This is an oldie from Kathy Sierra but such a goodie: Crash Course in Learning Theory.

Anyone whose job it is to teach others should read this, every month, forevermore.

Over at the Product Vision Blog, I tell you why you should consider dumping the word processor and instead use a wiki to document specs and designs.

Apple finally unleashed its iPhone 3.0 software yesterday.  It was disappointing to see that the calendar app has not been revamped.

My critique of the iPhone calendar continues to be one of the most commented on this site.  Unfortunately, we are going to have to continue our wait.

The Google UI is not fast enough.

Well, I should clarify.  On searches for which there is one clear, perfect hit to pursue, the current workflow is fine.  One search, a bit of scanning, and one click to get to the results.

What Google is missing is that finding an answer often involves hunting through several sources.  Google could be made significantly more efficient by considering this larger workflow.

Here is the typical best-practices workflow for checking out multiple hits from Google:

1. Type in a search
2. Skim the results for hits that may be credible.
3. Control-click the links that may have the answer you are looking for into new tabs.  This could be many tabs.
4. Peruse the tabs one by one.
5. Search within the page for the results you are looking (it could take some digging).
6. Once you find the answer you are looking for, go back and close the rest of the tabs.

It’s up to the end-user, using facilities in the browser to efficiently examine multiple search engine hits.

Here is the design to steal:  Search engine results don’t require very much width.  So why not show the search results in one column and a preview of the destination page in another?  Clicking a link would still go directly to the destination page.  But there are additional clear buttons to view the destination page (or its faster, cached version) in another pane. The new workflow might look something look like this rough mockup:

Step 1. Type in a search and get search results

Step 2. Click the Cache button next to pertinent search result to instantly see the cached version.

The cached version appears much more quickly than loading the page from the destination site.

The user could also click “Show page” to fetch the latest, live version.

Step 3. If that isn’t the result you needed, click on other cached results

Here is the result after clicking “Show cached” button for a different search hit:

The page is pre-scrolled to the area that most closely matches the search and the relevant section highlighted.  This saves the user from having to work as hard to find the useful information within the results page.

Step 4. If you want to read the destination page, click into it.

If the user has found a useful page there is a clear way of going to it.  The search results would disappear and the entire browser window would show the destination page.

A further optimization

If Google had clear a sense of what the top hit would be for a given search, it would take the liberty of loading it by default, without the user having to click any links.  This effectively integrates the “I’m Feeling Lucky” functionality with the regular search results.

What is going on?

This solution is made possible by the larger screens we now have.  They are wide enough that we can see both the search results and a useful part of the destination page at once.

In this design approach the search results behave like a vertical set of tabs. You don’t have to manage your own browser tabs, which confers several benefits:  (1) You don’t have to work as hard to find the results within the destination pages.  Since Google is controlling the presentation of the results it can highlight the relevant parts nicely.  (2) You don’t have to worry about the memory drain of having many browser tabs open at once.  (3) You don’t have to clean up the tabs after you have found what you were looking for.  (4) And one click on each search result is enough to peruse its content, as opposed to one Ctrl-click to open the results in a tab, another click to go to that tab and another click to close the tab when you are done.  One click instead of 3 for each search result you visit.  If you have to check out four hits to find your answer, that’s four clicks instead of twelve.

For best results, the cache would be fast.  It must be, because it is competing with the efficient alternative of ctrl-clicking tabs and having the browser load the pages in parallel in the background.

Content owners may not be all that thrilled with a search engine employing this approach.  It encourages access to the cache rather than hitting the target site directly for the guaranteed freshest content displayed as the site owner intended.  Google might do is set up an API whereby site owners could find out how often their site is being served up from Google’s cache.  [Readers, do they do this already?]

[As usual, if you know someone who might be able to do something with this idea, please forward them this article.]

—-

Philip Haine is a product vision specialist and founder of Obvious Design in San Francisco.  He writes for the Product Vision blog as well as this one.  Please contact him for guidance in rethinking your products.

You can follow Philip on Twitter at @dphaine.

