Deskspace Blog

Chapter 2: Post Production Pro

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Attending IBC in Amsterdam early in September in order to do a Press Conference to Launch Post Production Pro I took the opportunity to visit the Stands (Booths if you are North American) of the main competitors to our product. One wasn't actually at the show although I gather they held a party, perhaps to celebrate not having to stand on a stand for 5 days? I also talked to various resellers and actual users of the competing products to find out what they thought of the competition so we could plan how best to market Post Production Pro.

Several things struck me:

Software DNA

You can see the DNA denoting the origin of each of these products quite clearly in their current form. The DNA of an software product encompasses the key assumptions about the main purpose of the system made by its original architect. Such assumptions are virtually impossible to remove later when marketing say the product should also do something else, not originally envisaged, unless you rewrite the entire system. Having recently rewritten our original first generation Deskspace system, aimed at the law firms market, into the second generation aimed at any type of professional - using a very high level of configuration to achieve this - I have learnt alot about software DNA. For example, one competitor was originally a room booking system. Today may years later, if you want to plan an activity that will not occur on your own premises you still have to create an imaginary "Room" in which that activity takes place.

Powerful but difficult to use

The competiton produce undoubtedly powerful products, if you know how to do it you can do some great things with them. Some very clever people have laboured for years to extend and develop further the original information systems envisaged by their creator and you have to give them great respect for that.

However, the key word here is "IF". In reality, talking to actual users, they generally find much of what these systems will do far too complex to use in practice in a frantically busy working environment.

True Ease of Use

Thus when we presented Post Production Pro and said that at our first deployment at Shepperton Studios they had used it for 12 weeks before asking for any training - I detected an element of surprise in the room.

In our design we have focused on what we call "true ease of use". That means that a member of the target user group can sit down at Post Production Pro and use it without formal training. They may require training or master classes to learn about the more sophisticated power user shortcuts, but that comes later after they have become familar with basic use of their new information system.

What users of competing products say

Interestingly, having talked to quite a number of users I have yet to find any actual user of the competition willing say anything really positive about the system they are using. Comments like:

"the best of a mediocre bunch"

"I hate it but we have paid for it so we have to use it for several years minimum"

"I can't wait to get rid of it - as soon as my boss will agree"

"It falls over regularly when linking to our core enterprise content management system and we have to wait for several days before they fix it. After a few months the supplier's interest in supporting us has much reduced"

are all I have heard. In fact so negative I searched hard for a positive comment I could include here for balance, unsuccessfully. So it is up to me to give the positive comment that, as I mentioned above, I am personally very impressed by what these systems will do, if you know how.

Charcoal Interface

I could hardly help but notice that many of the current generation of digital asset management and editing software made extensive use of grey and near black interface elements and thus decided to offer an alternative interface for Post Production Pro inspired by this approach.

Three days later we has a trial version we shipped to several users to try, got their feedback which was enthusiastic, made a couple of adjustments and released it. Thus our users can now select from three interfaces:

"Lite" using simple graphics for low powered machines

"Pro" our original much loved colour keyed interface in mathematically balanced shades

"Pro Charcoal" using mainly mid / dark greys and near black with a few hints of the original colours

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How to deal with Address Management?

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Basic Decisions

When designing any information system that includes some form of contact management system there are a common set of decisions to be made before you get very far:

(1) How will we handle peoples' alternative contact details, work, home etc?

(2) How will we handle addresses?

Over the last ten years my approach has developed from the keep it simple, home and work details in a contact record approach, essentially a flat architecture linking into a related work "Organisation", to our current approach where:

(a) every contact has unlimited different personalities [ie different personas for home work and other activities]
(b) every organisation has unlimited different locations [ie different offices etc]
(c) every personality can relate to a specific organisation location or not as required
(d) every personality and/or location can relate to a specific address if required
(e) every different address comprises a record in the address table but no address is ever duplicated

Pros and Cons

The advantage of our earlier approach was simplicity, always a virtue, and it took very little time to produce.

