Scroll of Wisdom
Tim Cook on Privacy
TechCrunch has a write up on Tim Cook’s Speech from EPIC:
We believe the customer should be in control of their own information. You might like these so-called free services, but we don’t think they’re worth having your email, your search history and now even your family photos data mined and sold off for god knows what advertising purpose. And we think some day, customers will see this for what it is.
Hard to say if customers will really see this for what it is someday. Google and Facebook have business models that work because people have already decided they are willing to give up privacy for service. Will that change as privacy concerns become more apparent? Maybe, but I wouldn’t bet on it.
Material Design’s Floating Action Button
Teo Yu Siang in a great post on Medium:
FABs are circular buttons that float above the UI and are “used for a promoted action,” according to Google. They act as call to action buttons, meant to represent the single action users perform the most on that particular screen.
And because of the bold visual style of Material Design, FABs are strikingly hard to ignore and stand out — and herein lies the problem.
While FABs seem to provide good UX in ideal conditions, in actual practice, widespread adoption of FABs might be detrimental to the overall UX of the app. Here are some reasons why.
Material Design is an exciting direction for Google, but I have a hard time getting past some of the usability concerns with it.
Google Photos
Google yesterday announced Google Photos which, among other things, has an extremely impressive search feature:
…with a simple search you can instantly find any photo—whether it’s your dog, your daughter’s birthday party, or your favorite beach in Santa Barbara.
I have only used it for a few minutes but I can already tell how incredibly useful this will be. Seems so obvious but I think this is the true way forward for photo management. Google at its finest.
Google Knows Water
Benedict Evans on Google’s evolving business:
The key change in all of this, I think, is that Google has gone from a world of almost perfect clarity – a text search box, a web-link index, a middle-class family’s home – to one of perfect complexity – every possible kind of user, device, access and data type. It’s gone from a firehose to a rain storm. But on the other hand, no-one knows water like Google. No-one else has the same lead in building understanding of how to deal with this. Hence, I think, one should think of every app, service, drive and platform from Google not so much as channels that might conflict but as varying end-points to a unified underlying strategy, which one might characterize as ‘know a lot about how to know a lot’.
5,200 Days in Space
Fascinating article on the lives of astronauts onbord the ISS:
Sleep position presents its own challenges. The main question is whether you want your arms inside or outside the sleeping bag. If you leave your arms out, they float free in zero gravity, often drifting out from your body, giving a sleeping astronaut the look of a wacky ballet dancer. “I’m an inside guy,” Hopkins says. “I like to be cocooned up.”
I really have a hard time imagining what it would be like in space for an extended amount of time.
BlackBerry CEO Wants Legislators To Make Developing BlackBerry Apps Mandatory
BlackBerry CEO John Chen, however, thinks this is unfair. In fact, he thinks it is so “discriminatory” that he wants legislators to widen the definition of net neutrality to include “application neutrality.”
In other words, if a company makes an app for iOS and Android, they must also make a version for BlackBerry and all other operating systems.
Call him out of “touch.”
Esports Growing Popularity
Not quite apples to apples but the League of Legends World Championship drew an impressive number of viewers:
Over 32 million fans watched SK Telecom T1 earn the Summoner’s Cup in front of a sold-out Staples Center. At peak, more than 8.5 million fans were watching at the same time.
Compared to the NFL Divisional playoff games:
The NFL announced today that the four divisional round playoff games averaged 34.3 million viewers.
I’ll be keeping an eye on Esports.
That’s The Spirit
Microsoft has just revealed its next great innovation: Windows Holographic. It’s an augmented reality experience that employs a headset, much like all the VR goggles that are currently rising in popularity, but Microsoft’s solution adds holograms to the world around you. The HoloLens headset is described as “the most advanced holographic computer the world has ever seen.” It’s a self-contained computer, including a CPU, a GPU, and a dedicated holographic processor. The dark visor up front contains a see-through display, there’s spatial sound so you can “hear” holograms behind you, and HoloLens also integrates a set of motion and environmental sensors.
Don’t count Microsoft out just yet.
The Human Side of Automation
Excellent perspective on autonomous cars by Don Norman:
But why do we make it so humans are second-class citizens? Shouldn’t it be the machines that are second-class? Shouldn’t we design by considering the powers and abilities of humans, asking the machine to pick up the remnants? This would be true human-machine collaboration.
Note that there is a wonderful possibility for collaboration. People are especially good at patterns recognition, and dealing with the unexpected, and at setting high-level goals. People are especially bad at dealing with repetitive operations, producing highly accurate, precise actions over and over again, and at vigilance, long periods of monitoring with nothing to do until or unless some unexpected critical even occurs.
Machines are superb at all those tasks people are bad at. So why not devise a collaboration whereby each does what it is best at. The real advantage of this is that the person can always be involved, but at a level appropriate to their abilities. When something goes wrong, the person is in the loop, cognizant of the current state, ready to act.
I recommend reading the entire article.
Putting Thought into Things
Structuring websites is painful because thinking is painful. It is less painful to just rely on a technique. It is less painful to blame the client, the method, or the organization. You can wail about this and make snarky comments as much as you want, but no technique or technology is going to solve a lack of thought. On the contrary! Adding stronger, faster, more technology is going to amplify our thoughtlessness. And that’s why the plastic soup of data we’re fouling our online oceans with is not making us any better at solving tangible problems.
