Tag Archive for 'Documentation'

Creeping featurism: SLR cameras, yesterday and today

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on February 5, 2021
in Design history and Odds and Ends
. 2 Comments

Page from Kowa SE camera manual

The photographic camera is one of the great inventions of the 19th century, and is quite a simple idea: take  a light sensitive surface, put a lens in front of it, add the ability to control exposure time and aperture, and you’re all set. And for more than a century, that’s what cameras were all about. But not anymore.

During my life I’ve owned maybe a dozen cameras. The first (discounting a plastic Kodak Brownie I had as a child) was a Kowa SE SLR (Single Lens Reflex) I had in my teens. The latest is this Canon EOS 800D I recently bought. Both Japanese; both relatively inexpensive entry-level SLRs. But there the difference ends.

Both cameras have a light sensitive surface (film in the first, CCD in the latter), a lens, and controllable exposure time and aperture.

However:

  • The Kowa allowed you manage this setup with 8 physical controls (including the film advance lever), and its instruction manual was 26 pages long.
  • The Canon provides 27 physical controls and 14 screenfuls of menus (most of them with sub-menus), and its manual is 486 pages long.
  • The instruction manual of the Kowa devotes one page to focusing, where it says things like:

Image is focused by turning the lens barrel helicoid and looking in the focusing screen. For more precise and easier focusing, a split-image is provided in the center of the focusing screen. The lens is focused accurately when the two halves of the split-image are aligned.

  • The instruction manual of the Canon devotes 24 pages to focusing, and says things like:

In [7:Auto AF pt sel.:Color Tracking] under [4: Custom Functions (C.Fn)], you can set whether to perform AF by tracking colors. If [1:Disable] is set, focus is achieved based only on AF information (p.393).

Now, let me be clear: I am no luddite, and I realize that the modern camera has many advantages. Many of them are nice-to-haves, but some are significant, like shooting video and the vibration-cancelling lens, both unthinkable back in the day. And I’m sure today’s lenses, being computer-designed, are much better in terms of reducing optical aberrations. When I got this new camera I was full of admiration for the triumph of innovation and miniaturization it represents.

And then I started using it, and I realized that this triumph involves such a huge degree of overkill that the user experience is severely impacted.

Consider:

  • Having countless options leads to the “embarras de choix”, the mental information overload from too many choices.
  • A camera is for taking photos. Many of the features of this Canon camera are actually post-processing best left for Photoshop, where they can be done in the comfort of a large screen UI optimized for the task.
  • Most features in this camera will never be used by the average user (remember, it’s an entry level camera; someone who really needs to “disable AF by tracking colors” – and who is willing to flip to page 393 of a manual to figure this out – would buy a more expensive professional camera).

But most importantly: the experience of shooting with that Kowa SE was far superior, because although you could only control three parameters (focus, aperture and shutter speed), you  had direct control over them. You twisted the focus ring around the lens, and you had immediate feedback by seeing that split image come together into focus. You set your aperture and shutter speed, peeking at the light-meter needle in the viewfinder, and you knew exactly what effect that would have, because there weren’t dozens of other parameters being tweaked behind your back by algorithms in the camera’s “brain” – it had no brain, so you had to use yours. In fact you learned to use it well, because with a film camera any error would only be discovered days or weeks later when the prints were developed.

Incidentally, the Kowa SE was not my best SLR – in the 1980s I owned a Minolta X700 film camera. This had 17 physical controls  and a manual of 62 pages, and was at about the sweet spot in the features vs usability equation. It had added the automatic exposure mode that today’s cameras have, which was useful at times, but not being computerized, it was still a straightforward camera. And it had the split-image focusing screen that was effective and fun to use.

And then came Digital cameras, bless them, and the creeping featurism that today allows me to shoot images made to look like watercolor paintings, or like low-quality toy camera photographs. And a zillion other things (see pages 129–165, 311–337, and 426 – or whatever).

Oh well…

Form follows dysfunction

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on June 8, 2013
in Bad design
. 0 Comments

Postal form

So we had to ship some parcels overseas, and we were given these forms to fill at the post office.

Not surprisingly, the form had four copies, and asked for a lot of shipping and customs information. what was surprising, however, was the incredibly poor functional design of the form’s layout.

Most obviously silly was the layout of the field for the recipient’s address, which you can see in the photo below:

Postal form addressee field

The small area provided would barely accept any respectable street address, but then they ask you to add telephone, fax and email on the indicated lines. Forget about a.very.long.email.address@long.host.domain.com – you couldn’t even fit short@gmail.com on that tiny line! Same thing for any respectable phone and fax numbers. Nor can you try your hand at miniature calligraphy, because to mark the four copies you must push very hard on the pen…

Every day hundreds of people in the country struggle with this form. Won’t anyone at the PO take pity on us?

