When designing software for the iPhone you would think people would use Photoshop, illustrator or the Interface Design software Apple included in the iPhone developer suite. Not Chris over at CulturedCode. He used pencils, wooden forms representing various interface elements, ink, brushes and felt pens to sketch the User Interface for Things:
Make sure you check out this photo full screen. It is just beautiful:
Ozh jumped in the Wordpress game when version 1.0.1 showed up, so I guess it’s safe to say he’s a true expert. Thus make sure to check out his post, as he wrote down some witty comments.
Here’s a Flickr slideshow with the screenshots. See it grow man!
I wonder when we will see more interactive interfaces for handling information like this. We all complain about information overload but stick with the old fashioned interfaces we are used to. Wouldn’t it be cool if our RSS feeds would swim by, like fishes, and appear bigger, smaller or brighter if they are more important?
What if Google would present search results like this? Would it work?
What about CNNs newsticker? Can i get one of those on my own monitor displaying feeds from Google Reader and Subjects from my email inbox? I could just work and casually look at the viewer at the bottom of my screen now and then.
Stare at Aqua for a few minutes and more possible interfaces will start appearing before your eyes…
A few years ago I managed an online Calendar service. One of the biggest buttons on the front page was titled “Add a Birthday”. It was huge, bold and you just couldn’t miss it. Or so I thought. I kept getting emails from users asking me “How do I add a Birthday in your calendar”. It was extremely frustrating to me to just keep replying “You add a birthday by clicking the big ‘add a birthday’ button’.
Then one day I sat down and had a few users work with my website in front of me. I didn’t guide them but just watched as they browsed around and tried stuff. Then I found out that people thought that the way to add a birthday to a calendar was by double clicking the calendar. They kept double clicking and after trying it three times they would turn around and say “I don’t understand how to add a birthday”.
It was an amazing experience and taught me a lot about how people interact with technology.
You would think that the iPhone is the easiest and most user friendly device there is. But check out this slideshow with a test on how people really use the iPhone if they don’t have any prior experience with the device. Some of the slides will make no sense but most ‘mistakes’ are actually very logical. Does a looking glass represent ‘Search’ or ‘Zoom in’? Is the ‘Plus’ sign to enlarge something or to add stuff?
It is more proof of how extremely hard it is to predict what people actually want and think. Enjoy!
Andy Denmark is one of the founders of TripIt and their VP Engineering. Tripit, The online travel assistant that received $5.1M in funding earlier this week, is a service that helps you manage your trips. The main interface for getting information into their service is email. Instead of copy/pasting and submitting to a webbased form you simply forward all your confirmation messages to plans@tripit.com. Their software then analyzes the content of the message and extracts all important information and plots in on an easy to read itinerary.
During his presentation today Andy challenged us to come up with more email centric interfaces like this. The benefits are clear. Almost everyone who uses the web has email. In fact, probably more people have access to email than access to the web.
Right now I use TwitterMail.com to send and receive messages for Twitter. I use email to send most of the photos I make to Flickr and I use email (in the background) to sync appointments with my partners via iCal. I also use email to post blogs now and then and instead of using a notebook I send my notes to an emailaccounts I reserve for just that purpose.
Some people even use email to browse the web:
Tripit.com makes it clear that email is a great interface for services and it is inspiring to hear their ideas about this. I can imagine that email is a great way to work with social networking sites. Instead of manually entering someone’s name and emailaddress into a website why not simply cc connect@linkedin.com when I email them? LinkedIn could parse this message, connect the sender (from address) and receiver (to address) and send us a confirmation after that. The first message could be archived with the account as an easy reminder of how you met. Simply, easy and scalable.
Via a tip off from one of my staff in our internal office chat here at UltraSuperNew Inc., comes news that Google has updated the interface for its top page for Japanese users.
The new design keeps the position of the main search bar and associated links, then adds a line of quick access icons below that to some of Google’s other services. There is a tabbed menu, then 5 items shown under each tab.
The first tab can be translated as “recommended”, it includes Google Mail, Youtube, Google News, Google Maps, Google Transit.
The second tab can be translated as “all kinds of search”, and provides links to search interfaces for images, blogs, books and the desktop.
The third tab is “convenient tools” and includes Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Reader and Google Toolbar.
The final tab is “more fun” and has links to Youtube, Picasa, Blogger and Google Earth.
One thing to note about the treatment of all these links is that they are all referred to by what you can do or what they are rather than the product name. For example Picasa is referred to as a photo management tool and not by its name, “Picasa”.
The design change seems to be more in line with what Japanese users expect (generally a higher need to see more information on the page) and is a big move for Google moving away from their long standing simple home page. Its nice to see Google treating individual markets in a special way.
Written on 21st May 2009
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