Via Jesper, Pierre Lebeaupin writes:

If one remembers a document, but not the app which was used to create it, it’s hard to find it again, as the system-wide search in iOS cannot search in third-party apps (at least it couldn’t when this feature was released in iPhone OS 3.0, and I am not aware of this having changed), so one has to search each and every app where this document could have been made.

In some cases, for a project for instance, it is necessary to group documents created by different apps: sometimes there is no single app that can manage all the different media for a single project. On iOS these documents can only exist segregated into their own apps with no way to logically group them.

Organizing documents based on their app is akin to organizing notes based on the pencil you used to write them.¹

Benjamin Jackson, in an excerpt from one of the first Distance essays:

The primary characteristic of unethical games is that they are manipulative, misleading, or both. From a user-experience standpoint, these games display dark patterns, which I define as common design decisions that trick users into doing something against their will. Dark patterns are usually employed to maximize some metric of success, such as email signups, checkouts, or upgrades; they generally test well when they’re released to users.

For example, FarmVille, Tap Fish, and Club Penguin play on deep-rooted psychological impulses to make money from their audiences. They take advantage of gamers’ completion urge by prominently displaying progress bars that encourage leveling up. They randomly time rewards, much like slot machines time payouts to keep players coming back, even when their net gain is negative. And they spread virally by compelling players to constantly post requests to their friends’ walls.

Aforementioned xScope is now available in a new version.

Also, Nick Disabato, who successfully funded his design book Cadence & Slang using Kickstarter, is at it again. This time, he’s funding Distance, a quarterly publication featuring long-form essays about design and technology. Help fund Distance by clicking here.

I typically use xScope for all of my on-screen pixel measuring needs, but recently, I’ve often found myseful using SnapRuler instead. It’s very simple, but has three really useful features.

First, hitting shift immediately snaps the measuring rectangle to the nearest visible edge (like the border of a button or window). Second, once you’ve measured something, you can copy the values as CSS or Objective-C code, and directly paste them into your text file. And third, you can easily resize your selection rectangle by single pixels using the arrow keys (something I have to do often when I’m working with a trackpad).

Both xScope and SnapRuler are really nifty, and get along nicely with each other.

Learning from Games

Brent Simmons:

«Gamification» is a word and concept invented by idiocrats who confuse humane with manipulative.

There are many problems with «gamification», but I don’t think this is one of them. Essentially, all UI design is about manipulating users, whether you’re coming up with the most easily understood button labels that will get people to click on the correct button, the most readable typeface that will get people to read your essay, or design ideas taken from videogames.

The goal of UI design is to get people to use our products successfully. That’s «manipulating people».

I suspect that «gamification» makes people uncomfortable because it’s associated with Skinner box type games like FarmVille and World of Warcraft, games that can be actively harmful to their players, and manipulate them into doing things that go against their own best interests. But the idea of taking design hints from games itself is value-neutral.

Like all UI design, it can be used for good or evil, to help people or to hurt them.

Presumably, users of apps like EpicWin or services like RunKeeper actively demand to be «manipulated». Stackoverflow «manipulates» people into being productive citizens and contributors. Is that really bad, or disrespectful, or even fundamentally different from UI design that doesn’t take cues from games?

Tog on Browse vs. Search, via John Gruber:

Then, there are the users. They are different from us. Users must be assumed to favor full visualization, with 75% feeling significant discomfort with abstraction (Myers, Tog on Interface). This majority has spacial and motor memories that tend to be good, while their ability to rote-memorize and to form complex mental models may be limited, and, in any case, they find those particular tasks unpleasant.

A Machine for Reading Books

If you were to design a piece of hardware that was only used for one single task, to read books, how would you design it?

If you look at the iPad, it’s clearly a device that is not meant for one specific task. It’s just a frame; the application you run on it defines what the device does. That’s why the iPad barely has any hardware buttons. What buttons would you add that would be useful to most iPad apps? Even the volume buttons are of questionable use; most apps don’t need them, or provide their own on-screen volume control.

But a device you use for one very specific thing, and one thing alone, is an entirely different proposition. Since you know exactly what people will do with it, you can design the hardware specifically for that task.

So why, then, do the new Kindle Touch devices look like small, grey iPads?

Again: if you were to design a piece of hardware that was only used for one single task, a machine specifically made for reading books, how would you design it?

What’s the one single thing Kindle owners do the most? I’m guessing it’s turning to the next page. While reading a book, every Kindle Touch owner will do this at least once a minute, probably hundreds of times in a single session.

With a button, it’s simple. You don’t have to move your finger. You don’t cover the screen with any part of your hand. You push down a bit, and you get tactile feedback, a little «click» that tells you that you’ve successfully initiated a page turn.¹

Now, compare this to turning pages using a touchscreen. First of all, the Kindles don’t have resistive screens. This is usually an advantage, but in this particular case, it means that you can’t rest your finger on the screen. You have to physically lift it before you can turn the page.

Turning pages using a touchscreen also means that you have to cover part of your screen with your thumb.

And it means that your screen will get really dirty, really quickly. This doesn’t matter too much with something like an iPad. When an iPad is turned on, the screen is bright enough that you usually don’t notice the dirt that has accumulated since the last time you wiped it down. The Kindle’s reflective screen is different. I immediately notice when I accidentally touch my Kindle’s screen.

To be clear, none of these issues are particularly egregious. But all of them are entirely needless.

So how would you design a piece of hardware that is only used for reading? One where people do a very specific thing — turn a book’s page — hundreds of times a day? Would you remove the physical button for turning the page?

