August, 2006

2 days ago I had a major breakthrough in Domburi’s interface. I had been racking my brain for several days for a simple, elegant way to provide all the new functionality I had dreamt for it, but the standards I’d set made the task daunting:

Simple and easy to understand

Instructive Interaction: Making Innovative Interfaces Self-Teaching, by Larry L. Constantine and Lucy A. D. Lockwood was very useful in crystallizing my ideas on the subject.

Building (or at least not interfering) upon earlier knowledge

We’ve been using (web) GUIs for decades now, patterns have emerged. To waste them a silly thing would be. Right-click contextual menu, buttons, selection methods, drag & drop, and general link behavior (from one-click-activation to middle clicking on a link to open it in a new tab) are useful patterns we learn early and should be respected.

Consistency

I wanted to have the same interface for thumbnails and full-size images, just like Imagery works now (with almost the same toolbar for both cases).

Minimally intrusive (as in hidden)

I’m obsessive with claiming the precious few screen real state I’m able to and profoundly detest what Edward Tufte once called “administrative debris.” The goal is to see at a glance as many images (and nothing more!) as it is usefully possible. Even onhover interfaces must be extremely discreet, not only for conceptual clarity, but because rendering times can make for a jarring experience.

Visual

On the other hand, even if keyboard shortcuts and other tricks & gimmicks are more efficient, I believe it’s crucial for users to be able to get a visual overview of their options.

Modeless

Modes^WP can be useful and uncannily efficient—I love Vim—but they take a huge cognitive load to understand and use, and many, many hours of practice for them to become second-nature. They’re prone to frustrating mode errors^WP too.

Textual

Text is always a good thing, text and icons can sometimes be an improvement, but icons alone I usually find confusing and useful only for the most trivial of cases. The big problem with text of course is all the space it demands.

I dabbled for a while with tool palettes like those of Adobe Photoshop but in the end sweared off modes of any kind, even graphic ones.

I tried expanding the weird text-toolbar I currently use in Imagery but it proved too constraining.

Jensen Haris’s Office User Interface Blog sent me reeling into the possibilities of ribbons and contextual tabs (GUI innovations in upcoming Office 2007), but though interesting and definitely appropriate sometimes, they can be brutal overkill for such a simple application as Domburi.

In the end, it was clear to me that what was needed was a contextual menu of some sort and a way to activate it graphically (since I wasn’t willing to break the right-click, and other keyboard/mouse combos reeked of inelegance).

I finally found my solution in a little known interface innovation from Flickr (who introduced it only recently in a May 16, 2006 redesign).

They call it a “person menu” but it’s not the menu itself what interests me, it’s the way it’s activated: you hover over someone’s (otherwise undefiled!) buddy image and this obvious sidebutton appears; you click on it and your options to manipulate the image are presented.

This is a natural evolution of the pulldown button (), of course, but it allows for a revolutionary array of possibilities. I’ve been playing with the idea for 2 days now and am ready to nominate the onhover sidebutton as one of this decade’s contributions to our shared GUI alphabet: a visual, yet non intrusive, way to activate a context-menu. I’m using it everywhere in Domburi now (the idiom is evolving some impressive refinements!) and it has simplified things further than I thought possible. In the prophetic words of Jeff Han: “the interface just disappears.”

Exciting times!

It beats me. “My son is always checking out his Yahoo!” So what? Who’s the target audience of this ad? Angry-faced mustachioed dads? Have children become parents’ rolemodels already?

Back when I was a serious download freak, always looking for that little app that’d make it all right, Nonags was one of my favorite haunts. They listed only freeware and well-behaved, no-nags shareware. The design was accordingly simple and unobtrusive (though quirky). How weird then that now when trying to download something you’re taken to one of those infamous “Your-download-should-start-automatically” pages, full of Google ads that don’t stand a chance of being remotely relevant (relevant to what? the “invitation” to join Nonag plus?). Worst, the cheapest, lowliest possible kind of popup (party poker! your computer is at risk!) creeps underhandedly (that is, hides beneath your current window).

...says Aaron Swartz nostalgically. And I say so myself too. And I ran away from it too at the first chance. And I don’t regret it too.

Just good fun writing. On the singularity to boot. To be read with that eemadge from Moravec I always quote in such settings.

Heh, that “first, then, now” schtick never grows old. Here’s another instance of it.

