I’m so glad Michael, Uli and Laura made it. I think the idea of having four designers show at Olypus Fashion Week is a nice change from past seasons. Nothing deep to add beyond that, just wanted to share. And for those of you who are at a loss…
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I wanted to share a fantastic blog posting on accessibility that I just found by way of Coding Horror. As part of Michael Hunter’s DDJ blogging series entitled “YOU ARE NOT DONE YET,” Michael posted a great list of accessibility scenarios that should be checked for every application. One example includes:
Run in high contrast mode, where rather than a full color palette you have only a very few colors. Is your application still functional? Are all status flags and other UI widgets visible? Are your toolbars and other UI still legible? Does any part of your UI not honor this mode?
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Mel Sampat from the Windows Mobile team blogged about a new UI management library, called ScreenLib, that dramatically simplifies creating native user interfaces for Windows Mobile applications:
[ScreenLib] takes away a lot of the pain of designing user interfaces for multiple screen sizes, orientations, form factors etc. It lets you create a user interface once and have it automatically adapt to whatever the device’s screen size is at runtime. By doing this, it offers basic docking & anchoring support for native development and can do a lot of UI plumbing work with just 1 or 2 lines of code.
ScreenLib works on Pocket PC and Smartphone devices, so it’s a great step towards creating single binaries that will run on both platforms.
If it wasn’t for the fact that I’m a managed code-only developer on the Windows platform, I’d be all over this library 
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Every now and then I get into a masochistic mood, prompting me to read NewsMax, a proud purveyor of mainstream American notions and values, like “Bill Clinton hates America,” or “MoveOn.org is sponsored by a crazy, liberal billionaire who is trying to raise your taxes” (my question, why would that even make sense?).
One of my favorite ads on the site is for StopMoveOn.org, which seems to be able to pony up millions for nutty, conservative TV ads, but can’t pay a copy editor $15 an hour to grammar check their website.
The ads on the site are priceless, in any case. I highly recommend watching them. It turns out that the organization behind StopMoveOn is a front for a group of conservative Wall Street financiers. You’ve gotta love that these people who are at least partially responsible for getting the “Heartland’s” jobs shipped overseas are attempting to rile them up enough to vote, in an attempt to keep their radical ultraconservative agenda alive (you know, it’s not nearly as much fun to say ultraconservative as ultraliberal, but such is life, I suppose). Ah, the delicious irony.
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Back in July, I decided to create a new weblog where I could share my thoughts on UI design and User Experience (especially the snarkier ones) with the world, and keep my writing skills (shabby though they may be) from deteriorating completely. I tend to be pretty bad about maintaining these things, as you can see on some of the other blog detritus that I have littering the web. Somehow, I’ve managed to stick it out with posts on topics ranging from why I hate menus, to snazzy Flash applications, and even my biggest web usability pet peeve.
Up until recently, I’ve been writing this blog for myself more than anything else, but now that I actually seem to have a readership (a small one, but much appreciated nevertheless), I’d like to know what you would all like to see. Do you want me to talk more about building great user experiences on Mac OS X? More on Winforms? Perhaps more content specifically focused on Developer Tools? In any case, let me know. One of the biggest problems I still have is in coming up with interesting topics to write about. I’d appreciate any feedback you might have.
Your snarky host,
Aaron
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Cozi just launched their first product, Cozi Central. I’ve mentioned them before in conjunction with their Chief Product Officer, Jan Miksovsky, who was formerly a UI Architect at Microsoft and is a strong proponent of inductive user interfaces.
I was invited to download the Beta last Friday, and I was pleasantly surprised by the amount of cool stuff the Cozi dev team was able to accomplish using nothing but the standard Windows Forms stack. The application is designed to simplify common family tasks, ranging from sending messages to your family members, managing a grocery list, and sharing a family calendar.
As for the UI, it looks exactly like what you’d expect out of a company backed by the former General Manager of Microsoft Money and the UI Architect responsible for advancing IUI throughout Microsoft. This is decidedly good. For example, creating new items on your family calendar requires you to click in an oversized text box, which proclaims “Type here or double-click a day to add appointments.” Immediately next to this is a handy little hyperlink entitled “What can I type?”
By and large, Cozi Central is an incredibly easy-to-use application, with a few notable exceptions. First, on my laptop (2GHz Pentium M with 1.5GB RAM) Cozi Central’s UI seems to stutter a little bit when I first use it. It’s unclear as to whether this is a Vista issue, an issue with my laptop, or an issue with Cozi Central.
