No unlocking to make the volume UI available.  No having to ensure that you are in the right mode.  You can feel for it and operate it without even looking, with instant response. What a great idea!

Hmmm… come to think of it, I think my 1979 Walkman had a similar UI.  Maybe other products should steal that idea.

Today, if you mark your beautiful template as stationery, when you subsequently open it it creates and saves a copy of the file under the same name with the word “Copy” appended, in the same directory.

This so does not make sense.  First, people often to store templates a central repository of tools, outside any project.  That is not where you want your new project-related instance to be.  Moving it to the right location is an added, unnecessary step.  Secondly, the name of the template is never going to be the right name.  If the user doesn’t think to change it immediately it will cause confusion and make it hard to find the document.  That’s more unnecessary work, including closing the document you just created to move and rename it and then reopening it.  These required steps make the stationery worse than useless — it’s less work to just manually copy a template file to the destination.

The better behavior (to steal) is to instantiate a new, unsaved, untitled document when the stationery file is opened.  Later, when the user saves, it  she can give it the right name and put it in the right location the first time.  In other words, just like how untitled documents have always worked.

[Didn't stationery once work like this?  Anyone have insight into how and why it went astray?]

Here is the workaround I’ve been using for a while.  Never use the Stationery bit.  Do mark templates as Locked bit.  This will have almost the correct behavior.  When you open it, it will look like you are editing the template.  But it will prevent you from saving over it, instead prompting you for a save location and name.

[Bonus idea to steal #1: why can't the File Save dialog give instant access to the Finder windows that are already open?  These are the most likely save destinations because they relate to the current project.]

[Bonus idea to steal #2: When you do Save As, why must it give you what amounts to an arbitrary default save location?  Why not default to the current folder?  This would match the scenario of retaining an old version of a document while branching it for further editing.]

It’s kind of cute, as long as the laptop has its own bedroom.

But, like a snoring dorm-mate, it’s the most annoying thing when you have no choice but to share sleeping quarters.  Such is the case in hotel rooms, or when a home office serves as an impromptu nursery for an eight-month-old.  The laptop causes the ambient room light to cycle from pitch dark to bright night light, piercing photons through your eyelids, keeping those synapses firing, and inhibiting sleep.

The analog remedy for both snoring roommates and obnoxiously glowing MacBook Pros is the same: get out of bed and smother it in a pillow.

What we need is a digital remedy, today’s idea to steal:

• Or, provide a preference to stop the throbbing glow
• Or, employ an ambient light sensor on the outside of the device to smartly control the throbbing glow.  By daylight, throb away.  When the room is dark, don’t.
• And while you’re at it, also dim the charging light when the room is dark. It, too, must be covered to keep the room dark enough for the laptop’s very young roommate.
• Or, just stop throbbing

As for snoring roommates, I’m unaware of a digital remedy.  Anyone?

“I would just caution people that think they’re going to walk in here [to the cellphone market],” said Ed Colligan.  “We’ve struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone,” he added. “PC guys are not going to just knock this out.”

Apple, the novice, didn’t merely walk into the business. It climbed a 10-meter platform and executed a back two and a half somersaults with two and a half twists in the pike position.

The iPhone remains best-in-breed three years later.  It is raking in huge swaths of the total market and is a testament to the power of product vision.

I love my iPhone and use it enthusiastically, daily, for all sorts of things I could not previously imagine.

There. Now that the props are out of the way, it’s onto the gripefest.  I pick on Apple a lot for three reasons.  First, because their products are the only ones worthy of criticism.  Secondly, because I use them and know them intimately.  Thirdly, I want to fight the perception that Apple can do no wrong; that Apple design is equivalent to good design; that everyone should strive to design their products just like Apple.

The reality is that Apple has a number of bad design habits which others should avoid to create products that are even better than Apple:

• Apple sacrifices actual simplicity for the appearance of simplicity (parodied scathingly by the Onion).
• Apple puts form ahead of function, to the actual detriment of users.
• Apple is can be obstinately not-invented-here, depriving users of good ideas that are well-known and work
• Apple has a tendency to bolt new features on, accumulating complexity over time, rather than blending them in.
• Apple often fails to identify and streamline the most common, frequent tasks (you know, such as pausing playback on a music player or typing an email message into a mobile device or placing a phone call).

My post from a year ago critiquing the iPhone calendar continues to garner a steady stream of traffic and amen-brothers.  In that post I was focused only the calendar.  But there are several other aspects of the iPhone that stick in my craw daily.

1. The phone app itself is terribly inefficient and demanding of the user’s brain and eyes for the most common tasks.  On my 12-year-old flip phone I could press and hold one number to dial a frequently used number.  I could do it in two seconds, without even having to look at the device.  On the iPhone I have to wend my way through the modes to get to the page of favorites, then I have to look at the screen and target the right entry, possibly scrolling.  [Voice dialing may or may not be a panacea for this; my iPhone 3G doesn't have that feature.]

   Dialing an arbitrary contact: I have over 3,000 contacts, which makes the primary navigational UI, flick-to-scroll, useless.  Searching by typing should be the primary way of finding a contact from the entire set.  (In contrast, the Palm Treo’s had a clever feature where you could type the first letters of someone’s first and last name to jump straight to them.  To dial me you might type “pha” for philip haine.)

   The iPhone doesn’t learn your habits and tune its behavior to your patterns.  If I search for Mark, it always presents me with the same set of 28 Marks in the same order, beginning with Mark A, even though I have only ever called up Mark D in the last year.  (My favorite precedent of a UI which tunes itself automatically based on your real-world habits is LaunchBar).

2. I have loathed the home screen / app launcher since the beginning.  It scales poorly.  When searching for an app I feel like a flicking idiot, paging madly through screen after screen of icons to find an app.  And if you move one icon it shuffles the rest of them on the page.  So much for positional stability and muscle memory.  Trust me, there are better paradigms for navigating and organize scores of applications.
3. The new Spotlight feature that lets you search the whole device is welcome.  But it suffers from Apple’s habit of bolting on new features.  For example, the Spotlight page is now better at looking up someone to call than the dedicated phone app (which ought to tell you something about the phone app.)  Yet when you find someone to call, can you just tap the person and choose a number?  No, that would be too blended and efficient.  Spotlight instead passes you off to the the Phone app to complete the task.  Adding insult to injury is the UI friction of the zooming away visual from Spotlight and then zooming into the phone app.  I’m busy; just give me a dial button.
4. iTunes is tired.  It is simply too clumsy to move media back and forth between the computer and the iPhone.  Managing playlists is a chore.  Backing up the iPhone takes a ridiculous amount of time (up to an hour for me) and often fails.  Coverflow is distracting eye candy.  I once lost all my apps by syncing.  My calendar has never synced properly.As a result of all of these problems syncing, I do none of it.  Yes, that’s right: the exact same scenario that Apple+iPod+iTunes exploited in the early days of MP3 players has come around again.  The process of syncing is so onerous that non-use is a better solution than dealing with the hassle.  Time to reinvent iTunes as Apple did with Mac OS 9 and iMovie.
5. Alarms, alerts and notifications are inconsistent and not trustworthy.  Each feature has its own policy on how to alert you.  I had to really study the UI to isolate the idiosyncrasies of each.For example, an SMS message will beep and buzz every few minutes, indefinitely, to make sure you find out about the change of restaurant plans.  But if the same message happens to be left as a voicemail you’d better be paying attention, because voicemail beeps and buzzes just once and thereafter remain silent.

