I just released a new blog called What, Where, Why?, focused specifically on web development, the Internets, and other related geekery.

There are already a number of posts on the site, including one titled Octopress in the Cloud explaining the technologies I used on the blog (which include Octopress, Amazon S3, CloudFront, and Route 53) and my latest post on two tools two help you develop responsive designs.

Hope you enjoy it!

I will be releasing a few other subject-area blogs in the coming days and this blog will continue as a place for general news, and updates on what I'm doing.

Check out What, Where, Why? today.

That is why this blog is blacked out in protest today.

You may also have heard that SOPA has been killed. It hasn't. It has merely been shelved, most likely until February.

It does, however, need to be killed and it–and similar bills in the future that are supported by the dinosaurs of our age, the old-school publishing companies, the BSA, RIAA, MPAA.

And, if you need any more reason to hate SOPA, just remember that Rupert Murdoch wholeheartedly supports it.

Find out more about why SOPA and PIPA here:

• SOPA Blackout–learn more
• Google: End Piracy, Not Liberty
• Guardian: Stop SOPA or the Web really will go dark
• Wikipedia: SOPA and PIPA, learn more.

PayPal freezing accounts is nothing new. They do it all the time. And they've done it to other conferences also, including dConstruct, and more recently to Remy's Full Frontal.

After keeping our account frozen for two weeks (during which time I had to send them proof that I wasn't a fraudster) they decided to unfreeze it. With a little catch: they implemented a "90-day 100% rolling reserve". What does that mean? It means that they keep all the money you have in your PayPal account for 90 days. So the ticket sales that are in our account now? Over £11K of them? Yes, they'll keep all that for two months after conference. (I spoke to Emmanuelle in their credit review department today who said that they would give 50% of it to me the day after the conference and 25% a few weeks afterwards but I'm not sure I believe them. It says nothing to that effect on the account.) Regardless, I don't know what planet PayPal are living on.

PayPal must inhabit some strange alternate universe where cash flow isn't an issue for businesses. In PayPal's alternate universe, venues and airlines apparently accept 90-day credit terms.

Thankfully, I knew about PayPal's reputation and I had been keeping a voluntary 25% reserve in my account for possible refunds and withdrawing the rest to my bank account on a regular basis. Yes, because of their reputation – because I didn't trust them – I was keeping my PayPal balance as low as I was comfortable with and thus depriving PayPal of interest on my balance too. (In case they need more evidence on how their policies are hurting them.)

So, ironically, because I didn't trust them, they weren't able to ruin my conference. Can you imagine what would have happened if I had trusted PayPal and left all the ticket sales in our PayPal account? We would have been royally screwed.

As is, thankfully, I have enough in the bank to cover the remaining payments for the conference even without the £11K or so that PayPal are keeping hostage. But it makes things more painful for me and means that I have dig deeper into my own pocket. Not what you really want as an independent designer/developer who is trying to stage a beautiful and affordable conference for the local community.

What this whole ordeal has meant is that I've lost several days – days that I could have been devoting to making the conference even better. That PayPal can treat independent businesses and conferences like this is utterly disgusting and unacceptable.

Oh, and I'm not taking it lying down.

As of today, I switched our event to use EventBrite's own credit card system. This wasn't straightforward as I had to create an entirely new event on their system by cloning the old one and then changing its short url to the old one. It means that I now have to manage two event databases for the conference and adds to the administration work involved and complicates registration on the day (we can't use the cool EventBrite mobile app and have to do manual registrations).

From now on, I am not giving PayPal a single penny of my money. Once this ordeal is over and we've received all our money, I will be shutting down my PayPal account for good. (I've been with PayPal for over ten years and our current business account has been with them for six years. During that time, I've put through hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of business through it. So yes, it wasn't millions – and is probably chump change to them – but still, they won't get a penny more.)

Thank-you all for your help and support through this.

Take your favorite content slider and try this: on a Mac notebook, two-finger scroll. I'll bet my hat (easy to do when you don't wear hats) that the component will go nuts. For one thing, it will most likely be mapping your vertical scroll gesture to a horizontal scroll. I don't know who first decided that was a good idea but I think we can safely agree that it doesn't make any sense. And every content slider out there that I've encountered does this! So much so that I actually thought that you simply couldn't get horizontal scroll information from the "mousewheel".

