I’ll be the keynote speaker at Easy6, India’s conference on software usability. Held in Bangalore, India, in January, 2006. Here’s the page for Easy5.

30 must-have PC skills

Here’s the top 10, just to make the point

1. Move and copy files
2. Navigate using keyboard shortcuts
3. Use shortcuts in Word
4. Install and remove new hardware
5. Send image files as attachments
6. Search your hard disk
7. Hard disk maintenance (including disk cleanup and defragmenter)
8. System restore and backup
9. Update software online
10. Create desktop shortcuts

How many can you do? To me, this list suggests how daunting a lot of this stuff is. I know several PC users that don’t understand file systems – where files are stored when you download them or save them. To ask them to attach something, say, by finding it somewhere on the vast structure of files and folders, yikes. They’ve managed to use apps without building that level of knowledge. So doing these tasks, I dunno, it’s pretty challenging without getting a sense of the underlying model of the system that these tasks all require.

I’d opt for things like “cleaning up the desktop” “knowing what the start menu is” “choosing a printer” – some real fundamental stuff that you can build on to get to these skills.

But anyway, the fact that the 30 things they picked are actually pretty hard just confirms my sense that computers are still too hard to understand/use.

Update: A reasonable-looking intro/tutorial on Windows XP can be found here

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Here’s one of those store locator interfaces that maybe you’ve seen before. You can type a city into that field at the bottom and pull down a state, or you can click directly on the map. Those little pink/red dots are so target-like, and it’s easier to click than type, so my instinct was to just click on my area. Here’s what I get:

It’s extremely precise; I somehow clicked 38 miles north of San Francisco, though I was just thinking “in and around San Francisco” when I aimed (and there are indeed so many little dots that it’s pretty hard to aim for a really tight region). But the results are assuming you meant to click EXACTLY where you clicked. Try again and you might end up 11 miles south of San Francisco and a totally different list of stores.

Clicking ends up being useless. The map is too small and expects more-than-human precision, at least given the enormous density of stores in many regions. Entering the city name is the only way to go for my situation.

It’s further hampered by the ridiculous results – it seems that any store that has any type of product from the Sanrio people anywhere on their shelves qualifies for this list. They sell a lot of stuff, but not all of these stores are going to carry similar ranges of inventory, so you’re going to have to do some more legwork – either visit many, or phone (yuck) many and ask, or simply give up.

Today I received this email

To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: Disk Usage Warning (critical)
Date: Sat, 19 Mar 2005 05:51:58 -0800

The account with the username ‘stevep’, is running out of disk space.
Please remove some files from this account, or ask the administrator to increase your disk quota.
You have currently used 90.85% of your disk space.

Talk about useless! It’s autogenerated from myself, to myself. It doesn’t make any reference to what organization, site, company, or anything, except for stevep – you can imagine that I’ve got many accounts using the name stevep. I eventually ran an nslookup on the IP address in the header (yeah, that’s what I did and for most people what I just wrote is complete nonsense) to see that it came from my ISP. But I have two domains registered with that ISP! They don’t tell me which one, they expect me to map the login to the domain? Even their support person couldn’t tell me what domain this account name referred to; he suggested I tell him all my domains and then he could tell me which one this was? I happen only to have two, but what if I had 30? Or 300? I’m sure that’s not unusual.

Very very crappy error messages, and of course, the usual technical-oriented support that doesn’t feel this is really a problem they need to address.