Second, tabs in the application simply don’t look like tabs. When I first entered the Calendar View, it took me a while to realize that the labels at the top of the view actually represented unselected tab pages that I could click on. Hovering the mouse over them provided me with no feedback, either in the form of a cursor change or with a hot-tracking state for the control. Actually, I have run into this in numerous places across the application; hot-tracking is good, and more of it would be better.
Third, the application seems to be entirely mouse-driven. It doesn’t appear that a user who could not, or would choose not to use a mouse could interact with Cozi Central.
That said, these are all relatively minor nits about an application that just entered Beta for its 1.0 release. There’s a ton of cool stuff in Cozi Central, and I’m sure it could do a lot for families needing an easier way to coordinate their lives.
Also, John Cook has more details on his Seattle P-I VC blog. Jan Miksovsky also makes a few interesting points about the usability and readability of EULAs on his blog in the context of Cozi Central.
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I became tired of my rather pathetic looking home page, and redesigned it a while back. I put the project on hold about two weeks ago when my priorities dictated otherwise, and didn’t have a chance to resume the project until today. I hope to replicate this theme (or a variant thereof) across the full body of my site in the future. No timeframe, of course 
… after all, site redesigns are considered harmful, right?
What do you think of the new look?
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The Windows Vista love-in on my UI Design blog continues unabated! I was browsing through a surprisingly active thread on the Shell Revealed site about the design of the new Vista Start Menu. Not surprisingly, some people love the new Start menu, some hate it, and some are demanding that Microsoft change it back the way it was.
First off, for everyone out there who hates the new design, and wants to change it back:
Voila, all is right with the world! Although, I do think you’re missing out on a big way if you don’t use the new design.
Second, for everyone who’s decided that new is good:
Did you know that you can hit the Windows orb and start searching away? Keyboard focus automatically goes into the Search field. Furthermore, did you know that this will allow you to search for anything on your system (including Outlook emails)? Or, did you know that you can launch applications by typing their name and hitting enter? (just like the Run dialog).
Third, if anyone from Windows Shell ends up reading this:
When I am typing, the focus of my attention rests on the Search box. Once results start popping up, I shift my focus up to the top of the Start menu to see if the results are what I expect. If I need to keep filtering (by typing more stuff), I need to shift my attention back down to the Search box, or risk mistyping (I’m not that good a touch-typer).
A better alternative (although decidedly non-standard) might be to treat the list as a Stack. The first results would be at the very bottom, right next to the Search field. New entries are pushed onto the stack and end up moving towards the top. Yes, it would definitely take a while to get used to, but it would mean I could stop doing these awful, time-stealing attention shifts while I use your awesome search feature Whaddya say?
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Simon on the (dot)Net released an awesome Vista utility (with source code, might I add), which duplicates the functionality of Apple’s Expose feature on OS X. It’s still a bit rough around the edges, but it’s an awesome example of what can be done with the DWM in Windows Vista.
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Aaron Ballman left a comment on this blog last night, raising a good point about needing to pony up a solution to my “I hate menus” dilemma. Unfortunately, I’m not certain what the best solution would be, at least not universally.
I don’t think that menus are universally bad. Some are quite useful and cool, like the Action drop-down button in the Panther and Tiger Finder. Here, Apple is placing common, contextual commands where they are most needed.
As for the notion that menus provide an outlet for the exploratory catch-all approach, I think this is entirely reasonable for smaller applications that don’t suffer from an addiction to modes (although whether this mode-addiction is acknowledged or swept under the rug depends on the application).
My core issue with menus is that I think they are abused more often than not. Xcode is a prime example of this. I have Xcode 2.2 sitting open on my iBook G4 with the iRooster project running (yes, I need to upgrade Xcode). I currently see 14 separate top-level menus, with well over 100 menu items beneath that (plus many more items sitting on flyouts beneath that).
Xcode’s Debug menu is a particularly egregious offender. It barely fits on-screen at 1024×768px, with 34 items (not counting the contents of flyouts, again). 14 of these items are disabled, since I’m not debugging.
The Design menu is another offender, here. Since Xcode is in a code view, literally none of the items on this menu are enabled.
Windows Media Player for the Mac is another example of an application that makes poor use of menus. As near as I can tell, WMP:mac’s Edit menu contents are always disabled!
I have no issue with vertically stacked commands identified by labels and bitmaps. Instead, my problem stems from the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink dumping ground approach taken by many applications. I think it would make far more sense to move commands that will only be applicable in one place in the application into that component of the application.
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