But you can.

Here's a little example I just hacked together that demonstrates it.

It uses the jQuery Mousewheel plugin by Brandon Aaron which gives you a neat callback with the deltaX and deltaY of the mousewheel/trackpad two-finger scroll.

I've only tested this on Firefox and Chrome on my Mac and it worked on both.

So, dear content-scroller-makers-of-the-web, let's use that lovely little deltaX property to actually map horizontal scroll gestures to horizontal scrolls and leave the vertical scroll alone so that the web page can, y'know, scroll like it should.

Update: I improved the example with a nifty little compass. Nicer to look at. Not sure why I had to do that at almost 1AM but hey, enjoy!

So, to upload the 140 or so photos, I downloaded Flickr's desktop uploading app, Flickr Uploadr and dragged my set of photos in. Upon dragging them in, I realized that they were in the wrong order. They were listed in reverse chronological order, which the last taken photo at the top and the first one at the bottom of the window. In the top-left corner of the app, I saw a message telling me that they were "currently ordered by date taken" and that I could drag and drop if I wanted to re-order them.

Here, the app was telling me that I had two sort options. Either reverse chronological (as was the default) or custom (where I had to drag and drop the photos manually). Not wanting to reverse 200 photos manually, I ran a Google search to see how others had solved the problem. Interestingly, I found this forum post dating from 2008 that informed the Flickr team of the issue. The resolution there appeared to be that it's not a bug but a feature because Flickr is a photo blog and that's the only ordering they were willing to support. I also found a post by someone suggesting that I manually drag each photo to the Flickr Uploadr in the order I wanted them to appear.

Needless to say that infuriated me a little.

These were photos from an event and they told a story of sorts. They needed to be in chronological order. I vented my frustrations, as you do, in a tweet:

Harsh words, perhaps. But this is the effect bad user experiences have on people. Some people blame themselves. Others get angry. If people have enough bad user experiences in a day – they end up having a bad day. That's the power we have as user experience designers and developers. We have the power to make someone have a good day or a bad day.

And yes, I know this specific instance is very much a first-world problem but imagine if I had to use Flickr Uploadr every day as part of my job. Or imagine someone that does have to use a piece of software that is entirely unergonomic. Going beyond simply infuriating people, badly-designed software can actually harm people physically. (Based on numbers from five years ago (PDF link), RSI was costing the UK economy £5-£20 billion alone – I would love to study how much of that is based on bad software ergonomics.)

So, to get back to the story: several people tweeted suggesting that I use iPhoto or the web uploader. It was Aegir Hallmunder who tweeted the next piece of the puzzle:

Really? But that's not what the app told me (it told me I had two options for sorting my photos. I would expect the web site to offer the exact same two options). So I went to the Flickr web site to see. And lo and behold, Aegir was right. I could sort the photos in my in whatever order I wanted to.

This, actually is even worse UX. Why? Because there is an inconsistency.

If the app didn't offer any sort options whatsoever, I could understand it. It would still be confusing but at least I could view the app as a dumb uploader. I would think: "OK, I drag the photos here and they get uploaded. I guess I should be able to change things on the web site."

But that's not the case.

The app appears clever. It gives me the feature to order my photos. It just doesn't give me all the options that the web site has. What this makes me think – because I see the desktop app as a complete app and not as some sort of hybrid that shares parts of certain features with the web app – is that Flickr itself doesn't let me order my photos in any other way.

Now, before you think I'm simply dumping on the app, there are parts of it that I do like quite a bit.

For one thing, it intelligently handles updating of multiple selections. When I select multiple photos, the Tags box changes to read "Add to existing tags:" and lets me add tags to all selected elements. It is similarly clever about other attributes that you can change in multiple selections. The bit that I do not like about multiple selections is that the settings are applied when you deselect. Since there is no undo (another UX gripe), I would expect this action to require a more outward expression of intent (e.g., a button press) to persist.

To bring the story to a conclusion, after learning from Aegir that I could reorder the photos on the Flickr web site, I proceeded to upload the photos to Flickr only to see that they were appearing in the correct (i.e., chronological) order in the set. I kid you not. So, after all that, it did exactly the opposite of what it told me it would do. Oh. My. Goodness!

Talk about being a bad communicator. If Flickr Uploadr had been a person, I would have said he was having a laugh with me.