That last paragraph of the quote was included simply for Chepe & Andrea, the two wonderful translators-to-be in my life, to read and grok. It’s not that I don’t support such a lovely liberal-arts profession (I’ve surely considered it for myself in several occasions). I simply believe it’s going to be among the next professions to be submerged^EE by AI, and seafaring success thereon will require a different skillset and attitude.

From an Our Living Language note on the defintion of the word “like”^A on the American Heritage Dictionary:

The black background of this website was dropped because I realized recently that some relatively old displays can be configured, by tweaking brightness and contrast, to better display black text on a white background (and it makes sense to do so, most text comes like that) but doing so would turn black elzr.com into garbled chicken scratches.

That was utterly unacceptable.

Two people had complained of such problems before but it was only until I experienced how bad and frustrating it was that I realized it really had to change.

I loved black^EE: it was distinctive, easier on the eyes, allowed for exploration of an entirely different color scheme, and it looked absolutely gorgeous (luscious) on my Dell Ultrasharp.

But I must think of who’s reading my website.

An epithet is a term used to characterize a person or a thing—a meaningful nickname if you will—and I’ve been obsessed with them (through my obsession with self-definition) for a long time. Examples abound, from the simple Dougie Houser, MD, to Warrren Buffet, the sage of Omaha:

• Claude Piron^WP, famous Esperantist and psychotherapist, calls himself ”plifelicxigisto” (literally, more-happy-maker), because most of the people that come to him don’t do it because of a particular ailment but because they want to enjoy life more.
• Piron also famously described Esperanto as ”la bona lingvo” (“the good language”).
• Margaret Thatcher is “the Iron Lady”.
• Guadalajara^WP prouds itself as “The Pearl of The West.”
• Among the X-Men, mutant Forge^WP, whose special power is technological brilliance (that is, a superhuman ability to understand, conceive, and build machines), is often referred as “Maker” (and that has got to be the coolest, most heretical epithet ever).
• William Gibson^WP is invariably introduced as “the coiner of the term ‘cyberspace’”.
• William Shakespeare is “the Bard (of Avon)”.
• Steven Johnson describes himself numerically as “a father of three boys, husband of one wife, and author of five books.”
• Lord Voldemort^WP is best known as “He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named”.
• Benito Juarez^WP is the ”Benemérito de las Américas” (“the meritious one of the Americas”).
• Juan Gabriel^WP is fittingly called “El divo de México” (“Mexico’s male diva”).
• In role-playing games epithets according to your level and race are common; I remember Erasmo, who usually used Yang, an assassin, as his main character, really fancied his early-level epithet: “Yang, the man.”
• Adolfo calls himself (amusingly) an “infoplebeian.”
• Carl Friedrich Gauss^WP is “the prince of mathematicians.”
• Madonna^WP has long been known as “the material girl.”
• Shiva is usually “the destroyer”, but he is given thousands of names^WP in Hindu scriptures.
• Satan is “the prince of darkness”, or, in Michael Bakunin’s famous description in God and the State, “the eternal rebel, the first freethinker, the emancipator of worlds.”
• Jaime Sabines wondered, upon being called “a great poet”, if he could even be considered, simply, but truly, “a poet”—only to conclude he’s actually just “a pedestrian.”

I could go on forever.

But on a more pedestrian note (or not) what epithets do you fancy for yourself?

Without any pretense of deserving any of them, I personally like webcraftsman, formist^ELZR, and whimsicist^ELZR (which I stole shamelessly from someone I can’t remember now!). Other favorites, preceded with the same warning as before, include singularitarian, amateur, (techno-)libertarian, anarchocapitalsit, dynamist, reader, freethinker, and designer—this last one with or without any qualification, but I’m particularly fond of interface designer and analytic designer. Symbolist would also be a nice (undeserved) compliment and so would hacker. As of this moment, perhaps my favorite epithet of all is conceptual designer—a huge post on the subject upcoming.

For my webfront and brand-to-be, , I came up with the sloganesque epithet of “avantgarde webcraft” and I quite like it.

But really, I’m all ears, what labels look good on you? (And you don’t have to write them here, just think about it, between you and you.)

This may sound silly but I was happy to read such a well-crafted confirmation email. Notice the avoidance of empty superlatives, the non-patronizing, the effort, not to sound hip or flippant or “professional”, but to be useful. The complimentary premium articles were the extra touch that made me want to share this with the world. This is persuasive (marketing) writing at its best.

The McKinsey Quarterly is impressive by itself too, most interesting and with the best graphs I’ve seen since The Economist (and they present them inside sexy, useful Flash “exhibits” that allow you to zoom in/out and pan around).