Handful of Nothing

But it was written after, and it’s way clearer and more on the topic than what I was able to express in my 10 minutes writing :

http://mpt.net.nz/archive/2008/08/01/free-software-usability

If you read the past post, please take your time to go through the items. This is by far some of the most arguments that I agree most.

Updating: the article was commented also by Celeste Lyn from KDE and I think her opinions are really worthy a reading. For example I agree with her on defending the release early, release ofter. We are running the projects with scrum, so the only difference was to make sure the Design team works ahead of the development team one sprints. Also I have been planning and now doing (2 universities) something that has the same goal as the Season of usability, which by the way is just great. I will see if I can take the approach to the Brazilian universities and really start breeding the interest in User Experience design from the core.

I want to quote her specially in this part of her writing :

The problem is no one trusts anyone who opens their mouth and says “usability”. This is a cultural and social problem more than a process problem. Open source is a meritocracy, and it’s easy to prove you are a competent developer because you have other competent developers available to judge them. You can’t do that with designers (at least very easily) and so the only way to get past the cultural and social problem is to start with small contributions just as a new developer may start.

I will take the time to do my version also of the comments slowly but this is important. It is easier for a Usability guy to help with small bits on a already existing project. Because you can find a lot of small problems and good fixes are indeed quite small. But here comes my side of the analyzis: I am really more interested on bringing User Experience. Interaction Design on it’s core to the table on the earlier stages. Like she said, first define the audience, the user and from that point create the experience that will be the best for him. Usability will be the tool to prove and to improve that experience. (to discuss what is what is another topic).

Thank you Matthews and now Celeste for such incredible compilation / explanation of the challenges in the Usability / UX in the open source / free software software.

via: Salvetti : Thanks dude | sorry for the mess. Coming from vacations my head still out of control :)

So Glauber’s entry was selected as the new logo for the Maemo.org community. I am of course really proud of his work, and I am also happy to see a lot of people saying that they like it too.

But, as anything related to design, there’s the ones who are not satisfied, and they have all the rights to do so. I have been following branding processes re-branding and all kind of visual representation work. There’s just no way on earth to please everyone, and its part of the designer’s skill to deal with that. People are really different and go beyond the minimum common denominator is a must, because it’s better to have something nice, representative that brings attention to it’s target than having something too simplistic in the sense of “we do not want to offend anyone”.

In the end : I believe Maemo.org’s new logo is a clear evolution in all aspects, my favorite was another one, but now the chosen one is of course my favorite as my work is solid related to this platform.

I am in the Airport returning to Recife. Second half for sure will bring a lot of joy in my work endeavors and I hope to help OpenBossa Labs to improve the experience on Maemo, hope to see the guys more and more active in the community - Need someone to hlep me there - and with that construct more and more nice experiences for the tablet lovers.

This will be quite short (it never is I know), but it’s the idea behind the main problem I am studying how to solve:

There’s not today a simple way to really improve the UI on most of FOSS big softwares. Why?
Ownership. Open source projects are most of the time product of the need of a specific individual, most of the time a talented developer, that indeed has a problem or a desire. He starts the work, gets something done, some friends join to help and a new software is born.

This is beautiful and it’s indeed the way most of the important and nice projects came to life. After this you have some roles into the project, but the main one is the “maintainer” role. This guy is the responsible for what goes in and out of the project.

So how on earth do you expect to all of them simply to give up their position to another guy, how cannot get anything working (after all he’s just a interaction designer) and comes saying that everything should be different, some of the things should be actually quite stupid or crap (in the maintainers view) and when you decide to listen to the users, you realize that the only users that are “active” or online where you search for them, are most of the time other developers and not the real base of regular, end-users.

You get stones in the face. You get flames about not being a good way to do stuff, that this is the totally wrong way bla bla bla. Because there’s now a “community” for that software, not of the users but a community of those who help it born. So they love their software, they have a small felling that will always break a new, disruptive way of working. Ownership.

