At the close of Interaction’09 here in Vancouver I was surprisingly asked to come speak on a panel at Simon Fraser University’s School of Interactive Arts and Technology (SIAT). Stoked and humbled by the request I said “sure!” w/o first asking about what I would be speaking about. Turns out that I get to split my time talking about our local IxDA chapter and my perspective on being a User Experience Designer at an Agile SW Consultancy (Nitobi)

The panel event, Entrance into the Industry: Design, Media Arts, and Informatics, is being organized by the SFU TechBytes program that provides students in IAT and TECH courses with software & technical support to enhance learning needs across the SIAT curriculum.

By now we’ve all heard these words or uttered them ourselves, “why the hell didn’t they (Apple) build copy/paste into this damn thing!?” In an effort to improve on my idea + sketch + prototype process I threw together this little movie walking through a potential copy/paste solution for the iPhone OS.

Arguably and obviously there are many ways you could employ to trigger the copy/paste interaction. I chose the “3 finger tap” for this example. “Pressing” the screen for a set duration is another viable option that would trigger the copy/paste feature that came to mind, but I liked the “3 finger tap”. I’m sure there are tons of viable ways to launch the interaction and I’ve already had some questions about the ease of executing a “3 finger tap” as I put this together but the goal for me isn’t to be right, it’s to have the conversation. So here ya go! What’s your solution?

The movie

The initial sketch

Wikid Flex resource courtesy of Duane Nickull.

http://technoracle.blogspot.com/2008/12/building-service-clients-with-flex-and.html

While browsing through 90mobilesin90days I stumbled upon a wicked visual search browser and wondered to myself how I didn’t find this sooner? I can’t give enough praise for a job well done by the wizards at Viewzi. Having the power of being able to visually search via 18 facets/sites at your fingertips is just that… POWERFUL. The concept is forward thinking and I particularly love the appropriateness of interaction design in how they display the results across the various sites/facets. I definitely see myself using the site as a new point of potential inspiration for solving interaction problems as I encounter them. Cheers…

With the new enhancements and layout changes to Facebook I figure it’s high time for me to take some time and get back to ye ol’ blog on UXD here at Nitobi

I must admit that upon a sub-surface evaluation of Layout, Navigation and Interaction Elements, I’m quite impressed with the changes to “The New Facebook”. I do have a few complaints but they’re far outnumbered by worthy improvements and advantages gained so here we go…

Global NAV

1. Removal of arrows for drop down menus

Perhaps they were just ready for a change but I can’t agree with the decision to remove a) the navigation functionality previously made available through the old nav and b) the visual cue suggesting to the user that there is more information hidden under the arrow should they click on it.

The look/feel is cleaner but I see several clear disadvantages:

• removed the ability to select from multiple friend options in drop-down menu

• removed the ability to navigate directly to specific “Inbox” options such as Notifications. If I’m not on the home page, how do I get to them?
  

I’m sure there is a reason behind this decision and it’s up for debate until one of you out there feels compelled to clear it up for me.

2. Addition of “Applications”

Seems like a logical addition but referencing the applications as “bookmarks” the “Status” container on the home page can be a bit unclear at first. Sure, I can easily figure out what they’re inferring with the icons but some a labeling change to “Application bookmarks” would clear this up greatly. With the previous observation negligible in scale, the major oversight here is that there’s no link in the Applications menu to “Find more applications”.

3. Changed “Profile” to “user.name”

Personally I liked it how it was before because it creeps me out a bit to see my name all over the place. I wonder what the meeting must have been like to justify that change?

Home Page

1. Layout

The first change I noticed was obvious in that they’ve increased the overall content container width to 964 pixels, a significant increase of 20% from the previous 799 pixel container.

This has gave them a nice advantage to condense the home landing page information vertically and in this case, contrary to my comparison of profile page footprints coming later, they actually increased my home page height, albeit by a negligible amount (134 pixels).

2. Visual changes

It’s nice to have the vertical bounding box removed. The content blocks now “float” in space and IMHO give the entire site a slightly lighter visual feel.

3. News Feed navigation

Having the newly added ability to browse through your News Feed by facet (Top Stories/Status Updates/Photos/Posted Items) is a welcome addition. This feature alone gives them arguably a 4x increase in information density by footprint w/o having to increase total page height. Nice work indeed in terms of IA and UX.

4. Inline Preferences/Editing for content chunks

I love this addition!! Incredibly useful and powerful for the user that will take advantage of it (of course).