A few months ago I wrote an article describing my Top 7 Tools for Interaction Design and IA.

Since then I’ve added a couple of other power tools to my frequently used set.

I drank the DevonThink Pro Kool Aid.  DevonThink is a general note taker and snippet database.  It’s hard to get how useful and important such a tool is until you have used it for a while.  The functionality should be built into the OS.  [That's a vision to steal, btw.]

I also started using Scrivener to organize and compose long articles and the book.  Simple and wonderful.  It’s what Word would have become 15 years ago had Microsoft realized that writers need word processors to help them think.

(Interestingly, both these Mac-only tools use TextEdit at their core.  They also rest on the Mac’s package architecture that lets a document contain other documents.)

Can someone please tell me what year it is?

Judging from Firefox it must be circa 2001.  Otherwise, why would Firefox insist on using Stuffit to expand .zip archives?

The year cannot be, say, 2009, because by then the Mac will certainly have had unzipping capability built-in for years, rendering the clunky and obtrusive StuffIt completely obsolete.

Now, if I can only figure out how to get my Mac to stop syncing the system clock forward to 2009…

My MacBook Pro is the best computer I’ve ever owned.  This is not saying much, as you would presume the last computer you buy is better than any you have owned before.

Usually after about a year I’m pining for a hardware upgrade and averting my eyes from the Apple store.  But I’ve had my current machine for 2.5 years and it’s still going strong and running the latest version of everything with aplomb.

With one exception.  As my tool set is growing, I am wishing for more RAM.  3GB isn’t cutting it anymore.  I have to keep a close eye on MemoryStick app in the dock to make sure I don’t run out of RAM and start the descent into the swapfile swamp, from which  a reboot is the only rescue.

So in a moment of weakness I surfed over to store.apple.com to see how I might be living. I was surprised to see this:

At left, a brand new midrange Macbook Pro, $2500.  At right, the specs for my 2.5 year old MBP.

They are roughly the same!  Especially since I upgraded the RAM to 3GB a long time ago (cheap) and my hard drive to this fast, quiet, inexpensive Seagate 320GB drive last week ($90 bucks including shipping).  The only appreciable difference is that the newer machine goes to 4GB.

Wow, 2.5 years goes by and a machine with roughly the same specs is still $2500.  I am not sure what to make of that.  Apple continues to do a good job squeezing out margins on their premium (and worth it) products.  Perhaps the performance/battery life curve is taking a breather at a local maximum.

According to the MacRumors buying guide the Macs are all due for a refresh soon.  Let’s hope Apple hits us with more than a few sharp bevels.  It’s overdue.

There something not right about the message threading system in Mac Mail.app.  Have a look at this screenshot:

I have messages with the typical subject line, “Checking in”.   As you can see, it’s threading messages I sent and received yesterday with messages from four and six months ago.  What’s more, there are three different sets of recipients. There is no way that this is a continuation of the same conversation.

So here’s a design to steal to improve threading:

• if the subject is the same but the recipients are different, consider it a different thread.
• If the recipients are the same, and the subject is the same, but a lot of time has passed, take a look inside the message. If there is little or no quoting of the earlier messages ( As happens when messages are replied to), then consider it a different thread.

[Readers: Is this problem present in other mail programs? Please comment.  And, as usual, if you know someone at Apple, please send them this feedback.]

I just installed iWork ‘09 trial and was surprised to see that Apple is still using this old, excruciatingly long installer.

I thought that this sort of thing was behind us.  What happened to just dragging an item into the Applications folder?

This design is old.  It came was modeled after installer from the Windows 3.1 era.  You’ve seen it, the one that starts off, “The Install Wizard will now guide you through the setup process.”  Gee thanks, now I know to roll up my sleeves.  (How about if it just installed the software?)

Apple has been exemplary at questioning and slashing out wasteful steps.  Apparently they haven’t gotten to this old thing.

Um…

Why can’t I just follow #hashtags in Twitter like they were @users?

