Before it was a UI blog, All About Balance was the home of my photography from 2003 to 2006. Those photos are back online (Galleries) and I’m working on several years worth of backlogged images, which I hope to process and upload in the coming weeks.

I was an early adopter of Apple’s Aperture. The idea of eliminating my bubble-gum-and-paper-clips RAW “workflow” (I use the term more loosely than it’s ever been) was, and still is very attractive. As with any version 1 product, there were glitches. The most unfortunate of which was the removal of my PowerMac Dual Core 2.0 GHz from the supported platforms list. Rather, the platform is supported but performance is so poor I opted to stick with the devil I knew. Not to mention RAW conversion quality issues, lagging support for bodies (e.g. Nikon D200) and an extraordinarily high price tag…  Aperture 2 has been released, but I just can’t imagine performance has increased to the point where my now 3 year old PowerMac can keep up.

Along came Adobe with Lightroom.  Over the course of 3 weeks, I used a beta version of Lightroom to cull 1500 images from my trip to Africa.  Performance was terrific.  RAW was terrific and already you could see the marked improvement in usability over their other tools.

Two years later, Lightroom is now at 1.4 and I’m working on understanding the ins and outs before importing all of my images, specifically with respect to backup and restore.  That process does not seem well understood by many, and it needs to be bulletproof for me to take the plunge.  Aperture had it right with their notion of a Vault, and first-class support in the UI as we’ve come to expect from Apple.

Currently on the lookout for good Lightroom books as I start to experiment…

If you’ve used Amazon within the past few years, I hope you’ve stumbled on to the Gold Box.

The Gold Box is daily set of deals tailored to your interests, with what appears to be at least a 5% discount over the normal price. 5% might not seem like much, but when you’re mostly interested in a new Mac Pro and Nikon D300, it’s quite a lot :)

What I’ve noticed recently, is that the discussion topics at the bottom of the Gold Box have turned into a general community, irrespective of Gold Box deals.

Of note:

• motherless at 5yrs old, anyone else? how did it affect you?
• How to dye gray hair?
• PB&J pancakes How do you make them? (communication side note – no punctuation separates this sentence but we read it as two separate because of the use of sentence case)

Why is this? How does design factor in? Specifically, what did Amazon do to encourage this?

(1) This ‘forum’ is not a separate site as most forums are. They tend to have their own unique URLs where you leave an area of interest (e.g. the Gold Box) and transition fully into the forum. Here Amazon has a forum ‘preview’, to show that there is a community in place with (mostly) relevant ongoing discussion.

(2) No extra steps are necessary to begin posting – not a single one. The text area at the bottom allows you to begin a new topic immediately.  As you click into the Topic: field and begin typing, message components appear immediately below the topic.

No page navigation, refresh or other needless transition.  Compare this to the flow over at macnn (not to target them specifically – I just happened to be there yesterday).

Now to be fair, when  you are looking at an individual topic, there is a “quick post” section.  However that is not the focus here – quickly creating a new topic is.

(3) Simple posting interface.  Compare Amazon’s interface to the one in use over at macnn.  I had to max out the browser window on my 30″ display and I still have a scroll bar.

If you make it easy for people to express themselves, it will happen.

It’s been quite a while since my last post and a lot has happened during that time. Unfortunately, not much of it has been related to a general, world-wide increase in usability.

I finally moved away from iPower, my previous hosting provider, and over to GoDaddy. This move was due largely in part to the usability of their new hosting platform (or rather, the lack of). Combined with increasingly poor customer service, it was an easy decision. Oh, and when they moved me to the new platform, they botched all the file permissions, didn’t copy hidden files and didn’t copy the admin interface folder for WordPress… which makes it difficult to post!

Back to business.

This past Tuesday morning, I was visiting the Kaiser Permanente office here in Mountain View. While waiting for my physician, I used the iPhone to snap a few shots.

Oops, wrong one.

