Design Fun

One of the great things about the web is the relative ease with which one can set up a new service. In social bookmarking alone with have Del.icio.us, Digg, Facebook, Fark, Mister-Wong, Newsvine, Reddit, Technorati, Slashdot, and StumbleUpon, to name a few. That’s great for competition, and that’s great for users, but it’s not so good for bloggers and content creators.

What are you to do if you want readers to promote your content? Kevin Rose, of Digg, put it succinctly: “Encourage your visitors to submit their favorite stories directly to Digg [with a Digg badge].” Not everyone uses Digg. You have to decide on which bookmarking site, if any, to dedicate your precious screen real-estate. It’s a hard choice. If you choose poorly your reader won’t vote—it’s not a single click coupled and out-of-sight means out-of-mind—and your content losses its chance to make it big. You have to choose your horse wisely.

Read the rest of the post for a way to figure out which social bookmarking sites visitors use, on a per-visitor basis. JS library included.

Design Our Products

As usual, our readers delighted us with the number of well-thought-out comments about our recent release of the Enso 2.0 prototype. We’ve posted a new version of the prototype here, with several bug fixes and some tweaks to the visuals of the new argument-input box. If you found the previous prototype to be crashing too much to seriously consider, please try again; the new one should be more stable.

Continue reading »

Design Our Products Software Development

As part of the our move to Mozilla and thinking about a free-as-in-speech Enso, I want to be more transparent with our design directions and goals. Our designs can only benefit by incorporating the criticism and suggestions of the community we have here. Open-source design is a balancing act between making final decisions and finding consensus. We hope to take the lessons that Jono spelled out in his excellent article on successfully humane open-source projects and use them in our own projects.

This post is about the new directions we are taking Enso. If you haven’t done so yet, start by reading about some of the motivations for doing some Enso redesign. In short:

• Enso shouldn’t make you type all of “open” every time
• Enso should be able to open paths and urls
• Enso should support international character input
• Enso should gracefully handle the case where there’s no convenient place to enter text
• Enso shouldn’t require you to type out text, select it, and then run a command when you’d rather run the command and then enter the text (think calculate)
• Enso shouldn’t make you hold down a key while typing lots of characters

We think we’ve solved these problems with our Enso 2.0 redesign. In this post, and possible follow on posts, I’ll walk through the new stuff. I should note that our upcoming prototype will not yet have have all of the features mentioned here.

Continue reading »

Design Our Products

Last month we added an “about songza” page to Songza. It’s a simple page — just a couple headers, some text, and a return-to-Songza link. I thought I’d a walk through my thought process in through-designing this tiny feature. It’s not quite as simple as it first appears.

The first question is whether to have the about content be on a separate page, or as lightbox/hidden-div content on the main page. I was tempted by the second option; there is a seduction to having Songza exists on only one page. On the other hand, that solution isn’t particularly scalable — Songza has already added other pages similar to the about page, how would they all interact? And how do you keep the load-time reasonable as more and more content is added? — More importantly, the content is not linkable or search-able. Using clever Ajaxy tricks means that the visibility of the content is dependent on application state.

It’s clear that the about page should be, in fact, a separate page. That leaves us with a glaring usability problem. Do you see it? It’s bad enough that I would be wary of clicking links while listing to songs if I ever got bitten by the problem.

Continue reading »

Design UI Design Fundamentals

The growth in popularity of digital cameras has brought along with it a heightened interest in image editing software. Everybody knows Photoshop, but noteverybody can afford it. Enter the free Web apps! Recently one of our readers directed our attention to the edit imaging site splashup.com.

Our thoughts are below.

Continue reading »

Design Our Products

Okay, so for all of the Quicksilver enthusiasts out there: Yes, we know about Quicksilver. And, no, we didn’t steal our ideas for Enso from Quicksilver. Enso is based on Jef Raskin’s command quasimode, an idea that has been around for years. As Quicksilver’s creators will tell you, Raskin’s ideas formed part of the inspirational basis of Quicksilver’s current design.

If you’re familiar with Quicksilver, you know roughly what Enso Launcher can do. And if you’re stuck using Windows, you may be surprised by the new things Enso offers.

Continue reading »

Design UI Design Fundamentals

Social networking site twitter.com has created quite the splash this year. Millions of people worldwide have answered the question, “What are you doing right now?,” millions of times, all for the amusement of and desire to connect with friends, family members, and complete strangers. You can Twitter just on your computer, or you can take it mobile and use the service on your cell phone. Twitter pithy messages that tell your pals where you are, what you’re doing, or what you’re experiencing, or simply use it to find someone at a party. What do the Humanoids think about Twitter? Find out below.

