A few weeks ago Microsoft released a video showcasing their idea of what the future of technology might look like. Some weeks later, Bret Victor wrote a rant about how unimaginative Microsoft’s vision is. The thrust of his argument is that the ubiquitous touchscreens depicted in the video are uninventive because it disregards the most fundamental and powerful tool known to man: our hands. He explains that the physical interfaces of today don’t take advantage of our hands’ ability to both feel and manipulate things.

All this talk about hands and feeling and manipulation got me thinking. Given the current state and inertia of technology, it should be our foremost goal to make our interfaces feel good.

Feeling is often the indescribable property that separates a good interface from a great one. It’s the gap between the pixels and your finger (or mouse, by extension). You hear people mention this all the time when talking about software; “I don’t know, it just feels good”. Of course they’re not actually talking about how it feels, they’re talking about how their brain perceives it would feel if it were a physical interface. They’re talking about how well it responds to their input.

Without tactile feedback, as is the case when using a touchscreen or navigating a mouse cursor around a screen, our brain can’t depend on our hands and instead relies on our eyes to proxy visual feedback. We use this information on a subconsious level to confirm our last action and plan our next one. How an interface feels is the fidelity of the visual feedback to how our brain predicts it should feel.

It’s easy to see how important visual feedback becomes to the user experience in the absense of tactile feedback. It explains why skeuomorphism has prevailed as a common user interface design approach: it’s comforting to us as users when what we see and feel in the virtual world matches our perception of the physical world. This is why buttons often look like buttons and calendars often looks like calendars.

But how an interface feels goes deeper than the pixels on the screen; it’s all about trust. As an interface designer, you enter a contract with your users. Your design implicitly guarantees the user: “When you click X, the software will do Y”. It’s the job of your interface to back this guarantee by providing the feedback necessary for the user to feel assured you kept your end of the bargain. The gap between what your UI promised and what was delivered is received by the user as negative feeling. We’ve all experienced it, that brief moment of cognitive dissonance when you beckon the software to do one thing and it appears to do something different, or worse, nothing. That’s broken trust.

I have long preached that every clickable element (links, buttons, etc) deserves at least three states: idle, hover and click. I also encourage additional states for active-hover and active-click, but they are less necessary. Even novice designers know to make the idle state of their links obvious, but it’s surprising how many neglect to provide the user proper hover and click states. The hover state signifies that the element is clickable at this moment and the click state confirms that the element was clicked, both of which are crucial to keeping up your end of the UI contract.

The very best user interfaces are those that have a two-way conversation with the user, with equal transmission amplitude from both parties. When the visual feedback provided by your interface falls short of what the user expected, you’ve subconsciously broken their trust and left them with an indescribable feeling of doubt.

For all of my three years at Imulus, I have always known the joy that is Stacks. I’ve seen it as a glimmer in George’s eye to the project management powerhouse it is today. Recently (or not so recently) I have taken on the arduous task of… planning a wedding (cue ominous music and lightning). Knowing my typical knee-jerk reaction to procrastinate and then forgetting what I needed to do in the first place, I opted to use Stacks for personal use.

The Good

Like so many brides-to-be before me, I have been using The Knot to stay on track with my wedding to-dos. The Knot does a fantastic job of divvying out to-do’s based on your time-line. Unfortunately because there have been so many brides-to-be who enjoy the usage of this site, it has become bloated with ads, banners, links, animated gifs, you call it, they have it. Furthermore, sometimes the to-do’s don’t apply to me (i.e. no videographer).

So instead of digging around in the links and ads of The Knot, my “wedding planner” populates Stacks with the to-dos. This is helpful when there are tasks specific to the bride or groom or maid of honor etc. Furthermore, if the to-do has any other information, I can add notes in the details and I can adjust the urgency of each task.

The Bad

I mentioned my procrastination, right? It’s a wonder I completed this blog at all. Anyway, one problem I encountered is that unlike my thorough use of Stacks at work, I have a tendency to ignore tasks in my wedding stack list. Because each task is something I need to complete by the end of the month, I usually ignore it till I get nagged about it. Sort of defeats the purpose of Stacks. However, I chalk that up to user error.

Another problem I encountered is my wedding planner is no project manager. Each month a task dump occurs and each task isn’t carefully scoped out giving it the correct due date, actionable date and details within the task. Stacks isn’t utilized to it’s full potential. It becomes a to-do checklist for whenever I get around to it.

The Conclusion

Being the sexy app that it is, Stacks is an extremely powerful project management tool. I’m glad I have the opportunity to use it for my wedding so I don’t have a random freak out that I am forgetting to do something. However, it is becoming a glorified to-do list. There is nothing wrong with this, I just know what Stacks is really capable of. So thanks, Stacks, for helping remind this procrastinator that she is continuing to procrastinate, but will get around to it eventually.

Before I dive into this review, you should probably have some background information. First of all, as the title suggests, I am a graphic designer for a web design company. I spend 90% of my time on Adobe Creative Suite programs (most of that time is dedicated to Photoshop). Second of all, I am a female. This piece of information applies to this review because as a woman, I am genetically predisposed to have smaller hands than (most) men. Lastly, I have run through the gambit of Apple mouses since 2004. That being said, lets get started, shall we?

