User Centered

I suppose the product design team and testers over at Apple have "casual day" all during the week- or at least they don't rock the super cool "no tie" dress shirt like this business casual author is prone to do.

I say this because anyone who's spent any time with a)iPhone headphones and b) a collar would notice that the headphone "clicker" is perfectly designed to catch on the edge of my collar every time I turn my head.

How about you smooth over that hard edge Apple?

Amron Experimental design for a toothbrush that redirects the water stream in a more "water fountainy" kind of way.

This is welcome for my son at least- watching him pull himself up onto the sink and strain to reach the water is amusing for me, not so much for him.

http://www.creativereview.co.uk/crblog/mind-the-graphics/

Transport For London has turned to graphic design in an attempt to make it easier to get on and off crowded tubes.

From 14 February, London Underground is to trial various graphic devices on the Jubilee Line. The markings are designed to encourage those waiting on platforms to let passengers off the train before getting on themselves. There are four different styles, each style to be tested at at least two locations

Read more...

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.

After those last words from Shell (Activity Centered vs. Feature Rich), I got a series of emails from her with more and more information in regards to usability quirks and nuances. It rapidly started turning into a new post -so she decided to put to paper to pen on a comparison of the Treo 650 and 700w. She's passionate about the Treo brand, so I thought we'd give her some room to speak her mind...

by Shell-


I started off with the Treo 650 in mid-2005 and worshipped the phone from the start. When the 700w was released, I was hesitant to use it because I have a bias against all things Windows. However, I decided to give it a shot a few weeks ago. I'll admit, the multimedia capabilities on the 700w are amazing - but I'll save that for later. For now, the following are a few things I've noticed regarding the differences between the Treo 650 and the Treo 700w.

The keypad buttons are actually better on the Treo 700w. They're more squared off, making it easier for those with big thumbs to hit the proper key (which makes male users in particular quite happy). However, two of the previous shortcut buttons on the 650 are now missing from the 700w. It's not as if those buttons were taking up too much space on the 650, so what was the reasoning behind the change? The shortcuts buttons on the 650 made it easier to get to your email, calendar, drop down list, or Today screen with one push. On the 700w, you now have to hit at least two buttons to get to anything besides the phone application. Instead of one shortcut button, all of the 700w's programs are bundled under the nifty little Windows-logo'ed key. Perhaps this was just a ploy to bury the Windows logo even further into our subconscious, but it's a pain when you want to see your email or contacts quickly.


The web browser on the 700w provides, overall, a better web browsing experience. Faster loading, better graphics, a screen that is easy on the eyes. However, the lack of easy-to-navigate screen softkeys on the 700w is irritating (Eddie's note: I tried to get Opera Mini and/or Mobile on her Treo(s) before but can't remember offhand what roadblocks prevented me from being successful). Notice how the 650's browser, Blazer, has back and forward screen softkeys and a Home Page softkey? These are the simplest to recognize - even an internet rookie can figure those ones out. The folder-looking key is for optimizing web pages (okay, that one is not an obvious icon - not to me anyway), the globe spins when pages are being accessed, and the folder-list looking icon is where Favorites are stored. Easy enough. But on the 700w, where are all my easily-accessible shortcuts? The top bar here is dedicated to a phone/mail shortcut which will inform you if you've missed any calls or email while you were browsing the web - even though you will still be notified of any incoming phone calls or emails received while browsing the web. So what is the point of this icon? Moving on: the EV icon will tell you which network you're connected to. You can click on and choose the settings for your network. I consider myself a typical user - I don't get into networks like that. The signal strength bars are fine, I suppose, and lastly there's an icon showing your battery life, an icon that you canNOT click on. (Sidenote: this is one of the most irritating features of the 700w. On the 650, you can tap the battery icon and it will tell you how much life you have left. But on the 700w, tapping the battery does absolutely nothing. I still can't figure out where to find the amount of life left).


The Today screen is basically the home page on the 700w, where you can dial a number, look at your latest email or check your calendar (the settings on the phone pictured have those options removed - I don't like clutter on my main screen). But whether or not you like clutter, this layout isn't too terribly shabby. A quick hit of the Menu button will take you to your Contacts, Dial Pad, Call Log, etc. However, meandering on over to the 650 - I can get to Contacts with one keystroke instead of two. Same with Call Log. And hey, there's a shortcut to my Mom's number right there on the front screen too. While I think each layout has its benefits, I'm sticking with 650 here because it lets me go places with one tap versus two.

And speaking of taps - the 700w can be a pain for navigation. With the 650, I can use my finger to tap the screen for almost every single thing I want. However, on the 700w I find myself trying in vain to use my finger to tap the screen and hitting the wrong link every time - I have to eventually pull out my stylus. What happens when I lose my stylus? Because eventually I will. I think this difficulty in being able to hit the mark with my finger is owed to the size of the marks. In trying to cram so many options into one space, they've made everything so small that you're forced to use the stylus and personally, I hate stylus'.