The stupidity continues
29 March 2007 Thanks a lot Apple. Now you've poisoned the boys and girls over the hill into thinking we should have a desktop interface metaphor on handhelds. Dudes, the emperor is not wearing any clothes!If Sun CEO Jonathan Swartz is right, and I think he might be, then in the future:
...the majority of the world will use the internet through their phones, not through a PC."Jonathan is not saying we won't use desktops. Far from it. But he feels the need to access information on a portable device will become a key driver of how people will want to use the internet.
With this in mind, I think it is fundamentally wrong to use a desktop interface metaphor on a portable device. The zoom and keyhole-browse features of the iPhone and Deepfish, and even Opera are very clever. But the definition of a browser is no longer based on the desktop. It could be on any device.If I can't read the information on a web page that has been rendered like a tiny version of a PC desktop on my mobile device, or distinguish one item from another, then how the heck will I know what to zoom in on?! And looking at web pages through a keyhole? Who thought this would be a good experience for the user?
No, no, no. You should be serving me your information in a way that adapts to my device. This is called the web standards way. Did we learn nothing from letting Netscape create it's own non-standard HTML tags?
Furthermore, as a colleague of mine pointed out, people using browsers like this will have to pay for unnecessary bandwidth, because the full, desktop amount of content in a web site will be being served to the portable device, rather then being re-formatted for a handheld environment.
I still think this is a phenomenally stupid idea.
Labels: mobile design
posted by Greg on Thursday, March 29, 2007,
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Information design for the time poor
08 March 2007 Information design, or more specifically interface design, helps us time poor individuals survive in the modern world.
I realised this the other day I when showed my colleague Bruce the new Windows Media Player 11.For some time I'd not bothered too much with Media Player, because v. 9 drove me nuts for its poor usability (all those split windows reminded me of HTML framesets and they were just as horrible to use - urgh!) and doing stuff I didn't want. All the talk about problems with digital media rights put me off upgrading to v. 10, so I put up with v. 9 at work, but used other media players at home.
Recently someone at work showed me v. 11 and said they thought it was much improved. So I installed it and was surprised to find it was much better to use.
When I showed it to Bruce, he commented that it did look better, but did it show you a track list while running in compact mode? I'd forgotten that was how he preferred to use it, and sure enough, when we looked, v. 11 didn't either.
Thinking about this later, I realised I didn't know the answer to his question because:
- I used the interface differently than him, and
- I really wasn't aware of all the features in the software.
In part it is because there are so many features in software these days - compare Word 6 with Word 2003 for instance, but I think it is more than this.
I think software has now become part of the current information overload phenomena, in that not only does most software do more than we actually need or use, but we have so many types of software now. Software for creating documents (notice it's not word processing anymore), programs for creating and managing data, tools for storing, creating and editing images, things for organising us and our stuff, things for storing our stuff, and more. And the expectations on many of us in our work places and homes to be able to use these things is high.
Of course with these new fangled online office applications and storage facilities (Google, Zoho, ThinkFree, gOFFICE, and many more) we have a whole different way of working with these tools to deal with.
All these software tools are created by different people who have different ideas about interfaces and the way they should work.
I don't have time now to spend discovering all the intricacies in most of the information tools I use. I need to get something done right now, and so I discover as I go. To do this, I need things to be easy to use, to be intuitive, and possibly familiar to other things I've used.
Because of this emphasis on action and immediacy, there may well be features in many of the products and software I use, that I never use or discover. I'm told the new Office 2007 has few new features, but the interfaces for Word, Excel, etc have been completely re-designed, based on feedback that users keep requesting features that have existed for several versions. Obviously the interface was getting in the way of people finding the feature they wanted.
Good information design is often about being involved in many aspects of the design of something, but the key is being user-orientated. People today work and live in environments that are short on time and high on complexity. Provide a tool or information product that works the way the user will expect it to work, and you're likely to be on to a winner.
Labels: information design
posted by Greg on Thursday, March 08, 2007,
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Analysis or synthesis?
04 March 2007 I've done a bit of user evaluation of websites, and I'm starting to realise there's one major division I can propose between the way individuals behave in sites.People either search, or they don't."Don't get me wrong, every site above about five pages needs a search function, but not everyone will use it.
Some people are analytic, like me. They are natural taxonomists, dividing information into categories, looking for similarity and difference - these people expect to use navigation to find stuff, because the stuff will be categorised. If they're disappointed in this, they may just strike their tents and depart, never to return.
But the other class of users, the ones I didn't suspect existed until I began to observe how other people use websites - they don't think taxonomically. They see information as a mass of discrete chunks, linked by a web of possible connections, any one of the possible arrangements could be the real arrangement, so they don't expect to divine it. They go straight to the search box.
These users don't analyse information, they synthesise it, they look for connections, not divisions.
Now obviously only a head case is really 100% either of these things (but believe me, I've done my reading, and those head cases do exist). Most people are on a continuum between the two poles. The useful thing to remember is that if your site is going to satisfy as many users as possible, not only does the search have to be well-designed, well-placed on the page, and fully functional - but the navigation has to be intuitive, clear and designed with user goals in mind.
Only with both bases covered can your site hope to 'do the business'.
Labels: usability
posted by Bruce on Sunday, March 04, 2007,
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