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Sketchbook: Using Ubiquity with a mouse

January 14, 2009 under design, usability, hci

Lately, I’ve been finding Ubiquity to be pretty handy. But honestly, I only use a few of the commands on a regular basis: tinyurl, map, and define. I use Ubiquity in these cases because it’s significantly faster and easier than what I’d normally have to do. On the other hand, I don’t really find it easier to use Ubiquity to do a Google search than to just open up a new tab and hit Ctrl-K.

What I find cool about Ubuity is not that it’s “a command line for the web”, but that it provides a much simpler way to extend Firefox. To reach its full potential, I think it needs to move beyond the command line — which is why I was glad to see Aza Raskin (one of Ubiquity’s creators) blogging about making Ubiquity more mouse-oriented (see here and here).

The Concept

In Aza’s proposal, the main way Ubiquity would be accessed by the mouse is through a “badge” that appears beside the selected text, as in the photo below:

Ubiquity badge beside selected text

When the badge is clicked on, the page slides to the left to reveal the Ubiquity pane. Take a look at Aza’s video to see what I mean:


Mouse-Based Ubiquity from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

Thoughts

The badge-with-selected-text behaviour can be incredibly annoying (e.g. Snap previews), but it can also be done well (e.g., nytimes.com). As implemented in Aza’s prototype, it’s very subtle, so I think it could work.

But there also needs to be a way to bring up Ubiquity without selecting some text. And whatever that is — a toolbar button, a context menu item, etc. — it’s going to be something completely different from this badge. It’s already a problem that Ubiquity doesn’t integrate into your regular workflow, and having two separate ways of accessing Ubiquity would only make things worse, in my opinion.

As for the slide-over effect, I’m not sure I understand the advantage over a translucent overlay like Ubiquity currently uses. And I think that if Ubiquity is invoked with the mouse, it should look as similar as possible to when it’s invoked with the keyboard, providing a smooth transition from mouse-based use to keyboard-based use.

Alternative Ideas

One possibility is for Ubiquity to have a dedicated toolbar button, like many extensions do. When the user clicks the button, the Ubiquity pane pops up or slides out. If we want to call attention to Ubiquity when text is selected, the button could change it’s icon in a subtle way, getting more colourful, or even glowing or pulsing.

There are other ways Ubiquity could be hooked into the Firefox UI. A Ubiquity bar could replace the search bar (since Ubiquity can do search anyways). Or maybe Ubiquity deserves its own pseudo-tab? See the sketches below:

IMG_1522.JPG

Panel Layout

The real hard part about a mouse-based Ubiquity is figuring out how commands would be accessed using the mouse. Since Ubiquity is essentially a command-line interface, it can easily scale to handle dozens or hundreds of commands. It’s harder to imagine how that can be done with a mouse-based interface.

To complicate things, there’s no obvious way of grouping Ubiquity commands. Do you group them by verb? e.g. search, post, convert, translate? Or do you group them by site? Or…? And how do new commands fit into that picture? Overall, I think trying to fit commands into a static hierarchy is a losing proposition.

A Ubiquity user needs to be able to access all of their commands, but it doesn’t need to be especially quick to access any arbitrary command. Most people probably have 5 - 10 commands that they use most frequently (it would be nice to have some real numbers on this — Test Pilot anyone?). Those commands should be quick to access. For other commands, I think it’s okay if it’s not as quick.

I don’t have a complete design in mind, but I’ve sketched up a few ideas:

Ubiquity Mouse Ideas

Any thoughts?


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Could visualization help make better software?

December 18, 2008 under design, programming, infoviz

Writing software is incredibly hard. Every programmer knows this. The software we write is complex, unreliable, and difficult to maintain. And this isn’t a new thing — the term “the software crisis” was coined in 1968.

The thing about software is that it’s remarkably easy to write a program that mostly works. And it’s difficult to tell the difference between a quick hack and a stable, reliable, and robust system, because the software development process produces almost no visible artifacts.

When you look at a building, it’s easy to get a quick sense of how well-built it is. Which of the two buildings below would you rather be in during a heavy storm?

"christiania, glass house, august 2007" by seier+seier+seier on Flickr "This incredible house was featured in WIRED magazine!" by jonrawlinson on Flickr

Besides the program itself, the only visible artifact of the software development process is the source code. And that is only viewed by the programmers, through the tiny lens of the text editor. What if we could make the entire process more visible?

I’m thinking of visualizations along the lines of the comparison of system calls in Linux/Apache and Windows/IIS that I posted a while back. But this is just one idea. What other ways could we visualize Code Smells? (Maybe we could actually smell them!)

