“things I've learned”
59 posts under this tag.
Ellen J. Langer’s Mindfulness was a personal landmark: a wondrous book on human possibilities, their promise, and their everyday annihilation. I’ve already sprinkled several quotes from it in previous postsELZR (and will continue to do so) but there is one quote that deserves all the highlighting I can give it—this may rank as the most provocative thing I’ve ever read:
Teaching can be done in a much more conditional way.. Children are usually taught “this is a pen,” “this is a rose,” “this is a car.” It is assumed that the pen must be recognized as a pen so that a person can get on with the business of writing. It is also considered useful for the child to form the category “pen.” But consider an alternative: What happens if we instruct the child that “this could be a pen”? This conditional statement, simple as it seems, is a radical departure from telling the child “this is a pen.” What if a number of ordinary household objects were introduced to a child in a conditional way: “This could be a screwdriver, a fork, a sheet, a magnifying glass”? Would that child be more fit for survival on a desert island (when the fork and screwdriver could double as tent pegs for the sheet, near a fire made by the magnifying glass)? Or imagine the impact of a divorce on a child initially taught “a family’ is, a mother, a father, and a child” versus “a family could be…”
Ellen J. Langer, MindfulnessAM, p124
To the jaded eye, most of the paragraph can be easily dismissed as an extravagant, pie-in-the-sky rambling, and I dismissed it so when I first read it—so what if kiddos would make better Robinson CrusoesWP? Should we realign our education for that?—but then the last lightning sentence comes and in its flash we glimpse the world that could be. Do you see?
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
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).
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.
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 errorsWP too.
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!
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 blackEE: 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.
William W. Lewis’s The Power of Productivity (PDF and HTML versions available), a summary of his same-titled bookAM, has only grown on me since I read it a month ago. It’s main thesis, that wealth hinges on productivity, has come to resonate inside me like few things have of late.
It was, for instance, what lead me to finally accept the possibilities of technology and, shortly thereafter, to naively proclaim I’d one day have a massively profitable company with less people than my then-age. The whimsical limit, I believe, will force such a company to be always awake, always flexible, always smart, always doing technological judo. It would force it to value people in a way we’ve barely explored at all.
This past week was frantic and exhausting (not boring!) but yesterday it was all worthwhile: we—my sisters, cousins, and me—threw mom one helluva birthdayparty. Preparations started Sunday, August 20, at a virtual meeting of the Parra Cardenas where a Jewish theme was decided, an impossibly long menu was agreed upon, and (since we wanted something picnicky despite the monsoon that is August) we were all set for a tenting-camp dinner at the new store’s roof.
The contrast’s interesting ain’t it? Joel On Software’s Joel Spolsky sees Dell’s homepage as a textbook case of heavy-handed, rapacious marketing. A List Apart’s Nick Usborne, on the other hand, sees it as one of computer industry’s best examples of self-effacing design, respectful of its users and the now-fashionable right to self-identificationWP.
Dell doesn’t think like their users think. When you go to their website, the first question they ask is what kind of buyer you are: home, small business, large business, etc. I don’t know what I am! I guess I’m a small business, but home systems are usually cheaper, and I usually like to buy top of the line PCs, so maybe I need the Big Business section. This distinction is completely lost on me.
I want a PC. What difference does it make whether I’m a home buyer or a small business buyer? I suspect that they are asking me this because they want to charge businesses more than homes, and large businesses even more. To defeat their system, I choose “home.”
Dell has what is probably the most visitor-centric site of all the computer manufacturers. For years now they have built a homepage that holds back on saying, “Look at us, we’re great.” Instead they devote a significant part of the page to an area where visitor can self-select.
The design and text on the page immediately recognizes that some people are looking for home computers, while others are looking for networks for local government offices. Both audiences and more are addressed. The Dell.com page says, in effect, “Yes, you’re
in the right place. Yes, we can help you. Yes, self-identify and please click here so we can help you find exactly what you need.”
Education doesn’t make you happy, and nor does freedom. We don’t become happy just because we’re free—if we are; or because we’ve been educated—if we have; but because education may be the means by which we realise we are happy. It opens our eyes, our ears… tells us where delights are lurking…
Iris Murdoch character in Richard Eyre’s IrisIMDB script
I can’t believe how silly happy I am some days. And then when I remember the world, and its great treasons, and the billions of un-happy, in-war, un-healthy, un-eating, un-knowing (of so much beauty!), still-mortal people in the world I can’t stall work any longer—but, you know, despite and impudently in front of it all, it just makes me happy to be so happy.
So get over it and swallow.
As observers, we judge behavior according to whether, as actors, we could or would do the same thing. If I take a basketball shot from the outer key (and make it), I am looked at as though I took a risk. What that means is that my perceived competence exceeded someone else’s estimates of her own competence. It does not mean that I took more of a risk than someone else would have, had she felt as confident as I. I took the shot because I believed I could make it. However, since the observer would not have risked the shot and does not know my perceived level of competence, she presumes that I’m a risk taker. Enjoying the compliment, I do not argue. But being aware of all these elements is in the nature of mindfulness.
Langer’s little book is chock-full of such luminous insights.
|
RSS
email
