Life is grand

Daring Fireball writes:

This is not about “easy” vs. “hard”, which are clumsy, imprecise words for describing a user interface. Easy what? Easy to learn? Easy to understand? Easy to remember how to use? Easy meaning “simple”?

There’s nothing complex or confusing about iCal’s event entry UI. And with specific fields for each item of data, it is more obvious than Backpack’s — but only for a first-time user, which is the wrong case to optimize for.

I love reading that. That optimising for first-time-users is wrong (generally.) I am in the middle of designing an RSS interface and am hitting this wall a lot. I put in UI elements that are aimed at fast, efficient, repeated use but which are difficult to figure out on first glance. They take a bit of learning.

In this short-attention span economy though immediate comprehension has some value. Striking the balance between grabbing a users’ attention and keeping them is difficult.

An interesting SMS project over in India is proving to be popular with farmers. Twitter is a presence command line, YubNub an internet command line and IM bot systems like IMIS are coming out into the open. I for one spend most of my day between the Mac OS X terminal and a text-editor (which interestingly can run terminal commands.) When I use Gmail or Google Reader I use the keyboard almost exclusively. I wish WordPress had better keyboard support. Even when I am in Photoshop or Fireworks I find learning the keyboard shortcuts to be invaluable though in those two cases it becomes an even faster system of mouse and keyboard movements. Mac OS X with Quicksilver or even Spotlight is a god-send for launching applications and finding files.

Even Windows Vista has made some improvements by putting a search/run/command text-box in the Start menu. Now if only Windows would have a good command line as default (PowerShell requires extra steps, make it the default Microsoft.)

All in all the command line and the keyboard are reclaiming some lost-ground that the mouse ate.

The more I orbit the solar system of iPhone commentary the more eccentric my orbit becomes. A few hours ago it became so eccentric I smashed into the planet known as The Touchscreen Debate; first rock from the sun, closest to the damning and purifying fire. I burnt up as I plummeted through the thick atmosphere of touchscreen criticism and ended up a cinder in their camp. How can I dial without looking at it? Gestures might help but that isn’t intuitive, you have to learn that. No tactile feedback seems a killer blow, a meteoric impact.

And so I began fiddling around with my Nokia mobile phone, a very basic model which does nothing well but is better than the more expensive, complicated devices which do nothing at all, least of all audio.

I realised I didn’t actually use speed dial. Most of my phone usage is texting, good old SMS. Who speed dials an SMS? I realised I didn’t sit in meetings furtively texting under a table either. The only two times I ever used the keypad without looking was when I was driving, which is pretty dangerous and illegal so maybe it isn’t a good thing we can do that anyway, and when I locked and unlocked the keypad. The latter you can do without looking on the iPhone too, you just drag your fingers across the screen, apparently.

The more I used my Nokia the more I remembered how much I hated the software interface on it. Not the physical interface but the software. Reading an old text takes 5 key-presses and about 7 seconds for the inbox too load. If I want to read the next message I have to press 3 keys to get out of the current one and back into the inbox. Sending a text takes about 7 key-presses (excluding the message) and depends on where the contact is in the list. Scrolling menus is a click, click, click, click, click affair. No smooth scroll, no dragging a finger down a screen or trackpad.

Getting a number from a text into the phone book is a chore. Finding a contact and reading a note is a mission. Visiting a URL, even a bookmarked one, involves so many sub-menus I cannot tell anyone where it is on the Nokia. I have to find that menu again everytime I want it.

Pretty much everything takes more key-presses, more scrolling and more waiting than it should.

The iPhone might not have a keypad but the software on it has the potential to be like the software on my MacBook Pro. Intuitive, aesthetically pleasing, taller than 7 lines of monochrome text. Things that work vertically will work well, things that work horizontally (landscape) will work better.

