Not to worry, this is not a post about politics, but about design (I am an expert in neither field). You have probably grown tired by now of reading this popular quote attributed to Steve Jobs, but it’s worth repeating:

Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. People think it’s this veneer – that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.

You only need look at the design convulsions of Ford and GM over the last 10 years (in particular the various retro models) to see that most design is either adding more and more lipstick on the pig or worse, adding fluff to a product (or presentation: think colour gradients in text boxes in PowerPoint slides) that makes it less usable.

Take this example from my workplace. Up until a few months ago, we had a water cooler that looked like this:

Picture 1

A fairly straightforward affair, with hot and cold water indicated clearly by colour, and no ambiguity on where the water comes out. This unit was replaced with the slicker one below (let’s call this picture 2):

Picture 2

Any guesses on where the water comes out? That’s a valuable bit of knowledge when you want to use the hot water! Perhaps the water is dispensed from a point below the red and blue markers? Or atop the circular holes on the base filter? If you guessed either of these not only would you be wrong, but you would be wrong in a dangerous way (let’s call this picture 3):

Picture 3

As you can see from the above picture, if you were to position your cup below the red icon or the circular hole on the base filter, the hot water would in fact pour out a bit to the left of your cup (blue arrow(s) added by me), most likely on to your hand. Note that only the coloured icons and the base filter are visible from the top (Picture 2), your view when you are filling water at the cooler.

It is not clear to me if there is some usability testing that is performed at GE before these products are released. But what seems likely is that the function (“how it works”) is a somewhat distinct process, at GE, from the form (“how it looks”).

BumpTop is a 3D desktop manager for Windows and Mac with some slick features and fairly well done OS integration. I have been using it for a few days now and it is impressive if not indispensable. The reason for this post however is to comment on something that John Gruber wrote about this app:

And the 3D stuff, with a weird perspective on “walls”, just seems silly.

I can see how he may find it silly, but in my usage I found the walls quite a useful feature, psychologically speaking. Despite the large collection of useful widgets on my Mac OS Dashboard, I rarely bring up the Dashboard to access the information or operation that these widgets provide.

Why not? Apart from the fact that the Dashboard takes forever to update, somehow, bringing up the Dashboard, visually an overlay on my desktop, seems to neither fit into my workflow nor appeal to my instinctive usage patterns.

On the other hand, in the few days I have been using BumpTop (intermittently), the ability to create sticky notes on a wall (admittedly, a particular application, and not a replacement for the Dashboard) has resonated well with my impulses… to look for a note on a wall seems, well, just the right thing to do!

It helps that BumpTop causes no increase in CPU utilisation on a quiescent system or when I working primarily within one application.

I am not sure if I will stop using Qu-S and keep using BumpTop, but it would be interesting to know what those who study UI/UX design think about the ideal way to present informational widgets and tiny apps.

So I am just some schlub with a Toucan for a logo, but people with venture funding (and even profits in the case of some) should be able to do better than this screenshot I picked off of PixelPipe (a service whose purpose I shall discover very soon, I am certain):

I left Tumblr and WordPress in to give some relief to your eyes.

From John Gruber today, a quote from MG Siegler on the superiority of the iPhone:

MG Siegler on the Nexus One MG Siegler: Perhaps the single biggest reason that I like Apple products, and their software, in particular, is the attention to detail the company puts in. In my mind, that’s exactly what still separates the iPhone from all the Android phones. It’s the little things. The things that are almost too small for you to even notice, but which make the experience subtly better.

Which is all fine, but it seems to me that history (even Apple’s own) has demonstrated that design, “attention to detail”, and so on have rarely fared well against buzz, FUD, user entrapment, collusion and other tactics (different subsets of which are the advantages enjoyed by Apple’s two primary competitors: Microsoft and Google). The difference in the “smartphone” market is, of course, that Apple for once is the most successful and advanced device, but let us see how this pans out three years from now.

[ link: Daring Fireball Linked List: MG Siegler on the Nexus One ]

Take a look at the screenshots from iTunes 9. It looks like Apple is (regrettably) returning to the white look (also note the blue hues for the checkbox). As well as (again regrettably) adopting the grungy buttons look pioneered by YouTube and adopted, with predictably shiny excesses, by Windows. Or is this just a conservative aesthetic instinct on my part? On the potential plus side, one day perhaps we will see the candy/lozenge scrollbars in Mac OS X replaced with the more subtle ones that iTunes has been sporting for a while.

iTunes 9

We have all let this universal healthcare and economic recession business distract us from more pressing matters. Well, no more, in my case. The time has come for me to comment on the Ikea font debacle, namely their switching from a customised Futura to Verdana. And when I say the time has come for me to comment, what I mean is that the time has come for me to quote the comments of someone who has said it better than I could:

Carolyn Fraser, a letterpress printer in Melbourne, Australia, adopts a different metaphor to explain the problem. “Verdana was designed for the limitations of the Web — it’s dumbed down and overused. It’s a bit like using Lego to build a skyscraper, when steel is clearly a superior choice.”

Yeah, what she said. What were you thinking IKEA?

Much impressed as I am by Google products and services, I have been left cold by their not merely spartan but aesthetically displeasing user interfaces. You may disagree with me on that, and you may be right (I have no background in either design or aesthetics!), but still find the below from A List Apart (via Daring Fireball) interesting:

Attractive things work better

Okay, so maybe perceptions are important to product design. But what about “real” usability concerns such as lower task completion times or fewer difficulties? Do attractive products actually work better? This idea was tested in a study conducted in 1995 (and then again in 1997). Donald Norman describes it in detail in his book Emotional Design.

Researchers in Japan setup two ATMs, “identical in function, the number of buttons, and how they worked.” The only difference was that one machine’s buttons and screens were arranged more attractively than the other. In both Japan and Israel (where this study was repeated) researchers observed that subjects encountered fewer difficulties with the more attractive machine. The attractive machine actually worked better.

So now we’re left with this question: why did the more attractive but otherwise identical ATM perform better?

Norman offers an explanation, citing evolutionary biology and what we know about how our brains work. Basically, when we are relaxed, our brains are more ?exible and more likely to find workarounds to difficult problems. In contrast, when we are frustrated and tense, our brains get a sort of tunnel vision where we only see the problem in front of us.

[From A List Apart: Articles: In Defense of Eye Candy]