Apple-Centred Design

It’s commonly known that Apple took inspiration for the first Mac interface from Xerox Parc, however I don’t have a problem with this for two reasons. Firstly, they took concepts that were in a research lab and turned them into a successful commercial product, in the process creating a revolution in the computer industry. Secondly, they improved upon the original ideas, refining the rough edges to deliver a pleasurable user experience for all.

Since then, Apple have lead the way in innovation and design, constantly delivering products that move the computer industry forwards.

Design Process

What’s interesting about Apple is that they don’t appear to look to others to copy from.  If they use competitive analysis design techniques then it’s more likely to be ‘make sure we don’t do that’, rather  than ‘make sure we do’.  The launch of the iPhone instantly made the world think if Apple could do this with their first ever attempt at a phone, then what have the other phone manufacturers been doing all these years.  If I were a mobile phone maker on 29th June 2007 I would have been embarrassed.

There hasn’t been much said about Apple’s design process, it’s not quite clear how they get it right time after time.  Despite their products being driven by the user experience, it does not seem apparent that they employ user-centred design techniques, the more obvious answer is simply that they have the best talent working for them.  A senior engineer at Apple reveals some details here

Of course it’s much easier to follow than to lead, at least it should be, but it’s always amusing to follow the ‘me too’ attempts from other computer manufacturers.  Let’s look at two recent examples.

Microsoft

Microsoft’s preview of Windows Mobile 6.5 revealed many ‘borrowed’ interface and interaction techniques from the iPhone.  This in itself is fine, Microsoft are renowned for copying features from OS X for example, but in true tradition, they make everything worse. They’re like a bad photocopier where each copy makes a worse version of the original.

Throughout Windows mobile 6.5 preview, the presenters mentioned that they took a user-centred design process.  I didn’t see any evidence of that, but did think that they took an Apple-centred design process.  This process simply involves looking at Apple products but then adds one final MS step which states ‘and make worse’. It’s bad enough that the MS design team have no capacity for original thought, but they don’t even appear to be able to analyze existing products.

MS have always said that they don’t copy Apple, however watching a documentary on Bill Gates I was surprised to see an early photo of Gates and Balmer in a meeting, complete with a Mac Classic in the corner.

Microsoft using Apple-centred-design

Dell

It’s not just Microsoft of course who take inspiration from Apple, surprisingly even Dell want to be seen as design conscious these days. They recently revealed their Adamo laptop, an attempt at copying the MacBook Air. The Apple-centred Design approach for the Adamo is obvious enough, it’s a very poor copy which looks terrible as you’d expect from Dell, but for me the more interesting attempt at Apple-centred Design was in the marketing of  the laptop.  Take a look at this Dell Adamo video then compare it with the original Apple video
At first I thought the Dell ad was a joke, the amateur production, poor script, the lead designer fumbling through a description of the inspiration and passion for the laptop, laughable.  Then 30 seconds into the video we see the care and attention that Dell have lavished on this machine when it’s taken out of a classic Dell brown box.  It seems Dell’s attention span didn’t quite reach to the whole user experience, I suggest their design team do an unboxing of a MacBook Air as soon as possible. It’s not the same at all, is it?

ACD justified

I can understand why both of these companies copy Apple’s design and marketing approaches, because when left to their own attempts at original thought, Microsoft give us the Churros ad and Dell give us ,well, anything that Dell produces.

Windows Mobile 6.5 – first thoughts on the UI and interaction design

Microsoft recently gave a demo of their upcoming mobile phone OS, Windows Mobile 6.5, at the Mobile World Congress Conference in Barcelona. The keynote lasted one hour and can be seen here http://tinyurl.com/d59acl or you can look for shorter demos of the OS on YouTube such as http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-w9fP6terY

Keynote introduction
Balmer gives the introduction, he says the focus is on UX and new interaction techniques. Worryingly he says they’re bringing the PC experience to the mobile, but I’m not quite sure what this means.  Designing the user experience for the desktop and for a mobile platform should be very different, and the Windows experience is not exactly a model of UX that you’d want to see anywhere else anyway.  Not a great start.

Throughout the talk, the words innovation, interaction and user experience are repeated, however just saying the words does not make it true. I found no presence of innovation in Windows Mobile 6.5, it definitely seems like they’ve tried to bolt on touch capability to their existing OS. I found more innovation in Apple’s iPhone cut and paste feature than in the whole of this Windows Mobile demo.

This keynote covers three aspects:
1. Windows Mobile 6.5 – the new OS
2. MyPhone – the web service to manage your phone.
3. Windows marketplace – the app store for the phone.

Andy Lees comes on stage, a senior VP at MS.  He shows a promotional video. Even in this promo video the interface lacked elegance. Flicking between photos causes the image to simply appear, no sense of gesture or physicality which the iPhone offers. This also happens on the Home screen, the user issues a command via a gesture, but the result just appears as if a mouse click has been issued.  The response does not match the style of the input.  No thought, no care.

