Previously, iTunes media transfert was either a full sync, meaning you had first to put songs in a playlist then tell iTunes to sync it with the phone, or a full manual process, where you could drag and drop files, but would loose the power of using the sync options defined.

It is now possible to simply drag and drop songs from the iTunes list to the iPhone icon, which which prompt iTunes to immediately transfer these songs to your device.

iTunes 10 will list those songs under a new “Manually Added Songs”  group in the “Music” tab of its iPhone settings.

This new feature allow the best of both modes: full sync while still allowing immediate media transfer on demand. Sweet.

See it the new iPhone sync music settings screen on this screenshot.

PS. I discovered this by chance, and I can’t understand why Apples doesn’t announce such new features somewhere in their release notes.

Read the full post A reading mode for the web? on Flow Interactive’s Think blog

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. 

The iPad is Apple’s Wii.

A massive share of the people offering their thoughts on the iPad compare it in term of technical features to today’s laptop, and find the iPad lacking. What they miss is that with the iPad, Apple is doing the same thing Nintendo did with the Wii, and I am not talking about making an unfortunate naming decision. For years, the video game industry plan was to make next year console more powerful in term of processor speed, with better graphics but similar controller and game mechanics. However, they were only addressing a single market of usual suspects who “play video games”. The Wii, which used to be codenamed “Revolution” for a reason, threw all this logic to the wind. It targeted a much larger and untaped audience made of people such as parents and older users who do not used to play video games. As a result of this decision, they created a new, more intuitive and fun way to control the games. But they also decided that processor and graphic capacities did not really matter, and released a console much weaker on those fronts that the competition, but also much cheaper. The Wii is the opposite of what the video game industry has been producing over the years, yet it sold roughly as much unit as both Xbox 360 and PS3 combined.

Computer are hard to use (really!)

Most of us do not realise how difficult to use our everyday computer really are. However, most of us also spend a good share of our days using our Mac or PC, and we are so well trained in using them that their complexity is not an issue for us anymore. I have the “privilege” to be the one who “is good with computers” in my family, meaning every time one of my relative is stuck, they ask for my help. It turns out they need my help quite a lot. My relative are just like yours, just like so many people out there. They are an untapped potential of users who do not use “computers”, or use them as little as they can, simply because they struggle to use it. Today’s computer are just too complex for them. They do no understand what all those folders are for, or can’t remember where they stored their last file. They do not want to spend their time “making windows faster”, installing drivers, defragmenting hard drive or fixing their computer. They are scared they might do a wrong operation and “break” their computer which is why they can be paralysed by the amount of features, menu items and preferences that are presented to them. They want it to “just work”. With the iPad, there are no such things as a file system to manage or drivers to install. Installing software takes only seconds merely require selecting the one you want to install, and clicking ok. This could not be more simple, and there is absolutely no way for the user to go wrong. Thanks to the way applications are sandboxed, one application simply can not mess up the other. This advantage in ease to use, especially compared to netbooks running windows or Linux, can not be overstated.

The iPad is not a WIMP

Roughly 30 years ago the Graphical User Interface revolutionised the way people used computer, making it much more easier to use than the command line interface that was the standard until then. Since that time, all the mainstream computer platforms have been declinations and improvements of the original ideas of the Windows, Icons, Menu and Pointer (WIMP) recipe. The iPad however has neither Windows, Icons, Menus or a Pointer. This alone should make it obvious that the iPad’s interface is a different beast altogether, in itself deserving a very close look, especially if like me you work in the field of designing digital User eXperiences. On the iPad, there are no windows to manage. There are no files to manage either. The traditional single permanent pointer is not there anymore, replaced by many possible simultaneous finger touches that exist only when you use them, and disappear immediately. This multi touch input provide a much better way to interact with content, replicating the real world experience we are already familiar with. The iPad, thanks to its larger size allowing more fingers to come into play, will go further than the iPhone to bring multitouch interactions to the masses. The multi touch experiences of the future have yet to be invented, and I find that incredibly exciting.

When App. stands for Appliance

With today’s computer, even with the most portable laptops, no matter what application you run, you are stuck with something that looks like a computer, with a keyboard and trackpad that are there even when you don’t need them: when you watch a movie on your laptop, you are not using half of it. Having to use a keyboard and a mouse/trackpad puts another distance between you and the content you are interacting with. There is simply no way to forget that you are actually using a computer. By contrast, the iPad’s hardware is pretty much just a screen, providing a clean slate (pun intended) for you application to turn the iPad into whatever you want. Each app open in full screen, and you can make it look like whatever you want including photo realistic Address Book, Calendar, Books, and so many more thing. Each app has the potential to turn you device into a different appliance. The App store is full of crazy idea that no one would have anticipated would be the features of a phone. I can’t wait to see what new things the iPad apps will bring.

