After 30 years, Microsoft does somn "cool"

It seems the multi-touch and "true" direct manipulation interfaces are starting to pop-up in many products. I'm a big fan of this interaction type so I'm glad to see some interesting progress being made. I would not expect any one product to "get it right" the first time around though. I'm sure users will unveil serious problems that will take several generations to get to a point where the UX is bearable for routine everyday use. The Microsoft Surface product starts out pretty slick with it's ability to recognize PDAs and integrate with them apparent ease. I also think it's important to have a large screen for multi-touch interaction since our hands are pretty big themselves.



As Henry Petroski notes in his book, "The Evolution of Useful Things", all of the things we have come to rely on, (even things as simple as forks and paper clips) did not begin as flawless designs. They slowly evolved as each generation learns from the last and adds some innovation in turn.

So although these new product are way high on the cool factor I will probably wait to see what people hate about them before I consider buying one.

I cant wait to get rid of my RAZR

Maybe it's not the phone, maybe it's software or service... it's hard to tell these days where to put the blame. I have many gripes but one in particular really chaps my hide. So you try to make a call but for some reason or another there is a bad connection and it fails. This was not an issue with my phone but now, instead of notifying me audibly a message appears on the phone screen with a modal dialog. The problem: I can't see with my ears; after I dial the number I instinctively put the phone on my ear waiting for the ring. When there is a failed call, however, you'll never know until you get tired of waiting for the ring and take a look. This really infuriates me for some reason. A simple irregular beep in addition to a screen message would be much better. Another possibility is instead of just a message, the phone can try to redial the first time automatically and allow a choice for the user on subsequent failed attempts. Or maybe just keep redailing automatically until the user actively stops it.

Wow, a video on how to code something?

I don't think I've ever seen an instructional video about a programming topic and don't think I'd be so inclined to watch one before now. For those that don't know, an IDE(Integrated Development Environment) is a familiar acronym for developers; it's where they do all there work. They are typically massive software packages that seem to do a million different things. Most of these IDE's have serious usability issues with a lot of complexity. Fortunately, most of these systems are very customizable. And most developers spend a great deal of time customizing thier environment to something most usable for them. The more advanced IDEs even provided ways for developers to enhance the features of the software with plug-in support. As you might imagine developing these plugins can be difficult as programmers would have to learn about the behind-the-scenes inner-workings of the IDE. One IDE, IntelliJ, claims that developing plugins is actually very easy and provided a video to show it. Now I wouldn't exactly call this process easy, but the video demystified a lot the detail work that is sometimes hard to find. Sometimes just getting started is difficult thing.. or maybe just integrating a finished plugin... in any case, all these details are right in the video! They also have a lot of very readable traditional documentation on this topic. No wonder they have over 300 plugins and new ones every week.

I digg good UI design

When it comes to testing the speed of your Internet connection you can imagine there would be a bunch of simple free tools available on the web to choose from. You wouldn't expect much out of this interface; something utilitarian and pragmatic.

Other tools I've seen simply provide a link which displays an hourglass upon clicking and some moments later you have your results in a nice simple table. Great, thank you, I'll be on my way now...

That's why I was very pleasantly surprised to learn about speedtest.net. They did this simple application in a big way. Several layers of information are presented in clear, aesthetically pleasing visual design.

They effectively utilized this one moment of my attention spark a greater interest than just what I came there for. I had to stick around to play around a little bit and learned some interesting things in the process.

What's most interesting to me is that this design allowed them offer more complex features with out taking a hit on UI complexity!

Word of this design got out quick, a single digg.com posting with a reference to this site redesign got 4783 "diggs"; not bad!

I may actually buy office 2007

Well on an acdemic discount at least. So I had this beta version of office 2007 sometime ago and used it on some class projects. In my opinion the best feature of this product is the ability to solve a great mystery to me: the use of color. I've tried for many years to learn these secrets but every time I try to come up with my own coloring scheme the results are disasterous; I end up making my work look like it's for easter (too pastelly) or holloween (just plain scary).

Office 2007 has some features that allow you to apply a "theme" to your documents. Themes are these cohesive and harmonic styles, treatments and colors that can be easily integrated into your document. I made stuff like this:

and graphs like this:

The user interaction techniques used in office 07 are pretty fresh. Instead of a toolbar, they now use what they call a "ribbon" which changes depending on what you are doing. I was pretty impressed and was able to quickly adapt. The only problem is that my beta version ran out sometime ago and I have to use some ol' crusty Visio version from 19-diggity5 or Illustrator which doesn't have a connector tool that I can figure out. That's ok for now, I have two of my own "themes". Easter is over soooo...

Why do I wait to the last minute?

Me<-----Mr last minute.... past 2am and I am just finishing my taxes in the final hours of the second day of the two day extension. Now, I have to post to this blog at this ungodly hour even though I had all week. We have a class project due in some weeks to come.... yeah, I'll be 5 mins late to that class printing it. 'Just telllin' ya now Ms. Powers.

While I rush, I notice some UI things working with me and this lifestyle of mine, and some things working to teach me a lesson the hard way. I found the tool bar at the top of blog page very useful as it was very clear how to post a comment and make another post. This interface is simple and clean. I can tell there is a lot of stuff behind all these tabs but I have no time for exploring now. I did have a problem connecting to the internet though since I couldn't remember my VPN password. Is it possible to have a security system interface that doesn't rely on the memorization of codes? Well something like this (go to page 8 for pictures) showed up on the web a long time ago in the dot com days but then I never saw it again. It's just like a virtual keypad but with pictures of stuff. I think my pictorial memory is better than my alpha-numeric-symbolic memory. They have some interesting research that suggests that this might be the case for many people.

In turbo tax, you have pay extra for a better user experience. Yep, forms prefilled with the information it already has in the system (names, addresses, creditcards, employment info) costs extra. And uh you can't understand that accountant jargon? no problem, "help" is only 30 dollars! Giving this to you for free would cost them nothing but someone must have told those business guys how much people hate bad UI design and they hoped we would dish out money for a better experience. I refused to pay this extra dough for a help system. God, I hope I don't get audited.

First Post

Ok, who cares what I think. :) I'm just a UI developer right now hoping to gain the skills to become a UI Designer. The switch is not an easy one, for me anyways. Especially since I am very implementation focused. When I was younger I loved fixing things but eventually you run out of broken things and start wanting to improve working things; to make them better. So you take them apart and well it's all downhill from there; those things are never the same. In engineering academia, you are given many problems for which to implement solutions. It's fun, challenging, and it prepared me immensely for a career as a developer where again problems are given. The danger in this is when you become so solution focused you start developing solutions for which there are no problems. I in fact have a library of very interesting widgets that have no real place in the world.
As a UI designer you must first find problems or requirements by deriving them from some very fuzzy data. This can be very tedious and arduous if you have the wrong process and finding the correct process seems very difficult. I'm not used to dealing with fussy topics but I am certainly willing to start.
So I just wanted to breifly comment on this amazing new interation design built by this dude, Jeff Han. The technology he uses is called the "Multi-touch" screen which is an innovative twist on the old touch screen. Instead of just recognizing where a user touches as with current touch screens, this system seems to consider how the user is touching the screen as a whole new way of intuitive communication with computers. I'm very certain this technique will play a major role in how personal computers and devices are designed in 5 - 7 years.