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.
Speed, simplicity, and security. These are the core tenets that Google has built their Chrome OS around. I watched a video of the demo they gave last week, and while I have a lot of respect for their efforts, I can’t get excited about it.
Much like the Litl, which I wrote about last week, Google is stepping back from the robust operating systems we are used to and creating something new. There is no local storage—everything is cloud based—and this fundamentally changes the way in which the UI is designed. I appreciate what they are doing, but I can’t say that I like it.
Part of it has to do with the fact that the main method of organization and navigation is tabs. Now, I don’t have a problem with tabs—I use them quite often in my own work—but I’m uncomfortable with the extreme employment of them. I realize it fits with the browser-as-OS approach they are taking, but it feels too limiting to me.
The majority of my misgivings are due to the lack of “desktop” applications. Would I be satisfied using a web app to edit my video? I have an HD camera, and I don’t see myself uploading gigabyte’s worth of video to the web for editing. That isn’t practical—at least, not yet. Do I want to trust my thousands of high resolution photos to a web service? And how much is it going to cost me in monthly subscriptions to manage all of this content?
All that said, I really do admire Google for trying. It’s not just any company that can introduce a new operating system and be taken seriously. At the very least, Chrome will teach us a lot. It’s going to be fun watching it develop.
I’ve had Google’s app on my iPhone since it was released, but I have rarely used it. I thought of it more as a gimmick than a useful feature. In case you aren’t familiar with it, I’ll provide a brief explanation. After launching the app, you can raise the phone to your ear and speak a word or phrase that you wish to search for. The application listens to your speech, transcribes it, performs the search, and returns the results. I suppose it could be handy if you are on the move and need to look something up, but don’t want to stop to type. I think I have used it in such a fashion once or twice.
I was recently writing something in which I wanted to use the word “cachet,” but I couldn’t remember how it was spelled. All I could think of was “cache,” but as that is a different word with its own meaning, it kept me from using the auto-complete feature in my dictionary widget to find “cachet.” I knew how to pronounce the word, and Google’s app came to mind. I turned on my phone, spoke the word, and sure enough, Google promptly returned a list of results containing the word “cachet.”
Update: Something happened to the second half of this post when I saved it. I just discovered that it was incomplete and have re-written it. I’m sorry for the incomplete post.
I was listening to Jared Spool’s podcast, Spoolcast, specifically the episode titled Search, Scent & the Happiness of Pursuit Followup. Jared suggested that the vast majority of people don’t use advanced search, so you should spend effort towards improving the navigation of a site, rather than creating a more powerful search feature. It triggered me to think about my own search habits, and I realized that I wasn’t even sure what options Google included in their advanced search. Now, Jared wasn’t talking about a general web search engine—he was talking about a company’s website—but I found it strange that, as much googling as I do, I don’t use the advanced search.
The reason it really struck me was that just a day or two before, I had been searching for information and received a lot of hits from discussion forums. I was looking for recent information, but most of the posts I was getting were from four or five years ago. I thought to myself, “Gee, Google ought to have a feature where you can limit the results by date.” For some reason, though, it didn’t occur to me to check their advanced search. It’s in there! But I’m in such a habit of relying on that single search field, I don’t think about doing something smarter with the results it gives me.
It occurs to me that the Advanced Search is typically downplayed in the UI. On Google’s homepage, it is a tiny link to the right of the search field grouped with two other links. Of course, I rarely visit Google’s homepage. I always start my searches directly from the search field in my browser. Once you have your list of results, you can then click the “Show options…” link at the top of the list to display a sidebar with options for filtering the results or changing the view, but I’ve never paid attention to that either, as it appears at the end of a little breadcrumb trail representing the scope of your search. I’ve never been encouraged by the UI to try the advanced search.
So now I’m wondering, do most people not use advanced search simply because we are advising them not to through the design of the user interface?
The Safari 4 Beta drew a lot of criticism for its implementation of tabs. Perhaps drawing some inspiration from the recently released Google Chrome, that version of the browser moved the tabs to the top of the window, above the address bar. This makes a lot of sense, as the address shown in the bar changes as you change tabs. For a strict tab metaphor, anything that changes should be contained within the tabbed pane.
However, unlike Chrome, Apple decided to replace the title bar, or more accurately, merge the tabs with the title bar. It broke all windowing conventions and caused confusion. Safari was the first browser to introduce draggable tabs, and now there was a conflict. Where do you click to drag a tab, and where do you click to drag the window? Apple decided that dragging the window was more important, so the majority of the tab/title bar was given to window dragging. The right corner of each tab was textured as the grip for dragging a single tab. This took some time to get used to, but I became comfortable with it. Another issue was that the tabs automatically grew to fill the width of the window. As a result, the tabs would all shift every time a tab was added or removed from the bar. This could be disorienting. The bigger problem, to my mind, was the inconsistency within the operating system. Why should a single application have a completely different title bar from all the others?
I just installed the final release of Safari 4 and was surprised to discover that the tabs have been moved back down below the address bar. I find this interesting, and uncharacteristic. Apple doesn’t tend to go back on its changes. They have decided that this tabbing model isn’t optimal, so I’m expecting them to change it again in the not too distant future. For now, given the choice between this model and the Beta model, I think they made the right decision.
It’s not very often that Google makes changes to their search user interface, but yesterday they introduced a handful of significant, new features. As described in their official announcement:
Today we’re launching SearchWiki, a way for you to customize search by re-ranking, deleting, adding, and commenting on search results. With just a single click you can move the results you like to the top or add a new site. You can also write notes attached to a particular site and remove results that you don’t feel belong. These modifications will be shown to you every time you do the same search in the future.
I’ve never considered Google’s search pages to be particularly well designed. They are functional, but they are rather bare-bones and antiseptic, rather than aesthetic. That said, I think Google has done some really nice interaction design on these new features. They’ve added some very useful functionality that will fundamentally change the way we use search. Where once search results were generic and out of the users’ control—dependent on search optimization and “Google Foo”—we can now wield some power over the results, turning Google into more of a personal research tool, rather than just a search engine.
And, somewhat surprisingly, the UI design is quite elegant. Animated transitions utilizing fades and transparency make it perfectly clear what is happening. Temporal, in-line messages help you learn how the new features work on the fly. This is the Google that wowed us when they released Google Maps and Street View, rather than the Google that believes the ultimate design goal is a 28 word limit.
Very well done, Google! I applaud you.
Mark Hurst, over on Good Experience, introduced Googlephrasing back in 2004. Prompted by a more recent post, I Googled “Design is defined as”.
- The design is defined as truly next-gen for the Nintendo console. (referring to Sonic Unleashed)
- Therefore, information design is defined as: Preparing communication products so that they achieve performance objectives established for them.
- An aesthetic design is defined as any design applied to any article, whether for the pattern or shape or configuration of ornamentation thereof, or for any two or more of these features, and by whatever means it is applied, having features which are necessitated by the function which the article to which the design is applied, is to perform, and includes an integrated circuit topography, a mask work, and a series of mask works.
- The designer of a design is defined as the person who creates it.
- Appeal [Graphic Design] is defined as an emergent property coming about when different system attributes are experienced positively by the user.
- Instead, a “design” is defined as: “… the overall appearance of a product resulting from one or more visual features.”
- Product design is defined as the aesthetics, style and function of the product.
- Geometric Design is defined as the selection of the visible elements of the road.
- An optimum design is defined as a point in the design space for which the objective function is minimized or maximized and the design is feasible.
- The propagation delay for static CMOS design is defined as the time interval between the 50% transition point of the inputs and the 50% point of the worst-case output signal.
