... interaction design, user interface design, user experience design and a bit about me.
Wednesday, March 5, 2008
No Flash Player for iPhone Anytime Soon!
(Sound of expelled breath...)
At the shareholder meeting two days ago Steve Jobs spelled it out: no Flashplayer for the iPhone! The reasons? Flash Lite, Adobe's Flash Player for the mobile platform is too weak, the desktop version too slow on the iPhone. The iPhone, in other words, needs a new Flash Player!
(not holding my breath here...)
Since Safari on the iPhone is the real thing, a Flash Lite version of the player wouldn't help anybody. Most Flash sites for the internet simply can't be transported to the lite player. More then ever it is best practices to have an html version of your Flash sites to avoid user frustration.
It asked to wireframe a typical online shop, online newspaper and company web site by dragging and dropping UI elements like "main navigation" , "company logo", "contact link" onto a screen. What exactly does this study hope to accomplish?
If you want to improve usability on websites you need to look at each specific case. There is no generic online-shop which works for *all* situations, products and users. Leave the improvement of usability to designers who will apply user research results and combine them with their own skills and creativity. This kind of study does not lead to more usable web sites. Just to innovation-free same ol'-same ol'.
I believe in a designer's work experience, the knowledge of what works and what doesn't. I believe in creativity, breakthroughs and revolution. I believe in the intricate knowledge of human behavior and desire. Stop praying at the altar of the-user-knows-best!
Two days ago the Mac Book Air came out. If it will turn out to be a visionary product remains to be seen, but the omission of an optical drive, driven by the goal to create a truly wireless machine, is bold. It wouldn't have happened if you had ask typical laptop users if they wanted that.
It's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them. Steve Jobs May 25, 1998
Wal-Mart Sells Universal MP3s without DRM Restrictions. No Mac Support!
Wether Universal is truly interested in selling DRM free music online remains to be seen. Starting yesterday, they made a selection of albums and song available at walmart.com until January 31st. Each song can be purchased for 94 cents. Other vendors, including Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN), Google Inc., Best Buy Co., RealNetworks Inc.'s Rhapsody,..., were chosen for this test-run. Interestingly Apple‘s Musicstore was excluded, despite the fact that it is the largest platform for music downloads. Although MP3s are completely compatible with any music playing device – including the iPod and iPhone platforms, Mac Users are not welcome on Walmart‘s site. Instead they presented with this message:
We‘re sorry, your operating system is incompatible. .....visit again after you upgrade to Windows 2000 or XP.
Incompatible with DRM free music downloads?? Somebody willing to upgrade their system to download some crappy MP3s?
Then I asked a collegue with Parallels and WIN XP installed to load the site, I was curious to see the interface Walmart came up with:
Why is all type on the page so tiny?
Songs can be previewed, but there is no „player“ functionality. You have to listen to a song to the bitter end, even when you don‘t like it. Sad...
I am soooo frustrated with Adobe CS3. I've complained about it before. This is another warning! Photoshop sucks up more resources than my entire system. I am working on a MacBook Pro with 2 gigs of memory and I am here to tell you: It's not enough! You will experience lags of 3-6 minutes(!) while Photoshop collects data from the hard drive instead of memory. It will feel like PS died on you. (My work is all screenbased, my files are tiny). You will endure frustrating crashes, especially when using "Save for Web and Devices". The whole application often feels like a beached whale. I hoped for speedy and elegant and bought CS3 the day it came out, because I so wanted my tools to be optimized for the Intel chipset. Well, keep hoping!
Flash is not much better. Adobe opted to create an annoying fade-in-all-windows-when-switching-between-apps effect that accomplishes first and foremost a laggy response. Don't ever try to use the debugger before saving your work FIRST, you will experience crashes!
Physical Interfaces: BumbTop, the iPhone and Leopard
Recently I rewatched Anand Agarawala's demo BumbTop at TED 2007. BumbTop is a three dimension cubicle desktop. Documents on the desktop have physical qualities like weight, size, light reflection etc. They can be stacked, flipped through, bumbed into and organized in ways more similar to a real world desktop.
What struck me in the demo was the audience's reception. Partly due to Anand's humorous presention style, but largely because of the surprise effect the interface holds, the audience was clapping, laughing, even cheering. When the iPhone was introduce in January there were tons of moments like these. When Steve Jobs first scrolled through a song list with the flip of his fingers, the audience erupted. It is the RE-cognition factor. In that instance we identify a resemblance between real life physical behavior and the onscreen simulation of such physicality. It is a magical moment.
At the WWDC 2007 Steve Jobs presented the latest beta release of Leopard, Apple's upcoming OS for Macintosh. For a long time I imagined Apple's designers to arrive at their user interface solution by cheer genius. It never occured to me that the might take their "inspiration" from others, even purchase UI solution like Coverflow (first introduce to the general public with iTunes 7) from Steelskies . With the release of Leopard it will be a standard way to view information in its redesigned Finder.
"Stacks" in Leopard's Desktop
Leopard continues and broadens its use of animation as a general interface element. The Dock tags on the new "stack" feature, which may have been borrowed from BumbTops stack function, but lacks its physicality. Other Leopard features show me the direction Apple's interfaces are headed. Coverflow, Time Machine, Stacks and Spaces are all feature that rely heavily on animation. At the heart of them is Core Animation, a set of animation routines offered to developers to easily produce animated interfaces.
Leopard looks fun to use, but generally feels light, digital and spacey (quite literally in Time Machine). Animations in Leopard accelerate and decrease in speed which is a quality taken from a real world physicality. There is a new quality of light and shadow peeking through the new 3d-ish Dock design, but compared to BumbTop there is no sense of weight. The reason for that might be that we are still using a mouse pointing device. In BumbTop is strikes me as odd to manipulate objects imbued with weight using a mouse pointer which cannot return physical feedback that resembles pushing weighted objects around. In makes sense that Leopard lacks the physical quality of weight. Leopard will also run on the iPhone, where the manipulation of information is accomplish with your fingers. While weighted pressure on its multi-touch surface will have no bearing, speed of movement does and thus represents one more step in the direction of physical interfaces.
Apple's Patent for Back Side Multi Touch Interface
Just when I thought the iPhone's multi-touch-the-information was a breakthrough for a consumer product the next exciting interface appears at the horizon. Yesterday macdailynews.com reported that patents have been filed by Apple concerning their 6th G iPod. It looks like you can navigate the front face of the iPod with a touch panel located on the back side. Input and output will be on different sides of the iPod.
UPDATE 05-15-07: This post on Core77.com explains why a touch panel on the back is so smart: This way the user is no longer obscuring the very interface he/she is supposed to interact with...
The greatest innovation is often the timely implementation of a particular technology that often has been around for a while. This only happens after other technical hurdles, such as CPU speed, bandwidth or component size have been solved. The iPhone made me research multi-touch technology and I have written about it in previous posts. During my studies I discovered a touch table interface on youtube.com which utilizes the underside of the table for additional navigation as well.
Matthias Müller Prove recently reminded me of Alan Kay's famous quote: "The computer revolution hasn't happened yet". Physical computing finally makes it to the market place. Only the very best will catch our attention. Apple stock briefly climbed to an all time high yesterday again ....
