Category — GUI Prototyping Tool

Facebook has added a so-called panic button to its security interface design for users in the UK. This new feature will allow minors to report suspicious or inappropriate behavior of adults (or others) to the authorities. The new addition is a part of Facebook’s collaboration with the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP). The British government-run organization is dedicated to ensuring  that minors are safe when they surf the web. To this effect, they have requested updated security features from various social networking sites. Facebook is recovering from an explosive internet safety controversy in the last few months, so its newest user interface security feature sends a clear message that user safety has become a priority. According to Facebook spokesman Andrew Noyes „both Facebook and the CEOP have shared interests in keeping young people safe online.“ Thus, both organizations will complement each other as they work toward the mutual goal of privacy and security for youth.

With the global smartphone market estimated at $2 billion and the iPhone (a product that did not exist 3 years ago) accounting for 40% of Apple’s revenue, it is an understatement  to say its future is anything but bright. According to research2guidance, the market is set to reach $15 billion in 2013. Which players appear set to be the winners and loosers of this boom? As things stand Apple is far ahead of the pack. A January report from the research firm Gartner found that the app market in 2009 was 99.4% Apple’s. Despite this, other stores, particularly Android, are currently growing at a much faster pace.

According to eco (the German Association of Internet Businesses) handset manufacturers seemed poised to continue their hegemony over the smartphone app market despite more and more cellphone carriers, such as Vodafone, planning their own app stores.  But they might be simply too late to the party. With handset manufacturers in pole position, OS platform providers such as Microsoft come in second.  With this in mind it would seem that the combination of creating your own handset and platform is all it takes to challenge the market leaders but one must not forget what made the Apple App Store a success in the first place.
One of the important things that made the iPhone and its App Store a success was their ease-of-use, i.e. high usability and great interface design. Compared to other mobile platforms the iPhone was intuitive and did not have a labyrinthine menu layout. The capacitive touch screen coupled with the interface design of the OS allowed for revolutionary Human-Computer Interaction that was seamless. The app store also well and truly brought e-commerce to mobile phones with an interface design that allowed users to browse apps as if they were music on an iPod. Android would pack a lot of the same functionality but on a more open platform that could be tweaked by handset manufacturers as evidenced by HTC’s celebrated Sense User Interface design. So, really, challengers should strive for a great interface design in addition to whatever features they may be planning to differentiate and market their offerings.

Over the past few weeks numerous iPhone 4G users have been complaining that the phone has a faulty antenna. They claim that they easily lose reception when holding the phone at its lower left-hand corner.  Apple’s solution?   Steve Jobs simply says “don’t hold it that way”.   Apple also has a more concrete answer, insisting that the problem can be avoided by using a case that covers the phone (presumably an iPhone case purchased from Apple).  While this hardware related usability complaint may seem trivial, Apple’s newest hardware usability problem is a springboard that we can use to explore a growing area of concern for many technology users: the increasing gap between hardware and the interfaces required to use them.

What impact does the smartphone market have on the tech industry?

This current fiscal year has been a great one for Apple as they, for the first time, surpassed long-time frenemy Microsoft to become the second largest US company by market capitalization after Exxon Mobil. This achievement would not have been possible with a product that did not exist just over three years ago. That product, in case you were wondering, is none other than the iPhone which now accounts for 40% of Apple’s revenue. Smartphones, this goes without saying, are the hottest game in tech town! And everyone seems to want a piece of this ever-growing pie if HP’s purchase of Palm is anything to go by.

How are the two biggest players in the smartphone market seeking hegemony?

