Ellen Beldner

Steve Jobs & the power of ideas (via Give it Five Minutes)

2012-03-16T16:39:15Z

http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3124-give-it-five-minutes

If you aren't sure why this is important, think about this quote from Jonathan Ive regarding Steve Jobs' reverence for ideas:
And just as Steve loved ideas, and loved making stuff, he treated the process of creativity with a rare and a wonderful reverence. You see, I think he better than anyone understood that while ideas ultimately can be so powerful, they begin as fragile, barely formed thoughts, so easily missed, so easily compromised, so easily just squished.

Emphasis mine.

Apple: Tabbed Inspectors Suck; Adobe and Omni get it right.

2012-02-29T22:43:12Z

Could you PLEASE redesign your OS conventions for big screens? Or at least afford some expert accelerators for people with big monitors?

This drives me nuts whenever I use Keynote. Most common tasks: Bullet points, type style changes, and borders on images. I just want all these fussy little panels to always be available to me. Look, I have plenty of space!

I have to visually parse all of the inspector icons and either remember which one allows me to set a stroke or click into a few to see. The icons are tiny and they lack text labels.
Once I find the proper inspector, I usually have to operate multi-tiered controls, with multiple dropdowns and those horrid little twiddly up/down controls.

I get that you need an interface for discovering and navigating through these different options on a small screen. You know, like the small screens we had 15 years ago. But what would be way less shitty are some big-screen versions where I don't have three clicks of navigation to get to what is, for me, a common feature.

Omnigraffle, for example, overrides the OS default behavior and affords locking-open different tabs within their inspector palettes. Adobe allows you to group, ungroup, or tab different panels depending on how you work. In both of these cases, the features I need, use, and want are available with zero clicks. They're visible onscreen and I can track my mouse directly to the control I want without having to fuss around.

Miss Manners on Interaction Design*

2012-02-22T06:44:12Z

"People who are deluged with information on a subject in which they have limited interest (apologies to the couple, but such is life) do not become increasingly informed. Quite the opposite. They tune out."

-- Miss Manners' Guide to a Surprisingly Dignified Wedding, Jacobina Martin and Judith Martin. Kindle Ed., Loc. 3,305-16.

* Obviously she's discussing etiquette as it relates to weddings, but the point is exactly the same. Human psychology still responds to sites and devices with the same emotional wiring that we use to respond to other people's actions. Poorly behaved people and poorly behaved sites receive roughly the same treatment: people stop wanting to hang out with them or do nice things for them.

A while back on Quora, I wrote:

Interaction designers are like Miss Manners. We teach websites how to behave; we teach them to say "please" and write thank-you notes and to tidy up when visiting at a friend's country house for the weekend.
Visual designers are makeover stylists. They ensure that the hair is perfect, the clothes send the right message, the makeup is tasteful, and the accessories match.
Both aspects are important to nail if you want to be a well-socialized and respectful person or website.

By the way, I'm reading the above-mentioned book because as of last Friday, I'm engaged to @gadishamia. Thrilled about it, naturally!

Inbox Surprise via @iansilber

2012-02-10T20:16:24Z

via @iansilber:

"This reminds me of an app I made called Inbox Surprise that would basically allow you to spam someone's inbox with something like this: http://cl.ly/3C08030R3M1v1P3M3s0l. Basically take ascii art and deliver each line as a new email.

"Yes, I'm very proud of it."

EPIC SQUEE: Eames Elephants

2012-02-08T07:52:34Z

According to dwr.com, "Demetrios [Eames, grandson of Charles] recently took the Elephant on Safari, creating this film for the Eames Office. For a fun twist, mute the soundtrack and replace it with "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" by The Tokens."

Cow Bezoars

2012-02-08T07:38:30Z

So I'm doing this project for one of the design classes I'm taking right now, and one thing led to another, and before I knew it I was reading all about cow bezoars on Wikipedia.

Remember that scene from Harry Potter 6 where Ron eats the love-potioned candies intended for Harry and they go to Slughorn's office for an antidote and then drink from a bottle of mead given to Slughorn as a gift which he intended to re-gift to Dumbledore, but which was actually poisoned by Draco Malfoy, and then Harry saves the day by remembering that a bezoar soaks up just about any poison? Well, apparently J.K. Rowling knew her stuf, because bezoars were traditionally used in alchemy to cure poisons.

