User interface stories from a Tokyo hotel

Mar 04

JohnUncategorized 5 Comments

In Aza’s recent blog, he was looking for examples of good, and bad, user interfaces.

Here is the bath/shower tap that I found in my hotel here in Tokyo yesterday morning. After quite some trial-and-error, I’ve figured out that with this one tap, you can:

  • shower
  • or bath
  • or both
  • while adjusting temperature for each *independently*!!
  • and with a safety red button (visible on top left) which you have to press before you can raise shower temperature above 40C to avoid accidental scalding. Note the lack of scald control on the bath tap, as its not needed.
  • and with a separate water on/off lever (visible on top right), once you get the shower water temperature just right, you can leave the temperature knobs set, and the shower temperature will automatically be perfect tomorrow morning! :-)

While it does do all of these things quite well, and I do now like it, it was more of an IQ test then I needed in a pre-caffeinated, jet lagged state, first thing yesterday morning.

Putting hot/cold taps by the shower head, and another set of hot/cold taps by the bath spout is (probably) more complex to install, but would have been more intuitive to use, imho. Also, as a nit: while the red “scald-prevention” safety button makes sense, the other two red dots are only for alignment; using the same color red for those confused me into thinking they were also for safety / hot water. Took some experiments to backtrack and figure out one was shower, one was bath, and the extra red dots were decoys. And yes, I got quite wet in the process! :-)

UPDATE: I just discovered that part of the tap pivots!?!?! Part of it sticks out so far that I bumped into it while showering. At first I was worried that I broke it, but after some playing discovered its hinged and is designed to swing fully back to the wall in either direction. Thats good, because it makes standing in the shower much easier now. Of course, I’ve no idea why the water-into-bath tap had to protrude that far in the first place; somehow a shorter, non-pivoting, taphead seems like it would have been easier. John 12mar2009

Fun and Games with Major Updates

Mar 04

JohnUncategorized 15 Comments

When we make a Major Update available, all users at least see the Major Update offer. Right? Well, actually, not always.

Short answer:

  • When we make a major update offer available, only some of our users see the major update offer at all.
  • For users who might see a major update offer, they only have the potential to see the major update offer *until* we next make a new minor update available. At that point, the major update offer is effectively disabled / turned off for all users.

For the longer answer, make some coffee and read on!

First, to set context, here’s a diagram showing what we did for FF2, including the 3 different major update offers.

With that in mind, lets start by looking at a straightforward case:

  • Mozilla makes FF2.0.0.15 -> FF2.0.0.16 updates available
  • User upgrades from FF2.0.0.15 -> FF2.0.0.16
  • Mozilla make FF2.0.0.16 -> FF3.0.1 major update available
  • User see MU offer from FF2.0.0.16 -> FF3.0.1
    • some users upgrade to FF3.0.1, some stay on FF2.0.0.16

All that worked as expected. Now, lets revisit that scenario to find some “gotchas”.

1) User never sees the major update offer because they are on an untargeted older (or newer!) dot release.

  • Mozilla makes FF2.0.0.16->FF3.0.1 major update available, targeting users on the latest available FF2.0.0.16 release.
  • By design, this major update is only visible to FF2.0.0.16 users, so FF2.0.0.15 users will not see this major update offer.
  • Once FF2.0.0.17 is available, and users move to FF2.0.0.17, there is no way for those FF2.0.0.17 users to go back to see the FF2.0.0.16->FF3.0.1 major update.
    • A user on FF2.0.0.17 needed to wait until we produced FF2.0.0.18, upgrade to FF2.0.0.18, wait for us to produce a new major update offer from FF2.0.0.18, and then react to that new major update offer before we release FF2.0.0.19.
  • Similarly, once FF2.0.0.17 is available, users on FF2.0.0.15 can only upgrade to FF2.0.0.17; they are forced to skip over FF2.0.0.16, and are never given a chance to see the major update offer.
  • Today (03mar2009), we currently only have major update visible to FF2.0.0.20 users. This is important because according to today’s metrics data, 49% of our FF2 users are not on FF2.0.0.20. This means that 49% of FF2 users cannot even see our major update offer to move to FF3.0.5:

06.1M (51%) FF2.0.0.20 users who can see major update offer
05.8M (49%) other FF2 users who cannot see major update offer
=====
11.9M total FF2 users

Summary: major update targets upgrading users from a specific dot release. If a user is not on that specific dot release, they don’t see the offer.

2) Some users never sees the major update offer, even if they are on the targeted dot release, because of a race condition.

  • Mozilla makes FF2.0.0.16->FF3.0.1 major update available
    • This major update is only visible to FF2.0.0.16 users, so FF2.0.0.15 users do not see this.
  • Mozilla makes FF2.0.0.16->FF2.0.0.17 updates available
  • Existing FF2.0.0.16 users no longer see major update offer, and can now only see the update to FF2.0.0.17.
  • Any FF2.0.0.16 users who had their browser turned off long enough would miss this time window, and never see the major update offer at all.

Summary: The only users who can see the major update offer were using FF2.0.0.16 between the time the major update was first made available, and the time FF2.0.0.17 was released.

Hopefully all that made sense. Its tricky to explain without hand-waving in front of a whiteboard, so please let me know if you have any questions.

Finally, I’d really love to hear any suggestions people have on what we could do differently, so that more users see these major update offers?

UPDATE: I accidentally dropped some important disclaimers. See this follow-on blogpost for details. Sorry for any confusion. John 06mar2009

Expiry dates on food

Mar 01

JohnMozilla, Travel 20 Comments

When traveling, my packing-list includes emptying out the fridge before heading to the airport. Fortunately, I have almost nothing perishable in the fridge (chocolate, cliff bars, coffee, beer, vodka all last a *long* time), so this is quick.
However, when throwing out the last of the milk, I noticed the expiry date:

  1. A typo; ARP should be APR! Huh!? I always assumed those dates were all computer timestamped, but is there really a human putting in a new expiry date every day? Has anyone else ever noticed something like this?
  2. Since when did milk last over a month? This milk was bought slightly over a week ago (approx Feb 20th) and claims to be good until April 5th, which is approx 6 weeks!?! How is that possible? I’m used to milk only being good for a few days.

If you don’t already know of it, check out www.stilltasty.com. It answers all important questions like how long will pizza safely last when frozen / when in fridge / when left out at room temperature. :-)

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