Results tagged “email” from Appleseed Blog

While I do almost all of my work - and maybe a little too much of my play - on a MacBook laptop, I keep an older desktop computer in my office for tasks that are better left to sessile machines. I seldom use it interactively, though, and its display - balanced on the back edge of my desk - usually shows only whichever screensaver has most recently caught my fancy. (Was running SurveillanceSaver for a long time, but lately have favored HAL-9000.)

Recently, I discovered, quite by accident, a new use for this arrangement that may permanently improve the way I work. For a project I'm working on, I had reason to comb through some video footage that existed only on one of this machine's two hard drives. It was a time-consuming task, so inevitably the usual forest of Twitter clients and Gmail windows and RSS feed-readers and such sprouted up as I worked. (How strange, yes, as if by magic.) Presently I completed by task and switched back to my laptop, but decided that I liked how all the happy little info-stream windows looked on the larger display, so left them there.

After getting back to work, I quickly realized that the constant Bing! New email and Bong! new tweets and Doink! new news articles interruptions I had going on my laptop were now entirely redundant, as these same activities were also evident on the screen in the background. My background in physical space, recall, running on a separate computer.

Experimentally, I turned off all my laptop's many new-event notifiers. I found myself in a new place: the streams were still present, and I continued to stay current with the outside world, but the sense of constant interruption had vanished.

Now, when I need a micro-break, I need only cast my eyes up at my other display and see what's changed. I do this often enough that I never fall behind; the crucial bit is that I decide when I'm ready to take another sip from my personal external-info fountain, rather than have it splash me in the face while I'm in the middle of a thought.

I realize this exact solution isn't something that everyone can implement, since not everyone happens to have the same computing setup I do. But I do recommend that fellow knowledge workers who share the need to be continuously plugged in, but also feel the constant low-level stress of continuous, clangorous interruptions, re-invent this solution in whatever way works for them. I'm hopeful that, in a small but crucial way, it's changed my life for the better.

As threatened earlier, my first use of this blog as a (very occasional) soapbox about the world of web application design and deployment. Particularly when it involves other peoples' work, ho ho.

A colleague from my past recently had bike accident. He got roughed up badly enough to require emergency surgery, from which he is currently mending rapidly. I stayed up to date with his fall and recovery through frequent updates that his wife's been making to a CarePages.com page, and as far as that goes, I certainly appreciate the existence of the channel.

As relieved as I am that my friend will be OK, though, I'm bitterly disappointed with some serious flaws in CarePages' design.

First of all, when invited to the site by an email telling you that your in-hospital friend or loved one has had a new page created for them, you have to submit to a full user-registration process before you can see the page at all. This is pretty bad, since to coming to the site expecting to learn news about your sick friend or family member and seeing instead a lengthy account-creation form is just tacky. But, sadly, it's such a common metaphor across various weirdly paranoid websites (including several newspapers I could name) that many users are inured to this sort of abuse. (And, yes, I did check Bugmenot to see if they had a suitable account, but no such luck.)

Far worse, however, is the site's update-notification system. Once you've registered, you start to receive email whenever the person's page gets updated. But, frustratingly, the email contains no details about the update - only a link back to the website. When you click the link, you have to log in again, because - as far as I can tell - there's no option to keep a session cookie with the website!

And here we cross the line from annoying to incompetent. When a significant percentage of your users are worried-sick friends and family who (depending upon the situation) may be holding their breath with dread every time there's news, what you don't do is announce this news with a content-free email and a link that makes them fumble around for their password when they're too stressed out to type straight.

All these mistakes have been made countless times before by other websites serving a variety of functions, and they're certainly irritating, but I shrug them off. But for CarePages, of all places, to feature them all is entirely inappropriate, to the point where I have to call it breathtakingly negligent. There's no argument that CarePages provides a very useful service - it's a popular site. But they can do a lot to improve their user experience.

So I just used plain old email to wish my friend a swift recovery. Oh, RFC 821: you are much maligned, but you're there when we just need simplicity.