The good:

1. The size. I love the way this thing conforms to my hand. So much so, I feel like all other mouses feel too large and clumsy. I have read reviews where people have claimed this mouse is too small and light. I have not had this problem – however as stated previously, I have normal sized hands for a 5′8″ female which means they’re relatively small.

2. The scrolling. The predecessor to my Magic Mouse was of course the Mighty Mouse. One of the main problems I would have with the 360 scroll ball on the Mighty Mouse was it would become gritty and would stop being functional. This could always be cured by holding it upside-down and puffing can o’ air into the recesses of the 360 ball. Obviously this problem is cured by Magic Mouse. Please note – being a control freak while using Photoshop, I turned off the momentum scroll. I have been told this is a nice feature, but I can’t say that from personal experience.

3. The right-click. Although the right click is functional with the Mighty Mouse (as long as that is specified in the system preferences), I feel like the Magic Mouse’s right-click is more responsive and intuitive.

The bad:

1. The sensitivity. This is a double-edged sword. Sure, it’s nice when you WANT to scroll, but when you don’t it’s a pain. This rears it’s ugly head often when I am using Photoshop. An example of this is when I have the color picker window open. Notice on the screen shot the field next to the “R” (meaning red) is highlighted; this happens by default when one opens this color picker window. What happens when this field is highlighted is the scroll functionality on your mouse can easily add and subtract the color red. Many times I have barely brushed the top of the mouse and it will change my selected color without my consent. There is no clear area on your mouse where the scroll sensitivity begins, so just laying your hand on the top of the mouse can create a scroll with any slight movement.

2. The two finger swipe. This also goes back to the sensitivity problem. I had to turn this option off after I was working on code in our CMS and my fingers brushed the top of the mouse. The mouse somehow gleaned from this that I wanted to go back to the previous page in my browser, and thus losing all of the work I had just completed.

The conclusion:

After turning off the two finger swipe functionality, life has been easier along with learning how to deal with the problems in Photoshop. I haven’t yet ditched this mouse for the older Mighty Mouse (which is still in my possession), but that’s only after adapting to its downfalls. Basically my conclusion to this review is I would NOT recommend this product to a Graphic Designer, but I would recommend it to people who don’t use Adobe Creative Suite.

In the Beginning

When I first started using Mac OS X in college I fell in love with the Safari web browser. It was light weight, sexy, and fast. Unfortunately, the more I ramped into complex web development the more I realized Safari’s severe developer limitations. Back then developers had to enter terminal commands to even gain access to Safari’s developer menu. And, once turned on, the developer menu lacked the oomph of Firefox’s flourishing Firebug and Web Developer Toolbar extensions.

Since that day I’ve been using Firefox heavily for development and only occasionally jumping into Safari to test site feel and functionality.

Then, about a year ago, Safari started making real steps to support web developers. The release of Safari 4 earlier this year capitalized a nice upswing in Safari developer improvements. But, unfortunately, Safari still lacks some of the most basic development capability.

In my opinion, if Safari doesn’t address the following three issues, it will never become a viable competitor to Firefox for developers.

Source View Made for the 80’s

Any time your browser’s source code view renders like Internet Explorer’s you really need to sit down think things over. Is this acceptable, am I being an asshole? The answer, obviously, is yes.

Let Me View Background Images!

The web is no longer a mass of tables and img tags. Thanks to CSS we’ve started abstracting background effects from real content. Knowing this, there is absolutely no reason why Safari shouldn’t have a view background image option. Safari, do you really expect me to right click, inspect element, and then track down the CSS that links to that background image? Give me a break.

Target HTML Elements Faster

The best thing about the Web Developer Toolbar extension for Firefox is that you can hit cmd-shift-y and instantly view HTML elements. This is perfect if you’re trying to track down a styling issue or remember an ID name. It’s fast, easy, and accurate. Safari’s right click > inspect element isn’t even in the same ballpark as this. And, as hard as I’ve tried, there’s no way to reassign the Inspect Element shortcut in OS X.

Conclusion

Safari, you’re a great consumer browser. And yes, WebKit is a phenomenal web rendering engine. Hell, even Google loves you. Please, just fix these small problems and I’ll switch to you full-time, I promise! Until then, I’m going to continue buying FireFox t-shirts.

It’s amazing how many times we overlook the importance of usability with objects we encounter on a daily basis. Take for instance, coins. This seemingly simple object has basic usability elements which should be considered during the design process:

1. Weight. It makes no sense to carry a coins which are heavy and are burdensome to transport in a pocket.
2. Size. They need to be small enough so that many of them can fit into a pocket, yet large enough to be easily read.
3. Material. Should be durable enough to resist wear and tear, yet not expensive to massively reproduce.
4. Art. A good coin should say something about the country and the culture it comes from.

I’d also argue there is a 5th trait which somehow seems to be lost in a survey of coins. Accessibility.

Let’s look at American coins.

There is zero logic to the corresponding value of the coin and the size. But most importantly it lacks any numeric representation. A foreigner using American coins needs to either recognize the coin or read the English text to interpret it’s value. Compare this with the Euro, which clearly denotes the value of each piece.

From an accessibility standpoint, American coins are unfriendly. They lack the universal visual data to quickly understand the value of each piece. Since we’re undergoing all this “change” lately, why don’t we just take a moment to revamp all our coins as well. Let’s make a Yankee version of the Euro.