Sometimes in the midst of designing a screen, I wonder to myself why Adobe Photoshop has to be such a complex tool. But then I saw this photo and it quickly shut me up and made me into an appreciative Photoshop-lover once again.
Designers talk about the use of white space in their designs:
Yes, I’ve heard that and a whole lot more. There’s a lot of merit to it. But have you ever heard of using white space as the premise for a game? This isn’t web design or user experience related, but it’s a pretty cool idea and marvelous execution. It’s also in the spirit of Halloween.
The Unfinished Swan - Tech Demo 9/2008 from Ian Dallas on Vimeo.
When Microsoft does something, people are prone to take a look at it with great interest. Whether or not one likes them or uses their products, fact of the matter is they’re the industry leader and the decisions they make about their products affect hundreds of millions of users in the industry. So, when Microsoft introduced the ribbon UI in their new Office products, it was of very great interest to our team. Is there some way we can benefit from the new design metaphors and patterns they’re putting in place? It may seem strange and a radical departure from their previous UI, but what will adoption rate be? Does that affect how we design UI?
Microsoft presented a Windows 7 first look. Ars technica published a few screenshots and it made for very interesting reading.
First off, Windows 7 is very clearly a release focused on user experience. Unlike Vista, nothing new under the hood is really changing. It’s all the about the user interactions, and the upgrade of optimizing for user experience. To that end, Microsoft has huge gains if they can nail this one. It is, after all, the primary differentiator upon which Apple has recently been dominating the market–if not in fact of dollars and laptops sold, then at least in market perception. Microsoft has a huge resource in their Customer Experience Improvement Program (CEIP for short), and there’s a lot of data there that can be leveraged. Not only for them, but for other designers like us. For example, there’s this gem:
Through the Customer Experience Improvement Program (CEIP), an optional, off-by-default feature of many Microsoft programs, the company has learned a great deal about the things that users do. For example, from CEIP data Microsoft knows that 70% of users have between 5 and 15 windows open at any one time, and that most of the time they only actively use one or two of those windows.
As user experience folks, we know this. But having actual numbers and raw data reinforces the significance of this fact. And Microsoft has sought to leverage this gem of data to change their approach to the Windows 7 taskbar, jump lists, and windows management (e.g. maximizing, restoring, resizing, viewing, etc.).
My first gut reaction to the Windows 7 preview is skepticism. I’m not sure the changes they’re introducing into the OS will be a significant improvement to the actual user experience. Microsoft products have (of late) exhibited the tendency to be overly helpful, sometimes even hindrances to the actual functionality the user wants to access. I feel that way about the windows management system, particularly the preview popup functionality off the taskbar, and the jump lists. Moreover, the look and feel of the OS seems a tad overboard, introducing a little too much visual clutter (and flash) so that the OS disturbs rather than enhances and empowers the user.
What does Windows OS need to do to go to the next level? I’m not sure and I’m still trying to figure it out. But I’m gratified to know that the big guys in Seattle are probably wondering the same thing.
And while we’re on Office news, here’s the latest via Microsoft: Office is going online in the next release. Very cool.
I’m always on the lookout for fresh, new examples of data visualization. It’s best to learn from other folks who are doing a good job.
So I ran across this and it struck me as a neat mashup of available data which was originally presented in a numbers format, but has been re-presented in a visual format to draw out (visually) some of the overall trends and patterns.
Phillip Kromer took newspaper endorsement data from the Editor and Publisher pages, and mapped the results. It’s an interactive map trying to understand the oft-heard accusation of left-leaning bias in the media. I’m not looking at this from a political slant, but interested in the data visualization and what I can learn from it as a designer.
My first impression was: “Cool!” But that quickly devolved into, “This is confusing. What’s going on?” It looks neat, but the context wasn’t clear to me until I paused to understand the legend. Even then I found myself reading the thing multiple times, checking the visual, and trying to understand what was being portrayed so I could start drawing conclusions.
One point of confusion, unfortunately, are the many layers of data on this visualization, but that their sum complexity rather than providing a keener insight into the problem, only muddies things up for the viewer who’s trying to sort through everything. Here’s what I mean:
Now, I don’t know about you, but I think Layer 3 is fine. It makes sense. Even Layer 4 (conceptually) is okay… but the legend is absolutely confusing:
It’s confusing because Kerry (’04) is in Red and Bush (’04) is in Blue. Huh? Why do that? That breaks the mental category which which we’re familiar. We’re used to working that way, why upend it and introduce a legend that breaks our familiar categories? Sure, the legend makes sense in an of itself. But because of a viewer’s pre-cognitive categories, it can really leave a viewer in a lurch who’s trying to interpret this visualization.
That’s something we definitely want to avoid as we try to build a usable product. How do people think? What are they bringing to the table even before they reach this feature or task we’re building, and how do we account for that so the UI is consistent (or, even better, leverages) what they already know and are famliar with?
Google Maps recently put a Vote widget on their Maps landing page that tells voters where they can vote. It’s simple, it’s useful, it’s relevant to the times.