   And unlike every cellphone or answering machine built in the past 20 years, the iPhone has no blinking message indicator light to let you know there is something you are missing.  The only way to know you have a voicemail message waiting is to check it.

   In contrast, the countdown timer in the Clock app is like a drill sergeant.  It will insistently remind you to feed the parking meter now, repeating the alarm continuously and indefinitely until you stop it.  If left upstairs it will vibrate the iPhone clear off your nightstand and onto the floor.

   Different still is the Clock app, which is kind enough to completely ignore the silent mode switch, so you can hear it over those pesky stage performers.

   Appointment alerts take a kinder and gentler approach.  They will prod you gently every five minutes to tell you about the upcoming meeting.  If your volume is turned down it will do so quietly.

   The clock app lets you snooze alarms, but you can’t snooze the countdown timer, nor calendar alerts.  For example, you cannot tell the calendary app,  “Thanks, I know the phone meeting is in 15 minutes; remind me once more in 10.”

   The alarm clock and the countdown timer lets you specify the duration down to the minute.  But the calendar appointments limit your choices to 5, 15, 30, 60 and 120 minutes, which is just not enough specificity.

   There are even more quirks that make it hard to understand the rules and predict the behaviors: different alert options whether the device is on standby or on, message indicators that make you do the busy work to visit the Phone and Messages apps just to clear their status, repeat options that differ between the alarm clock, the calendar app, and iCal.

   The entire paradigm of iPhone notifications deserves a nice, healthy, systemic rethink.

6. The slide to unlock feature lacks common sense.  It is a dexterity test to perform with one hand.  And if the phone times out while you’re reading a screen, it should let you turn the device back on within a few seconds, bypassing the swipe.
7. The lack of real background processing is a huge limitation.  “Oh but we want to save your battery” says Apple.  But what about when the device is charging?  How about doling out limited slivers of time?  How about giving the user the prerogative to decide who may work in the background, as is done with notifications?  This one smells of disingenuous self-interest – SMS, voice mail, money makers, would be threatened if third parties could play on a level playing field with Apple.

   Background processing is an enabling technology and when other platforms exploit it it will be clear what iPhone users have been missing.

8. Mac and the iPhone are not very friendly towards one other. They are on the same wireless LAN most of the time.  Why don’t they just say Bonjour, and just trickle sync in the background throughout the day to keep my Apple world in sync?  (Surely not because Apple wants me to subscribe to Mobile Me?)
9. If I’m re-downloading an app I’ve already purchased, why do I have to click BUY NOW and then have it tell me that it’s free because I already bought it?  The device should just say hey, you own this, help yourself.
10. The app store approval process is a bottleneck that is truly hurting users.  Bugfixes cannot be dispatched instantly to users and are delayed for upwards of a week.
11. Apple’s patriarchal control over what apps show up is an idea that is playing itself out.  Protecting the users from badness is one thing.  Artificially protecting Apple’s interests at the expense of the customer’s is another.

    Every app that Apple prohibits is a set of needs that will never be fulfilled by the iPhone. The controversy over the Google Voice app rejection is only the most vivid recent example.  When the Pre eventually gets its act together we will, hopefully, see how different the world can be.  Apple could use the competition to keep it honest.

Given the triumph that was the iPhone, these issues were tolerable for the first year or so.  But we are now at the third version of the iPhone OS.  It’s time for Apple to get back and fix the basics.

Until they do, there is an opening for competitors to exploit.

Here is an idea to steal for whichever competitor is first to trump the iPhone interaction design:  launch an advertising campaign with billboards that trumpet the ease of use and efficiency advantages: “Call your spouse.  iPhone: 6 steps.  Pre: 2 steps.  The Palm Pre.  For busy people.”  “Move an appointment.  iPhone: 13 steps.  Palm Pre: 5 steps.  The Palm Pre.  For busy people.”  You get the idea.

Readers: what serious long-standing iPhone issues did I miss?

—

Philip Haine is principal of Product Vision Associates, a product innovation consultancy that helps product leaders and their teams envision new, breakthrough products and reboot older ones.  To follow him on Twitter click here.

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…

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.

These are not gifts or promotions or bonuses like frequent flyer miles.  These are credits you PAY FOR.  With REAL MONEY. In exchange for future imagery to download.  They just “expire” them.

iStockPhoto calls these credits their very own currency.  And they deem it okay to just take that currency from you with nothing in return.  Imagine if all those gift cards you gave and received “expired” after a year.

Sorry for sounding redundant.  I’m incredulous.

They are already benefiting from having customers prepay: they get to hold onto your money and keep the interest.

This is so obviously sleazy and unfair. Some states already have explicit laws banning the practice.

The ethics of it should be plenty to prevent a company from employing such practices, but because we care about product vision, including business models, let’s lay out why this is such a petty, short-sighted idea:

• Most companies try and incentivize customers to spend more.  Expiring credits is a disincentive for customers to prepay for bigger chunks of credits.  The more you buy, the more you have to lose.
• Most companies understand the high cost of customer acquisition and try and keep customers loyal so they don’t stray to competitors.  Unused credit is a financial incentive to return to the service.   If I had just two dollars left in my account I’d go to back to iStockPhoto and spend another $10 to get what I want.  But now that my balance is zero, I’m free to look elsewhere.  By expiring credits, iStockPhoto frees their customers who would otherwise be locked in.
• Expiring credits turns happy customers into angry customers.  Someone wrote, “Yep, iStockPhoto stole money from me as well. They got 4 dollars from me that expired a few months ago. For that, they’ve lost a customer. Genius business model. Luckily there’s lots of competition so no worries on finding clipart.”

Some homework for the business leaders of iStockPhoto: read up on net promoter.

So here is some advice for competitors: differentiate by not expiring credits, and ridicule the ethics of those who do.

Readers: what are the best alternative stock photo providers?  How did you feel when you found out your iStockPhoto credits disappeared?

