Author Archives: Allan Caeg

About Allan Caeg

Allan champions people in the knowledge worker age by creating human-centered technology. Reach him on Twitter: @AllanCaeg. http://allancaeg.com

Converting Thoughts Into Solutions

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Voice commands aren’t new and Siri is far from perfect, but there’s a lot to learn from it. Other products are about converting speech to text then acting based on how they fit the defined syntaxes.

Siri is unique, because of Natural Language Processing (NLP). You don’t need to memorize the defined syntaxes of commands. You don’t even have to input commands. Its job includes knowing what would solve your problem in case you say “I’m hungry” or “should I bring an umbrella?”

Converting thoughts into solutions outsources to the computer tasks like finding out which app to use and how to use it to solve your problem. Some may see this as advocating laziness, but letting the computer do some of your chores gives you more bandwidth to solve problems that only humans can.

Immersion and Form Factors

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Immersion to the computer is an important subject that has not been getting the attention it deserves. Fortunately, Nokia’s design chief has been preaching it. The N9 and MeeGo could be zombie, but their values in this regard can survive through the company’s Windows products.

Microsoft’s strategy with Windows Phone and Windows 8 can contribute here. Unlike Apple’s iOS and OS X combination, Microsoft’s phone OS is different from what will run on tablets, laptops, and desktops. Some may disagree with Microsoft’s idea of a no compromise design for the tablet, but the tablet can be seen from another angle. Jobs himself suggested that PCs are going to be like trucks (where tablets are like cars) and Zuckerberg said that the iPad isn’t “mobile.” Perhaps, it doesn’t have to be.

Perhaps, the tablet should not be in the same category as the phone. Concepts like “glance-able UI” and “sloppier gestures” that Nokia’s Ahtisaari has been preaching are very valuable for the phone, but not as much for tablets and larger form factors. Quick computing fixes are great if you want to check Twitter while waiting in line, but greater immersion is required if you’re trying to focus on serious work.

The phone may or may not share the same OS with larger computers, but the UX should bend for the context. Beyond the OS, apps and Web UI should scale. We need to value this subject to keep our eyes away from a glowing screen while on a dinner date, but focus on one while doing serious work at the office.

On Using Undocked Tablets

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With traditional PCs, our hands are only occupied with manipulating input devices like a mouse and a keyboard. Unlike them, post-PC devices like tablets usually give the hand(s) an extra task: carrying the device. This is the case whenever the tablet doesn’t dock on a stand accessory or another part of the user’s body like the lap.

This may be seen as an extra chore, but it allows the device to have some of the great characteristics of post-PC devices. Holding them means being able to have the device close to the body and not needing tables to conveniently use them.

With the said benefits, we should keep in mind the value of portability and explore means to help carry these devices easier. Do you know an accessory or hack that would help?

Edge Gestures vs. Four-finger Gestures

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John Gruber quotes Josh Clark on iPad’s use of four-finger gestures on iOS 5.

tl;dr: OS level four-finger gestures on iPad shouldn’t have deprived apps from using them and that edge gestures are better for this purpose better anyway.

I agree. It’s also worth noting that OS X Lion gestures can be OS or app level depending on the number of fingers you use. Works beautifully compared to a gesture-free system, but the concept isn’t as easy to digest as edge gestures.

Perhaps, Apple just settled with this, because it’s the easy gesture to scale from touchscreens to trackpads. The baggage of creating consistency between form factors is really heavy. You’ll have to make tough choices.

Google+’s Clever Fixed Header Approach

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Fixed headers are becoming more popular these days. These are the elements that stay on the top of a webpage page even when the user scrolls down. A key factor that determines this approach’s value is screen size. We don’t want headers that populate half of small screens.

Google+ was recently updated to execute this in a clever way. Based on the screen size, it will choose to show one of 3 approaches: no fixed header, with a fixed part of the header, or with a fixed whole header. See screenshots below.

