘Add criteria button’ provides a set of rules (see Different kinds of Filtering) and a list of attributes to filter on. Active Directory Administrative Center lets you filter on about 20 attributes. From a pure design point of view that number could be much bigger. From this applications’ perspective, we went through rounds of user testing to figure out what the right attributes were to include and it did simply not make sense to include all 150 or so attributes.

We added the idea of rules for two reasons. First of they are a helping hand in what we expect a lot of people to be filtering on all the time such as for instance “users with disabled/enabled accounts” which is really just a shortcut for “Object type = user AND Account state = disabled/enabled”. Rules can also be a way to package a filter that would otherwise not be possible to make with this design. More on that later.

The ‘Add criteria button’: 

As soon as we add the ‘users with disabled/enabled accounts’ rule the filter is updated.

To get the enabled accounts, simply click on the link “disabled” and you will get a dropdown with possible values.  And we could of course have added more than one rule and several attributes. Here is just one more attribute:

Notice the ‘and’ in the beginning of each line? We automatically AND the free-text filter and the rules and attributes together. this gets us to the core of this filter design:

Criteria on different attributes are AND’ed and Criteria on the same attribute are OR’ed.

Here is an example of this design rationale in effect:

In the example above we have created a filter for

((Name starts with ‘t’) OR (Name starts with ‘a’)) AND (Type = User) AND (Free-text contains ‘hund’)

We do not allow you change the Boolean operators, and we do not allow you change the attribute once it has been added. you can remove a criteria (click the red x) and add new attributes. We do not allow you change the Boolean operators or change the attribute because that way we can take care of grouping automatically and prevent filters where you get the too much due to wrongly grouped ORs (the Cartesian product) or nothing at all due to wrongly placed ANDs.

On one hand we have avoided the raw Boolean logic exposed in products such as Winamp which we know most people have a really hard time getting right, and on the other hand we have avoided jumping through hoops as Itunes does or created a design that is inherently limited as Zune has done. 

We also have created a design that can take care of about 95% of the scenarios. And if 95% is too little there is room to improve it through rules that target special cases where a set of criteria across different attributes should be OR’ed. We don’t ship any of those in Active Directory Administrative Center. We could not come up with any even through extensive user testing.

What about the last 5%?

The Active Directory team has put a lot of effort into PowerShell in Windows Server 2008 R2 so if you need a really advanced filter you can always go to command line. The alternative would be to make a GUI design that covers all cases, but honestly, I don’t believe we could do that and still keep it usable. This is a trade-off, but by not designing for all edge cases we also don’t pollute the experience for the majority of people using the application.

A little more on this specific Design

I am sure you could implement the core design idea differently and still get a great design. The following covers some specific choices we made for this implementation of the idea.

To get the query shown above we first selected Name and Type

…and then added Name again…

The new criteria is inserted under the existing criteria for Name and indented and OR’ed.

This may seem like a round-about way of adding the same attribute twice, but we chose to do it this first of all because we believe most filters will only use the same attribute once, and second because this allows us to insert the second instance of an attribute at the right spot and hence both take care of grouping and get it to visually line up without having to move criteria around after you have already interacted with them.

If you are an Active Directory admin you may very well be working across multiple domains. If you have 2 domains, say ‘Corp’ and ‘Sub’ and you want to find users with expired accounts in the User OU of either domain, you can create the query anywhere, save it and reapply it in a different OU:

I hope you have enjoyed reading about filtering as much as I have enjoyed designing for it and writing about it and if you have comments or questions, please leave them here or catch me at Twitter @rulerbreaker.

Credits

Like all other designs this was a team effort.  A lot of people from our UX team (Twitter @MS_ITPro_UX) have contributed and it should go without saying that so have the great Program Mangers, Developers, and Testers who have worked on this.

Active Directory Administrative Center will ship as part of Windows Server 2008 R2 which means it is not out yet but has been presented at TEC and will also be touched upon at TechEd 2009 (session SIA326 “What Windows Server 2008 R2 Does for Your Active Directory”).

Social trails

Don Norman talks about how we in the real world use the actions of others to find our own way. He has used exampels such as seeing people waiting on the train means that the train has not arrived yet, or that a path through some grass being an indication of a need for a path there. Very interesting and insightful, but I can't help but wonder if maybe it applies less to software. I think that in software, at least ideally, we look at what people really do and then change the application to fit their workflow.

What I am really trying to understand is if it is better to build trails ofbither people into software, or if it makes more sense to just change the software.

There are probably cases for both approaches.

Zune –on Filtering

Zune has, in my opinion, nailed the core insight in attribute based filtering: Criteria on the same attribute should be OR’ed and criteria on different attributes should be AND’ed.

There is no mentioning of AND or OR In the Zune autoplaylist UI. You also do not have to select between ANY or ALL as you do in ITunes. It is simply all built in and just works the way you would expect it to work.

Zune’s autoplaylist has two defining characteristics. First, there is a predefined set of attributes you can filter on. You cannot add additional attributes which means Zune does not need to expose groupings. Second, the dropdowns used to pick values to filter on automatically makes the ORs between the values.

Below is a screenshot of the dropdown. When picking what album artist to filter on, you can pick multiple entries from the list.

Here I have picked NOFX and the dropdown has added a semicolon to indicate that more can be added. Similar to typing in email addresses.

You can also just type text in the dropdown which is the same as a ‘contains’ operator.

Above we have created our example from previous posts:

(Album artist name is NOFX OR Offspring OR contains ‘Bad’) AND rating is Like

When it comes to music players, I think the Zune autoplaylist UI is the best i have ever used. The only reason to not just copy it is really that its strength is also its weakness. It cannot be expanded to include a lot more attributes.

Next we will finally look at the filter in Active Directory Administrative Center.