Interactions and Design

Jared Spool talks about why experience design is so important

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Apple released its new iLife ‘08 suite of applications yesterday. I am intrigued by the new iPhoto and how it helps to organize your photos. Changing the name of a collection of images from ‘Albums’ to ‘Events’ is particularly interesting. This change of terminology not only simplifies the photo organizing process, it also makes users think differently about how they categorize their images.

Apple chose to organize images around events, which reflects the circumstances around which most pictures are taken. If you go on a vacation in the Outer Banks, NC, you typically want to keep these photos together. You take pictures at your child’s fifth birthday party, you want all of those pictures in one place. Apple makes it really easy to do this. From what I can see from the demos (I have not been able to use it as of yet), images are automatically organized by the day they were taken. Since most pictures are taken sequentially over the course of an event, organizing images into in this way becomes simple. iPhoto’s interface makes it incredibly easy to string together multiple days into a single event, or split a day into two or more events.

Arranging photos into albums is the old, physical-world way to organize photos. Typically, we fill our photo albums up until they are full of pictures. So, our organization is based upon how many pictures the album holds. In the digital world, the size of the album is no longer relevant. So, the old term of ‘album’ and the organization scheme associated with albums has become obsolete. Apple has recognized this, and has thus changed the name of organizing images in iPhoto to ‘Events’. This not only makes organizing photos easier, it helps the user to think differently about the process.

Could this small change in terminology be a tipping point in how users organize photos?

I want a Wii, but tracking one down seems to be a difficult task. I’m not sure if Nintendo is purposely trickling out supplies to retailers to maintain the mystique, or if they just seriously underestimated the demand. Either way, they have blown out their competition by creating a gaming system that meets a single purpose: it is fun to play!

The Wii doesn’t have the latest 3D graphics chip, or have 5.1 surrounds sound. It doesn’t have a 1080i high definition picture or play Blue-Ray DVDs. There seems to be no shortage of gaming systems with these features at your local department store. Yet the Wii, with its unimpressive graphics, has been almost impossible to find since its release in November, 2006. Why is this?

I think that that Nintendo has found a niche that overlaps both the hard-core and casual gamer. Its unique game controller is truly revolutionary, and it is a great platform for playing games that are just plain fun. The Wii sports game that comes with the system features bowling, tennis, golf, baseball and boxing (if you haven’t had the pleasure of hitting your Wii friend in the face using the game controller/nun chuck combination, then you haven’t lived). Instead of sitting on your butt pushing tiny buttons to incur actions in the game play, the player actually engages in movements similar to the playing the real life version of the game. Some people have claimed to actually lose weight by playing the Wii on a daily basis.

I believe that this is a classic case of technology driven vs. people driven product design. Donald Norman talks about the transition from technology driven products to people driven products in his book The Invisible Computer. He talks about how when technology makes something possible that was not possible before, it drives the design of products. Early adopters accept these products because it allows them to do something they were unable to do in the past. As the technology advances, the demand for more features begins to drive the process. At some point products become so feature laden that transitioning it beyond the early adopter audience becomes more difficult. Designing products from the viewpoint of the people that actually use the products helps to transition the product from the realm of the early adopter to the hands of the general consumer.

A great example of this phenomena is the cell phone. Up until recently cheaper, faster, and smaller components have driven our cellphones into a feature laden mess. Sure, there is a web browser on my phone, which is really cool because I can access the internet anywhere I can get a cell signal. Yet, i have to push 13 buttons on my Verzon VX9800 to access the browser and type in a URL on my phone. Many tasks on this phone take weird combinations of button pushes to accomplish things. Yet the iPhone only takes two ‘clicks’ before you can type a URL into Safari. iPhone = people-driven design. Verizon VX-9800 = technology/feature driven design.

Paradigm changing products such as the Wii and the iPhone are great examples of people-driven technology, and will help the user experience community solidify themselves into the product design process. The Wii has found an audience with the regular non-hard-core-gamer crowd. This is why the PS3 is looking at price reductions, while stores cannot keep Wiis on the shelf. Will my local department store PLEASE get some in stock soon……

Too funny.

So, Apple has finally come out with the long rumored iPhone. I think they have hit a home run with this one, and they will eventually come to dominate the ’smart phone’ market with this offering.

Here is a summary of what I think Apple has done right with the iPhone, along with things that I am disappointed with:

Interface

I have always thought that the tiny plastic keys for alpha numeric input on phones were inflexible and a waste of space. They force cellphone interface designers to create highly modal interfaces that require multiple key presses in navigating deep hierarchical menus. They also take up a lot of precious space. People want their phones to be small, which makes implementing a full qwerty keyboard with buttons big enough for my fat fingers to push very difficult to do.

Apple has shrewdly eliminated these problems by offering a touch screen where their designers can create usable menus that are appropriate for the desired interaction. When a keyboard is required to input text, one appears on the screen. When a numeric pad is needed to dial a number, one is provided. When I want to watch the newest episode of “The Office”, those pesky input devices disappear allowing the majority of the phone’s surface area to be used for the task at hand.

