We’re so lucky. We have cellphones and GPS, cheap high speed Internet, free shipping and Wiis. I’m grateful, I really am. The progress has been astounding.
But there are some perennial UI issues in everyday products that year after year never seem to get fixed. Every year I expect someone will finally do something but year after year ticks by and nothing happens. Perhaps if I wish real hard out loud here on StealThisIdea some of these these problems will finally be resolved.
Here is my wishlist for 2008:
- Awesome speech recognition on MacSpeech recognition works and it’s here to stay. It is one of the few remaining advantages that Windows has over the Mac. Unfortunately the Mac has been second-class citizen for years. It’s only worth using the best speech recognition system available, and that system is Dragon NaturallySpeaking, available for Windows only. Apple, buy Nuance, willya?[1/27/08 It's working already! Within days of writing a draft of this article, MacSpeech announced they have ported the Dragon NaturallySpeaking engine to the Mac with a product called Dictate! I can't wait. I currently use NaturallySpeaking on WinXP within Parallels on a MacBook Pro, channeling input to the Mac side of my Mac using TightVNC on the Windows side and Vine Server 2.2 on the Mac side. It works really well, and I depend on it. But it's memory-intensive and cumbersome. A Mac-native solution will be most welcome.]
- Put a real second mouse button on MacsIn the mid-80s, I used a three button mouse on Sun workstations. It was a scourge of usability. There was no standardization of which button should do what. The user was left to flounder, learning and relearning button definitions across applications.In that climate, it was refreshing for Apple to pronounce, “let there be but one button.” One button, no ambiguity. If you wanted a second action you could double click. Advanced users could Option-click or Shift-click. (Or Shift-Option-click. Usable indeed!)
Later, Microsoft introduced a second button, But they were careful to declare a clear and unwavering mandate: “Let there be a second mouse button, and let it be used only for contextual menus.” It has been an unqualified success. Every app uses it. Even your proverbial mom knows how to right-click to get options on things. Even on the Mac, support for second mouse button is ingrained in every serious app.
Apple seems to agree: Mac OS X, the iLife and iWork apps fully support the second mouse button.
The only thing missing is an actual second button on Apple mice and laptop trackpads. It’s as if Steve Jobs himself is petulantly holding out on his 20-year-old pronouncement out of sheer stubbornness. The only Apple-branded bone we’ve been tossed is an invisible, barely functioning fake second mouse button on the Mighty Mouse that requires that you lift your fingers off the left part of the mouse in order for it to register a right button click.
A third-party mouse with a proper second button therefore remains a required purchase with any Mac. Laptop users are still out of luck. It is a point of confusion and an ongoing barrier for Windows users who would otherwise switch to the mac.
Apple is a well-known button hata and we hope it gets over it in 2008.
[1/27/08 The signs on this one are not good; Apple looks like it's going to use multitouch trackpad gestures to get around having to desecrate its laptops with a second physical button. Maybe that will work, but I'm skeptical, based on bad experience with gestures on Powerbooks]
- Put a real, physical keyboard on the iPhoneWe are evolved to sense things by touch, not just by sight. Tactile, haptic user interfaces make use of that faculty.On-screen keyboards require much more user attention than physical keyboard. The user must look not just at the text field but at the keyboard. The user cannot trust that a keypress will be interpreted correctly like a real button and must therefore verify what has been entered. It’s a “type->verify->proceed” mental loop instead of a more efficient “type->proceed” loop you use when you can unequivocally trust that a key press gave you what you expected. Finally, keyboards with real buttons you can feel are easier, faster, and more gratifying to use. Apple, please get over the buttonphobia. Stop trying to be clever with the workarounds and put a proper keyboard on the next iPhone.
[Update 4/24/09 - Apple has said "emphatically" that it does not believe in fixed keypads for phones. This either means that they aren't going to do it, or they aren't yet ready to show their fixed keypad for the iPhone.]
- Put physical playback and volume controls on music devicesThere are very few universally-applicable UI principles. Almost all have contingencies and caveats. The only safe answer you can give to a general UI questions is, “It Depends.”But there is a solid, generally applicable principle that you could teach a monkey: identify and streamline the most common and frequent tasks.
My first Sony Walkman cassette player got this right in 1979: I could adjust the volume and pause the music instantly, without looking, without changing modes, without unlocking anything, without even removing it from a belt clip. Yet most iPods are horribly modal. Turning down the volume on my current iPod requires pulling it out of the pocket, unlocking it, looking at it, turning the click wheel, locking it again and putting it back in my pocket. As I have pointed out, this makes the iPod touch flawed as a music player. So please, Apple, in 2008, put the volume and playback controls physical, pressable buttons that you can feel.
- Stop the bouncingOn the Mac, icons of applications which require your attention bounce. And bounce. And bounce. Even if you’re in the middle of something else. They clamor for your attention like a needy child. Instead, icons should bounce once or twice and then stop. If they still require your attention, they may step forward from the dock, peeking out a little bit until a moment befitting the user.
- Cars should stop self-destructingHow many products can you name, that you rely on for your life that self-destruct when the user makes a minor error? This is what happens when you accidently walk away from most cars with the dome light or headlights on. The car will dutifully shine that light all night long until your battery is dead and the car is no longer operable, leaving you stranded.In 2008, at this point in human history, all cars should be smart enough to know never to allow the battery level to get below what is needed to start and recharge itself. This should be a national safety requirement.
