Handful of Nothing

Apart from the title, that is just to grab your attention I really wanted to make sure some people understand one thing: Knowing how to criticize is a crucial thing to have your message heard. Also I wanted Maemo Developers and some heavy users to know another thing: The most important thing your software or your device must have is a target group, the group to which you design and develop your user interfaces.

So, the guys over tabletschool, were very kind with our project, but What I want to talk is on the end :

There’s been a lot of rather strong feedback (EXTREMELY strong, some of it!) for this article already, which is the main reason the ITS has avoided editorials. :-)

This would make me sad, if I was not surrounded by great Developers (physically or in the net - IRC, Gtalk) that are concerned with more than their own belly button. Let me clarify some thing that may help you understand better what is “User Centered Design”:

We picked a user profile. We analyze their needs, We see the competitors, We try to solve the USERs problem and most important: we try to solve that “User” profile problems, not EVERYONE’s problem. Why? Because it’s simply impossible to do so.

With that said, I then ask all the thumbs down guy here on maemo planet to read the following sentence:

“If you don’t agree with the basic concept behind canola, the simplicity and focus on consuming not editing, then Canola is not for you.”

But hei! What is the beauty of open platforms? : You have choice. You have the Hildon UI, you have KDE so you’re actually more well served than those users that do not care for the 95% of features you miss in Canola or any other simplified UI. They care about User oriented interfaces, not a powerhouse interface, and I can be wrong with that but the massive amount of emails I receive gives me the hint that there are a lot of user who wants the simplicity way.

Don’t get me wrong, this is like Itschools not about technical matters. I’m the one here in the company who says: I don’t care what Acronym you’re going to use, I just want the best user experience with everything that we can do on it. I want the cherry on top of the user’s pie. If you don’t think it’s important, pass it forward there are a lot of people that do care about.

And just to make clear: ~80% of the email asked for features, complained about bugs, requested improvements but none asked to include regular UI elements on the software. Why? They understood the goal.

So please, stop felling “hurt” when people talks good things about things you don’t agree. I think Hildon is a desktop like UI, and thus provide a desktop like experience. Canola tried to fill the other gap. If users think they should have more Canola, it’s their rights, as much as you think Hildon should “be ok for them”. It’s not. That’s why the use Canola (or the other apps) and that’s why We focus on python development. Because we believe we need to do more, in a simple and python give us that power.

And about the whole Canola thing: If you also really want to criticize, I know it takes time, but read the forums in ITT. Look at our way of dealing with users. We do treat them as co-developers. We do listen, we do change. But we stick to our goal.

Also to make clear another thing, this time for the tabletschool: http://tableteer.nokia.com/tableteer/os2008/team_marcelo.xhtml, INdT stands for : Nokia Technology Institute and Canola only exists because Nokia indeed wanted it to exist. As I said Canola is in opposite direction to Hildon, but that doesn’t mean Hildon is not good. It just means that the user focus is different.

Concluding: Please understand the concept of user centered design, before trying to compare things. And please be ok with the fact that it was not made for you. As it probably was not made for the one who made it. Or do you really thing all the Devs in the team were happy to hear me shout that the thing was not “smooth” and fluffly enough?

There’s a LOT MORE after the click :) But please, bare in mind that the topic here is not about Canola, or hildon or this or even your taste. It’s about being humble enough to figure out that sometimes you may not be the target.

Continue reading…

The post entitled Visualizing Fitt’s law is really a nice reading. Even if you have read that more than 5 times before, you will like the way it was written and illustrated. A nice bookmark for those who are “consulted” a lot in the Ux field :)

For those who are starting, and wanted more, maybe “real world” view of it : What about MS office ? and last but not least the graphical view at Mind Hack.

And in those links you will be able to find some small pearls, also worth bookmarking :
here (on Hick’s law, here on Gom and also this on the Power law of practice

We added a bunch of bug fixes, a new version of the Scanner with MUCH more improved support, I think most of people’s problems with media will disappear now, and I also can say that we will be the application that can find more media on the tablet (Bold hun?)

Highlights with the bug fix:
Now you can backup your radios, podcast and covers with the maemo backup application, and it will be restored on canola future updates. Or at least will try no to break it :)

And finally, you can zoom on the photos! :)

Goals for next feature release?

