2006

Now, of course I had no option but to post a just-found formista quote that links conceptualization and algebra with genius to spare. I’m predictable and then some.

I shall read Ayn Rand soon, I can feel it’s just about the right momement for us to meet. (She surely is one polemical woman: there’s no shortage to people advising you against her and her massive—as in, it has so many damn references (~100) that it needs two-columns for footnotes—↓pedia↓ is currently protected until the bickering quiets down.)

In a surprising study, Jakob Nielsen found out most (85%) of the learning gleaned from usability tests came from your first 5 user tests; 3 users tests will still give you a whopping 67% of the learning there is. He then goes on to advocate small and iterative testing over a single massive one (say, three tests with 3 users each and improvements in between instead of one lone test with 9):

Combine that with Joshua Schachter’s, founder of Del.icio.us, idea of “Starbucks usability tests” (“offer someone coffee to sit down and play with your product.”) and you’ll know why I’ll be this Friday on Minerva’s Starbucks harassing three every pretty girl I can find with Domburi (TeenVogue recently had a feature on young fashionistas being excellent for usability tests, can’t find the link though).

As I mentioned a week ago, I am just starting to feel my way around McKinsey’s Quarterly but it’s been impressive so far. I recently finished reading the three complimentary articles I was granted upon registering (which is free) and they were all remarkable.

This (anonymous) feedback on Imagery just came on Saturday.

Some sort of auto-citation of images is a fantastic idea (as anyone who uses EverNote or Google Notebook will know firsthand) and my gratitude goes to whoever sent it to me, I’d never have thought of it myself. And yet, for a while I almost decided to willfully not implement it:

I strongly disagree with the way citations are usually handled within “education-land”: little more than curtsies one must mindlessly perform to pay respect to others’ property (and it is against such moralistic establishment that I am one of those kids who believes he owns the internet). Citation styles are taught and required simply as one more formal hoop for students to jump.

But citations can be much more than that! They allow readers to recover and rewalk the path the writer followed, and in that they perform an invaluable service to readers, but they can also be immensely profitable for writers too, starting with forcing them to walk paths in the first place (one is so loathe to do the slightest of researches when in the thrall (or duty) of writing, so very prone to simply rearrange one’s prejudices and call it even). Citations make for more rigorous reading and writing—that’s why we should encourage them (not simply because they make, arguably, good fences).

So yes, I thought I saw some of that ownership-based, rote teaching of citations (copyright-instruction) in that email—in a scared flash of exaggeration I glimpsed a DRM image-search engine—and my recoil reaction was so surprisingly strong I thought of deliberately not implementing any sort of auto-quotation. Lawrence Lessig has talked already on the power technology’s architecture has to regulate conduct and the weight of such responsibility was suddenly overwhelming.

Careful thought has shown me the error of my ways. My overreaction to such friendly (and helpful) feedback was not called for. An auto-citation feature in Domburi would be very helpful indeed and will be implemented. But it’ll be tinged with my prejudices and that means it will be open-ended.

I’m knee-deep in Jef Raskin’s The Humane Interface^AM. You’ve got to love a book on interface design so fundamental and visionary that it dares to ponder such deep digressions as, say,

or take,

That’s a translation of one of Stefan Sagmeister’s “Things I’ve Learned”. The original phrase in Bregenz^WP dialect read: “Jömmara isch blöd. I söt eappas tua odr’s vergessa.” and it was embodied in beautiful red, calligraphic installations by Marian Bantjes (also check her “I want it all” flowers)

It’s a good phrase, y’know.

Interesting: hundreds of people are just pouring to Imagery from, of all places, Slovakia^WP. This Slovakian website apperas to be the cause. How weird (I did nothing particular for this to happen) and how cool (it’s the 21st language on which there’s written record of Imagery talk!).

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?