UX and all... - Random thoughts, ideas and opinions on user experience, usability, interaction design, online product management and anything remotely related to web or mobile.

Design of Everyday Things

Just finished reading the marvelous "Design of Everyday Things" by Donald A. Norman.

It's a great read. Though mainly about designing tangible objects like doors, knobs, faucets or ovens, Norman manages to outline universal laws of good design, also relevant for the web. Despite its 1988 debut, the book is still fresh and not at all obsolete. Overarching principles of design are constant regardless if you you design airplane cockpit controls, typewriters or iphone applications.

According to Norman, fundamental ingredients of designing for people are:

- Affordances

- Constraints,

- Mapping,

- Feedback,

- Making things visible.

Affordances. Affordance refers to the perceived and actual properties of the thing, primarily those fundamental properties that determine just how the thing could possibly be used. A chair affords ("is for") support and, therefore, affords sitting. A flat plate on the door affords pushing - meaning, the door is meant to be pushed. An empty container affords filling and so on.

A good designer makes sure that appropriate actions are perceptible and inappropriate ones are invisible. Rule of thumb - if instructions have to be pasted on something (push here, enter this way, turn off before doing this), it's badly designed.

Constraints. The surest way to make something easy to use, with few errors, is to make it impossible to do otherwise - to constrain the choices. Want to prevent people to enter memory cards into cameras the wrong way, design them so that they only fit one way.

The thoughtful use of affordances and constraints together in a design lets a user determine readily the proper course of action even in a novel situation.

There's an interesting relationship between affordances and constraints. They're in opposition to each other. Affordances suggest the range of possibilities, constraints limit the number of alternatives.

Mapping is a technical term describing the relationship between two things, in this case, between the controls and their movement and the results in the world.

For example, if you steer a car, mapping is following: to turn a car to the right, turn a steering wheel to the right, to turn to the left, turn a steering wheel to the left. Steering a car is a great example of intuitive and simple mapping. On the contrary, compare with bad mapping like unintuitive placement of knobs operating your stove hot plates. If they were done right, you didn't need to double-check each time which particular knob operates the bottom right burner.

Feedback. It's important to immediately see effect of our action. Without feedback one is always wondering whether anything has happened. Maybe the button wasn't pushed hard enough, maybe machine stopped working, Feedback is critical.

To sum it all up. Great design is where all relevant things are visible, primary actions are clearly affordable, unintended actions are constrained, the design uses intuitive mapping, and finally, users get prompt feedback of their actions.

Norman makes some very interesting observations:

- On accidents: Apparently, in most cases, major airline accidents or nuclear plant malfunctions, are not due to human error (which is a common belief), but to inappropriate design of the controls! If it wasn't for bad design of equipment, we could have saved thousands of lives.

- On errors: Assume that every possible mishap will happen, so protect against it and plan for it. Make actions reversible. Try to make them less costly.

- On users: There is no such thing as the average person.

- On functionality: The system should provide actions that match intentions.

- On ease of use: Most things are intended to be easy to use, but aren't. But some things are deliberately difficult to use and ought to be. The number of things that should be difficult to use is surprisingly large ie: security systems, dangerous equipment, bottles of medications or games.

At the end of the book Norman summarizes:

1. Use both knowledge in the world and in the head

2. Simplify the structure of tasks

3. Make things visible

4. Get the mappings right

5. Exploit the powers of constraints-Natural & Artificial

6. Design for Error

7. When all else fails, standardize

- Not intending to overuse inverted comas in this post I purposefully omitted them, but most of the above was authored by Donald A. Norman, author of the book -

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Posted 8 days ago

Entering and reviewing long number sets

One of the most regular problems I experience as a user is having to double-check if the long number that I've just entered in the field is correct.

In most instances the input field contains tiny little digits squashed together, so comparing the entered number with what I have on paper is very cumbersome.

Usually it happens while entering my credit card number in the online transaction or making a bank transfer and inputting a long IBAN number from the paper invoice.

Example is below. Now, try to quickly check if what you've entered is correct. Hard, isn't it?