Now, again, you might be thinking: wow, what a way to make a mountain out of a molehill. But you have to remember that user experience is about the little things. This was a little thing that annoyed me and made what could have been a lovely experience an infuriating one. And it's OK to get annoyed. If you don't get annoyed by things that don't work – if you don't find fault with the status quo – then you probably shouldn't be a designer. Why would you want to be if you don't want to change things? Make them better? The trick is to channel that anger, that passion, into making things that are beautiful. Things that give people delightful experiences. Things that change the world for the better…

One little thing at a time.

I was saddened to learn that many of the people in the room were in the process of being made redundant. Schools are already axing ICT from their offerings, before the government has even announced anything. Their whole budgets cut, they see the subject as expensive and expendable. The process was described as "slash and burn".

And it gets worse:

Most worrying of all was the discussion around City Learning Centres (CLCs). These were introduced in 2001 and they're purpose-built state of the art computer and multimedia suites. They're available for schools and businesses to use. The centres have equipment that many schools can't afford to buy, which makes it more cost effective because schools can collectively share the facilities available. Students can make use of Apple Macs, specialist software and equipment, industrial sized printers, video and radio equipment. This not only helps supplement the current IT curriculum, but is also available for extra-curricular, training and business use, which is much needed in disadvantaged areas.

I'm furious and I'm not even British. I have, however, for the last ten years made this country my home and I care deeply about its people and its future. If you happen to be British, you should be utterly livid. This move is a nuclear bomb dropped on Britain's digital future. It is a clear indication that the current government does not understand the value of digital literacy.

So what should we do?

ICT in its current form is broken. It is probably broken beyond repair. We are teaching kids secretarial skills, not digital literacy. If you want to put a kid off of computers, introduce them to computing with Microsoft Office. That is basically what we're going in ICT today and the results are a year-on-year drop in the number of kids taking GCSE ICT.

So this could be the perfect opportunity to replace ICT with something better. But that doesn't seem to be what the government is after.

The government's suggested solution is to ignore the problem and cut all funding for digital literacy altogether. They must hope that somehow – magically, perhaps – students will learn this stuff and we'll end up with a generation of digitally-literate producers (as opposed to merely consumers). With overworked teachers struggling to teach the curriculum as it currently stands, that's just not going to happen unless an instructor here or there goes out of her way to incorporate digital education into her class.

The answer should be to tackle the problem and fix it. Replace ICT with something better: with compulsory digital literacy classes in the core curriculum complimented by the introduction of digital literacy as a cross-cutting concern across the wider curriculum. And, while we're at it, let's support the use of open source solutions whenever possible in these classes. Lets teach kids concepts and provide them with solid foundations that they can apply to any platform in the future, be it open or proprietary, instead of training them in the specifics of using a certain proprietary technology.

Regardless of the specifics of the solution we replace ICT with, the last thing we should be doing is to cut funding for digital literacy. Quite on the contrary, we should be redoubling our efforts and our investment to fix it. Britain's digital future deserves no less.

What you can do today

• Read Anna's posts, Help keep ICT in our schools and Naace Curriculum Review Think Tank to get a better understanding about what's at stake and why this is important.
• Tell the government how you feel: the Department of Education has asked released a call for evidence on the National Curriculum Review
• Write to your MP

Day 1

During the conference, I got the chance to attend a number of excellent talks, including Paul's "Your design sucks! (How to manage the sign off process)" which made me realize that my decision, several years ago, to stop doing development work for clients – while painful and difficult – was the right one for me.

I also loved Elliot's "Stop Worrying & Get On With It: Tips and Tricks for designing for the Modern Web" in which he channelled Mr. Andy "HardBoiled" Clarke and told the audience that it's all right to develop with the latest and greatest web technologies as long as you use them to implement enhancements instead of core features and take into consideration that core functionality should gracefully degrade on older browsers. (See http://dowebsitesneedtolookexactlythesameineverybrowser.com).

Brian Fling gave a lovely talk on Designing Mobile Experiences and I could only sit there and nod my head every few minutes in agreement. What can I say, dude gets it.

And, it was great to catch Daniel Burka and Rob Goodlatte's presentation (The first 15 minutes - Designing for new-user experiences) in real life after listening to it virtually earlier in the year while I was opening the UX Web Summit.