The iPhone’s biggest challenger comes in the shape of Google via their Android OS which can be found on a number of smartphones made by manufacturers such as HTC, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, LG, Samsung, and more. The Android OS, with its royalty-free license, manages to compete with a hardware item like the iPhone by going the route of Windows in the 80s of targeting volume to create a ubiquitous platform that will in turn attract developers to create apps that add to the OS’ functionality. Although the iPhone is a hardware item the real attraction is the exclusive, beloved OS. This is evident in the fact that, so far at least, the iPhone is the leading smartphone OS in terms of market share despite Android boasting phones with better hardware specs such as the HTC Desire. Both Apple and Google have announced future iterations of their respective smartphone OSes, namely iPhone OS 4 and Android 2.2. According to tech blogger John Gruber “Apple and Google are jostling to shift the comparison between the two platforms to their very different strengths. Apple’s strengths: user experience, design, consistency. Google’s strengths: the cloud, variety, permissiveness”. And just to be clear, design here also refers to interface design, of course.

More of Google’s many announcements at the recently concluded Google I/O 2010 developers conference are a number of new features to its Google Chrome internet browser. Apart from improved speed and now being available for both the Mac and Linux platforms the web browser now features the Chrome Web Store. The store is an open marketplace for web apps that makes it easier for both users to discover web apps suiting their needs and for developers to reach a large audience.

How do interface design changes improve usability through efficient access?

Installing web apps will create shortcuts to said apps on the tab bar making them more quickly accessible through Chrome’s interface design with just one mouse click, thereby improving usability and user experience. Furthermore, installed web apps built on HTML5 can access services that regular web pages can not such as Geolocation APIs, file drag-and-drop and App Cache (this  can allow apps to tap unlimited local storage for offline access for example). Although using web technologies, with App Cache web apps would be able to run like native apps as all their resources could be stored locally. An example of this would be a video game that wouldn’t require a server connection in order to run.

Lack of User Interface Design Standards

The iPad also has no user interface design standards. The device was unleashed on the market with developers not having any sort of advanced access to the device to test out their upcoming apps. As a results apps are inconsistent in terms of interface design and many users were unsure what exactly to click (since “anything you can show or touch can be a UI”) or what options they have. Once they have figured out how an app works there is very little chance of transferring these skills from one app to the next. An example of this is the act of touching a picture in different apps which could cause any of the following to happen: enlarging the picture, nothing happens, hyperlinking to another page, flipping the image to reveal more pictures, and popping up a set of navigation choices.

Similarly, to continue reading once you hit the bottom of the screen could be done with any of three different gestures: scrolling down, swiping left or swiping up. Many apps also lack a back button leaving many users unable to retrace their steps. Some publication apps, although beautiful and mimicking the print medium, would not offer enough interactivity with their headlines not being clickable. Other apps required the learning of complex multi-touch gestures that were not transferable to other apps. The “fat finger” problem lead to many users touching something they didn’t intend.

User Interface Design Guidelines may Help Developers

As a summary the report states “iPad apps are inconsistent and have low feature discoverability, with frequent user errors due to accidental gestures. An overly strong print metaphor and weird interaction styles cause further usability problems”.  According to Nielsen all these shortcomings are to do with the interface design of the apps and not necessarily the device itself. Perhaps Apple should have released an app to teach developers usability and interface design guidelines for the iPad!

In this blog post I shall look at Usability guru Jakob Nielsen’s early findings in his iPad usability test. The original report is 93 pages long but I shall try and summarize.

The iPad runs the same OS as the iPhone leading Nielsen to remark, “From an interaction design perspective, an iPad user interface shouldn’t be a scaled-up iPhone UI”.  This is mainly due to the iPad’s larger screen real estate. Although regular websites “work reasonably well” on the iPad, whereas previous iPhone usability studies showed that iPhone users preferred to use dedicated apps rather than browsing with Safari, the iPad has read-tap asymmetry where text big enough to read is too small to touch making large touch zones highly recommended. The tab bar at the bottom of the screen is said to work worse on the iPad than the iPhone due to the screen size. Users on the smaller phone can notice the tab bar even when focusing on the middle of the screen. On the iPad users tend to become oblivious of the tab bar.

