Lukas Mathis's Blog, page 17
June 11, 2012
Get my Book via Dropbox
My publisher, The Pragmatic Programmers, now offers a nifty new feature where you can get updates to ebooks delivered directly into your Dropbox. If you have a reader app with Dropbox support on your tablet or phone, this also means that you can get my book delivered to your device automatically.
This FAQ entry on pragprog.com explains how to set up Dropbox integration for your account.
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June 10, 2012
Back Button Placement
Reader James Chen asks:1
I’ve been trying to decide whether an iOS «Done» button would be more suitably placed at the top-left or top-right corner of the screen when it’s the only button in the navigation bar and used to close the current view.
Most apps tend to place the «Done» button on the right in this situation. Popular apps such as YouTube and Facebook, however, have also trained users to tap a «Done» button on the left to dismiss videos or photos (although in both of these cases, they are accompanied by another button on the right-hand side).
I think a good argument can be made for placing the «Done» button on the left when it’s being used to dismiss a view, since in these cases it’s effectively acting as a «Back», «Close», or «Cancel» button.
At first, I was inclined to agree with you, but then I spent some time looking at different Apple apps, and something occurred to me: apps often show both a «Back»2 and a «Done» button at the same time. For example, in Safari, when you open your bookmarks, you can go into folders and back out. But you can also hit «Done» to close the bookmark view entirely.
You can also see this in the Messages app, when you pick a photo from your camera roll: the «Back» button on the left is used to navigate, and the button on the right (in this case «Cancel») is used to close the modal view. Similarly, in an email app, you could use a modal view to edit your accounts; you would use «Back» to navigate between accounts, and «Done» to dismiss the «edit accounts» view.
This is reinforced using animations: if something slid in from the right (the user moved further into the currently visible information hierarchy), use «Back» (the button on the left) to move to the left. If something slid in from the bottom (a modal view), use «Done» (the button on the right) to have the currently visible sheet slide back down again. To the user, there’s a spatial system that conveys how screens are arranged, and which button should be used, depending on where she wants to go.
This is further complicated by applications that show a modal view that has both a «Cancel» and an action button (such as «OK» or «Send»). Apple’s HIG shows an example of a modal email composer with «Cancel» on the left and «Send» on the right.
Published with permission. 
By the way, Apple recommends against using the word «Back» as the actual label on the button.
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If you liked this, you'll love my book. It's called Designed for Use: Create Usable Interfaces for Applications and the Web. In it, I cover the whole design process, from user research and sketching to usability tests and A/B testing. But I don't just explain techniques, I also talk about concepts like discoverability, when and how to use animations, what we can learn from video games, and much more.
May 30, 2012
Is the "Like" Button Helpful?
In my previous site design I had a “Share this on Twitter” link at the bottom of every article. But as I watched and measured the use of that button I found that people were organically sharing my articles on Twitter at a ratio of 5-to-1 those who were clicking the “Tweet this” link.
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May 29, 2012
Like Buttons
Promising to make you look wired and magically promote your content in social networks, the Like, Retweet, and +1 buttons occupy a good spot on pretty much every page of the World Wide Web. Because of this, almost every major site and world brand is providing free advertising for Twitter and Facebook.
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May 9, 2012
EdgeCase
EdgeCase is a nifty new utility for the Mac. Tons of features on the Mac rely on Fitts’s law. Notably, the Mac makes good use of the «infinite width» provided by screen edges. These «infinite width» edges allow you to quickly access the menubar, reveal a hidden Dock, or slam your mouse into a screen corner to activate Mission Control, Exposé, or another feature.
This stops working reliably once you have more than one monitor. Now, the edge between the two screens disappears. Instead of hitting the edge, the mouse moves to the other screen. EdgeCase solves this problem. With EdgeCase, the edge returns, and works as if you only had one monitor.
To move your mouse to the other monitor, hold down ctrl or ⌘, wait for half a second, or «bounce» the cursor on the edge.1
Recommended.
This is also useful if you have a second monitor where you usually don’t want your mouse to go to at all, like a Wacom Cintiq.
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April 28, 2012
Chabudai Gaeshi
I learned countless things at Apple, but the most important skill I acquired was the ability to simply take a set of extremely polished designs—sometimes designs I’d easily consider to be the best I’d made in my life—and throw them away, trash them entirely, and start over. It’s where truly great design is born. Since my time at Apple I’ve done this many, many times, and it has always resulted in incredible progress. You have to learn to kill your babies, mercilessly. They’re just pixels. You can do better.
It’s interesting that Nintendo does the same thing. At Nintendo, it even has a name; it’s called «Chabudai Gaeshi» («Upending The Tea Table»).
