usability on S Anand

Human as an Interface

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 09:54:54 +0530

People often email me questions they could have answered with ChatGPT. I just copy-paste the question, copy-paste the answer.

This isn’t new. From 1998-2005, I used to do this Google searches.

Even people who have Google Maps on their phone ask me for directions. I pull out my Google Maps and tell them. They don’t even get the sarcasm.

Effectively, I’m the Human-as-an-Interface (HAAI everyone!)

But I learnt today that this has historical precedent. Doormen, lift operators, doormen, the waiter who recites the menu, the secretary we used to dictate to, …

These can be high-paying jobs, too.

Consultants look at your watch and tell you the time.
Coaches make you talk yourself out of your problems.
Wealth Managers invest your money worse than index funds.

This happens because:

You’re buying convenience. “I don’t have to think or worry about it.”
You’re buying insurance. “The consultant said so.” “The auditor signed off.”
You’re buying status. “I can afford a butler.”

Also, we’re biased. Costly feels better than cheap (e.g. watches). Action feels better than inaction (e.g. active investing). Those we hire create (or lobby) work for themselves. It takes disruption (e.g. tech, regulation) to change this.

If you want to sell these, your scale depends on what people buy: Procedure, Brains, or Grey Hair

Companies sell procedure. Consultants, auditors, IT/BPO firms, …. have partners who sell, associates who work, and churn doesn’t matter. (McKinsey, BCG, Accenture, Deloitte, Infosys)
Studios sell brains. Agencies have star-led small talented teams where churn matters. Scale hurts their agility. (IDEO, Thoughtworks, Pentagram, Frog Design)
Professionals sell relationship. Coaches, therapists, advisors, … have a person they trust. Scale is limited by their calendar. (Oprah Winfrey, Simon Sinek, Marshall Goldsmith)

Technology (SaaS, AI), by-products (books / speaking engagements) etc. can’t scale these much. Changing what they sell (products > procedure > brains) scales.

Of course, what you want to sell matters, and can change over time. I thought I wanted to sell products, but preferred selling brains. I’m now exploring procedure, and might retire with relationships.

Since people use me as a Human-as-an-Interface anyway, I’m going to monetize this. If you’re not paying, you’re the product.

Your question is my data point.
Your confusion is my next blog post.
Your recurring problem is my next software prototype.

Thank you for training my intuition on what the market is too lazy to do itself.

Things I Learned - 10 Mar 2024

Sun, 10 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This week, I learned:

Mughals just replaced the top of most temples with Mosque domes as part of the conquer or die policy
“Math is racist”. Because people who can’t solve it can’t because of their underprivileged background!
Winners: commodity businesses, companies that own lots of data like Reddit and Stackoverflow, profitable bootstrapped businesses
Making a tool more usable, e.g. a video, can have a 10-100X impact. Yet every developer thinks it’s redundant
All in one podcast. Can Google save itself?
- the success of a developer platform is the number of people using it. But not everyone uses it equally. Some people create winning products which drives attention to the platform. Use llm proxy like that to measure weekly average users and cost saving through caching
- one week ago, if someone at Google stood up and said we have too many black people in our images, the responsible AI team would have shut them down calling them racist. They had too much power and it was a one-way conversation. With the backlash now, there is a lot more awareness and acceptance of the balance. Security is like that. It’s too easy to empower and shut things down until there is a backlash
- the lawyer’s job is to tell you what’s not possible. But like Travis, your job is to decide whether it’s worth the risk of running a taxi company without a license or not
- Americans pronounce Sundar pichai’s name as Sun Daar!
- data licensing has become a business model. Reddit, Accel springer, stack overflow and many others are licensing their content to Google and open AI for several million dollars.

Colour spaces

Mon, 27 Aug 2012 14:04:23 +0000

In reality, a colour is a combination of light waves with frequencies between 400-700THz, just like sound is a combination of sound waves with frequencies from 20-20000Hz. Just like mixing various pure notes produces a new sound, mixing various pure colours (like from a rainbow) produces new colours (like white, which isn’t on the rainbow.)

Our eyes aren’t like our ears, though. They have 3 sensors that are triggered differently by different frequencies. The sensors roughly peak around red, green and blue. Roughly.