Psuedobezoars are induced in commercial cattle: ranchers will give their cows small magnets to eat. As the cows graze they typically nom on nails, bits of barbed wire, and other metallic detritus. As you might imagine bits of sharp metal passing through the intestine is a Bad Thing. So the magnets get the bits of metal to stick together, where they apparently get bezoar'd up in the cow's gut, which is less bad than pokey bits of metal in the intestine.

Stripper shoes: Still not okay.

2012-02-08T07:18:29Z

I look at all the stripper shoes on the market and think "Ugh. Who wants to look like a hooker?" And then I think "Uh-oh, I must be getting old." And then I think, "But no. They're stripper shoes."

Is email on the iPhone a good idea (for me)?

2011-11-17T03:19:26Z

Responding to email on my iPhone mostly sucks, compared to the Blackberry I had previously. However, I'm not sure even a Blackberry could save me now.

My role at Groupon means that I now get massive quantities of email that very often require a response / action. I had been glancing at my email on my phone ("okay, this is what's going on & what I have to deal with") but not necessarily responding: I'll think about what I want my response to be (like in the car on the way to work) and compose the response when I get there.

The fail is when I THINK about something in my head and forget that I haven't actually WRITTEN the thoughts down -- and find out a few days later that the intended recipient was still waiting for an answer.

Maybe I need to just not have email on my phone.

Google Calendar: Your modals suck.

2011-09-09T18:58:21Z

Seriously, don't you ask your candidates about Fitts' Law during interviews any more? It's not like scheduling recurring meetings is an infrequent event, especially at a business, making this a merely occasional annoyance. This MUST annoy Google employees too. And I KNOW you all have big monitors like I do. And I KNOW you have crazy-full schedules like I do, which means that like me, you benefit from letting your calendar browser window take up a big chunk of monitor real estate. (PS -- the new headers look nice but take up too much vertical space.)

I hate that you use SO many modals in Calendar's interaction in the first place. But if you insist, can't you at least read the fucking cursor x,y and situate the modals under my cursor instead of reading the browser's viewpane dimensions and centering? The math is actually EASIER to put the modal under my cursor than to center the thing onscreen, right?

While "Repeat" isn't something I have to do for every meeting, SAVE is. You elected to use a modal to ask me whether I want to send an invite to new guests (can't you just make it an inline option near the SAVE button that's sticky with my previous choices?), and that too is centered -- rather than being proximate to the SAVE button, where by definition my mouse just was:

Seriously, you can do better. Stop copying Outlook.

Are you sure you want to leave this page? You suck.

2011-09-02T20:55:28Z

Dude. Make the options "Save my changes" and "Discard changes". For fark's sake, people. Also, it isn't just Facebook who does this -- I've seen this elsewhere. Probably Outlook.

Addendum

Wordpress does it too. (I hate Wordpress, but there's something gone wonky when I've tried to migrate to Posterous.)

Buy.com Social Modal: You Suck.

2011-08-25T20:02:05Z

I clicked on a shopping result in Google. I expected to go to the product page of the product I had clicked on. I got a lightbox / modal asking me if I want to shop with friends. You must be kidding me. If this works, it's because people do it on accident.

OmniGraffle Style Manager: You Suck.

2011-08-25T19:33:33Z

Normally I tell designers: Don't be derivative. Don't just copy the dominant UI because it happens to be the dominant one. Think the design through from first principles of human cognition, visual design principles, usability heuristics.

OmniGraffle. Who are your users? I'm guessing professional knowledge workers. The only people I've known to use it are professional designers, maybe a product manager or two. These may be people who know HTML and its structured styling examples. These are certainly people who have some basic word processing / style examples. In this case, I am in fact one of the target users.

There is nothing about this style manager interface that relates even remotely to anything I've ever seen before in any desktop publishing or graphics application:

Click on "Other", like you'd think you could if you wanted to edit, manage, or change a style. You get this totally bizarre dialog box that pops up in the middle of the screen... and god knows what next.

Irony...

2011-07-29T20:42:41Z

...is a TechCrunch writer "complaining about Google's ugly black toolbar".