Nintendo is known for delaying the release of its games. This is largely due to the perfectionist tendency of Miyamoto who would go as far as scrapping the entire development if he did not find a game up to his standard.
For example:
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time was supposed to be released immediately after the release of the Nintendo 64. Instead, Miyamoto, who was the producer, repeatedly ordered the game to be redone, resulting in numerous announcements of delays by Nintendo until the game’s eventual release on 11/21/1998.
It’s painful, hard, and often time-consuming to restart when you’re already done, but you can’t argue with the results. Both Apple and Nintendo create some of the best, most inspired design out there.
Completely redoing Ocarina of Time again and again and again may have been tough. But today, that game is widely considered to be one of the best and most influential videogames ever created.
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If you liked this, you'll love my book. It's called Designed for Use: Create Usable Interfaces for Applications and the Web. In it, I cover the whole design process, from user research and sketching to usability tests and A/B testing. But I don't just explain techniques, I also talk about concepts like discoverability, when and how to use animations, what we can learn from video games, and much more.
April 27, 2012
Gmail's New Buttons
Jono Xia, writing about the recent Gmail redesign:
But these icons are particularly bad. Again with the cult of minimalism: the icons are so streamlined and featureless that they all look the same: a row of meaningless, square, grey objects. When I want to mark something as spam, I used to be able to click the “spam” button. Now I have to mouse over each square grey object one at a time, looking for the one that pops up a “Report Spam” tooltip. (It’s the stop sign. Why a stop sign? I don’t know. Years of using GUIs have trained me to interpret a stop sign as an error message.)
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April 18, 2012
Twitter's "Innovator's Patent Agreement"
Marco Arment, writing about Twitter’s «Innovator’s Patent Agreement»:
A patented «invention», even when patented under these terms, is still patented. It’s not free for anyone to use, and willfully infringing upon it is still dangerous and unwise.
(…)
I didn’t patent [my] older inventions because I couldn’t afford to. I probably could have patented some of the newer ones, but I didn’t even look into it enough to do basic prior-art searches. I fundamentally disagree that software patents (and many other types of patents) are a net gain for society, and I can’t participate in that system in good conscience. That’s a stand that I’d like to see more companies adopt.
Agreed. I realize that Twitter might feel that they have no other choice than to get as many patents as possible. Given this, Twitter’s IPA is better than nothing. But it’s definitely not the solution to this mess.
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If you liked this, you'll love my book. It's called Designed for Use: Create Usable Interfaces for Applications and the Web. In it, I cover the whole design process, from user research and sketching to usability tests and A/B testing. But I don't just explain techniques, I also talk about concepts like discoverability, when and how to use animations, what we can learn from video games, and much more.
April 5, 2012
The Monochrome Trend
Literature & Latte's Keith Blount makes an important point about using color in user interface design:
As Joni Mitchell sang, you don't know what you've got till its gone (although in all fairness she was talking about trees rather than colours in icons, and I'd concede that trees might be a little more important). When Apple decided to drain the icons in these programs of their colour, I learned something about the way my brain works that I hadn't hitherto ever had to think about: my brain is an awful lot faster at processing colours than it is at processing shapes.
I've written about this in my book:
From a usability perspective, using color is beneficial. Colors make things easier to perceive. Our brains are really good at doing tasks such as "find the green icon on this screen." In [his book] Information Visualization, Colin Ware notes that color is "preattentively processed," meaning that we identify color before we give it conscious attention. In other words, when we look at a user interface, we can find and identify user interface elements with a specific color really quickly and easily.
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If you liked this, you'll love my book. It's called Designed for Use: Create Usable Interfaces for Applications and the Web. In it, I cover the whole design process, from user research and sketching to usability tests and A/B testing. But I don't just explain techniques, I also talk about concepts like discoverability, when and how to use animations, what we can learn from video games, and much more.
March 29, 2012
Simple Ideas
Simple ideas like this will naturally occur to many people. A small percentage of those will have the ability to execute on them. A small percentage of those will then actually do so. And an even smaller group will combine it with an otherwise interesting product, thus making it into something.
People often assume that ideas are where value is created. In reality, ideas (even non-simple ones) are plentiful, easy, and often generated by more than one person at the same time. Ideas are essentially worthless. Value is only created when people actually make stuff.
See also: patents (which protect the worthless part of this equation, and thus make it harder to do the truly valuable part).
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If you liked this, you'll love my book. It's called Designed for Use: Create Usable Interfaces for Applications and the Web. In it, I cover the whole design process, from user research and sketching to usability tests and A/B testing. But I don't just explain techniques, I also talk about concepts like discoverability, when and how to use animations, what we can learn from video games, and much more.
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