Fugu Talk

Popups have evolved from just popping up to jumping in front of you. In some cases, they are “nice” enough to only pop up when your mouse moves over them (the evil twin of tooltips), in which case you end up playing a browser game called Avoid-the-Hotspot. Here’s one that jumps in over the reading area from the right. Surprise!

Worse are the ones that abandon restraint and just say “Here I am. Look at me! Look at me! It’s time for my close-up, Mr. Demille!” I ran into this popup while scrolling down and trying to read the article – and of course it pops up right where you’re trying to read. It’s as if those ubiquitous television badges (reminding you that you’re watching “Syfy”!) were placed in the center of the TV screen instead of the corner.

From an advertising perspective I suppose it might be considered effective in that you can’t ignore it (you could say the same about a punch in the face), but I make a point of not “sharing” those sites via Twitter or whatever – I’m not going to inflict that on anyone else.

I don’t have a lot of nice things to say about EULA’s or TOS’s, but I’ll say one thing about Apple – their general reputation for good user interfaces extends to EULA display. Nothing fancy, but they generally present them in a large window that is actually suitable for reading a document, like the one I just read for my iTunes update.

You might say of course, what’s the big deal, but then I started up Microsoft Works on my new Windows laptop and got a lengthy EULA displayed in a tiny text window you usually see with installers, except this is a startup window. The fact that the window is non-resizeable might lead one to conspiracy theories. I can’t imagine anyone actually bothering to scroll through a few lines at a time to read the entire agreement, which I’m sure is the point.

And then I decided to take enter some tax deductions and started up Deduction Pro, which isn’t even a real app anymore but takes you online (yes, I really want to put my financial information on your web site!). In a browser, the inappropriate tiny size of the EULA window is ridiculously obvious. There’s barely enough room to display “PLEASE READ CAREFULLY”. Yeah, right.

Yesterday YouTube ditched their five-star rating system for thumbs up/down. AppBoy was way ahead of them – my most recent new app, Fugu Type, benefited, receiving 15 out of 16 “Love It!”s

In contrast, Fugu Type has received no ratings on the App Store. Maybe Apple should follow the trend and dispense with their five-star rating system. I have to admit, my own method for rating apps is suspect (+1 for not crashing, -1 for ads…)

Lately, I’ve been seeing this ad where a young woman says she had an epiphany in the back of a taxi that “Windows should be simpler.” So she told Microsoft and they took her suggestion! I’m jealous, partly because it never occurred to me that Windows should be simpler, and also because last time I called up Microsoft, to ask them to stop billing me for the Hotmail account that Best Buy signed me up for when I bought a PC there, they kept transferring me to successively less cooperative and articulate phone reps and then charged me for an additional month. I guess I should have opened with, “Hey, I have an idea for you – Windows should be simpler. And give me my $20 back!”

Putting together a hugely bad user interface is hard work – it requires painstaking assembly of numerous small bad interfaces. Recently, I received an email containing my World Market Rewards ID (are there any stores left where they you can just buy something without donating yourself to a database?) and a link to a confirmation page. In most online registrations, I can just click the link and I’m done. Here, you have to enter the code they emailed you, but you can’t even cut-and-paste it – the fields are separated so you have to type it in as if you’re entering a serial number for Microsoft Windows. I’m in no hurry to receive “more special offers”, so I’ve let it sit, while they send me reminders to finish my registration.

A recent reading of Richard Tedlow’s excellent biography of Andy Grove renewed my appreciation for Moore’s Law, which states that the number of transistors that can be placed on a chip will double every two years. This is why my latest MacBook Pro costs less than an Apple computer from 30 years ago.

Meanwhile, I have C-SPAN2 on right now televising the hearings on the latest Anthem Blue Cross rate increase. I say “latest” because I haven’t heard anyone mention that Anthem raised rates last year. I joined Anthem two years ago because my previous insurer, Healthnet, quadrupled my premiums over five years and then for a while terminated me after they lost (i.e. cashed without crediting me) my check, then after I complained to the State of California sent me a half-hearted apology blaming me for writing illegibly – which normally is a pretty valid accusation, except they addressed me as “Ralph Chu”.

I haven’t had a similar dispute with Anthem, but they did increase my premium immediately upon acceptance because I take cholesterol pills, and then another $2 per bill for not letting them automatically draft from my checking account, and then premium increase last year and the now much-publicized increase. Altogether, my premiums have doubled in two years (you can see why I didn’t allow them access to my checking account – they might decide it’s more efficient to empty the whole thing immediately).

Oddly, my cholesterol pills have gone up in price, nearly doubling in the last five years. Each batch is getting more expensive to make? (Apparently there’s a big pharma inverse to Moore’s Law).

Not everything has gone up. My car insurance has gone down over the years. As with computers, you get more car for the money these days, too (although not on the same curve as Moore’s Law – otherwise, we’d be commuting to work like George Jetson). Some costs have been volatile. Like real estate. I bought my condo in 2001 – it might list for 30% more now, but probably would take longer to sell. However, compared to three years ago, it’s a deal. Gas also has gone up and down, but I’d guess over the past decade it’s up at least 50%. I just read that college tuition has outpaced inflation over the last twenty years, which means it’s probably been doing that longer, since I went to college twenty years ago and I heard something similar then (business schools, heal thyself!)

