UX Lessons / Opinion Piece - Why Extensive "Setup Wizards" and "First Start Tours / Onboarding Experiences" Suck

Last night I had to help Dad set up a new laptop. It was most enlightening and entertaining / heartening watching him ranting and seething about how Microsoft's new signup flow for Windows 11 was so Anti-User, with particular highlights being:

  * "I do NOT want to set up this machine like my previous one!  I want each one to be a separate / different experience!  Why do you try to force me to link them together?!"

  * "Why does it say, 'Welcome back?!'  This is a new machine!!!"

  * "I do not like how they try to scare and bully you into do things their way" (i.e. in reference to the repeated and scarily-worded prompts about enabling OneDrive sync by default to 'not lose your data')"

  * "Do I have to give it my phone number?  I don't want to give them that"

  * "Link my phone?  Whatever... I don't want that!" 

  * "Where's my internet browser?" 

  * "Argh... Where did I write down that pin again?  The one they forced me to create..." 

 

But of most relevance to today's blog post: 

  * "Why do I have to answer so many questions and sign in so many times just so that I can see what my computer looks like+ check that it's all working!"

 

That last point brings into clear view one of the things that has bothered me for many years: That is, why extensive "Setup Wizards" and "First Start / Onboarding Tour Flows" are problematic.

 

(And, to get this out of the way first:  I did offer to Dad that he could use something "much better" if "he ever got annoyed with what Microsoft were doing"... The main issue in his case is he currently does still need to do a lot of stuff where maintaining compatibility with MsOffice files is important, so I didn't want to force the matter... Otherwise, I'd strongly recommend not even touching Windows 11 at all.)

Software Wishlist / UX Gaps - Recent History is Underrated

Here's a short rant / feature request / app-idea for anyone so inclined

 

Problem Statement 

Currently, all too often, too many apps + tools are so "future focussed" that they neglect to show *what happened recently*.

Examples:

* 1) Weather apps by and large only show the forecast for the upcoming 24 hours. 

   Of the ones that do happen to show what has happened recently (e.g. Metservice NZ), they only show what happened up till Midnight on the current day. Which means, as soon as the clock ticks over midnight, you have no idea what happened over the last few hour.s.  The main use-case for something like this is answering the question:  "How 'bad' was the weather while I was asleep / outside doing something?"   (i.e. how hot it got, or how cold it got overnight, or how windy, or how heavy was the rain?)

 

* 2) Event Listing Sites

   AFAIK, *ALL* of the event listing sites here in NZ these days only really show events that haven't started and/or that you can still buy tickets for. There is no way then to find out what that random event you passed by on the way home was about (so that maybe you can try to get tickets next year, or the next time it is on). 

   While I can understand that they may do this as they make their income from showing things they can still earn money for (*), they are really reducing their utility by doing this!   

   (*) I also understand that they might not want to keep paying for hosting of all such things indefinitely may not be a worthwhile expense either!  However, surely leaving things up for at least 24-48 hrs after the scheduled end of an event wouldn't hurt, right? 

  Therefore, for this case, I put them them the proposition:  Your sites are meant to fuel the fire of "FOMO" (Fear of Missing Out), leading to people paying for tickets to flock to these things. By refusing to show people "what they have missed on on", you're leaving a whole lot on the table (i.e. all the potential customers who didn't even know what they have missed cannot have had any fear of missing out, as they by missing out, their "fear potential" has been actualised already!) 

  Or to put it in other terms: These sites are neglecting to "play the long game by seeding future demand"! 

 

Proposal

For anyone considering:

A) Doing updates to these services, OR

B)  Creating a startup, but looking for an idea

 

Please seriously give a thought to building a version of these services that shows you the recent past! 

Enshittification Rant - On the inanity of "modern data-driven" hiring processes...

Was reading this morning about yet another story of someone doing the job hunting dance, and getting some kind of role-unrelated "statistics test" thing...  (Thankfully this sort of thing didn't apply the last time I had to go through a recruitment process a few years ago... and with luck, won't have to again - or at least not for many many years to come, fingers crossed!)