The downside is its very severe limitations. Generally with this sort of approach there are never enough places to put the new information users want to store and you end up with address data in the notes field. It offers no means of retention records of previous employment, always useful when analysing social and business personal networks or considering employment history.

The downside of our more sophisticated approach is the time and work involved in developing the model so that it actually offers users what they expect to see. The work was been a great deal more than I had originally envisaged. The investment in pursuing and completing this aspect of our system design has been significant.

The upside is that we do now have an amazingly flexible powerful but easy to use contact management system which through its relational structure offers the ability to record whatever information our users wish and also offers lots of real added value. Now, for example, our users can see who shares an address, who used to work together or do work together, how far apart are different people and/or organisation locations, which contacts and/or offices are any given country, region, county/state, city, town - ie all the "natural" questions that are not so easy to answer using post codes.

Automatic Address Cleanup

We have necessarily had to create address cleanup procedures which is able to take the various forms of address data in legacy systems, from everything in one address field upwards, and correctly parse the different elements out into Country, PostCode, County/State, Place, subPlace, Road etc fields.

This gives us an enormous advantage when starting to work with a new client - since our ability to take their existing legacy contact data, which is seldom in good order, and automatically create from it a full relational address structure has significant value add from their perspective.

UK Geographic Address Structure

As a consequence we have created our own UK structure for all the main geographical elements in the UK including postcodes which has proved a very useful resource.

Useability

In terms of useability - always the key measure of successful design - our approach is to give the user with a simple requirement a simple interface which merely stores and displays the required single name, address and other contact information. On input they can select from existing addresses or input a new one. If they input an existing address the system identifies this and gives them the existing address.

It is only when they want to create a further address that more options appear and it becomes evident that they can store many more different addresses.

Future Proof

The long term upside for us is that our investment in creating this level of sophistication future proofs our data architecture since its completely relational and extensible structure can easily accommodate any conceivable future requirement and hence we will have to do very little to it for the forseeable future.

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British Gas Erroneous Billing (Further Updated)

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A Big Gas Bill: Out of the Blue

Having transferred our domestic Gas Supply to EDF from British Gas in 2003 we were naturally surprised to recently receive bills, out of the blue, from British Gas - claiming that we owed them several hundred pounds. This escalated after about 2 weeks to advising that they were commencing legal action to recover this debt.

Given that we were definitely not a British Gas customer we found this odd, and a little disturbing.

Was this a feature of global warming, or the Russian effect on the UK gas market - maybe they were charging us a suppliment for gas purchased years ago - or a penalty for daring to switch suppliers?

It was none of those things, in fact it appears to be an occurence of Data Transfer Drama.

Apparently many people have suffered similar problems. It appears that the new SAP system they are deploying has suffered teething problems resulting in many thousands of complaints about incorrect billing and accounts.

Energywatch

Having obtained our "Meter Point Reference" from EDF we spoke to Energywatch on 0845 9060708 who very efficiently checked and confirmed that we were indeed served by EDF not British Gas. Can't praise them highly enough, they were patient, efficient and authorative.

If you have a similar problem you can telephone British Gas on 0845 6070870, to escalate your complaint to the highest level.

Data Transfer Drama

In the end British Gas advised that they had a new billing system and that in transferring the data from the old system they had mistakenly allocated our Postal Address to another Gas Meter within the same PostCode.

Thus they knew the postcode area within which their meter was situate but, so they told us, were not certain of the correct address, and thus customer, for the meter, and erroneously allocated our address.

The bills we received were all addressed to "The Occupier", demonstrating that they did not know the identity of their "customer", merely the address.

What exactly has gone wrong?

It would be interesting to hear exactly what has gone wrong here? What is the underlying cause of this Data Transfer Drama?

It appears that the data conversion model may have suffered partial failure since they presumably had the correct addresses related to the relevant meters and Meter Point References under the old system yet appear to have failed to complete a correct transfer of that data?

Whilst it is true that address translation is not always easy it is a pity that British Gas's apparent failure in this case seems to have imposed great stress / inconvenience on many domestic customers receiving erroneous bills.

