…a new day

The single most beautiful thing I have ever borne witness to was a Sigur Ros concert in Seattle back in May 2006. There’s a point in one of their songs, entitled viðrar vel til loftárása, where the lead singer, Jónsi, pauses mid-lyric, holding his breath, as the audience waits with a sense of rapt attention that I only wish I could hold over you, my gentle reader.

You can get a sense of the sheer beauty of this moment through a stream of an Icelandic show from 2005, which has been handily archived for your viewing pleasure. Watch the whole thing, or scrub forward to 1:11:30.

Someone far more poetic than I could ever hope to be described this moment thusly:

[T]he climax of the concert occurred in “viðrar vel til loftárása”. i have already mentioned the long silence before the line “við riðum heimsendi”. though this was particularly sweet, nothing could have prepared me for the flood of emotions that came upon hearing jónsi singing the line “the best thing god has created is a new day”. in one instant all the memories of my life appeared to me, just as is said to happen when we die. i saw a white light which was not of this world…[and] a tear fell down my right cheek and i had to tighten the grip on my significant other, sitting to my right. The person sitting to my left ran off shortly after this song and didn’t come back. i imagine the song touched him so deeply that he realized he had made a mistake and decided to run down the stairs, into the embrace of his loved one. just like in the movies. except it’s real.

The best thing God has created is a new day. Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindi, Shinto, Agnostic, or what have you; there is still something deeply moving in these words.

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August 31, 2006

Is an HCI revolution just around the corner?

This month in ACM Queue, John Canny, a distinguished Professor of Engineering at UC Berkeley, poses the question “Is an HCI revolution just around the corner?” Although I generally find breathless prognostications of amazing possibilities Right Around the Corner to be a little overbearing, Professor Canny does a good job of providing a balanced perspective on the future of HCI.

One of the most interesting (and lucrative) ideas discussed is the notion of vastly-improved context-sensitivity. The context-sensitive systems that we interact with today are incredibly bare-bones, and I think we’d stand to benefit greatly if this sort of advancement was done carefully and respectfully (essentially, being mindful of privacy concerns).

Google does a fantastic job of presenting context-sensitive advertisements today, and Amazon is taking steps in that direction with their Omakase system. The ACM article discusses this sort of system integrated into our day-to-day lives through three types of contextual knowledge:

immediate context; activity context, which is about the history of the particular user and a few others (because many activities are cooperative); and situational context, which is about how other actors typically behave in that situation.

Although a system like this would have great potential for abuse, it would also have the ability to make life significantly easier. For example, I flew back to Seattle from San Francisco last night. After getting back to my apartment around 7pm, I was beat, it was raining outside, and I was in no mood to cook. If my phone or PC could have offered me a great deal on food via delivery, I would have snapped it up in a heartbeat.

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August 30, 2006

Aaron’s UI Design Blog on hold until Wednesday(?)

I’m off to not-so-warm-and-sunny San Francisco until Tuesday night. I may have time and opportunity to post, but I’m not counting on it. See y’all Wednesday at the latest!

In the mean time, go take a look at the following blogs I read on a regular basis:
Wil Shipley
Cabel Sasser
Jensen Harris

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August 27, 2006

Simplicity is Anything But

A fantastic blog entry on 37Signals’ Signal vs. Noise explores the complexity of creating effective, simple user experiences:

Sometimes there’s a lot more to simple than meets the eye. To the customer, this is just a few obvious words in a small box. But really, that’s the point.

The sheer amount of work that can go into something as trivial as creating two lines of helper text is sometimes frightening. People who don’t do UI design typically look at the work I do and pooh-pooh it for “wasting huge amounts of time on a few measly pixels,” but ultimately it’s much more than that. Effective and clean user interfaces feel better to use, and make you far happier when you’re using them. They feel light and responsive, and (ideally) you might even forget that they’re there. That’s the ethos I think 37Signals has, and that never ceases to impress me.

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August 26, 2006

KDE’s New, Snazzy Start Menu

I found a video of the new start menu for KDE on the Web the other day. It’s actually pretty cool; it looks far more polished than previous versions I’ve seen, it’s resizable, and includes some nice integrated search functionality.

One complaint I have with it, though, is that the search field resides at the very top of the menu. In the video, the user invokes the menu by moving their mouse to the bottom-left corner of the screen and pressing the big friggin’ lizard. To set focus into the search field, they must then move the mouse to the top of the menu and click in it.

In contrast, with OS X Tiger, you would move your mouse to the top-right corner of the screen, click, and type away. Alternatively, you can press Command-Spacebar and start.

With Windows Vista, you would move your mouse to the bottom-left corner of the screen, click, and type away. Alternatively, you can press the Windows button and start.

From my understanding, they’ll be doing usability tests of this feature. I hope they catch this and change the search field’s position.