Google launched a new security feature last week — users now have the ability to search the web securely using the encrypted web search option.  This feature utilizes the same Secure Socket Layer connection (SSL) as the Gmail and Google Docs applications.  Google’s new security feature is timely given the recent unsafe interface design pandemonium exploding at Facebook; web surfers could use an internet safety confidence booster.

How does the new feature work?

From a usability perspective, Google’s new encrypted web search option couldn’t be simpler.  If Google users want to search the web safely and privately, they need only type https://www.google.com into their browser.  This will then encrypt the connection, protecting the words, phrases, and results they search on from interception. The interface design is practically the same as the one that users are already familiar with from using the normal Google search. Some minor differences are due to the fact that only Google web search is currently provided with SSL, so the other menu options do not appear in the interface design of Google’s SSL option.

As Google describes on their official blog, the interface design of the search engine results has undergone a “spring metamorphosis”.   Google has updated its visual look in addition to providing users with new search tools to enrich the user’s ability to find exactly what he is looking for on the web in the most expedient fashion.

New and improved interface design

The main change to Google’s search result interface design is the introduction of the contextually relevant, left hand navigation feature.  It appears as a side panel on the interface and underscores the important search tools and refinements necessary to best assist you with your inquiry.

There are three extant Google technologies integrated into the new left hand panel of the interface design that can assist you with your search: Universal Search, Search Options Panel, and Google Squared. The Universal Search helps you to find the most relevant search results.  The top section of the new search panel uses Universal Search to suggest the most relevant categories for your inquiry, allowing you to effortlessly switch results.  The Search Options Panel lets you change the view of your results, enriching your perspective.  Google Squared helps you find and compare elements related to your original inquiry.

Google’s new search result interface design relays its desire to continue to make their program the premier search engine on the web, allowing users an easy and simultaneously detailed and dynamic inquiry experience.

In this three part Usability Spotlight I shall look at Google Wave from a usability and interface design perspective. Here’s part one.

Why was Google Wave created?

Email, as we know it, is technology that is essentially old (in technological terms).  Emails sent in the 70s and 80s are very similar to their modern counterparts and were created at a time when the computing power used to send men to the moon was less than that of a modern scientific calculator! The development of the Internet has brought us many more web technologies such as instant messaging, blogs, wikis, forums and social networking. With these technologies in mind some developers at Google begged the question: what would email look like if it were invented today?  Their answer is a new Internet communications platform: Wave! Personally I find the use of the word wave to be similar in concept to string theory whereas string theory looks at matter not as a singular object but like a string constantly oscillating through different dimensions taking on the guise of different musical notes. A wave too, though singular takes on many shapes and forms.

What is Google Wave?

Google Wave can be described as a hybrid version of all the aforementioned web technologies, combining them into a single web-based service, communications protocol and computing platform offering great potential for real-time communication and collaborative teamwork. Wave allows you to create… wait for it… waves, which Google refers to as “equal parts conversation and document”. You can then invite others to join a particular wave, or not. But then that’d be like playing chess by yourself, I suppose, though I must say that I have a personal wave with just me in it that I have used in a note-taking capacity. What you and your co-conspirators type in the wave appears instantly as you type them for all who are using Wave at that instant to see.  Those not online are notified of edits (in the form of a threaded conversation) when they next log in.

When to use Google Wave?

Wave has many benefits that are best exemplified by the following scenario: say you are a developer working on the interface design of a software application. You would like to brainstorm some ideas and you write an email to a fellow worker with your ideas. You then go back and forth and as your ideas gather steam you decide to forward the mail to the rest of the team who then all start chipping in their 2 cents. Soon your inbox is full of a number of emails that have to be expertly deconstructed. Furthermore, you also just had a great brainstorming session on Skype but only with one or 2 other people and not the whole team. Do you then copy and paste that conversation into the latest mail and click on “reply to all…” again? And what about when want to do a quick poll over an idea?

More to come in part 2 of this blog post.