A new contraceptive?

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on March 8, 2013
in Odds and Ends
. 0 Comments

See this product which I found at a hardware superstore. Looks useful enough for organizing stray cables in the home. But it has another unexpected function.

Prevent Children

As you see in the close up, this device has an added benefit beyond storing extra cord length, and the packaging clearly states it:

Helps prevent children.

You don’t say!  🙂

 

Your mother should know!

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on April 21, 2012
in Good design
. 0 Comments

 

A friend pointed me at this image, which seems to have gone viral online:

Laundry Tag

Now, this is pretty hilarious as a joke, but there are some serious comments it brings to mind.

First, the “normal” laundry instructions use icons instead of words, but unless you’re a laundry expert these convey no universally obvious meaning (the leftmost one in this image excepted, but that one uses text). This reinforces an earlier post on this blog: pictographic instructions are not always a good idea!

More important: the reference to mother’s knowledge is something no manufacturer would ever use in an instruction sheet, but it makes a whole lot of sense: sometimes the best way to access knowledge is by relying on others. Depending on the subject, you can learn a great deal from your mother (or father), from your coworkers, from your boss, from your friends… a process that throughout most of human history was the preferred method. Mother would teach daughter how to care for a baby (or, yes, do the laundry), father would teach son how to sow, or fish, or hunt, tribe elders would pass on the group’s history and lore… as the Beatles said: “Though she was born a long, long time ago – your mother should know!”

And even today, much knowledge is moved around this way. And many young people do ask their parents  for advice; the parents  in turn benefit from their kids’ expertise in other areas. No one, incidentally, reads the manufacturer manuals!  These  would get much better results if instead of the reams of multilingual safety appendices that everyone ignores they’d simply say “as to how to use this device safely – you really want to ask your Dad!”…

The abused art of form design

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on June 28, 2011
in Bad design
. 0 Comments

People who design forms never cease to amaze.

This was very obvious in the era of paper forms. You’d get forms with fields that are patently too small for their content; like this snippet from one I recently filled:

Name ______________________________ E-mail ___________

Cellular: _____________________________________________

What were they thinking?? Many email addresses won’t fit on that short line; and the next line is far too long for a phone number. Why not switch the slots?

This situation is very common, especially when it comes to addresses; you often end up overflowing the allotted space, which can result in barely legible data. Which is really weird, because with a five minute effort the form’s designer could have made things right for thousands of users later on. Don’t they see how ridiculous it all is?!

Another problem is forms that get photocopied and/or faxed so many times that they’re barely legible at all; strangely, bureaucrats seem not to mind getting back forms whose fixed portion is smudged and illegible. Evidently it’s the act of forcing us to submit a formal form that counts, not whether you can read it…

And now, we are paperless; you’d think all would be well with electronic forms… but no. Some organizations I deal with actually mail you a scan of a smudged photocopy of a paper form, and ask you to print it out, fill it with pen and fax it back, adding to the smudging. And even when they send an editable electronic version, they never use the features available in the  Word or PDF formats to steer the filling of the right fields. Instead, they just send around a plain document and expect you to type in the data; and since they use underlines to denote fields, we end up with forms like this:

First Name __________John Smith________________________

Address: ________100 Main street_______________________

and so on…

At least in this last case, you can put things right – put the word processor in Overwrite mode and replace the underlines with your text, or just delete the underlines, ending with:

First Name: John Smith

Address: 100 Main street

Then, if you import a scan of your signature in, you can send the filled form back as an attachment and be done with it!

Grand Prize for Engrish

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on November 18, 2009
in Bad design
. 2 Comments

We’ve discussed Engrish before… it’s always hilarious, but this one beats them all. Read it through!Engrish shirt tag by Azouri

This is from a very nice flannel shirt imported by Azouri Clothing Ltd, and manufactured in China.

The amazing part is that in addition to mangling the spelling and grammar, as in “You can’t using bleash”, which is fairly normal, these folks invented some linguistic innovations that – at first glance – seem to reflect some serious erudition, like “hydrograph”, “wield”, “fumigator” and “micro therm smoothing” (“ironing” to the rest of us). It sounds like the output of an English professor who was locked in a dungeon for decades until he went mad…

And if you can decipher “powder of in dusion bleach”, do share!

We aren’t all noobs!

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on October 11, 2009
in Bad design
. 0 Comments

One gripe I have with the help systems in many consumer software applications: they’re written with the assumption that we users are all clueless newbies.