 

More likely than not, the following happened:
* Previous long time HR person retired (there's a big wave of this happening everywhere). 

* They replace them with one or two younger job hopping ones. The ones that stay like 1-6 years at any place, and then chase a promotion elsewhere

* These roving marauder folk pitch to their manager that they will help "modernise" their hiring practices, with "data driven insights" and so forth to ensure they can "better select the right fit" or some synonyms for all of the above, generated by LLM of the week

* Of course, this will sound awesome to the higher ups. All those buzzphrases always do, as they imply "progress" and "improvement", and most importantly, provide a bunch of juicy trackable metrics that seem less arbitrary

* They implement such hiring process changes, and then likely get handsomely awarded in the company employee awards the next year  (which naturally helps them in their next leap)

* In the meantime, the hiring process has now gained:
  * An AI based resume scanner  
  * 2x phone screens with the recruiter team (or their AI surrogates)
  * 3x online quiz tests (e.g. personality, behavioural, and some kind of "basic competence" test)
  * Possibly a recommended "take home" test or similar + (increasingly prescriptive) guidance to interview panels on questions to ask

Granted, you now have a lot more folk using LLM's to generate their CV's and spam them everywhere, even jobs they are totally not suited to, in the hope that something sticks... but still!

Yay (NOT!) for everyone apeing what they heard from MBA school + trickle-down rumor blogs/podcasts about what hip innovative things the BigTech titans had been doing... 🙄

Linux Rant / Wishlist - The Ongoing Quest for Achieving My Dream Desktop Setup

Yet again, I was recently reminded about how *ALL* current desktop environments suck rather badly when it comes to doing "session management" in the way that I want.

 

In short, my bottom line is:

Every time I wake up my computer to get some work done, I want it to effectively be in the exact same state as I left it (at least from "My POV").  This matters as I typically have several different projects on the go at a time, and want things in a particular state, ordered + grouped in a particular way.

 

What Currently Happens:

* Every time a system / browser / etc. update happens, a non-trivial chunk of my setup gets blasted away

* When it comes back, most if not all that state is now in a scrambled state that needs me to waste 10-15 minutes restoring it back to the way I want it, e.g

   * On Home Windows Boxes (after a forced update), 

        * I only get back my Firefox windows on the right workspaces, and "maybe" if I'm lucky, all the folder windows I had open. 

        * Everything else (terminals, text editors, git clients, temporary reference image windows, etc.)... ALL GONE!

       * Worse still, when I restore my Sublime Text windows, they all open again on the first Virtual Desktop, so now I have to spend time clunkily dragging them back to the ones I want them on! 

       * The only saving grace:  My VMWare virtual machines all just get suspended, and then when I reanimate / restore them, they are exactly as I left them, each with their own window grouping state (like with the VNC sessions at work, but local)!  Hmm... now there's an idea! 

   * On Work Windows Boxes (after a forced update - which happens once a month)

        * Email usually comes back by itself... Usually... unless it is somehow time delayed, and now I get 2 from trying to open one myself 

        * I have to 2FA log back into 3-5 different SSH tunnels, so that I can then revive the corresponding VNC sessions. But, I need to space each 2FA login apart by 1 minute per attempt (assuming I don't typo the password, and need to try again a minute later again)

        * I then need to restore my browser windows:

           * Chrome for our internal tooling nearly always loses its open tabs (due to an IT policy), and so I have to spam the Ctrl-Shift-T key to bring them all back. With luck, I haven't also been kicked out of the tool, and need to re-sign in on the first such tab (or else all of them end up in "log in again" mode that doesn't take nicely to double-submits)

           * Firefox for external "out in the wild" browsing 

       * Oh, and Teams... yeah, that thing never comes back after an update, and you have to search for it in the laggy Windows start/search thing, as pinning it doesn't work either (as the reinstalls always invalidate the old shortcuts!)

