David Duey

Crunchies: Best Design

I took a look at the sites nominated for the Crunchies Best Design award; most of the nominated sites seemed to be relatively simple and nondescript.  Netvibes has a fairly complex UI, but it's not overly cluttered. 

I think that's a good thing.  I'm not a UI or usability person, but I sometimes obsess over the user interface.  I like clean, uncluttered designs.  In fact, I like white.  I like plenty of white space.  I like a very focused and simple user interface. 

Here are the Crunchie Best Design nominees:

• Etsy
• Jackson Fish Market
• Netvibes
• SmugMug
• Songza

The Changing Face of the User Interface

A few days ago, after reading a TechCrunch article about Microsoft Tafiti, I played around with Tafti for a short time.  It has a really cool and impressive interface.  I don’t think Tafiti is something I’ll be using on a regular basis, but I think it's a good example of the direction that user interfaces will be going in the near future. 

  Based on my experience, hardcore techies often seem to be indifferent (at best) when it comes to the user interface.  During the early to mid 90s, I remember the shift from DOS character-based applications to the graphical user interface (GUI).  At the time, it seemed like the technical people preferred the character-based applications over the GUI.  The techies’ argument was that Windows required too much overhead to run (it did) and that DesqView (or whatever favorite TSR utility) was a superior environment.  But, users obviously embraced the richer environment of the GUI. 

During that period, I remember some of the software companies seemed to make the shift to Windows/GUI very slowly.  WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3 were slow to change and ultimately released buggy Windows versions of their software.  I think part of their failure in the marketplace was because they didn’t move quickly enough to improve their UI.

I think things are a little different now that we’re in the internet era; we have a legion of web designers with a specialized skill set that is a mixture of a good sense of aesthetics, art, usability and technology.  With web applications, I don’t think we’ll see the huge shift in UI paradigms like we saw when we moved from character-based applications to the GUI, but I think we’re going to be seeing a new class (for lack of a better description) of web applications appear that are based on Adobe AIR, JavaFX, and Microsoft Silverlight.  AJAX has gone a long was to making web applications more appealing to use, but the new tools for building rich internet applications are taking web UI far beyond the clunky realm of HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

I think there’s currently a lot of opportunity to take some of the applications of years past (desktop or web) and update them with a new and better user interface along with some collaboration/networking included courtesy of the internet.  Some examples are a web version of WinZip or possibly a screen snapshot utility.  I can’t wait to see the next round of rich internet applications.

Browser Evolution

It’s obvious that desktop applications are dying a slow death even though we’re seeing things like Acropolis.  It seems as if the masses are happier using browser plug-ins like Flash and Adobe Reader than they are downloading applications via ClickOnce.  And, Google Gears is adding fuel to that fire.  So, it looks as if the browser sandbox is the place to play.  But, I don't think the browser offers a terribly compelling user experience; the internet is compelling, but the browser sucks.

Ajax is great, but I think things like Adobe Apollo and Microsoft Silverlight (both plug-ins, so to speak) are really going to make a big difference in the way people interact with online applications.  Unfortunately, the browser will still be in the way. 

What I’d like to see is a simple browser toolbar that launches pages onto the desktop.  Tabs are fine, but they’re still confined to the browser window.  I want something that allows me to stash pages anywhere on the desktop, iconize them, maximize them and treat them as something separate from the browser.

I’m going to create a simple browser app to do that so I can see if I really do like it.  Of course, it may end up on my long list of bad ideas.

Visualizing Time

I’ve been discussing a UI/programming issue with a colleague and an interesting question arose:  “If you could visualize time, what would it look like?” 

It may seem like a dumb question, but I think it’s a good question.  Of course, we have calendars, which deal well with days weeks and months, but we have to deal with time of day, days, weeks and months over a long period of time.  Graphs and charts are fine for viewing aggregate data, but we also need to allow user input. 

I did a quick search on the internet (nothing exhaustive yet), but I didn’t find anything new or unique.  It may simply be a dumb question, but I wonder if there’s not a better alternative to a calendar, particularly when viewing, entering and editing data over long periods of time.  If you could visualize time, what would it look like?