Since I think, it's not just me having this problem regularly, I thought how to fix it so that comparing numbers of the screen, with numbers on paper is much much quicker.

1. Simplest way is to make the field in question much larger with XXXL digits, while keeping other fields regular size.

2. Other way is having all fields regular size as the page loads, but next to the bank account number field, put a small A+ icon. Clicking it, would quickly magnify the digits within that field.

3. On rare occasions, banks, merchants or payment gateways decide to break up the field into subsections, either by displaying separate fields (as per below) or forcing a space between every fourth digit as the user enters the number.

4. Lastly, we could adopt an iPhone solution and give users a little magnyfing glass as they hover their mouse over the field. It would simply magnify the digits in sets of two, hence giving you quicker tool for comparing the numbers. (as per the first image).

All in all. Problem isn't particularly hard to fix, so I wonder why banks don't bother fixing it. Don't they usability test their users?

Such a tiny thing, but surely would make millions of users happier, or at least less frustrated.

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Posted 12 days ago

Designed a home tab for the new Mozilla browser

What better way to spend a Saturday afternoon than mocking-up a home tab for the new Mozilla Browser :)

(Having uploaded my Mozilla Home Tab Challenge video submission to vimeo, I've realized I'd gone overboard with the length of my video - over 10min - hope mozilla guys won't punish me for it.)

Anyway, here's a quick run down of my proposal:

1. Home tab is a place where you should begin your browsing experience, not where you read your emails, chat to people or manage your extensions. I've seen many submissions that run a lot of these functions and I think this is too much.

2. I believe browsers should finally adopt a log-in option. This would allow for remembering sessions, settings and bookmarks between your home computer and office machine. Also, I propose that browsers learn your behavior and browsing patterns, so that when you come back from work and open your home computer, the home tab wouldn't offer you the work related page, but the page you're likely be browsing in your leisure time.

3. Common solution to the home tab these days is displaying a matrix of site screenshots tipping you where to go. I think it's cute, but not ideal. These thumbnails do not do a great job at representing specific content as they're just high level screenshots of the page. Much better way of showing an informative summary of a site/page is what facebook does with the links you publish on your wall. They automatically generate a text snippet of that page, add a visual cue on what the link is about and include a title / header. This is a more superior way of displaying page thumbnails and I go with this approach in my project. On top of that I introduced a site view. Site view contains just logos of sites and below each logo show top level domain names. Page view, in contrary, display a low-level facebook style thumbnail as well as the full URL. At any time you can switch between the site view and the page view, depending on whether you want to find particular content / article or just want to go the the site you've bookmarked a while ago.

4. Last but not least. I believe browsers shouldn't be only about rendering html. First and foremost they should help users...browse and discover new content. Sites like stumbleupon, digg or delicious really exploited lack of that mindset among browser product managers. Think about it. Firefox (or any other browser for that matter) is in much better position to tell me what hot new content I might be interested in. Not digg or others, but Firefox. They churn tons of relevant information about my browsing behavior, what time I go where, what sites I had visited before & after, how long I spent on each page, what was likely to trigger me leaving the page. Not only can they see this thread of information about me, but they can tap into the patterns of millions of users, datamine and produce great recommendations based on my location, interests and demographics (provided I agree to disclose them) or time (hot sites vs evergreens).

There are 2 sections in the header of my home tab: my sites & hot sites.

My sites are either those that I visit regularly, visited recently or am likely to visit now, dubbed - current, as well as my bookmarks.

Hot sites are the pages recommended by my friends on facebook, twitter and other social platforms, as well as sites recommended by the firefox itself, as per my comments above - named suggestions.

Here are the wireframes:

Current tab - sites view (squares with crosses are big logos of the sites)

Current tab - pages view

Bookmarks tab

Friends tab

Suggestions tab

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Posted 23 days ago

Where online meets offline. Metaphors for e-commerce.

I've made a strange self-observation recently. Being so engrained in online, working in the field, churning web projects and talking web apps over beer with friends, I got into this habit of looking down at the so called - Offline. Offline was lame, it was 1.0, passe and backward - I could hear me thinking. Offline seemed like a different world. Distant and irrelevant world. My business was online, my users were online, my friends were certainly online. Pretty much everyone lived and breathed online. That was a great dream - happily, I was on a different planet. Or was I?

