Design Sapling.com

Grab your cellphone if it has a camera.
Take a picture of your location after you park.
Especially useful in multi-level garages.

I recently took a course on design communication at Cooper. Cooper is an interaction design firm. The founder, Alan Cooper, is one of the godfathers of interaction design.
Adobe TV has a video showcasing Cooper’s use of Fireworks. It’s a good introduction to the type of work an interaction designer might do after performing user research and developing a solid framework for the product.

I would consider interaction design to be a large sub-field of human factors. Lately, there has been a debate among some prominent interaction designers on the Interaction Design Association discussion board concerning the usefulness of UCD. In particular, the usefulness of observing users, developing personas, and using those personas to guide a design has been challenged by Robert Hoekman Jr., author of Designing the Obvious and Designing the Moment which advocate an alternative approach to Interaction Design called activity centered design.

Personas are a central part of Goal-Directed Design, a UCD process developed by Alan Cooper. Hoekman claims that, while personas may be good for understanding a niche market, it’s hard to apply that to something made for everyone. This is a valid point. The
creation of personas takes into account work environment, social factors, and personal preferences. There’s no common ground on those topics for the mass market. The solution is a process developed by Don Norman called Activity-Centered Design (ACD). Norman and Hoekman both claim that people adapt to technology, citing evidence found in our daily lives: using clocks, remote controls, musical instruments, etc… None of that is natural, and yet we learn how to use it without trouble.

Activity-Centered Design focuses on “activities”, which are comprised of tasks. Tasks are comprised of actions, and actions are comprised of operations. Norman’s uses a cellphone as an example in his article Human-Centered Design Harmful?. A cellphone can do many functions, such as email, voice, SMS, calendar, camera, etc… The “activity” for a cellphone would be communication. The tasks would be checking email or dialing a number. He then contends that the difference between Human-Centered Design (HCD) and ACD is that HCD only sees the opportunity for
technology to adapt to people while ACD sees the potential for people to adapt to technology. With ACD, products are designed to allow people to easily adapt to the technology.

Reading through many discussion on the Interaction Design Association discussion forum, I conclude that each method has its purpose depending on the situation. It’s better to gather many techniques from different methodologies than it is to choose one and stick to it dogmatically.

A short follow-up to the To Do list article.
Cooper (an interaction design firm) has some interesting ideas on email in-boxes.

Word is the standard word processor. The Office 2007 ribbon makes it even easier. Check out the ribbon story.

Is there a better way to create your documents? Maybe…or maybe just a different way.
Check out LaTeX and Lyx, two interesting alternative (and free) word processors that let you build your documents the way you build your webpages: separating logical structure from formatting.

There’s a new browser out called Blackbird. It’s very similar to Firefox with some additions, such as search results will tend to come more from Black American sources and it includes built-in social networking features.

There’s been some controversy. Some people claim it’s racist.
I don’t agree, I see it as an interesting way of connecting people to African American culture. I don’t know if it does that effectively or not.
However, anyone is free to download it and use it, so I doesn’t seem discriminatory.
There are already other social networking browsers out there. Blackbird connects a group sharing a culture together.

Could we have a Whitebird browser? There’s not really a white subculture. I could see a DixieBird though.

The developers were smart in making it a stand alone browser instead of just a Firefox plug-in or a website.
It’s more buzz worthy. It’s a more powerful vehicle for spreading the message. Could it have been done with a website? Absolutely. Those websites already exist, but I’ve never heard of them.

My favorite feature is the “Give Back” button, which takes you to a site where you can discover volunteer opportunies for many different causes.

Trouble keeping yourself organized?

A new system may seem great at first, but one day you realize that you haven’t used it in weeks.

These have been my excuses:

• Forgetting about it. Web app? Calendar program? Out of sight, out of mind.
• Too lazy to write it down. Sometimes, it’s not convenient to stop what I’m doing to add something. When I’m in the flow of work, that’s where I like to stay.
• The INBOX is already a To Do list in itself. Nobody wants to keep track of multiple lists.

