User Centered

I've tried posting a grocery list on the fridge and keeping track of stuff throughout the week that I need to get, it just doesn't work for me. Maybe I'm lazy, maybe I'm just missing some user centered process that works best for me. I quite regularly decide to go to store on the way home from work, or "while I'm out" -in other words, when I don't have that list handy.

There are two problems I need to solve- the traditional list solves the first one:

1. Quickly keep track of things I run across that I need to get as I encounter them- "hmmm need a new vacuum cleaner bag, I'll make a note of that." (yes, I have gone back to stupid bagged vacuums)
   
   
2. Recall all of those items I've collected when I get to the store
   

The second item there is often where the process breaks down for me, so what can be done? Go electronic of course! That's our answer for everything.

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I thought it would be timely given all this recent talk on smartphones and convergence to reprint this question from my Q&A with Donald Norman:

In your "Ask Don" feature, you ended your thoughts on convergence with:
"Today simplicity, tomorrow convenience. Tomorrow convenience, the next day simplicity." Do you feel there is hope that technology will close this gap? In other words, it would be nice if our cell phone would physically "change" into a MP3 player at our whims, but until reality catches up with Sci-Fi, is there a middle ground that technology can reach that will make make simple and convenient devices? (like a touchscreen interface that offers the tactile feedback of physical buttons)

DN: We are always caught in the bind of wanting our devices to be straightforward and simple, while simultaneously wanting them to do more and more things.

This is not a technological problem.

Technology can help only if it can adopt a simple structure so that controls for different devices are as similar to one another as possible, making the learning much easier. Multiple purpose controls are an abomination. It is possible to have a single device transform itself into independent devices for controlling different tasks. But here the key is to make the switch from the support of individual technologies and individual devices to the support of cohesive, organized activities.

When I watch television, I don't really want to watch TV: I want to watch a movie, or a TV show. Therefore, the "watching a TV show" control should automatically set up the TV, the cable box or DVR, the audio set, and let me control volume and selection of shows -- activities that require numerous separate devices, but should e smoothly controlled by one. Indeed, the "watching a TV show" controller might also control room lights and draperies. That's what happens in my home.

But, that's it. The "watching a TV show" controller should not select music channels, or control the bedroom lights, or the room temperature -- it should be configured for all and only the components that make up the TV viewing experience.

Similar strategies are required for all of our activities. Activity-centered design is the key to simplicity.

My girlfriend sends me this note...

I saw this article talking about the pie menu (extension) in Firefox.... does Opera do anything like this?

...the other day in some article about the *next* version of Windows that may (or may not) include pie menus... the author discussed the Firefox extension in the absence of any Windows based examples. So that got me explaining the difference between mouse gestures and pie menus, and I thought a little bit about what I like and dislike about them that I thought I'd share.


Pie menus are great in my opinion. At least, much greater than what we have for menus and toolbars. They take the mouse travel out of the equation and change it into mouse direction. So you're not constantly moving all the way over to the back button, then back to page content... (I'm already tired!). In addition, they take a context sensitive approach. What your mouse is hovering over at the time you bring up a pie menu determines what kind of menu you get. The latest version of Office includes the context sensitive part in the "the Ribbon."

All this is of course very familiar to Opera users, or any mouse gesture fan. The big difference between the two is that you don't get to see what's going on with mouse gestures. You'll get feedback only after the command has been executed, and hopefully it will match what you intended it to do.

It sounds like I'm putting down Opera's approach (of course available as a FF extension as well), but I'm not. In fact, I prefer this approach in the long run as it forces simplicity and activity centered design. I explained back to the email (paraphrased if you're reading Shelly):

Pie menues might be better for “the masses” because you can see it on the screen, you get visual feedback and an actual menu that might remind you of a command you may have forgotten about. Mouse gestures have the advantage in that you can easily do them without looking at them. You can be in the middle of reading an article and execute the “close page” gesture even as you’re still reading the last sentence…. Since you don’t have to actually look or “hit a target” with the mouse, I prefer them over pie menus. The command is invisible to me.

(I do like to woo the ladies with usability talk)

Now, I'm sure experienced pie menu users can execute them without looking at the menu, and I think that's great. It's a nice "best of both worlds" approach, but gestures are *designed* to be executed without looking at a menu, which is a different approach. Nested pie menus are possible, but nested mouse gestures would be too cumbersome. I tend to keep my mouse gestures at the very max three movements only (left, right, left to enable fit to width... I envision my mouse bouncing of the edges of the page to "shake" it to the correct horizontal spacing of fit-to-width). Since I love my browser mouse gestures so much, I tried the software that lets you use them on Windows and was sorely dissappointed. Mainly because they weren't native and not nearly as responsive as in Opera, but also because I had to draw letters of the alphabet with and complex gestures with my mouse that were impossible if you didn't show the trail. This defeats the purpose of the mouse gesture to me- that you can execute a command without having to spend any mental cycles thinking about the physical act of execution.

I love replying the slashdot comments about how mouse gestures are for lazy people. It has nothing to do with that. I love mouse gestures because I dont' have to divert from whatever task I'm doing (reading a page, thinking about the next tab I want to view...etc..) just to preform some browser UI manipulation. Gestures are the epitome of "the UI shouldn't get in the way." I think "back" and I'm back in history. I don't have to right click, select from a menu, or look up at the browser bar and find the "back" target. The muscle memory takes over and it's absolutely seemless.