Youtube -> it’s done
Last.fm -> It’s already playing radios etc scrobbling on the oven
Podcast -> Add to “today’s episode” and more smart playlist
Videocast -> Podcast ready videocast will be automatically
Upnp -> the third party client is under heavy optimization
Themes -> blue theme + simple theme + color variants

And more… so thanks for everyone that sent files bug reports, this really speeds ups and tells us where to go first.

Come on Samsung, you do such nice industrial designs but the previous UI was lame, this one for sure is better but seems like a bad rip of iPhone. No problem and doing things like iPhone, but this… is almost pathetic. The scrolling is lame, and I can’t think of anything, anything worse then the “selection” always on when scrolling, then when you touch an icon it goes there. Also it looks that is on the limit of sluggishness. When animating back to the home menu (like the iphone but without the rotation) you see the maximum speed of the UI. The Song name scrolling also looks quite sluggish.

Again, this only can be the final offer from a Manager demanding “I want a iPhone like UI!!! NOW!! in 4 months!!!!” and a good competent team trying to give him what he wanted, after all he pays the bills. : /

The only credit is that is actually looking more usable then the last one.

My highlight? The “change background” widget. It’s so big that you don’t want it on your “desktop” so to change the desktop pick you need to click on the widget menu, drag the widget to the screen, choose the picture, click on apply, open the widget menu again, drag the widget back there.

VERY USABLE. =) It could be a simple, small icon on the corner, that expanded when clicked to the picture browser. Chooses, minimizes it again. Of course could be added some live preview coolness but this would be like 3x more usable.

We are now already testing the update that will fix most of the bugs the users found on the first version. It has been also a lot of work to really dig down the design problems and try to solve them (but most of those are bigger and will be out of this bug fix release).

Now is time for us to schedule the next release that will bring some of the missing features to Canola2. But let me talk first of some of things we are solving:
(so some of this are indeed in the update) but not everything and… Cover part is both in canola-tuning (downloading, finding embedded, cover.jpg) + canola (selecting from multiple available covers)

1. Compilation or SoundTrack albums being replicated N times: We did a wizard that helps you merge albums in that situation.
2. Cover Art support: Canola-tuning now looks for a local file inside the folder, looks also for the id3 tag art and in the end downloads it from the internet
3. Cover Art selection: The first support is coming : you will be able to choose a correct or another cover for an already downloaded cover.
4. Podcast downloading / playblack and remembering state : Kenneth did the download manager again, so we improved the whole podcast + added better error messages
5. MP4 not playing when mplayer installed : Mplayer has some problems with those files, so now it’s by default played by the default media player always
6. Some Pictures not appearing at all in the application: A user sent us the pictures we found the problem and fixed!
7. Support for WMA and WMV files: It’s also on the scanner, thus we think is not a final support

Also, we are already baking up some surprises for the real Update (feature update) coming in february : More video applications, more audio applications, more options for the podcast (auto download, current download, download all)

The work is going on quite hard and we are really excited to see that what we imagined is happening: We have a lot of great feedback, suggestions, bugs from the users and now it’s time to give back to you the help in the form of an update.

So, we are already testing it, planning to release on monday (then we are able to fast solve any problems).

It has been a great project to work on, and I’m more happy to be able to find time to answer all the emails, and give each user the respected time and respect. Even not being a opensource project I believe we are doing a great work of keeping all users as friends and co-developers and always on the loop and more than that: Really listen to the request and evolving the software the way they need and that fits our concept for Canola.

Busy day, Apple unveiled the really thin Macbook Air (of course its also because it doesn’t have Optic drive) and finally we can set a pin in the maps application on the iPhone. Nice laptop and nice iPhone software addition,but just like I thought that curling page effect just to show more buttonsand the lack of a little bit more ports can be a little bit too much.

But I really want to try out the Air notebook, it seems really light for those incredible exhaustive trips overseas. Looking forward of course to try out the new touchpad with the full multi touch support. It should come also as an update for all macbook pro owners (I wish).

——-

So my vacations were officially over yesterday, I’m full speed at work again, and back in the office in friday I think (now I think I will arrive in brazil 16:30 friday). The guys are baking up the first minor update to Canola2, as we had this time between the holidays to visit our families, and I’m trying to figure out the last pieces of some puzzle (read design problems) that are happening. The various artists albums are a small but annoying problem (but it seems to exist a part of compilation on id3).

So we are almost there. This year was again a crazy year due to some parallels projects but again the Dev team showed that they are off the hook, they were able to build everything in a couple of months. Very proud of them.

