Just think, soon you’ll be explaining what Mail really was and why the icons look like envelopes to kids that have never seen a mailman in real life.
Tempus fugit.
=)
Just think, soon you’ll be explaining what Mail really was and why the icons look like envelopes to kids that have never seen a mailman in real life.
Tempus fugit.
=)
Design is all about focus. What to focus on, what to disregard. There is limited time and no designer has the time to make anything perfect.
Apple is sublime in making the 90% mostly used parts of the user experience near perfect.
Except one thing.
You have an iPod, what do you listen with?
You have an iPhone, what do you listen and make calls from?
Apple’s headset and/or head phones.
In the 2002 article Mind your language, by Game Developer Ben Cousins, Cousins explains what to focus on to make a successful product. In short: whatever the user spends most time with. Apple is usually great at this but seem to be missing the headsets.
It’s not that the headsets / head phones are bad per se. They just aren’t really good. And the quality is awful, I’m on my 6th pair this year and mad as a hat when the sound goes in one ear.
Apple should really look into making a better headset, ensuring that customers are using headsets with the intended functions.
To work effectively with other people we need terms that define abstract things so we don’t get stuck on them, such as Grok and User Interface.
Let’s define two more: Object and Model.
Any interaction consists of a one or more systems of thought. In cognitive psychology such systems (or representational models of the real world) are called cognitive models.
When we interact with something we use a lot of these models. But the term isn’t fleshed out enough for daily use in interaction design.
An Interaction Object is the entire interaction process with a thing or a process. Using a pair of scissors (holding them correctly, using them to cut and understanding in what way they cut) consists of many cognitive models but only one Interaction Object.
But every process or new function is a new object. A Swiss army knife has as many objects as it has tools.
A Interaction Model is one set of possible interaction methods. Much like the cognitive model a Interaction Model consists of only a single thought process about something. A pair of scissors can be held by the handles, one model. A pair of scissors has cutting surfaces that are sharp, another model. Etc etc.
Using these terms we can discuss interaction design for abstract products such as games and web apps with much greater efficiency.
Example 1: A menu on a web page is an Interaction Object. And if it has more than one or two Interaction Models you’re making it to complicated.
Example 2: A game avatar has several Interaction Objects. To be able to understand them they must have very few Interaction Models.
Example 3: Facebook has a lot of Interaction Objects, but most Objects only has a single Interaction Model. Does this make Facebook easy to use or harder to Grok?
Can you use these terms or are they still to complicated or undefined? Let me know what you think.
Quote from Bill’s Q&A with Stanford students:
“When my son asks me questions like ‘What’s fertilizer?,’ ‘What’s a black hole?,’ ‘Why do supernovas explode?,’ I can answer those questions. Why? Because I have the internet. We learn together.” – Bill Gates 2010
Check out the rest of the Forbes article here.
A lot of people I talk to are confused about design. Not least when they hear about abstract design such as web design, UX design, game design etc. I can’t blame them. As designers we really tag ourselves with the word most appropriate for the task at hand. Even though our main work is always to solve problems by design.
But let’s make things easier
For most designers working with abstract design the term user interface is crucial. But exactly what is a UI? Sure, it’s the thing the user interacts with. But where does it start and where does it end?
User Interface
Interface is a proxy layer between a human being and a function.
But what does that mean? For a pair of scissors, the scissors themselves are the user interface between a human hand and the function of cutting.
A computer has two layers of user interfaces between the human and most functions. The keyboard/mouse or physical UI, and the graphical or text based abstract UI.
But what if the user interface is a part of the function? The iPhone for instance doesn’t really have a physical UI. There is nothing physical to interact with (excepting the home button, volume and mute controls but lets not digress from the example). But it does have a graphical abstract UI.
Why is this definition important? Because now we can all say user interface and know what we’re referring to. No more wordplay to guess what the other person is talking about.
UI is the second most important part of any application or service.
The service or function is more important, but it’s not important at all if users can’t use it.
How to know whats good or bad?
Thankfully, our old friend Cognitive Psychology provides us with the key. Just record a user using your UI (or use it yourself and make notes).
Every negative counts twice, that’s how humans perceive negative impact.
The higher the score, the better it is.
Of course, this is only generally true, performing 200 actions to change a song on your MP3 player is not a good UI. Even if every step was intuitive.
I don’t know about you, but I certainly do less exciting things than I could. Actually I do know a bit about you. I know that at certain times you go beyond your comfort zone and have a fun exhilarating time, but usually you back out right back into that comfort zone.
During work, time with your family, even at parties most of our time seems to be spent not doing the things we want to.
We cant do them all of course. But we could live a bit more.
Why don’t we?
Fear of success: My own worst enemy. The fear of succeeding and adding to the pressure can be daunting. This is why we find errors in our own work, why we focus of details that don’t really matter.
Fear of failure: The fear of not succeeding can be stifling because we fear the mocking of those around us. This is why we find reasons that projects have to fail. Why we spend a lot of energy on finding reasons or scapegoats to blame tha failure on.
Learning to indentify when and why we’re backing into our comfort zone isn’t enough. When you’ve identified such a situation, your doing something right. This is when you should get going.
Try it, right now. Go do anything that makes you nervous.
Excited about the Playstation Move?
I’m not.
And the reason for it is simple: Sony isn’t completely behind the product.
Just compare this commercial
Playstation Move
To these two
Apple iPod Touch
Nintendo Wii
Which is all about a new interface and a new way for consumers to have fun? And which is just a marketing scheme to cram another accessory down your throat?
PlayStation Move seems to be a very qualitative device for 3D manipulation. It’s well designed and the interface seems robust.
But Sony should either go full out and place it’s bets with the Move or just stop. Accessories might be a large source of income for the company but PlayStation is already behind the competition and diversifying the platform further with even less support is not going to help.
“Web users will have to pay for what they watch and use, or else we will have to stop making content in the costly and complex way we have grown accustomed to making it. And we don’t know how to do that.”
Simply brilliant!
Read the full post here.