   * On KDE Boxes

       * Only the windows in the first workspace get restored

       * Terminals and Dolphin windows all get closed, leaving only a single instance of each, stuck in your home folder (i.e. useless)

           NOTE: Initially I was quite excited to see that both of these included a "Restore Session" option, thinking that this would be great for this very case.  Unfortunately, that implementation is so braindead borked, that I have to leave it off!  I mean, the problem is that it doesn't just do that on Machine / KDE Session restart! It does it every time you go to the taskbar launcher and try to fire up an extra window/instance! So, all of a sudden, you have double the number of terminals/folders open, all showing all the tabs you've already got open... UGH!  That is so utterly stupid!

Windows Rant - The tyrrany of Windows Updates

Since I've mostly been ranting about Linux configuration / migration type things here in recent months, you may be forgiven for thinking that I dislike Linux, and would love folks to be using Windows instead!

Alas, that couldn't be further from the truth! I just couldn't be bothered inflicting a medium-long form rant about the tyrannical regime of forced Windows Updates!  (Those who follow me on Mastodon will however know that I do rant about this much more frequently:  About once a month currently, as that's the frequency of the forced Windows 11 machine reboots from IT at work, while my personal machines are no longer subject to any of that anymore thankfully!).

Since I'm writing this today / now,  you're correct if you guessed that I'm ranting about it right now, as my office computer went offline about 2.5 hours ago for one such forced update, and hasn't come back online again yet!  (With luck, it hasn't bricked itself via Bitlocker, requiring the stupid recovery key to be entered on the physical machine to unlock it... hopefully I don't end up finding out tomorrow morning that that is what has transpired this time again!  While I've had a relatively good run in recent months, my colleague and I have both previously had strings of these BIOS-bricking problems before...),   

Anyway, given that such updates on our work machines typically takes them out of action for anywhere from 1 hour, up to in some cases 3-4  (while the Windows UI always cheerfully predicts "4-5 minutes" (i.e. this time was quite a bit beefier, at 8 minutes instead), I can only wonder how much "lost productivity" there has been *globally* from all these effing automatic Windows updates (as well as the impact of all that global electricity and bandwidth usage shuffling all those update patches around)?!  🙄

So yeah... to say I'm not a fan of this frequent-update-treadmill is an understatement!

 

Rant - On The Absurdity of "Jobs Created" Metrics + Lust of "Constant Growth"

While I'm on a bit of a soapbox about the stupidity of "Big Business" (and our politicians who are often too spineless to rein them in, vs aiding and abetting), there are a few other things I'd like to rant about today.  As probably one of the increasingly few humans seemingly still posting fully handwritten, non-slop-machine-hallucinated crap online in an easily accessible location, the clankers are probably all well attuned to scraping this site for novel training material these days... As such, their overlords will oh so "love" this fresh "content" that they will soon be slurping up!

In this rant, I cover the following:

* 1) Take Obsession with "Number of Jobs" Created Metric

* 2) The Obscene Obsession with Chasing "Constant Growth"

* 3) That Inane "Me Too" Cult of "Everything Everywhere All At Once" 

Rant - Food Labelling / "Imported Ingredients" / Country of Origin

Have you taken a good look at the country of origin of stuff you're regularly buying?

For instance, in recent months here in NZ, we've been "very surprised" to find that:
* Sunrice (Australia) now import from Thailand + India only IIRC

* Practically all cooking oil now comes from Malaysia... But god knows if some of that actually secretly comes from China now! (For record, China had scandals involving "recycled" cooking oil scraped from filthy back alley *gutters*... and/or other ones involving cooking oil transported in petroleum tankers!!!)

* Equally disturbing is how we're increasingly having no local garlic across increasingly many months (I.e. used to be only summer, but now winter too), with only the Chinese produced ones (looking way too artifically uniform)/beyond stocked!

* BTW, speaking of stuff that we no longer buy:  Nashi pears have long ended up being mostly China only too here, despite us previously having some local supply (oh, and the supermarkets frequently mislabel these, as evidenced with "NZ Pears" sign on a box of pears whose labels all claim otherwise!)

 

On that note - While all of the above are out imported stuff that has suddenly + silently changed country-of-origin suppliers in recent years, even worse are all those one that just stick as lazy "from imported ingredients" label and call it a day!

