⌘   Interface Poisoning

Years ago my then-girlfriend saved these comics from her Dilbert daily calendar and gave them to me. I still don’t know why she likes Dilbert so much, she’s a Physiotherapist. But the comics remain.

“Have you been exposed to any user interfaces designed by engineers?” “Yes” “You have interface poisoning. You’ll be dead in a week”

⌘   Help for Help Files

“HELP” should, and could be…

If only.

⌘   Scratch Input

We conclude with a study that shows users can perform six Scratch Input gestures at about 90% accuracy with less than five minutes of training and on wide variety of surfaces.

As far as low-cost surface computing goes, scratch input takes the cake; it could find a million uses in ten-foot interfaces around the home. But will it? Doubtful.

Sure would be fun to control Sous Chef from across the room like this, though.

Gestures include a double tap, an X, an O with a line through it, an i, an F, and a Y.

⌘   Minority Report Comes to Life

If you’ve been waiting for that Minority Report-style interface to really come to fruition, you can finally exhale. One of the science advisors from the Steven Spielberg film — along with a team of other zany visionaries — has created an honest-to-goodness, real-world implementation of the computer systems seen in the movie.

Quite the visual treat.

It might be tiring to use, and it might cause all manner of repetitive stress injuries, but it’s hard not to be impressed by the richness of the interactions. It makes pointing and clicking look positively stone-age.

⌘   Keyboard Shortcuts and Web Apps

When I tried to hide the browser window using the “Command + H” key combination, something unexpected happened. The “Find and Replace” window popped up inside the app

Ghastly. In my own web app development I’ve made frequent use of keyboard shortcuts—pressing ⌦ to delete a selection, ⎋ to cancel out of a dialog, et cetera—but never have I overridden a browser’s own shortcuts.

And if overriding a certain shortcut were necessary, I would at least hope to make it platform-specific.

⌘   Apple Publications Style Guide

Apple developers and third-party developers should follow this guide when labeling user interface elements and writing any text that users see, as well as when writing documentation for their users.

Read me.

⌘   More Notes on Notes

I don’t think these dynamic default.png files are a good idea in the first place. I fully realize that the user’s perception of performance is often more important than actual measured-by-a-stopwatch performance, but in the case of dynamic default.png files, I think it goes too far. It is frustrating to see a complete UI that looks usable but isn’t. Dynamic default.png files make application launch times look faster, but they don’t make them feel faster. I feel like a dolt every time I get tricked into uselessly tapping UI elements on a default.png screen.

John Gruber doesn’t talk about UI as much as he used to, which is a pity because he’s usually on target, and has a large audience of developers under his influence.

⌘   Frustration-Free Packaging

It’s strange to see all the concepts we talked about in primary school (read: elementary school) becoming mainstream years later. Recycling, global warming, package reduction; at the time we were so frustrated because the adults didn’t care.

Whether you see this as a landmark in environmentally-friendly packaging or whether you believe the spin and see it as a user experience improvement, isn’t it nice that it’s both?

The Frustration-Free Package (on the left) is recyclable and comes without excess packaging materials such as hard plastic clamshell casings, plastic bindings, and wire ties. It’s designed to be opened without the use of a box cutter or knife and will protect your product just as well as traditional packaging (on the right). Products with Frustration-Free Packaging can frequently be shipped in their own boxes, without an additional shipping box.

A pirate ship toy can come in the glitzy store-shelf marketing package, or a regular old cardboard box

⌘   The HIG on Action Menus

Use an Action pop-up menu when you want to provide a visible shortcut to a handful of useful commands. Although contextual menus also provide shortcuts to a small number of commands, the fact that they are hidden makes them difficult for new users to discover and for all users to remember. […] If you are thinking of providing (or already provide) an application-wide contextual menu, you might choose to replace it with an Action menu control in the toolbar.

This reeks.

The word replace suggests you should use Action menus instead of contextual menus, while my understanding is that Action menus are simply redundant to right-clicking.

If contextual menus aren’t a big deal and apparently difficult for people to remember, why exactly did Apple capitulate and start producing multibutton mice after all these years? Why the convenience of the two finger right-click?

⌘   The Windows 7 Taskbar

Text descriptions on the buttons are gone, in favor of big icons. The icons can—finally—be rearranged; no longer will restarting an application put all your taskbar icons in the wrong order.

So the taskbar is becoming the OS X dock?

clarko

Chris Clark is an interaction designer in Vancouver, BC. Chris hits the Twitter like Sonny hits trees, and rumor has it he likes Piña Coladas and getting caught in the rain.