A big iPod Touch?

Of course, most of this is not completely new: while many UI concepts are new and specially designed to accommodate the iPad larger screen (see an excellent UI overview here), the OS and the general ideas behind the iPad UI are not seen as very new, for the simple reason that Apple has been bringing those to the public since the introduction of the original iPhone, almost 3 years ago. Yet to dismiss the iPad as a bigger iPod touch is a mistake: the iPod Touch / iPhone and iPad have a lot in common of course, but the larger size of the iPad changes everything. Yes, size and scale matters.

It’s not pocketable!

Yes, at this size, it is too big to fit in a pocket, and as such is not as portable as an iPhone. This is by design, and I’m sure Apple will not mind continuing to sell iPhones. But have you ever found yourself using your phone at home or at work to do task you could have done on a “proper” computer nearby? You are not alone: most of the time spend on mobile devices is actually spent either at home or at work. A couple of reasons explains why the mobile wins: you can use it wherever you are, sitting more conformably than when using a laptop, you don’t have to wait for it to boot, and you can quickly do what you need with perfectly focused apps. The iPad is designed to improve precisely those experiences. And since this device was meant not to be portable, they made it much larger making it much more comfortable to read a book or browse the web.

When more is more

Technically, a tweet and a book are the same thing: just a succession of letters forming words to convey meaning. Yet I don’t think anyone will deny that a book can offer a depth that a tweet do not offer, which make it possible to handle a much bigger level of depth and complexity. While an iPhone app must really focus on small task given the small size of the display / input surface, the iPad has much more space to play with. Apple is releasing new versions of its word processor / page layout, spreadsheet, and presentation applications especially for the iPad, and the message couldn’t be clearer: the iPad is ready for large and powerful apps that could not have been handled by its smaller relatives.

But wait, the iPad is doomed!!! It does not have…

Multi task!

Despite what has been written times and times again the iPad OS technically supports multitask, and the iPhone has been doing it since day one, for example when it continue to send a heavy email when you switched to read a webpage. What the iPhone OS does not provide is a way for non-system application to run in the background. In effect, every time you press the home button or you receive a phone call, the application you were using quits. However good iPhone apps are designed to save their state when quitting, and to restore it when reopened, and in effect to the user it’s like the app never quitted. Keep in mind also that in 2007, the system resources were so limited that this was necessary to avoid turning your phone in a sluggish mess. The user interface implication of allowing concurrent app also bring a new layer of problem to solve: you need to manage “hide” on top of “quit”, and provide a way to switch between applications. Running too many apps at the same time has a very negative impact on performance and battery life, so how do you help uninformed users to avoid having too many open? The last thing you want is to force the user to spend time managing his running applications. Those are non-trivial design challenges that deserve attention, and I’m glad Apple is not rushing a bad implementation, but taking as much time as needed to provide a great solution, just like they did with copy and paste. But eventually, Apple will come up with such an implementation, and with the iPad and the next iPhones, the hardware will probably be able to handle two or more non-system app running at the same time. My guess is that this will appear in the next revision of iPhone OS, due around june. I do not think however that this has been a big issue hurting the sales of the iPhone.

A Camera!

Another “disappointment” is that the iPad does not have a camera. I do not find it personally to be an issue, as I got tired of the novelty of video calls after a couple of Skype calls on my laptop. I do think iChat on the iPad can have an audience. My guess (supported by the presence of UI code implying a camera is the iPad SDK) is that a camera was originally included, but was cut out in order to keep the price under the $500 psychological barrier. It will probably be added somewhere down the line, maybe next year.

Adobe Flash!