The one drawback to this type of interface is the lack of tactile feedback that you get from physical buttons. I assume that Apple was smart enough to include the tiny iPod-like audible ‘click’ each time you successfully activate a ‘button’ or ‘key’ on the screen, yet the feel of the button on the tip of your finger will never be present in this type of interface. Currently, I can grab my phone and press-hold the ‘2′ key to auto-dial my wife without looking at the keypad of my phone. This type of intuitive action will not be possible on the iPhone, which may or may not be a significant interaction problem. We will have to wait and see.

OSX

Yes, this phone runs on the Mac OSX kernel. Hopefully this means that the list of current applications and ‘widgets’ is just the beginning. The demo of the Safari web browser was VERY impressive, and I am sure its implementation will be light-years ahead of the crappy Openwave browser on my LG V phone. I have long hated the necessity of viewing stripped down versions of web pages to accommodated the tiny screen on my cell phone. With Safari in the iPhone, you get the full version of the web page, not a crippled version intended for a mobile browser:

It will be interesting to see how the iPhone version of Safari will differ from the desktop version. Will it have full Javascript/Ajax capabilities? I am hoping the answer is “yes”!

Widescreen video iPod

It has long been rumored that Apple would release a wide screen iPod. I don’t remember anybody predicting that the wide screen iPod and the iPhone would be the SAME device. Hopefully Apple will soon offer standalone iPod with the same wide screen format. I remember seeing a patent with Apples name on it the showed the iPod click wheel on a touch screen interface similar to the iPhone. We can only hope that Apple will bless us iPod junkies with such a great innovation.

4GB or 8GB

I can’t imagine only having 4GB of storage for an music/video player. 8GB seems like it would be the bare minimum for storing any significant amount of music and video. As flash memory and SSD storage becomes less expensive, Apple will probably up the amount of storage on these phones along with their iPod Nano line of music players. What about removable storage? There was no mention of this ability, a strange oversight in my mind.

Conclusion

I think this phone will be a hit. I know I want one. I also know I will be angry when I buy one, and one month later the 16GB version comes out at the same price as the 8GB one I just bought. Apple is notorious for this, yet people (namely ME) NEED to have their cool new gadgets. So as we part with our hard earned money, we are temporarily awed by the wonders of the technology and eventually disappointed when our precious is one-upped by the newest bigger and better device. So is the life of the lowly gadget geek.

• Wireframing With InDesign and Illustrator :: UXmatters
  Good article on using a combination of InDesign and Illustrator for creating design documents. I also prefer this approach, as I find Illustrator and InDesign to be more flexible and much easier to use than Visio. Plus, coming from a visual design background, creating designs in Illustrator and InDesign is almost second nature for me.
  (tags: Prototyping wireframing)

• UPA Voice - December 2006 - Institute for International Research (IIR) and the UPA Connection: The Market Research Event 2006
  I saw Rolf Molich speak at the UIE conference in October, 2006. He spoke extensively about his studies on usability testing. I agree with his point about usability testing being used as a political tool. He emphasizes that no amount of user testing will eliminate all usability problems, as he has found in his research on usability testing. Usability problems should be eliminated early by doing proper user research and adhering to good usability heuristics, while usability testing is best used to drive iterations of the prototype design.
  (tags: usability ux test study rolfMolich)

• 2007 Web Predictions
  Web trends to watch for in 2007. I agree with their prediction that RSS will become mainstream this year, with Vista and IE 7 finally embracing it. What will be funny is watching the organization that I work for once again scramble to embrace this ‘new’ technology! I have some great ideas on how to use RSS in our Learning Management System. Feeds to inform students of announcement postings, conference board activity, and other occurrences in the online classroom would be a great way to increase the interaction in the online classroom. Blackboard already has an RSS building block that allows instructors to bring feeds into classrooms. I am not sure if it supports RSS as a way to push classroom activity directly to the student. This is what I would find useful, and is the type of functionality I plan to implement in my Master’s Thesis Project.
  (tags: web predictions technology 2007 Trends Internet)

• toddwarfel.com » Blog Archive » The Task Analysis Grid
  This is a great way to document interactions. I like the way Todd has condensed all the necessary information into a one page deliverable. This diagram looks to be very effective in communicating what needs to be built to both stakeholders and design team members. I will have to add this one to my arsenal of design documents. In fact, it looks like it could replace two or three I already use. Thanks Todd!
  (tags: design documentation diagram task interaction interactionDesign)
• kuler
  Great Flash interface for picking a color scheme. You can even create your own theme and submit it. Since I am not much of an artist, so I like being able to just pick from a collection of themes that have been put together by people who are more adept at such activities. This should be very useful.
  (tags: color design tools adobe)

• Neighboroo
  A google map mashup that shows various demographic data, including politics, crime, home price, cost of living, etc.
  (tags: google map mashup)