Sit up straight, I’m about to explain the secret sauce behind exceptional products.
There is a difference between products that perform poorly and products that perform well that is hard to put your finger on. Designers have been struggling to tell you about it for years. But it turns out it’s not the answer that is the problem, it’s the question.
The question is: Is it enjoyable? It’s the difference between functional and great.
Tracking is the basis for everything online these days. We track what content gets the most clicks to make sure we create better content. We track the ads we run to make sure our ads are targeted to the right people and that they convert well. We use tracking in all aspects of our lives to make better decisions and take the right action. But it’s not working, is it. No matter how long you stare at those numbers they don’t give you a golden bullet. So what’s wrong with this theory? Everything.
To people in the tech industry, telecom operators seem helplessly behind the times. To most people however, telecom companies are their only real connection to tech. So why are they so far behind?
Most journalists now believe Apple will be releasing a TV this year. Speculating over Apple’s plans is close to impossible, but if we look closely at what Apple have been releasing over the last few years I think we can predict what an Apple iTV would be like. There are a lot of problems. All of which would be solved by taking the problems out of the TV set and instead making it a much more connected device.
When the iPad was announced a lot of people wondered what it was for. Why carry a giant iPod touch with you instead of a small laptop? When Apple later unveiled the updated MacBook Air a lot of people asked the same thing. But the iPad is still flying off the shelves and people love the machine.
But if you’re still wondering why the iPad is good I did some snooping. Actually I’ve asked non-leading, weird, questions to every iPad user near me for close to two years just to understand the behavior. And I think I’ve solved it.
Why the iPad feels wrong for real work
Some people will tell you the iPad does multitasking and that it works great. That’s just not true. It does uni-tasking and great app switching.
The difference is it really forces you to focus on one thing at a time. I have no problem switching between apps to get stuff I need to send or reply to that email with facts from simplenote etc. But you can’t have all that on the screen at the same time like you are used to.
This makes people believe it’s hard to use for work. Simply because they have to relearn their entire workflow. The desktop experience simply doesn’t translate to the tablet and it makes people feel less efficient.
Why the iPad is awesomee
The iPad actually makes you more effective. Not efficient. You won’t be doing things at the same speed as you do on a desktop, and that might frustrate you. But it’ll also force you to think about what is most important. Usually, in both my experience and my sneaky interviews, making the end result better.
The iPad really does almost everything a desktop computer does. So far I’ve found two things it doesn’t do as well as a desktop:
The second thing the iPad doesn’t to really do highlights the efficiency vs effectiveness problem. It doesn’t format text well. But is that really what you should be doing? Yes a well formated document looks a lot more professional than a poorly formatted one. But the content is really the important thing, right? And seriously, you could’ve made a template for those visual documents years ago.
Don’t worry though, there’s probably an app for that.
The ending was intended as sarcasm and not rampant fanboyism. Though I probably am a rampant fanboy of Apple’s take on design.
When I roam around a city (which rarely happens I promise think) I often find myself wishing there was a good way to search for local services (coffee shops, bars, restaurants).
This unicorn has never appeared though. Local seemed to be impossible with current tech.
Then I was on the subway this morning. And a tweet lead me to Google Mobile, below the search bar I found something odd…
It said log in. And it asked for my location (sorry about the Swedish btw, I’m in Sweden so Google assumes I prefer the deprecated language over English).
Now I’ve used Google Places before and I was not impressed. There simply isn’t enough aggregated data in Stockholm for it to work. Well that’s what I thought.
I logged in and pressed the icon marked “Cafe’s”. Lo and behold! Google quickly returned Coffee shops close to my location, on a map even!
Now this is impressive. But what is a lot more impressive is what happened next. I scroll down the list and instead of just finding aggregated information, which I come to expect from Google, I’m shown an impressive interface of detailed information and functions for each location.
Not only can I call the location directly from the app, I can also find reviews directly. But this is the most impressive part: the item on top of the list is shown on the map (which stays at the top as you scroll) and an overlay button appears letting me find Directions to the location…
This post is quite probably the worst I’ve ever written, and that is because I’m completely blown away by the UX of this SERP.
Google has really understood what I want out of a local search and given me the tools I need to use the information they present me with. A level of user experience I’ve never seen from Google and would only expect from the very best Apple products.
Google, I salute you. Keep this up!
Trackpad Settings in Lion
To change back from Lion’s default natural scrolling open Settings -> Trackpad -> Scroll & Zoom and uncheck the natural scrolling checkbox. All done.
Why shouldn’t you?
It’s annoying right? Why should you have to relearn how scrolling works?
Because it makes no sense in Lion, and I’ll bet you anything it’ll make less and less sense going forward. This is the new paradigm, learn it now or later.
But why?
In the beginning of Graphic User Interfaces scrolling was done by clicking the scrollbars on the side of an application window.