Tomorrow, probably at night in Brazil, like the last time we will launch the Beta site where you can download the Canola2 beta.

Unfortunately you will need to uninstall and reboot CANOLA1 from your tablet before installing beta2. But good news: if you don’t have Canola you don’t even need to reboot after installing Canola2 like it was necessary for the version1.

There are also a couple of things I would like you to learn before hand. that will help you a lot.

The main Canola UI (present and next release)

1) System indicator.
Today it shows the clock, Wifi signal strength and the Battery level.
Tomorrow we want to provide the ability to search / join networks etc.

2) Task Switcher?
This was supposed to be a task switcher, but we decided not to it. This will be a notification area. For now you will be able to return to play now screen, but in the future this will also hold any kind of notification.

3) Contextual Options buttons
This is our “safe harbour” to avoid add multiple buttons to the ui, while still allowing other features to be added, we add this options buttons. It will works just like a softkey on a phone. Contextual options for the screen you are in. In this case the home screen actually doesn’t have it. This will also be available for plugin coders in the final release.

4) Back button.
This is always back. Only in the home screen you get an “exit” canola with this. You can return to home at any point in canola (except fullscreen playback) holding down the back button a little bit.

5) Hardware keys shortcuts

Unfortunately this will not be as useful in the N810 as in the others, but ok, this can help people with N770 and N800 a little bit.

The first goal, as Canola is mainly touch-based. Is to provide basic controls to help users of Nokia 770 which has a not that sensitive screen. So for the final 1.0 release we plan to add this controls. (Thanks to patricia for prototyping it).

How it works :

If you are in any of the screens that has content, you can press up or down to scroll content up or down, as well left and right. It will work as a simple, one screen throw in the kinetic scroll.

If you in the other hand press the middle button this will bring up the screen you see, with music controls on it. I think it’s also fair enough to put the volume control to the up and down keys as well as maybe the music name. if you hold down the select key it will give you the playing now screen.

I really complained a lot about the lack of physical keys in the iPhone, so I wouldn’t leave this out.

Suggestion will be welcome, as this is not closed yet.

Playing Now Screen

5) Volume bar
This is available only in players today but you can access it also with the buttons on top of the device. The plan is to make available in our “hardkey solution” for the future but this in dangerous because n810 thrown the 4-way navigator in the sliding keyboard, thus is not suitable for that.

6) Album art
They are stored in a folder (home/user/.canola/covers) in the folders following this convention : Artist/Album/ and then cover-1.jpg. don’t touch the the cover.jpg (it’s a link) to allow also to change covers as we plan to support in the near future.

We have some neat plans for interacting with the Album art, of course first one would be to show the album list of musics (like the iPod) but I really don’t like the fact that if you are not in album mode, and selects a song from the list it takes you out of your choice and put you back in artist->album playback. This I really want to avoid. So if you select a new song album while playing your random playlist for example you just put the song on “random” queue and then you go back to your random playblack. I know some people maybe hate it but it’s our chance to try different things.

7) Rating Start
Pretty simple like the previous version. I hope to implement this also for pictures in the future.

8) The Switcher
As said, the switcher when you leave the playing now screen becomes a “play” sign and a shortcut to the now playing screen from any screen that is not fullscreen.

9) Options in the player
As said, the contextual button holds options for that screen. So in the player screen we will add pretty soon the support for the random, shuffle and more like for example the ability to control (set playblack device) to other upnp capable renderer.

10) The drag bar
We trying to make it quite consistent that everywhere you can seek you have this drag bar. So now you can just drag like previous canola but soon we will implement tooltips, and actually new kinds of browsings methods in this part (like alphabetical hints, etc)

also the player will remember all the states and you can return to it just by touching the switcher or the music icon on the main menu.

ps: Kenne, Gustavo: you’re right I forgot to put CANOLA1 there =) : p

Hello everyone (actually I know you are not that much =) ). As we are approaching the launch day of the Canola2 beta, I think it’s good to explain a couple of things.

 1st : why open beta? Well, in the first version we did a closed beta testing to check how it was going to work in peoples device but we were not able to really “test” it properly and a lot of problems happened in the installation. So it was our fear that we wouldn’t be able to do a proper testing with a small amount of users. Add to that also that we were caught by surprise with a deadline smaller then we expected, and we really have a beta now. So we need the feedback from interested users to fixes all basic bugs that can appear and after that (having a good infra makes it easier to grow in feature number without making a bloated unstable software)

2nd : Where is the feature ______ that I saw in the site or the flash? Some of the features are in the oven, and as they were planned for a little bit later release we decided to let them out to do not put in risk the stability at this point. So you will notice some missing screens, maybe some plugins are missing and some balls are not there but the good point is that we are really going to keep this version quite alive with regular updates / additional features.

