notebook

Conservatism in time investments

I just came up with a good test for determining whether something is designed usably enough for it to be a safe bet that normal people will attempt to use it: whether I will. I just realised that I am extremely conservative on investing time in unknowns. I was at Cute Overload and realised I was only reading entries featuring photos, skipping the ones involving videos. I wondered why I was doing that and it was because I felt it possible I might have to spend quite some time getting a video to play. If it wasn't one-click I'd be very sad.

I finally found the courage to try to play a video because one of my website development projects will depend on easily accessible video, and I thought I'd check in on how the rest of the world lives. (I live a version or two behind on most technologies. A note about that two paragraphs hence.) I hoped it would be one-click, and thankfully it was. Now I feel better about embedded YouTube videos.

As a design rule, it works well for me that if I would use something I can trust that others would. I just have to design for myself. This rule won't work so well for you unless you can get me to try your thing, or better unless you look into your interactions and find the same rule holds for you.

Finally, some people reading this will be of the preconception that I am rather leading edge in my technologies and what I'll try. (Witness that I carry an ultraportable laptop about my person, powered on, 24 hours a day, with always-on cellular Internet.) I just realised that the distinction is that I am very conservative in time investments, but fairly adventurous in money expenditures. $60/mo for Internet is slightly pricey, but having no obstacles in reading and writing and managing my projects and computer use turns out to be invaluable. From a time-investment perspective, my ultraportable was no different from any seven-pound laptop with which everybody is completely familiar, but most people have a fairly low upper limit on the price they'll pay per volume for a thing. A lot more could be said on these topics, but for now, if this is a new thought for you, consider that different people value time and money differently and sometimes in much higher correlation with variables on third axes than each other.

How Google Street View could be made more private

I think an important step Google could take to make Street View more private would be to remove from imagery anything which moves between shots. As a bad but easy-to-understand example, if the van had three sets of cameras facing sideways as it moved, the pixels for each point in space could vote: agreement in two out of three means an object is fixed. This way the number of people photographed could be greatly reduced, resulting in clearer pictures of the streets which is what Google says they're after anyway. Alternatively, each pass through an area on different days could be used all the same to decide on impermanent pixels to remove.