90 percent of everything : Usability Blog

Written by Harry Brignull

I usually hate it when people blog about their sprogs but suddenly I understand… My daughter Lilly was born on saturday afternoon, 7 pounds 14, a little bundle of joy.

I’ll be fairly offline over the next two or three weeks, but I will be making a quick appearance at UX Brighton on Tuesday 13th May, where I’ll be giving a talk on out-of-box experience design. If you’re local, why not come along? I promise not to bore you with baby stories.

OK, maybe I will just a little.

A great quote that sums up the art of User-Centered Writing:

“Bad writers worry about whether the reader will understand them. Good ones are more concerned about how well they understand the reader.”

- Paraphrased from Lindsay Camp (2007)

Has anyone else noticed how great Facebook image tagging is?

Granted, it is only for putting names to faces, but it’s incredibly quick to use (say 5 seconds per photo), and it’s really satisfying. Your friends see you’ve tagged them (the images appear in their news feed on their facebook homepage), and usually respond with a comment or by tagging some of your photos in return.

Compare this to Flickr where image tagging feels heavyweight, tiring and you get no quick payback for your effort.

Come on Flickr - you’ve dropped the ball on tagging. It should be a rapid, social and fun activity!

Microsoft Surface is a pretty amazing piece of research: tabletop touchscreen computing done really well. But, the “origins” section on the Surface website strongly implies that the whole concept of tabletop computing originated from Microsoft. It didn’t. If you find this stuff exciting, you should check out some of the prior research in this area.

MERL’s diamond touch : one of the first multi-touch technologies (works by running an electronic signal to your finger via your chair to identify each user).

IPSI’s roomware: this is an entire room decked out as touchscreen surfaces that are all linked together.

Stanford’s Tabletop groupware: they’ve done tons of stuff in the area. You may recognise some of the gestural stuff that also appears in the MS video.

Jun Rekimoto’s work (Sony) this includes “holotable”, “smart skin” and “augmented surfaces”. Jun is a genius- in my opinion, his research is genre defining.

I’m not saying that it’s a bad thing that Microsoft are building on top of prior research - this is, after all, what research is all about. I’m just trying to say that there are some talented people and research groups out there that also deserve recognition for the state of the art today.

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Another great deal from Three.

According to Diggnation, Microsoft ran a number of focus groups for Office 2007 and asked people what new features they wanted Office to do. They gave a list of needs and nice-to-haves. Funnily enough, all of the requested functionality was in Office already, but nobody could find it because it’s all hidden away in the many-layered UI.

This is an important lesson - if your users can’t find a feature, it may as well not exist and you’ve wasted your time making it. The Ribbon menu has done a lot to fix this problem, since it only shows you the features relevant to what you are doing at that particular point in time.

Touchscreens. Pockets. Keys. Big Fat Thumbs. These things haven’t managed to go together very well in the past … but have Apple managed to crack it with the iPhone?

The great thing about physical buttons is that they stay in the same place, and they have a “tactile landscape”. This means that if you are familiar with your phone, your hand can feel where the buttons are, and your motor memory can make using them feel “automatic”, a bit like riding a bike. The tactile landscape can help you do things while you are using your phone, like walking down a busy street and writing a text without bumping into anything. This makes your phone into a genuinely mobile device - something that you can use while moving, rather than just a portable device - something that you carry around but only use while stationary. [Ref]

This all seems fairly logical, right? So the question is, will the touchscreen on the Apple iPhone require too much visual attention? Will it be one of those devices you have to use while standing (or sitting) still?

Then comes the question of robustness. Apple tends to make devices that get scratched just by looking at them. I resent having to mollycoddle my ipod. I dread having to do the same with my phone. I don’t just want a phone that works with itunes and osx. I want a phone that’s compatible with my keys and my loose change.

But having said all this, when are they released in the UK? I badly want one!