Day 2

On the second day, the lovely Mr. Dan Rubin kicked things off with an excellent presentation on using high-fidelity prototypes for usability testing and rapid iteration. Basically, Dan's technique involves using comprehensive Photoshop mocks of web page UIs as background graphics and layering on top of those only the live components and links that are necessary to test a given feature or screen. You, thus, end up creating simple HTML prototypes that are nevertheless high-fidelity and which you can then use during usability testing. You can also iterate quickly upon these prototypes in response to the user feedback you receive.

I loved the pragmatism and simplicity of Dan's approach although I did raise the question of whether it made it harder to respond to user feedback on aggregate and easier to fall into the trap of having individual users influence the design directly as opposed to having them inform us about the design. User feedback should, after all, inform us about the design and we – as designers – need to filter that feedback and weigh it against our design vision and goals before deciding whether and how to react to it.

Dan's response was that even though they had to make one or two u-turns, the process worked our remarkably well for them and that having seasoned Experience Designers on the team was an important part of the equation.

(Having great people on your team is probably the ultimate determiner of success. A good, lightweight, user-centered process helps support those people, keep them happy and sane, and creates an environment that works with them as opposed to against them. This is important because while finding great people for your team is hard, keeping them is even harder.)

I found Kwame Nyanning's talk to be a great contrast in terms of tone and delivery to all of the other ones. Here is a man with an inner peace and rhythm all his own. While I didn't agree at all with the waterfall nature of the development process he was advocating (although it may work for the types of projects they have on, which I am assuming are mostly high-production-value (and cost), mostly linear, one-offs/microsites for large names like Disney), I loved the aesthetics, pacing, and multi-disciplinary nature of his talk. My tweet at the time pretty much sums it up:

After Kwame's talk, I decided to finally venture out of the Radisson Blue Scandinavian hotel that the event was taking place in and find myself some warmer clothes (having forgotten to pack anything but t-shirts). Of course, I proceeded immediately to get lost in downtown Oslo and had a great time discovering the town. It did mean, however, that I was late for the after-lunch talks and only got to catch a portion of Meagan Fisher's excellent talk on taking your designs from wireframe to a beautiful finished product. Needless to say, her slides were lickable and you could see that the audience was delighted by the boatloads of practical advice she presented in her highly-concentrated talk. It left you wanting more, like any good talk should.

Given there was time left still after Meagan's talk, I caught the end of Per Martinsen (AKA Tied Revolverman)'s talk on "Transmedia art and non-linear storytelling". In fact, he had just concluded his presentation and there was a Q&A in progress. One of the audience members (Benny – sorry if I spelled your name wrong) started a debate on the nature of reality that I heartily took part in (hey, you don't get the chance to make use of those long years spent studying critical media theory every day). The ensuing debate was one of the highlights of the conference for me and I'd love to see more talks end in a group discussion. After the talk, Per was also kind enough to take me through his talk, which revolved around his extremely interesting "transmedia" project, Earthbound – Surfing the Apocalypse.

I did, unfortunately, miss Paul Irish's session (though I really wanted to attend it) as it was on at the same time as the other two talks but I'm looking forward to catching it on the video recording.

By the time the last pre-closing-keynote sessions came around I was rather knackered. I summoned enough energy to pop into Jina Bolton's CSS session to find a packed room full of entranced people (all but Mr. Heilmann, of course, whom Jina told me was heckling her from the front – this is to be expected!) :)

In the penultimate session of the conference, Nick La presented a relaxed design portfolio review, concentrating on "the little things". He also took us through some web sites that he found inspirational, including Jina's beautiful sushi & ROBOTS.

Finally, to round of an excellent series of talks, Christian Heilmann gave us a closing keynote that took us on a ride through a smorgasbord of different web technologies (and techniques) that we have at our disposal today with the aim of both knowing the right tool to use for the job and to try and get us to "build for the future and to convince those who live in the past to join us."

All in all, I had a great time attending the conference, met some amazing people, and loved Aggie Elisabeth Grøndal Peterson and Per's opening performance (and their show at the dinner) with their band Frost (check out Frost's music on Spotify). And, the whole experience would not have been exactly the same if I hadn't gotten to tickle the ivories of a Steinway grand piano that just happened to be standing out in the hallway. I'm yet again ruined and cannot play any other piano without thinking, "but it's not a Steinway". (It's like the Retina display of pianos.) Oh well.