I was in that false mind-frame for a long time, until one day I came to a realization that the business I've created - pstro.pl - was destined to be more offline than online. Online was just a conduit for offline emotions of my users. Not only were my users offline (I sort-of sensed that before), so were to be my paying customers and the very businesses my users wrote reviews about. I had to accept a fact that, in order to succeed with pstro.pl I had to be more offline than online. My sales-force, my marketing, and my thinking, all needed to be offline anchored or at least firmly touching offline if I wanted to make a difference.

Today, I make it a point to learn from offline and inspire myself with examples, cases and successes from offline. It's almost a game. If I have a problem in online, I try to see how a similar case was solved offline. And once I started doing that, a whole new perspective opened up.

Someone said, that real innovations and breakthroughs happen on the boundary of domains. In that weird zone where blue ocean dissolves into red waters, in that funny spectrum where you can't tell one color from another. In the conceptual no-mans land, where every concept seems out of place, and certainly where busy (read: blind) people don't stop-by.

I've created couple of scenarios, in attempt to open up our creative mind when thinking about online:

- What if online products experienced wear and tear? An unmistakable quality of some real-world items is that they get better with time as they wear-off, could that work in online?

- What if attention span of each new customer arriving at your site resembled that of a 3 year old receiving a new toy for birthday?

- What would you see if you stapled yourself to your online order? Would it be a long / short / enjoyable journey?

- Imagine you have to have a changing room in your online store, what would it be?

- What if there was no SEO, no search engine crawlers indexing your site. Would your site look, feel different to your users? would they like it more?

- What if your users were entirely text-blind (they actually are)?

- What if switching from / to a competing website was equivalent to switching from car to car (note: stearing wheel, all controls, gauges, everything are always in the same place, regardless if you drive Kia or BMW)

- What if customers visiting your site could actually see and talk to each other, like they do in real shops

- Have you ever seen that guy wandering cluelessly between isles trying to find one particular product. Multiply him 1000 times and picture them on your site. Scarry?

Finally, read Why We Buy. Paco UnderHill is to offline shoping science, what Jackob Nielsen is to online user experience.

Last but not least. Go find your offline counterpart. A business that does what you do, but offline. Talk to the owner, take him/her to the pub, drink some beers and ... learn.

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Posted 1 month ago

Golden equation of e-commerce. Emerging profit drivers.

All online retailers, whether they're cognizant of it or not, live by the following equation:

$ = ( VISITS x CONVERSION x ABV x MARGIN ) - COSTS

The only way to increase profits in any e-commerce enterprise is either by:

1) increasing the number of visitors to your site

2) improving the so called conversion (percentage of those who buy to those who only view your site, aka look-2-buy ratio)

3) increasing the average booking value

4) increasing the profit margin on products sold

5) decreasing operating costs or overheads

Let's have a better look at each of these profit drivers.

I've broken them into two categories, based on how much innovation we can expect from each of our equation variables.

Tired Variables (past their innovation hay-day)

VISITS

We've seen it all. PR, SEO, PPC, Affiliate Marketing, Online and Offline Advertising, Mobile, Social, Viral, Video. Most marketing and online marketing innovation of the last decade went into shuffling more and more visitors into the sales funnel. Stepping from CPM, via CPC, onto a CPA, our models became more sophisticated and cost effective. We learned to be aware of the quality of our traffic and discriminate based on its source, channel, provider, season or time of the day. We have virtually become visits-crazy. The notion that the best way to increase profits is buying more traffic is the first commandment of online marketing. Visits, Leads, Clicks & Acquisitions are to online marketers like der, die & das'es are to German speakers. Today, competition in the traffic generation business is fierce. I doubt however, we are to see a lot of new innovative concepts arriving in this segment in the years to come.