So comes the question : how to have both core developer and a core designer working together? Trusting each other and understanding the first rule: YOU (both) are not the user. We are creators. We have too much power, and with that comes the need to step out of our arrogance and do things we do not like. People may think I like Canola’s UI more than anything else for me. No. My favorite UI is more along Jeff Haskin’s invisible UI or Quicksilver on the Macintosh computers than the icon based way of Canola. My favorite graphical UI is more a grid based level-digging zooming UI than Canola. But this is not ready for the end user. This is ready for me (and I think it’s indeed quite risky still)

Back to the question, how to elevate a UI designer to a position that nowaday is 100% taken by developers (by full merit) and how would be the mechanisms to do so with the Designers? (and I’m not talking about the Icons and UI designers out there) I know that are some interesting projects like openusability.org but this is not enough. Even inside companies it’s not common to see a good Designer - Developer symbiosis and without this, again this will make a lot of people angry : there will not be a real good user experience around the open source based software. And for the developers, by user experience we are talking about everything in the OS, not only a fancy UI like Elisa on the desktop or Canola on the tablets, but the whole mental model of a daily user, internet,media hungry user being taken into account when designing a simple project. Integration, unity in every single contact of the user with your device, not only when using it but also when improving it, updating it, charging it, synchronizing it and so on.

Now we are half of the way to accomplish what we wanted. The team in Manaus already submited all their logos. I have 2 favorites among those. Now the team recife is finishing creating the custom Fonts (as they need to be free) and have also some submissions coming. I am quite happy with the team work, that in the middle of a lot of projects achieved a good quality in short time. Branding is a really complicated field. Not in the sense of opening a application and doing it, or the research needed behind.. but in the fact that it will NEVER please everyone (like almost everything else) and will always bring bad comments from all sides. But I think that’s the beauty… and we are ready for both things, if you like them… Vote :) if you don’t you can always call us retarded here in the comments :)

You can read each logo’s concept on the submission wiki : here
As It’s difficult to have favorites, I can say that I like quite a lot this 2 : logo numb 2 from Affonso, and number 1 from Glauber. Also the completely different style from Miguel’s logo is quite catchy. Without doubt the best humored logo :)

So We are a small country (at least if you compare to China) but we have more than 100 million mobile phone users (I think the last number I saw was something like 120mil lines. Apple’s partner (America movil) opened a registration for those interested in the Apple 3G iPhone and got 100k guys there. They didn’t say what the plan is going to be, but is not going to be less than 99 Brazilian Reais (1/4 of a minimum salary) and for sure there will be a fee + taxes (not free iPhone for plans under 300 reais / monthly).

This give us the following scenario :
a. It seems that there’s something like 200k users already in Brazil (using jailbroken phones) + the 100k or a little bit more users from the other carries, we can arrive at a number of 500k possible clients. so if iPhone reaches 1 million in one year will be quite a achievement… but how much does it represent? less than 1%. I strongly believe that they will be confined to the 500k-600k clients, half of them non-official from 2g models, so no revenue, no unlimited data plan and a maximum 0,5% market share. It seems that the High end phones market in Brazil is something around 5% giving this ~10% to Apple which is not bad, but also is not 100% official, profit generating iPhones like the official ones sold by the carriers.

I think my previous comment will start to make sense once the phone hit’s the stores :)

I think I miss listening to the Cranberries :)

As some people know, I work for INdT where we develop a couple of applications for
Maemo, and we are really fans of the platform and the whole linux mobile in general. So when I read about the contest it was clear I should make a internal competition with the members of the design team. Here is team.M first works, and of course I said it’s not good to be submitted :) This team is based in Manaus (in the amazon) and it’s composed by 3 really nice guys: Miguel, Abrãao and Glauber. Here is their first iteration on the brands:

This is their message about the candidate for entries (they need to be approved by me after some modifications etc):

“We would like to start this post saying that branding design is not
our main area of expertise or business. Knowing that, what we’ve done
was try to apply some graphic design principles to accomplish
something that may look rather simple but is in fact one of the most
complex things in the design field: Construct a visual identity. As
every design process should, we have started the job by doing some
research on the topic, our goal was to define “what means maemo.org to
its users, what values does it represent?”. After doing some internet
research, digging a lot in the forums and conducting a survey with a
bunch of developers, we ended up with the following characteristics,
aspects, keywords and etc for maemo.org:

People, Freedom, Mobility, Internet, Nokia ITT, Linux, Technology, Nokia, Internet, Challenging, Nerds, Fun, Share… and so on.

