Another glorious example of UI friction is Apple’s Front Row. If you are watching a video, to get back to the computer desktop you have to press the “Menu” button several times to navigate up the strict menu hierarchy.
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.
The dock on Mac OSX also suffers from UI friction. When the is set to “auto-hide” you can move the cursor to the screen’s edge to reveal it. Unfortunately it slides out when it appears, and not as snappily as you’d like. Switching apps is a high-frequency operation: the UI should be optimized for speed.
[...] Currently, much work is going into GUI toolkits to make it easy to add UI animations, such as having elements that slide around. The inevitable problem with animations, though, is that they introduce action delays and so must be kept very short, and yet the shorter the animation, the more the animation defeats its original intent, which is to convey to users where elements go to and come from. (See Philip Haine’s critique of Apple FrontRow) [...]
This may be a change to how Front Row works in later versions of OS X, after all, the UI has changed. However, once launched with a push of the (MENU) button on the very simple Apple Remote, you can use the (PLAY/PAUSE) to descend its hierarchy, (MENU) click will as you say take you back one level, but (MENU) hold will take you “home” to the top level of the Front Row hierarchy. This also works with (ESCAPE) on the keyboard.
Apart from that small point, I very much liked your article. One of the things that particularly irritates me about Front Row is the way that the “movie poster” is large for a brief moment then scales back over the blurb that explains about the movie. This text is almost always curtailed due to the restricted amount of space it appears in. Perhaps, holding (PLAY/PAUSE) would get you a side-by-side view, where you could look at the poster and read the full details of the movie. (+) or (UP) and (-) or (DOWN) would scroll the details side, revealing reviews. There is no reason to force the user to exit Front Row to research opinion on the movie via a conventional web browser. Apple could quite easily cache summaries of reviews from respected sources. Clicking (PLAY/PAUSE) again could go even deeper to the full review. So, at one level you would have comparative ratings and the next you would have the text of the review itself. It could conceivably include “talking head” video reviews.
Nick, thanks for the clarification on press-and-hold of the Home button.
That is annoying that the text is always truncated. It sounds like another example of an Apple design philosophy I call, “deliberate oversimplification” that violates Einstein’s quote (“Make things as simple as possible, but no simpler”) for the sake of a clean look and the perception of simplicity, at the expense of true simplicity.