Aikido and the dissolution of touching taboos
May 26, 2004 | CommentsWe shape our tools...
May 25, 2004 | CommentsWhen I first moved my weblog over to MovableType from Radio Userland, I wondered what difference a new tool would make. Nearly 6 months on, I think I know.
I find the MT interface great for working up longer, more serious posts which (when I can spend the time) are edited several times before publication and which have more of a structured feel to them. But I missed the "whack-it-into-a-text-field-and-post" feel which Radio used to give me, and I think that consequently this weblog has suffered a little bit.
I think there are 2 things at play here: the way that MT structures posts (with bodies, titles, and a primary category), and the user interface on the tool I use (the lovely NetNewsWire). With MT, I feel obligated to give each piece a title and find a category for it; with Radio I felt less guilty about squirting a bit of text out here and there. And given that my time is short, and many of my thoughts only half-formed... I quite liked the Radio way of doing things.
None of the above is a complaint about any of the excellent software which I now use, just an observation that different weblogging tools may naturally lead to different sorts of weblogs... bloody obvious really I s'pose.
Anyway, I'm going to try and Radiofy my writing, posting less, but more often, and see how that goes.
Tomorrow is Towel Day
May 25, 2004 | CommentsTalking of design...
May 25, 2004 | CommentsTalking of design... has anyone else noticed that working on web site design leaves a whole bundle of preconceptions lying around your head?
I've noticed on a few projects recently (mobile ones, of course) that we, or the people we've been working with, have thought of designing flows and architecture in terms of "site maps" (actually using that phrase). Whilst what you might end up with might superficially resemble a map of a web site, in fact this brings in a whole load of assumptions (e.g. navigation links on each page, "breadcrumb" trails, a "home" link, "back" links) which might be valid for a mobile application... but needn't be.
Mobile applications don't have "site maps". For complex applications (e.g. a complete handset UI) then a single piece of paper mapping out a hierarchical organisation of information just won't cut it. For simple applications, why do we insist on building such maps? By doing so, aren't we implicitly asking the end-user to build a similar model in their heads, and navigate around it (remembering all the time "where they are" in the application)?
Interaction design for mobiles is IMHO more like appliance design than web, or even application, design. Focus on core tasks, simplicity, and elegance... try to avoid forcing the end-user to think more about interfaces than getting the job done.
Mr Coates spits out some pointers on improving design
May 25, 2004 | CommentsMr Coates spits out some pointers on improving design. He really should write that stuff up some time.
Number 4 is particularly interesting to me: much of the work we've been doing this year has been on prototypes or proof-of-concepts, and the value of having something in the palm of your hand, which you can ask real people (as opposed to industry folk) to interact with, makes it well worth doing.... particularly for mobile, I feel, where it's difficult to visualise exactly how an application will "feel".