DesignAday

In the Details: Parallax

Parallax is a displacement or difference in the apparent position of an object viewed along two different lines of sight, and is measured by the angle or semi-angle of inclination between those two lines.

In simpler words, parallax is a visual effect you experience when moving. Objects closer to you appear to move past more quickly than objects that are farther away. For example, when riding in a car, if you look out the side window, a tree by the side of the road will move through your field of vision much faster than a barn in the distance behind it. This effect is utilized within software to convey a sense of depth.

The most recent incarnation of the Foursquare iPhone App employs a parallax effect in which information on the screen scrolls on a plane above the map.

This GIFF doesn’t do it justice, of course, but a still image wouldn’t convey it at all. The effect is purely aesthetic, but it feels good. It’s an enjoyable microinteraction. 

In the Details: Tap

Yesterday, I used the Pro Metronome app as an example of skeuomorphism. Today, I want to point out my favorite feature of the application: the TAP button. I’ve never owned a fancy, digital metronome, so I had never seen this feature before. I imagined it was an inventive addition taking advantage of the touch capability of the device, but no, it is a feature translated from existing devices. You can set the tempo by tapping out a steady beat on the surface of the phone. It’s very useful if you want to make note of the tempo of a recording, and I imagine it is even better suited to the iPhone than the physical depress of a button required by digital metronomes.

In the Details: Two-Step Scrubber

A few weeks back, I reviewed the new mobile app from Audible. One detail I left out was the microinteraction involving the scrubber. A scrubber is a control for moving forward or backward through a segment of audio. In most audio playback applications, it takes the form of a slider. The length of the slider represents the length of the audio clip, and the thumb, or handle, indicates the current playback position. Dragging the thumb allows you to change the playback position. Thus, the control fulfills two functions: it shows you where you are in the clip, and it allows you to navigate to a different point in the clip.

The Audible app is designed specifically for people on the go. It is a mobile app, after all. When you are moving, be it driving or walking, it’s easy to miss your tap target. If you accidentally move the scrubber in a song, that’s not such a big deal. You have a reasonably fine-grained control of position in a 3 or 4-minute track. An audiobook, however, has much longer audio clips. A slight move of the scrubber can translate to a huge jump in relation to the story, and you’ll have a hard time finding where you were.

So, the designers of the Audible app did something really smart. The scrubber is always displayed in the player interface, so you can quickly glance at it to see where you are.

To actually move it, however, you must first tap it. Tapping the scrubber unlocks it, allowing it to be dragged.

This two-step interaction makes it highly unlikely that you will ever accidentally lose your place. Furthermore, if no further interaction has occurred, the control returns to its locked state after a period of about 5 seconds. This is not conventional—most UIs allow sliders to be dragged without being tapped first. Given that the control is probably rarely used, making the control less intuitive is actually an excellent design decision.

Laudable Audible

Another of my favorite sessions from Interaction 13 was Trip ODell’s If UX Can Kill it Probably Will: Designing for the 70 MPH Interface. And what interface might that be? I had the fortune of making Trip’s acquaintance a couple days before his talk and learned that he has worked for both Microsoft and Adobe, but he wasn’t speaking of work he did at either company. He is currently at Audible, a company that I have a lot of respect for. He convinced the company that, even though their customers had a very high satisfaction rating with the existing Audible app for mobile phones, it had to be redesigned. That, in and of itself, is impressive, and the fact that the company put the time and money into the effort shows that they really do care about their customers.

What was so bad about the Audible app that it had to be redesigned?

This is what the old app looked like with all of the controls exposed. All the icons and the progress bar at the top could be shown and hidden with a tap on the screen. The volume slider and the row of buttons above it could be displayed or put away by dragging the ribbed tab. But let’s think about the use of audiobooks. As Trip pointed out, you almost always listen to them start to finish. You don’t skip parts, and you certainly don’t jump back to re-listen to a previous chapter. That entire row of rewind/forward controls, while useful when listening to music, are not only useless for audiobooks, but a source of extreme frustration. If someone is driving, or even walking, and they attempt to pause the book, but accidentally jump back to the beginning of the chapter, there is no good way to recover from the mistake.

Trip’s focus was use while driving, and he said that they determined that the play/pause button was the most important, followed by the 30-second rewind and bookmark buttons. Everything else could be minimized for non-driving use. The new design, which released this week, is a brilliant example of simplification done right.

There are a number of other laudable improvements to the app, and it’s getting rave reviews. I want to congratulate Trip and his team on some outstanding work. They should submit it to the IxDA Interaction Awards next year.

iCloud Tabs

In the latest updates to iOS and Mac OS, Apple introduced a new feature within Safari. There is now a button in desktop Safari’s toolbar for iCloud Tabs. Clicking on it opens a popover that lists all of the browser tabs open on every device registered with iCloud. As I type this, it lists all of the pages I have open on my iPhone.

In Mobile Safari, the feature is accessed through a folder in the Bookmarks list. There, it currently lists the Tumblr page I’m typing this into, as well as a couple other tabs I have open. It’s an extremely useful feature, more so the more devices you use on a regular basis.