Audience reactions

Oh, and what post would be complete without some of the feedback from my talk (this is the bit that other conference organizers see and go "oh, look, that guy's good, let's hire him to do a talk at our amazing conference!"):

By the way, if you want to catch my talk, I'm going to be presenting the opening keynote this Friday at the Over The Air conference in London. Hope to see some of you there.

Last Wednesday, I gave Twitter a break for a few days so I could examine its impact on my life. The experience has been rather enlightening.

Here are a few things I discovered about myself, how I use Twitter, and how I want to use Twitter:

Losing a sense

In my article titled 10 Trends for 2010 in Netlash's Online Trends 2010 book, I wrote:

Today we are all cyborgs.

We have been cyborgs for quite some time now. Do you wear a wrist watch? You are a cyborg. The watch may not be implanted in your arm but it doesn't need to be either. Your watch "extends your physical abilities beyond normal human limitations" by letting you know exactly what time it is at any given moment.

I only realized how much of a cyborg I had become when my iPhone 3G got stolen earlier this year. It was a week before the iPhone 3GS was to come out so I thought I could hold out a week for the new phone. I was wrong. It took me one day (yes, just one day) to buy another 3G. Why? Because I felt that I had lost vital senses that I had begun to rely on. Senses like Perfect Location (the ability to know exactly where I am and how to get anywhere via Google Maps and the built in GPS), Infinite Knowledge (the ability to query the world's knowledge-base on any subject at any time), and Omniscience (the ability to know what my friends are doing anywhere in the world at any given time via Twitter). These are senses that have become as important to me as Sight, Smell, Touch, and Hearing; they extend my consciousness and abilities beyond the limitations of my physical being.

So, giving up Twitter for a few days robbed me of one my senses but that wasn't entirely the hardest bit. I could compensate for it by actually calling friends up or emailing them or (brace yourselves), actually talking to them face-to-face.

What I missed most was the inability to share stuff I was learning. I also missed the ability to throw an idea out there and have it be debated by some very smart people.

I tweet a lot of links to things that I find interesting and not being able to do that on a whim was somewhat frustrating. I realize that I've started to use Twitter like a lower-overhead Delicious (this has its disadvantages given Twitter's lack of focus on The Long Now and its limited ability to search through a single account's tweets. Remy's SnapBird is a good third-party solution that makes Twitter more useful for finding links you tweeted earlier and I do still use Delicious.)

I did feel out of touch with what was going on at times but I found that if I needed to find something out (for example, where someone was) I could always look up a specific Twitter page without signing into my account. This made me think about ways of using Twitter on my terms instead of giving in to the demands of the stream.

The heartbeat

As part of my Twitter hiatus, I turned off all notifications and stopped using Foursquare and Gowalla also. Ah, the bliss.

On the one hand, I love notifications. Normally, I have notifications on for Twitter replies, direct messages, Foursquare, and Gowalla. The Twitter notifications alone usually mean that my phone has a somewhat regular heartbeat of notification messages that flash every few minutes. I realize that I had started to rely on this heartbeat. If the heartbeat slowed, a part of me would wonder if something was wrong. The heartbeat can easily become a wonderfully addictive reinforcement – a validation of sorts – that everything is all right and the Internets still loves you.

It's also terribly disorienting and it's too easy to simply lose yourself in the stream and let it take you where it wants to.

So the only notifications I'm going to turn back on are going to be Twitter DMs. Everything else stays off and I'll poll Twitter, Foursquare, Gowalla, etc. when I want instead of having my schedule for the day dictated by the heartbeat.

Cognitive effects

Perhaps the scariest bit was the first time I caught myself tweeting in my head.

My initial impulse, after seeing something interesting or having an experience was to compose a tweet in my head. I realized that I've begun to automatically summarize bits of my day into 140-character chunks.

What does this mean? (IT'S A DOUBLE RAINBOW ALL THE WAY!)

Is it beneficial? Could tweeting in my head be aiding my memory, for example, by making me analyze events in my life as they happen, thereby reinforcing those events in my mind much in the same way that dreams apparently do?

Or am I stripping events of their definition by downsampling them into mere approximations; a string of sound-bite-esque simulacra?

One thing is for sure: Twitter actually affects my behavior and the way I think about and, quite possibly, how I interact with the world.