3rd : Wheres the plugin support ? This is the major update in our opinion in the architecture side, and this need extra love. So we will wait for the basic bugs to come, fix them as fast as possible then we will release some of our plugins as open source examples of how to write plugins. So expect this in the first set of updates. We don’t want to let people write plugins right now, then some user shows us some nasty bug that makes us break the users plugin. So first we make sure everything is working nicely then we release the documentation / examples to the coders interested in writing plugins.

4th : So canola will leave the beta status? Sure. As much as we like to see those “forever beta” applications I think we will make clear when Canola2 reachs the version 1.0 and let everyone knows that, and of course keep it improving over the time.

————–

Conclusions :

Yes, we are actually not ready to release a final version, and even doing the most that we could (I can say: the guys worked overnight for more than 4 weeks and weekends) we did our best for the date. And we will improve it so fast that I know you guys will really enjoy the speed.

 Price:

For those that told me that  “what is the point of giving canola for free and not making it open source” well I will start a new method of payment : it’s the first-usage-video-with-comments-WARE. Just send us a video of you installing / using canola with your feedbacks and we will be grateful for almost 379 thousand seconds =)

Hi, as promised I’m going to talk a little bit about the photo viewer on the new Canola. This was a little bit controversial design and got of course the normal suspicious overview by the dev team. I fully understand them, as most of the time I have an idea but it just don’t fit in all cases, and they are a great in setting “hei dude calm down” points and to of course keep my feet on the ground sometimes.

But this time, I was really after this. I had a problem with thumbnail pages that are a really solid and fixed grid. I always thought that you photo view should be the closer to the real thing, and real thing has a real human made arrangement, where you try to combine and use the empty space as much as you can. So the goal was: How to be more “real”? More “personal”, more “human” or more “organic”?

Of course a real simulation is not possible (yet) due to the same problem like always (hardware performance) but come on! We are on a mobile platform! And this is running today only on high end computers or videogames like the Playstation 3.

But one good thing can always comes out of a restriction. After analyzing the photos, even a very small difference between the photos can give this more realistic look and feel. So it is possible to do that only by having landscape and portrait oriented photos. Then you put some small png images to the corners to create the 3D illusion and we finally found a nice format. We defined that at least height was going to be equal to ease some calculations in the thumbnailer and also in the drawing engine. But this simple detailed gave a much more “organic” feel to the view.

The internal screen

So, we are on a touchscreen based device, and as an Interaction designer I’m aware that “second click” or click and open menu are not a good solution for this kind of device. And personally I think contextual menus on touchscreen devices that appears when you hold the stylus down just one of the worst decisions ever. It’s again an attempt of bring the same behavior from the desktop to the mobile without adapting it.

To solve this we decided to have a “almost” fullscreen preview of the chosen photo and taking advantage of the widescreen and also creating consistency with the album art browsing screen, we decided to go this way :

This screen allows us to create a area for image information and maybe buttons to connect it seamlessly with other mashup content in the future, but also gives us contextual menu on the corner. We are actually not going to use in the december release this menu, as most of the options will be available in the fullscreen view but this already enable plugin developers to expand the functionality creating for example : Twango uploader plugin, Flickr, Picasa Web album or any other kind of send to application.

And to end the sequence, there’s the fullscreen view. But some of you may already say : hey what if I don’t want to see this intermediary screen? Well, you can double touch the picture and go straight to the fullscreen (actually this will be hard on low sensitivity screen) but solves the problem adding the shortcut.

The fullscreen view brings you the commands like the player : play, previous, next and in the other side: zoom and rotation.

The screen appears to not have enough hit area if you think that the Internet Tablets has a high bevel as a border, but the hit area on these screen will be actually bigger than the buttons, to allow you to click always correctly.

What’s more in and really counts: We gave an special attention to the details to make the whole usage more “smooth” so even when you have slightly bigger load time (bigger pictures being rescaled) you will have nice fade in and out transitions to reduce the loading time sensation, as well some sequential loading transitions to give the illusion of flow.

