My name is
Jack Moffett. I am an Interaction Designer with over ten years of experience. According to
Herb Simon, that makes me an expert, so I must have something worth sharing. I have started this venture as an exercise to spur critical thinking about my chosen profession. I hope that others may find it thought provoking as well.
DesignAday will present a brief thought about Design every weekday.
Illustrator’s mechanism by which arrowheads can be added to lines is a juvenile attempt at user interface design that does not belong in a professional design application.
What should be a standard attribute of a path is hidden in an obscure location. I had to search the help files to find out how to use them. When a path is selected, you must go to the Appearance palette and select the Stroke. At the bottom of the palette is the “fx” menu. Open it and navigate to the Stylize sub-menu. There you will find the Add Arrowheads command. Why this is considered to be stylizing the line is beyond me. To my mind, adding arrowheads is nothing like introducing a drop shadow or glow effect. It is important to select the stroke, as the application will allow you to add arrowheads to the fill, which actually does nothing, and makes no sense whatsoever.
Once you find the function, you are presented with the dialog shown below.
Notice that there are 27 different arrowheads. The only way to see what is available is to click through all 27 of them. If you want the same arrowhead on both sides, you have to click through to select it separately for each end. If you decide you want to remove an arrowhead, you must click through them serially until you return to “None”. This is inexcusable coming from a company like Adobe in a product as mature as Illustrator. Their designers should know better.
The UI should display all of the arrowheads so that they may be compared and selected with a single click. There should be a “mirror ends” checkbox. The feature shouldn’t be tucked away in a sub-menu that doesn’t make sense, and it shouldn’t allow the user to apply it where it has no effect. Finally, it should make clear which end of the path is which. It is based on the order in which the points were added, but there is no way to know this once a line has been drawn.
I’ve had a Fantom vacuum for over 10 years. It was a well-designed product, and we definitely got our money’s worth out of it. A circuit board went bad and the beater stopped turning. Fantom went out of business several years ago, so I decided repairing it wouldn’t be a good option. My in-laws decided they would give us a new vacuum as an early Christmas gift, so my wife and her mother went shopping on Monday. They came home with a Dyson.
When I got home from work, Susie excitedly showed me how to empty the canister. The Fantom had a canister, which was a huge improvement over dealing with bags, but the Dyson takes it a step further. Where you had to rotate the Fantom’s canister and pull the lid off, the Dyson has a lever that opens the bottom of the canister. You just hold it over the trash can, pull the lever, shake it a little, and then close it again.
Once again, thoughtful design resulted in small details leading to the sale of a more expensive product. There are other features that set this model apart for her, but I’ll leave those for future posts.
I’ve had an annoyance with the bouncing mail icon in the dock for quite some time. I like the notification mechanism, but I don’t like the fact that it bounces even when the Mail application has focus. In the past, I would ignore it while reading my mail. Then, I would minimize Mail, or switch to a different space, and remember, too late, that the icon was still bouncing. Clicking on the icon would stop the bouncing but bring Mail back up at the same time.
Snow Leopard hasn’t entirely fixed this, but it has mitigated the annoyance. I noticed that when an icon is bouncing in the dock, simply moving the cursor over it will stop the bouncing. It takes that as a sign that you have seen and acknowledged the notification.
When dragging within a window, standard behavior dictates that when the cursor contacts the edge of the window, the page will scroll. This allows objects to be dragged to a location that isn’t currently in view, or a selection to be made that extends past the window’s edge. There are a couple of different methods for accelerating that scrolling. For example, when creating a selection with the marquee tool in Photoshop, the farther the cursor moves outside the boundaries of the window, the faster it will scroll in that direction. On the other hand, when dragging folders in OS windows, there is a narrow area inside the border of the window within which dragging will cause scrolling. The closer to the edge the object is dragged, the faster the scrolling will be.
The problem with the selection dragging is that a window will often be right against the edge of the desktop. If such is the case, it isn’t possible to move the cursor outside of the window, so the window scrolls very slowly. This can be painful if you are trying to select several paragraphs of text, or if you are at a high zoom level.
I was working on my new MacBook Pro today and connected my mouse—there’s no way I’m using a trackpad to do real work. All of the ports on this model are on the left side (as you face it). I’m right-handed, so my mouse cord had to wrap all the way around the back of the laptop. The cords on Apple’s mice are designed to be the perfect length to plug into a port on the back of the keyboard and no longer. It made it around, but I was constantly pulling on it, like a dog on a short leash.
