“The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.” — Bertrand Russell. Dunning–Kruger effect - Wikipedia (via giantrobotlasers)
Sketch templates and other resources for wireframing -
I spent a couple of hours at work yesterday, preparing some templates of my own. Those two hours are now considered wasted :)
25 User Experience Videos That Are Worth Your Time
Have you seen those fancy cooktops with touch controls? Here’s what they look like:
My parents recently moved, and in their new house the kitchen stove has one of these. They look nice and everything, but try using them. It’s hell! See those tiny icons along the bottom? You touch them to increase or decrease the heat. You typically get some kind of audio feedback when interacting with them. The problem is that on many of these cooktops, to set the heat to maximum, you need to touch one of these icons ten times, and they all have an awkward delay in them (supposedly there to make sure you don’t accidentally turn on the heat when you didn’t mean to), so that you need to wait about half a second before touching again. This delay and the small size of the icons, together with the lack of tactile feedback, also makes it really hard to be sure if you managed to touch the icons properly, or if you need to try again. The whole experience turns into one of frustration.
Whoever made these touch cooktops the new cool thing should think again. It’s amazingly stupid that people even try to redesign the way you interact with kitchen stoves. Kitchen stoves have worked the same way for a hundred years — four knobs that turn either way. Simple, learnable and efficient. And very familiar. Is there a problem with the good old knobs that these touch controls actually solve? If so, please inform me.
I’m sure this is far from new for some of you, but these 12 lectures on justice, equality, morality and more gave me a lot of good insights. Very much worth checking out.
Gruber rightfully bashes Blodget’s thoughts on Apple’s past and presumed future failures, and I have some thoughts on this.
What people like Blodget so often fail to recognize is that, back in the 80’s, Apple was incredibly ahead of its time. With the Mac, Apple created a product that would sell solely because of its vastly superior usability. Their whole sales argument was a user experience and an ease of use that was supposed to be better than anyone else could provide in computers at the time. It was the computer for the rest of us. And that was because of the innovative software and UI shipped with it.
I think the problem for Apple, back then, was the immaturity of the industry and the users. Selling a computer based on its ease of use was difficult because most people was unable to distinguish between good and poor quality. Likewise, the industry, while it probably saw its relevance, didn’t see the overall importance of it. Think about it. If you only have one tool with which to achieve an important goal, and don’t know about anything else you could do or use to achieve that goal, would you be unhappy with that tool? A taste for something doesn’t easily develop in the absence of options. And when the first option is very different from the original, would you immediately see its benefits? Today, however, we have all seen and experienced a lot of different options.
Another, more recent change that suits Apple well is that up until quite recently, computers, mobile phones and other hardware sold pretty much based on their hardware features, i.e. speed and whether they had a built in FM radio. Software was taken for granted. During the last 10 years or so, hardware features have become increasingly irrelevant, to a large extent due to innovations in software and usability. Today, software, and what you can do with it, is a more powerful sales argument than how many GHz the processor does. “You can easily make your own music” is better than “it has a SoundBlaster 32 sound card”.
I would argue that selling computers and cellphones based on their hardware features have never really worked, except for geeks. I can’t count the times I’ve been asked through the years by people less interested in computers what all those MHz’s, MB’s and RAM’s mean, and what to make out of them, and I’m sure many of you have heard the same questions. People don’t care about these things, and worse, don’t even understand them. The hardware is not the tool for them. The software is what you can describe in terms of actually doing something; it is the possible maker. While the wi-fi is what makes logging on to Facebook and interacting with your friends possible, the wi-fi in itself is not the interesting thing.
Now is a completely different time. People have tastes. People know good from poor. They know a lot more about what you can actually expect to be able to do with a computer. And Apple’s long history of innovation in software pays off. And that’s part of why they can initiate paradigm shifts in several markets, by offering a superior user experience based on software. And it’s also part of why what happened to Apple in the 80’s and 90’s will not repeat itself today.
Just a moment ago, I suddenly got the feeling that perhaps I’ve got something to write about. I haven’t written a blog post in years. Maybe it’s time to start sharing my thoughts again. Tumblr will probably be sufficient for (re)starters.
I will write here about anything I feel like. But most likely, it will have to do with the web, user experience design and stuff related to that.
For those of you who don’t know me, you can get a concise introduction here.
I recently released a redesigned version of my website. Though the blog has been removed in favor for a pure portfolio site, I may intergrate this tumblelog with my site in the future.