6 posts tagged “ui”
I think Microsoft's new table idea is pretty nice. Touch-screen kiosks are pretty lame right now. They only "feel" one of your fingers, and they're not very precise. The big improvement here is that it has "multi-touch", which is turning into the buzzword of the year. Multi-touch means you can touch with multiple fingers and it will know how to respond.
But I'm a little concerned about this device, even though I like the overall idea.
Responsiveness
While watching the video, I noticed several times where the action on the screen lagged the person's movements. (go to where the timer shows 1:37 remaining and watch BillG's left hand swipe do nothing) This is a big deal. When I use a mouse, there is zero lag. If I'm going to use something natural like this, I don't want to take a step back with regards to its responsiveness.
The UI Isn't Great
At one point in the video, Bill Gates sets down a camera and the pictures it contains magically appear on the screen. That's fantastic. (look for 1:16 remaining on the video to see this in action) But the photos that were previously scattered on the canvas disappear. I think they go into one of the piles on the left-hand side of the scren, but the visual cues aren't great. This is easy to fix, but frankly, a bit of a giveaway that this was designed in Redmond.
Responsiveness
Seriously, this is a big deal. Watch the video where there are about 55 seconds left and you'll see two swipes that simply don't register. If the computer reacts in a smooth and fluid way, you'll feel like you're actually manipulating the objects on screen. If there's a delay, you'll feel like you're using one of those annoying kiosks at the local movie theatre.
Note to Apple: if your iPhone UI is as responsive as the MSTable's, it will fail.
So! I have this web app called bouquet that I use to post little pictures that represent what I'm doing with my life. It's like twitter using images, which I hate to say because I was working on this for ages before twitter.
Here's a picture of the front page right now. I overlaid little circles to explain what represents the newest activity and which one is the oldest. Notice that I have the most recent image on the left side.
This is the way I thought was right for about 9 months. But then I showed the app to a designer at work who immediately said "your 'earlier' link should be on the left, not the right". We discussed it for a few moments and he stressed the obvious precedent: because humans read left to right, the newest data should always be on the right. On a page with height, such as a page out of a book, the most recent content should be at the bottom right.
I was a touch embarrassed that I didn't notice such an obvious design violation so I redesigned the page to look like this:
But something didn't feel right. I know a lot of design is aesthetic judgement, but there is a lot of science as well. Best practices. Logic. And while this way seems more logical ("people read left to right, end of story") it just feels wrong to me. So I went looking for evidence and precedent.
At first, the blogs proved me wrong. Here's how powazek does it:
The prior article is on the left. The newer article is on the right. Every other blog that links to previous/next posts works this way, and it makes perfect sense. So why was I having such a hard time swallowing the idea that the new content had to go on the right?
I figured it out. Navigating forward and backward through pages is more natural left to right. But navigating through media is more natural when the latest thing is at the top left. Why? For the same reason. Don't you want the most recent data to be where you start reading? Apple thinks so:
Here I've listed my home folder, kept arranged by "date modified". And rather than shunting the most recently modified file ("Desktop") to the bottom right, where I may need to scroll down to see it, they've floated it to the top left. The most likely place my eye will look.
And this makes sense. Put the thing you're looking for most often (recently modified files) in the place you will look first. (top left) And while this turns the idea of "but people read left to right" on its head, it makes sense for sifting through data.
To verify, I checked out Flickr's approach and found they use both ways. While looking at a single photo, you are presented with two small photos representing the prior and the next photo. The prior photo is on the left, and the next photo is on the right. Just like blogs.
So I'm feeling pretty sure about this. When listing media, newest belongs on the top left. But I want to make sure. Have I cherry-picked this data? Is there some compelling counter-argument I should read? After all, Flickr also thinks tags should be space delimited, which clearly breaks English language convention. So maybe they (and Apple) are wrong about this too. I doubt it, but I'm all ears.
Unless I hear otherwise, I'm reverting bouquet now.
In the English language, lists are organized with commas.
I went to the store and bought
grapes, some cereal, steak, and yogurt
Which is why I've never understood why Flicker wants you to write it like this:
grapes "some cereal" steak yogurt
As they helpfully point out on every tag page, " Separate each tag with a space: cameraphone urban moblog. Or to join 2 words together in one tag, use double quotes: "daily commute"." Clear as mud.
When I made a tagging technology demo several years ago, I thought for a minute and realized that Flickr and delicious were simply wrong. I guess you can argue that it's more typing to have to put a comma between every tag. But it's more consistent, even when you have two or more words in a tag. Clearly Flickr and delicious was wrong, I thought, so I went with the correct approach, commas.
I got a lot of flak from people who argued that delicious and Flickr did it one way, so any splintering of approaches was bad. "Why should I have to remember to use commas on your site when everyone else does it the same way?"