The problem is that, as far as I can tell, pay hasn’t gone up, except for a Web 2.0 bubble a few years ago in Silicon Valley. As a contractor, I can get paid what I quoted ten years ago (with a bit of eye-rolling and hand-wringing), and a good way to avoid taking on more projects is to quote more. On the other hand, most of my work is in the game business, which isn’t notoriously high-paying. But the IGDA has stepped up and is now offering a group insurance plan, which was a timely factor in my recent membership renewal. It would be an interesting turn of events if people started entering the game industry for the benefits.

I was dismayed when the new IGDA leadership started off by announcing a member survey. What’s the big deal? Well, to put it bluntly, surveys are lame.

First of all, it rings of amateurism. It’s one of those bright ideas you expect from fresh-faced business school grads, along with “branding” and “monetization”. (“hey, let’s do a survey!”) And I’m not saying this is something just biz-school grads do – I joined a engineering-oriented startup just before they sent out a survey to potential customers and frankly, it was a waste of time. Everyone has their pet not-well-thought-out idea of how to design a product – if they really know what they’re talking about, you should hire them or work for them. And most of those surveyed weren’t the purchase decision makers, anyway.

Second, it’s annoying. I get pop-up surveys every time I leave my online bank account (“What can we do better?” “Get rid of this pop-up”) and other sites (like the KTLA news site). And I’ve only seen one or two on-line surveys that bothered to tell you how many questions are included up front are provide a progress indicator. The last IGDA survey I started said “this will take approximately ten minutes” – that’s both vague and unappealing. I once got suckered into taking a survey at GDC to get the “free” t-shirt, but after ten questions I asked the attendant how much longer it would take. I forget the answer, but it explained why the line was so long, so I bailed out. At least on-line surveys are less obnoxious than telephone surveys (“this will take just a few minutes…”). Non-profits are guilty, too – before I got rid of my land line I used to receive telephone surveys from non-profits (“help us out with our study”). I even left one non-profit after I showed up and they put me on a phone to call donors (“thanks for donating, so now I’m going to call you at dinnertime…”)

Thirdly, surveys generally lack rigor. You can construct and interpret a survey any which say – it’s like a focus group without the free food. And it’s the laziest form of research, like the students who post their homework questions online and ask for answers. There is some entertainment value, like the call-in opinions solicited by news shows (although I could go to a bar to get a man-on-the-street opinion, and a beer to go with it). I always check the Game Developer salary survey out of morbid curiosity, but I wouldn’t cite the results in a scientific paper. One year I was surprised to see the highest salary listed was $200,000 and then noticed they mentioned that they omitted any salaries over $200,000. I put much more stock in Christer Ericson’s article that lists real salaries based on Department of Labor records.

Finally, there’s no substitute for real data, but if you’re searching for subjective conclusions, swing the other way and really talk to people. In the startup mentioned above, there was an existing loyal following of customers who could have acted as an advisory panel. The IGDA already has an active member forum (and if it’s not active enough, there’s one thing that could be fixed – how about an RSS feed?) and personally, as someone who’s not only a paying IGDA member but a paying studio affiliate member, I would have appreciated something more than a mass e-mail soliciting my input. And sometimes, if you really want to see what the situation is, just look around. To pick on the IGDA one last time, I looked at their latest diversity survey. It’s well intentioned, and probably a good idea (like the Quality of Life survey), but studio owners and managers aren’t going to knock themselves out reporting how much they resemble a Minuteman patrol, and I’m going to guess your average white male isn’t going to be startled that he’s surrounded by other white males. But just browse around the forums where female game developers compare notes (it’s both horrific and entertaining) or just attend GDC and take a look around, especially in the progamming sessions. Even I was taken aback in a DirectX lecture when I looked around the hundred-plus crowd and couldn’t spot any women (not that I was expressly searching for some) and saw only a handful of non-white males. For real awareness, there’s nothing like immersion.

So, if you really think surveys are useful, well, just include that question in your next survey…

I just looked over the Twitter terms of service (a while after starting to use it – shame on me!) and I’m pleasantly amazed there’s no indemnification clause. That’s a breath of fresh air. More typically, when you sign up for a web service, there’s a clause like this one (taken from the WordPress terms of service)

1. Indemnification. You agree to indemnify and hold harmless Automattic, its contractors, and its licensors, and their respective directors, officers, employees and agents from and against any and all claims and expenses, including attorneys’ fees, arising out of your use of the Website, including but not limited to your violation of this Agreement.

That’s nice – if anyone, not just the company, but anyone employed, on the board, contracted, whatever, is sued or suffers any “expenses” in any way related to your use of the site, whether or not you did anything wrong, you’re on the hook. I’ve even seen this on sites of non-profit organizations – hey, give us some money, and pay our legal expenses!

