... what PC developers have been doing to them for years.

Safari for Windows is out. And so far, I’m not liking it. I am a PC user, but I own a Mac machine as well and I’ve used Safari on it a fair amount.

So what am I hating about it? First and foremost, Apple broke the golden rule that every PC software developer that ported to the Mac was shamed for doing: Apple has forced their OS’s s look/feel and UI conventions onto another OS. Take this screen shot of the Safari for Windows Preferences panel:

... do what they’re telling you. This came up at GDC when talking to the Mawsoft guys so I thought I’d blog about it here.

Community is big these days. You’ll hear lots of designers tell you that it’s important to build a strong community and listen to them, because they are your core users. And I agree with that.

But in UI design it’s important to understand that what a user says and what a user is telling you can be two different things. It is rare that a user outright lies for no reason. There is almost always a root cause for what your users are saying. The trick is to find that root issue to truly get what the user is telling you. And it is often a bit different than what their words are saying. Read the rest of this entry

Google screwed up and published a web page that was stolen from Yahoo’s own design. You can learn all about it on Yahoo employee Jeremy Zawodny’s blog. It’s not a big deal, and people seem to be missing the bigger tabloid headline that this underscores: That Google is playing follower to Yahoo.

But then Google employee Matt Cutts, in a left-handed compliment, pointed out how Yahoo had stolen the look and feel of Google’s sponsored links. Twice. Even Robert Scoble jumped in with some commentary about it.

But stealing good UI is different than stealing good art design.

This is a comment I posted on the blog zuneinsider, where the question “where will we be in 1 to 5 years?” was asked. I decided to repost my comment here as well.

I want an MP3 player that I don’t have to use. No one ever says “I love to use my radio”. They say “I love listening to music”.

Right now, all I associate my iPod with is maintenance. I gotta make sure it’s charged. I gotta make sure it’s synced, and I gotta do a fair amount of spinning and clicking just to get some music playing. On the PC I gotta answer little dialog boxes for store updates and downloads, which appear at the worst time. I gotta check the screen to make sure it’s okay to unplug it, or I may hurt the little thing. Keeping a working iPod in my life is more trouble than owning a pet.

So, when are these things actually going to become easy to use? When is using an Mp3 player going to be just as easy as using a radio?

At the end of the day, it’s not about the iPod, or the Zune. It’s about the music, and any time I spend “using the player” is just taking away from “listening to music”. Less is more.

In 5 years, that’s where we should be. Listening to music, not fussing with dialog boxes and cables.

(And a full mia clupa here: I’ve worked on a few MP3 players, but it’s not easy to cause a sea-change.)

This is my second post in my Gmail UI rant series. I started this series to point out why I prefer Yahoo Mail over Gmail. I don’t think Yahoo Mail is perfect, but Gmail to me is just downright nutty, and has many-a-time left me feeling like a n00b, which is something that I really don’t think email should ever do to anyone except the elderly (that’s a joke, please no hate mail). This time I’m discussing the shortcomings in Google’s labels-instead-of-folders approach, and the difficulty in telling read messages from unread ones. Read the rest of this entry

A while back I wrote about the secret handshake. The idea is that websites that want to communicate with you could allow you to provide to them a keyword (not a password) that they would then include in all email correspondence. It would make phishing more obvious and allow you to set up filters to look for your handshakes to move them to priority folders.

Yahoo! has been using something similar for at least a few months now. It’s not for email, it’s for their log in page. Here’s how it works:

• Yahoo allows you to choose some words or upload an image. This image becomes your seal.
• Once you’ve done this, the seal will appear everywhere Yahoo asks you to sign in.
• Since it’s displayed before you sign in, it’s computer dependent -- go to a different computer and you’ll need to set up another seal.

A few months ago I wrote a little rant about how none of the map websites accepted a single paste a of multi-line address, and how lame that was. I followed up with writing my own little hack to make it possible with Google Maps and Yahoo Maps.

Shortly after writing these blog posts, I was asked to do a User Interface presentation at one of the major search/maps companies in Sillicon Valley Read the rest of this entry

As a video game designer and a television user interface designer, I’ve been paying close attention to the Nintendo Revolution Wii with baited breath. And now that Nintendo has shown what they’ve got, I am confident that within the next five to 10 years Nintendo’s controller concept will spill out of the video game arena and become the desired input style for TV-based UIs like televisions and set top boxes. Read the rest of this entry

I came up with an idea that I call the secret handshake.

The secret handshake is a property on a user’s online account for services that want to send me email. Here’s how it would work:

• I sign up for an account on a web service -- let’s say a newsletter for an online video game site.
• In addition to a password, I also elect to enter a “secret handshake”. I enter my childhood dog’s name: Magoo.
• Whenever an email is sent to me by the service, it includes the secret handshake (Magoo) in the subject line.
• I know the email is one I requested because it has my secret handshake -- even when it’s a service that rarely sends mail and might not otherwise be spotted among spam.
• I can set up mail filters based on the handshake to higlight them to further make then stand out from spam.

Now, I didn’t think of this for secure services like Paypal, but at first glance it seems like something that could reduce phishing scams.

The hunch engine mentioned in Wired News today sounds just like Variations in Photoshop, which has been included in the program for, oh, at least ten years:

To try it in Photoshop just open and image and choose Image > Adjustments > Variations. It’s not really new, but perhaps this kind of results-oriented UI may finally catch on.