What is the main task I have to accomplish while reading an article on the web? The answer is obvious: the task is to read the article.
Yet looking at most websites, only a small part of the webpage actually supports this task. Safari Reader is the latest attempt to help users take matters into their hands.
Read the full post A reading mode for the web? on Flow Interactive’s Think blog
Here are the slightly updated slides from my presentation at UXCampLondon 1.5.
This is an in-depth look at the iPad user interface with guidelines and examples: what’s new, and what lessons were learned from theTablet PC concept and the iPhone’s user interface.
If you think the iPad is just a bigger iPod, this presentation is for you.
View the slides on Slidshare (and make sure you read the notes!): Why the iPad UI matters, and how it differs from the Tablet PC, but also from the iPhone.
Apple’s iPad will be released next week in the US, and a bit later in the rest of the world, so now is the perfect time to share why I think it will be a massive success, and deserves the attention of anyone who care about User eXperience.
This post is my reply to Jude Rattle’s own post, titled “I don’t love my iPhone”.
I actually agree with many of Jude’s points:
1, 2 & 5) Typing is in some ways harder than it used to be when you were used to physical keys and T9 text-prediction.
3) The switch between portrait and landscape mode can be annoying, especially when lying down. There should at least be a preference to disable for in each app.
4) When the iPhone is off, it is off, and will not start itself up on time to wake yourself up as an alarm clock. Which also means it is totally off, not in some standby mode.
7) The battery life is not great: my iPhone 3GS last little more than a day in normal use, years ago I had a Nokia 3210 that lasted 4-5 days.
So the iPhone is not a great mobile phone, I would actually agree with that.
Many users who only need a simple basic mobile phone, would be better served by cheaper and less fragile devices, such as my old Nokia 3210.
But what surprised me in that post was that it was not mentioning what makes an iPhone so much more than a mobile phone.
Read more…
The culmination of the Over the Air 09 conference is a developer competition. Over the 24h of the conference, developers are invited to code some application, with many prizes setup up by the organizers and the sponsors.
Sponsored categories ask for example how to provide a demonstration on how a sponsor’s product / API can be used. For example “Best BBC. com hack”, or “Best Lonely planet hack”. There are also general categories “Best use of WebApp/widget”, “Best hardware hack”, and the weirdly phrased “Best User Experience / Service Design”.
Sounds cool? Yeah, kind of. But to me such competitions, hackday or hackathon tend to encourage the worse of the typical developer mindset, which is often antinomic to delivering a good UX.
I attended the first day of the Over The Air conference yesterday, which proved very interesting for two reasons. First, I heard about some of the new and upcoming developments in mobile tech (widget, widget, widget, it seems…). Second, this was a Developers conference, and very much so. So this doubled as a field trip in developer land, ethnographic style.
If there was any doubt about the audience being developers, just counting the number of ladies would remove it. I estimate the ratio to be close to 1 woman for 15 guys, a very far cry from the approximate gender parity of UX crowds.
The session were mainly technical, full of info about APIs, (in-)compatibilities, standards etc. Some UX session were also present, but I have to say I was a bit disappointed by them. It’s not that they were not good, far from it actually, special props to Bryan Rieger with his incredibly clean, beautiful, and effective slides. It’s just that given my background in UX and the MSc I just finished, none of this was really news to me: I was simply not the intended audience.
Like any good event, #ota09 got me thinking on a couple of points, that will be the basis of a few blog post.
First up: Hackathons, developer’s conceptions, and how it negatively affect good UX
The new Zune HD is out (still US only), and the reviews are out.
Zune are an interesting breed. The first one was just fugly (remember brown as *#&* and lime green?). The second one looked better, and I have to say I quite like the hardware design of the Zune HD. FINALLY some device with its own design personality, not another iPhone cheap look alike.
Reading the review, and watching the videos of the UI, it seems Microsoft’s team produced a beautiful UI, full of eye candy and animation. However, it presents a really glaring flaw.
With the coming release of Mac OSX Snow Leopard, I find it interesting to compare Microsoft’s and Apple’s policy regarding serial numbers, activations, and how they affect the user experience.
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That session is one of those that can only happen in a bar camp: it was pretty much improvised, consisted mainly of a group discussion. I found it however very interesting especially since a couple of participants were less deep in UX than the rest of us, and provided a somewhat external outlook, very much appreciated given the topic.
In the field of UX, you pretty much have as many job titles as you have individuals (each of these post it is one!), and it is very difficult, even for us, to clearly see what each of these mean.
I enjoyed the presentation, but just like after watching the official introduction at Google IO, I am not sold on Wave.
The technology behind it sure seems impressive, but I have yet to see (or understand?) what concrete benefits it brings. I have not yet seen any use that would not have been filled by either email, IM, a forum, or google apps.
Wave is remixing all of those into something new, which is bound to be very disturbing as it will be in a uncanny valley where we think we know what is there (for ex. someone typing a message), while the reality is different from what we expect (you can edit you correspondant message while he types it).
Seems to me they try to have one single tool to achieve very different things, which is generally a recipe for failure.
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