With these in mind, we gave a look at the alternatives that were
produced so far for contest and in some famous, and not so famous,
logos to avoid “copying”. I hope we did our homework well. After that
we gathered our design group over a rounded table and generated the
biggest number of alternatives we could, nothing was discarded, no
devil advocate was allowed. With a lot of paper in our hands we did a
old technique to let creativity flow: Every member of the group got
one alternative sheet from the pile and had a small time (15 min.) to
make some “improvements” over the alternatives he liked and then pass
the paper to the designer next to him. We keep doing that until all
the alternatives were reviewed.

With half of the process gone, we selected the best alternatives with
the help of some good willed developers and went to the computer. There
we still did some small changes over the main idea, defined the logos
final appearances(plain and fluffy) and illustrated some use cases for
them, like application over t-shirts and caps. That may be not the end
of the road, but we think that we are on the right way.

People Involved:
Abraão Affonso
Glaubert Oliveira
Miguel Peres
And a lot of nice developers
”

——-

Wow! that’s a huge headline :) Well after seeing / reading some big consultancy companies going back to the desk to work on their iPhone sales prediction, because they remembered that small detail that MOST OF THE WORLD is not the US… I will try to make a small comparison for people to understand with my other hobby : Guitars.

What guitars has to do with mobile phones or the iphone sales? Well… As I explained in the other post, iPhone cannot sell a lot in a lot of countries because of price. People then said “Are you dumb? it’s only 199 now, in some countries it’s even free!”. yeah yeah yeah, but is it free or 199 without contract? No! So how much it would cost? something around 500 US they say. But wait.. we are talking about imported products, and for that I give you the Guitar example:

This is my consumer dream nowadays : A Steve morse signature guitar:

It cost 1.4k USD. today’s exchange rate is at 1.6 BR$ for each dolar, so this would give us the final price of 2240 BR$. The same could be applied to the iphone, at 500 USD, going for only 800 BR$. Affordable :)

But then enter a common 3rd world / emergent country taxes crushing style customs! And your 1.4k dollars guitar has turned into this:

Yes. you saw it right, 8.300 Br$ (and this is cheaper than the official distributor recommends) so we are talking about 5243.12 USD :) Magic? No baby just taxes over taxes :) This is actually better than the ps3 case that I talked when it was launched, the ps3 at 599 got here for 8k also.

So, 5k Dolars :) you can by a round trip with hotel for the US, buy 2 guitars, come back, pay all the taxes, and sell one guitar and you will have the 5k back and 1 guitar. Magic.

Now, what about a 500 USD phone? Even with the 199 USD you can compare with other eletronics: the Wii costs 249 right? Here in Brazil it costs 1.599, or 1000 USD :) So the best price for the iPhone will be something at 500 USD WITH contract (I’m putting here that the carrier will make it free, but it will have to pay the taxes to import the phone) and the minimum salary is 2 times lower than this :)

I was looking the entries for the Maemo logo and I was really happy to see how many people have contributed already. But I also gave some laughs, because I could recognize at least 6 or 7 famous brands there :) Amazon, Palm, Engadget, etc and 2 guys being hanged by the neck! :) In the end I’m happy to see people giving their shot on the future maemo looks, and for sure we will contribute with some options :) after all we are the fuffly fuffly-ui-dudes :) Anyhow I think Maemo really needs this revamp, and I hope more people contribute to make this a great brand. My advice as a graphics professional? Be simple :) We are brazilians, but the European way of less is more is always great to start with :)

Carman, our fully open source project here at OpenBossa Labs, aims to give tablet users the chance of analyzing their Car’s OBDII protocol was on “hold” for a while with no new versions announced. The fact was that just like Canola, the whole INdT team was going over a lot of changes so the projects were hit by that.