It turns out that it’s possible to recreate most (not all) colours using a combination of just red, green and blue by mimicking these three sensors to the right level. That’s why TVs and monitors have red, blue and green cells, and we represent colours using hex triplets for RRGGBB – like #00ff00 (green).

There are a number of problems with this from a computational perspective. Conceptually, we think of (R, G, B) as a 3-dimensional cube. That’d mean that 100% red is about as bright as 100% green or blue. Unfortunately, green is a lot brighter than red, which is a lot brighter than blue. Our 3 sensors are not equally sensitive.

You’d also think that a colour that’s numerically mid-way between 2 colours should appear to be mid-way. Far from it.

This means that if you’re picking colours using the RGB model, you’re using something very far from the intuitive human way of perceiving colours.

Which is all very nice, but I’m usually in a rush. So what do I do?

I go to the Microsoft Office colour themes and use a colour picker to pick one. (I extracted them to make life easier.) These are generally good on the eye.
Failing that, I pick something from http://kuler.adobe.com/
Or I go to http://colorbrewer2.org/ and pick a set of colours
If I absolutely have to do things programmatically, I use the HCL colour scheme. The good part is it’s perceptually uniform. The bad part is: not every interpolation is a valid colour.

Comments

isomorphismes 13 Mar 2013 5:20 pm: What colours can’t be created by convex combinations of {R, G, B}? I mean within the visible spectrum.

Inline form validation

Thu, 03 Sep 2009 08:49:32 +0000

A List Apart’s article on Inline Validation is one of the most informative I’ve read in a while — and it’s backed by solid data.

Some useful lessons:

Inline validation can reduce form completion time by 40%
Use inline validations where the user doesn’t know if they’ll get it wrong (e.g. is a username available?). Don’t use them if user knows the answer (e.g. their name)
Validate on blur, not on keypress (it’s distracting, and users can’t multitask)

Comments

jesse 25 Sep 2009 4:15 pm: maybe u should add some inline validation on your comments form, instead of the wordpress error page?

Creating user friendly 404 pages

Sun, 18 Mar 2007 12:00:00 +0000

Creating user friendly 404 pages.

How users read on the web

Fri, 28 Apr 2006 12:00:00 +0000

Jakob Nielsen’s old write-up on how users read on the web. Actually, this is how people read anything. I write my e-mails, PowerPoint presentations, and Word reports this way.

HTML keyboard shortcuts

Wed, 30 Nov 2005 12:00:00 +0000

HTML keyboard shortcuts using the “accesskey” attribute.

10 best intranets

Thu, 17 Mar 2005 12:00:00 +0000

10 best intranets of 2005 according to Jakob Nielsen.

Prank on the RIAA

Tue, 16 Sep 2003 12:00:00 +0000

Neat prank on the RIAA. Intruiging, though, about their contact address being hard to find. So I tried the same, by Googling RIAA

First hit: www.riaa.org/index.cfm -> The Page Cannot Be Found
Second hit: www.riaa.org. No contact info on 1st page.
Tried “About us”. No luck.
Searching for “contact” on the site gave 704 useless pages.
Google search for “contact” in www.riaa.org gives www.riaa.org/contact.cfm -> The page cannot be found

I give up. But this guy John Hargrave is good.

Top 10 web design mistakes of 2002

Wed, 25 Dec 2002 12:00:00 +0000

Jakob Nielsen’s top 10 web design mistakes of 2002. Fortunately, I was committing only one of them – fixed font sizes. Now rectified.

Speech recognition is not such a good idea

Tue, 21 May 2002 12:00:00 +0000

I always felt using voice to communicate with computers was a bad idea. In my case, it’s more because speaking takes up a lot of energy. But looks like it takes up a lot of thought power as well. Maybe speech recognition is not such a good idea.

Patents on usability

Sun, 30 Sep 2001 12:00:00 +0000

Jakob Nielsen has a whole bunch of patents relating to Internet usability. Metafilter has an interesting discussion on whether that’s a good idea.

Interface design on the Web

Tue, 06 Feb 2001 12:00:00 +0000

Web usability. About interface design on the Web.