Continue reading »

Design UI Design Fundamentals

BeFunky.com, another of this year’s TechCrunch40 winners, is a private beta site that enables you to create “funky ways to express yourself.” If you have some time to kill, create a personal avatar of yourself dressed in plainclothes, or get fanciful and use one of the the costume options to turn yourself into a beer maid (as Lauri has done), superhero or other fantasy character. You can even give yourself a Burmese or Persian cat, or add a celebrity such as Woody Allen. Because it’s still in beta phase, you have to request an invitation to use BeFunky. Don’t worry — the process is painless and quick. But is it worth the effort to register? Read on.

Continue reading »

Design UI Design Fundamentals

ThinkFree.com, an online office suite poised to rival Microsoft and other free options such as google docs, claims to be “the best online office on earth.” Its free version offers 1GB of storage, as well as a document viewer and online document collaboration, all within an interface that essentially duplicates that of Microsoft Office. ThinkFree applications Write, Calc and Show use the same formats as Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Some people like ThinkFree’s extreme similarity to the tried-and-true Microsoft suite; Computerworld raved about it in a recent review. But while imitation may be the most sincere form of flattery, does it result in better, more humane interfaces? Read below and find out.

Continue reading »

Design UI Design Fundamentals

Ever wanted a quick, convenient way to monitor your spending habits? Mint.com, a free, online money management tool, allows you to do just that. Connected to over 3,500 US financial institutions, Mint updates your account information nightly, and automatically categorizes all of your purchases so that you can track how much your Starbucks habit is costing you. Last month, Mint was featured as one of the TechCrunch40 showcase of start-ups; reports say that new features will be added next week. So, is it awesome, or what? Read on.

Continue reading »

Design UI Design Fundamentals

Today the Humanoids review Trymango.com — a Flash-powered language learning course currently available for free as a beta product. Mango offers nine courses for English speakers, as well as English courses for Spanish and for Polish speakers. After typing your email address and logging in, choose a language from the scroll-down menu and begin learning. Is Mango an effective learning tool? Read and find out.

Continue reading »

Design UI Design Fundamentals

Today the Humanoids review flashearth.com: a Web app that uses satellite and aerial imagery from Yahoo, Google and other Websites to enable you to view the world’s surface from the comfort of your easy chair or desk. If you’ve ever wondered what the Sahara, your childhood home, Chicago, or any other destination looks like from the skies, use flashearth.com and find out. Here’s what we have to say on this app’s UI:

Continue reading »

Commentary Design

This is Humanized’s first “Interface of the Day” weblog posting. Every week, from Monday through Friday, the six of us will share our thoughts on a new example of interface design. For our first “victim,” we’ve chosen dontclick.it, an interface that attempts to completely eliminate the “click” from your usage of the mouse. Dontclick.it’s authors assert that their project improves “total control and quickness” while challenging existing norms and beliefs regarding user interfaces. Is it successful? Read below to find out!

Continue reading »

Design Software Development UI Design Fundamentals

As users, we make mistakes. As designers, we need to design with mistakes in mind, as I argued in my recent article, Never Use a Warning When You Mean Undo. Undo is the ultimate safety net, lending an incredible sense of solidity to an interface. That’s why every desktop application from Word to Photoshop provides multiple-level Undo.

So, then, why are Web apps that provide any sort of Undo so few and far between? The answer I often get is that Undo is hard to implement. I’m here to tell you that it is not.

In this series of blog posts, my goal is to explain just how easy it is to provide Undo functionality. Recently, I gave a preliminary version of this post in a workshop. After giving the front-facing demo of how Undo could work, the audience moved slightly towards the edge of their seats (it’s all you can hope for in the post-lunch session). When I opened the source code and started showing how I implemented undo, the universal response was, “Why are you bothering to explain this implementation? It’s barely anything at all. We’re software engineers. This is easy.”

That’s my point!

Adding Undo to your interfaces profoundly and positively affects the usability of your site. It reduces user frustration, and increases user trust. Both of those outcomes mean that more users continue coming back, which helps your bottom line. Remember: To the user, the interface is the product.

Continue reading »

Design

Iterative design isn’t design by trial and error. Iterative design is a process of continually improving not just the design, but also the problem your design is trying to solve.

Coming up with a solution is often the most straightforward part of the design process. That isn’t to say that creating the solution is easy, or doesn’t require a deep knowledge and honed skill set. It’s just to say that when you have a set of requirements and a well defined problem, you know where you stand and where you have to get to. It’s mostly straightforward. Much harder is the implicit problem of figuring out exactly what the problem is in the first place. If the problem is vague or ill-defined, the design solution will be too.

Continue reading »