Anyways we were not stopped, and Carman indeed received a lot of love, but it could have used a little bit more. The first thing was the obvious “closer” relationship with Canola. The new version is not integrated, but is indeed full EFL based and respects the same approach as Canola on GUI design. More important than the visual is the addition of several new features, one of my favorites is the Trip report. This little feature will enable you to record all your trips or telecommutes to analyze for example best route, with lower consumption, lower engine stress and give you the chance to compare 2 very similar routes (like I have 2 - 11km and 13km possibilities here, but one of them is really better even on consumption: 13km, just because the engine is less stressed the whole way)

Also we tried to give a real “renew” on the visual design, bringing a really outstanding, best-of-class graphics to Maemo, and I can guarantee, it’s going to be the most gorgeous application for Internet Tablet. If you do not believe me take a look in those images below : (these are the final Visual design being implemented) the goal is really to create a custom look, trying to give freedom for theme makers to adapt Carman for several Car models. This themes were crafted by Nando Sperb, a incredible designer working in carman Project.

In the future, we still want to connect Carman and Canola, have both as opensource and this is the first step.

Please, waste a little minute of your life to read this : http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/06/16/heres-whats-going-to-happen-to-apples-rivals/ and then come back to the non-alienated world outside the US.

Fact: I am a huge apple fan. Fact: I do use the iPhone. Fact: I do use OsX. Fact: I know a lot of mobile phones. So let’s go:
Not using only the “Nokia sells more than apple in single day” argument, the point is: Apple has a head start on the single smaller niche of the market: the high end phones. Also: Even on that niche, there’s still people that think that they need physical keyboards or a working bluetooth (so their small laptop can go to the internet once they are in the country for example). Also there’s a bunch of people who like to add media in a little bit free way, like just inserting a usb cable and copying inside the card. Likewise there’s people who want a little bit better reception and a camera that takes better pictures(like the sony ericssons).

With that on the line, and after you expend a little more time reading the comments the conclusion is the following:

Apple will indeed have a great year. But has someone noticed that the same success level that Apple had in the US was not achieved in the other countries? That only countries that are more american-like (Status-driven etc) like Brazil, will be able to replicate it, when others (parts of Europe, India, most of china) will continue with their own choices of phones (mainly durability, pre-paid cheap phones, etc)? Does anyone reported that Symbian, even with all it’s flaw still selling a lot of phones and by no ways in the universe will be staring at apple without moving?

Please people! Get your grips on! It will be a nice competition, on the high end section, but as everything it is also subjected to a possibility of failure in several other market, and the whole early adopter community can also be dragged in the future to more open devices like the future android enabled ones. The market scenario will be a lot more complicated than the iPod was for apple. iPhone will never never hit 20% market share in the world. This would mean nobody uses anything besides iphone on the high end category, what we all know is just like to say that nobody is going to use anything but the ipod ever again.

There’s just no space in the world for another monopoly like MS windows. I don’t believe that after all this bla bla bla about long tail, people believes that one product, with just storage space variation will be the doom of it’s competition.

So finally the 3G iphone hit the shelves. Already a lot of people pissed off because there’s no front camera, or better bluetooth support or this or that. I barely read those topics. I went straight to the thing that catch my attention: the MobileME. While it looks just like a new clothing to .mac + mobile sync, it’s actually looking quite similar to OVI from Nokia. I maybe be wrong, but at least in some part (I think OVI will be a little bit bigger and cover a lot of field not covered - games, maps) but if you put together, application store + itunes store + mobileMe it’s almost like OVI. Now comes the thing: does it worth 99 dollars / year? Are you going to buy it? For us here in Brazil, 99 is just a little bit too much, but it makes more sense than paying 99 for .mac.

It’s going to be interesting now to see the fight going over the User experience field more than ever: Who’s going to provide this “technology-internet-savvy” user with the best experience? Nokia OVI or Iphone + MobileME?

Update: It was good to see that some of the design flaws I complained a lot were solved for this issue. The main one was in the industrial design : weak reception. this time apple’s placed a plastic cover on the back, this will for sure improve the signal strength. Also I complained a lot about the lack of mass item deletion. The new email also brings that. (I’m not saying that they saw any of this here) I’m just happy to see that even with all the things that were out, they still paying attention to a lot of details that, in the end, makes the difference.

blogo
Is a really great small application with a very simple interaction design that just works really flawlessly on amateur’s blogging workflow.