Google has their secret weapon: the (ugly) black toolbar that resides across all of their properties. If it weren't for that thing, my usage of Google+ would be once a day instead of twice a day. But even that won't matter in the long run if Google doesn't have the network and the content to back up G+. In addition to an overall traffic dip, average time spent on the site was down 10 percent, Hitwise says. That's not good.

Groupon is hiring UX people, all levels, all functions.

2011-07-19T16:17:57Z

All roles can be in our Palo Alto product / development office or in our Chicago HQ. We're looking for people in all roles who have a strong grounding in design theory, human cognition, and technical knowledge -- the classic ingredients of an HCI background. At the end of the day we're looking for good people.

You can apply via JobVite at the links above, or email me (ebeldner@groupon.com) your resume, a link to your portfolio, and your LinkedIn profile.

Apps are just little websites in cheap fur coats.

2011-07-08T16:41:53Z

While on the London Underground I saw a poster advertising Potiche, a movie starring Catherine Deneuve, who I think is the bees' knees. I made a note to myself to research it when I got back to WiFi.

Back on my iPad I opened Safari and Googled for [ Potiche movie ]. The first couple of results were for IMDB (installed on my iPad) and Rotten Tomatoes (I may or may not have Flixter). Both sites took me to splash screens that suggested I download their apps. I got to thinking about why I'd gone to Google instead of using the native apps.

Ever since I discovered Google in 1999, my strategy has been the same. I go to the same reliable location (Google.com, or more recently, my browser address bar), type what I want, and I either get lucky and am there, or I click on one of the first couple of results.

It was more cognitive load for me to have to think about whether I already had the app on my device or not, and then I'd maybe swipe around to see whether it was there or not, and then open the app and enter my query. I did what I've been doing for 10 years: type what I want and get the answer, only this time I got interrupted and had to ponder whether I would use this installed thingy or the website thingy.

Technically, the only difference between an installed app and a website is that the app has access to more of your device's hardware. Platonically, from a human-need perspective, they're the exact same thing: A collection of tools and information that lets you do something.

It's a particular garden or destination.
You have to learn that it exists.
You have to understand what functionality it offers or what tasks it lets you accomplish.
You have to know how to navigate to it.
You have to learn how to use it.
You have to establish a relationship with it: by downloading, creating an account; paying for it.
You have to remember it the next time you want to use it.

I don't have a ton of apps on either my iPhone or my iPad, especially compared to some people I know. If I don't find an app useful, I delete it; they add too much clutter and overhead. Some of my friends use folders on their home screen to organize their apps (I've started doing this recently for certain categories that I use occasionally -- like travel-related apps: Onavo, SPG, Skype, AirBnB, TripIt).

A couple of friends almost exclusively use the iPhone search screen to get to their apps. I almost never use Search, although as I get more apps, I'm starting to use Search to navigate to the one I want. It's starting to be faster than browsing (and using spatial memory) to get to the thing I need.

Aside from apps' technical capabilities (which are blurring as HTML5 webapps via the browser are granted more capabilities), apps are no more than bookmarks used to be pre-Google. They're pointers to functionality. Right now they graphically represent space on your start screen, but this isn't scalable for the same reason that Yahoo's and Google's site directories didn't scale. There were too many sites, and there are / will be too many apps to use spatial navigation to get to more than a few.

As we install more apps, and the number of apps to choose from becomes greater, we're simply recapitulating the same problem that Google solved for websites in 1999 or so. We'll have to develop a navigational and / or search-based approach to get to the functionality that's available via our computing devices.

Moreover, the delineation between "app that is currently installed on my device" and "app that exists but is not yet on my phone" is going to blur. If I want to OCR some text let me search for [ OCR ]. If I have an app with this functionality, take me to the app. If I don't, find the best app in the apposphere and let me use it.

For the same reason that the Google search box became the way to navigate the web (1), an equivalent search field -- effectively, a command-line interface -- may become the main way that people navigate the world available to them on their mobile devices. The major caveat is that it's mechanically more difficult to type on mobile devices, so query-driven interfaces can be extra-punishing.

Apps are no different from websites. They just have special permissions to use my device's hardware. We'll need to solve the same problem for the app world that we did with the website world.

(1) Google saw such a large proportion of navigational queries -- I personally loved the ones like [yahoo.com] -- that it became the design basis for Chrome's combined URL and query input bar.