So, is the USB port placement sub-optimal, the mouse cord length stingy, or should I take the blame for using a corded mouse when the best solution is obviously to buy a wireless mouse and throw money away on batteries?
Apple’s iCal allows you to set multiple alarms for any event. There are many notification options to choose from, and it provides a list of past settings for quick reuse, so in many ways it is quite a robust feature. You can specify the alarm to go off minutes, hours, or days before or after the event. But there is one small detail that often annoys me. If I select “hours before”, it won’t allow me to enter hours and minutes. Nor will it allow me to enter a decimal, so I can’t specify “two hours and thirty minutes”, for example. For that, I have to do the math in my head and enter “150 minutes”. No, it isn’t difficult math, but this is an interaction that is needlessly complex simply because of the way they decided to implement the form.
I do not carry the reputation of a klutz. I’m more likely to be thought of as slow and overly thoughtful of my actions. If I weren’t a designer, I’d likely be embarrassed to admit that I have cut my leg when closing the door after exiting my car… twice. It literally drew blood both times. The first time I did it, I didn’t think too much about it, chalking it up to a careless moment. The second time it happened, I decided there must be something wrong with the design of my car.
Upon examination, I realized that the styling of the front doors of my Nissan Cube are atypical. On most cars, the bottom corner of the door is rounded off or angled inward. The Cube’s door is the exact opposite.
This photo is showing the passenger-side, front door. The picture is taken looking at the inside of the door with the door open. As you can see, it comes to a point. What’s harder to tell in this image is that the point sticks out beyond the rest of the door. In other words, if you opened the door into the wall of your garage, this point is what would hit. Notice in the background the rounded bottom corner of the door to my wife’s Mazda5.
So, when I’m parked in a lot beside another car and don’t have room to open my door all the way, I slide out and shut the door while I’m close enough for the edge of the door to brush my shoulder. The point at the bottom of the door juts out just far enough to scrape across my calf.
I understand why they shaped the door that way. It makes for nice lines when you are looking at the car. I don’t believe nice lines are worth bleeding for.
I can remember being impressed as a child that my grandparents’ car had power windows. That was a really cool feature and so much easier and faster than the hand cranks in my parents’ car. These days, it is extremely rare to find a car that doesn’t have power windows as a standard feature. My colleague and I were quite surprised on a recent business trip when we had to pay a toll and realized that the windows in our Jeep Compass rental had to be cranked.
The additional ability to open automatically with a single press of a button was a convenient feature, and I always thought it would be nice for them to close automatically as well. Of course, that would require that the mechanism be able to detect an obstruction, such as a person’s fingers, and reverse. This adds a fair amount of complexity and cost, and may therefore not be worth the extra convenience.
I was pleasantly surprised to find that the driver-side window in my Nissan Cube does have an auto-up feature, which I’m finding to be at least as useful as auto-down. When I’m pulling out of a drive-through with cups and straws and bags of food, it helps to be able to free up a hand that would otherwise be pulling the window switch up. I have yet to test it for a safety feature, however.
Occasionally, people get new email addresses. They may have changed jobs or switched ISPs. Whatever the reason, I will receive an email from them stating that they have a new email address and asking that I no longer use the old one. So, in Mail, I right-click the new address to open the contextual menu. One of the options is to add the address to an existing contact. This then opens the contact card of the person that sent the email directly within the Mail app. I can specify whether it is a work or home address.
Unfortunately, it won’t let me delete the existing address. To do that, I have to open Address Book, which completely defeats the purpose of the feature in Mail. In this case, Apple has not fully thought through the various use cases for this otherwise quite useful feature.
We use JIRA for issue tracking at my company. All of my design documentation gets posted to JIRA, attached to whichever issue required it. Awhile back, we updated to a new version, and there was one particular feature improvement that significantly improved my experience with the software.
Previously, to attach a file, you would click on the “Attach File” link, and you would be presented with a single import widget. You know the one—a field with a “browse…” button that allows you to select one file on your system. After selecting a file, there was a button you could press to add another file, revealing another import widget. I could repeat this process a few times and then press the button that would initiate the import.
In the new version, rather than requiring that you press a button to display another import widget, it automatically displays an additional one as soon as you have selected a file. If you don’t want to attach another file, no harm done. You can ignore it. If you are attaching several files—screen mockups, for instance—it saves you several steps.
Small changes can be important. This one, over time, will save a lot of clicks.
