Tech IT Easy » UX

On Interface Design: Why Digg is the best News interface on the iPhone

Vincent van Wylick — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 14:12:18 +0000

My first post about the iPhone was on why I thought app developers should forget about “apps” for the iPhone and develop Games exclusively. It’s a touch interface and as such inferior to tactile feedback interfaces. I’m hearing rumours that the touch keyboard on the iPad actually works quite well for full-speed typing, but that’s another story.

Putting Digg in the topic title is a trick to get you to read the post. My point is that there is a logic to designing software for a certain interface and, as far as news-interfaces go, Digg is pretty good. Now that I think about it, there is a different interface that perhaps works better, and that is browsing news via pictures (more on that later).

On my PC/Mac, I use Netvibes pretty exclusively for browsing the news. I tried Google Reader and other RSS readers for a while, but linear readers don’t make sense for a waterfall of news. Twitter is perhaps a counter-example to it, but I generally don’t read more than the top-5 posts / or the last 5 posts for close friends on Twitter.

Where Netvibes has the advantage is in presenting you multiple widgets at the same time and your eyes can easily glance from one feed to the next, cherry picking the best of the crop. Do the same in Google Reader and I get the same feeling as in Twitter, only the top 5 items or so matter.

The iPhone with its 5 x 8cm screen is very different and it’s best noticed when doing something that requires a lot of screen-real estate, like working in Excel or looking at a window with a lot of info. Netvibes wouldn’t work at all in it, which is why they also developed their reader interface, which in turn is inferior to Google Reader.

But my point about iPhones and Gaming remains unchanged. The reason that gaming reigns on this platform (more so than is healthy for anyone) is because it is not a text-input device. It is a media-consumption device that has less screen-real estate than a PC (or an iPad for that matter).

Therefore, reading things in a list format makes much more sense. And, because inputting text kind of sucks (well, apart from short brain dumps), Digg is actually the best news-interface that I’ve come across. You couldn’t put a gun to my head to get me to use it on the PC, but it feels natural to “shovel” through it (via the app called “Shovel“) on this small screen. Not only because it’s a list-based interface, but because the user’s interaction with the information is limited to “digging,” while the content is pushed up by everyone.

Minimal interaction required is why Digg works on the iPhone.

Now, a second interface to consider for news is certainly to browse via pictures, which works on the AP Mobile app and the World News app (an interface for BBC news). But for text-junkies, it certainly is slower as you have to slide from item to item.

With the iPad, we are entering new territory, and I unfortunately haven’t tested it to find out how it works exactly. But what is certain is that due to the larger screen-real estate available to display information and to the relative improvement of the touch keyboard, the dynamic very much changes. This is the kind of interface where widget-news makes sense again.

And that also leads me to reiterate a point I made last time writing about the iPad. The best way to display certain apps again is the often-forgotten Dashboard interface on the Mac. Widget apps like calculator or weather already exist in Dashboard as do many other clones of iPhone apps.

I’m very curious what will be announced tomorrow at Apple’s iPhone OS 4.0 event as there are many questionmarks regarding multitasking and building interfaces that use the hardware keyboard (without a mouse?). But that’s the fun of Apple and the right way to run a company: keep your audience engaged and/or enraged, day in and day out!

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Single Purpose Browsing & Why Tabbed Browsing Makes for a Pretty BAD User Experience

Vincent van Wylick — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 10:19:35 +0000

When Firefox, previously called Phoenix and Firebird, launched tabbed browsing (well, after Bloatzilla), I was super-excited and pimping it to all my friends. It’s been a while since I felt this way and, with tab-saving in browsers (which I of course turn on), I tend to choose the browser with the least tabs saved in it. Apps like Choosy for the Mac, which gives me a pop-up with a choice of browsers whenever clicking a link, or which chooses the best-performing browser running at the time, are a life-saver, but they are just a piecemeal solution to a greater problem.

Firefox, in its latest version (3.6), introduced a nifty feature for a better tab user-experience, which I hope they expand a little more. Basically, when you click on the little icon on the top right (see screenshot), you get a nice overview, called “Showcase,” of all the tabs loaded in your browser at the time.

A similar implementation is of course Safari’s and Chrome’s start-window, which shows you an overview of your most viewed sites, making it a visual replacement for your bookmarks and/or history managers.

For some time now, you’ve also had the feature of restoring tabs after closing your browser, either voluntary, which makes sense as tabs consume an insane amount of ram and CPU (especially for Flash sites, but for plenty of other things also), and as a safety feature, when your browser crashes. Saft for Safari (Mac only) introduced a tab-recovery user-interface (see picture), where you see a list of tabs previously loaded and where you can tick or untick sites that you want to start up with. I believe Firefox has a similar interface for tab-recovery after a crash.

But it’s all still a hassle and I really haven’t come across a perfect implementation of dealing with several dozens of tabs. I wouldn’t mind having the option of starting Firefox tab-free, with option of restoring whatever tab I used previously, in its original state, via something like the Firefox Showcase interface. There are some Firefox extensions that do just that, but I’ve so far not come across something that is intuitively usable.

There is the other problem, which is that sometimes you want to open a browser for a single purpose, such as Google Maps, Gmail, or the weather, and it’s annoying to have to open a browser with 50+ tabs in it. Some sites have become applications rather than sources of information and just like it doesn’t make sense to open the full Office suite when opening Microsoft Word, it doesn’t make sense to open several tabs to go to one site.