- Allow graphics to be copied and pasted into web forms; allow files to be dragged inBlogging apps, SaaS apps like Google Docs, any webform requring a photo: all of these require that you provide files. Unfortunately you cannot interact with a web browser as you can with regular apps and the desktop. You cannot copy and paste images one application into a web app. And you cannot drag one or a dozen files from the desktop into an upload area. Users must contend with a cumbersome file open dialog, and do so repeatedly to upload multiple files. These facilities are needed now to upload images in many web apps, and they will be needed for evermore in RIAs and SaaS apps. [Update 11/9/09 I was extremely surprised to discover that dragging a photo from my desktop into a Google Wave pane accepted the upload elegantly. How'd they do that?! Turns out it was Google Gears at work, the offline extension that was created to let you work with your web apps when you had no connectivity.]
- Cell phone service with the clarity of VoIP and the low latency of landlinesCell phone service sucks. It has always sucked and so we take for granted its suckitude. But it doesn’t have to suck. There are two key problems: latency and audio quality. Latency is the delay from when you say something to when your friend hears it. You can get a sense of how bad it is by having both parties clap on the count of three. Latency affects cellphone service and VoIP and makes for awkward conversations. Either you work out a telegraphic protocol with clear, unnatural pauses to clear the air, or you talk over one another clumsily. Latency doesn’t have to suck so badly: it is negligible on old fashioned landline service, so it should be possible with cellphone communications.The other problem is audio quality of phone calls. You don’t know what you have been missing all along until you participate in a VoIP call using headphones. The other person sounds like they are right next to you. Puhs, buhs and duhs are clearly distinguishable, as are v’s and f’s. It’s wonderful. This is a mere matter of bandwidth and it should be solvable, not just for mobile phones but for landline phones as well. [Update 11/9/09 As of September 2009, "France Télécom has become the first mobile operator to transmit voice calls and audio in high definition, part of an effort by telecommunications companies to improve the quality of cellphone conversations." h/t Steve Portigal]
How many more years must pass before we have clear, instant, reliable voice communications? I hereby wish for someone to do something about it in 2008. We have HDTV; the time is ripe for HD phone service.
- Bring back OpenDoc
- Make it impossible to leave an ATM without your card and your cash.My Washington Mutual ATM seems designed to want you to leave your card behind: after it gives you your money, but before it gives you your card, it throws up a full screen ad for several seconds. You’ve got your money, the message it’s sending you is that your transaction is over. You start walking away, and if you’re lucky, you realize that you don’t yet have your card. I saved myself several times but one day it happened to me and I left without my card. When I returned to the bank later the teller told me that this happens several times a week.It’s not terribly difficult UI design problem, and it’s amazing that it persists after twenty years of ATMs. The solution is to withhold all three items, card, cash and receipt, until all three are ready, and spit them all out at once. The best design I saw was years ago in Tokyo, where the three slots where together and you could grab all elements at once. Please, everyone who works at a bank: in 2008, make it impossible to leave without your card.
OpenDoc was killed ten years ago, but the idea of mixing and matching components of applications has always made sense. I want to be able to put an OmniGraffle chart in a Pages document or a Numbers table in Stone Create. PenPoint did it pretty well in 1991, Microsoft botched it (with OLE), integrated apps like ClarisWorks approximated it, and some ISVs have been pushing the ball forward with LinkBack. But it is still not yet a robust, well supported standard. In 2008 I wish a proper standard and a workable cross-platform technology would emerge for embedding components of apps in other apps.
That concludes my top 10 UI wish list for 2008. Let’s check in again next year to see what has been fixed.
[Readers: if you know anyone involved with any of these products, please send them a link to this article. It's: http://stealthisidea.com/articles/2008-ui-wishes]
I’ve been a lifelong Mac user and for a time was forced to use a Dell laptop at work. It has the two buttons you describe, however, I navigate the trackpad with my right hand and use the thumb of my right hand to click the button. For much the same reason I like an ergonomic keyboard, my arm approaches the trackpad at an angle so I click the right-side of the button on my Mac touchpad and navigate from the right-lower quadrant of the trackpad. On the Dell this meant I was always clicking the right-click button and finally had to convert that button to left-click and set right-click to pressing both buttons at the same time, which I could do by laying my thumb across the two. I recently got one of the new Mac laptops with full gesture support. Right-click is now resting two fingers on the trackpad and clicking. This is amazingly natural since I already have two fingers there most of the time for scrolling (both directions). While it’s cool to be able to rotate and resize from the trackpad the same way the iPhone does, I find I don’t use it much. But I find I try to use two-finger right-click on the Dell when I use it on occasion. I do use a Microsoft mouse at work, but more than the right-click button, I use it for the back button during web browsing. Click to follow a link, thumb-click to go back. Like the new trackpad gestures, that was an instant hit with me.
I love these ideas, although some would stumble upon politics and security issues I don’t see them impossible goals
Apart from the Mac related wishes, I hope that especially number 7 gets reality soon.
To note point 6 is already achieved in almost all new cars.
I am not sure why ATM still is designed that way. Here in the Netherlands its been fixed probably for over a decade already.
I have one for ya. This is an OS wish.
A copy/paste history in my clipboard. Every time I hit Ctrl V or Cmd V, I get to scroll through a history of text that I have recently pasted. Kind of like hitting the up and down arrows inside a Terminal window.
Pearly, great idea, and I agree!!
The latest version of LaunchBar, which I think is indispensable, has this, and I use it dozens of times a day. (see launchbar.com; I am not affiliated with them; just a happy customer for years)
LaunchBar also has an option to paste unformatted text which is extremely useful. Not all apps have this feature and they all seem to use a different keystroke. When pasting text I almost always use paste unformatted.
[...] Over at Steve Portigal’s blog there was a discussion of France Telecom which has been introducing high quality audio to cellular voice calls. (This is #7 on my 10 UI Wishes for 2008.) [...]
Regarding #10, the new Chase ATM have you insert and remove your ATM card. You don’t stick it in the machine. So that problem goes away.
To complement that design, you need to reenter your PIN to get cash. This prevents others from stealing money if you walk away before the session is done.