What’s out: We are not able now to make a fully powerful zoom feature, or other transitions (mainly tearing and redrawing the wholescreen smoothly limitations) and features like renaming or tagging. But as I previous stated, we already have the place to do so (menu) and there’s also small things in my head that I want to put to work next year that will allow better management, even with my belief that Canola should be more a player than a manager of media.

The Drawbacks

We all know that not everything goes the way it’s planned. There’s of course bad things about this design but I really like the way it came out.

1. What I think is really going to commented by some people is the different aspect of organization (by rows) and that some of the photos in a sequence will be out of the screen. This will be the price to pay, but I think that in this particular case it will worth.

2. The other drawback is that if you don’t have at least pictures in both orientation you’re will end up not seeing the effect and worst: if you have only regular pictures the “tearing” appears a lot more.

3. The need for a really fast thumbnailer: EFL came to help again, but this is quite complicated when you think about leaving room to allow users to manage it, and control how it works.

4. Memory consumption when kinetic scrolling : we need to provide a great experience to do not be boring. so if the user “throws” the screen to the side, it should “answer” to that. This is for example what made the iPhone UI so “attractive”. But how to do this if you have 100 or 500 images in a device where you should be really careful with memory and mainly with reading data speed? This gave us a lot of headaches. (Leo knows it)

We also did a regular, static grid version (actually used in the album browser view) so if people doesn’t like the more organic one we can maybe provide a way to fall back to the regular way.

I really believe the gorgeous touchscreen with have to work with, and it’s unique widescreen nature provides the perfect background to do something like this. So the photo view is truly an exploration of how to create exclusively for the horizontal use in a high definition widescreen. If we have this, let’s use it to it’s maximum.

Real demonstration of this screens : you can take a look in the video posted previously here (sorry for the low resolution)

Conclusion: The drawbacks are there off course, but I’m really please to push the boundaries of the platform again, and now on both fronts: design and development.

Next topic will be player screens and how Car users will really have a reason to do not worry about the smaller buttons on this version.

This was the final piece of the fast lecture I had the pleasure of presenting at WUD’07 Recife. After talking about UX practices, our team, and how things can change when you do user centered design I made a small demo of the new Canola explaining some design choices and how it evolved from the past version.

The video is a nice opportunity to see the UI for music and Photos, that even not being the most important on Canola is now for sure one of my favorites.

Bellow you can also watch the video of the same UI but now running on a real device. Sorry for the quality but here the goal is just to show how smooth we were able to achieve with EVAS. The guys are just out of this world.

Click here to watch the second movie

Well, after what some considered the “biggest” iPhone review, I really tried going back to my previous cellphone. The problem is that like an friend said, when you are not using, and making critics to something new you maybe mistake a little bit what the old one was. So I admit: I was not able to return to my N95. Here goes the why’s  :

1.  I used the web a lot, and the browser (even being webkit) just feels awkards enough to make me hate it.
   1. It tries to “shrink” the pages, to fit better in the screen. This approach is just not as good as showing the minimap and choosing the section. So using my blog’s wordpress administration was just impossible.
   2. Not enough ram to multitask. the iPhone do crashes a lot, but it’s incredible that I’m able to open 5 or 6 pages on the iphone, while opening 2 on my n95 will make the browser crashes. Actually it looks that some memory is leaking because the behavior is not well predicted. I do make sure nothing was “open” when opening the browser.
   3. Flash is not present in both browsers, but the javascript in the iPhone worked better than in the N95
2. The music application works fine, but (when on the headphones) the quality is not as good as in the iPhone
3. Video playblack (specially in the plane) was also better in the iPhone
4. The email application on the iPhone is simpler, the settings are synchronized and has rich html email that doesn’t crash.

So I still miss the hardware keys for music, the powerful speakers and the better reception as a phone. But I grew dependent on the superior browser, superior email client and the iPod application.

I was really hoping to be satisfied once I returned to my previous, much powerful phone but it really didn’t happen. The iPhone still have all the problems I said in the last review but it also brought the best multimedia and internet suite packed in an enjoyable UI experience.

To close: I’m not saying that the iPhone is a overall superior phone, but as I started the previous post about it I end this one : For a hardcore internet and multimedia consumer it really fits better. And I realized that I just don’t use the phone that much.