To me, not having flash is actually a feature! I even disabled it on my main laptop browser. The reason is simple: most Flash content on the web is more annoying that helping. “Skip intro” useless animation before a web site open. Blinking video adds everywhere, some with sound. I don’t want any of that, yet it consume vast amount of system resources on my Mac. Having those on the iPhone or iPad, with their much more limited system resources, would be a nightmare making everything sluggish and draining the battery really fast. There is the reason why the Mozilla team working on Firefox mobile also disabled it. Additionally, most of the Flash content I do care about can be better implemented with HTML 5’s <video> tag, or even better by a native iPhone app. I believe that most websites will do one or the other (or both, as YouTube as done). Another type of desirable flash content are the many games written in Flash, but they very often rely on keyboard presses, mouse over event and drag and drop, which do not translate easily to a touchscreen only interface. Just “running” the flash plugin would not solve these input issue, and those game would probably need to be rewritten. A sweet solution for me would be something like ClickToFlash ported on the iPhone: flash content is not loaded by default, but can be displayed on demand. But this would introduce an additional level of complexity that is contrary to Apple’s ethos, so I am pretty sure this will never happen.

Conclusion

If you’ve read it this far (than you!) it should be clear to you that I think the iPad has an incredible potential. It offer a brand new, easier, and more enjoyable way to accomplish most of our daily computer tasks that will make it a hit among people who never tough they would ever use a computer so much. In 2007, someone reacted to the iPhone by saying to Steve Jobs “Make the screen five inches by eight inches, and you’ll rule the world.” These happen to be the dimensions of the iPad, which is no coincidence. That person was Alan Kay, arguably the main force behind the invention of the GUI all those years ago. He might know a thing or two about computers. Remember also how Slashdot, the self-titled “news for nerds” site and king of the tech-savy blogs, first reacted to the iPod in 2001: “No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.” The geeks weren’t impressed, but we all know what happened next.

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.

The iPhone is not just a mobile phone

The iPhone is a mobile phone (calls, SMS), but that is not all.

It is a song jukebox (the iPod app).
It is a live TV (see (live UK TV).
It is a TV/VCR combo (the videos in the iPod app).
It is a photo album (the photo app, or Flickr’s app).
It is a pocket translator that speaks foreign words for me. (iSpeak serie).
It is a networked computer (mail, safari).
It is a photo camera.
it is a video camera with built-in editing facility.
It is a book that can display thousands of titles (Classics).
It is a map that always knows where I am and how to go where I want to go (Map app with GPS, Sat Nav apps ).
It is a game console (too many games to link!).

And all of this in the volume of a deck of cards.

For me, the small dose of usability that has been lost from simpler phones is much more than compensated by everything else that this device can do. Even in Star Trek, they didn’t foresee such advanced technology.

The iPhone is not perfect and there are tons of things than it could do better. But yes, for everything that it does, I do love my iPhone.

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.

Developer are gods

Developers have advanced skills that allow them to give life to applications: before their work there was nothing, and once they are done, there is something that works. They have the ability, unlike graphic designer or UX people, to create a functioning application on their own. This god-like power on software should not be underestimated.

But the issue is that too often, developer think that the important issue, no, the only important issue, is one of functionality. So the first thing they do when starting a project is jumping on their code editor, and when they manage to have the key functionality part working, they think the application is mostly done, only lacking a superficial layer of polish.

UX is more a differentiating factor than functionality.

This is what this kind of hackaton encourage: the idea that the basic functionality is the most important thing. Well this can very well be true if you are curing diseases, but in the world of software, there is a very strong chance that a competitor proposes or will soon propose the same core functionality. What will really make one product successful over another is its user experience. And you simply can not create a good UX in a day or two.

A frequent developer misconception

This is what Alan Cooper describes in “The inmates are runing the Asylum”) as the “dancing bear” phenomenon, typical of a developer driven mindset: too much focus is on solving a functional problem (“making a bear dance”). No time is spent thinking how to make it dance better, or even why it should be made to dance at all.

This remind me of the time some developer complained about the Siteoverflow.com website, and despised it saying basically he could redo the full site in a weekend. I recommend you read the full reply from Stack Overflow’s Benjamin Pollack, it is well really worth it. The gist of it: there is more than meet the (developer’s) eyes, and by seeing only how to solve the basic functional problem, you ignore all the refinement that make the site actually enjoyable to use, and ultimately successful over its competitors.

Another good insight is Brent Simmons’s “Anatomy of a feature”, where he discusses the inclusion of the “Send to instapaper” command in his RSS reader NetNewsWire. This is another post that was written to placate to developer comments saying “Oh, it’s easy, just a quick http call. I could write a script to do it in like 20 seconds.”
Except implanting this feature involve making a very long list on hard decision on how precisely this feature should work. A menu item? An Icon? How / when does it syncs?…
Eventually, the devil is in the details of the interaction design which end up taking much much more time than solving the basic technical issue.