Take the Microsoft Office tools: they have many advanced and powerful capabilities; it is both interesting and useful to know what exactly they do. But the Help system only gives you the step-by-step “How To”. Say you want to try the Auto-Summarize feature of MS Word, and are curious what exactly it does (I mean, beyond automatically creating a summary). How does the feature work? What algorithm is involved? How does it identify the important parts of the document? Knowing this is not only interesting; it can let us users know what to expect, and how to use the feature better. But all we are served is a sequence of steps like

  1. On the Tools menu, click AutoSummarize.
  2. Select the type of summary you want.

And so on. Necessary and useful for the computer-naive types, but not sufficient for the technical or curious.

I sometimes imagine the day when I’ll run into a button (perhaps in Word 2015?) that says “Stop world hunger”, and when I check it up in Help it will only say

  1. To stop world hunger, click the button Stop world hunger.

C’mon, folks, you develop awesome code – let us know what is going on behind the scenes. At least give us a link to this information after the stuff the noobs use is listed…

A noble piece of hardware!

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on August 10, 2009
in Odds and Ends
. 0 Comments

Engrish is all around us; here is a recent sighting that made my day.

Noble Keyboard by Teac

This is from the box of a Teac Media Systems slim multimedia keyboard, model TK-5108. One can’t help but wonder whether this item is noble by birth, being descended from a long line of aristocratic peripherals, or is its praise the result of some outstanding feat demonstrating strong nobility of character.  🙂

A feast of technical illustration

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on May 9, 2009
in Good design
. 0 Comments

A picture is worth a thousand words – when it is a good picture. There is a huge gap in effectiveness between the best and the worst illustrations you see in technical and scientific publications. The trick is to convey the essence of what’s being shown, whether it is a machine, a building or an anatomical detail of some biological specimen, without drowning it in the irrelevant; and it gets trickier when you’re dealing with cutouts and other means of showing inner details of complex systems. Many illustrators never get the hang of it…

But today I accidentally surfed onto the site of Beau and Alan Daniels, producers of “cutaway, ghosted and phantom view illustrations in various styles including: Blueprint, watercolor, photorealistic, pencil, pen and ink, pastels, and black and white line art”… and they have an extensive portfolio there of incredible illustrations spanning technology, science and biology that is truly a feast to the eyes. I simply had to share it with you!

Take a look and enjoy!

My blogging passes the immersion test!

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on February 27, 2009
in Design history and Improvement
. 1 Comment

A few days ago I was at the IEC history of computing museum where they also exhibited their progress in map making – from old blueprints and paper maps to modern CAD and GIS software. They had there an old 1960’s map that caught my eye – a 1:50,000 topographic map by the Israel Survey Department. These were the best you could get when I was a kid hiking around the country; every house was correctly shown as a black dot of the exact right shape, and every hill and gully were visible in the contour lines.

I looked at the map and it struck me how much maps’ visual quality has progressed since then, with modern printing techniques. The stark colors used in the 60’s are replaced today with delicate pastels; the topography is enhanced by fine shading; the important details are not drowned out by the density of equally strong contour lines. The information of the old maps was perhaps perfect, but to the modern eye they look, well… old. Unfortunately, as far as I know the maps you can buy today at such a detailed scale use the same old techniques.

Then the next day I came to see a new Israel Survey Department map that was wondrous fine to behold, done in pastel shades and fine shading gradations, reminiscent of what you see in Google Maps but with all the detail of the maps of my youth. And my friend Gadi happened by, and I said unto him, lo, see this map, for it is very finely done, and only the other day had I wished such were made; and he looked upon the map and found it good. And I said to him, surely I should blog about this map and compare it to the older ones, and he said, verily thou shouldst. And I resolved to make it so. And then the matter passed from my mind until my alarm clock went off to wake me for my day’s labors.

The bad news is, evidently the Israel Survey Dept. has yet to produce the fine map I saw in my dream. The good news is, looks like my blogging has reached the point where it passes the immersion test. I’ve found long ago that when I really immerse myself in some practice or task, it makes its way into my dreams. As a forensic scientist, I would dream of Gunshot Residue Particles; as a Thin Films VLSI engineer I would examine LTO defects in dreamland; and when I took to developing software, I would dream at times of bugs – I remember once actually solving a particularly stubborn one in my sleep, a solution that turned out to be valid in real life. So now I dream of searching for stuff to blog about!

Topographic Maps

As for my resolution, I can’t show you the nonexistent topographic map, but I can and hereby do show you a comparison of an old ISD map and a detail of the same area from Google Maps (Terrain option) that illustrates the visual qualities I was dreaming of merging with it.