Designing Exceptional Experiences

Will the iPad usher in a golden age of UI design?

When people talk about the future they were promised as kids they often say, "where are the flying cars?" The iPad is the flying car of consumer electronics. It's the exact device that the futuristic movies and tv shows have always promised us and now it's here.

Personal computers (both Mac and Windows-based) have gotten a lot easier to use and many people are now comfortable with them, but let's not kid ourselves: computers are hard. Even Macs. Want proof, Apple nerds? Try using search in the Finder. It's painful. Macs "just work" when the user already has a certain familiarity with the basics of personal computing.

The operating systems we use today are still based around the office-oriented concepts of files and folders. I suspect that's because when Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) was creating the first GUI they were imagining the office of the future, not the home of the future. We've lived with that for twenty years because home computers still did mostly the same things that office computers did.

Fortunately we've been freeing ourselves of the office idiom over the last few years. Thanks to the MP3, the iPod and the Internet, we've seen the gradual shift from the computer as spreadsheet-and-word-processing machine to a true information appliance. The iPad could potentially fulfill the promise of the original Macintosh.

This is where it gets fun for designers and developers. We are now free to ask a really interesting question: "what do regular people actually want to do with this magic tablet that can basically do anything?" Yeah, we know that they'll want to watch movies, play games and surf the Internet. But what else? And when we figure out what they want to do we, the designers, will get to figure out the easiest and most intuitive way to do it. My mind boggles at the potential for rethinking everything we've become accustomed to when designing user interfaces for the web.

Some of you might be saying, "but isn't it just a big iPhone? What's the big deal?" To which I say, "YES! Exactly! It's an iPhone that's big enough to show lots of information. What more could you want?"

And please don't say "Flash."

P.S. I think Apple missed a great opportunity when they called it the iPad rather than the PowerBook or the iBook.

Gmail makes it sound like it's my fault

I was trying to check my email this afternoon and I got this message from Gmail:

They've phrased this error message to make it sound like my fault. "We're sorry but your Gmail account is currently experiencing errors. You won't be able to use your account while these errors last, but don't worry, your account data and messages are safe." It makes it sound like there's something in my email that brought down their service and now their engineers have to fix my problem.

Does anyone else read it this way?

Designing feed content

I subscribe to feeds for several web design gallery sites and I've noticed an interesting difference in how two of those sites have designed the content of their feeds.

CSS Remix (top) displays a large screenshot of the featured site while CSS Drive (bottom) displays a small thumbnail of the site. CSS Remix, in addition to the links at the top, links the image directly to the featured site so you can simply click on the screenshot to go to the site whereas CSS Drive provides no links within the entry. You have to click the title of the entry to go to the permalink page on CSS Drive and then follow a link to the featured site.

CSS Remix provides more information and is much more convenient but for some reason I find that I end up clicking the title to go to CSS Drive more often because I want to see the full-size version of the site. CSS Drive is making me jump though an extra hoop, but they're getting a pageview out of it.

I think this is an excellent example of weighing user needs against business objectives. If the goal of your feed is to drive traffic back to your blog then you have to consider limiting the amount of information you provide in your feed.

The magic of Twitter

I've finally relented and have started using Twitter. I knew that Twitter was already really popular with people in the tech industry, but I didn't really see what the big deal was until recently.

Once I added some friends, started reading their updates and started posting my own I began to understand the attraction: the creators of Twitter have actually made something simple. Not simple-looking or simple compared to other web apps. It's just simple.

And the reason Twitter is actually simple: there are almost no decision points. Seriously. You decide to post and then you post. You don't have to figure out a title, or format the text or add tags or categories or anything else. You just post less than 140 characters, which ensures that you don't get too verbose.

And when viewing your friends' updates you don't have to mark anything read or unread, or tag anything or file anything. You read it or you don't.

The lack of control is actually very liberating.

Next question: does Twitter inspire a flow experience? I don't think so, but I'm going to use it for a while longer before I try to really answer that question.

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