Helvetica Neue in OS X
When Apple unveiled OS X Yosemite at this years WWDC, I was pleasantly surprised with the design changes. They were practical yet refreshing and more inline with iOS 7.
However, after spending some time with Yosemite there is one item that I have yet to warm up to: Helvetica Neue. Changing the system font is a tall order, especially from one that has proven itself over its long span.
Well known typeface designer Tobias Frere-Jones claims:
Despite its grand reputation, Helvetica can’t do everything. It works well in big sizes, but it can be really weak in small sizes. Shapes like ‘C’ and ‘S’ curl back into themselves, leaving tight “apertures”–the channels of white between a letter’s interior and exterior. So each shape halts the eye again and again, rather than ushering it along the line. The lowercase ‘e,’ the most common letter in English and many other languages, takes an especially unobliging form. These and other letters can be a pixel away from being some other letter, and we’re left to deal with flickers of doubt as we read.
Lucida Grande presents open apertures, inviting the eye to move along sideways through the text. It has worked really well–for years, and for good reason. For any text, but particularly in interfaces, our eyes need typefaces that cooperate rather than resist. A super-sharp Retina Display might help, but the real issue is the human eye, and I haven’t heard of any upgrades on the way.
Even if Retina Displays help, they are really not common yet for Macs. Let’s take a look at Apple’s current (July 2014) Mac lineup:
Only one of the above five has an Apple Retina Display. Granted the Macbook Pro w/Retina Display is probably the best selling in the lineup. Still, Retina Macs are simply not pervasive. I suppose we could see new Retina Macbook Airs and iMacs, along with a new Retina Thunderbolt display this year and that would cover the whole line up, but that’s hoping for a lot.
It will take time for Helvetica in OS X to sink in and prove itself.
Nord Keyboards Interface Design
From the Nord Electro 3 product page:
One of our main focuses is to have dedicated knobs and buttons for all vital functions, and keep the interface simple and easy to use during a performance. We don’t believe in submenus, and the only functions in the Electro 3 that only are available through menus are printed on the panel so you don’t need to read the manual.
“Don’t need to read the manual.”
On Using Tools
As builders, we like tools and tech because they’re interesting and new, and we enjoy mastering them. But when you think about the people we’re building for, the reality is usually the opposite. They need simple designs, clear writing, less tech, and fewer abstractions.
There are good reasons to use tools when building stuff, they can speed up the process, reduce barriers, and increase enjoyment. I would be the first to admit I enjoy using the latest frameworks and tools for web development, but it’s not always the right thing to do.
Product Bloat
It’s an immovable law of design physics — adding functionality adds complexity. You can’t get around it. All you can do is try to add functionality that people really want, and do it carefully enough that the increased complexity is worth it. There are no shortcuts or magic bullets.
Nintendo’s Focus
From The Rise of Nintendo: A Story in 8 Bits:
As Nintendo exploded, there were plenty of opportunities to make a quick buck (hardware upgrades, unnecessary peripherals), exploit the company’s beloved characters (movies, theme parks), or dilute the brand by trying to attract an audience older than Nintendo’s six-to-fourteen-year-olds. But these kinds of things didn’t interest Arakawa. What propelled him was a desire to continually provide Nintendo’s customers with a unique user experience. He set up a toll-free telephone line where Nintendo “Game Counselors” were available all day to help players get through difficult levels, and he initiated the Nintendo Fun Club, which sent a free newsletter to any customer who had sent in a warranty card. Both programs were very costly and could have been offset by charging small fees or obtaining sponsorship, but Arakawa believed that doing so would compromise Nintendo’s mission.
Intense focus like this is always applaudable.
Great Advice from Jakob Nielsen
From a Dorm Room Tycoon Podcast:
The less intrusive the design is the better the user can focus on the task. A lot of designers want to wave their flag and say, “Hey, look at my design.” But the truth is the user does not want that. They don’t use your app to admire, they use your app to get things done.
Information Architecture Analogy
I often equate my job to that of a building architect — just like they need to make sure that the floors are sound and people can walk across without hitting beams, get to an elevator and push a button and when they get off they see what they expected to see, I have to make sure that if a patron is on our website, they can understand our navigational elements and when they get to a page all of the information they need is front and center.
Great way to put it.
Designing for The Z-Axis
For years we’ve thought about the web as a two-dimensional space filled with pages that sit side by side on a flat, infinite plane. But as the devices we design for take on an increasingly diverse array of shapes and sizes, we should embrace new ways of designing up and down. By building interfaces using a system of layers, we solve tricky design problems, flexibly adapt to a variety of screens, and create new patterns that will point the way to future interactions.
In the words of Jim Dalrymple, “Yep.”
Shiftgate
Apple is the company that I think of when I think of world class user interface design. However, iOS 7.1 took a wild turn with it’s shift key behavior.
Can you tell if shift is currently enabled?
Nope, me either.
Be Careful What You Geotag
From How Your Tweets Reveal Your Home Location:
And in 2007, four Apache helicopters belonging to the US Army were destroyed by mortars in Iraq when insurgents worked out their location using geotagged images published by American soldiers.