User Centered

Originally posted by Aza Rask:

It’s ironic (and predicable) that the interfaces SUPPLE comes up with for dexterity/visually impaired people are just better interfaces than the controls. The optimized interfaces almost always display more information in a way that requires less clicking than the original interfaces. No wonder they perform better! It’s just a direct application of Fitts’s law and GOMs analysis.

One interesting thing to call out: The interfaces for SUPPLE are defined by schematic intent, not by layout. The computer translates a user-flow markup into an actual interface. We’ll probably see a lot more of this as we need to design web sites for truly divergent screen-sizes (computer, mobile, wall screens).

Hot on the heels of me getting fired up about cellphones having a better understanding of the users motivations etc, I find the Just-in-time watch (via Gizmodo) that takes a (conceptual) stab at solving some of these issues.

From the site:

The watch knows the wearer's actual position coordinates via GPS, GSM-tracking or other techniques. In addition to that the cell phone enables a data connection with the www. Appointments with site coordinates can thus be synchronized. They were entered in advance e.g. into the cell phone or into the computer with a calendar tool like iCal. Furthermore the watch can access web-based navigation-, timetable- and traffic information services.

Just-in-time watch

One of the hallmarks of today's generation of mobile devices is a built in camera. I love the convenience of having it around, but why do we need it? Rather, what do we really do with it? I'm sure you bought it thinking that you now have the ability to:

• Snap pictures of your run in with Tom Hanks at that Los Angeles cafe
  
• Capture the "fender-bender" for the purposes of having them be admissible into a court of law
  
• Replace your Digital SLR for capturing the sun setting over the Pyramids of Giza (insert you correct spelling)
  
• Have an image to go along with every person in your address book.
  
• You see something funny/interesting/cool you want to blog/share/save
  

According to my rigorous scientific studies (ie- completely made-up) 98.56% of the usage of your camera is for the last bullet there. What's got me writing today is that even from that bogus number, a large percentage of those things I take a picture of are not anything i want to have around for any extended period of time. If it *is* something I want to keep around, I would have already emailed/sent it off to a place where I could more easily share/retrieve it.

So what are we left with? In my case a phone full of garbage that needs to be cleaned up in regular intervals. Why isn't there a "Send but don't save" option? Does your phone have this? Every phone I've seen lets you do the following:

• Save
  
• Delete
  
• Send
  

..mine also offers quick menu access to take another picture, or to set as callerID/Wallpaper.

I never see a "send and delete" or an automatic image cleanup, which is most often what I'd like to see happen. I'd like that UI above, but see a distinction between "save" and what I'll call a "work with" or "working image." (A better term would be appreciated...) This working image is something you are going to send, or crop or set or share with someone via MMS or email.. something that you don't want to "save" onto your phone in the traditional desktop sense. Speaking of the desktop, it's not immune to this either- working with screen captures and file manipulations and image downloads, you often end up with a littered file system that takes a strict "system" to keep the craft from the clutter. This system is most often just the user's behavior that compensates/adjusts for the lacking software. For example, in my case: "I store all my 'temp' files on the desktop- that forces me to deal with it eventually..."


Some picture I've already used, but is still on my phone.
BTW-Opera can we get a *real* image caption thing here?


In the case of the phone, I'd like the same "clean-up" rules applied to images as are applied to messages (MMS/Emails/etc..). All the handsets I've had offer a clean up after "X" days of messages. Applied to images, this would clean out all old *unsaved* images...of course, if you do happen to run into Tom Hanks and you want to show that around to everyone you meet, you'd just choose to save the image and it would be spared. Designed *this* way, the phone interface would be more in tune with my usage.

It seems silly to me to treat images differently than messages. Sure we tend to get much more of the text variety (so "X" wouldn't be the same for both), but the same circumstances apply. Some are important which we know to save or flag or move.. but images are all assumed to priceless artifacts just waiting to be submitted to the Louvre, when in reality it's a funny misspelled sign you saw on the way to work three weeks ago that you already blogged about.


edited- fixed my backwards logic

My girlfriend sends me this note...

I saw this article talking about the pie menu (extension) in Firefox.... does Opera do anything like this?

