“web”

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).

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.

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.

OK, pardon the profanity. I had been following the Net “Neutrality” argument from a perplexed distance for some time (as I’ve chronicled about before) but this month’s Scientific American editorial on the subject and its disgusting rhetoric is just too damn much. Perverting George Orwell’s masterpiece on the dangers of imposing equality, Animal Farm^WP, so as to defend that very same imposition is off-limits, it’s too low, it’s too devious. It’s repulsive. Yuck.

There are several more gems sprinkled throughout. Here’s another one:

Of course, forget the silly “caprices” and blind moneylust of the pesky owners of the cable themselves. Who could know better about the cable business and its needs than casual passersby like ourselves?

To respond in kind, I propose a different appropriation of George Orwell, this one from his other anti-totalitarianism classic, 1984^WP:

One good thing came out of that editorial though, I found out about Hands Off The Internet, a sane organization against government intervention on the net. Pay them a visit.

Imagery’s multilingual feedback^ELZR has been the best, most rewarding part of it all. I was feeling down with Domburi the other day (and with how hard it is to get the interface just right), but then a new review came in and things are bright and beaming again:

Annzah’s was the first blog I read, back before there was a word for blogs themselves. A belle with a knack for writing, drinking, geeking, musicking, and partying—all with flair—, she used to blog her life at glitterkitty.net/anna: living and growing up in Sweden, her many girlfriends (wives, she called them), her parents (she’s a single child), her extended family, going through one strange boyfriend, moving to London, reading, cooking, clubbing, living with the second (webdesigner!) boyfriend, working at a bar and a clotheshop, getting hurt—falls, car-accidents (hates cars), whatnot—a surprising amount of times, and starting an English major. Her candid blog got her intermittently into trouble and after many false starts she finally changed to LiveJournal, where she blogs very different stuff, far too far and in between.

She was somewhat obsessed with Suede^WP (whom I know thanks to her) and used many of their songtitles for her posts. Today Suede’s Saturday Night^MP3 played randomly and I missed her suddenly, with a vengeance. “Having a public voice can make you a non-stranger, even to people you have never met.” This is a post to her.

Blogs are many different things to all of us, but sometimes, if the stars align just right, they can be empathic enzymes of sorts. They have been.

Wikipedia has become such a taken-for-granted, basic building-block (on the web and beyond) that I’ve taken a special hatred for the unwieldy, clumsy “Wikipedia article” epithet and similar unhappy permutations. I need more of the short sweetness English is known for: “email”, “web”, “net”, “blog”, “post”, “podcast”, “inbox”, or “feed”. Language is the ultimate interface (to steal an ALA title) and shortness does make a difference.

English GMail’s Sidebar

Spanish GMail’s Sidebar

I tried “article” and “wiki-article” but both are hopelessly general. Then I thought of being grammatically incorrect and use wikipedia for articles themselves—similar to the way we use email for the email address, the actual message, and the act of sending it: “email me an email at my email”—but it just won’t do. It doesn’t feel right. Wikipedia is so huge that the brutal metonymy^WP feels jarring. Port-manteaus^WP were tried, but neither wikipedicle nor wicle struck any fancy.

The only path that proved fruitful was twisted back-formation. Wikipedia comes, of course, from encyclopedia, which in turn comes from the Greek phrase enkuklios paideia, often translated as “general education.” Paideia is a nice, short Greek word that means education and that is itself a derivation of pais, child. It’s perfect (with a slight respelling).

I propose we call a Wikipedia article a pedia. It’s short, has a nice ring to it, has meaning (“a pedia is a document for learning”), is memorable, and has a semantic link with Wikipedia (the uninitiated might think it a contraction and that’d be okay too). With even the pettiest pedia gradually refining into a massive, referenced survey (take the optimistic leap with me for the sake of argument), wouldn’t it be beautiful and inspiring if we could whisperingly call them “documents-for-learning”?

Did you know “thruthiness” has a pedia?

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-identification^WP.

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.”

Joel Spolsky, Dell And Usability, November 14, 2000
(Dell’s homepage around that date)

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.”

Nick Usborne, Helping Your Visitors: a State of Mind, February 20, 2004 (Dell’s homepage around that date)