Update 8/20/09 – Here are some alternative stock photo sites:

• EveryStockPhoto – searches multiple free sites
• stock.xchng – free.  Includes search results from paid sites including iStockPhoto, our nemesis
• StockXPert – paid, credits do not expire.
• PhotoXPress – free, but limited downloads per day

[Non-recommended sites that expire credits: iStockPhoto, Fotolia, Dreamstime.]

They did do something subtle and brilliant, though. I’ve been moaning for decades about the absence of a proper second mouse button on Apple’s computers. With the new MacBooks, Apple found a way to add a second button without desecrating the precious industrial design. The track pad itself is a real, physical, press-it-and-it-clicks button. Press it with one finger and it’s a regular click. Press with two fingers for the right-click operations.  (There’s a chance that there will be a lot of false right clicks, if the user fails to assiduously lift all other fingers before clicking. Something to look out for.)

Another great side effect of combining the mouse button with a multi-touch panel is that it greatly simplifies clicking and dragging when using a trackpad.  Before, this was a two-handed operation, one hand pressing and holding the button, and the other one doing the drag.   Now, the user can press and drag with one finger.  It’s more direct, and it neutralizes one of the advantages of an external mouse, which had this capability ever since Englebart’s day.

Combining the mouse button with a multi-touch panel has other potential.  Double-clicking, still difficult for many users, can go away: instead, click with three fingers. Triple clicking was always pretty ridiculous, but the equivalent, click with four fingers, is more tolerable.  You can zoom, pan, change the volume, scrub a video, by pressing with multiple fingers and dragging horizontally, vertically or diagonally.  These are my off-the-cuff thoughts, not what’s been announced.  Apple says:

The amazing new trackpad doubles as a button — just press down anywhere and consider it clicked. No separate button means there’s 39 percent more room for your fingers to move on the silky glass surface. Now that Multi-Touch gestures have come to MacBook, all the function is in your fingers. Use two fingers to scroll up and down a page. Pinch to zoom in and out. Swipe with three fingers to flip through your photo libraries. Rotate to adjust an image with your fingertips. Using the new four-finger swipe gesture, swipe up or down to access Exposé modes and left or right to switch between open applications. If you’re coming from a right-click world, you can right-click with two fingers or configure a right-click area on the trackpad. The more you use the Multi-Touch trackpad, the more you’ll wonder what you ever did without it.

(By the way, is it possible to use a stylus with the conductive glass touchpad?)

There’s only one little issue.  Most of us use our laptops on a desk, right?  And most of the time when working at a desk a mouse is still preferable, right?   So all this track pad goodness is only an occasional benefit, until the future mouse is invented. [Update 10/21/09 The future mouse has been invented.]

See also

• Panning & scrolling with a mouse by tilting
• The irony of Apple’s Magic Mouse

Here is my love/hate list for the iPhone after using it for a month:

iPhone Behavior love/hate list

Both my love and hate lists are pretty long.  But overall, I love my iPhone, and I’m not going back.   No, you may not have mine.  Get your own.

What is on your iPhone love/hate list?

Link to this article at: http://StealThisIdea.com/articles/iphone-love-hate/

See related article: The 1995 Palm calendar creams the 2008 iPhone’s

===

Philip Haine is product vision specialist and product designer in San Francisco.  He founded Obvious Design, LLC in 1997.  He’s used Macs continuously since 1984 and the iPhone since August 2007.

That said, I’m disappointed in some of its designs.  The particular object of my ire is the calendar app.  The Palm 100 calendar UI from 1995 laps it in terms of moment-to-moment usage.  In this article I want to show how a thirteen year old UI designed for a 160×160 pixel, monochrome display on a cheap, slow CPU is so much more effective than a 2008 iPhone with a larger, high-res screen and fast CPU.

Here is a real-world example of what I mean.  When I have a tentative appointment, I append a question mark to show that it isn’t confirmed.  For example: “Dinner with Rich?”  Later, when the appointment is confirmed, I will removed the question mark.  Here’s how to remove that question mark on every Palm device from the first PalmPilot to the latest Palm Centro:

1. Tap at the end of the appointment text, to place the cursor there
2. Press (or gesture) backspace

That is it.  Two steps and you are done.  You can now turn off the device or navigate away to some other task.  The direct manipulation is similar to how you might do it with a paper agenda.

Now, here is how you remove that question mark on the iPhone 3G:

1. You can’t edit the appointment text from the day view, so tap it to open it up in the “Event” details screen.
2. Well you can’t edit the text here either, so tap the “Edit” button in the top right corner
3. Unfortunatly the “Edit” view doesn’t let you edit.  Instead it shows the components of the appointment.  Go ahead and tap the event name to tell the iPhone you want to edit it.
4. You are now in the “Title & Location” field with the cursor blinking on the appointment, with the on-screen keyboard shown.
5. Press backspace.
6. Press Save to get back to the “Edit” screen
7. Press Done to get back to the “Event” screen
8. Press the back button at the top left corner (labeled with the Date)

Them’s a lot of steps.  And a lot of modes.  And a lot of thinking to do an every day task.  Four times as many steps as the 1995 Palm.  This design conduct is unbecoming of an Apple product.

This is not an obscure task.  We are not changing some technical configuration on a one-time basis.  We are making an adjustment to the title of an event.  It’s the sort of thing that everyone who uses the calendar needs to do all the time.  No excuses here: common, frequent tasks should be the most streamlined.

And it’s not just this task.  Creating a typical appointment on the Palm takes two steps versus about ten steps on the iPhone.  Five times more steps.  (And that is being generous with the horrendous spinning slot-machine style time picking UI.)

Palm, and in particular the guys chiefly responsible for its UI design, Rob Haitani and Jeff Hawkins, understood that for a PIM device to replace the reliable, always-on paper-based planner, it would have to be  simple, direct and fast.  When you are trying to capture an appointment while on the phone, only a sliver of your attention is available to spend on the UI.  The Palm’s UI is direct enough that you can do it during a conversation.  With an iPhone, you’d better jot it down on paper and transcribe it into the device later if you want to avoid putting your caller on hold mentally.

Here are some other reasons why the old skool Palm’s calendar laps its young cousin.