And neither of those two cases seems to be doing any real User Centered Design, so they risk building their product for themselves instead of for the actual target users. A proper UCD process would have lasted very much longer than the time it took the developer to solve the main technical issue. But it would also deliver a better product, that delight its users.¹

Boys will be boys, and developers will be developers.

Is it an issue that developers love to take part in hackathon, or like to code something just for fun?

Of course not.

Developers will always play around with code, basking in the wonderful pride provided by seeing your application “work”. Instant gratification!
Playing around with new functionalities is one of the best thing about being a developer and this can be a good way to learn new APIs, and simply coding is making them better coders.

Developers and their skills are absolutely necessary to the development of software. We all need them to be the best at what they do, and hackaday, or coding for fun can help with that.
Nonetheless, we need everybody, especially developers, to understand that this is not the way to create quality products.

As always, I’d love to get your feedback on this, especially if you are a developer (or have been in a previous life), so please let me know what you think!

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

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.

the Zune HD new UI offers a nice way to quickly access favourites (or “picks”) or recently added media, straight from the start menu. iPod users traditionally need to have manually put their own smart playlists, and then dig down into music > playlist > to find them. This is definitely a good idea that Apple would be wise to take inspiration from.

Now let’s focus on the screen that will be displayed the most on a portable music player: the “now playing” screen. Here is photo, sorry I couldn’t find a better screenshot.

Take a good look at it. I’ll wait.

Image "courtesy" of PCmag

It doesn’t look bad at first glance. I won’t go into details and esthetics, probably largely a matter of personal taste, but there is a glaring omission on this screen.

Let’s see what the same screen looks like on an iPhone.

Oh, and BTW, Muse's new album rocks!

Do you see what the Zune UI is missing?

It does not have any controls! No way to directly play/pause, adjust volume or change track!
The one and only way to do that is to press a hardware button to open a new screen / menu with those features.

Such simple, obvious, and very frequent actions are hidden away!

When I read about this (on Ars), I just couldn’t believe it. I do not think it takes extensive user research to find out that controlling what’s playing it a frequent user need, yet Microsoft ‘s Zune UI team did not realize this.

Well, as far as I’m concerned, I would give up all the nice animations and background pictures for direct access to those elementary controls.

So the lesson of the day: all graphic work is pointless if you can’t figure out what the user needs to do, and prioritize access to those features accordingly.

By comparison, newer iPhone/iPod allow you to use all those control without even taking the device out of you pocket, thanks to their very handy and light remote built-in on their earphones.

On a side note, while Zune quality keeps improving, it still seems they are competing with last year’s iPods. An iPod touch is now much more than a portable media player, thanks to its App Store and the 60k + applications it offers. On the Zune, there are now plans for third party apps, and the few ones Microsoft themselves will offer will be ad-suported. Yes, first party apps with ads, this might be a first.

More than apps, devices keep pilling features, in a very tangible show of the much heralded “convergence”. Even the tiny iPod Nano record video now!
It seems clear to me than single purpose devices are a dead end. I can’t wait to see what the much rumored Apple tablet will look like, but you can be sure it will do more than just a web/eReader.

Windows: Serials and activation

To give you some background, as “the one who knows computers” I’m always asked to fix others’ computers.
The last time I had to fix a family member’s Windows setup, I had to reinstall it. No worries, as he had bought a licence of Windows XP with his computer.

So I pop in the CD, start the reinstall process. Then it asks me to type in the serial number. The one that is on a sticker, UNDER the laptop. Ok, a few minutes later, that was done. Install finished in its own time. But it’s not over. I had to “activate” it. There’s a way to do it simply online, but it failed to validate my perfectly legal setup. So I had to make a phone call to an automated service, type something like 50 characters (on a phone keyboard, without seeing them, or the possibility to erase a typo!). Then the phone would speak to me another key, again of many characters.

This was not an enjoyable User Experience.

On the other side

Tomorrow marks the release of the new version of Mac OSX, called Snow Leopard. Apple had announced that it would only cost 25£ for users of the current version of Mac OS.

Since that announcement, I was wondering how they would enforce this requirement. Would the DVD only install on machines where Leopard was already installed, preventing clean tabula rasa instals? Or ask you to pop-in your old Leopard DVD for a quick check?

Apple’s decision was different (shared by uncle Walt) and very unusual in the software industry: they simply won’t check. They will trust their users/clients to respect the agreement. So you simply use you new DVD, and there you go. Oh, and there is still no need for a serial number for the OS.