Old school Scrollbars
Since this wasn’t a very efficient way to do it many weird solutions for simpler scrolling popped up here and there. It soon became standard for Mice to have scroll wheels on them. Making the entire representation of scroll bars a bit redundant. They take up a lot of screen real estate just to show you where in a window you are looking at any one time. It’s not like you didn’t scroll there in the first place right?
A Mouse with a Scroll Wheel - high tech in the 90's
When touch pads started becoming standard, this design thought was transplanted over from mice and scroll bars. Nothing wrong with that, reinventing the wheel isn’t always a good thing.
Except when it is.
In this case it made no sense. The mouse and it’s scroll wheel use two different controls to achieve two different things. You move the mouse to point. And you scroll the wheel to.. eh.. scroll.
But on a touch pad you use the same control. Your poking the touchpad to move the pointer and then poking the touchpad in the opposite direction to scroll. The only reason this feels “natural” is because we, as the ingrained PC users we are, are so used to scrollbars. We know that what we’re scrolling isn’t the content but the scrollbar. Which in turn scrolls the content…
See where the design falls apart?
The metaphor is broken. The scrollbar no longer makes sense when you scroll using the pointing device to move the content, instead of the scrollbar.
Alright. That makes sense, but why relearn? Why fix what ain’t broken?
In two words: Cognitive load.
Lion’s natural scrolling (directly scrolling the content instead of the scroll bar) will become the standard, like it or not, because the average PC user doesn’t change default settings and certainly don’t understand why scrolling should be inverse to the screen. The cognitive load of thinking about how to scroll will simply become to much as more computers are delivered with touch pads and more of our PCs become touch based (as tablets become more widely spread).
To clarify; on a mouse the scrolling direction won’t change. Because the scroll wheel isn’t directly linked to the content anyway. But a touch pad is directly linked.
Update: For some reason, Apple has changed the scrolling direction on the mouse wheel for non-apple mice. This is weird. Thanks to Dan in the comments for reporting!
It takes a little time to get used to, though less than you might think, but it will be worth it. And you won’t have to relearn later on which will get increasingly frustrating.
Not convinced? Check out MG Siegler’s excellent pre-lion post The iPad Has Broken My Brain; OS X Lion Will Help Fix It.
Something I don’t get about most current design is that designers adding features always add layers of complexity.
Never add things unnecessarily.
This is my design for a new Notification system. The notification counter on top will ping in color and sound/vibration when new notifications drop in. The user can set which service does what in settings.
The entire notification list is under the spotlight window. If you use spotlight, it’ll disappear until you remove your search.
UPDATE:
iOS5 has been unveiled and while I’m not shocked to find I wasn’t spot on, I am a bit shocked by their adding another menu just for notifications. If you have no idea what I’m talking about check em out here.
The iPad three will probably have a button, but you’ll never use it. Before the iPad 2 was announced there were rumors that Apple were preparing an iPad without a home button. There was much debate and the rumor seemed drastic. But the rumors are actually true.
New interface gestures for iOS 4.3 which shipped on the iPad2 lets you multitask without using the home button. Pinch to homescreen let’s you close apps without the button and swipe up to reveal the multitasking bar let’s you exit apps that are running in the background. Effectively making the home button a relic of the past.
So from the release of iOS5 (probably with the iPhone 5 this june) you might never need to use a button on an iOS device again. Some of you might think that’s a great thing, I for one would love it since I rarely double click fast enough, and others might think it’s useless.
The tail end of this effect is that you could, theoretically, controll all the interactions with apps running on an Apple TV with a Magic Trackpad…
Let the rumor mills run wild! 
Notifications on the iPhone and the iPad are broken. They distract us and get us away from our work flow or Angry Birds and if you, like me, get a lot of them they stack most annoyingly.
So why haven’t Apple already solved this?
We can’t know that for sure, secretive as Apple is. But I’ll bet it has something to do with the new iteration of OS X.
Lion
In Lion Apple is bringing iOS features back to the Mac. Specifically, for notifications, applications are now encouraged to be full screen. Full screen apps can’t use badges or jumping icons in the dock to notify users of what’s going on.
Lion has to redesign notifications.
And Lion has to make notifications work with full screen apps, exactly the same problem that Apple faces on the iPhone and iPad.
Unified notification system
I believe the new notification system will be the same, or very similar, across all Apple platforms. It just makes to much sense not to, all their devices need new notifications and they face the same constraints… Except input. iOS handles touch, OS X has a mouse/keyboard. Both of them handle gestures however.
Universal Gestures?
In the new beta of iOS, 4.3, Apple has released a set of gestures to do multitasking making the feature a lot more powerful and easy to use.
These gestures don’t translate all that well to the iPhone (five fingers on a 3″ screen?) but I dare say Apple can solve that.
But I also notice there’s one gesture missing: down.
Right and left swipes change app, swipe up to show active apps, why not swipe down to show a notification app/menu?
Notification app/menu/dock
Gathers all notifications, only needs to make a sound or visual cue for new notifications and users can come back to it at will.
It would work on all Apple devices and could be accessed by gesture or from the icon.
Sounds pretty Apple-y to me. What are your thoughts?