Since last night, I’m experimenting with Fluid on the Mac, one of a few, I’m sure, applications that turn websites into applications that launch from your application folder. So I now have a Google Calendar app, a Google Docs app, etc. For Gmail, I really like Mailplane, which also uses Webkit, Safari’s open source sibling, as a basis for creating a service dedicated to one site, or in Mailplane’s case, multiple Gmail accounts.

So far that is the best user-experience for me if I want to go to a site that is also an application. Tabs, I’m sure, have a purpose, but they just invite information overload and the guilt for not being able to deal with it all. If you, the readers, have similar experience, feel free to share them, and if you found solutions, please let us know as well!

Addendum: talk about measuring the real cost of tabs… In the last weeks, I received 12 identical letters from the Dutch government regarding an access code I requested once. Turns out that it was one of my 50 saved tabs in Firefox that, every time I restarted the browser, requested a new code when the page loaded.

Thoughts on the (iTablet) iPad – connectivity, apps, multitasking, integrating with Macs

Vincent van Wylick — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 10:54:10 +0000

The following is a draft I wrote prior to the announcement of the iPad, but which I didn’t publish because it was a series of hypotheses based on an as yet non-existing product. It’s a series of thoughts on how an interface of a touchscreen larger than an iPhone might look like. It is inspired by both my experiences with Macs and since recently with an iPod Touch. Here goes.

A couple of thoughts I had last night (written on 13.01.2010) about interfaces, the current state of development for the iPhone OS, how Apple could build a hybrid of Mac and iPhone OS, and how the company could build multi-tasking into its rumoured tablet. My thought were the following:

a. A new category: I don’t think the iTablet, if it exists, will be either a Mac or an iPhone. My super-superficial reason: it doesn’t fit in the Mac line-up depicted on the online Apple Store (see pic), but a more underlying reason is that I don’t see space for it in either a Mac-category or a Mobile phone/media player category. Which is not to say that it won’t do either well, but I think it will more fall into the class of Netbooks, though of course with the purpose of bombing those low-tech, low-innovation devices out of the water… just like Apple did with MP3 players and with Phones. Note from today: as it turns out, the iPad is depicted below the iPod, iPhone, and Mac lines, but time will tell where it will be once it’s on sale.

b. The Keyboard: I think that any 10″ screen will demand more connectivity to secondary (Apple) devices than the iPhone allows for. That means, an external keyboard and mouse, which transforms the tablet into a desktop. I have less complaints about the software-keyboard now, after working with a Touch for a while, but I still don’t see it as an alternative for longer texts, which a larger screen would warrant. Some months ago, I made a stupid mock-up of the iPhone + a keyboard (see pic), which is how I envision it looking (only better).

c. The App Store: 3 Billion Apps downloaded, Apple just reported, which also suggests a kind of lock-in. For better or worse, developers have accepted the App-store and I think it works for several reasons for both, namely more protection from pirates, more predictability for developers when developing for the black hole that is Apple, and more control by Apple, which is what Apple likes, not to mention new income streams for both. I think the App Store will continue to exist and will present new challenges when talking about a larger screen. Note from today: I don’t believe that what we will get to see in less than two months will be that what people were playing around with after the Apple keynote. iPhone apps inflated to a larger screen, come on?

d: The User Interface: I’ve written previously about Quick Look in Snow Leopard and how I also dug its slight innovation in terms of in-icon playing of media. Previously, OS X also introduced Dashboard into Tiger (I believe), whose interface, on the surface at least, resembles the iPhone. My view is that Apple will give developers the option to just keep the same resolution apps as they have offered before, though not exclusively of course. But imagine “Quick Looking” an app and still having it run inside its “Icon,” while the user does something else. For the rest, I of course think that full-screen Apps will exist, which is where Dashboard comes in, or at least a type of Dashboard. (Note: that was wrong. More below.)

e. Integration with the Mac: One of the most underused interfaces, at least on my Mac, is Dashboard, which allows people to have continuously open widgets on anything from news, to games, to radio, to system monitoring. It’s useful for those purposes, but not really something i spend more than a few minutes at a time with. Yet the first thing that came to mind when thinking of a “Tablet,” using both iPhone and Mac interface components, was Dashboard. It creates a new layer on top of a traditional desktop, allowing for user-input and information display. When I envision someone running the apps that would work on the “iTablet” also, I think of it either being that you open up a new layer on your Mac and run the very same apps on it through something like a Dashboard-like interface. Or, and the simplest solution is usually the best, through having the Tablet sync through iTunes with regular applications on the Mac.

Note from today: well, obviously this was wrong, but there have been several theories aired of having a type of Dashboard on the iPad for apps like calculator and weather, which don’t at all make sense to run in single focus on a larger screen than the iPhone.

Further thoughts from today: I do think that we will see a new OS update for both the iPhone and iPad before the release of the iPad. This will address the concerns that people have about it just being a larger iPod Touch. For the rest, to me the only downside to this device is the lack of a front-facing camera for video-calling, and some minor things. And I also think it’s the perfect “parent device!” What the Wii was to gaming, the iPad is to computing, addressing a very very blue ocean.

As previously stated, I’m still in line to get one this year, though only after trying one first.

Vincent

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