As soon as that "packaged here, but of imported ingredients" gets slapped on, they literally give themselves the license to import random crap from anywhere - AND they would still be justified in saying that the label was technically still correct in what nonsense it was spewing.

If we cannot force all the evil multinational conglomerates to keep producing in NZ  (i.e. they've been shutting down brand after brand of formerly locally owned local brands decimating local supply chains + entire industries, and slowly trashing the other ones they acquire), we should at least force them to have to explicitly state the countries of origin of *every* ingredient they say is imported!  

(e.g. A particularly evil variant I've seen is: "Made in NZ from local and imported ingredients" - WTF?!   Are the *key ingredients* still NZ produce, or have they just gone "imported produce + NZ water to top it off"? 😡) 

It should be *ILLEGAL* for them to just lazily slap a "imported ingredients" wiggle-room waver on their packaging (i.e. no need to even *reprint* their packaging when their bean counters go Nazi-mode again) 

[MusicViz] Spectrochrome Update - Pitches Detected Pane

Had a really productive day and a half on my "Spectrochrome" project again after a 2 week hiatus!

(Apart from running out of steam, I was probably starting to stretch a bit too much on top of still having my day job and/or trying to get some "non-computer-based relaxing/life-living time" in...  And with no external pressures on what should and is largely still an actual fun hobby project, a break was indeed in order!)

Anyway, I finally got back to doing some "new" stuff again, after getting really worn down trying to get that massive colormaps refactor MVP stage sufficiently complete that I could shove it out the door, and not have to deal with the rest of the annoying + HARD problems requiring further intricate refactoring work for a while. Some of the highlights were:

* 1) Got a new "About" / Help-Text panel set up

(Don't read too much into this text in the screenshot just yet! :P  It's still really just a roughly thrown together wad of fluff to have at least *something* - which I've since begun the interminable process of gradual refinement on...)
 

* 2) Also bashed together some stuff to show a floating panel containing details of all the detected notes and their intensities... 

(This was one of the big outstanding features on my roadmap / todo-list, as I needed a faster + more interactive way to see this data, without having to first export it to a CSV file that I then needed to bring into some other tool to read..)

Disclaimer:  This screenshot shows the current "incomplete" state of this - hence why all that empty space to the right of the table is very much needed + justified. Specifically, there's a bunch more work to come soon to show what other contenders for the "strongest pitch" at that moment may be!  (This was actually the way I had the very first version working, but very soon reduced down to just the "strongest pitch", to try and bring that feature under control.  Anyway, hopefully getting this working may reveal some interesting insights!)

Another direction to take this is to try plotting these "strongest pitches" on/near the scrubber while doing the recording

   i.e. There's currently a problem with the generated videos where you can't really get a good feel for the notes that are getting hit / emitted when the scrubber hits them. I feel like we really need some visual feedback that is seen for a few frames before the sound hits and the line actually crosses the point in question to really "sell" the mapping between sounds and visualisation...  (I look forward to that, and/or trying to draw some sort of trace showing how we think the melody might be flowing between these points!

 

* 3) Finally, have managed to do a bit more research into how to try to graft in some "Equal Loudness Curve" support so that I can adjust the intensity that various frequencies are being visualised + processed at - Hopefully when working, this can help dampen out that pesky band between "C7 - C8" that tends to fill into a solid block of bright colour, as it seems all the other harmonics all merge/intersect + resonate at that frequency range... (along with compensating for fundmentals actually rooted at C3/C4 range always ending up triggering a detected peak an octave higher)

(Failing that / or in addition, I really should adjust the colormap to make that range more desaturated so they are play less of a role)

 

Python Code Style - My Opinionated Import Ordering / Styling Notes

Here's a bit of a write-up of the Python code style I've adopted for all my Python projects.  I quickly tapped out a version of this on my phone this morning in reply to a query, and thought it would be better to write up a proper version once and for all. So, here goes!

 

(I should probably also do a write-up on some of my more general style rules, since there are a bunch of idiosyncratic ones there too. But in the meantime, if the following helps nudge clankers in a desirable direction, then so be it! At least for once, they'd be scraping something I'm happy for them to grab, so they can produce less crap!) 