English translation:  Twitter lets anyone toss their transient thoughts into the ether for anyone in the universe to listen in on.  This is useful if you know of people who say interesting things.  You can subscribe to such people — many of them — and then conveniently track their utterances over the course of the day.  And this can be very interesting indeed.  It is like being on the listening end of a cocktail party conversation where the other person says something that makes you pause and go, “huh!” (*) Serendipity happens several times a day, and it becomes addictive.

The problem is that you only every hear from people you already know of and to whom you have already subscribed or followed.  If someone you don’t know of says something brilliant about something you care about (say, cats or Madonna or product vision) you won’t hear about it unless you go out of your way to search for it.

To help identify the topic of their dispatches into the Ether, Twitter users have taken to appling keywords (a.k.a. tags) to them.  But Twitter doesn’t officially support keywords or tags.  So people make up their own and tack them into their 140 character Twitter message.  By convention, to identify the tag as such, they start them with the hash symbol (#) and call them hashtags.  Hashtags look like #catscomposite triple beat or #madonna or #productvision.

The problem is you cannot subscribe to hashtag traffic directly, as you subscribe to people. (You can subscribe to the RSS feed for the hashtag, which means going use another program.  The benefits of centralization and serendipity are lost.

So I repeat:

Um…

Why can’t I just follow #hashtags in Twitter like they were @users?

—–

*This doesn’t apply if the people you follow insist on telling you about their flight delays or what they just ingested.

I enjoyed this article about reinventing graduate-level education:
The problem:

Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising cost

The author’s vision to steal includes:

2. Abolish permanent departments, even for undergraduate education, and create problem-focused programs. These constantly evolving programs would have sunset clauses, and every seven years each one should be evaluated and either abolished, continued or significantly changed. It is possible to imagine a broad range of topics around which such zones of inquiry could be organized: Mind, Body, Law, Information, Networks, Language, Space, Time, Media, Money, Life and Water.

Consider, for example, a Water program. In the coming decades, water will become a more pressing problem than oil, and the quantity, quality and distribution of water will pose significant scientific, technological and ecological difficulties as well as serious political and economic challenges. [..] A Water program would bring together people in the humanities, arts, social and natural sciences with representatives from professional schools like medicine, law, business, engineering, social work, theology and architecture. Through the intersection of multiple perspectives and approaches, new theoretical insights will develop and unexpected practical solutions will emerge.

Have grad students come down from the ivory tower and pile onto the challenges of the day. Sounds like a plan!

My Twitter ID is now @dphaine. Please make a note of it!

Houston Neal makes the case for the viability of an Apple iTablet in healthcare.

Is Apple really declaring that no iPhone shall ever have a physical keyboard?  What a gift for their competitors. Read the analysis at the Product Vision Blog.

More on Apple’s Buttonphobia at: Buttonphobia, UI Friction, and the iPhone and in this wicked Onion piece:

Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard

I am not sure what is behind the proposed delay the DTV transition.  Millions will be without TV for a while while they make the transition  So what?  Will people really wither and die in large numbers if they miss Oprah for a day or two?  Will delaying really get more people to transition?

I (heart) Obama, but it sucks to see him expend precious first-hundred-days political capital — and money — on this self-correcting problem.  Leaving the schedules as is would have an economic perk: it would make the remaining 6 million households to buy converters or take the opportunity to upgrade their TVs — a nice boost infusion to consumer electronics retailers.

That said, if we are going to make them switch, there is probably a better way to go about it.

But first, some key observations:

1. People tend to act reactively.  They won’t act until they sense a problem, which means further delays will not fully solve the problem.
2. Reaching everyone with traditional ads for the switchover are extremely expensive, and of limited efficacy.  (See point 1.)
3. Who says we have to change cold turkey?  Why not pull it off in stages?

Here is the design to steal:  Give stragglers increasingly bitter tastes of what will happen if they don’t switch.   Disable analog broadcast of regular programming, showing instead a 10-minute public-service infomercial loop on all analog channels, with a phone number and website for more information.