Forecast is iCloudy

I’ve been experimenting with iTunes Match recently, and thus far, I don’t find it to be particularly useful. I reached this conclusion due to a few basic issues:

1. It’s on or off. When it is turned on, my iPhone won’t synch music with iTunes on my desktop. In fact, all of the synching options are hidden. This meant that all of the tracks that I had on the phone when I first turned on iTunes Match were still on the phone. I would have to go through and delete them individually to remove them. The only way to put new music on the phone was to download it by track or by playlist. I learned that once you press the download button for an entire playlist, the only way to cancel the download is to press the stop button on each individual track, which would be a lot of tapping for a 2,000+ song playlist. Or, you can turn off iTunes Match, which is what I did.
2. I have over 10,000 tracks in my iTunes library. Obviously, they won’t all fit on my iPhone. So, I have created a smart playlist that automatically removes songs I’ve listened to recently and adds songs that I haven’t. So, every time I synch my iPhone, play counts and dates are updated. Then the music I’ve listened to is cleared off of the phone and replaced by music I haven’t heard in a while. I have also created several playlists that further filter the “not recently played” list so that, for example, I can listen to up-beat, singable songs while I’m driving without one of Bach’s cello suites coming on. This doesn’t work with iTunes Match, because it doesn’t support playlists that include other playlists. And, while the playlist itself updates, it doesn’t change what music is locally stored on the phone, which brings me to the final point.
3. I’m not going to pay more for a data plan that will be big enough to cover streaming music every day. So, I can only play the music that is on the device, unless I’m on a WiFi network. So, I can’t synch music on or off the device, and I can’t usually listen to music that isn’t on the device.

With the only options being on or off, I’ve chosen “off”.

Routed

I had to drive down to Quantico yesterday to present a visionary scenario at the NCIS headquarters, so I tried out Apple’s new Maps app with spoken turn-by-turn directions. Overall, it worked well, but there is one glaring issue I encountered.

It initially presented me with three routes to choose from, and I selected route 3, which might take a few minutes longer, but would avoid the D.C. beltway and would be more scenic. I tested the app’s ability to reroute right away by making a slight detour to fill my tank. It didn’t miss a beat, giving me new directions within seconds after I turned left, instead of right. It wasn’t until after I had left the PA Turnpike, eaten dinner, and reached the exit where route options 1 and 3 branched that I discovered the problem. Apparently, when the app rerouted me, it remapped the entire route, defaulting to route 1. It isn’t smart enough to remember that I had specifically selected route 3.

That should be easy enough to fix, but it’s the kind of detail I expect Apple to get right the first time.

Charging for a Bug

Do you remember my complaints last month about Apple’s Podcasts app chewing through my wife’s data allowance and costing me $15? Well, that’s not the half of it. I’ve been trying to track down the culprit that has been causing my wife and I both to significantly exceed our data plan limits in July and August. At first, based on AT&T’s reports, I thought something was causing enormous cellular data downloads in the middle of the night, even though the phone was on my WiFi network and plugged into power. I finally figured out, however, that AT&T only checks the phone’s data use occasionally, and reports it all in one chunk at the time it checks. So, I was actually seeing an entire day’s worth of data use logged in the middle of the night. Still, I had to figure out why I was burning through as much as 70 MBs in a day.

I tried an application called DataMan, but it only told me how much was being used, not which app was using it. Then, this morning, after learning that I had once again exceeded my quota, I found My Data Manager, which graphs the data user per application. I installed it and got it set up. After my morning commute, I checked it to find that the Podcasts app had used about 20 MBs since I left my house. I had been listening to a podcast all the way to work, but the audio file is on my iPhone. Podcasts knows that it is there, because it isn’t showing the download button beside it.

Apparently, it is ignoring the fact that I have the file locally, and it is streaming it over the cellular network!

That does it. I’m trashing the Podcasts app and going back to listening to my Podcasts in the Music app. This bug has probably cost me around $100 in unnecessary data use.

The Car as an Accessory

I’m coming up on five years of owning my Nissan Cube, and while I hope to get another five years out of it, I’ve been thinking a lot about what I will want in my next car. There are certain features that I want to keep, like the continuously variable transmission. I’ll probably want at least a hybrid, if not a full electric, by then. But what appeals to me most is not the typical automotive options, but tight integration with my iPhone. I want full voice control while I’m driving. I want to control the vehicle’s systems with an app and view visualizations of performance data. I want the software in the car to be upgradable over the internet, so the next version of my phone is still compatible. I want my car to be a peripheral that seamlessly interacts with the rest of my devices, as well as a platform supporting development of additional applications. Seemingly more than any other automobile manufacturer, Ford is moving rapidly in that direction.

I payed $15 for a free app

Please pardon me for spending one more post on Apple’s new Podcasts app. I thought I had given it enough knocks in my initial critique, but today’s events are worth the telling.

I received email from AT&T this morning, warning me that I was nearing my data plan allowance. I’m currently on the cheapest, 200 MB plan, and that is usually just enough. I certainly wasn’t expecting to be anywhere near it this month since I was without service for an entire week. But there it was, sitting in my inbox. So, I went to their website and checked. I was only around the 100 MB mark. It should have occurred to me then to check my wife’s account, but she never uses anywhere near 200 MBs of data, as she is almost always on WiFi when she uses her phone for anything substantial.

This afternoon, I got a second email stating that I had exceeded my limit and would be charged $15 for an additional 200 MBs. That really surprised me, as there was no way I could have used 100 MBs of data just today, so I resigned myself to the fact that I would have to contact their customer support when I got home.

During dinner, I explained this series of events to my wife, and she told me that she had received two text messages stating the same things. I finally had the “Duh!” moment, and realized that it was her data usage that the messages were about. So, I asked her, ”Well, what have you been doing differently this month?” She didn’t know. I don’t remember which one of us brought up the Podcasts app first, but I was eventually able to figure out what had happened.

She had set all of her podcasts to download automatically, not realizing that they would download over her cellular connection. That ate up 200 MBs really quick.

So, anonymous Apple designer, if you’re reading, here’s another enhancement that ought to be made. I should be able to set podcasts to download automatically, but only when I have a WiFi connection.