...the other day in some article about the *next* version of Windows that may (or may not) include pie menus... the author discussed the Firefox extension in the absence of any Windows based examples. So that got me explaining the difference between mouse gestures and pie menus, and I thought a little bit about what I like and dislike about them that I thought I'd share.


Pie menus are great in my opinion. At least, much greater than what we have for menus and toolbars. They take the mouse travel out of the equation and change it into mouse direction. So you're not constantly moving all the way over to the back button, then back to page content... (I'm already tired!). In addition, they take a context sensitive approach. What your mouse is hovering over at the time you bring up a pie menu determines what kind of menu you get. The latest version of Office includes the context sensitive part in the "the Ribbon."

All this is of course very familiar to Opera users, or any mouse gesture fan. The big difference between the two is that you don't get to see what's going on with mouse gestures. You'll get feedback only after the command has been executed, and hopefully it will match what you intended it to do.

It sounds like I'm putting down Opera's approach (of course available as a FF extension as well), but I'm not. In fact, I prefer this approach in the long run as it forces simplicity and activity centered design. I explained back to the email (paraphrased if you're reading Shelly):

Pie menues might be better for “the masses” because you can see it on the screen, you get visual feedback and an actual menu that might remind you of a command you may have forgotten about. Mouse gestures have the advantage in that you can easily do them without looking at them. You can be in the middle of reading an article and execute the “close page” gesture even as you’re still reading the last sentence…. Since you don’t have to actually look or “hit a target” with the mouse, I prefer them over pie menus. The command is invisible to me.

(I do like to woo the ladies with usability talk)

Now, I'm sure experienced pie menu users can execute them without looking at the menu, and I think that's great. It's a nice "best of both worlds" approach, but gestures are *designed* to be executed without looking at a menu, which is a different approach. Nested pie menus are possible, but nested mouse gestures would be too cumbersome. I tend to keep my mouse gestures at the very max three movements only (left, right, left to enable fit to width... I envision my mouse bouncing of the edges of the page to "shake" it to the correct horizontal spacing of fit-to-width). Since I love my browser mouse gestures so much, I tried the software that lets you use them on Windows and was sorely dissappointed. Mainly because they weren't native and not nearly as responsive as in Opera, but also because I had to draw letters of the alphabet with and complex gestures with my mouse that were impossible if you didn't show the trail. This defeats the purpose of the mouse gesture to me- that you can execute a command without having to spend any mental cycles thinking about the physical act of execution.

I love replying the slashdot comments about how mouse gestures are for lazy people. It has nothing to do with that. I love mouse gestures because I dont' have to divert from whatever task I'm doing (reading a page, thinking about the next tab I want to view...etc..) just to preform some browser UI manipulation. Gestures are the epitome of "the UI shouldn't get in the way." I think "back" and I'm back in history. I don't have to right click, select from a menu, or look up at the browser bar and find the "back" target. The muscle memory takes over and it's absolutely seemless.

Pie Menus are nice because you could achieve this same "muscle memory" feeling while still having visual feedback in case your muscles don't quite remember. I think that's great in the long run but it opens the door to overly complicating the simplicity of the pie menu. It's tempting to make the slices really small and cram as much in there as you can, or to nest pie menus together. It's probably still better than what most menus look like now, but keeping me focused on my tasks (activity centered design!) and not inviting complexity into the menu is why I prefer mouse gestures over pie menus.

Of course, as I write this- it would be nice to have a combination of them. Executing a gesture up would start a pie menu, but the other (left/right/down and subordinate movements) ones would be traditional mouse gestures. But that would probably blow my mind.

A game designers take on the Wii brings out some interesting thoughts on human and computer interaction...

So which do I want to design for? From a creativity standpoint, it’s the Wii, hands down (or up!). The human-computer interaction people have a buzzword they’re fond of: affordance. Affordance refers to the possible actions that a tool, or other object, provides or suggests to the user. The Wii Remote offers a different and quite new set of affordances to the player: steering with it, waving it, jabbing it, pointing it, stirring with it, paddling with it, and so on. It’s the wizard’s magic wand we’ve always wanted. All we have to do is supply the magic.