Aside from visualizing various aspects of the source code itself, could we show how well tested a piece of software is? We could show how many tests were run recently, what their results were, how good the code coverage is, the number of crashes encountered in the field, etc. With projectors and LCD displays being so cheap these days, there’s no reason a development team couldn’t have a few displays dedicated to these kinds of visualizations.

What do you think? Could this help improve the quality of software? What if companies openly published these kinds of things?


Sketchbook: Firefox session restore

December 5, 2008 under design, usability, hci

Since I’m doing a field study on how people use tabs in Firefox, you can imagine that I spend a lot of time thinking some of the smallest details of the Firefox user experience. One thing that’s been on my mind lately is the session restore feature. You know, when you start Firefox, and it asks you if you’d like to restore your windows and tabs from last time? That’s session restore.

It’s definitely a handy feature. I often use tabs like lightweight bookmarks, leaving tabs open to a page that I am planning to come back to. (And in my field study I’ve learned that lots of other people do this too.) If your browser crashes, or the Firefox process sustains collateral damage in a kill(1)ing spree, it’s a relief not to lose all the tabs your were saving.

The Problem

But the interface for session restore has always bugged me a bit. First, it uses modal dialog boxes, which are generally a bad idea. One of great things about Firefox 3 is that it eliminated a lot of the modal dialog boxes (e.g. “Do you want to remember this password?”) in favour of non-modal messages in the notification bar (see Alex Faaborg’s post about this from last year).

Not only does it use modal dialog boxes, but it’s asking me a question that’s usually unrelated to what I’m trying to do. “Do you want Firefox to save your tabs for next time?” I’m probably closing my browser for a reason, but I have no idea whether or not I’ll need these tabs next time. And asking me when I start up might not be the right time either…I’m starting my browser because I have something to do, and I can’t remember what I had open before, so how should I know whether to restore or not?

Either you’re part of the problem, or…

So I’m thinking — what if we got rid of these questions altogether? What if Firefox always remembered what windows and tabs you had open? But you might not want 15 tabs loading every time you start Firefox up.

A while back, Aza proposed making the new tab screen more useful. His proposal included a separate screen for restoring recently-closed tabs and windows, but it’s kind of hidden in his design. Most of the space in his design is taken up by contextual actions, but when you’re just starting the browser, these aren’t as relevant. Here’s a quick mockup of what a similar screen might look like on startup (mouse over to see the notes):

Firefox session restore startup page mockup

There are a few things to mention here. First of all, recently-closed windows are accessed from within a history list. Lately, I’ve been thinking that so much of what we do in the browser is revisiting pages that we’ve been to before, so a time-based view makes a lot of sense. Unfortunately, the history is pretty much hidden in most browsers. So you can see some inspiration here from Google Chrome, which presents the history like a regular web page. I think this makes a lot of sense, because it lets you use the same behaviours that you use on the web, whereas a separate history window forces you to learn a new UI.

Recently-closed windows are presented in a way that looks somewhat like they actually appeared in the window, maintaining the tab ordering. It probably needs to be made a bit more obvious than in this mockup, but you get the picture. Of course you could go a step further here, and make it look almost exactly like a screenshot of the tab bar. This mockup only shows one recently-closed window, but you can imagine having more than one, and they would appear in the history at the time that they were closed. I’ve also incorporated recently-closed tabs into this page. That’s currently available as a menu item under History->Recently Close Tabs, but to me, it’s always seemed kind of tacked-on there. You could also imagine using some of the space here for bookmarks.

What do you think? If you have any thoughts, please leave a comment.


Removing debris from your interface

October 21, 2008 under design, usability, minimalism, hci

There are a few things I’ve been meaning to write about for a while now, and in a burst of inspiration today, I realized I can probably tie them all together in one post. Here goes.

Fennec

Fennec is the name of the upcoming mobile Mozilla browser — think Firefox for your phone. I’ve been keeping an eye on the development for a while, especially the UI design discussions that Aza and Madhava have been having. Things are really coming along…last week Madhava posted a walkthrough of the first alpha version:

Fennec Alpha Walkthrough from Madhava Enros on Vimeo.

One of the coolest things about Fennec is that it dedicates the entire screen to web content. Pixels are precious on small screens, so you don’t want to waste them on controls that you aren’t using. On the iPhone version of Safari, the title and URL bar are fixed to the top of the page, so that as you scroll down, they disappear. But the navigation bar — with the back, forward, and bookmark buttons — remains fixed at the bottom of the screen. In Fennec, the title and URL bar also disappear when you scroll down the page, but the other controls aren’t at the bottom — they’re accessible by dragging the page to the left or right. Check out the video to see what I mean.