Here’s a system that hasn’t let me down.
It uses Gmail, the GTD plug-in for Firefox, and optionally, Google Calendar.

Here’s what you do:

1. Get all your email from one place
   If you don’t have one, start a Gmail account. You can have Gmail check your accounts for you. Your other accounts messages will be labeled as coming from your other account. Any replies you send can be sent from Gmail, but the recipient will see you other email account, so nobody has to learn a new email address. This alone can save you lots of time.

   Worried about keeping work mail separate from personal mail? It’s under control. With a single click, you can view all the messages from your work email account without seeing any of your personal messages.

2. Use Firefox
   Since you’re using Gmail now, you’ll be using a browser to check your email. That means you can check your mail from anywhere that has internet access without worrying about setting up an email client.
3. Install a Firefox add-on that you can forget about.
   Now, we’ll convert your Gmail into a To-Do list by installing the GTD add-on. This will add-on will add new features to Gmail that make it easy manage tasks. It uses Gmail’s label feature heavily. Use labels to tag messages as Work items or Home items, tag them as a messages regarding a specific project, as references, or however you see fit. Email messages can be labeled with many different labels at once, so you can label it both Work and a specific project. Label a single message with as many labels as you see fit.

   You’ll also label every message as either “Action”, “Next Action”, “Someday”, etc… These labels tell you how urgent a task is. Learn more from the GTD walk through once you install the program.
   
   One-click viewing of Work To Do or Home To Do
   Use Gmail’s QuickView feature to create one-click access to certain labels. For instance, if I want to have one click access to messages labeled “Home” and also labeled “Action” or “Next Action”, I just do a search for “label:Home (label:Action | label:Next-Action)”. Create a new QuickView (you may have to turn on QuickView in settings) and use that search string as the input. I name the QuickView “Home To Do”. Now I just click “Home To Do” in the Gmail sidebar, and everything I want to do after work that day pops up.

4. Add your calendar into Gmail
   If you don’t want to use Google Calendar, you can stop at the GTD add-on. Using your INBOX as your one and only To Do list eliminates most of the problems that keep you from sticking a scheduling system. However if you want to visually represent those items hour-by-hour, Google Calendar is your best bet.
   • Automatically add upcoming calendar events to your To Do list
     Google Calendar can automatically email you notifications about upcoming events. You can setup a Gmail filter that automatically applies appropriate labels to that email based on the calendar that sent it. (You can have multiple calendars in Google Calendars: One for work events, one for leisure, etc…). Since those Gmail labels define you different To Do lists, you only have to add your events to Calendar once and you can forget about it! It’ll automatically be added to your To Do list when that date comes around!
   • Web-based.You can view it anywhere with internet access.
   • Keep using your old calendar.You can link Google calendars with Outlook or iCal. Keep using your old calendar program, but see the tasks in Google Calendar as well.
   • Email yourself new eventsJust like you can add new tasks to yourself when you use Gmail as your To Do list, you can add new events to Google Calendar with email.
   • See you calendar in GmailGoogle provides you with an option to have a mini calendar, complete with a color coded list of upcoming calendar events, display directly in the side bar of Gmail. (You will have to turn this option on. Go to Gmail Setting, click Labs, and scroll down to find it. Enable it and it’s done!)

What does this mean? Your Gmail window can be your To Do list, and any upcoming events in your calendar can be added to your that do list, all in one web page, accessible from anywhere in the world, whether it’s for work, for home, freelance jobs, or anything else. You can keep using all your old systems if you want (although, I don’t know why you’d need to).

I don’t mean to promote Google too much. There are lots of good systems out there that work fine. I’ve tried some that I’ve liked, but I always find myself not sticking with them. Using Gmail, Google Calendar, and the Firefox GTD add-on, everything I need is in a place that I already check at least once a day, my email. I can’t forget about my To Do list.