If I want to enter numbers on my Nokia during a text message I have to hold down the number key for 3 seconds to tell the phone that I want the number and not one of the three possible letters. That makes entering an 8 digit phone number take almost half a minute. On the iPhone I’ll have a QWERTY keyboard and a numeric keypad available whenever I need.

Wait a minute. How can I say any of this when you, me and 99% of Earth haven’t even used the iPhone? Call it a hunch. Call it “I’ve used Apple software and it is more usable.” Call it “An iPod with a tiny, monochrome screen is fifty times easier to use than most smartphones with full-colour, 8 inch screens.”

Call it what you want but Apple know how to do user interfaces. And that is what they have done with the iPhone. They have looked at Nokia, looked at Motorola, looked at even the BlackBerry and laughed so hard they’d almost prefer to be Zune users.

Then they went and put Apple UI know-how on a mobile phone.

That can’t be bad.

Reading Kottke’s roundup of iPhone coverage I was struck by the following comment:

You could have different swipes and taps as a speed dial mechanism…swipe the screen from top left to bottom right and then tap in the lower right hand corner to call mom, that sort of thing.

That is very interesting. A lot of people are complaining that a touchscreen interface won’t let them dial without looking at the screen. Firstly, none of them have even used the iPhone touchscreen. It could be rubbish or Apple might have figured something out. We don’t know.

But gestures would go a long way towards solving that problem. I already use gestures on the trackpad of my MacBook Pro. It works very well and you don’t have to stare at the trackpad.

Will there be custom gesture software in the iPhone? I hope so. Three taps and the pizza joint is dialled.

Reading Joel’s long piece on the Windows Vista shutdown menu, which took 48 people a year to implement, had me thinking; the answer is pretty simple. It is three choices. Sleep, Restart and Shutdown. ala Mac OS X.

User Interface Design for Programmers by Joel Spolsky is a worthwhile read though there are better books on the subject out there (e.g. Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug (which Joel recommends too.)) The information is good though I find Joel’s tone to be grating. This is the same Joel of Joel on Software fame and as I have said before the man has good things to say but says them in the most awful ways. Arrogant is the main word that comes to mind. Steve Krug in comparison respects users and avoids calling them morons at every turn.

What Joel has to say on the program model vs. the user model is very helpful though. If that is all you get from the book then you are doing well.

So if you have an hour or two free (the book is short) and have read the other books on the subject give Joel’s a shot.

Kevin Clark’s Things You Shouldn’t Be Doing In Rails article is causing some consternation in the Railsosphere. Particulary the pagination comment:

I haven’t used pagination in my last 15 projects. The pagination code is ugly. Ugly ugly.

There are two parts to his comment. The first is that the implementation of pagination that everyone first gets with Rails is poorly done. It is not scalable and is inflexible.

“So what do we use instead?” is being asked by many and there has been no real answer beyond the obvious answer; write your own pagination code that fits your application.

The second part of the pagination comment though is more interesting. Brian Hogan comments:

Pagination of “next / previous” is pretty useless on large data sets anyway. Alphabet bars or searches are much better approaches for filtering data in my opinion and they’re easy to implement.

That is very interesting. Yes, there will be times that pagination is the only logical way of cutting datasets up but they are rare, very rare.

But everyone uses pagination! Google does!

That is because it is easy. Maybe not easy to implement but easy to conceptualise. It is dead easy to say “List the data in chronological order in pages of 20 records.”

Instead you should be thinking hard about the data you are presenting. If your data is timely then page by logical date ranges (hour, day, month, range etc.) and not just chronological + page sets.

If your slicing results in too long a list to display on one page then you need to slice it better, not just stick in page numbers.

Google is a good example. When I search and don’t find the result I want on the first page I don’t go to page 2. I research. I refine my search.

Newzie has a fascinating and well implemented colour system that denotes the last update time/date of a feed. The colouring is a bit bold for my tastes but the idea is sound and I found it worked well.

Newzie itself is one of the better desktop aggregators out there.