Touch Is Good, but Doesn’t Preclude Buttons

I’m not against having a touchscreen on an ebook reader. Tapping on a book to open it makes perfect sense, even if it does mean that the screen gets dirty. But having a touchscreen doesn’t preclude you from also adding a hardware button that makes the one single thing people do the most often with your device as easy and seamless as possible.

I’ll probably wait until the next revision to replace my Kindle. I’m sure Amazon will see the light, and add a smaller keyboard-less 3G touchscreen Kindle with physical buttons to the lineup.

Further Reading

Craig Grannell agrees:

I’m not sold on the touch interface for this kind of device: I like the Kindle buttons, and getting fingerprints all over the screen doesn’t seem like a great prospect.

Michael Tsai also agrees:

I actually prefer the hardware page-changing buttons to touch. They feel natural and don’t lead to fingerprints on the screen.

John Gruber disagrees, mostly because the page-turning buttons on the Kindle 3 are a bit crappy:²

The new Kindle Touch seems exactly right. No more needless keyboard. No more junky buttons for page-turning. A touchscreen. Everything good about last year’s Kindle remains, everything bad about last year’s Kindle is gone.

Jason Snell writes:

But if you don’t do a lot of text entry on your Kindle, I’m not sure just how crucial that touch interface is to the enjoyment of books. Clicking the next button works pretty well. I don’t have to move my finger to tap on the screen (and get my finger grease on that screen).

I admit that in the long run using a square of directional buttons to navigate around will feel about as modern as stone knives and bear skins. Yet I find myself wondering if I might actually prefer the fourth-generation Kindle to the touchscreen model—it’s a bit smaller and lighter than the Kindle Touch.

Jin Kim and Riccardo Mori have also written about this.

Reviews of Designed For Use

Now that my book has been out for a while, I’ve seen a number of reviews on the web. Here are the ones I’ve found so far.¹

Luiz A D R Marques:

I highlighted tons of the book while reading on a Kindle (which has awfully slow highlighting!), because so much of it seemed useful.

Si Dunn:

There’s no code inside this well-written book for programmers and visual designers. Instead, the focus is on usability — how people use things — and how you can make big, modest or subtle improvements to their experiences with digital interfaces.

Simone Chiaretta:

Have you ever heard the sentence «Give them a fish and you’ll feed them for one day, teach them how to fish and you’ll feed them for the rest of their life»? This book is about teaching how to fish.

Purple Plutonium:

Overall, I found the book to be useful as it gave me broad coverage in the topic and pointed me to resources in case I wanted more depth.

Robert Brown:

Many great techniques are suggested that I never thought of as part of «design.» Mathis includes mock press releases, job shadowing, and feature sorting. Not only does he teach several techniques, but he also gives low-budget suggestions. He removes any excuse for not following certain steps such as usability testing.

(…)

In general product development I often see two areas that lack: design and documentation. Mathis hits on both topics. Every step of the design process is covered succinctly and thoroughly making it quick and easy to read yet includes many references for further indulgence. I would highly recommend this book to both young and experienced developers.

Chris Clark (who was a tech reviewer for the book):

Instructional design books tread a fine line between compelling reading and academic bore. Designed For Use delivers the goods with accessible writing and content that is broadly applicable.

Jon Bell (also a tech reviewer):

I was struck by the intellectual rigor in this book. A lot of designers are self-taught, so when they write books, they’re heavy on anecdote, opinion, and swagger. That’s great for selling yourself and getting on the speaker’s circuit, but those books are often a bit … light.

There are also a lot of books that boil everything down into very strict scientific formulas. These books take a lot of magic out of design, by trying to turn an unpredictable process into something that feels like painting by numbers.

I like that this book gives you a full survey of the field without being dry. There are tons of real-world and entertaining examples and diagrams, so it feels less like a textbook and more like a guy who loves great design and would like to tell you everything he knows.

TamsPalm:

In the end, it is hard not to like Designed for Use. The book presents a plethora of design methods which are sure to inspire everybody – the price of 30$ is more than justified.

yyztech:

[Designed for Use is] pretty in-depth and covers a lot of information that isn’t usually found in books like this.

I also saw some nice Twitter-sized reviews of the book.

Brandon Tennant:

@LKM’s Designed For Use clearly demonstrates language as user experience in every single sentence.

Guillaume Campagna:

Designed for Use by @LKM. Haven’t finished it yet, still one of the best reading I’ve had.

Justine Jordan:

Currently reading (and loving) «Designed for Use» by @LKM.

Eric Cestari

Upgrading @LKM’s book to bible status, next to @zeldman’s.

Felix Metzger:

«Designed for Use» by @LKM is the ultimate hydra book. Every page read spawns 2-3 new links in my instapaper queue. Superb sourcing!

Clayton Miller:

Enjoying @LKM’s Designed for Use. Spoiler: Usability wins.

If you’ve written a review and would like me to link to it, please tell me about it. If, on the other hand, you haven’t yet read it, you can buy it here.

Timothy B. Lee, writing for Ars Technica:

Three Boston University researchers have produced a rigorous empirical estimate of the cost of patent trolling. And the number is breath-taking: patent trolls («non-practicing entity» is the clinical term) have cost publicly traded defendants $500 billion since 1990. And the problem has become most severe in recent years. In the last four years, the costs have averaged $83 billion per year. The study says this is more than a quarter of US industrial research and development spending during those years.

Eight Traits of Great Metro Apps

Microsoft’s 8 traits of great Metro style apps presentation, via Daring Fireball.