Pie Menus are nice because you could achieve this same "muscle memory" feeling while still having visual feedback in case your muscles don't quite remember. I think that's great in the long run but it opens the door to overly complicating the simplicity of the pie menu. It's tempting to make the slices really small and cram as much in there as you can, or to nest pie menus together. It's probably still better than what most menus look like now, but keeping me focused on my tasks (activity centered design!) and not inviting complexity into the menu is why I prefer mouse gestures over pie menus.

Of course, as I write this- it would be nice to have a combination of them. Executing a gesture up would start a pie menu, but the other (left/right/down and subordinate movements) ones would be traditional mouse gestures. But that would probably blow my mind.

(Update: edited number 5 below...)

I can't wait for mobile widgets.

Currently, to find out weather info on my phone, I have to:
1)Select my browser from a phone menu
2)Select "bookmarks"
3)Scroll to weather.com bookmark
4)Select Bookmark
(of course, you'd have to type the URL if it's not bookmarked)
5)(optional)enter zip code or city information
6)Read Current temp...Click on appropriate forcast (I always use the "hour by hour"), navigate page as necessary...(back/forward, links etc...)
-hopefully, steps 5 and 6 are optimized for mobile devices.

With widgets on a mobile, I'd like to:
1)Select the widget from my phone menu.
1a)(Optional) enter zip code or city information
2)Read current temp and hour-by-hour all together.

I think the difference, even if it's only one step saved, is quite welcome in the mobile area. Phones are not the speediest processors of our multimedia requests. It seems to take forever just to load a browser and get a google page up. Any steps taken to alleviate the process and reduce input seem to be a great way to go. Widgets could help out there quite a bit by taking the overhead of the browser away from the user and just focusing on the activity at hand.

I like have a browser to browse the web of course, but when I think to myself "Should I walk home from work today, or take the bus?" on my way out the door, I want that answer quickly.

Of course, I could use Google SMS, but you get the point- the more activity centered tools we have at our disposal, the better.

This article was rewritten/updated.

Please see: iTunes as a Podcast Manager: it's time for an intervention for revised version

iTunes+iPod has always been great for me as far as music is concerned. Playlist management and the iPod interface have not always had EVERY feature I wanted or needed, but simplicity is the selling point and well frankly, it sold me. "Less is more." By limiting the feature set to create a simple UI, you've created "more" in terms of the user experience. I agree.

But lately, my iPod is almost exclusively (emphasis on almost) used for podcasts, and I’ve found iTunes to not match exactly the|my real world usage of podcasts (activity centered anyone?)

Here are a couple UI quirks I've found that make me think "less" is actually less when dealing with podcasts-


Repeat

This is a useful feature on playlists of music, but has little value to podcasts. I always want
my music to loop back through the playlist, but I never want my podcasts to loop. iPod can only let you set one. If I'm listening to music- I prefer to select repeat. Podcast? Turn it off. I’ve found (maybe it’s just the podcasts I listen to) that sometimes it’s not so easy to tell you’ve looped back to the beginning, and conversly, when your music playlist ends when you're hitting 9MPH on the treadmill- that's also a let down.


Limited choice of syncing

The options available are perfect for one podcast, but not another. Variations in publishing/syndication lead to variation in how why should sync them. The "one size fits all" approach to updating your podcasts keeps the interface simple, but at the cost of being useful...

• Unplayed podcast This is a podcast specific feature (as far as I know)- but some podcasts I get (like the onion news) are only a minute at best, and some are an hour. If I’m only 20 minutes into one and I want to keep it around, I have to disable automatically sync, because otherwise as soon as I dock it, the unfinished episode has to be marked as unplayed and re-sync'd (and then, I have to FF/find where I was again)
  
  
• Most recent episode- some podcasts are published every once in awhile (PK&J show) and some are published multiple times a day (Armstrong and Getty is a radio show that publishes each hour of a four hour show, every day). Most recent episode is good for infrequent podcasts, but daily (or multiple per day) podcasts require dedicated daily syncs and the potential to miss some.
  
  
• Only Checked- labor intensive. Seems like this is my only choice for the large variety of podcasts I listen too. But each podcast doesn't need to "managed" on a daily basis. I'd like to set it once for each podcast. The PK&J show? Get the most recent. Armstrong and Getty? Get all of em...etc.
  

Auto update

It only updates when you dock it. I dock it when I get home from work and pick it up in the morning on my way out the door….after every podcast I know of has sent out updates. So I have to manually sync it before grab it. I realize iTunes doesn’t know when you’re going to grab it. But how about if it updates the iPod whenever it searches for & updates new podcasts?


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How about allowing us to set preferences for each podcast? Too complex? Would that clutter the UI too much? Less is more, simplicity is key? How about “activity centered design is the key to simplicity” instead? Build your UI to enhance my activities. In my opinion, podcasts management (as well as the searching via iTunes, but that is a different post entirely) is an afterthought.

Perhaps simplicity is still the key here. Maybe iTunes tried to cram podcast functionality into a music manager. In 37Signals mantra- maybe two simple interfaces are needed that are designed for the intended activity. Are podcasts different from music? Should the UI treat them differently?

You may immediately tell me to “use product 'X' instead of iTunes- and that’s fine. But I really do appreciate the integrated music store, syncing and management of iTunes and my iPod. But if you have a better solution that allows me to sit at my desk, dock my iPod and get my music and podcasts sync’d, I’d listen.