Edward Tufte would be proud: “the content is the interface, the information is the interface — not computer administrative debris.”

Computer Administrative Debris

In his critique of the iPhone interface, Tufte praises the iPhone interfface for minimizing “computer administrative debris”: the buttons, menus, labels, etc. that steal content space away from the users. This is becoming a serious problem as we continue to shoehorn our desktop interfaces into smaller and smaller screens. For example, take a look at an Asus EeePC running Excel:

Asus EeePC running Excel

Barely half of the available screen space is actually taken up by the content.

On larger screens, losing a little content space is not a problem. But then, I find it causes another problem: it’s distracting. My monitor is too big to run apps at full screen, so I have no choice but to work with clutter all around the window I’m focusing on.

Debris on the web

Inspired by Tufte’s coinage, Ryan Tomayko redesigned his web site to remove all of the “computer administrative debris” earlier this year. When I saw it back then, it caught my attention. I thought it was definitely an interesting experiment, but I thought it went a bit too far, although I couldn’t quite pinpoint what I didn’t like about it.

Earlier this afternoon, I was procrastinating on my thesis work, looking for inspiration for the long-promised redesign of this blog. I want to stick with something minimal, and I remembered Ryan’s site, so I swung by to check it out again. This time, I was able to put my finger on what I don’t like — it’s the missing title and navigation bar.

The thing is, without a title and navigation bar, the user is missing a lot of important context. When I visit a web site, I’m happy to see a small banner across the top with a few navigation links, because it quickly gives me some important context about the content I’m looking at, and about the site itself. It’s not strictly necessary, but that’s fine as long as it doesn’t get in my way, and lets my focus on the content. And the way most sites implement a navigation bar, it disappears as soon as you scroll the page, like the URL bar in Fennec. So it’s not persistently in your face, or wasting important screen space.

The other thing a navigation bar does is give you some idea about where the links lead. When I follow a link labeled “about” from someone’s blog, I have a pretty good idea where it’s going to take me. But if I just click on the person’s name, I’m not sure — maybe it’s a mailto link (note: I’m guilty of this one too).

So, by all means, let’s eliminate useless administrative debris. But be careful; you aren’t just moving functionality, you’re also removing important contextual information.

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The future of tabbed browsing

June 25, 2008 under design, usability, hci, research

For my master’s thesis, I’m looking at how people use multiple windows and tabs to organize their web browsing. I’m especially interested in tabs. I’m a pretty heavy tab user myself, and I while I can’t live without tabs (in today’s browsers), I also think that tabs introduce some problems of their own.

In my research, there are two main questions that I’d like to answer. First, what are the problems that people encounter with tabbed browsing? And second, how exactly do people use tabbed browsing? What strategies do they use, and why? The answers to these questions could guide the future design of web browsers.

Great minds think alike

It just so happens that I’m not the only person interested in this. Mike Beltzner put me in touch with a bunch of people at Mozilla who have been thinking along similar lines, and I thought I’d point you guys to some of the interesting things they’ve been posting.

The closest thing to the work I’m doing is Bryan Clark’s post about how and why people use tabs. Bryan is working on the UI for Thunderbird, the Mozilla mail client. They’re interested in understanding the use cases for tabs, in order to support similar use cases in Thunderbird. He’s collecting his data informally; I’m hoping to get similar data, but in a more formal way.

Big changes…

On the Humanized blog more than a year ago, Aza Raskin wrote about the problem with tab scrolling, and challenged his readers to come up with a better solution. Lots of interesting thoughts in the comments, especially the idea of implimenting “tabs” as a single, infinitely long document (perhaps inspired by Aza’s father Jef’s ideas).

That was last summer; more recently, since he’s joined Mozilla, Aza’s been looking at interfaces for mobile browsers. To check out some of the ideas he’s playing with, check out his post on Firefox mobile concepts. I really like the idea of implementing tabs in a zooming UI — it’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while.

…and smaller changes

Since he’s currently focusing on mobile, Aza’s prototypes are a bit more radical than we’ll probably ever see in the desktop version of Firefox. But Jenny Boriss and Madhava Enros are looking at both big and small ways to improve the tabbed browsing experience on the desktop. Boriss starts by listing some of the problems with tabs, and suggests some possible ways to fix the problem: check out her post here.

Inspired by Boriss’ post, Madhava comes at the problem from a different angle, “crushing it, finally, in something we like to call the pincing crab-claw of good design”: see here. Boriss follows up with a great post, incorporating some of Madhava’s ideas, which discusses ways that future versions of Firefox might better support visual navigation. These ideas are a bit more down-to-earth, maybe; it’s easier to see them being added to a future version of Firefox.