The result? I’m getting more done in less time. Accidentally waiting until the last minute to do something because I forgot about it is a thing of the past. As soon as I get an email, I use GTD to help me label it and add it to my list. If it’s a personal email, I read it an archive it or a label it “Home” and check all my “Home” messages after work. My INBOX is clean. I can easily check my schedule.
You can even use your cellphone to text Google Calendar and it will send you back upcoming events. It doesn’t get much more convenient.

“Instant Win: Not an instant winner.”

This is what a Subway Scrabble game piece says if you don’t win. Get’s your hopes up, then immediately shoots them down.

New and Interesting Online Interactions
280 Slides. It’s beautiful, free, and very useful. An amazing online slideshow maker.

Swype. Take a look at an interesting new way to type on touch screens.

Five Second Test. For UI designers, understanding a users first impression is important. A 5 second test is a usability exercise where you show your interface design for just five seconds and then ask the viewer to describe what they saw. This website makes getting first impression very easy. Make it a part of your design toolbox if you make software or webpages.

Adobe CS4 Product Info. An interesting feature from Adobe’s CS4 product page. Roll over a product name in any of the 4 software bundles, and the same product is highlighted in the other 3 bundles. Makes it easier to compare bundles and decide which is right for you.

Did you know?
Pressing the Alt key in MS Office 2007 software will superimpose the hotkeys used with Alt onto the interface. Now it’s easy even for novices to speed up their workflow and stop using the mouse.

Other Interesting Things
DaPino Colada. Beautiful, free vector images from some talented designers in the Neatherlands.

Konica Minolta: Museum of Beauty. I found this presentation compelling. A virtual tour of the Venus de Milo, one of the world’s most famous sculptures, with insights about how it was made and what it may have looked like if the missing pieces were put in place.

Edit — Link was down last time I checked.

Google recently released it’s browser, Chrome, in beta for Windows.

Evidently, Mozilla is not worried. Google funds the majority of Mozillas expenses in return for a default Google homepage and search engine in Firefox.

The UI is innovative and well done, including a feature similar to the Speed Dial found in Opera (also a a great Firefox extension). More profound is it’s more secure and efficient JavaScript engine. A little more competition in the browser market is great. Firefox may take a small hit, but Google recently renewed their deal with Mozilla until 2011, so no financial worries for a few years. Anything to either reduce IE market share or force Microsoft to fix their browser is progress. I bet Chrome will push many browsers developers to be a bit more innovative, including Opera and Mozilla.

Web developers should be aware that Chrome’s rendering engine is Webkit, the same as Apple’s Safari. Any page that doesn’t render correctly in Safari will look the same in Chrome, so know may be the time to fix those rendering bugs. Chrome is advertised right on the Google search page, so expect a lot of people to start using it.

To learn more about Chrome, check out Google’s Chrome comic by Scott McCloud.

Short post today! Firefox 3 is now official. Go download it! There are some nice new features that I’m sure you’ll learn on your own.

Read on for my favorite change.

In Firefox 2, after you typed your username and password into a site, a Firefox pop-up dialogue box appears asking if you’d like to save the password for next time. You can choose “Yes”, “Never for this site”, or “Not Now”. The web page won’t load unless you respond to the pop-up. Since I am hardly ever sure if I used the right password, I usually choose “Not Now”, so that I won’t accidentally save the wrong password.

Firefox 3 asks you the same question, except instead of an obtrusive pop-up, it uses an attractive drop-down dialogue bar right under the menu bar. The page continues to load even if you don’t respond Why is this so great? Now I can wait to see if the site accepted my password. Once I see that I used the right password, I click “Yes”. Firefox will no longer save an accidentally mistyped password!

A small change, but much more usable!

P.S. I haven’t posted in a while because I’ve been helping shoot a movie (!), have been trying to reorganize my office at work, just got a tablet PC (it’s used, but it’s awesome!), been moving a lot of furniture into my apartment, and I’ve adopted a new exercise regimen.)