This tall screen has the whole Google+ header following as the user scrolls

This screen size allows Google+ to serve a persistent part of the header

This screen doesn't satisfy the minimum vertical pixel requirement for Google+ to show a fixed header



That’s An Unusable Door Lock

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I was proud to successfully operate what’s likely the most unusable lock I’ve ever seen. This is in a nice restaurant, which is probably just trying to make its look and feel consistent up to the restroom’s door. What’s funny is, sometimes, our desire to make things look nice can be counter-productive.

Below, you’ll find an image of how the two pieces of the lock look like. It’s already odd in the picture, but seeing it in person is another thing. The restroom is relatively dark (my camera used flash to take the pic) so it’s not easy to find those small pieces of metal and they’re not the most conventional things that come with doors. The affordance is probably distorted to many and there are no instructions to make it even worse.

 

How did I lock the door? Apparently, part of the metal on the left has to be pushed up so it can pivot down to the metal on the right, as seen below. Again, explaining it probably doesn’t give justice to the experience when you’re there.

 

This is important, because many probably settle with holding the door while doing number one or number two. Let’s make usable doors, please. Sometimes, it’s for the joy of pooping with peace of mind.

Designing in The Open

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As an experience designer for free and open source software (FOSS), I know how it feels to distribute your work for public consumption. It feels great. This idea can be difficult for many to digest, but it’s actually rewarding. This is recently reinforced by another FOSS designer. Alexander Limi, UX Lead at Mozilla, shares a story about Apple Safari’s adoption of a design for Firefox.

After the break, you’ll find a wireframe by Stephen Horlander for Firefox’s download Manager. Limi wrote about the enhancement in detail here.

 

Because the design was done in the open, other players had the chance to adopt and to improve their products even before the design is implemented in Firefox. Below is a screenshot of how it’s implemented in a pre-release version of Safari that Limi found in Dustin Curtis’ blog.

 

Let me share with you why user experience design for free software is very valuable. We create well-designed products to advocate value creation, which isn’t limited to products we’re directly involved in. Designing in the open may or may not be the right way in every single situation, but truly great UX designers care about people enough to wish them well even when they use someone else’s products.

Firefox’s Unobtrusive Modal Dialog

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Whenever we sign in to online services, browsers ask us if we want to save the username and password. Firefox and Chrome have been adding a persistent violator strip on top of the screen, which is more decent than the legacy popup, because it’s associated to the browser tab where you signed in and it doesn’t add an unsolicited window.

Firefox 4 has an even better solution. It has this neat unobtrusive modal dialog that pops out to ask if you want to save your password. It’s better than other known approaches, because it can be hidden very easily, all its contents are positioned in a small area (for Fitt’s law), and it can easily be re-opened. This is valuable, because too many people have the violator strip staying on their screens for too long. It eats up screen real estate and too much of the user’s attention.

GNOME Shell Window Picker Recommendation: Take Advantage of Spatial Memory

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GNOME Shell is GNOME 3′s defining technology. It has an Overview mode, which is best explained by the screenshot above. Basically, it’s like Mac OS X Lion‘s Mission Control, and it’s not impossible that it inspired the Apple version.

Its Dash and the planned Workspace Switcher take advantage of the user’s spatial memory. It does so by having a fixed arrangement of items (app icons for Dash/workspaces for Workspace Switcher). Their linear order of the items can also be changed manually by the user and this order can have meaning attached to it (like sorting by level of importance).

On the other hand, the Window Picker is two-dimensional instead of linear. Also unlike the Dash and Workspace switcher, the arrangement of items (in this case, windows) depends on an algorithm and the user can’t manually edit the sorting.

My recommendation is inspired by Firefox Panorama. Like on the Dash, let’s take advantage of the user’s spatial memory by attaching a fixed linear relationship between windows. It’ll still be flexible by allowing to user to manually rearrange windows, so the user can meaningfully sort them. The approach here is just a bit different from the Dash or Window Picker, because there’s a bigger real estate allocated, but the principles would be fundamentally similar.

It’s best to read the Firefox Panorama Principles of Design that Aza Raskin wrote here to understand the rationale behind and to test the latest Firefox 4 beta build to test how it works.

Feel free to share your thoughts by adding a comment below.