Stuck on Amber

The World Clock app on the iPhone is one the most beautiful designs I’ve seen on the system. Seriously. It’s elegant and honest. It very subtly customises the native UI elements, which makes it look special yet very familiar. It’s effortless. I wish I did that one.

Matthew Frederick:

Jeff Fong, design lead for the slick Windows Phone Metro interface:

Right now the thing that really fascinates me is architecture. I see a lot of parallels between what we do and how an architect thinks about a space. 

I couldn’t agree more. It struck me when I read 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School, by M. Frederick.

The thing we did with Windows Phone is we came out with a design that is unexpected. It’s not like anything else you see out there. That change in direction is the thing that’s bringing the attention I think.

So unexpected that it takes time for people to recognise how good it is. Some bits are not perfect yet, but overall, awesome fundations.

Designers are often blamed for being over-obsessed by simplicity. That’s not exactly right. They’re usually obsessed by making things manageable for the mind, and pleasurable.

Only when there’s apparently no good way to reorganise complexity should the designer begin to simplify, that is, to remove things.

Tidying up your home and putting everything back in its right place means making your home manageable. It’s not the same as throwing stuff away, which means simplifying (but also losing richness). 

So, ditching certain features from a design is not a question of style. It’s because they make the system to difficult to manage – or less pleasurable to use – if we keep them.

Mission Control in Mac OS X Lion allows you to drag desktops to re-order them, but strangely there’s no way to drag a desktop to position 1. In the animation below, I manage to move the blue desktop in front of the green one, but the system doesn’t let me move it further – in front of Desktop 1.

Similarly, Desktop 1 is the only one that can’t be closed.

Whatever reason there is to those limitations, from a pure user’s viewpoint I think it does not make any sense: I see no difference between Desktop 1 and the others. It’s just a desktop. It’s as if they implemented the constraint “Desktop 1 must always exist” while what you really expect is “At least 1 desktop must exist”.

Artificial constraints make a system harder to manage, develop and explain, because it’s about adding exceptions.

PS: Drop me a mail if you figure out a good reason for the Desktop 1 privileges in Mission Control! I’m interested.

I made this slightly improved grid for Windows Phone; it contains cell numbers so it’s easier to refer to elements positions.

I like the page about touch interaction, in the Windows 8 design guidelines.

The average index finger width is around 11mm:

Reading areas: the most important content should be kept in the top half of the screen.

I went through the setup of an ICS phone again yesterday, and I believe there’s still a long way before they get the UI right. It’s just those components overlapping, all over the place… Sometimes glowing like hell, sometimes desperately flat, looking unfinished. The whole experience lacks a bit of coordination and integrity.

A shame, for such a nice operating system. It’s not just a style issue (which is in part a matter of taste): it’s actually making the phone harder to use.

ICS features nice and powerful UI components in fact, but for some reason it looks like it’s very easy to combine them in a poor way.

Nice proposals of clear boarding passes. I wish airlines and rail companies made that happen. Is that so complicated?

When you think about it, what’s the meaning of ‘handmade’ after all? Because the fact that it’s made by a hand, we don’t really care, to be honest. And by the way, most handmade objects are actually made by a tool, that a hand was holding.

What it means obviously, is ‘Human made’: made with care, awareness, and love (possibly).

Now how would that feel to label our products ‘Made by a human’?

Heard from a marketing guy recently: in a nutshell it went “Are you sure you need so many days to deliver the design? We’ve done those features for product A in the past, and already have the other ones in product B. So all you need to do is put them together, and basta.”

I double checked the meaning of basta: enough, easy, done.

If it’s a crappy compromise you’re after, fine. If you’re a bit serious about quality and integrity of the result, and are such in a hurry, then here’s another basta approach I’d like to suggest: double check you know exactly what you want, show me your requirements, and let me help ditch all the kind-of-nice to haves.

See also Half, Not Half-Assed, by 37signals.

The Galaxy Nexus (Android 4) allows for a PIN code that is 4 to 17 digits long, but goes as far as requiring the user to validate their input by tapping OK. This ensures there’s no way to guess how long the PIN is, but seems a bit too boring to me for a daily use.

The iPhone also requires explicit validation with OK, unless you turn on the no-brainer option: a 4-digit passcode that auto-validates upon entering the fourth digit (no need for an OK action in that case).

Windows Phone offers a simple trade-off: variable length PINs that auto-validate upon tapping the last digit, regardless of the length you chose. So your thief can guess how long the PIN is, but that probably won’t help much, and at least you don’t need to press a boring OK key all the time. (In addition, the device has an extra safety mechanism that prevents too many combinations from being tried within a short period of time.)

Great use of orthogonality in the iOS 5.1 lock screen. The new unlock-to-camera gesture (drag up the entire screen) has been introduced without any collateral damage. It does not interfere with the main unlock mechanism. The only apparent impact is the addition of subtle grip indicators around the camera icon. It was obviously inspired by the Windows Phone unlock design, which I always found genius.

In the previous version of the iOS lock screen, in order to prevent inadvertent unlock to the camera, you first had to bring up the camera icon by double clicking the Home button, then to tap the icon. The new design makes the gesture as safe, but more direct and engaging.

For fun, I mocked up how this concept would apply to the Send button in the message composer.

Apple’s iOS Human Interface Guidelines:

As much as possible, you need to let your app’s task drive your customization decisions.

Matthew Frederick, in his excellent 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School:

If you want to be recognized for designing a good or even great building, forget about what you want the building to be; instead ask, “What does the building want to be?” A design problem has to be addressed on its own terms: the needs of the client, the nature of the site, the realities of the building program, and many others. These factors point towards an inherent order that must be acknowledged before self-expression can enter the design process.

Gerald Jay Sussman [attributed to]:

Remember, a real engineer doesn’t want just a religion about how to solve the problem. Like ‘object-oriented’, or ‘functional’, or ‘imperative’, or ‘logic programming’. This piece of the problem wants to be a functional program. This piece of the program wants to be imperative. This piece wants to be object-oriented and guess what—this piece want to be logic-based. And they all want to work together usefully, because of the way the problem is structured.