Coming Soon?

If you’re interested in how this will all play out in the next version of Firefox, check out this wiki page. Mozilla has assembled a critical mass of talented UI people, and I’m really interested to see what they come up with in future versions of my favourite browser. If you have any thoughts, I know they’d love to get your opinion.

As for me, I’ll be posting some of my own ideas soon, and will hopefully have some empirical data in the next couple of months to back some of these ideas up. Until then, I’ll keep you posted.


One fine day at meshU

May 20, 2008 under design, programming

I just got back from meshU, a one-day conference focused on design and development for the web. I went on a bit of a whim; the student tickets were only 30 bucks, and there were lots of interesting speakers. Well, it was a good decision — the three talks I saw were well worth the price.

(As an aside, I see that I’ve been added to Patrick Mueller’s Planet OTI aggregator. OTIers, read on! Today’s post contains at least two OTI connections.)

Avi Bryant: Turning the Tables: Moving Beyond Relational Storage

The first talk I attended was by Avi Bryant of Dabble DB fame. Avi talked about why how not to use a RDBMS. There’s been a lot of interest lately in alternatives to the relational database — CouchDB, Amazon SimpleDB, and Google BigTable being the most famous examples.

Avi mentioned that there are two main cases where it’s advantageous to have something other than a relational database. First, if your dataset is massive, as with Google. In this case, it’s just not feasible to use a RDMS. The second case is if your dataset is really just many small, independent datasets, in which case it might be simpler and more scalable to use an alternative technique.

At the end of the talk, Avi demoed MagLev, which is a Ruby interpreter built on top of a Smalltalk VM (OTI connection #1). This was really cool, not just because it’s Ruby running on top of Smalltalk. It was cool because MagLev can transparently persist heap objects to disk, and distribute them to other VMs, either locally or running on other machines. For example, you can define a function in one VM, and then call it from another VM. Wow. As far as I know this was the first time MagLev has been shown in public, but there’s going to be a talk at RailsConf 2008.

Daniel Burka: Iterative Design Strategies

The second talk I attended was by Daniel Burka (OTIers probably know Daniel’s brother Peter). Daniel is the lead designer for Digg and a co-founder of Pownce. Daniel gave a great talk on iterative design strategies. You can check out the slides here.

It was really interesting to hear some of Daniel’s stories from Digg. He said that one of the times that they redesigned the comments, they were getting a lot of negative feedback from users. But they also noticed that under the new system, stories were getting more comments than ever before. So although there was a vocal minority who weren’t happy with the design, it was an overall success. The moral of the story is that you need to look at the implicit feedback as much as the explicit feedback.

Another thing I took away from Daniel’s talk was that I should read How Buildings Learn by Stewart Brand. I’ve had this recommended to me enough times that I’ve finally decided to buy it.

John Resig: Building Interactive Prototypes with jQuery

John Resig is the creator of jQuery, “the write less, do more Javascript library”. This talk was pretty timely for me. I just started using jQuery a few weeks ago for a Firefox extension that I’m writing, and I’m pretty much in love with it. So it was practically guaranteed that I would like this talk, since it was further demonstration of all that is awesome about jQuery. I did learn one new thing from the talk — I’d never heard of the jQuery Form Plugin before, and it is really cool as well.

I’m not sure what more I can say about this one. If you’re a web developer, or a designer who codes a little, you should seriously check jQuery out.


So that was my day. $30 well spent at meshU. Thanks to the organizers: Mark, Mathew, Rob, and Stuart.


What I’ve been up to: freehand drawing on the OLPC laptop

April 17, 2008 under design, usability, hci, olpc

Some of you might remember my post from January where I talked about the innovative interface of the OLPC laptop. I wrote that post after talking to Mike Fletcher about doing an OLPC-related project for a course I was taking with Greg Wilson. It turned out to be a really fun and cool project, and now that I’m finally finished the course, I thought I’d post about it here.

So, you’ve probably all heard of One Laptop per Child. They recently started shipping their first laptop, which is called the XO. One of the unique things about the XO is that it comes with a built-in graphics tablet. Unfortunately, the system software doesn’t come with tablet support built-in. My project for the semester was to work on improving the tablet support — specifically, the API for activity developers, and the user interface for drawing.

The user interface ended up being the most challenging part of the problem, because the XO tablet is not quite like a standard graphics tablet. It has no hover mode, and it has an aspect ratio that’s completely different from the XO’s screen. In this video, where I explain some of the ways I’ve come up with to deal with these problems.