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August 25, 2006

Onyx – Concept Mobile Phone

I just found a bolus of information on a concept phone produced by Synaptics, makers of touchpads everywhere and Pilotfish, a German/Taiwanese design firm. The concept incorporates some unique elements to enhance usability, such as automatically answering a call when the phone is held to the user’s cheek.

While Onyx features convenient and intuitive new commands such as drag-and-drop, more sophisticated elements come to play, where you can close tasks by swiping an “x” over them and the touchpad can recognize whether finger input is coming from one finger, two fingers, or a finger on its side.

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August 24, 2006

Apple Design Awards 2006

Every year, Apple celebrates the best-of-breed applications on their platform with the Apple Design Awards, which are presented at WWDC. This year’s winners include the fantastic text editor TextMate and the eBay power sellers’ tool, iSale. The awards are presented in the following categories:

  • Best Mac OS X Developer Tool – This category highlights innovative Mac OS X software development tools which increase programmer or interface designer productivity in new and valuable ways.
  • Best Use of Mac OS X Graphics – This category highlights advanced, effective, and innovative uses of Mac OS X Quartz, OpenGL, and QuickTime.
  • Best Mac OS X Dashboard Widget – This category highlights widgets which bring valuable, relevant, and innovative functionality to the Mac OS X Dashboard.
  • Best Mac OS X Automator Workflow – This category highlights workflows containing an action, or collections of actions, which demonstrate the power of automation on Mac OS X and eliminate time-consuming, repetitive manual tasks, in an efficient and innovative manner.
  • Best Mac OS X User Experience – This category highlights products that deliver the elegance, attractiveness, polish, and attention-to-detail characteristic of great Mac OS X software.
  • Best Mac OS X Game – This category highlights great games which take full advantage of the features and power of Mac platform to deliver an highly compelling entertainment experience on Mac OS X.
  • Best Mac OS X Scientific Computing Solution – This category highlights products developed for the Science community (e.g. Life Science, Medicine, Computation, Chemistry, Astronomy, Physics, Etc.) that leverage features of Mac OS X and Apple hardware in creative ways to allow researchers to more easily and quickly push the limits of human knowledge and understanding.

I love that Apple highlights the applications for their platform that they consider to be the absolute best (even though I’ve never won one ;-) , and I wish Microsoft did it, too. With tens or hundreds of thousands of applications available for Windows, it can be really difficult to find the absolute best applications out there. Maybe I’ll do an Aaron’s Design Awards for Windows sometime soon ;-)

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August 24, 2006

On Fonts

I recently got into a disagreement with the Director of Marketing for a Seattle startup that shall go unnamed. Her company recently went through a logo redesign project, and got a new default Powerpoint template out of the deal. I think it looks decent enough, except that the fonts selected for use in the Powerpoint template are hideous. She disagreed, and we decided to settle this in the only way left to us 21st century folk. Google.

So, let’s compare a couple search results:
Arial Sucks vs. Franklin Gothic Book sucks.

I rest my case.

Interestingly, take a look at the search results for other common fonts:
Mac OS’s classic font, Chicago, does not appear to suck. However, the city does appear to.
Lucida Grande, the Mac OS X font, does not appear to suck.
Segoe UI, the new font for Windows Vista, also does not suck.
Comic Sans is Evil, incarnate. Everyone hates Comic Sans.

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August 23, 2006

New UI Metaphors

An editorial on MacObserver has an interesting round-up of newer UI metaphors seeing some traction, and some that are a bit futher out there. The author, John Kheit, links out to a ton of interesting content including videos, prototypes, and research papers discussing topics ranging from “wobbly-window UIs” to the much-further-out-there brain implant interface.

The current state-of-the-art User Interface (UI) we’ve been enjoying has remained largely stagnant since the 1980s. The greatest innovation that has been recently released is based on video card layering/buffering techniques like Apple’s Expose. But, there is a large change coming. Rev 2 of the UI will be based on multiple gestures and more directly involve human interaction.

Personally, I have yet to be convinced that many of the ‘UI of Tomorrow’ concepts I have seen or read about would offer a real improvement to the usability of our computers. For example, the UI Tom Cruise used in Minority Report looks like a better way to get a solid cardio workout than do data mining.

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August 23, 2006

Master List of IE 7 CSS Compatibility Improvements

Markus Mielke, a Program Manager on the Internet Explorer team, has published an exhaustively thorough list of changes to IE 7’s CSS support on the IE Team blog on MSDN.

Markus also makes mention of the IE 7 Readiness Toolkit, which provides:

  • Pointer to the latest publicly available build of Internet Explorer 7.
  • Developer Checklist including new features and changes of interest to application and web developers should be aware of.
  • Testing guidance and tips for isolating and identifying a particular compatibility problem.
  • Tools for development and testing.
  • Links to resources, technical articles and helpful blog posts.
  • Various methods for providing feedback to Microsoft.

    • Cool stuff, in any case. I look forward to seeing IE 7 reach RTM, and to the continuing efforts of the IE team. It’s good to see that they’re back and firing on all cylinders :-)

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August 22, 2006