This will be abused!

Yes, some people will abuse it and buy the upgrade version when they shouldn’t.
Yes, some people even just use a illegal copy from the torrents or use a single licence on many computer.

But as we all know, all the serials / DRM that are forced on windows users never prevented illegal copies. Cracked versions are easy to get, and using a torrented Windows is actually easier than a legal one since you don’t have tio deal with all this serial/activation.

So people who want to pirate still will if you use those protections. Except that this means you’ve made it clear to you loyal legal clients that you think they might be thieves, and you’ve forced to spent their always precious time entering endless strings of characters.

Is it a fair comparison?

You may say: “Hey that’s not fair! Apple make the vast majority of its money on hardware sales, so they don’t care if you pirate the OS, but Microsoft is a software company, and needs that cash!”.

This is true, but guess what: the end-user do not care what each business model is, and has no reason to. He only see how this affect his experience.

Take away

Getting rid of those protections won’t make much difference regarding piracy, but it will results in a much nicer experience, where the user feels considered and trusted. Those are things that count, and help to construct loyalty to a brand.

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.

Disclaimer: This is based on my poor recollection of the session, and may not be an accurate or comprehensive description of the presenters ideas. I also use those to share my own idea on the topic.

“UX Consultant” VS “UX Designer”

An interesting debate was the difference between “UX Consultant” and “UX Designer”. “Consultant” has a very wide meaning, which is not very helpful.
“Designer” present another issue, which came up because a couple of participants were less deep in UX than the rest of us, and provided a somewhat external outlook: many people do not fully realise what design means, or at least how we understand it (as “conceive”, or “define”). For most people, design means drawing.

Indeed, my Mac’s New Oxford dictionary says: “to design, verb [trans.] decide upon the look and functioning of (a building, garment, or other object), typically by making a detailed drawing of it”

So the choice is between one word that is so wide it doesn’t mean much, or something more accurate that will be misinterpreted by many (most?) non-ux people. Not a nice choice.

With a maturing field comes specialisation

The way I see it, the UX field is still maturing, and with maturation comes specialisation.

Ten years ago, the one and only job title regarding websites was “webmaster”. One title to handle everything. Over time, it became clear than a website required many different skills, and new titles were created: we now have very distinct roles as content writer, graphic designer, and web developer.

I see the same thing happening now with UX. Quite often we all do a bit of Information Architecture, a bit of Interface Design, a bit of User Research (etc…). In time, as the field mature, the teams will grow, and each of these task will be handled by a specialist.

“How do UX differs from marketing?”

A question along this line was also challenging.
This is another thing about which UX people tend to feel strongly about, yet often struggle to express why.

To caricature, marketing is often seen a lowly task about selling things in a very materialistic way, while UX is here to help users and make the world a better place, one web form at a time.

But of course, the difference is no so clear cut.

Both marketing and UX try to understand the individual better.
Both want to identify what the individual actually wants.
Both use similar tools: interview, focus groups, surveys.
Both can involve understanding and crafting emotional responses.

Marketing is primarily concerned about selling a product, so mainly before the sale. UX worries about how the individual uses a product, after the sale.

You could say that UX is about real needs, that are often unexpressed by the individual. But marketing would also says similar thing. We like to think the needs identified by UX are real and useful, while the needs that comes out of marketing tend to be artificially created (branding, product endorsement by celebrities etc).

But let’s not fool ourselves: while we take pride in helping the user, wich we really do, the reason we get paid to do UX is to generate more money, whether by having a better software that more people will buy/upgrade or a better conversion rate on a website.

How to answer “what do you do?”

This is not easy, especially when the person asking has only vague idea of what websites or software are.

One answer I gave was “I work to understand what people need so I can make their tools easier and more enjoyable to use”. This usually leads to an awkward stare (the unexpressed “this sounds wanky” that was mentioned durring the session). Sometime people are really interested and ask “what tools?”. To which I reply “could be software, website, planes, nuclear plants”. It’s not really convincing however.

I was reminded I once came up with a better way of explaining UX, exploiting the person’s own experience. I would ask “Have you ever struggled while trying to do something with your computer ? Or had to ask for help to program your VCR?”. Of course they always answer something along: “Hell yeah!”. Then I say “Well my job is to understand people and work on those those products to make sure this does not happend anymore”.

This may give them narrow and vague idea of what we do, but at least the are likely to see our profession as valuable, and well, less wanky.