1. Windows Mobile 6.5

Next up is Prithvi Raj, he says the new OS “brings my work life and personal life together”, previously Windows Mobile has been business focussed, clearly they want a slice of the iPhone market.

He alleges that the team have done user research, for example they have discovered the three reasons why people pull their phone from their pocket. From their pocket? Does this mean they only asked males? Most females I know do not keep their phone in their pocket.  I presume he really means, ‘all the engineers on our team look at their phone for one of these reasons’, or even worse ‘I take my phone out of my pocket because …’.  I’m starting to doubt their research approach, regardless, the reasons people look at their phone (according to MS) were:

1. To know the time
2. To find out where should they going (next appointment)
3. To find out why has their phone been buzzing / beeping in their *pocket* all day long. Pocket again?

What I find interesting about this is that all three reasons are to check or read back stored information (time, appointments and missed calls / text), not to actively use the phone.  Also, these reasons seem more in line with older mobile phone use, not smartphones.  Not sure I fully trust these results or how they were obtained.

Lock Screen

With their ‘user research’ completed, they have made use of these findings to inform the design of the Lock screen. This screen shows the current time and the user’s next appointment, but to see why their phone has been buzzing, the user has to click another button at the top of the screen. When they click this, any missed calls or texts appears, but their next appointment disappears. So, after all that user research revealing the top three reasons why people looked at their phones, Microsoft’s design makes it impossible to see all three at once on the screen.

Despite user research, only 2 of the 3 key items are viewable at any one time

One observation worth noting is that the unlock slider is at the top of the screen, this means you’ll need to use two hands to do an unlock (one to hold the phone, one to swipe), not one like an iPhone, as it’s slider is within thumb reach. Also, when trying to unlock the phone, the slider didn’t follow the user’s finger, it only goes part of the distance.

Home screen

Once the phone has been unlocked (similar to Apple’s swipe gesture to unlock), we are now in the Home screen.  The Home screen is the user’s landing screen, where they can get access to all their information.  The first thing that strikes me is that this is a textual list, it doesn’t look like an inspiring place to spend time, nor does it make the phone particularly usable.

The Home screen, lack of usability and satisfaction

Let’s stop and contrast this with the iPhone. The iPhone home screen has a grid of icons, each is identifiable by it’s spatial position, colour, and missed calls / texts are highlighted with a red badge. MS have went with a monochrome text-based list which means the user has to click and hold their finger until they’re over the menu item they want.  This approach results in slower navigation and fewer items the on-screen at once, so more scrolling for the user.

I know this is beta, but the visual style was unbelievably terrible, the text message screen look like a screenshot of a compuserve bulletin board from the ’80s.  Again comparing the mail app to the iPhone reveals how the iPhone uses appropriate use of colour and meaningful information, the Windows mail app lacked usability and user experience.

Start screen

Not content with the Home screen, MS think we need another, er, home screen.  This one is called the Start screen and seems to be like a graphical version of the text-based Home screen.  Confused by all the screens?  Turns out it’s not just us,  I watched several presentations on YouTube from various MS staff and many of them have confused the name Lock screen with Home screen or Launch screen or Start screen. Typical MS, confusion over simplicity.

The Start screen features a honeycombe design, but I can’t see the research justification for this.  The iPhone allows 16 icons per page, plus the 4 permanent apps at the bottom, the honestcombe design only allows for 9 to be viewed at any one time.  This must result in more unnecessary scrolling, and may also make it difficult to remember exactly where an icon is, i.e. “I know it’s in the middle somewhere, but not sure exactly”, versus the iPhones “I know it’s on page 4″.

All Windows phones will have a windows hardware ‘home’ button on them. Organizing the icons is not as easy as the iPhone, the only option seem to be to move an icon to the top or bottom of a page, but no ability to place them where you like, which is important as once you get more apps, you may want to cluster them by usage or category.

The Start screen, a graphical version of the Home screen?

Calendar

Raj demonstrates his calendar and steps us through his day by swiping each event in turn. This seems more complex than the iPhone solution where your day is presented as a list with all events in view. So to me the Windows mobile calendar seems to take longer to access and reduces the viewing of my appointments to one item at a time rather than by full day. User research?

E-mail

In the e-mail app, we still see scrollbars down the side, on a mobile device why would you do this? Have they learned nothing from previous criticisms of Windows Mobile? This is a mobile app, screen space is a precious resource, they could even have resorted to their usual tactic of copying what Apple do only making it worse (topic of next blog). The top of the screen also looks cluttered with meaningless monochrome icons, complete with a Windows desktop X button in the top right.

In the e-mail app the presenter says that you can move between e-mails by swiping across the screen. In true MS style, the page just appears, not like the photo browser on the iPhone where your swipe feels like a physical action as the image is given momentum proportionate to your swipe speed.