Have a look at the login screeen for Epic’s “Hyperspace”, taken from the terminal Kaiser has in each patient room:

If there’s a screen I’d like to be simple for my practitioner to use, it would be the login screen.

• Centered, giant, red letters to indicate a safe state?
• “Spring 2007 iU1″ – I would guess this is the release/version of the software. Seems like something my physician or her assistant would like to know while logging in.
• Why an “Exit” button on this screen? Windows users are certainly aware of the the ‘X’ to close a window, especially physicians – this ain’t their first rodeo.
• A checkbox for “Change Password”. Rather than a button or a link (which I would actually like to see here), a checkbox. Does it mean that I enter a new password instead of my current password? Will I be taken to a separate screen? Do I have to enter my username first?
• That background and those graphics might look great as the default desktop for Apple’s Leopard OS, but are entirely out of place in a business setting especially in a health care environment where speed and efficiency are of the utmost importance. Any distractions (like a flashy, garish background image) should be cut.

This is only the login screen… Next time I’m at Kaiser, I’ll see if I can finagle a peek at my patient record when the system is online.

Hopefully not too soon :)

The most frequent type of clicking on the web are forward navigation clicks (i.e. links) and… the back button!

While navigating Rally, I was experiencing a slight amount of navigational trauma and wanted to push the proverbial “eject button” and get back to somewhere familiar.  Here’s what I saw:

Don’t forget about page titles, even when you aren’t interested in having the pages searchable!

At my accountant’s office yesterday morning -

“Stock sales… looks like you sold SPDR and INTC this year?”

“Yep, I- WHAT?!  SPDR?”

“Your 1099 from TD Ameritrade.  You sold a few stocks?”

I unwittingly sold a very large chunk of an index fund that I’ve owned for several years.  The buying and selling flows at TD are virtually identical save for the words “Buy” and “Sell” being interchangeable.

TD could have easily caught this mistake with some simple logic.  “You’ve only been buying SPDR in big chunks once a year for 5 years now.  Type the words “SELL SPDR” into this field to verify your (strangely seeming to us) intention.”  And in the future, no more typing as the pattern is now established.

I’m sure there are generalizable patterns among traders.  Why doesn’t TD use some of that knowledge in its interface?

Reinforcing yet again that confirmation screens and pop-up warnings are no substitute for an interface that too easily lets  you do the wrong thing.

My 401k fund allocation was recently modified due to changes in available funds.  I logged on to TransAmerica to verify, who by the way has an absolutely killer site compared to GWLA, my previous benefits company.

While I’ve become less a fan of pie charts than I have been in the past (c/o Information Dashboard Design), I get quick verification that I am indeed in four funds.

Because the colours are identical between charts, I’m left wondering why I only have three slices on the left.  I spent a bit of time hoping to decipher which of the funds on the right were large/mid, small or international equity.  After a few moments I gave up, although I can’t seem to shake the fact that there is some hidden meaning there.

Without contrasting colours between charts, I still can’t help but think there’s a connection I’m not seeing.

In spite of a the ribbonifically overhauled UI, one thing remains the same in Office 2007: the font selection component is a combo box.

Who out there is typing “A-r-i-a-l” into this thing?  Or “T-r-e-b-u-c-h-e-t—M-S-”?  (I left out the ‘u’ and had to correct that – Ha Ha!)

In spite of all the advancements with that control – font preview in previous versions of Office as well as MRU fonts and true font preview in 2007 (the selected area in your document changes while you mouseover the font list), it’s still a combo box?

One shouldn’t be too excited about this – it tailors to the 99% of the us who use the drop down without harming the 1% of us who still feel the need to type “Plantagent Cherokee” rather than select it from a list.

The first thing that comes to mind when I think about my home audio and video equipment is the ever-present blinking “12:00″ on our VCRs (now DVD players I suppose).