I had three points:
- My little page will only be seen by a few people. I'm not exactly disrupting the internet.
- Commas are clearly better because they're more consistent and more natural.
- I'm going to use what's best, not blindly follow for the sake of following.
I'm happy to see that Vox gets it right. And look at how simple their help text is:
"Separate tags with commas".
Clear as day.
Remember Tom Cruise moving stuff around on the screen in Spielberg's Minority Report? The UI sucked, and here's why: Tom wasn't touching anything.
Think about it. He was waving his arms around in front of him, but never resisting against any solid surface. This means the computer has no way of knowing that he's pushing his arm forward to mean "computer, I want to zoom in on this document" or "my arm is getting tired and I want to stretch it", or even just "I didn't mean to push forward there, I was actually focusing on a right/left motion but accidentally pushed my arm forward".
It's a UI nightmare because the system needs to know when you're navigating and when you want to make an action. Imagine if every time your mouse hovered over a document, it opened it. Total bedlam from a UX standpoint. Much better to require two different actions, one to navigate over, another to actually do something. Tom Cruise's display doesn't offer this. Which is odd, because they got so much right in those scenes, just not the actual position of the person's arms. It was probably done for Hollywood maximum effect.
Minority Report-like touch screen displays are actually coming, and allow you to do more with fewer mistakes. I just caught this new Han video and I'm giddily awaiting my iPhone so I can have some of this magic in my daily life:
http://link.brightcove.com/services/link/bcpid271543545/bctid422563006
I'm reading everything I can about Microsoft's Zune device. Apparently it's pretty nice, though kind of heavy and locks you into its own format. (It doesn't even work with the PlaysForSure ecosystem they spent so much time boosting, which is going to cause some partner unhappiness) But none of that matters if the UI sucks.
After all, the reason the iPod originally got a foothold was its superior user experience, so if Microsoft can pull off a device that's easy to use, they may actually have a shot. The initial impressions are good and make it clear that Microsoft actually got designers to help them rather than making WindowsXPZune Edition. Which got me to thinking:
Steve Jobs has made his point.
This is the man that always advocated for things to be more like a simple appliance, even when the entire computing industry was intent on making everything interchangable and open to all. And while I love open source software, I just want my devices to work. I don't care that my iPod can't play Ogg Vorbis, because it's so good to me day to day. The most significant thing Steve Jobs has done in the last 10 years at Apple is finally prove his point that there is a place for "just works" even if it's closed, more expensive, and insulting to geeks that like to tinker. It's about time.
I don't think Apple was ever fantastic at UI design, I think they were exceptional compared to their pathetic competition. If Microsoft had started thinking about user interface in a serious way before, oh, 2003, the Apple advantage would have been almost moot. But Microsoft is the creator of some of the most staggeringly awful interfaces the world has ever laid eyes on. And as the leaders of the industry, their attitude of "make it pretty later, and maybe not even then" was emulated by many.
We are now living through a UI design renaissance. You aren't taken seriously as a new company if it's too hard to use your product. More and more amazing design concepts are released every day, and Apple is starting to fall to the position of "better than average" from their previous perch of "the gold standard".
If Steve Jobs left Apple tomorrow, I wouldn't mind. It took him 30 years, but he finally got the market to understand anyone can make a product, but it takes real skill to design it well. We're finally emerging from the dark ages of usability, and Jobs deserves a lot of the credit for helping us see the light.
Both Apple and Dell are currently undergoing battery recalls because they both use the same supplier. Some blogger wrote a story comparing the response time of the two companies, since he had both an Apple and a Dell laptop. Apparently the Apple replacement came in 3 days, but he's still waiting on the Dell battery.
I was surprised by the negative reaction the blog post got, although I shouldn't have been. A surprising number of people complained about the post, most of them pointing out that Dell has about 4 times the batteries that Apple has to recall. Then it hit me: the customer doesn't care.
Let's say you test drive two cars. One is zippy and cheap, the other seems sluggish and is more expensive. Would you care if some car expert came over and explained that the first car has an unfair advantage because they weren't able to get the V6 engine on the second car due to riots in China, but the revised model that comes out next February will, like, "totally blow the first one away"? No. The first one is zippy and cheap, and you like it more. Full stop.
So, yeah, the geeks (yet again) can cling their pedantic technically-accurate but irrelevent point. Dell does have a tougher job than Apple because they sell more. But as a user, all I know is I want my battery in 3 days. Or that I have never once gotten a virus in Mac OS X. Tell me all you want about how the virus writers don't even bother considering the Mac, and I'll tell you again: I have never gotten a virus in Mac OS X, and I simply don't care why.