In the day view:

• If you have appointments far apart in the day, the Palm is intelligently condenses hours of the day, so you can almost always see all your day’s appointments without scrolling.  This is important to give you the big picture.  If something is concealed you might very well miss it.  On the iPhone, if you set up an appointment at 7 AM, and another at 7 PM, it’s possible to look at the day view and completely miss one of them…or either!  We are talking missed appointments here.  The iPhone tries to help by auto-scrolling as you step between days, but this ostensible bit of cool just adds UI friction.
• 

  The irritating iPhone slot-machine spinner UI.   Please, just give us a calendar to tap

  To change the a date of an appointment the Palm gives a standard calendar UI that you have seen on every travel planning site.  Calendars are tried and true and have some great information visualization benefits.  You get to see where the dates are relative to the week and month and relative to other important dates.  Assigning a new date is a simple matter of tapping on it.  The iPhone instead gives an atrocious spinning slot machine picker.  It provides none of the contextual information and requires a lot of painstaking work to flick to the right date.  It’s easy to inadvertenly touch something in the wrong column without even knowing it.  I have had several appointments that have been off by hours because of this.  Form gave function a beating the day that one was designed in Cupertino.

In the month view:

• The month view on the Palm shows you roughly how busy you are on each day.  The iPhone shows a dot on each day with an event.  Any event: appointment, birthday, multi-day.  The result is that just about every day has a dot, eliminating any useful information it might convey.
• The Palm’s month view shows multi-day events with a dotted line that spans multiple days.  It shows me when trips are happening or when visitors are in town. The iPhone just gives me that dot on each day, which could just as well be a morning workout appointment as a business trip.  There is no way to distinguish those big multi-day events in the month view.
• On the iPhone, when you tap a day of the month, it tries to be helpful by showing the day’s events in a little pane at the bottom. The problem is, in six-row months like this one (August 2007) there is only enough height to show one appointment.  You are supposed to scroll that little area vertically to see more.  It’s like looking at your appointments through a straw.  To make matters worse, there isn’t even an indication of there being more than one appointment.  The scrollbar only appears when scrolling.  If you are checking to see what you are doing on a certain day you must scroll that tiny text area, always. In contrast, the Palm lets you tap on any date to see everything.

Furthermore:

• The Palm has a Go To date function.  You can get to most dates in two or three taps.  It’s a wonderfully tuned UI.  The iPhone makes you press and hold the Next Month button as it whirrs through the months.  It’s attention-consuming and clunky by comparison.
• On the Palm, you can get to the calendar in one step, even if the device is off, by pressing the calendar button.  Brilliance!  On the iPhone this is three to seven steps which vary depending on the state in which the device was last left, which means you need to pay attention (cf. Don’t Make Me Think).   [Step 1. Press button on top.  2. Slide finger.  3. Press home if you were in another app. Step 4. Figure out where you are and slide the home screen left or right one or more times to get to the page with the calendar app.  5. Tap in the calendar.  6. Switch calendar modes if necessary.  7. Navigate to today if necessary.]  For a worker who checks her schedule twenty times a day, this makes a difference.  Apple’s buttonphobia undoubtedly makes things look sleek and elegant but it really does hurt, every single day, many times a day to not have direct access to the most frequent and common tasks.  [11/14/08 Update: see some ideas for instant access without adding buttons.]
• The Palm lets you search for an event (“When is Peggy’s wedding?”); the iPhone does not offer this.  This is an important SSNiF that should be covered.  [6/18/09: iPhone v3.0 software now allows this]
• Why can’t you flick left and right to go to adjacent days in the day view, as you do with, say, the photo album?  There is already a left/right spatial paradigm established by the small arrow buttons.  Instead, you have to press those small arrows with your finger, obscuring the screen with your hand in the process.
• [added 6/18/09] There is no coherence or consistency between the calendar and alarms. The (non-calendar) alarm are more insistent, and therefore reliable, then the calendar reminders.  You get to choose the sound, unlike calendar reminders. (For instance, I use the “Vrrroom” sound to remind me of street cleaning times in San Francisco, when I have to move my car.)
• [Added 6/18/09] You still cannot create repeating appointments that happen on, say, the second Thursday of the month.  This is basic, required functionality.  iCal on the Mac allows such appointments, but they do not sync to the iPhone.  (At least I don’t think so… I’ve been waiting… over 30 minutes… for my iPhone… to sync… with iTunes…)  I anticipate more parking tickets.

In this giddy age of hi fidelity UIs, iPhone design team and those trying to emulate them would do well to carefully study the old, low-fi masters.  Get the function right, then make it pretty.  It’s the Apple way.

Please link to this article at: http://StealThisIdea.com/articles/palm-vs-iphone/

See also: iPhone love/hate list

—

Philip Haine is principal of Product Vision Associates, a product innovation consultancy that helps product leaders and their teams envision new, breakthrough products and reboot older ones.  To follow him on Twitter click here.

Look in the mirror, Patelco.

[Cross-posted from KPAO.org]

Dear Patelco,

You and I have been together a long time. Over fifteen years! I have nostalgic feelings for you. I know you so well. I haven’t had to deprive you of my warm wallet to make a gadget purchase in years. So etched in my brain are your sixteen rhythmic digits.

I took pride in my loyalty to you. I felt special knowing that not just anyone could be a part of you. You were not just a bank and I was not just a customer. No, you were a credit union, and I was a member. I belonged to you. I was special and we both know why: because 15 years ago I was once part of Pacific Bell or a company that had an arrangement with you.

And yet I was not an ordinary member. I was, literally, a “loyal household” member. I believe this entitled me to a twenty-five basis point reduction in interest rates. I thought, “stay close, Patelco! Someday I might need that boost!” But my credit was true, and my need for your generous gift never did arise.

And, I confess, my heart wandered… over to bankrate.com, that sweltering morass of mortgages, CDs and, yes, other credit cards. There were others out there willing to give me even better rates should I ever need them in a bleak moment of fiscal challenge.

But, Patelco, that is not the reason for my discontent. The truth is, it’s not you, Patelco, it’s me. We’ve grown apart.

When we first met I was satisfied retyping the transactions you sent me by mail into Quicken. When you offered a way of downloading transactions online via QIF files, I was first in line. Yes, it was quirky and error-prone, but a revelation compared with manual data entry. I had only to spend ten minutes per account each month providing categories for each of your transactions. Those were crazy, exciting times.

But then my other credit cards — yes, there were others — started giving me more. They gave me direct connection from within Quicken, so downloads happen in one step! They were smart enough not to blindly duplicate transactions if accidentally overlap dates with what I already downloaded. They knew which accounts the transactions belong to, so I don’t have to tell them. They even assigned reasonable categories for me automatically, saving me a lot of tedium.

Patelco, you need to know that this has been going on for years. Look around: QIF is way out of style. I am busier these days, and I just don’t have the time to spend with you categorizing transactions.

(Yes, things are on the rocks between me and Quicken. But that is our business. Please don’t change the subject.)

Don’t get me wrong, Patelco, you’ve been faithful to me, and I appreciate it. You’ve given me 1% back on every dollar I charged to you over the years. For that I thank you.

