» Apple Matters: The Mac Has Never Been User-Friendly

Apple Matters: The Mac Has Never Been User-Friendly

A mouse’s tail is at the bottom. Thats funny.

The only way to improve user friendliness is to put in hours of testing with all levels of users. Learn by watching them _and_ soliciting feedback.

I see many ways all the time to increase the user-friendliness of systems, software and technology. Machine learning in everyday items is the next frontier. For example:

iPod pseudo-randomizer - Offer several pseudo-random options: random with artist blocks, random with genre blocks, random with several highly rated and a few non/low-rated (to get me to try out the far reaches of my catalog). Pay attention to how I playback my tunes and adjust the weightings based on how often I interrupt the pseudo-random playlists. If I continually switch artists/genres, make the artist/genre blocks smaller for more variety. If I never adjust a pseudo-random playlist, bump up the block size. Many other options here.

Social feedback in search algorithms. I’m sure Google uses this somewhat, but other search algorithms could benefit. Each link a person clicks on in a search is more likely to be a more valid result for a given search term. The little bit of human thought necessary to decide which link to click on for a result is worth more than thousands of CPU cycles trying to decide for me. Any link clicked on should get bumped up some in relevancy. The last link a selected is likely the most relevant. A link clicked on, and returned to after trying a few other links in between would also probably be a better choice. Think of the millions of searches a day Google gets, everyone is already making these choices. If you could perfect an algorithm they are getting each of our brainpower for free. Thats got to be the largest grid computer in the world. Yes, this could easily be gamed and manipulated but thats nothing new over the status quo. Preventing over inflation of relevancy would have to be a big part of the algorithm.

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