Handful of Nothing

After a couple of years working on a mainly developer based company, it has been quite nice to see the Design team to grow and show it’s value in the last year. But one problem has arrived for us here in Brazil: There’s not available professionals around.

I know nowadays everyone is facing problems in hiring good professionals but my point is that here you can always find only web-oriented guys. Not that there’s a problem in hire by talent, but I really see the day when I will hire a intern that did a lot of real user interface during his university. The courses in Brazil were first focused on graphic design, then on digital design (mainly web) and now I think that there’s a chance to influence the academia to the real interaction design, or even better to the user experience area.

For me it’s clear that UX is the umbrella of almost all design subjects thus it has a lot of potential of gathering interest from the students, but for sure they need some vision that there will be market for them to really dive into the idea.

That’s why I’m quite happy to be involved in some work with the Universities, that were only giving scholarships to Computer Science students and now is including the Design students as well.

It’s crucial to give the design students the same kind of challenge we give to the computer guys to prepare them better to the real life challenges in this increasingly digital and interactive market.

I think soon enough We can have some more interaction design oriented courses like there are already in some other countries. I will do my best to do my small part on this as good as possible.

By Krisse:

You see Canola as over-simplified, but I see Hildon as over-complicated. I think the reason we disagree is because we have totally different ideas about the kind of person that would be a potential tablet user.

I would just change that to not use the actual things, but what they represent : Canola would be replaced by a task / simplified user experience to the Hildon as “desktop-like more featured experience”.

Sorry for the prolific post before :/ Thanks Krisse, to point out everything in 2 lines.

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

This :

The 37signals’s post tells exactly what I was prepared to post. I just feel sorry for the probably competent Interaction designer who was the one to carrier the “I Don’t care! I want just like the IPHONE” task.

So you can already download the new canola from the application installer and put it to test.
The beta7 brings the major modifications to allow third party plugins and youtube was developed like one. It’s indeed a full example because it has also “theme” files so if you are a python fan and would like to develop a plugin for your Canola, just grab the source and take a look.

Now we need to rush to add support to change the folder (it’s saving on internal disk) and also make sure you have latest mplayer, if not you will face some slowdowns in playback.

Known issue : Seek does not work. The FLV support does not give us a good seek, so we removed it because it was almost usable and really annoying. Let’s see if we can help mplayer in the future in this matter.

I made this video while ago, but it’s nice to see that are step by step moving to it :)
Youtube is coming to beta6, and we are working as hard as we can to make Upnp available for Beta7. We are just not satisfied with the user experience as it is. Of course I need to add this here or the developers will kill me: don’t take the video for granted, bad things can happen on the dev path blabla :) you got the point!

From our experiences we know that those guys will generate a lot of requests / bugs and specially Upnp will be a lot of work to fix compatibility to custom servers. That’s why we are trying to improve Canola2 itself to the maximum so then we can focus at least for a sprint on fixing youtube, upnp stuff.

Again, time is the only villain : /

Info : you can see that the menu is actually “media servers” then a ball for the upnp devices (names will probably change) this means that we are open one room, just for those guys, so if people want to implement support for other servers/standards they can be placed here :)

Grab yours here : http://openbossa.indt.org/canola/add.html
or just refresh the application installer :)

The flat simple theme goal is to speed up some interactions by using less transparency on several images. It really works

We are asking our friends in the Mamona project for Xrandr (enable us to rotate the screen, and it was not available on the maemo) and they not only heard our wishes but also did the patches to run it on the chinook distribution (os2008).

With this we were able to see how canola reacts in a rotated screen, and we are quite happy with the results. It’s not fully usable (playback, covers and photo details are not good at all) but the basic (menus, lists, settings, album cover grid) work just great.

We would not be able to have a separated person just to do a vertical version /and/or maintain it with our current staff (as we do other projects as well) but this can be the case of just very small changes to enable a vertical mode for those who really want. Of course we like eye candy, so by little changes we also mean : transition when rotating, rotating video to play on landscape and modifying the player screen theme to work like this.

If people still interested (in the forums mainly) we will try to do this :) If not, it will stay as a “playground” for ideas.

Thanks Mamona guys :)

Update on canola portrait :
if you are interested to look at it (but please bare in mind that some screens are unusable - the main landscape ones) you can take the files and instructions from : http://sse2.net/rotate/ I was trying to get the site owners name, but for sure he’s a maemo friend :) he compiled the patch by vivi and kindly posted the instructions for those wanting to flash their device + applet to rotate easier than command line.

Bare in mind also : you do need to flash your kernel, so if you don’t know what that means, don’t try please :) We are already fighting against too many problems, so we will not be able to help on this :)

About the regular Maemo Desktop / Applications The desktop resizes it self, and it’s usable. even the 2 layers menu shows at least the icon so you can still recognize, but you cannot scroll with finger (in n810 will be quite awkward to do that but you can install some launcher to make it easier) the internal applications, well some of them will suffer because most of them were done like our landscape screens : to take maximum advantage of the landscape orientation :/ thus lots of elements can be out of screen :/ so…

THIS IS VERY VERY Experimental do not expect to have a full device working perfect :/

more info here. Unm… ok. This is really a bet that silverlight will go anywhere.

This plugin will enable you to watch your favorite movies from youtube inside canola, easy :)

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.

As I expected, the Sony Xperia it’s a shallow UI enabled phone. After the nice ” activity ” exposé based menu, the rest is pure windows mobile juice. Sour one. more details here, on Gizmodo

Also it was fun to hear the representative saying that the angular disposition is to follow the finger movement… but what if you’re left handed? Nice justification thought :).

I think I had a little bit more expectations from the first pictures of this phones, but is at least interesting to notice the detail here: SE is going windows mobile. So no more Symbian PX phones?

On the Korean side, Samsung’s Soul brings a functional way of using the a touchscreen as input device combining a 2 color OLED display with haptics. Haptics are for sure one way to go, but still doesn’t kill the problem of complete lack of physical feedback on touchscreen only devices. Maybe in the future we will be able to have surfaces that can actually “interact” with us in all touchscreen devices. Speaking about industrial design, the Soul phone is also very competent on that front.

Take a glance on the news from Samsung for this semester here

From the Finnish giant, the new Navigator phone, that brings one thing that I really miss when using GPS : the compass. The ability to really now where am I facing to! So this is really a pedestrian blessed phone. More details and video here

At the hidden front, in the sometimes not beloved hardware, the news comes from Texas Instrument that presented the 2 new mobile chips. The first one brings the ability to record HD movies on your phones! I was already happy with the quality in the N95… The second one will brings enough power to allow pico projectors to be on the phone. Add these 2 beasts with the one presented by Nvidia, and you get the felling of what’s happening in the Mobile World event in Barcelona.

I dream with the day that I will be able to enter a meeting with just a portable device, and will not need even to point it to a wall. Even on meetings the phone are incredible tools, and I don’t want to let it on the desk =) But for quick meetings this would be just perfect.

To end this collection of link post (almost exclusively from gizmodo) this concept design for a PSP device just rocks. I really like to see people doing those crazy concepts. Of course they are not working with industry limitations, but in a perfect world it would be nothing less then fun to see what we would be able to create with total freedom on industrial design. Would functionality be ahead of beauty bliss?