But then there are the fees. Late fees? I am sorry I am not that kind of man. You blame me for being late. And I was a few times. But let’s be fair, you had a part to play in this too. I want to give you your full balance every month. “Just take it” I said to your customer service reps, “Automatically deduct the right amount from my bank account every month so I don’t have to think about it.” But no, you refused. It’s as if you have some twisted control issues. You like making me come to you every month, don’t you? Yes, I am human, I am bound to forget sometimes. BOOM, you never fail to smack me with late fees. After all we’ve been through!!

News flash, Patelco: You may not be that type of financial institution to take my money automatically, but there are plenty of others who are. Smack on time, month after month. No complaining. No work on my part. It’s been going on for years and yes we’re both very satisfied.

And Patelco? I don’t mean to kick you when you are down, but the other bank websites just look and feel better. Even frumpy Washington Mutual recently had some work done and suddenly looks five years younger. You could too, but you just don’t.

Patelco, it’s time to look inwards and ask what YOU should be doing to attract people like me.

I am sorry, my mind is made up. After fifteen years it is time for us to make a clean break and move on.

Good luck, Patelco. Thank you for the good memories. I hope you can grow through this experience and become a better credit union for your other members.

Best wishes,
- Philip

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:

1. 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.]
2. 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]

3. 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.]

4. 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.

5. 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.
6. 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.
7. 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.]
8. 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.

9. Bring back OpenDoc

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.

10. 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.

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]

iPod touch

[Update 12/2/09 - two years later, the iPod Touch does not really suck very much anymore.  See the comments for some of the profound improvements since its introduction.  I am sure Apple read this blog to figure out what needed fixing.  - ed.]  [Haha, just kidding - ed.]

Here are some initial reactions to the iPhone touch based on the guided tour. I have not personally tried the device, so please forgive and let me know of any errors!

(By the way, anyone else find the guided tour a bit creepy? Something about the jovial, disembodied face and flailing hands…)

• The iPod touch is not highly optimized for playing music. It has poor capacity for a full-size device (8GB) requiring users to spend more time managing music. You cannot access key functions like pause and volume up/down from the outside of the device. The buttons are on a touch-screen, so you cannot just feel for the them and must look at the device to do these fundamental tasks. The device has to be in the right mode for you to pause music or turn the volume down. A music-optimized device would have physical buttons for these topmost tasks on the exterior. The big screen drains battery capacity, so you have to concern yourself with turning on and off the display. The touch-screen is easily pressed by accident, so you have to be concerned with locking and unlocking input. Despite some nice interaction design, this device is not a great conceived-from-scratch music player; it’s the design of a cut-back iPhone.
• The iPod touch is also not a great video player, again because of the limited capacity. What a waste of a large, sharp display. Would it have killed Apple to include a flash memory slot?
• The consolation is that the iPod touch is only $50 more than the iPod Nano of the same capacity. You get a lot for that 50 bucks. (Who will buy the 8GB nano?)
• Is it just me, or is Cover Flow a crappy way to navigate a music collection? The concept seems to be inspired by the vinyl & CD world of albums, where browsing a collection of music could be done visually. However the modern world of MP3s is largely a world of singles. This results in a stack of album covers, many of which represent one song. It’s pleasant seeing album covers, but flicking album covers back and forth is a pretty poor interaction model for finding music. While Cover Flow demos well, it strikes me as gratuitous eye candy with little user benefit. Such UIs tend not to hold their own over time. I expect that sooner or later a more functional paradigm will be invented for visually navigating music.
• Now that the iPod has a way of entering text, can you search for songs by typing? Or must you navigate a huge scrolling list? Navigating list of hundreds of items was always a major pain in the click-wheel iPods. (Good riddance, click wheel!)
• The iPod touch will make a sweet PDA. It has a calendar app and a contacts app, the two core apps of the classic PalmPilot PDA. iPods have had applets for these functions from the beginning, but they were nearly useless due to the lack of proper input on the iPod. If you think of the iPod touch as a PDA with music and internet surfing, it’s suddenly a much better product.


PIM features of the iPod touch

• But boy, could Apple have downplayed the PDA functions any further? It’s subdued in both the UI and the marketing. Calendar and contacts are highly frequent tasks for a PDA. Palm devices have always granted these tasks top-tier status, devoting physical buttons to them. On the iPod touch, these same tasks didn’t even make the cut on the iPod touch’s little dock. (Is this dock configurable?) There is scarcely a mention of these capabilities on Apple’s site, and it didn’t make the demo. [Update 9/11/07 Apparently they could have downplayed the PDA functions further, and may have: by crippling them. The word is that Apple disabled entering new calendar events on the iPod touch. Readers are, rightfully, screaming bloody murder at the prospect. Say it isn't so, Apple!] [Update 9/13/07: It is so.] [Update 11/26/07: It is not so any longer. Apple added calendar editing back to the iPod touch. Steve Jobs was somehow involved.] [Update 11/12/09: too bad the calendar UI remains so crummy.]
• We welcome the era of mobile, WiFi web browsing. When traveling it will save us many pilgrimages to Internet cafés. (Too bad the Palm Foleo got cut. Hopefully they will incubate it further and introduce an inexpensive, light laptop alternative.)
• iPod touch is crippled as an Internet device. It has a web browser but no maps or mail or widgets. It’s hard to see a good reason for these to be omitted, other than to protect the iPhone’s thunder. Pity. It’s unlike Apple to hold back on making a product the best it could be.
• Doesn’t the YouTube app require an active Internet connection? We’d hope that it would automatically pre-cache subscriptions to YouTube content to have available offline. The service is far less useful if only available when you are within WiFi range.
• Connecting to Starbucks for free access to iTunes store? Ho-hum. So much has to line up for this to give benefit to Apple or Starbucks or the user. It seems scarcely worth the investment or complexity. Perhaps if Starbucks threw in a free hour of surfing for buying one of their tracks it could get some traction.
• Wouldn’t it be interesting if the iPod touch could connect to any Bluetooth phone and use it to access the Internet? You could have the iPhone goodness without foregoing your tiny, inexpensive cellphone and your carrier of choice. Apple will probably never do this since it would cannibalize iPhone sales and the lucrative monthly contracts.

Despite its beautiful industrial design and truly innovative UI, the iPod touch is, ironically, not very well optimized for media playback. It is derivative of the iPhone, and a transitory product. Greater capacity, and physical, tactile, modeless buttons for controlling volume and playback would vastly improve the product for its stated purpose.

[Update 9/13/07 - We are also hoping that the device will subsume the role of PDA by restoring existing editing functions into its hobbled calendar. Further we hope that it fulfills its mission as mobile Internet device by restoring the Internet capabilities culled from the iPhone.  Most of all, we are hoping Apple does not squander its considerable goodwill by overplaying its hand with such consumer-unfriendly practices.]

