So what arguments do we (Generation X) come up with?

1. Paper books are easier on the eyes and you can read them easier.
2. Paper is less fragile than electronic formats. There is less to go wrong, for instance no need to power a paper book. Also if you drop a paper book into the bath it’s cheaply replaced, the same can’t be said about the eBook reader.
3. There is an emotional pleasure in simply seeing shelves of books. There is also an intrinsic value in a book that goes beyond the contents. It’s in the cover design and material, the binding, its weight and the tactile nature of a book.
4. There is a sense of ownership in having a physical book that just isn’t there in an electronic book. There is something more permanent about paper.
5.  A sketch on the back of a beer mat can record a world changing idea. It’s the freedom to sketch anything you like anywhere on the paper that makes a paper and pen a powerful user experience. Pickup a piece of paper and a pen and you can be sketching and writing with freedom in seconds (instant on!).
6. Some people read paper books as a way to take a break from the computer screen that rules their working life. We’re in front of a computer screen all day and when you relax you just want to have a different experience.
7.  Cuddly Toy! (hint.. Google the title…)

Ok, so looking back across all of the reasons I gave above I can see counter arguments from the virtual world and to be honest the arguments for paper do seem a bit generational.

A recent study by Habbo Hotel that asked 49,000 Digital Natives a.k.a. Generation Z (born 1990’s and 2000’s) to share their views on how the internet will shape the future. The following finding suggests they don’t have the same reticence about replacing paper:

“However, whilst the TV remains a relevant and important medium to this media-savvy generation, traditional print media (newspapers, magazines and books) won’t fair as well with 55 per cent of respondents saying that they will be extinct either very soon or some day in the future. Only 18 per cent feel that printed media will always have a place.”

Generation Z have grown up with the internet and mobile devices, and they are certainly comfortable and possibly even dependent on technology. To some extent they live their lives in the virtual world and don’t see a need to get away from it. They have access to a huge source of information and it doesn’t go stale like the information in printed books. They also have a green conscience that reverses the emotional context for a paper book.

Even if the feelings that Generation X has about paper and pens has some validity, it is obvious that Generation Z will eventually shut that door. The iPad and its descendents are the vehicle for this final move to the electronic world. It makes me wonder however what will replace books, DVDs and CDs under the Christmas tree in the next decade. In the meantime my sons will be getting a number of annuals and story books from this Generation X Santa.

Happy Holidays!

The prototype designs we were testing were based on real objects. The metaphors were therefore known to all users. During the test sessions they were consistently using terminology such as ‘intuitive’, ‘familiar’, ‘natural’, ‘instinctive’… to use.

These are terms you hope users might use when testing prototypes but you are grateful when they’re being validated by perfect strangers that have never seen the prototypes before.

However, there was one user who declared within the first minute of a one hour test that the prototype was, “Obviously an analogue real-world model – I hate tools like this”.

At this point I thought should I come up with an excuse to ask them to leave the lab, come back another time since I was feeling ill, any excuse… Then you remind yourself about the HCI principle all users are users, regardless of their preconceptions, so I needed to follow through the test and record all their comments, even if they might all be negative given their opening statement…

Aside from writing observation notes and filming the session, at the end I leave users to fill in a questionnaire following the same steps of the tasks we just went through, to express in their own words without me being in the room what they really think. To my surprise by the end of the session given their original statement, this is what they concluded: “I initially thought that the use of a real-world model would limit the interface, but it actually proved to be very intuitive.”

So what started with a user session that could have been entirely negative, turned out to be the best experience of that usability lab.

Priceless.

I then asked him about his support strategy for these consumer tools.  “Very simple”, he said, “self help unless it’s core network/ hardware/ infrastructure related – very little support is required because the products are intuitive and easy to use. There’s also a vast amount of assistance available online through knowledge bases and forums.  And, our users generally know their products better than IT.”

All of which got me thinking about software user interfaces again, and why it is that business software isn’t easier to use.  It was where we started with the development of the gDoc Fusion user interface.

If consumer stuff is so easy and fun to use, then why isn’t our day to day business software too?

It’s been touted before of course with different terminology but in the past hardware could not deliver and in most cases still does not deliver all that is needed to get a 100% NUI. Often though it’s also the software that is lacking because the user interfaces are not designed to give the user that natural experience; naturally.

