I grew up in a Mac family. My dad used to programme accounts recievable applications on an old, black and white Macintosh, and that was my first encounter with any sort of GUI. Since then, I’ve used both Mac’s and PC’s and have a MacBook for work and a poorly-running, but still brand-new Vista box in my home study. I’ve even dabbled with Linux several times.
However, I’m starting to realise something: an aweful lot of applications (on every platform) get aesthetics completely wrong.
There’s a balance between looking nice, feeling comfortable, and aiding use. I think that the appearance of an application is as important a part of the design as the application itself. It’s a part of the usability, it’s not ‘eye candy’ slapped on for gratuitous reasons.
This is something Mac’s understand, and their GUI is gorgeous. Vista’s pretty good-looking itself, but that’s it’s problem: that’s all it is. The operating system is huge, heavy, slow and unpredictible. It crashes, hangs, and takes minutes to load. I bought a brand new (though admittedly budget-conscious PC) from a manufacturer who shall remain nameless (cough! Dell! cough…) which barely runs just the OS. I’ve had to triple the RAM and will be re-installing this weekend.
So, what Can I do about it? I can switch Aero off… leaving me with a huge, heavy, unpredictable and slightly-less-slow OS which is now ugly. So there’s Vista, tipping in the balance with an “eye candy” approach at aesthetic design.
I see the visual layout, graphics, and overall presence of an application as part of it’s feature-set.
The idea is that people are using the web to get things done, and don’t seem to notice that service providers want them to stick around. They even get tetchy with intrusions or ‘widgets’.
I agree, to a certain extent, with this statement—that people are impatient with adverts on sites. However, I’m not sure if I feel this article is that well informed. Yes, it is backed by Jakob Nielsen (so-called “Usability Guru”); which means it’s founded on stable research etc…
But, what’s a widget if not a short-cut to a result? An Amazon widget on a site is basically a way to buy a product without the need even to visit Amazon.co.uk. I don’t think it’s helpful to lump all widgets together on this one. Most widgets are functional—In fact, I’d go so far as to say that a non-functional widget is just a banner-ad.
It IS annoying when your browsing is interrupted with a flash game or advert placing itself over your text or form. It doesn’t help me make a decision, and actually puts me off that particular site. The Times Online had a long-running Land Rover ad which drove over the page, stopping me from reading. Since when is a Land Rover Discovery 3 an impulse buy?
What this article fails to notice is that users are doing exactly what they’re supposed to do: use. The internet is usable now.
I just watched this talk by Richard Baraniuk (link if embed doesn’t work), about opening up access to educational text and information. One of the most amazing ideas from his talk and the project they’re working on (Connections) is open-sourced text books.
The idea is that collaborative text-books, published on-demand could answer more questions and provide a better, more tailored resource to students and teachers. If educational resources are produced with granularity (i.e. like ‘Lego’ blocks which can be reused at a small level) they can be used and reused in a variety of novel and unpredicted ways.
Have a look and let me know what you think!
I was listening to one of Stephen Fry’s ‘podgrams’—”Wallpaper“—in which he briefly touched on the idea that the English tend to classify something as ‘pretentious’ if they don’t understand it. It’s a form of defense of tradition or perspective. Intelligence or flamboyance are marked as a personality flaw; people exhibiting uncomfortable behaviour or traits are disarmed by being seen as blemished. Pretension is perhaps the greatest fuel for satire and ironic mockery—maybe because it produces such good, well-recognised material. It is funny to see pretentious people mocked, and they are therefore rendered harmless. (I find particular hilarity in piss-taking of Tony Blair and would happily laugh at someone poking fun at Jacqui Smith, also!)
I think I recognise this, and I wonder whether there might not be more perspective defenses? The way we perceive the world—metaphorically “see”—is a deeply personal and fundamental aspect of our characters. Perhaps it’s tied in with our own beliefs about ourselves to such an extent that a conflict of perspective resonates with an attack on our person.
We defend our perspectives, especially perspectives involving personality or other foundational ideas, because they are metaphorical constructs to help us understand our world. Maybe that’s why it hurts so much to be called pretentious (speaking from the platform of a much-called pretentious git)? Because one is consigned to the same category as the most-maligned in cultural conscience?
I tend to live in a world of metaphor. It’s not my fault, according to Lakoff and Johnson. We all use metaphor all the time: to construct our thoughts and work out abstract concepts.
I’ve been exploring this a bit in the context of the Semantic Web over on Nodalities. Please feel free to have a look and send me some feedback on what you think about this set of ideas.
Are we, as a society or set of societies too quick to categorise?
I think we have built upon the Victorian-era’s predilection for classification for understanding. You’ll notice, no doubt, that I categorised the idea of classification as Victorian. Perhaps this is a helpful metaphorical conduit for expressing a large number of semantic nuances–a sort of communicative shorthand. When I mention ‘Victorian’, loads of images appear in my mind: women in petticoats and parasols, men with mustaches, steam engines, industrial buildings, red-brick, tea, lack of smiles… and a corresponding set of ideas begins to emerge rather like a tag-cloud which gets more intricate the longer you focus on a single tag.
But, what if this becomes a hindrance to meaning. I am not alone in experiencing the frustration involved when someone tries to categorise you. My wife, a veterinary surgeon, was recently introducing herself to a middle-aged woman who had asked us how long we’d lived in our town.
“Oh, I recently got a job in the vet’s practice,” says my wife (who’s blessed with ageless looks which often leave people stunned to learn her real age)
“Really! Do you need some sort of qualification to do that?”
Both my wife and I had to bite back any reproach involved in explaining that it does indeed take quite a bit of training and qualification before being allowed to take a job as a practicing veterinary surgeon, the last of which being five-years’ worth of 40+-hour weeks of a veterinary degree and harrowing RCVS examinations.
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