UI and us

I came across The top 25 Biggest Product Flops article today via the excellent Sensory Metrics.

Which included this page on the Apple Newton, which was a distant echo of the iPhone to come.

One of the factors of it’s downfall is listed its ‘bulkiness’. Inspired by the current Macworld exhibition, I looked over some older Apple Keynotes. I noticed how important the form factor seems to be to Steve Jobs in his demos, and how the market seemed to echo this belief.

Here in the 1999 Macworld Keynotes, Jobs introduces Firewire. 

The finale has him showing off the soon-to-come portable hard drives that fit in his jeans pocket.

In 2001, the iPod was first released. Again, the same pocket demonstration. (And repeated later with the introduction of the nano)

And once again, with the iPhone introduction.

From the great Designing for Humans, comes this 60 Minutes story on advancements in machines that can read human minds. In essence, the new machines can be trained to recognize certain patterns and recognize them when we think. For example, think of a hammer, and the computer will know. Of course, you have to sit still in a giant MRI machine to do it. In time, though, this will be commoditized.

Watch CBS Videos Online

It seems reasonable to me to expect mainstream computing usage of:

• Touch interfaces within next 12 months (iPhone meet desktop)
• Active displays covering surfaces of devices in 4 years (iPod looks that change with 1 click)
• Gaze-tracking interfaces in the next 5 years (”Ah, you meant to type in this window”)
• Face recognition/verification in 6 years (Good morning Sally)
• 3D video displays in 7 years (Check out my new Sony 3D TV)
• Proper synthesis of haptics in the next 10 years (Turn down the paper thickness on this book)
• Brain tracking in 20 years (Computers are again too slow to handle the speed at which we can interact)

Here’s a nice New York Times article on the study of haptics. The thing which caught my attention:

Scientists have determined that the human finger is so sensitive it can detect a surface bump just one micron high.

 

Wow. 

In the excellent How the Mind Works, by Steven Pinker, is the following chapter:

The left hemisphere is not only the seat of language but also the seat of the ability to recognize and imagine shapes defined by arrangements of parts. A neurological patient who had suffered a stroke to his left hemisphere reported, “When I try to imagine a plant, and animal, an object, I can recall but one part. My inner vision is fleeting, fragmented; if I’m asked to visualize the head of a cow, I know it has ears and horns but I can’t revisualize their places.” The right hemisphere, in contrast, is good for measuring whole shapes; it can easily judge whether a rectangle is taller than it is wide or whether a dot lies more or less than an inch from an object.

 

There is something certainly interesting here, but I’m not sure what it means. I do know some people love to organize folders on the desktop, and some don’t, and some only want to see files in a more abstract ‘list’ or ‘column’ view.

Normally I like to write positive stuff and I really love Uxmatters.. it’s a great site. BUT, the recent article PDF Manuals: The Wrong Paradigm for an Online Experience, from my perspective is pretty much everything that’s wrong with Help today. Of course, I’d love to know what you think of my opinion.

Bad Help

The article is like bad help. It’s too long. It’s too dry. It has no narrative, and it’s written for the kind of people that like to read manuals. I’ll admit it, I’m one of them, but I’m aware I’m the small minority. The pictures are boring. It has no characters, story, or SEX to it. And it’s text, text text. The lack of any comments [edit: some comments have now been added] on the article makes me question how many read the full thing.

A Cultural Heritage

Meet Rupert. Rupert is computer programmer and writes Help files for Automated Teacups Inc. Rupert loves to read long bits of text. When he’s looking for something, he clearly knows what it is he is searching for, and how to describe it in a text form. His mind can unravel trees structures, and disclosure-triangle based maps with ease.. in fact he finds it easy to remember large maps of where stuff is in his head. He also doesn’t mind jumping around between chunks of text, because he always knows how to get back to where he was due to this innate and learned ability. 

It is these skills which lead him, and those like him into the computer industry in the first place. And inside this environment, these particular skills have strengthened. 

Rupert doesn’t understand why people simply don’t READ what he WROTE! Pictures don’t excite him as much as text. He choses usage examples like computer hardware or servers. His Help documents wouldn’t ever use “favourite puppy database” as an example.

Rupert has done a wonderful job. Without these minds, computers would never have got created and optimized in the first place. Now it’s time for the next step, to optimize for ‘average’ humans.

“HELP” should, and could be…

• Somewhat wiki-like
• Searchable images and video. With actual people in it
• Entertaining to browse.. to find out things you didn’t know you were looking for
• Much more integrated with the application itself* 
• Text-chat enabled
• Easy to keep above all other apps
• Easy to subscribe to
• Vastly easier for the creator to update, even if video/image heavy

I’m sorry Mike, but your article is dangerous, because it instills a feeling that Help is “almost there”. It’s not. 

* The earlier Mac OS’s Help would draw a thick red pen around the buttons you needed to click when explaining a particular topic

[NOTE: oops, comments were off. Now back on. ]