It’d be great if those proponents of tort reform to help out those poor big corporations suffering from class-action lawsuits would take a look at removing the legal traps from consumer transactions (and how about those EULA’s in shrink-wrapped software that you agree to even before you can read them? Don’t get me started…) In the meantime, try to reward those few bright lights of reasonableness with your business. I was going to point to just one other example, the Goodreads TOS which has an indemnification clause specifically for breach of contract,

You agree to indemnify and hold Goodreads, its subsidiaries, affiliates, officers, agents, and other partners and employees, harmless from any loss, liability, claim, or demand, including reasonable attorney’s fees, made by any third party due to or arising out of your use of the Service in violation of this Agreement and/or arising from a breach of these Terms & Conditions and/or any breach of your representations and warranties set forth above.

which seems quite reasonable, but it turns out they amended it least year (without even mentioning it on their blog) to this:

You agree to defend, indemnify and hold harmless Goodreads and its subsidiaries, agents, managers, and other affiliated companies, and their employees, contractors, agents, officers and directors, from and against any and all claims, damages, obligations, losses, liabilities, costs or debt, and expenses (including but not limited to attorney’s fees) arising from: (i) your use of and access to the Service, including any data or content transmitted or received by you; (ii) your violation of any term of this Agreement, including without limitation your breach of any of the representations and warranties above; (iii) your violation of any third-party right, including without limitation any right of privacy, publicity rights or Intellectual Property Rights; (iv) your violation of any law, rule or regulation of the United States or any other country; (v) any claim or damages that arise as a result of any of your User Content or any that are submitted via your account; or (vi) any other party’s access and use of the Service with your unique username, password or other appropriate security code.

I don’t know why they put ii-vi in there, (i) seems to cover any possible case. Now, you might say that’s just lawyer stuff, in practice you don’t need to worry about it, but in that case, it doesn’t need to be there. And if I can’t rely on a common-sense intepretation of the text, do I need to hire a lawyer every time I sign up for a web service? C’mon.

This is an interesting use of math. 24-hour protection, if you use it every 12 hours. Why not say year-long protection? Or lifetime protection? Or if until the end of time, if you happen to live that long?

During my trip to Toronto this summer I was struck by the nature of the health care debate there. Well, there were two debates – the one that a cab driver wanted to stage with me comparing the Canadian system to the US system, and the one I read about in their newspapers. In the latter, health care news centered around issues like citizens who wanted to opt for private insurance and doctors who wanted to conduct more screening not approved for coverage by the government. Conspicuously absent was any angst about anyone not receiving any coverage at all or anyone not receiving routine or preventative care. This is markedly different from the debate about the US system. Or at least, it should be. I used to watch discussions on health care on CNBC and they were pretty aggravating. One group discussion included a bunch of big-time CEO’s and they all just talked about free market and choice. When Starbucks Howard Schultz (who grew up in a housing project) expressed the need for making sure everyone has health care, the others just gave him a blank look. During the CNBC special on Walmart, the interviewer grilled Lee Scott on how Walmart ruthlessly drives supplier prices down, but didn’t ask why Walmart couldn’t do that with potential employee health benefit providers (at the time, Walmart expected employees to just go out and get it themselves, citing free market and choice, again)

For people who just take health care for granted, e.g. the wealthy, those in government or academic or otherwise secure employment with established health care benefits, it’s hard to imagine not having health insurance (I certainly never worried about it while I was working for big companies). But it is an employer-based health insurance system, after all, so draw the logical conclusion. Just try quitting your job (or losing it involuntarily). When I went freelance, it turned out my employer had never offered COBRA coverage to exiting employees before (not the first such employer I encountered, either). Fortunately, I had no preexisting condition, so I ended up picking the lowest-cost, high deductible insurance I could find (which by the way was the same provider as my previous employer, so I figured there’d be some continuity and familiarity with my history), never exceeded the deductible, and yet my premiums quadrupled in five years. And I’m single and healthy!

But availability of coverage is only part of the story. Even if you have coverage, you can never be really sure you’re covered. Again, my own story – my coverage was abruptly terminated when my provider said I hadn’t paid my premium, even though my check was cashed. It took a few months, an email stating I was going to the police to find out who cashed my check, and a letter to the California consumer insurance agency to get an “apology” that effectively put the blame on me.

Here’s an OC Register story that recounts how a woman lost her COBRA coverage, retroactively, because her first premium check was off by six cents. Or rather, it was correct, but the “computer” read it incorrectly. So on the next bill they showed she was behind by six cents, she paid it, and then they cancelled her coverage. The story didn’t go much further into the issue, but it seems to me there are some obvious questions – why didn’t they contact her immediately if it looked like her coverage was in jeopardy, instead of billing her again and then cancelling it. You’d think a company wouldn’t want to arbitrarily lose customers, but her family was incurring signficant medical bills at the time, so you’ve got to wonder if maybe once the claim forms were submitted they automatically look for some way to dump her (I recall there were some recent California state lawsuits against insurers who did just that). And the story doesn’t say anything about whether they refunded the COBRA premiums when they retroactivally cancelled her policy. If they’re going to say you were never really covered, they should return the money. After all, you’re gonna need it.