[Update 8/13/08 The iPod touch did get calendar functionality.  It's just a shame it's so much less efficient than the PalmPilot.  It's also a much better music device now that it can stream from Pandora!]

A design that avoids needed buttons is like a guy with poor eyesight avoiding glasses. He looks pretty cool standing there, until he starts moving and bumping into things.

The iPhone, too, looks great on a spinning pedestal. But the clumsiness of its outstanding but buttonphobic UI did not escape the reviewers at CNN:

[..] the lack of buttons requires a lot of tapping to move about the interface. For example, the Talk and End buttons are only displayed when the phone is in call mode. And since there are no dedicated Talk and End buttons, you must use a few taps to find these features. That also means you cannot just start dialing a number; you must open the dialpad first, which adds clicks to the process. The same goes for the music player: since there are no external buttons, you must call up the player interface to control your tunes. For some people, the switching back and forth may be a nonissue. But for mutlitaskers, it can grow wearisome.

(To its credit, Apple included physical volume controls to the iPhone, controls that remain absent on the iPod.)

By adding these buttons back, are we giving up too much? Would the iPhone or the iPod be what they are with another two to four buttons on the outside? Here is the industrial design challenge for Apple: find a way to give the products the buttons they need, while remaining sleek and cool. Maybe blend them into the black surface to keep the device looking stark and minimal. Maybe put little OLED displays behind them.

This also constitutes a design to steal for cellphone makers scrambling to catch up with the iPhone: add a small number of globally-available mode switching buttons for key tasks. Then, in your marketing, play up how much more efficient your user interface is than the iPhone’s.

And remember: the right pair of eyeglasses can actually make its wearer look cooler.

7/26/07 Update: Wall Street Journal has an article specifically about Steve Jobs’ animus towards buttons.

See also:

• UI Friction and Apple’s Front Row
• UI Friction

Apple’s Front Row UI

Each button press requires that you wait for the cool animation to complete. Input is ignored while that is happening. You cannot queue up several button presses, and there is no short-cut to get to the top of the menu tree. You have to press the button, watch carefully for it to finish, press again and repeat.

It’s a tedious form-kills-function design. It’s not long before the form undermines itself and becomes not cool, just irritating. The experienced user cannot get faster through time and repetition — everyone must wait.

Once again, the advice for interaction designers is: give snappy response first, animate second. Do not let the latter get in the way of the first, and especially not for frequent tasks.

More can be said about UI friction and Front Row’s strictly hierarchical, iPod-like interface. Before you can get to feature B you have to do a lot of mode management overhead work to get out of feature A. Front Row’s Menu button is essentially a Back or Escape button. There is no Home button.

How might the strict hierarchy of Front Row and the iPod be done differently? Imagine if there were not just a mode-relative Back button but a global Home button. Also imagine menu choices that were always in the same place. Operations could then be reached deterministically — with the same sequence of key presses.

Determinism is a very valuable design requirement. It allows users to learn key sequences through repetition and get faster over time. (It also lets programmable remotes work reliably since they are not dependent on the starting state of the system. Every piece of consumer electronics should accept distinct On and Off commands and not just a “toggle power” command.)

We could go a step further. Top features could be accessed directly with separate, global Music, Video, Photos and DVD. Each would always be one button press away, guaranteed. (More buttons on the remote, yes, but that is the trade-off between true simplicity and merely the appearance of simplicity.)

The original Palm Pilot was wonderfully low-friction because of this simple idea. It had independent, global buttons for calendar, contacts, to-do’s and memos.

Globally accessible buttons on the original Palm

The PalmPilot always responded to these four hardware buttons. No state the device was in could override them, no app, no dialog box, not even the state of the device being off! It even had silk-screened buttons for four other most-frequent tasks: Applications (aka Home), Menu, Calculator, and Find.

Palm’s friction-busting approach is a great design to steal for anyone wanting to improve an overly modal consumer electronic product.

See also:

• UI Friction
• Buttonphobia, UI Friction, and the iPhone
• Impressions of the iPod touch

1. Palettes that must be painstakingly re-arranged to get them off the content area (hello Photoshop and many others). When switching display configurations, the user must get all palettes placed appropriately before doing real work. We would like to see systems recognize common monitor configurations and intelligently partition a display into tool areas and content areas. When switching between, say, a laptop screen and a 24″ display, the user should be able to plug in and work without having to reconfigure the workspace.
   Vision to steal: This should be supported at the OS-level, for two main reasons: 1. For cross-app consistency, so the user can get used to finding tools at the right or left of the screen across all applications. 2. So the system can referee window positions and sizing. For example, on the Mac a maximized window knows not to extend under the Dock, so it’s scrollbar and resize handles remain accessible. See also: Making efficient use of big displays.
2. Often-clicked buttons that are too small and hence difficult to target and click (hello Fitt’s Law). Examples of this abound. In GarageBand, for example, the user must often mute and isolate audio channels, yet the buttons to do are tiny:
   

   The principle is straight-forward: if the user must click a button frequently, make it big. (Resistance may be expected from visual design quarters: tiny text and controls look cooler, especially surrounded by massive whitespace.)

3. Unnecessarily modal UIs that require you to put the system in the right state before being granted access to an important function. Try turning down a blaring iPod when it’s in its protected sleeve with the lock button on. Worse: try turning down Nine Inch Nail’s latest while you are navigating the menu structure. The very cool scroll wheel cannot be used as a volume control until you first navigate your way back to the current song. Better to just yank out those earbuds.
   Compare this against a 20-year-old Walkman: its physical volume dial can be adjusted without even having to de-holster it from your cargo pants. (The upcoming iPhone mercifully brings back physical volume buttons. Apple may have clued into this UI issue.)
4. Gratuitous up-front animation. A Windows XP user wanting to use a menu must first wait for it to fade in. This behavior has reportedly gotten 20% worse under Vista. Mac OS X is not immune: dialog boxes slide down from the titlebar with lovely acceleration and deceleration motions. The taller the dialog, the longer the slide. [Anyone know how I can hack this to make it stop?]
   Before complying with the user’s request to leave, Clippy the insolent paperclip would sarcastically wave Buh Bye. (The stupid bent wire knows that such cloying anthropomorphisms are what did him in to begin with.)

People crave and buy ever faster machines for responsiveness. Yet these up-front animations want you to chill out, take life a little slower. We’re not opposed to elegant animations, but they need to be on the tail end of the user’s operations. The simple principal is: whenever productivity matters, UI elements should snap to attention when called upon but may fade away gently once the user has moved on to something else.