IE

Again, Andy Lees says it’s the same expereince on mobile as the desktop as it’s the same IE engine. Flash is supported, a direct shot at the iPhone, however it seems to be Flash Lite which is not well regarded (i.e. useless). Lees states that 40% of people are *confused* as to what they’re seeing on the mobile screen compared to the ‘big screen’. Not sure what he means, is he saying because Flash is not supported on mobile devices? I’d like to know where he got this figure from, one place springs to mind.

An IM comes in during the demo and one of the presenters says ‘I hear a beep’. A beep? Is that how important audio is to them?  He could have said audio notification, audio alert, auditory icon or similar, but no, a beep.

Contacts
When scrolling through the contacts list Raj says that he prefers to look for people by their picture rather than their name because it’s easier. If that’s the case then why do you have the text on the Home screen and not icons? Let me guess, different teams worked on different apps and the team lead has no idea about consistency or UX?

Text messaging

It is possible to respond with voice, but I guess only to certain supported clients?. What is the user need for this? It can also send messages to Xbox 360 users in-game. Have they ever watched someone enter a text message using the Xbox interface, it’s torture.

Interaction – Finger Stylus

I find it interesting to note how the Raj in this case uses his finger for interacting with Windows mobile. In most cases he has turned his index finger into a stylus by steadying it with his thumb to hit the small icons and target areas. iPhone users use their finger flat, hand down and natural. They may say that the new Windows phone is touch enabled, but it certainly isn’t designed for the natural ergonomics of the human hand.  I will call this Microsoft interaction design method Fingus (Finger as a stylus).

Compare hand ergonomics, MS on the left, Apple on the right.

2. MyPhone

MyPhone is the web companion service for your Windows Mobile phone. It offers 200MB to backup information, but the iPhone for example has up to 16GB, why offer a backup service that doesn’t backup all your stuff?  Seems like there’s potential here to loose data, i.e. I thought it was backed up, but MS’s app didn’t do it.  He says if you loose your phone then you can get a new one and all the data is restored, but how if you can only backup 200MB?

They give an example of adding a picture to someone’s contact details from the web, but the iPhone makes this really easy right on the device. Why are they showing me this, they’ve just proved how much worse their apps are than Apple’s?

27m 07s into the video, his phone freezes and has to resort to a backup phone. Great stuff. All that was missing was a BSOD on the mobile.

3. Marketplace

Users don’t have to go to Marketplace for their apps, but they might. Scenarios please?  They then show a video of customers endorsing Windows phones, senior people at Samsung, HTC, Sprint, Toshiba and Orange among others. I’m just waiting for The Onion to make a spoof based on this promo video.

Balmer says there are over 20,000 apps that run today (legacy I presume). I don’t care about these, I want apps that are designed for these touch phones.

Conclusion

Lees says that cutting edge design, innovation and user experience are very important, but I really do fail to see how any of these have been demonstrated today. All I saw in this demo was a poor imitation of a product that really did deliver on all three of those criteria. He goes on to say that the device need to be optimzed for mobile content, but the MS presenters have been harping on about how they are bring the same experience from the desktop to the mobile. Can these two companies agree on their design direction? He says MS and HTC are working closely together, I have to wonder.

Microsoft say that it is easy to identify a Windows Mobile phone in stores as we’ll see the Windows flag on the device, as least they’ve made it easy for us to know which phones to avoid.

Microsoft Songsmith – why?

I love music, really, it’s as important to me as food, air, or my Apple Mac. At age 10 I thought it was what I’d end up doing with my life. My job during my undergrad years was playing in a band, so I could say (tentatively) that I’ve been a professional musician at some stage in my life. However, I’m well aware of my limits, and I recognize that I don’t have enough talent to make a living performing. Having at least an approximate grasp on your limits is important, will I compete in the Tour de France this year, enter X-Factor or start a new career in pro-wrestling? The answer to all is sadly no.
Nowdays I’m an academic, I work on new approaches that helps make video games better, and I understand the difference between an application that is intended for research purposes and one intended for commercial release. It appears that Microsoft don’t however.

Songsmith is a ‘music’ application that came out of Microsoft Research Labs, but I just can’t work out why it’s made it to commercial release. My first exposure to the app was not the terrible muzak that it generates (more on that later), but the publicity ads surrounding the product. Scoble interviewed the two Microsoft engineers (see video below), and like most of the videos covering Songsmith, I found this terribly painful to watch. I felt like a kid watching Doctor Who all over again as I had to watch this video with my hands covering my face, peeking through my fingers now and again. The key difference being that Doctor Who made me scared, Songsmith induced agonizing embarrassment. If there had have been a sofa in my room, I would have been behind it.