I was very much surprised to find a terrific example of usability in a niche product for those of us with too few component video and/or digital optical inputs: the Audio Authority 1154A. It’s the perfect example of something I wouldn’t have asked for but is exactly what I needed; goal-directed design at its best!

I’ve got too many devices and not enough inputs. Here I am updating the system software on the Playstation3 (right-most device on the top shelf).

Many “serious” A/V switchers can be remotely controlled as home theater enthusiasts typically sport universal remotes as part of their gadget repertoire. The remote control commands for all devices are added to a single device that rules them all. If your target market has a remote, makes sense to give them what they want right? An A/V switcher with a remote?

Not quite.

My goal when sitting down isn’t to mess around with my gadgets, it’s to have fun playing Rock Band! Enter the 1154A, the perfect goal-driven device:

No remote and only one button. It automatically routes the signal based on which device is powered up (my PS3 in this case). And as turning on a device is a prerequisite for using it, this switcher is completely invisible.

Multiple devices turned on? No problem, it gives priority to the higher numbered device (connections in the back are numbered) – simple as that.

Really phenomenal design here and not at all something I would expect from the home theater enthusiast industry which is typically more about the size and complexity of your universal remote than how easy it is to use. Best $250 I’ve spent in recent memory even though I sometimes forget I own it :)

UPDATE: Hopped in the shower after posting this when it hit me – look at where the 1154A is on my setup.  Top shelf, facing forward,

as though I need line-of-sight to use an infrared remote with it

This 1154A could be behind the receiver, out of sight, out of mind.  Instead, I’ve positioned it as though I’m using a remote with it, even though I’m not.  Old habits…

While anxiously forwarding iPhone photos of my Expert drumming skills on the new Rock Band Boston DLC, I noticed something:

What surprised me was the inclusion of the MIME type adjacent the attachment name and size. Actually a few things were surprising…

Let’s just take on this entire part of the interface:

• The entire attachment doesn’t need to be a link, as the link should target the canonical form of the content – the attachment name itself. Who is going to click on the size of the attachment to look at it? Increasing the size of the click target isn’t an issue here – attachment names are of generally sufficient size that this isn’t an issue.
• The MIME type is obviously excessive.
• I’ll go one step further and say that the attachment size isn’t important either. If the user won’t modify their behaviour based on the size of the attachment, why bother displaying it?

If Google’s objective is to translate the meaning of the .JPG extension, why not really commit and just call it an image? And rather than report the size, why not abstract that away as well?

Now we can concentrate on the actual attachments instead of the metadata.

As web applications become more interactive, there has been a tendency to turn them into their desktop brethren.  As a simple example, the close button as it appears in Microsoft Outlook Web Access 2007.

This is akin to using the MDI (Multiple Document Interface) which Microsoft promoted and disowned years ago.  This was the idea that a window could contain multiple windows – a desktop within a desktop; a usability nightmare.

Moving on, the most notable point of comparison is the dialog.  Yahoo’s YUI even makes creating them easy to do – draggable and everything.

The most notable offender in my day-to-day experience is the strangely named “Rally Program” by Rally Software Development.  Let’s say you’re working on a User Story and you’d like to change one of the many bits of associated data, for example the state or rank.

In order to change them I have to seek out the Edit function (virtually hidden in a pull down).  Here we have a small section of the Edit dialog:

One is left wondering why the extra step is necessary.  If we imagine dialogs as some suggest (i.e. “separate rooms”) this becomes a clear form of excise.

My father used to work for the PGA Tour and once met with Ron Jaworski.  At the time I knew of him as the backup quarterback for Dan Marino.  I remember him saying “If you can touch it, you can catch it.”  I’m sure his wide receivers heard that a lot :)

Likewise I have a similar saying for information in applications – if you can see it, you can edit it.

Rally Program does feature inline editing in some instances, not nearly enough however.  Fortunately Rally Software has a very friendly and responsive product team so I have no doubt things will improve in the future.