–Engage

Specifically, there is this new navigation widget on the Mac page. Check this image out:
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The basics of the design is that there is a horizontal scroll area, but the scrollbar is labeled with what you will see if a part of the scrollbar handle is under that label.

I can use it, but …

1) I find it very ugly
2) I find the model of interaction to be very cumbersome.

What do you all think?

According to Wired magazine’s recent article on the Wii talks about how “Fun won in the console wars”. Now, I’m not a gamer. I haven’t even opened up my Doom or Quake in years, which is probably why I’m coming so late to this one, but just reading the headline and understanding how a Wii works–all those movement sensing chips–and you know that something has changed.

Ever since video gaming existed there has always been new attempts to immerse people into the game through gloves, and haptic responses and all sorts of hokey devices. But what these devices lacked was actually a NEW way to interact with the video games themselves.

Then comes the Wii. By making hand motion instead of finger motion a primary interaction input with the games it has changed the playing field of video games in the living room (or bed room). And this all plays back to Jonas Jöwgren’s ideas on aesthetics in interaction design and pliability.

I’m constantly looking for new examples to explain pliability or help evolve its definition and this one in my mind helps tremendously. Ya see when the mode of interaction in physical space has a response that more closely matches that kinesthetic action then the interaction is more pliable. In this case if I can do casting of a fishing rod by throwing my hand over my shoulder and then flicking my elbow and wrist and what I see on the screen in front of me reacts to that movement in equal scale, speed, and fluidity it is more pleasing than hitting a bunch of buttons the last one of which is “engage” and then watching it happen (or anything in between).

Using motion sensing chips throuhgout the device the Wii is able to give an overall more pliable experience through a range of different types of gaming types. The fact that this has really (coming late) has beaten the other 2 with all their gizmos and higher tech is a testament to the fact that how we interact with devices is a large part of why we interact with them.

Aza Raskin teaches us design process & how to make a paper plane

Aza is brilliant (sometimes). He is truly the spirit of his father. He has articulated design process using such a simple example. It is just wonderful to see.

In this piece, he articulates why iteration is such an important part of the design process. Not just as he says to do “trial & error” but as a means of improving one’s understanding of the actual problem(s) trying to be solved.

He articulates this brilliantly through the use of a very very simple and easy to understand project–making a great paper airplane.

David Armano uses the horrible (my opinion) London Olympics logo design to teach us about Visual Design and Communications Design

In his latest post David Armano takes a look at the London Olympics logo for 2012. If you haven’t seen it, here it is:

Then he compares it to the current logo design for the 2016 bid by Chicago:

He then explains in what is a very convincing manner why Chicago’s logo is so much better than the London one.

I will say this, I now see something in the London logo I never saw before. Let me know before you read David’s article if you see it.

My conclusion about the Summer 2012 Olympics is that it is basically a MySpace Rock Concert Gathering. I mean what average MySpace user can afford $100 tickets to see Synchronized Swimming? Oh well!

Ray Ozzie is the new Chief Software Architect over at MS. Filling some pretty big shoes at that. Recently in an interview with Knowledge@Wharton he put out MS’s philosophy when thinking about software design (as Reported in Putting People First).

The relevant quote for me is:

The guidance that we are giving the development community — and the guidance that we use in-house — is to look at applications through the following lens: When the business model behind that app means that you have to get it everywhere, we call that the ‘universal web application pattern.’ When the most important thing is the experience that the user has with that application and you might be willing to trade off the breadth of the web for the richness of that experience, we call that an “experience first pattern.”

I find this very interesting that basically there is a duality where he is saying that either it is everywhere or it is rich and while there is a continuum (not black and white) the fact that this dyad is set in this way to me speaks more to MS’s weakness in truly developing a rich mobile platform, and working within open source solutions that could accomplish richness across multiple desktop platforms than it says about the reality of experience design.

I would say though that from a business perspective this duality makes a lot of sense. It feels similar to the old project manage of “Fast, Cheap, Good … Pick any two.” The reality is that to focus on pervasiveness and true richness at the same time is really difficult.

The warning inside the quote from Ray is to really be sure you aren’t being pervasive for the wrong reasons. Does your application REALLY need to be pervasive across all web platforms, or are you trying to use the web platform in unnecessary ways where today’s new desktop platforms like WPF, or finely richened web-Silverlight- (I guess he wouldn’t talk about Flex & Apollo or the new Java Platform JavaFX) get you what you need without sacrificing the experience.

I also liked how he called this patterns. They are a bit high level in my book to be patterns per se because there are no defined solutions to go with them, but they can definitely be some sort of meta-pattern much the way Alan Cooper uses Sovereign and Transient (and his other postures).