(Note: The automatic impulse to compose tweets in my head subsided after the first day and disappeared entirely towards the end of the week.)

Other effects

Removing Twitter from my life also had some immediate effects:

• I started (macro) blogging more and realized that I actually like making longer posts and exploring an idea for more than 140 characters.
• I spent more time on the phone, actually talking to friends.
• Friends had to make a greater effort to reach me; and they did (and in the process discovered new things about me, like my phone number).
• After the initial "tweeting in my head" behavior wore off, I began to enjoy an experience for what it was, without wondering if it held interest for a greater group and without necessarily having to summarize it for that audience.
• I started writing in my journal more.
• Oh, and I was also way more productive than I had been recently.

Going forward

All in all, giving Twitter a break has been an enlightening experience. It showed me that while I love Twitter, I'm not a slave to Twitter (and nor do I want to be). It made me realize that I love sharing stuff on Twitter and I love the positive conversations that people have (I've recently seen a large number of people use Twitter as a virtual support structure with very real – and positive - effects and that's really awesome).

I'm not, on the other hand, a big fan of the Twitmobs that can form at the blink of an eye or the endless of string of controversies that can whip entire communities into a frenzy one moment, only to be forgotten when the next, newer, or juicier controversy erupts. They rarely achieve anything of any value and, before you know it, a morning or an afternoon is needlessly lost to the inaccessible ether of the past.

So, going forward, I'm simply going to make an effort to use Twitter more like I want to. Which is something like this:

1. I use Twitter to share ideas, links, and other things that I find interesting or funny. 140 characters is rarely long enough to contain a universal truth or a fully-baked idea and thus my tweets shouldn't be taken as such. If you want to contribute and help evolve the idea, please do.
2. If I see a viewpoint that I don't agree with, I will strive to write a blog post on the subject and respond thusly. If it's not worth my time to write a blog post, it's either not worth responding to or I'm being lazy and Twitter simply isn't the place for long debates as it lends itself to absolutist statements which are usually the worst way to debate the nuances of a subject.
3. Since my tweets are read by thousands of people, I want them to be a positive, informative, possibly entertaining, and ideally inspiring influence. At the same time, remember that you are following a human being not the Techcrunch RSS feed. I have my good and bad days, hopes, desires, dreams, successes, and failures (just like you). If you are not interested in the human behind the tweets, now is a great time to take a moment and unfollow me.

(There you go, I guess that's my unofficial Twitter policy of sorts.)

And finally…

What are you waiting for? Follow me on Twitter already!

The hearts in the illustration are by Dryicons and the Twitter bird is the work of freakyframes.

Both times I attended SXSW I've wanted to stay on for the music festival – I think I'm finally going to this year. One of the cool things about SXSW is that it includes Interactive, Film, and Music under its umbrella but it does feel like the three are still somewhat disperate. Which is surprising to some degree since most web/interactive geeks I know either are musicians or have been involved with film and other mediums in one capacity or other.

So, I was thinking, why don't we invade SXSW Music in 2012 (it's too late for 2011) with a band of our own? A Geek Robot Superstar band or something (I don't know where the "Robot" bit came from, really.)

We did something similar in the Flash world a few years back with my friends and fellow geeks Seb, Chris (Allen), John, Sam, Jared, and Chris (Mills). It was called Phlash5 and we got to rehearse about as many times as we performed. Our debut was in Hollywood of all places, at B.B.King's bar (awesome venue) during FITC Hollywood and we also rocked Amsterdam. (Of course, given that we were dispersed around the four corners of the world, we relied *heavily* on improvisation and performed a set of our songs during the gigs.)

I'd love to see if we can't get something similar together for SXSW and get the web world to vote us in :)

Thoughts? Is anyone excited by the idea or should be Interactive folk keep our musical talents to ourselves and stick to our own bit of the conference? :)

(By the way, if you haven't done so, why not take a moment to vote for my panel: The Art of Emotional Design at SXSW 2011?) Cheeky, I know. But I'll love you like a puppy. [May actually not love you like a puppy - Ed.]

3mobilebuzz.com contacted me before my talk at WebDirections @media to see if I wanted to try out the Three MiFi unit and blog about my experiences (don't confuse this with the MiFi that's sold outside the UK, which is known as the Novatel Wireless Hotspot and is notoriously difficult to find here.) Having just lost the T-Mobile USB dongle that had served me well for the last two years or so, I decided to take them up on the offer.