COSTS

These days, squeezing the bottom line is way more sexy than lifting the topline. And rightly so. It's more predictable, fun and requires genuine smarts to generate same profits with half the work-force. Outsourcing, off-shoring, drop-shipment, business process automation are just the tip of the iceberg. Read the cultic 4 hour Work Week to get a sense of the cost reduction potential in e-commerce. I am myself a big fan of this movement, but come to a realization that our cut-costing ideas are slowly running out. We'll undoubtedly continue on this path, yet unlikely find new and innovative solutions to significantly squash the bottom line further.

Wired Variables (expect a lot of innovation here)

CONVERSION

Personally, I believe this is going to be a juiciest part of the equation going forward. How is it possible that 2 competing online hotel retailers, who sell virtually same stuff, who acquire their inventories at similar costs, have almost same pricing for the consumer and attract virtually identical quality traffic, yet have conversion 3 to 4 percentage points different from one another. Answer: site ergonomics, on-site & off-site user experience, managing users' trust, branding, constant, never-ending painstaking improvements to the sales funnel. Problem is: improving conversion is hard. It's an unpredictable trail and error process. Needs to be done in-house (not via a flashy agency). Puts burden on the entire organization, not a single person, and last but not least - it takes hell of a lot of time and dedication. It really is easier to go buy more traffic, than think up new ways to squeeze more out of existing visitors. If I was to start a conversion initiative I'd put emphasis on web analytics, customer insights, research (not only usability), branding, then move into loyalty & CRM and finish with personalization. But it's just me :)

ABV

Lifting the Average Booking Value is my #2 on the up and coming profit generators list. I always smile when I extend my domains at GoDaddy. These guys mastered the up-sell and cross-sale process like no-one else I can think of. True, it pisses me off, being asked 5 times if I want fries with that, yet I relentlessly push on with my shopping cart. Not so sure if other folks don't stop-by and fill their carts stuff they don't need, easily falling pray to these upgrade efforts. Obviously, we should aim at a balanced solution. One where the user is offered an opportunity to upgrade the product fitting his profile and interest criteria, but not too much to record a significant jump in path drop-outs or watch customer satisfaction dashboards turning red.

Another smart strategy to lift the ABV is micro-chunking (conciously pushing Umair Haque's definition a little bit beyond its original meaning). Best example deliver our resourceful friends at low cost carriers. Take wizzair for example. Previously you could fly Gdansk - London for, say € 50 return. Today you can also fly this route for € 50 return, but you know what? if you want to take any luggage with you, need to pay extra. If you want an invoice, need to pay extra. If you want to pee, need to pay extra (ok, exaggerate here, but I'm sure this one is on their Q1 budget initiatives list). What they've done was, they've left the base price as it was, but smartly decomposed a product into micro-chunks and got customers to pay extra for the bits and pieces which previously were included in the price. This is just one strategy, annals of micro-economy are filled with similar tricks. I presume online retailers will soon learn from the ball-breakers of the airline industry and surprise us with some smart ways of lifting the value of the basket as we move along the shopping path. Just watch.

MARGIN

Most e-commerce sites I know only vary their profit margin based on the type / category of products they sell. Many do not bother differentiating it on a product by product bases. Almost none make effort to engage into price discrimination techniques and sell one item to customer A at X and that same item to customer B at X +$1, five minutes later. Some claim it's not ethical to sell a product at different price points to different people, based on the judgment how much they can afford to buy it for, yet we experience this process on a daily basis with consumer auctions, government bids or other B2B dealings.

I expect margin management to become the new arrow in quiver of a contemporary e-commerce manager. As with conversion, this process is tricky, sometimes even illegal (some governments have laws against it), but done properly it would deliver great results. Also, as with conversion, analytics, personalization, loyalty, customer segmentation and CRM are the tools of the trade.

--

Not all variables are equal. They have different weights attached to them. These weights differ based on industry, company, product and vary over time. It takes talent, time and effort to discover what works for your business and what doesn't. I encourage you however to experiment and do things that your competitors don't. If they sign up to that 3rd affiliate network to get more leads, it's a sure sign for you to try things outside of the box.

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Posted 1 month ago

My 10 pet mac usability peeves

Here's my subjective list of 10 mac annoyances I would like to live without. In no particular order:

1. No cut and paste for files. I realize cut&paste is a flawed concept on its own, as you can easily loose a cut file if you cut/copy another file over it. Well, I need the cut and paste anyway.