We await the promised letter of apology.

Update: 15/May/2007: We received an appropriate letter of apology from British Gas as promised.

Update: 15/August/2007: Amazingly we have now received another letter of demand from British Gas - it appears that letters of apology are ignored when a major business has an enormous and unresolved muddle within its data system.

Apparently "Legal Proceedings will be commenced". As we really don't have the time to spend hours on the phone trying to get them to update their records correctly so watch this space.

Update: 21/September/2007: Having used the British Gas Top Level Complaints Tel No above again ( 0845 6070870 ) to make another compliant after receiving further threats of legal proceedings and visits by Bailiffs I spoke with Robert Syson from their customer services who explained the following:

(a) The local delivery grid in our area is owned by another company, no longer Transco

(b) There are meters which British Gas supply in our area, on new housing developments, where they have the meter number and the Plot Number, but no actual postal address.

(c) As they have no actual postal address they send the bills for these new plots to the nearest postal address they have on their system which is not already a known British Gas Customer.

(d) Surprisingly they do not appear to address their bills to the Plot Number on the development.

It appears that although they apologise for the inconvenience caused they do regard guessing the postal address of a new meter and then treating that house holder as their new customer, threatening to sue them for debt etc, as legitimate business practice. Logically I would have thought that they should treat the developer of the new property as their customer until they are advised of the actual postal address.

It does seem amazing that they regard this practice as implicitely reasonable.

If Deskspace had designed their information system we would not have permitted this unfortunate situation to arise.

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Colour as a cue in interface design

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Have attitudes to, and use of colour in, information systems changed over recent years as monitors have got better and the number of things on professionals screens multiplied?

As screens get bigger and better, and many professionals now work on two or more screens, the issue has grown of how best to readily inform the user with appropriate cues about what he or she is looking at.

It is true that shades of neutral grey can be quite pleasing

Received wisdom has been that use of various shades of mid-atlantic grey is safe and generally best. This view has been strengthened where garish colours have been deployed and users have had to resort to dark glasses and aspirins. It is true that shades of grey can be quite pleasing and probably no-one ever got fired for developing a grey interface.

However, where any integrated information system, displaying a wide variety of data, nestles on your desktop amongst a variety of other similarly grey artifacts it can be quite difficult to know immediately what you are looking at and clearly data only becomes information when the user understands what it is they are contemplating.

Can colour improve the user experience?

There are many ways of informing the user but I have long held the view that colour is the best. It is simple, non verbal and quickly becomes intuitive.

So how do you do this well and avoid the aspirin syndrome?

Clearly a good designer is a great start, but we thought maybe there was more to it than just artistic intuition, maybe there was a pattern we could identify and use?

Every software designer worth their salt is an expert at spotting and exploiting patterns, pattern recognition is at the heart of analysing a system and delivering an effective solution.

We took the mathematical approach

Having been guilty in the past of some arguably heavy handed use of the colour brush, we decided to look at the maths. The outcome was a series of colours which had consistent RBG values, different combinations of a limited set of RBG values, where related types of information had colours associated with them which were themselves associated mathematically.

Avoid large areas or blocks of colour.

We took various shades of grey and used minimal areas of the chosen colours, just enough to cue the user subtly so that they would automatically associate each colour with the relevant type of information. We took it as axiomatic that we should avoid any big blocks of strong colour.

Then we used different densities of the colour to signify immediacy, more dense more immediate, less dense less immediate - further away. Fairly simple, but effective.

An unqualified success - "easy on the eye"

The result has been consistent user approval and a complete absence of any desire to make any further changes so we have at least secured feature-lock on colour. Thus I would conclude that professionals are now ready for the introduction of some colour into their lives, provided it is done just right, so it is pleasent to look at - as one client observed - "easy on the eye".

Some questions for you:

1 how do you feel generally about colour in your computer interface?

2 do you associate any colours with happiness?

3 do you associate any colours with sadness?

4 do you associate any colours with success?

5 do you associate any colours with failure?

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