My wife looks after and teaches children of ages ranging between 2 to 12 and is a qualified Montessori teacher. In a nutshell the Montessori method advocates teaching only via concrete objects in a real environment. When I can I observe some of the children as they develop and learn. It’s amazing to see the difference when children are taught with real world physical objects as opposed to abstract concepts, how well they learn and how confident they are to use what they know. The same applies to software users. The more the tool works naturally the easier it is to learn, use and understand how it works. Simple!

In gDoc Fusion that is how we designed the Assembly View. If you need to merge two physical documents into a single document using parts of each, you would unbind them, lay them out on a table page by page and play solitaire with the pages until you organised them as you wanted then stapled the result into a single document.

That is exactly the way the Assembly View works. You can open two or more documents, they display in rows of single pages so you can see their content then you can select one or more pages, drag them and merge into a single document. Simple, intuitive and natural; NUI.

So what is an ‘Icon’. It is not a religious image as the term created by the ancient Greeks, was coined.
In computing, an Icon is an image, picture, or symbol representing a concept. They started out as small 16×16 pixels in size and only in black and white or green and black. Today they can be of any size up to 512×512 pixels and in millions of colours.

Is a picture worth a thousand words?

When I was a student at the University of Kent in Canterbury studying Computer Science in the last 80’, I had just started understanding HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) concepts. Back then personal computers were just starting to become available. The focus was on the ’technology’ that was constantly evolving and less about the ‘user’.

I was fortunate as a research fellow at Canterbury to go to a weeklong summer conference on User Interfaces in Scandinavia in 1989 and I jumped at the opportunity. There were over 500 attendees students and practitioners. Speakers such as James D. Foley and Andy van Dam, Ben Shneiderman, Brian W Kernigham (C) and Alan Cooper (Visual Basic) to name but a few. From diverse backgrounds, MIT and numerous cognitive science/ HCI departments of US and European universities.

It was the one event that changed my whole prospective on Computing. I realised the speakers were talking the same language I was trying to, in the software industry, and have been ever since, that the ‘User’ needs to be at the centre of the design process. This is important when designing User Interfaces not only for computer software but for any consumer product.

During the breakout periods we were set a task to design some meaningful icons. In those days applications had just started to have one level of Undo and Redo so no icons had been designed let alone standardised. In fact I had not yet seen or used an application that had such a feature.

The only tools we were handed were a piece of engineering paper and a pencil. My icons were chosen and later I used them in commercial products I designed in the early 90s. That experience taught me an important HCI lesson I have never forgotten. Although it is true that in certain circumstances ‘a picture may be worth many words’ it is also true that a badly designed image is ‘worth less than a word’. However if well designed, you can with a blob of pixels, represent a task, feature or tool.

This diagram shows my original design for Undo and Redo. Obviously it was language dependent but if you compare it to what we are use to using today (*), with no labels can you tell, without thinking, which is which?

When is an icon out of date?

An icon should not date. Like all pictorial symbols that have to follow basic rules such as clean, simple, easy to read and meaningful… Computer icons should not be tied to something that is transitory like the hardware we store computer data on. The classic MS Save icon is out of date. Try explaining to a child today why the save icon looks like something they have never seen or heard of before. You will be met by ‘What is a floppy disk?’. And even if you can find a dusty box somewhere in the garage or loft/attic it is not really worth explaining.

The issue is that icons should not be based on a computer storage medium because it was known to be evolving, so bound to change. Which is why the Open and Save icons in gDoc Fusion instead use a similar metaphor for Save as it does for Open…

Mixing Text and Icons

There is nothing wrong in combining Text with Icons. Not everyone relates to images in the same way. Some of us relate to words better then images and vice versa. A combination of even one word and a well designed image can mean ‘more than a thousand words’ and appeal to a wider user base.

This leads me to another useful design technique for icons I have found through observations in usability labs; to help make applications easier to approach by users. In gDoc Fusion, unlike other applications, instead of a blank screen users are presented with the ‘welcome screen’. This demonstrates a way of using Icons as representations of ‘Views’ on the world of ‘Documents’.

This not only makes gDoc Fusion easier to access by being less daunting for novice users but also encourages a way of approaching common document tasks.
One of my driving principles in User Interfaces design, ‘making the users life easier’.