The five week schedule might look like this:

• Warning shot:  Disable analog broadcasts for one hour next week during a low viewing period, say Monday 8-9 am. This will make headlines and get people talking.  Publish the schedule of analog brown-outs that every newscaster across the country will read.
• Give people a week to switch, then fire the second warning shot:  Disable analog for 3 hours on a Saturday morning with the same message on how to transition.
• Third warning shot a week later: Disable analog for 4 hours on a Sunday evening.
• Fourth warning shot: Disable analog from 6-11 on a Monday night.
• Fifth warning shot: Disable analog from 6-11 on a Thursday night.

Here is an even bolder approach:

• Designate a Thursdays as no analog programming day.  Every week, turn off analog broadcasts for the whole day.

Two other refinements to the idea:

• In additional to the tough love, station owners could sell advertising between replays of the public-service infomercial, but only to advertisers providing products and services involved in the transition.
• If there is a local or national emergency, stations would be allowed to start re-broadcasting in analog for the public safety.

Of course this will be painful for viewers and advertisers.  But it will be way less painful than the cold-turkey approach.

There’s a classic moment in Seinfeld when two spheres of George Kostanza’s world that he was wanting to keep separate intersected.  “It’s worlds colliding, Jerry!”  Something to be avoided at all costs.

It’s natural for us to have such partitions.  Our identities are different when we are dealing with our parents, our close friends, our colleagues, our students.  It’s natural and there’s nothing wrong with it.  We need to be able to tell fart jokes to your old high school buddy one moment, be silly with our children the next, then act professional at a meeting with senior management.

This is precisely the protocol that Facebook violates, by having all “friends” be on the same plane, be they friends, parents, work colleagues or nieces.

On the one hand this is a good thing.  It makes us all chillax a bit about the various pretensions we uphold in the spheres of our life.

On the other hand, it’s a bad thing. because despite the Facebook culture, most of us do still have that need to keep our worlds from colliding.  The stories of people who inadvertently made fools of themselves at work for what they did over the weekend are legend. And sometimes, you want to share something silly with one group, that your parents, or your kids, or your employer just should not see.  Without control over who gets to see information you post, prudent people must keep their edgy side under wraps.  Controversial topics that might  offend people whom you don’t want to hurt must go unspoken.

So here is the design to steal for Facebook: allow us to define spheres of friends and place each friend in one more more sphere.  When we post something, give us the option of limiting who gets to see it: everybody, or just certain spheres.

This same facility could be used for special interest sub-groups among your friends.  You could have a sphere for your college classmates, your high school classmates, your club, and so on, and post statuses or pictures that only they would see.

Allowing spheres would open up all kinds of new usage patterns and prevent users from having to water down the information they broadcast.  Go to it, Facebook!

In February, 2008 I proposed that music players should have thumbs up/down button to instantly tune your preferences for streaming music on services like Pandora.  The Slacker G2, announced in September, 2008 introduced a version of this idea:

(They were probably working on this when I published my article, but I’ll take credit anyway.)

Wired wrote:

Isn’t it about time your portable player had Heart and Ban buttons on it for personalizing customized radio stations that update with a single click via WiFi? We thought so.

I think so too!

There are several other interesting variants of the Heart/Ban or Thumbs Up/Down concept back in my original posting that the Slacker design doesn’t represent, so check it out.

It’s great to see so much innovation happening in the digital music space.  The one thing I crave is higher fidelity streaming stations.  It wasn’t until I dusted off the turntable I used to DJ with, and dropped the needle into the grooves of a 25-year-old album that I realized what I had been missing.  After listening to MP3’s and 128k-160kbps streaming audio for so long, I had forgotten how much better music can sound.

So here is a follow-up idea to steal: for $4 per month (what Slacker charges for the ad-free version of its service) raise the audio fidelity that will make my ears and my hifi happy.

The word iPhone is a misnomer.  Calling an iPhone a phone is like calling a car an iCarRadio or a computer an iWebSurfer.  The phone is just one of several things the iPhone does, and for me, only about 10% of what I use it for.  This is how it gets away with not being a great phone. It’s just so useful for so many other purposes.