2. Application window green (+) ball behavior is all over the shop. First. It's inconsistent. In some apps ie. itunes - it minimizes the window to a miniplayer, in others - it expands the window (as you'd expect). Second. In case of some applications, the green ball doesn't fully expand the window and leaves arbitrary spaces left on my monitor.

3. Lack of ability to switch off applications with a single click. To fully close the app, you need to press command + Q. Where is logic in that? Most users feel happy using their mouse, so there has to be a way for them to close the entire app with just one click. No such way exists. If that wasn't all, red ball behavior is also inconsistent. Close iphoto with a red ball and the app is gone, do it with other apps, and they'll keep flashing in your dock till you manually Q them.

4. Apple Mail text editing option opens in a floating pane. I just need the integrated 5 color swatch pane built inside the top of my mail app window, not some floating pane and color wheel to choose from million possible colors.

5. Changing folder icons. Not only unintuitive, but pain in the neck. It should be as easy as: right click, get info, change icon.

6. Hiccups while working with external monitor. Hey, and not just any monitor, but the 24'' Led Cinema Display, designed in California too :) First. When I setup all windows where I want them, then disconnect the monitor to take my laptop to a meeting, then come back and connect it anew, I need to set all the windows back again. It should remember the previous placement of my windows and always put them on that particular monitor I previously requested. Second. Application menu bar is often times on the other monitor than the app itself, causing mouse marathons back and forth.

7. Finder. I mean, it's better than it used to be. Still one thing bugs me: in a list view, folders are mixed with files. Windows has it better, folders come first, then loose files.

8. No user feedback (alt text) on many action items. Take the mentioned already 3 colorful balls, on top left of your app window, no feedback text as you hover them with the mouse. The list could go on a on, this is just an example.

9. No menu option for renaming files or folders. Fair enough. Takes getting used to, but this is yet another thing a PC switcher has to learn. This is a minor point. Still, in usability - minor is major.

10. Expose flaws. I've written about it already. When you have 10 windows opened, but for some quirky reason, need to have only a single window quickly shown on the desktop, there's no quick way of doing it.

All my whinging aside, I still think macs are far more superior when it comes to user experience, or so says my inner fanboy character :)

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Posted 1 month ago

2010. The year of touch.

If Minority Report's gestural UI made you salivate at the prospects of future computer interaction, start saving up for a toy that earned bragging rights to call itself revolutionary months ahead of its launch.

Excitement has reached its peak with the recent line-up of rumors on the upcoming tablet / ebook reader by Apple. Other guerilla fighters of the newspaper revolution don't sit idle either. Though facts are scarce and speculation fuel itself, one thing seems pretty clear by now. New tablet devices will sport touch user interfaces for scrolling, zooming, manipulating content & apps as well as typing.

So what's special about that you might ask. We've had iphones and other mobile handsets with touch screens for a while now. Occasionally we use touch technology in ATMs or KIOSKS at tradeshows or shopping malls.

Should Apple tablet project come into fruition, it would be the first mainstream consumer product aimed at work and entertainment use, allowing multi-finger gestures to operate a flat-panel device held in both hands. Now. This is special and new.

Provided the price is right and consumers fall in love with a new gizmo like they did with flashy iphones, Apple tablet will revolutionize the world of UX like nothing before. Soon enough computer manufacturers will follow suit and flood the market with better or worse tablets / ebook readers featuring touch interfaces. Tactile UIs will step off the geek scene and claim livingrooms of the Joneses.

We're about to take part in a major shift of archetypes. If what we associated with "computers" pre-2010 was a set containing a monitor, a box, keyboard and a mouse, it won't be the same ever after. 2010 and beyond, you will be able to comfortably work, play, study, read, email, or socialize online without having to touch your keyboard or mouse. You will just tap on your screen directly. If I had a go at predicting the future, I'd say 5 years from now, majority of short emails, IMs, facebook wall entries, twitter posts, blog post replies and other sub-50 text forms will be authored directly on screens, not keyboards, as is the case today.

