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.

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

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.

MyOwnBags come in many fabrics and colors

Ania designed a bag that she would want to use:

• strong enough to carry a heavy load of groceries
• light and compactable so it could be squished into its own little pouch and kept in a woman’s purse whenever she needed it
• large capacity so that multiple bags are not needed on a small shopping trip
• versatile, so it could be used not just for groceries but for yoga, gym, beach, clothes shopping, changes of clothes
• fashionable, to look good while being eco. They come in many fabrics and do not have huge gaudy phrases trumpeting the owner’s environmental sensitivity
• washable, so the bag can withstand grocery detritus and can be used for a long time without looking dirty and ratty

Ania created her reusable bags years before they became commonplace and way before progressive municipalities like San Francisco started banning plastic bags. Now there are dozens of players in the game. Amazingly, the MyOwnBag product vision has held up well against the flood of competitors:

• Grocery stores sell canvas bags that look like stiff green shopping bags. Pretty good for reducing waste but you cannot keep it in your purse at the ready.
• Many companies sell $5 nylon bags that fold into nothing. They are commendable for making something that can be carried around, and cheap enough that anyone could buy them. But they are typically over-branded and look like garbage bags when freed from their sac. You wouldn’t be seen with it for other trips around town.
• Hermès, Louis Vuitton and others have designer grocery bags for fashionistas willing to pay $500 – $1700.
• Various gym, yoga or beach bags are optimized for their stated purpose but are not meant for groceries

Here is what this comparison looks like in a needs table, which includes the original comparison points, paper and plastic bags (3 is better; 0 is worse):

Needs table comparing various types of shopping bags

The needs analysis clarifies the differentiation among these competitors. For each customer need along the top you can see which solution does a good job of solving it. You can compare any two solutions and immediately see the important differences between them and which niche each has carved out.

From this chart you can see that MyOwnBag is the only reusable shopping bag that squishes down to a little pouch, and is useful for for things other than grocery shopping, and is chic and may be worn proudly around town, without costing $500.

There is one other need which MyOwnBag solves excellently: your need to find a unique gift for your chic, environmentally-sensitive friend, for about $40 to $60.

Warning: do not give her a plastic bag.

.

For more on needs analysis, please see:

• Needs analysis technique at ProductVision.org
• Needs Analysis of Vehicles

I plunked down my credit card no more than five minutes after seeing David Creemer’s mention of the Chumby.

Here is the first product I have seen that embodies the future envisioned at the dawn of the Web era. An unobtrusive, wireless, sub-$200 Internet terminal with no specific purpose.

The Chumby Internet device, about $195 shipped.

That no-specific-purpose part partitions people who hear about the Chumby. Some see it as its greatest weakness, others see it as its greatest strength. I’m in the latter camp. I think the potential and relevance of this class of device is enormous. Here are some scenarios:

Alarms of every stripe: It’s time to wake up. It’s time to sell Google. It’s time to move the car for street cleaning. My checking balance is getting low; better transfer some funds. Oh my, something big exploded somewhere. Oops, we left the garage door open. Looks like a storm is brewing. Uh-oh, traffic is bad on 101. Oooh, Tahoe got a huge dump of snow. Oh! Was that an earthquake? How big, and how far? Hurry! Wii’s are available! Shh! Stay low! There is someone at the front door and he’s carrying a clipboard!

Ambient awareness: What time is it? How many minutes before my next appointment? Ah, my web traffic is growing nicely, and I even made $0.42 this week with Adsense. Cool, there’s the updated status of a bunch of my Facebook friends. It’s Friday night and three of my friends have no plans; maybe I will call them. Hmmm, it’s only foggy in my neighborhood of San Francisco, not everywhere How does it look in St. Catherine’s Street in Montreal? Does the baby look ok with the nanny? We’ve been using a lot of energy this month. Philip’s birthday is in a few days.

Control: Time to put the house lights, climate and security in bed-time mode / away for the evening mode / away for vacation mode. Time to put on ambient jazz or groove or drone or classical or acoustic chick rock or energetic rock throughout the house to suit the current mood. Tell the DVR to record Heroes and Earl.

Tools: Alarm clock. Kitchen timer. Game timer. My favorite Epicurious recipes. The family calendar in the kitchen.

Decoration: Ah there are photos showing what I was doing every year this month for as long as I have been collecting digital pictures.

Communication: Receive a video voicemail. Press a couple of buttons and record a voice message to your spouse.

On-demand radio: Listen to the latest NPR news broadcast in the bathroom, when you are shaving.

One could go on. I could imagine several Chumby’s around the house as views and controllers being fed by the same model. (Our mobile phones would take part, too.)

One piece apparently missing on the platform is a coherent infrastructure for pulling together alarms, ambient awareness, control, and tools. From what I can tell, the first batch of applets will be disjointed, inconsistent, mostly useless. The signal-to-noise ratio of useful vs. demo applets is too low, as happened with Palm apps and desktop widgets.

But with the Chumby, the technology and price point have arrived. The only thing in the way of most of these scenarios is a mere matter of design and code.

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

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/

One example is the toothpaste tube, the proverbial source of marriage friction. Who knew such tensions could have been avoided all along?

The solution is the stand-up toothpaste tube.

Let’s look at the SSNiF scenarios:

I love this sort of solution, because it’s something that could have been done years ago, but wasn’t. The need was there, the technology was there, but something intangible was missing: the framing of the problem, the inspiration for solving it, the vision to make a product out of it or the courage to go against the industry norm.

If you are interested in this product, it can be hard to find in the real world, despite tracts of supermarket shelf space devoted to every conceivable permutation of toothpaste feature. You can pick up a tube or two at Amazon.

And may toothpaste keep us together, til death do us part.

This tootpaste tube articles is a facetious example of SSNiF Scenarios — little user stories that are expressed in terms of Stakeholder, Situation and Need. If you are interested in this technique, other articles that demonstrate it: Who Read Your Email This Morning?, Hosted vs. Local Applications and Open, yet encrypted Wi-Fi.

[Update 8/21/08 - changed the old name "USN use cases" to "SSNiF Scenarios"]