The moral of the story is: when architecting systems, take a moment to isolate the most common and frequent tasks; think of the most efficient theoretical interface to these core tasks and keep comparing your design to this theoretical best. Beware of design solutions that introduce delay or overhead in these core tasks and eliminate this UI friction

Question for readers: what productivity apps have the best palette management UIs? How are Microsoft’s new tool ribbons and Adobe’s new palettes working out?

See also:

• UI Friction and Apple’s Front Row
• Buttonphobia, UI Friction, and the iPhone

FileMaker falls into the trap

FileMaker Pro is probably still the best-in-breed product for mom-and-pop data management. It’s a solid product, a product of integrity: fast, reliable and plays well with others. I have used it daily for over a decade for many purposes.

But FileMaker long ago fell into the classic innovator’s dilemma. They paid too much heed to their most vocal users, database developers. Database developers are not everyday people. They are technical and they need to build sophisticated solutions for their clients. They vociferously demand power, and are far more tolerant of complexities that stymie normal people.

By giving this vocal minority what it wants FileMaker neglected its roots: the everyday productivity worker — people like teachers, baseball coaches or small business owners. While the product got increasingly powerful, fundamentals that would have made the everyday user’s life better (such as a modern auto-complete data input controls or Google-like searching) were neglected. Thus a strong unmet need has been left behind for a competitor to come along.

Coulda Been Contenders

What other everyman database contenders are there? There’s Microsoft Access, written by and for developers. It sure ain’t a schoolteacher’s database. Access just took the old relational database mentality and built a desktop app around it. There was no new thinking about how normal people could and should go about managing and making sense of their data. Access has always been far behind FileMaker in simplicity despite the opportunity to learn from it and do better. Microsoft was going after a different audience: developersdevelopersdevelopers, again leaving normal people without a simple tool for their jobs.

Anything else? Microsoft Excel probably had the best shot at consumerizing database management. People use it as such and it actually is sufficient and flexible enough for many basic jobs. Excel even has some useful, well-hidden features to help you manage and understand your data (I’m thinking of conditional formatting and auto-filtering).

But a few features don’t a paradigm make. Excel never credibly broke beyond the paradigm of the VisiCalc spreadsheet. (That was a while ago; VisiCalc is a contemporary of Ms. PacMan.) Don’t get me wrong – spreadsheets are useful in their own right, and it probably wasn’t Excel’s destiny to become a true database. The point is, the holy grail of robust yet simple data management remains undiscovered.

(I should mention that if you are looking for a hosted database solution to use, check out Intuit’s QuickBase. It is a simple, flexible and well-established online database app giving FileMaker a run for its money.)

The Innovator’s Dilemma predicts that sooner or later someone will come along with a paradigm-busting innovation that renders the past thinking obsolete. I’m not sure this is it yet, but DabbleDB is bursting with new thinking. It should make the old skoolers think hard about how they are solving customer needs and what has been possible all the while, going back ten years, if only the problem had been looked at in a different way.

DabbleDB’s Innovations

DabbleDB is getting a lot of attention because of how it pushes the envelope on interactivity within a browser (need we say “Web 2.0“?). It is an exemplary role model for a desktop app-like experience. But it’s the thinking behind how users should be able to view and manipulate their data that excites me. Some examples:

• DabbleDB lets you flip between table view and grouped lists like it’s no big deal. This capability lets you group a list of names by profession, then by city then by company. In FileMaker you can only see grouped information as printable reports. You cannot edit or act on data in this view, an ancient limitation.
• DabbleDB allows ad-hoc changes to the data structure – especially in converting flat tables into relational structures so you can look at your data inside out. This type of conversion is a bear in FileMaker Pro, requiring that you set up tables, munge data, import multiple times and make sure things are connected.
• DabbleDB rethinks the balance between optimizing for fine-tuned control over layouts versus quick & dirty data analysis. FileMaker gives very fine control over layout. This control is no doubt needed in many realms but comes at a trade-off of convenience and speed. DabbleDB instead emphasizes letting you twist your data around until it makes sense, and then letting you save that view. It’s this ability for normal people to do ad-hoc data mining that is so badly needed.
• DabbleDB lets the user search across all fields Google-style. This is an everyday need that we’ve grown accustomed to thanks to search engines. It’s basic functionality in DabbleDB, but requires advanced techniques in FileMaker.
• DabbleDB attempts to pull off relational databases without invoking obtuse relational database theory. I’m not sure yet whether it succeeded. They may have just subbed in other concepts. For example what we know of as a table, they call a category.
• DabbleDB starts to integrate alternate data views, specifically a calendar view. If you have timestamped data, DabbleDB lets you view, filter, edit it in a calendar view like it’s no big deal. A calendar view is just the beginning though.

Let me see! Let me see!

It’s another disappointment that for the last fifteen years, in order to see your information you have needed to wrestle it into Excel’s charting feature.

I’d like to see a data visualization arms race with vendors competing on how well they can help you see — and therefore make sense of — your data. There is no reason why we shouldn’t be able to explore scatters, trends, correlations, distributions, maps, timelines and networks by poking a few buttons directly from the database environment. (There’s a vision to steal, by the way.) It’s not the data that matters as much as the insight gleaned from that data.

(Another vision to steal: Someone please create a solid timeline view of data for mapping out historical events or future plans. It’s hard for us humans to visualize chronologies. We’ve been without a mainstream tool to help with this forever.)

Tag, you’re it

Here’s a specific design to steal for everyday database products, including DabbleDB: Support tagging as a data type. Tagging is just a new name for the old concept of keywording, but it’s useful whenever you need to assign an indefinite number of categories to something, from a growable list of possibilities. (If you need examples, check out any blog or Flikr or Technorati.)

A tagging feature in an end-user database app would let end-users apply zero or more tags to a record, provide an efficient input UI that facilitates applying existing tags, let the user search against tags, and support adding new tags on the fly as an option.

The Big But

As interesting as DabbleDB is, I cannot imagine trading Filemaker in for it. DabbleDB and QuickBase are hosted web apps. This can be great if you need to collaborate with distant colleagues. But if you are just dealing with your own data there are some significant downsides. I wish there was a native desktop app version of DabbleDB. I’d be happy just to be able to run the DabbleDB web app on my personal laptop.

For more on the trade-offs between hosted versus local apps, see: hosted vs. local computing.

Meanwhile, here’s hoping that Filemaker, or another plucky upstart builds a new generation, desktop-based generalist database product.

Readers: If you know others involved in working on generalist databases, please forward this article. The URL is: http://stealthisidea.com/articles/dabbledb-thoughts/

You then turn around and dive back into the line, swimming upstream against the frowning hoards. Everyone, including you, wonders how you could have made such a silly mistake. It turns out the utensils were at the very start of the line, at a point where your mind was preoccupied with food, not the logistics of eating it.