If you haven't had the chance to see or play with a MiFi, it's a portable WiFi hotspot that takes a SIM card and shares your mobile connection with up to 5 devices. It has a brushed-aluminium-and-white-plastic case that resembles a metallic version of Eva from Wall-E. The user interface consists of three little buttons on the side and a screen with five colored icons.

At this point, you may be wondering why a device that has just one purpose needs three buttons and five icons to perform its duties. The answer, of course, is that it doesn't. The UI is the worst part of the package and it leads to a rather frustrating user experience with the MiFi in general. I can only assume that the unit was designed either by committee or by graphic designers, not product or experience designers.

One button to rule them all

As I previously mentioned, the MiFi unit has just one function: to connect to your mobile account with Three and share that connection, via WiFi, with up to five devices. To achieve this, however, the MiFi asks you to press and hold three different buttons: one to power up the unit, one to initiate the mobile connection, and one to create the WiFi network.

This is a perfect example of needlessly exposing the inner complexity of the device to the user.

It's also a perfect example of what happens when engineers and designers worry about solving their own problems first, not the user's problems ("inside-out design" vs. "outside-in design").

Basically, if Google was a MiFi, it would give you a map of its servers and ask you how you'd like to load balance the search you're about to perform. The MiFi is a one-trick pony that needs nothing more than a single "on" button that turns it on, sets up the WiFi network, and connects to the Internet. In other words, it should "just work". Or, as Steve Krug puts it, don't make me think!

Colour me unimpressed

Once you've mastered the black magic of which order to press the three buttons in and finally managed to turn the device on, you're tasked with making sense of the five icons you're presented with on screen. In another design faux-pas, the icons both create expectations they don't meet and use colour as their sole semantic differentiator.

There is a static signal strength indicator which looks like a signal strength indicator but, being static, actually does not use the bars to indicate signal strength. Instead, it uses colour. (I'm not making this up.) If the signal strength indicator is red, you have low signal, if it's orange, you have a medium-level of signal, and if it's green, you have good signal. Of course, this is exactly what the bars in a signal strength indicator are for.

Similarly, the battery indicator, connection speed, and WiFi indicators display their status based on colour alone. There's also an "R" icon that apparently comes on when you're roaming (and blinks alongside all the other lights when you first turn it on).

Gutsy

Another gripe I have with the unit is the location of the SIM card. Following the Nokia convention, the SIM card is located under the battery on the underside of the unit. This requires users to take the unit apart, remove the battery, and insert the sim card as part of their initial experience with the device. This is akin to going on a first date with someone and showing them the granny knickers you happen to be wearing. Why ruin the magic at "hello?" I don't want to see what the inside of my MiFi looks like. I want to insert my SIM card and be wowed by the magic of a data connection that I can share with up to four of my friends.

As far as actual operational functionality went, I didn't have any issues with the MiFi or 3's network. I was able to get a good signal in most places I went to in London and Brighton and when I couldn't, I couldn't. C'est la vie when it comes to mobile Internet these days with any network. The user interface issues, however, tainted the experience for me.

That said, the MiFi is a great idea and, even with its faults, it's a seductive financial alternative to purchasing different data plans for your laptop, iPad, and the plethora of other mobile gadgets in your geeky arsenal. With a single data plan and a single device, you can connect up to five devices or share your Internet connection with up to four friends. That, in and of itself, makes the MiFi a no-brainer.

If Three addresses the usability issues, the MiFi also has the potential to become a lovely experience. And it appears that they have begun to do just that with the recently-released MiFi 2.

MiFi: the sequel

I just read a review of the MiFi 2 by Ian Better that states that the MiFi 2 addresses some of the issues I outlined above. According to Ian, the new MiFi features a single "on" button. That's great news. Also, you can apparently now configure your MiFi via a web interface (this should make those of us on Macs and Linux PCs happy). Finally, the screen apparently now displays proper signal strength and battery information.

However, based on the photo of the MiFi 2 posted on Technovia and Ian's article, I still think there's room for improvement in the design. It looks over-engineered and the interface has way too much noise.

So, in my next post, I am going to design my version of the MiFi. Stay tuned for my MiFi 3 Prototype…