Cennydd Bowles on user experience.

Archive for January, 2008

Branes

Thursday, January 31st, 2008

Also deeply fond of spEak You’re bRanes, the zenith of user generated stupidity:

(Discussing a recent energy white paper) “The government have not said which type of power they are going to use, will it be the dirty fission reactors or the cleaner, more expensive fusion reactors.”
Hugh Pomells, London

(Discussing evolution) “One of the most basic laws in the universe is the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This states that as time goes by, entropy in an environment will increase. Evolution argues differently against a law that is accepted EVERYWHERE BY EVERYONE. Evolution says that we started out simple, and over time became more complex. That just isn’t possible: UNLESS there is a giant outside source of energy supplying the Earth with huge amounts of energy. If there were such a source, scientists would certainly know about it.”
awesomestnerd

I love that the public now has the means to air their opinions; I just wish some of them thought that little bit harder before doing so.

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FFFFound

Sunday, January 27th, 2008

Just to air my love of ffffound.com, a new image bookmarking site in private beta (as every new website is these days). Full of beautiful pictures like this:



At the moment I’m just taking the entire RSS feed, which will obviously become unmanageable once the userbase grows. No indication yet of whether there’ll be any easy way to navigate pictures in future (there isn’t yet), but for now it’s populating my /Inspiration folder magnificently.

Posted in design, links | 1 Comment »

Thing-A-Day

Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008

I do find that creativity is hard to sustain in these grim winter months. Those creative juices flow much more freely in autumn. So big whoops of mild interest for Thing-A-Day (via Iain Tait):


Which I’m going to do. The thing that’s swung it is the flexibility: any creative act counts, meaning there are days when haiku will act as suitable filler, leaving my quieter days a lot freer to try something more impressive. 1 February will be a very short cartoon, I have decided. Please help me choose the topic…

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Functional footers are the new black

Monday, January 14th, 2008

Time to share a current geeky web design crush: big footers. Seems that quite a few sites are now getting rather bottom-heavy and, you know, I think I quite like it.

last.fm footer

Powazek.com footer

BBC footer

There doesn’t seem to be a name yet for this type of expanded area of functionality. Ho hum. I’m calling it a ‘functional footer’ until someone comes up with a better term. Regardless of the name, this fad actually makes some kind of sense:

What can I put here?

The really interesting bit is that some sites are mixing it up and going beyond the typical legal / contact / careers links. Blogs are adding links to previous posts, popular posts, “about me”s. Some are getting creative and repurposing some typical sidebar content – del.icio.us links, Flickr thumbnails (I really like this one). At the extreme end, the new waitrose.com has its entire sitemap in the footer.

Standard design disclaimer applies – ‘it depends’ – it may not work for your site, but it looks like it’s worth a shot if you’ve a lot of content and not enough space.

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Old interfaces die hard

Monday, January 7th, 2008

One thing bothers me about Bill Gates’s assertion that touch interfaces will be all the rage over the next few years. Namely that I’m convinced he’s wrong. Of course, it’s not hard to disagree with a lot of what Bill says, but I really can’t see this major shift on the horizon.

Let’s start at the beginning. Gestural and touch interfaces are absolutely nothing new. Here’s some of Bruce Tognazzini’s concept film Starfire, made at Sun in 1992. (Quite amazing just how much great stuff there is in here, dress code aside).

Not a giant leap from Starfire to reach Microsoft Surface.

Honestly, Surface gets attention mostly because it looks great. Really great. It’s elegant beyond anything Microsoft have ever done, and has that futuristic appeal that causes lazy journalists to spawn lazy phrases like ‘the Minority Report interface’. However, as any interaction designer will tell you, these kinds of interfaces simply aren’t as successful as they should be.

First, tactile response, or lack thereof. Example: a button has a satisfying ‘click’ when you depress it. A brake pedal resists the harder you push it. The right key fits snugly into the lock. A touch-based or gestural interface doesn’t do this, because there’s no direct feedback. The iPhone keyboard, while a remarkable achievement, is a long way from perfection. Fingers obscure the view, and there’s no feel for where one button ends and another begins. So in reality, it owes much of its success to its excellent autocorrection. For SMSs, it works beautifully, but have you ever tried typing in a tricky URL? It’d be quicker to type it in Morse Code.

Second, waving your arms around is seriously hard work. Play some Wii Sports, or conduct an orchestra for an hour and you’ll agree. Interfaces like Surface and Wii simply require far too much effort to be usable for long periods. The Minority Report interface needs grand, full-scale movement. Sure, you could downscale it, but haven’t we done that already with the trackpad?

Subtle, well-considered gestural interfaces will become more prominent, but I really do think the mouse and the keyboard will be our predominant input devices for years yet. They’re simple, cheap, reliable, require minimal effort and can be used in a number of environments. Eventually, sure, they’ll die out. I don’t know what will replace them (and if I did, I’d be rich), but I’ll stick my neck out and say it won’t be the surfaces of giant LCD coffee tables.

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New Year links

Saturday, January 5th, 2008

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