But you are comforted to see you are no longer alone in your salmon run: others have realized they too have forgotten their knives and sporks.

Once again, the system sets up a trap. Once again, the users blame themselves for the "error" when a better designed system would have made the error impossible.

How might the buffet line be improved?

Although part of the analog world, the buffet line as a design problem is not much different than sequential tasks done on a computer. Examples of this include placing an order on a web site or guiding the user through the initial setup of a new piece of software.

Some key considerations for such sequential problems:

• Sensitize people up-front about what to expect.
• Only provide the essentials necessary for success at each step. Don’t convolute what is needed here and now with future concerns.
• Defer non-essential options to the end.

Idea to Steal: Guidelines for Buffet Line Design

Applying such considerations to the design of a buffet line leads to the following sequence of items:

1. First, show the complete menu with vegetarian options, common allergens and any other important information clearly called out, so the user can ponder their choices.
2. Offer the plates that will contain the food (preferably ones with separate compartments to help prevent plates from folding and to keep the liquid from individual dishes separated)
3. Next comes the food. Space the serving dishes widely enough to allow people to temporarily put down their plates. For those in a rush, serve grab-and-go foods such as pre-dressed salads and pre-made sandwiches.
4. Offer utensils and napkins at the very end, preferably in individually rolled-up packages for compactness and efficiency.
5. Separate the drink and dessert stations to keep them out of the flow of the buffet line.

Deep Fried Food for Thought

The buffet line is just one example of an interactive system in the analog world. We normally take them for granted, but they are worthy of closer analysis. Both good or bad examples can offer lesson on digital designs, just as design principles of the digital world can apply to the analog world as illustrated here.

And the next time someone cuts in front of you at a buffet line to grab a fork and napkin, smile at them knowingly and as you hand over the goods and say, "No problem, it’s not your fault".

[Readers: Let us know if you run across other examples where design in the the analog or digital world informs one another.]

David S. Cortright is a veteran Bay Area interaction designer currently at Yahoo! Inc. David’s previous stints included Microsoft’s Mac division, Claris Corporation and Oracle Corporation. David has a degree in computer science from Stanford University. You can read more from David at http://360.yahoo.com/davidcortright.

Have you gotten into the habit of selecting a block of text before you click that button, so you have a distinct point of reference to look for after the zoom?

Browsers are doing something strange when you increase or decrease the font sizes.

For example:

• In Safari, scrolling to the middle of an article and repeatedly clicking the font up button to zoom in progressively scrolls to the top of the article until its headline is visible at the top.
• Clicking font down repeatedly scrolls down until the bottom of the article is visible.
• Firefox and Internet Explorer do something similar.

Does it have to be this way? Not every app has this problem: Microsoft Word’s zoom feature, for one, keeps the content where you expect it when you zoom in and out.

Designs to steal

The effect should be akin to moving closer and farther from the screen.

Here are three possible heuristics to try out:

Alternative 1. When the user clicks the font size up/down, keep the line at the top of the page where it is after the zoom.

Alternative 2. Keep the line of text at the center of the page where it is after a zoom.

Alternative 3. If there is a selection active, keep its top edge where it is after a font up/down

I expect number 2 to feel most natural because it should give the brain the effect of zooming in and out.

[Readers: do you notice this too? Are there any browsers who do this well? Anyone know why most browsers have this issue?]

And it’s all your fault, isn’t it? For not knowing by now which way to insert it? For not looking at the little pictogram that makes it all clear?

I conducted some quick & dirty product research, asking several supermarket checkout clerks how often customers mis-swipe. The estimates they gave ranged from 1/3rd to 50% error rate, a critically high rate. Since so many people make the error, it’s not your error at all, but a trap built into the system.

What is the problem?

There are two main sources of the problem:

1. There are four possible ways to insert a card, but only one way is considered “correct."
2. Card readers are inconsistent among themselves. Some have a horizontal slot, some a vertical slot, some a face that you swipe. These different experiences tug the user in different directions, with the training imparted by one device reversed by the next. As a result, one never really get good at inserting the retched card in the retched slot.

Different card readers try to show a diagram of how you’re supposed to hold and insert your card. The best of these show it in perspective, making the mapping from reality to the diagram easier. But these efforts are beside the point. To process instructions, even visually, requires you to halt your conversation, break your train of thought, read and think. This is expecting too much of someone doing a cursory activity.

Some ATMs detect the leading edge of the card and block the card if it’s not going in the right way. This is a bit better, but it still requires experimentation to get right.

Regular keys don’t typically have this problem. Must card keys?

Vision

We need a solution that is as automatic and thoughtless as inserting a regular key into a keyhole. One that doesn’t require you to stop, think, experiment; one that is obvious. Why can’t the slot just accept the card however you insert it?

Possible remedies

Instead of just one solution, let’s show a range of possibilities that might be appropriate depending on the circumstances: whether we need to worry about backwards-compatibility of legacy cards, economic constraints, and so forth:

1. Make the shape of the card asymmetric, so there is only one way it can be inserted. (Precedent: the punch card of the 60′s or the SD card of today). The downside is you still have to insert the card before discovering that it’s the wrong way.
   
2. Include two or four magstripe readers in the slot. This makes the machine tolerant of other ways of inserting the card. Two readers reduces the error rate greatly; four readers eliminates it altogehter. No instructions needed![5/26/05 Update: I came across a soda vending machine that allowed bills to be inserted face up, either way]
3. Put the stripe down the middle of the card, not against one edge. Have the reader read the information backwards or forwards. Then you only have to insert the card up or down. This solution works if you don’t have to worry about the “installed base” of users. Here’s the before (left) and mocked-up after (right):
   
   
4. Have a strip in the middle of the card and include two magstripe readers in the reading device. (hybrid of 2 and 3): This allows all four ways of inserting the card, with the lower cost of only two readers.
5. Avoid having to insert the card to begin with. There are office doors that require only a wave of a card key across a reader. Prius owners never have to insert a key into the ignition; it just detects your presence through a key fob and lets you open the door and start the car. (But be wary of the unintended consequences of RFIDs.)

Applies to

• Any device that accepts magnetic cards: ATMs, Credit card readers, check-in kiosks in airports, parking ticket kiosks, transit turnstiles, library self-checkout kiosks.
• Vending machines that accept bills

Follow-up Research Topic

For the interaction design researchers or card reader companies: create a prototype card reader which accepts cards in any orientation. Try out different orientations of the reader. Measure the natural ways that people insert the cards to inform the design solution.

(Hypothesis: vertically orientated would have fewer errors than horizontally-oriented readers, because there is a clearer “up”. If so, it reduces the necessity — and cost — of including magstripe readers for two of the orientations.)