For more information about the project, check out the Pen Tablet Support and Pen Tablet UI pages on the OLPC wiki.

I’m planning on continuing with this work this summer, so if you’ve got a comment or any other ideas, I’d love to hear them. Leave ‘em here, or send me an email.


If you can’t say anything nice…

March 10, 2008 under design

Apparently someone from Rogers Wireless remembered the old adage “if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.”

I was taking a look at the phones they offer for prepaid, and got a laugh out of the description for the Motorola W370:

Rogers Wireless phone features

The features for the Nokia 6080: “Great value!”, “Pocket sized”, “Sleek design”, and “Embedded camera.” For the Motorola W370: “Flip phone”, “Affordable”, and then a blank bullet. Like the sales guy just gave up: “Meh…I got nothing.”

If that doesn’t convince you to grab one of these babies while you still can, I don’t know what will.


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Design Transformations

March 3, 2008 under design, the brain

Geometric design

My friend (and recent DGP graduate) Gerry Chu has started a cool blog on interaction design called Design Transformations. It looks at how existing designs can be transformed into new ideas by applying certain “design transformations.” For example, his first post is about how a mouse is just a trackball turned upside down. Eventually, the goal is to come up with a kind of cookbook of transformations that designers can use for brainstorming.

The concept reminds me a bit of Roger von Oech’s Creative Whack Pack, which I got at a Christmas gift exchange a few years ago. It’s a set of 64 cards, each one with a different “creativity strategy.” Some examples: “Try a Random Idea”, “Imagine How Others Would Do It”, and “Slay a Sacred Cow.” It may sound a bit cheesy, but they’re actually pretty useful. See also Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies.

(Photo by tanakawho)


A Hierarchy of Needs for Code

February 27, 2008 under design, programming

A couple weeks ago, I trekked through another Toronto snowstorm all the way up to the Canadian Film Centre. Normally I’m a downtown snob and don’t go north of Bloor, but I made an exception this time because my friend Geneviève was demoing a project at the CFC Media Lab.

A Hierarchy of Needs for Design

While I was there, I happened across a copy of Universal Principles of Design. It’s a really cool book which describes 100 design principles: from general-purpose concepts like Ockham’s Razor and the 80/20 rule, to specific techniques like Iconic Representation (”the use of pictorial to improve the recognition and recall of signs and controls”). It’s kind of like a universal set of design patterns.

I only had a chance to flip through the book for a few minutes, but I really liked what I read. And Donald Norman recommends it, for what it’s worth.

One of the principles that I really liked was Hierarchy of Needs. Inspired by Abraham Maslow’s famous psychology theory, the authors proposed a Hierarchy of Needs for design:

A design must serve the low-level needs (e.g., it must function), before the higher-level needs, such as creativity, can begin to be addressed. Good designs follow the hierarchy of needs principle, whereas poor designs may attempt to meet needs from the various levels without building on the lower levels of the hierarchy first.

What about the code?

This got me thinking about coding. As a programmer, you are designing not only the product itself, but also the code. For the end product (the software that you are producing) the Design Hierarchy of Needs can be applied. But what about the code? What would a hierarchy of needs for code look like? Here’s what I came up with, but I’d like to hear what everbody else thinks.

Keep in mind that this is a hierarchy of importance, with the lower levels being more important. It’s most definitely not a sequence of steps.

  • Functionality: If your code doesn’t work, there’s no point making it in optimizing that inner loop, or refactoring it to be infinitely flexible.
  • Reliability: Any software developer worth his salt knows that there’s a big difference between code that “works”, and code that is ready to be shipped. After your code is functional, you need to make sure that it is reliable. Run it through your unit tests, run it overnight, run it on grandma’s computer.
  • Maintainability: Can other people understand the code? Can you understand the code? When bugs are discovered, you need to be able to fix a bug and be confident that you won’t be causing more bugs in the process.
  • Extensibility: Is your code adaptable to meet new requirements? If your code is extensible, you will be able to grow and adapt your software to meet the changing needs of your customers. If not, you might have to throw it out and start from scratch.
  • Elegance & Efficiency: If you are sure you are meeting the other levels of need, then and only then should you worry about making your code fast and beautiful. Unfortunately, many people get hung up on this level instead of focusing on the more basic needs.

What do you guys think? Anything you’d change about it?


Related: Andrew McKinlay wrote about A Programming Hierarchy of Needs, and Oliver Steele proposed The Programmer’s Food Pyramid. Kathy Sierra, whose blog Creating Passionate Users I sadly miss, also tackled the user hierarchy of needs, and asked What comes after usability?


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