All that excitement aside, we UX aficionados stand against a big pile of challenges & opportunities when it comes to the snowball popularity of touch UIs.

Challenges:

- Lack of standards in tactile UI. Take scrolling for example. Because of patent protection, big egos and sheer creativity, each manufacturer would devise their own gestures for scrolling a website. There is a need for setting up a consortium that would endevour to standardize tactile interfaces or at least promote best practices among software makers.

- Custom elements. Ever tried to fill out a form on the iphone? Yeah. I don't think it will be that much different on the tablet. Hence the need for custom form elements (ie. pull downs, check boxes), bigger and with greater interaction area.

- Less affordance. Due to smaller displays as well as larger & less precise pointing device (finger), we'll have to start getting rid of things from our apps / websites. Not wanting to remove functionalites entirely, we'd need to hide them in order to unclutter the view. Decreasing the so called affordance, (decreasing the number of interaction possibilities that the user is aware of) will in effect tilt the UI learning curve even further.

- Typing. Will tablets and touch interfaces change the way we enter text into machines? Is touch version of a standard qwerty keyboard a way to go or should we rather explore new possibilities for inputting text.

- New browser / OS capabilities. Because of the above, browsers will require new features allowing to zoom on the specific area, like the block of text, group of tiny links or buttons positioned close to each other.

Quoting this post by AppleInsider,

"... the buttons of a control box may be smaller than a users finger and located close together. Therefore it may be difficult for the user to make a selection directly without possibly pressing an undesirable button. To solve this problem, at least a portion of the control box would be enlarged, including the buttons therein when the user places their thumb over the control box. Once the control box has reached its enlarged state, the user can then accurately select one of the enlarged buttons. The control box would then reduce to its initial size after the button is selected or after a predetermined time period in which no selection was made or when the user moves their finger away from the control box"

Opportunities:

- Augmented reality. If future generations of tablets get equipped with video cameras, amazing AR opportunities could be realized.

- Greater consumption of content. Most people read blogs or online news at work or when they're at their regular computers. Tablets will put the end to that and extend possibilities of interacting with online content.

- Increased usage by kids. Part of a reason why kids start with computers quite late (around the age of 3-4) is that they need understand and feel the relationship between the mouse sitting on the desk (or a touch pad) and a screen in front of them. Being more intuitive and WYTIWYG (what you touch is what you get) tablets will remove that need and decrease the entry age below 2 yo.

- Spatial controls. Thanks to built-in a

ccelerometers and similar widgets

, users will be able to operate some functions of the device / application / website by applying a motion to the device. Shake to reload?

Looking at the UX playing field, I think I need to acquaint myslef with a touch UI skill-set ASAP. I'm seting about to design some touch UIs in 2010. One of my new year resolution is getting my hands dirty with iphone / tablet apps and designing an app I could finally touch :)

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Posted 2 months ago

Happy Holidays emails

'Happy Holidays' emails are bad. Full stop.

Sending impersonal Christmas wishes via html email is no better than regular spam.

I keep getting these spamy, plain-standard, boring, cliche emails with Christmas ornaments & banal wording of Happy Holidays, every hour now.

Seriously. If you think your users read them or care that you wish them well, you're wrong.

Just because we can send one emailer to 100000 users from our database with just a single click, doesn't mean we should.

Not only do these Christmas emails show no respect to users time, they recklessly steal that another christmas touch point to push the marketing message.

If you're to send something, send a good bottle of wine. Make the user smile, not press 'delete' button again.

If your bosses still insist on sending these. At least make it original. Here's an example of Happy Holls emailer from Threadless, with a picture of their staffers beaming to their customers. Banal? yes. Original? Too.

On this note - Happy Holidays :)

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Posted 2 months ago

Light Switch Usability

One of my pet leisure activities is puzzling over a seemingly pointless question "why (enter a name of a random everyday object) have been designed this way?"

Last weekend I took my bathroom light switch on board and after a long deliberation decided to give it a C mark (even that was generous considering its various shortcomings.)