If you have a couple of blogs and a twittwe account this may be of some help. Or at least save you a couple of megabytes in virtual memory that you would spent with the browser.

May 19th, 2008

Hello people! After a long delay we are back with a slightly bigger update, now even with a smaller team.
We managed to get the two most desired features into this release, but please bare in mind that they are
appearing for the first time, so we will need your help debugging and reporting problems so that we can
iron out the bugs.

Instructions:

Already a Canola user? Just click on the “Check for updates” button in the Application manager and wait for the Beta9 to appear!

Before running Canola, make sure you install all of the Canola related updates.

Most notable changes:

UPnP streaming is here now you can install the plugin that will allow you to browse UPnP capable media services and stream (photo, video, audio) as requested.
Canola is no miracle maker, so make sure that your videos are already in good resolution and your pictures are not insanely big to avoid slow performances over your network.

(1) A new icon with the name “Media servers” will show up at Canola’s home screen as soon as you have installed the UPnP plugin. (2) Inside Media servers, “Search servers” (3 and 4) will let you browse available UPnP devices.

Support for playlist creation! Simply press and hold a song in order to add to the dinamical
“On the Move” playlist later saved as a real playlist if you like. You are able to save as many playlist as you like, as well as edit them. More features will be coming in a near future.

(1) When you enter Canola’s “My music” section your whole song library is at your disposal. (2) If you press and hold a song the song will be added to the “On the Move” playlist. (3) The “On the Move” is found within the “Playlists” section of My music. (4) At the “On the Move” you also able to remove songs from playlists and even save your modified playlist by accessing the options menu.

Tune Canola2 using a new plugin Now you don’t need to use another application for managing cover arts and video thumbnails. The standalone 3rd party Canola Tuning application has been turned into a plugin that integrate seamlessly into Canola and give you more control over your cover arts, video thumbnails by allowing you to update and delete unused cover arts as well as select your cover art sources.

(1) The cover arts and video thumbnails can be updated simply by accessing an option found in the settings panel. (3) You can even choose your favorite place to download covers. (4) This feature can also be accessed directly from within the album art screen, found in “My music”.

Better List handling, in order to reduce miss clicks during scrolling : Please, let us know if it works better for you. We will keep improving based on your feedback.

Other Additions / Fixes :

- You can now change the volume using the hardware keys on your internet tablet, not just when using the player, but everywhere in Canola.
- Pre-added internet media is added in new installations, which will bring you a nice selection of photocasts, internet radio stations as well as podcasts. Enought to get you started, exploring these features of Canola.
- More stream URIs supported for internet radio, which allows more radio stations to be added.
- An annoying PNG thumbnail bug has been fixed, which should make some of you happy.
- Several dozens of bugs has been fixed during the release cycle, and Canola should be considerable more stable.
- Many interface gliches and corrections were made, resulting in API change. If you are a plugin author, you will need to update your plugin accordantly.

Note: If you have extra themes and plugins installed, make sure to update them as well, at the
Add ons section.

What’s known, and what’s coming:

We already know that UPnP (Universal Plug and Play) support is not top of the notch, so please be kind and share your problems with us, so that this component is able to evolve. Also, we highly suggest you to use streaming optimized media as well a good UPnP server.
We follow Nokia’s recommendation: SimpleCenter. It’s a free download and runs on Windows. If you are on Linux, FUPPES does the job, but you’ll need to organize the shared media to appear as good as possible. Missing points: the media has no thumbnails and it’s not possible to differentiate visually one kind of file from another. So make sure you have organized your contents into distinct folders.

Coming before beta 10:
- Highly improved YouTube plugin; sorted results, support for comments, log in to your account, leave comments etc.

Coming in beta 10:
- FM radio
- Search on lists
- Better list navigations (search, jumps, alphabetical grid)
- Simpler grid for photos and album art, to ease use by allowing alphabetical grouping and to improve speed in some cases

It was just amazing :) don’t miss the next one!!!