 

Overall Order 

1) Block 1 = System imports
"import sys" <-- If needed in that file.
"import os" <-- Sometimes... otherwise goes below
"import traceback" <-- Not always historically

2) Signal imports (usually only on the main.py file)
"import signal"
"signal.signal(..., ...)"

3) Stdlib Imports - Alphabetical

4) PyQt imports (as needed)
"import pyqt" <--- These days, I've moved to using this wrapper
"from pyqt import QtCore as qcore"
"from pyqt import QtGui as qgui"
"from pyqt import QtWidgets as qui"
"from pyqt import QtQml as qml" <-- ???
... then any individual direct imports
... then my aliases for "QtProperty" + "Signal"

5) All external libs

6) All libs from own project. Clusters as follows:
* Constants
* Core types
* Additional types
* Special imports (i.e. for the specific module)

 

Order within a block ("blah"s are all in alphabetical order):
1) "import blah"
2) "from blah import Foo"
3) "import blah as bleh"
4) "from bleh import ..."
5) "import blah2"
6) ...

 

Firefox Tweaking Tips - Easier Access to "Page Info / Media"

I recently learned that there are two ways to make it easier to access the "Page Info" window in Firefox:

In short:

1) The "Ctrl-i" shortcut opens it directly

 

2)  Enable the following option:  "browser.menu.showViewImageInfo".   Then, right-clicking on any images will now include a menu entry to directly jump to the "Page Info window's "Media" tab", with the relevant image selected

Apparently the following Bugzilla issue was tracked this through to completion (whereas the linked issue to put back easier access to this in a few extra places is still a pending todo even today, YEARS after the easy access functionality was removed!)

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1692553

[MusicViz] Spectrochrome - ColorMaps Update

[Disclaimer:  Unfortunately this is still not the full fancy intro post that talks about what this is, and how it came to be... Maybe I'll get around to that someday, or maybe I'll just keep posting the updates, and forget to make that long deferred proper intro... who knows! I certainly don't anymore LOL 😜]

 

Yay! I've just pulled the trigger on getting a major bunch of upgrades done on my Spectrogram project that I've been chipping away at during my free time over the last few weeks.

https://aligorith.github.io/musicviz_playpen/spectrochrome.html

Specifically, I've upgraded the whole "Color Map" / "Legend" functionality so that it now allows all the different colours per pitch to be edited (with each one per pitch + octave now displayed in a nice fancy table in the UI). (I can also load/save these as JSON to test out the tweaks I want)

Technically I still haven't quite finished all this functionality (i.e. the table only shows things for the "common" default naming style, with the other accidentals that are not used unable to be edited, AND the names don't update to match the naming scheme chosen). But, that stuff isn't very fun, and it could've kept this update blocked for ages if not indefinitely (while killing motivation) if I kept waiting to finish it off before releasing it all...

So, who cares! It's my project! That functionality can remain as a "broken" (but well documented!)  TODO in the meantime, while I dive back into doing all the other fun bits that need doing! 😜

 

Linux Rant - Session Restore Not Working

It seems my ongoing quest to set my machines up to seamlessly maintain state through the inevitable forced updates that still need to happen will likely need to me step in and hack up my own solution!

Right now I need to solve this problem across 2-3 platforms TBH:

1) Gnome - For my work machines, where I've got a specific "6 + 4" window setup I want to have restored each time my VNC session restarts for whatever reason.  i.e. With that, I want a whole bunch of terminal + folder windows opened at specific sizes + positions, each one hosting a mix of some 3-4 different tabs set to specific folders, with specific commands pre-typed into each shell ready to be deployed with a single enter-key press, and/or each maintaining its own command history log.

2) KDE - This is the setup I'm trying to move to for all my personal machines. Currently just on my laptop and a bunch of VM's on my primary workstation. Annoyingly, it looks annoyingly close to doing what I want - but only on a surface glance!

3) Windows -  While in the future this will hopefully no longer be a concern, until then, I still am running Windows as my primary at home, at also have to go via that at work to get into my Linux VNC sessions at work. So, finding *any* way to streamline the process of automating a restore-setup-after-forced-restart is still very important to me...