Let’s rewind to the beginning. Songsmith is an app that let’s you sing into your computer’s microphone, it analyzes the recording and auto-generates a backing track according to some preferences that you set.

UI and Interaction
I feel that Songsmith does everything wrong. Everything. If I have an idea for a song in my head, I want to get that idea into the computer as quickly as possible. Not so with Songsmith. On launching the app you have to choose your style of song, then choose the BPM. How on earth anyone knows the BPM of what they want to record is beyond me. One of the ways of interacting with the UI is using a jog-wheel or dial approach, this made me scream out loud while trying to use it. In the Scoble video one of the engineers talks about how easy it is to use, I sense he’s toying with us.

Step 1 - choose your song style, but avoid the dial

Why you need two methods of interaction, both jog-wheel and the cursors is beyond me, the app already looks terribly old-fashioned, do they think dials are jazzing it up? After choosing the song style you have to then choose your BPM. I laughed when I first saw this, then shouted, then shouted some more. Both the UI and interaction for setting the BPM is nothing short of bewildering, none of my HCI students would design something as bad as this.

Step 2 - choose your BPM, if you know, care, or actually are able to.

In the choose BPM dialog, again there are two methods of interaction, the dial or cursors. There is almost no reason I can think of for having the dial here, it is very confusing to understand and control, and will almost certainly slow down the process. Nor does it add to the user experience, so how this made it past user testing is a mystery.
As for the interface itself, we can see there are two markers on the outside of the dial, is it obvious what these are? These are the maximum and minimum values of BPM, the value at the 12-oclock position is the min and the one at 9-oclock is the max. Obviously they don’t state what these values are, nor is obvious to me how the values should be chosen using this method. Is there not a common UI component that already exists that defines a numeric range and makes it easy to set a particular value? Oh yes, it’s called a slider and is also commonly found on music interfaces. Far too usable apparently, best to choose the infuriating option which makes users guess how it works.

Laying it down
We finally arrive at the recording window feeling enraged and have probably forgotten the tune that we were thinking of. Regardless, let’s record something. The first few times I hit record I wasn’t able to start in the right place, the count-in completely confused me. Once that was mastered I found singing-along to only a metronome completely, well, uncreative. After recording my vocals I was finally able to listen back to the joy of the auto-generated accompaniment. The final output is torturous, nothing else can describe it. The output seems to be using MIDI which was a protocol designed to primarily control audio equipment, and has as much potential for expressing emotional sound as Yoko Ono. Everyone else has mostly abandoned this approach for generating music, or do it very well and combine it with high quality samples (Garageband).

With vocals recorded, I explored the rest of the interface. I noticed a button labelled “Undo [1]” and when clicking it, it erased my vocals – with no ability to redo. Genius. I would suggest a better approach may have been to, oh I don’t know, how about actually tell the user in plain English what they’re undoing, e.g. Undo vocal recording? Programs like Adobe Lightroom tell the user clearly what steps they’ve performed and which they can roll back to, again MS take the ‘let’s make it completely confusing’ approach, which is always best for novices using these programs.

I don’t even know who this app is aimed at. The promotional videos show young kids but when I was using it, quite complex chords appeared, why would they care what a C#sus4 chord is?

Do potential users know or care what the chords mean?

Coda
So there we have it, Songsmith is an app which is infuriating to use, shows music syntax that is meaningless to novices, makes them answer pointless questions before they can record, will never be used by musicians, and the output would be terrible even 20 years ago. I doubt anyone on the dev team was either musical or had any awareness of usability. In the Scoble video they mention user testing, frankly I find this hard to believe, or another possibility was that the user testing wasn’t even conducted properly (i.e. our other engineers with no musical ability loved it too).

I suggest before this research team release any more products they ask themselves one question, “What would Steve say?”.

RROD and Microsoft XBox support

 

XBox 360 RROD

After less than two years of quite light use my XBox 360 has had the RROD (Red Ring of Death). Dead, lifeless, passed on, no more, ceased to exist. 

Day 1

I go to the XBox support website and try to find out how to contact someone helpful.  I sign in with my Live ID (which you must have) and it asks me to complete my gamer card. Eh?  How did I end up here, I thought I’d clicked on a support page.  Annoyance slowly sets in.  

Microsoft Silverlight event – and living with the iPhone

Silverlight

Although the Apple Mac is my computing platform of choice, I wouldn’t say that I live in an Apple bubble. When needs must, I will use Windows XP to get the job done (mostly usability software analysis tools) and I like to keep up to date with what the linux world is doing. On hearing that Microsoft were giving a talk in Brighton on their ‘Flash killer’, Silverlight, I made sure to go along.

I considered bringing my MacBook Pro along to take notes on, but I thought that being clubbed to death with a copy of Vista Home Premium is not how I want to check out of this world. Imagine my surprise however, when I turn up and both the MS presenters are typing on their MacBook Pros.