Well, this deserves a post because it’s exactly what I have been saying in all my talks over the iPhone. It really takes more than just “let’s do something to mimic” and what we see in the market is a bunch of frankstein trying to awfully copycat the phone without having the thing that really makes what the iPhone is: A guy who understand that user experience is everything, and that pushes it down into the company’s organization in such a way that what you get in the end is a device that was able to in it’s first incarnation set all the mobile manufactures 2 (I would say more) years behind when it comes to user experience (I already said that feature wise and hardware wise it sucks).

So take a little time to read this presentation from Peter, who beautifully put in a slideset the 10 reasons why you can morph a phone into the iPhone. here

To be able to produce inspired software, the top boss has to believe in great user experience and kick everybody’s ass to get it done. In huge companies a VP will do, but management below that level will be sidelined when trying to implement proper interaction architecture and usability processes.

In the meanwhile what we get is a lot of FranksteinPhones.

My highlights from his texts :

on Features :

This circle of dependancy is diabolic. Users and features are like children and candy. They never say no, even if stomach pains will surely follow. For developers, it is the easiest thing hand out. New features are a commodity. If you have no clue how to improve your software, you can always add new features.

Incrementally improving a mobile so that it leaves the cluster and approaches the iPhone is impossible. It is actually easier to join the iPhone’s position from above, below or the right. The only way to get there, is to jump.

Well, it’s not that, but this shows how easy is to create your own plugins. As a testing ground for our plugin architecture Kenneth is implemeting some Carman screens / sensors and data acquisitions.

Canola Menu

For those not interested in plugins, carman etc It’s really a peek into the most recent version of the main menu. Apart from the video quality you can see how smooth it is. The point for me is why to design a menu like that

Actually it was only a matter of observing the users and gathering feedback on the first version. Things that were clear and already posted here:

1. Scrolling on main menu : BAD. Why? A lot of users simply didn’t know that there was more options when scrolling down.
2. Arrows everywhere : BAD. Solving the problem above with arrows was the worst thing ever. It didn’t quite solved it and made the ui a stage for almost useless visual components.
3. Arrows not grouped : the arrows also were not “grouped” together. While the up and down were near by, right and left were quite apart, but there’s was not better way (IMHO) to do it. But it doesn’t justify the mistake.
4. Useless scrolling and not enough room: While it doesn’t appear too much with a 3 item only menu, it would be a hell to have 5,6 or more items on canola menu. Therefore the need to use something much more simple: the grid. You can run, you can hide, but in touchscreens the grid most of the times is the best, time saving view to use.
5. Textual internal menus are bad. While text can make things a lot clearer than icons, it also demands a lot more room (sometimes) and can be trick for a grid view. So to solve the problem of space we have a grid into a grid menu, or like a called here: menu on menu. The only difference is that we can fit up to 12 items on the first level then 10 items on internal menu. This takes canola now to a incredible capacity of 120 features in a range of 2 clicks. PS: WE NEVER going to place 100 items there =) but flexibility is never enough.

So this was the starting point to design the main menu, and after a lot of iterations we ended with a cleaner, simpler yet visually appealing menu that provides 2 level access to a number of applications much bigger than we need now and in the near future.

From the first 2.0 video, here you can notice that we really killed the scrolling. To keep main icon hidden is a incredible mistake that I really apologize for doing it ;)

Also in the image you can notice that we brought down some elements size. Actually we want to keep a small “compatibility” with the older Canola, and enable touchscreen use at it’s maximum, but I really (personally) wanted to get rid of :

The back button (letting only on hardware keys)
The menu button (also on hardware, but now harder because in the n810 is on the keyboard : /)
The home button (also on hardware, but this can break the device’s home button functionality while on canola)

In a sense, what I’m looking for is a almost button free (or at least when possible) User interface. Let people touch things and do things by context not only buttons. I know it’s a little bit too much, but come on, you need to have a bold target.

World Usability Day, Recife, originally uploaded by MarceloEduardo. Picture by: Fábio Caparica from UXRecife

Talking about User Centered Design (in Maemo) at World Usability Day using Canola 1.0 x Canola 2.0 as case

When you have someone, doing a “independent” review of a brand new “exciting” product you maybe have also a really nice user testing case to observe.

Of course this is not comparable to some deep in lab usability studies but really shows off the worst cases as fast as possible. Imagine a reviewer, used to a lot of devices picking up a device and facing several “odds” across the basic usage. This is for sure one of the best materials if not for influence, but to prevent you to commit the same mistakes again and again.

My observation to my own comment: it really helps in the cause of a touchscreen, to know it’s sensibility etc, so its better to at least hold one of the devices before to really dig what’s going on in the video.