To start with: we use this "light" switch to control our bathroom electric fan. Trick is, this particular fan model has a built-in delay at the off-state, so when you switch it on - it works right away, but when you switch it off - it waits 5 minutes and only then shuts itself. Problem I'm having regularly is this: I hear the fan working and just by looking at the switch I have no idea if I switched it off or not. The problem lies with the design of a switch itself. It doesn't acknowledge its status. Unlike in the States or Australia, Poland, like most other European countries, adopted the "rocker" switch design, whereby the switch doesn't indicate whether it's on or off. Naturally, builders or electricians who installed my switches didn't sweat over usability nitty gritties and applied absolutely zero consistency. We've ended up having each switch in the house either tilted up for off... or tilted down for off. In hindsight, I should've been a bigger usability nazi and made them stick to one consistent pattern. Rocker switch design is good, as long as you stick with a single consistent way to install your switches. Now, I couldn't be bothered calling them up and paying for redoing it, yet being a usability pervert I keep sweating over this little stupid thing each day :)

On a side note, when I travel, I keep wondering how come each country decided they needed to push their own standard for light switch. It's like each nation's founding fathers had a dream to influence the world in their own trivial way. I've decided to wikipedia the topic and found a tone of information (most of it useless electrical specs), but found some gems of examples: )

- American light switches have adopted a toggle design -

- Continental switches - mentioned here before, follow the rocker design -

- The real gem however is the Aussie switch. It's scary to notice how prevailing bad designs are. Mind you - there's like 19million Aussies using this thing. For real! Basically what the Aussies did was they took the American design and asked themselves a fundamental question "How do we make it even less usable?". The outcome is this beauty

So wrapping up my keyboard-happy post on light-switches, here is my subjective list of qualities any decent light switch should have:

- Status acknowledgement. The switch should inform you of its state, on / off. Classic European switches fail here.

- Findability. It should be findable in the dark & at distance (ambient light). Seriously why so few switches have ambient light built in.
- Discoverability. Actual toggle / pad ought to be prominent enough, so you can press it no problem, the interface area should be big enough,so you don't have to aim for that 1x1 inch toggle or swipe your hand across to find it.

- Softness. Only a gentle push is required to operate. No need to apply force. Hey! kids would like to use it too. In Australia for instance, kids to the age of 13 can't operate light switches as this activity requires a lot of force and concentration.

- Quiet. Be noiseless in operation yet give you a subtle audio feedback when you on/off it.

- Affordance. Switch should look like a switch so people know it's for switching light, not scanning fingerprints.

- Esthetics. Be elegant and native, fit the interior, don't scream "I'm so modern".

- Versatility of operation. Can turn it on /off with a wet hand, elbow, If I'm carrying something, even kick it if I feel BruceLeeish. Aussie switch fails again. Forget wet fingers, Aussie design is so hard to operate you need to stop whatever you're doing, free up your hands, take a deep breath, focus, press firmly with your index finger on a round-edge button, fail, press again, fail, press again... Presto!

- Flat. When I'm carrying something, like a sofa, I don't want damage the switch or tear the sofa fabric.

Let's not forget about the wall placement. There is science to it too. Don't want to end up with a thing like this :)

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Posted 2 months ago

Mac OS X - Quickly hide all windows except for that one you need on your desktop.

I'm regularly having this problem:

I've got plenty of finder/application windows opened and suddenly I need to grab a file from the desktop and drag it inside one of my finder windows.

Normally to do that I'd need to manually minimize all active windows leaving on the desktop just this one finder window I want to drag my file to. This is very cumbersome, so I came up with the new interaction pattern involving expose's hot corners.

Idea is to grab this particular window you want solely on your desktop, drag it to this hot expose corner, which shows the desktop, then place your window on the desktop where you want it and then drag your file inside it.

It works like that:

A) click and hold the window you want solely on your desktop, drag it to the bottom right hot corner (by default in MacOSX bottom right corner shows the desktop and hides active windows).

B) with all windows now hidden and desktop at your disposal, place your window where convenient

C) now you have only that window over your desktop and you can easily drag your file of choice inside your window.

Easy!

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Posted 2 months ago

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