One thing I appreciate about Google (in addition to their motto, “Don’t be evil.”) is the progressive, steady enhancement and additions they keep on putting into their products. The amount of change, for example, is remarkable each time I open up Google Docs, although one could hardly tell if you were to open it up each day. It might be one button. It might be changing the look of the tabs along the far right (especially the discussion and sharing functionality). But the sum total of this steady change is a constantly evolving product. Bad decisions can be backed out and don’t have such significant impact. And good decisions stay in, and themselves continually improve.
What can we do to incorporate this steady drumbeat of progress into our team chemistry and workflow?
Talk about cool, this is a fascinating new sketch tool. I don’t know that it’s terribly relevant to web application design. However, I can see its relevance for 3-dimensional modeling, particularly for video game character and environment design; automobile or airplane conceptual modeling; animation concepting.
It’s neat to see tools for artists continue to advance in such a way that their creative modes need to constantly change and adapt to take advantage of these new mediums.
ILoveSketch from Seok-Hyung Bae on Vimeo.
What a technology team Obama has, bringing the Obama campaign to the iPhone:
Download Obama ‘08: The Official Application
Obama ‘08 is your official, comprehensive connection to the heart of Barack Obama and Joe Biden’s campaign, giving you the tools you need to make an impact and stay in the know.
Making a difference takes only moments using the Call a Friend feature. Want to do more? Find your local Obama for America HQ or look up local campaign events.
You’ll have instant access to Barack’s positions on important issues, as well as local and national campaign news as it happens. Photos and videos from the campaign trail are all here, too.
Talk about trying to get in touch with the political (technological) mavens and connectors. Obama’s team has demonstrated they move fast, and they move well.
I’ve written previously about mobile texting as a way to engage constituents in the issues organizations care about, and even mobile texting as a new revenue driver. Connection Cafe even profiled the cell phone as the killer app for Election ‘08.
What’s fascinating about the Obama iPhone application is that an organization (Obama’s campaign, in this case) isn’t restricted to just one engagement channel with their constituents, namely texting. Texting, after all, is fairly limited, not terribly empowering, and doesn’t do a whole lot more than tell you people are engaged and interested. Tapping the power of the iPhone on the other hand places an entire application at the fingertips of a mobile user who’s a technological savant, at least savvy enough to purchase an iPhone. Chances are you put such a cool application at the fingertips of such a person and they’re going to use it. Functionality in the Obama iPhone application includes:
Talk about wow. Maybe non-profits and organizations can start hiring some iPhone developers to do this for them. On top of that, it looks cool.
Over on Jon Gruber’s influential Daring Fireball, there’s an observant quote about the iPhone’s persistent black UI from Paul Goracke and Gruber’s response:
The black iPhone UI look doesn’t look bad, per se, it’s just different than the standard theme.
I’d chime in and say the difference isn’t merely a question of aesthetics. At some point, the prevalance and superfluity of the black UI in any and every application strips each application the opportunity (or responsibility) to brand itself and go through the difficult task of distinguishing its particular user experience. In other words, the varied applications remain undifferentiated because the black iPhone UI is being used by everyone.
Black’s cool. But not at the cost of a decrease in independent creativity, or an increasingly prevalent (and disturbing) uniformity.
Our team’s split between the two offices in Austin, TX and good ol’ Berkeley, CA. The places couldn’t be more different. Texas and California: ’nuff said. But we’re on the same team and try really hard to behave like one: passing ideas to one another, dropping by one another’s virtual cubes to see what’s up, IM’ing, sharing prototypes and mockups, and everything else under the sun.
With the advent of Web 2.0, the big thing is social networking. It’s also sharing information. And it’s also sharing work not as a finished product, but work that’s in the process of getting there. Our team uses a bunch of tools. Some of them have been helpful, and some not. Some have been adopted with a bit more fervor than others, and thought it’d be good to write them down.
There’s more, of course. But at the risk of overloading and overwriting, this was a foray into some of the new technology we’re playing with, trying out, and have incorporated into our workflow as a design team.
In the last release, we did some crazy stuff: we got rid of the Previous button.
Yes, I know, what were we thinking? Part of our design team’s reasoning had to do with clarifying the visual cues in our multi-step forms, which our clients have to use for virtually everything they put together (i.e. Advocacy Action Alerts, Fundraising campaigns, Email campaigns, etc.). There’s so many buttons and links, garish greens and squished dull grays and purples all coagulated together in a row. It wasn’t pretty, nor was it usable, and with some of the bandwidth we had, our team jumped in to do a little cleanup: functionally, usability, and visually as well.
It was fun, and it was a first step to visually refreshing an admin interface that needed it. BUT (where’s the story without this word, right?), there was a lot of pushback. It was good pushback in the sense that we had a whole lot of feedback internal to the company from all sorts of people: developers, product managers, services, training, engineering management, our own usability team, the entire gamut. What was good about all this were the kind of conversations we were able to have:
You can imagine that all the feedback gave our team an opportunity to think long and hard about the choices we were making, and also to engage in discussion, build consensus and arrive at a solution we could all agree on as the best solution.
On the one hand, why all the hubbub over a Previous button? Or a Next button? But then again, I ran across this discussion on the Interaction Designers forum, and with over 75 comments, it seemed like no one person has a good answer.
Cheers and Kudos to the entire Convio team that was willing to start our own conversations so we could arrive at the best solution for our clients, no matter how small or insignificant the change might seem to be.