I Really Don’t Know

Decidedly obvious

Just finished reading Designing the Obvious by Robert Hoekman Jr. It turns out to be quite a simple book, an easy read, bringing together Hoekman’s own ideas and thoughts with plenty of anecdotal lessons.

Hoekman references all the usual usability heavyweights, Nielsen, Cooper, Krug and so on sometimes agreeing and sometimes offering alternatives views. Personas? Well, maybe, says Hoekman going on to explain that great software comes not from a deep understanding of the users, but from a deep understanding of the activities.

Under what Hoekman calls Interface Surgery he covers the redesign of a form to make it obvious, introducing well thought out approaches to form validation and form layout. The things he suggest are, inline with the books title, obvious - but given that every form you ever use on the web gets this stuff wrong it can hardly be considered common sense.

Usefully I stumbled across bits and pieces that are of immediate use. We’re designing some stuff at work right now that requires interaction with a tree structure. We’ve been struggling a bit with this, with me advocating a fairly standard tree control yet all of us feeling that it doesn’t quite work.

Hoekman provides a great explanation of why tree controls don’t work. He rightly points out that while they are present in Windows Explorer they are not the default, and as most users don’t change the defaults most users will not have come across the tree view regularly. He also decomposes the interactions used in a typical tree view and shows how complex they are. In short, don’t use tree views - ever.

Hoekman doesn’t leave us high and dry with navigation of these structures though. He describes the as Columns view provided by OS X’s Finder and contrasts the interactions of that view with those of the tree view. I’m sold on his explanations and will be looking to try that with the application we’re working on.

Overall, good book, easy read, nicely packed with useful ideas.

Lookybook

A friend emailed me a link to Lookybook a little while ago and I’ve been meaning to blog it for a while.

It’s an interesting experiment as there are a good number of brilliant picture books to read with young children online in all their glory. Not low-res scans or just the first two pages; the full books in great big hi-res, page turning flash.

You can, and I do, sit at the computer and read these with the kids. I suspect, though, that most parents will buy more of these books as they find more and more great books full of big pictures of lorries for the 3 year old boy in their life.

Emotional Intelligence in Signage

Using the 20:20 format (also known as pecha-kucha) Daniel Pink, a staff editor at Wired talks about improving signage through the use of empathy. He has two tenets:

Demonstrate Empathy

Encourage Empathy

With 20 slides at 20 seconds each he explains the concept clearly.

It strikes me that we could use these techniques when writing the messages that come out of our apps, making them more friendly. Isn’t that what Flickr do with the kitten pictures they show during outages?

Yamaha TENORI-ON

I love specialized controllers, providing an interaction metaphor that works with a keyboard and mouse is always sub-optimal as they are general input tools - that’s one of the things that’s so awesome about the iPhone, it allows the application to define a much more specialized interaction - look at the way different apps use the multi-touch. That’s just the start, too. The iPhone has limited gestures and is 2D, I expect much more to happen with it as interaction designers get to grips with the underlying change in capability that multi-touch provides.

I wrote last year about a whole host of multi-touch devices that show off the cream of what’s currently possible. One of the stand-outs for me was the JazzMutant Lemur, shown here as a music sequencer.

I’ve been keeping half-an-eye on music companies to see what comes out as keyboards, sequencers and digital DJing gear are all natural applications of specialized interfaces. A few days ago I spotted the Yamaha TENORI-ON. An LED based sequencing interface.

Here it is, in a short product demo

And here it is being shown off by it’s creator Toshio Iwai.

I knew, when I saw it, that I’d seen the idea before. The concept is the same as the Monome devices sold in kit form:

SpiderFriend

I love graph viewers and visualizers and being able to play with them on your own data is better than anything :-)

SpiderFriend is a visualizer for your facebook friends network, it graphs you and your immediate friends on the edge of a sphere with connections between y’all. Nice, but the visual treatment doesn’t allow you to see clearly who knows who.

I’d also like to see a way to explore the network, clicking on a friend and seeing their friends and so on. I guess facebook apps can’t wander around that easily :-(

Take a look at the short video below or download and play yourself from http://www.butant.com/spiderfriend/

Cheap Wii Multitouch

Low-Cost Multi-touch Whiteboard using the Wiimote is a great piece of innovation using the motion tracking camera in the wiimote to provide cheap tracking for a multi-touch display.

I told you so.

A few folks around the office and in the pub have been a bit skeptical about how fast we’re going to have really big touchable displays.

Well, here’s a really big touchable display.

you’re going to need gloves…

So, the Surface. A nice interactive multi-touch device from Microsoft.

I’ve been looking at the videos for this and it does look good, but a video of the Surface Paint application on ZDNet caught my eye.

Watch it and come, go on, I’ll wait.

So spot the difference between that and the shot on the left, taken from Minority Report from 2002?

Tom Cruise is wearing gloves. And they’re not just any old gloves, they’re little black gloves with lights on the tips. Why?

Go back and watch the video of Surface again. notice the bit where Mark Bulger says “we can both paint at the same time”. He then goes on to show how you can use a paint brush “just like in the real world”.

Look again - did you see it yet? When the interviewer joins in the paint color used by Mark changes. two of you can apint, but you can only use one colour. This limitation is because the Surface has no way of knowing which finger is which. My four year old likes to finger paint - she likes to dip each finger in a different color paint and make rainbows in one stroke. You can’t do that with Surface.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I think the Surface is great, and I’m trying to get some time to play with one here in the UK, but it still has a missing piece in how real it will feel.

Microsoft in on the multi-touch act…

“Surface Computing has Arrived” Microsoft Surface !!!

In a combination of many of the different touch techniques I’ve talked about before Microsoft have produced a beautiful marketing piece for multi-touch surfaces.

http://www.microsoft.com/surface/

The marketing goodness cleverly uses the gestures of the multi-touch UI as the animated tramnsitions in the Flash promo material very, very smart.

As well as multi-touch they also show the use of physical tokens like Reactable and talk about “phones practical introduce themselves”; a social network of devices just as Bill Buxton told us was coming.

Update: Nad’s found a nice launch video

Multi-Touch comes closer…

A comment from the venerable Stefano Baraldi over on my post about Bill Buxton’s keynote prompted me to take a quick look around. Catching up with Stefano’s blog, onTheTableTop, I see that tabulaTouch, blogged here previously, is coming to market shortly as Sensitive Table.

Stefano also provides a link to Natural Interaction who have more stunning videos of just how engaging this stuff can be.