Over the course of a typical excursion across the city recently I used eight different apps without thinking about it.  Not for the sake of using them, but because I had real problems to solve.  The apps were: Google Maps with GPS to get me to the appointment, email to see if a friend responded to a coffee request, SMS to confirm, Yelp to find a coffee shop, phone to finalize, NYTimes, Facebook and Wikipedia to catch up on news while I waited, photo app to grab a snapshot of my friend.  These were the scenarios we envisioned circa 2000 when I did some vision consulting with Palm.  They have now become a reality in a sleek package.

I’ve ranted about the iPhone and criticized its inefficient UI and lack of needed buttons.  It’s not the best phone in the world, but it is by far the best multi-purpose handheld computer and communicator.  I even think it is worth the high monthly cost.  But I can’t say for sure, because I can’t bear to look at the bill.

Recently I’ve been talking about the tools I use for interaction design and for general mac productivity.  Now I’ll cover the tools I use on the iPhone.

The first page of the home screen contains my most frequently used apps.  (Tip: press the physical home button in the home screen to get to the first page.)  On the iPhone the focus of attention is really near the bottom of the screen, so the most used ones are actually at the bottom of this list.

• iPod – (Now that I think about it, it doesn’t need to be here, since I can get to the iPod by double-pressing the Home button)
• Settings – To turn wifi off when walking around the city.  This is working around a design issue.
• App Store
• Safari
• Clock – for alarms & parking timers
• Zenbe lists – shared shopping list
• Google Maps
• Mail
• NetNewsWire – Offline RSS reading.  Syncs with my desktop RSS reader.  Outstanding!)
• Facebook (which I think of as Headline News of your friends)
• NYTimes
• Google – Amaze your friends by speaking your query
• Wikipanion – surprisingly how often we reference things in casual conversation
• Say Who – voice dialing makes up for the sluggish performance of the iPhone on my 2,400 contacts
• OmniFocus (which I’m going to demote soon because by the time it’s launched, 2.5 minutes later (!) I’ve completely forgotten what i needed to record.  I suggest you avoid this until they revamp their sync architecture and make launching instantaneous.)

In the grey bar, available on all pages of the home screen I have:

• Phone
• SMS/Text messages
• Camera
• Calendar

I sure wish I had physical buttons for accessing those items at any time, like the Palms!)

My page 2 apps include:

• Pandora – The best music app on the iPhone.  We plug it into our home sounds system and leave it on for hours.  (I have AOL Radio and FlyCast next to them for coherence, but in my experience they have been flaky or commercial-laden or both.)
• Instapaper – Click a single button on your PC’s web browser and the long article you don’t have a chance to read will be available on your iPhone, reformatted appropriately.  Great app!
• Weather
• Stocks
• Twinkle – Twitter app.  I may switch to Twittelator.  (Follow me: @feign)
• Yelp – look up restaurants and stores
• MoMuni, so I know when the bus will come by
• Stanza – eBook reading.  Excellent!  Wish I had more time to use it.  Reading prose on this small but hi-res screen really works
• My dreaded AT&T page, a Safari bookmark – so I can see if I’m going overboard in text messages, or just to feel bad
• Tip – restaurant tips
• Calculator

I have four more pages of apps I never look at.

iPhone apps are evolving faster than I can keep up.  So please tell me what absolutely must-have apps there are that I missed.

—

Philip Haine is a product designer and product vision specialist. He founded Obvious Design, LLC in San Francisco in 1997.  His other blog on product vision can be found at ProductVision.org.

Here is a set of downloadable, printable, public domain 2009 printable calendars in three formats: 1 month per page, 4 months per page and 6 months per page.

These are nice clean calendars with no ads or even a copyright notice.  Very handy for planning projects and vacations, for collecting stickers, for Seinfeld’s productivity method and for manually counting the number of days until Christmas (356 as of this writing).

Download free printable 2009 calendar pdfs in 3 formats

Happy new year!

[Trivia: these nice calendars were generated in the very obsolete ClarisImpact 2.0, which I designed when I worked for Apple/Claris back around 1995.  To make them I have to use an old Powerbook that still emulates Classic mode.]