. Wall: Edit posts
. News Feed: Set Preferences for a particular Friend being displayed
. Info, Apps, Friends all now have inline preferences found under the “Edit” box

AWESOME enhancement!! I love inline preferences. Incredibly useful.

Profile Page

1. Introduction of new profile navigation

Another addition that I am diggin’ on for various reasons. First and foremost by reworking this page and implementing a sub navigation they effectively reduced the height of my home page by 45.3%!!! (3487px » 1907px = 45.3% reduction in Eye Miles to view content). Those numbers are tough to argue with, especially in light of the fact that I now have more information at my disposal than before!

With the sub-nav now enabling inline viewing of Wall, Info, Photos and Boxes users, much like the new nav introduced on the home page for News Feeds, users can now browse 4x the info previously unavailable to access within the old layout. The best feature of this new profile navigation is the sub nav (Share Link - Add Photos - Give Gift - Fun Wall). I specifically like the Photos component that now allows users to create photo albums, post photos and take a photo directly within their profile page. IMHO this is one of the best small changes that they could have made in light of the fact that they have brought users one giant step closer to a core element of sharing experiences through social networking applications, PHOTOS!

Without going into every point in detail here’s my general list of advantages and disadvantages of the new profile navigation:

Advantage(s):
- Profile page is significantly shorter in height (3487px » 1907px = 45.3% reduction)
- Increased customization of profile view
- Greater IA priority and separation given to Photos
- New quick add interaction for creating albums/adding photos gets users that much closer to a core element of sharing experiences through social networking applications

Disavantage(s):
- Unnecessarily disruptive layout changes for navigating to Photos and Boxes.
- Photos page: No interaction element displayed for adding photos, only can Create and Album. They should consider including that interaction element as a component of the “Photos” sub nav which would help maintain the layout consistency and alleviate the disruptive layout change noted above.
The remaining items that I jotted down for the profile page alterations were….

- Wall and Mini Feed have been merged into one stream under “Wall”
- The additional tab in the profile NAV noting a “+” for adding a new tab to the mini-nav. I can infer that I’m able to add something via that interaction element but there’s no hover state indicating what it is until you select it. Small quirk, but easily addressed.

Summary

To sum things up I think the Facebook usability crew made some great decisions in the changes that they made to the new version. I’m quite interested to see how they address some of the dangling UI issues I have mentioned and any other once that surface over time as people make the switch. If you made it this far thanks for reading through my comments! Feel free to share yours or debate what I have to say.
Cheers, Chris.

Under the banner of token moves to re-connect with customers, last week Starbucks launched a website (My Starbucks Idea dot com) to encourage fanatics to lobby for new directions that the coffee mogul should consider in an effort to convey topics ranging from product based ideas to social responsibility. The site design is pretty slick (of course) and generally usable. I signed up to give it a spin with particular interest in the interaction of discussion threads and to vote for the Joe that wants to see Starbucks to serve 100% fair trade product (can’t argue with that idea). I would like to see some top level thoughts from Starbucks for each catrgory, rather than just a silo for Social Responsibility. I’d like to know what that means to them as a company and thoughts they’ve put into it, for example.

Good effort on their part. I think we can all agree that they’re an easy target and it’s only a matter of time until gets polluted with bitching and ranting like every other general public community site but they’ve had some incredible traffic in just about a week of going live. It’ll be interesting to see how the moderation unfolds, if any at all.

To my surprise this morning I stumbled upon the new UI for LinkedIn. My first thought was “oh…. so this is what might happen as a result of putting Facebook and Flickr in a blender.” While it sure is slick in a “web2.0-ey” portal kinda way, I can’t get on the bus and agree that the new design is terribly usable.

Andre and I were briefly chatting about the font treatment in terms of it’s difficulty to distinguish content amongst the sea of blue. In the same respect, the content headers suffer the same fate and I’m really quite surprised that a third color wasn’t utilized in anticipation of the site being difficult to browse for content. Granted, the old UI wasn’t the best design in history but it sure was straightforward to use. The interaction implemented in the new left nav is nice as are the drag & drop organization of panels, but then again why can’t I overcome the “People You May Know” panel? Strange that a decision was made to “give me control, but not total control.”

The section headers are a bit of a question mark too. All of the top level content sections, Profile, Contacts, Inbox & Groups, have that familiar blue header treatment (where have I seen that recently?), yet the home page lacks the same treatment. C’mon guys!!

Kudos to the folks at LinkedIn for taking a leap of faith with the new UI but I would have expected a bit more from them in terms of UX design. AS I noted above, the new interaction elements are a nice addition, but I’d still like to see some changes. Please comment, tell me I’m crazy. I’d love to chat about it….