Dylan Greene dot com

The screenshot to the right is from a brand new Lenovo N100 laptop (formally IBM) .

Why do hardware manufactures ship machines with such abuse of the Start Menu?

"Nobody goes there anymore; it's too crowded."
- New Yorker, 1943

I hope Windows Vista gets a major overhaul in this area, and not just a way to search this mess. Companies should be disciplined for littering our Start Menus like this.

Why don't control panel programs and property sheets show up in the taskbar?

The answer.

This one of my many Windows peeves.

In my brain, if it gets a Window, it should be on the taskbar. I don't care how it was coded.

While I'm very excited about the next generation XBOX, the XBOX 360, I hate the official web site at XBOX360.com. I'm boycotting the web site until they fix these problems:

1. It asks us what content, country, and language we want every time we go to the site. It should just default to our user's computer's language setting and not waste our time.
2. One you choose a language it opens another window. Use the same window, what was wrong with it?
3. The new window is full screen. Why full screen? So I can't check email, pause my mp3 player, or do anything else but look at the 360 site? That's fairly arrogant. Never make the browser full screen - in fact never change the size of the browser. I liked the size it was, thank you very much.
4. While the site loads there is no progress bar with % complete. Is it going to take 10 seconds or 20 minutes? Who knows? It's anyones guess - welcome to download roulette!
5. Before the site even finishes downloading the sound begins. Sound you can't turn off because it doesn't give you an obvious way to lower the volume. After the site loads you do get a fairly hidden graphic (look to the right) that will mute the sound. But I just want to make it softer. Why not?
6. Okay, now to the actual content. This is what we see:
   
   
   A few seconds later this is what it looks like:
   
   
   The reason everything is positioned different is because everything on the page is rotating (360, get it?). Nothing is labeled, even if you move your mouse over the various circles, dots, and rectangles. So while there might be lots of cool stuff on this site, finding it is too much work for me to bother with.
7. The final problem effects all sites that ridicule themselves to using Flash for their entire content: there's no way for me to give you a link to any particular bit of information on that site. So even if I did find something cool, the only way I could show you is via a screen shot. I couldn't even tell you how to get to the page, because there's no labels on the floating circle things.

I really hope more thought is going into the design of the XBOX 360. This site is a huge disappointment, especially for a marketing site trying build interest months before the product will be available.

What I would like to see:

1. A blog written by people on the XBOX hardware, software, marketing, and/or developer relations staff. One entry a day at most, once a week at least, like what Bungie.net did leading up to Halo 2. It must have an RSS feed, other sites must be able to link direct to the blog entries, and should include updates such as links to the newest 360 videos and announcements. This will get people to go to XBOX360.com on a regular basis and will get other sites to link to the 360 site more frequently.
2. Lots of pictures of the new hardware. I found rotating zoomable images on XBOX360.com but I have no idea how to find them again. More of that. (Downloadable backgrounds with these images must be the size of our desktops - so 1600x1200 is expected, not 800x600 like the site current has.)
3. Lots of techie info for the geeks. Lots. From memory bandwidth to RF frequency.
4. Explain, in non-geek terms, what people need to enjoy the XBOX 360 the fullest. Don't just say "HDTV" - say what inputs need to be available, because if people plug their XBOX 360 to their $3000 HDTV using S-Video, their XBOX 360 won't be doing HD. Give links to example products at Samsung, Panasonic, Toshiba, etc with photos of which connectors to use. Kids need to know what to tell their parents to start saving for and justify getting a system with multiple component or HDMI inputs.
5. Link to trusted often-updated community web sites like TeamXBOX.com and XBOX employee web sites like MajorNelson.com.

I wrote this post directing to XBOX360.com, but a lot of this advice can be applied to almost any commercial web site.

Before:

After:

Read the New York Metro article to find out what changes they made and how they got to this new design.

Source: Seth Godin

But still no word on the credit-card sized asthma inhaler.

Longhorn, the next major revision of Windows, will replace or augment TrueType with OpenType, and it's got some cool new features.

Here's a couple:

• Contextual Alternates
• OpenType Fractions
• Ligatures

Filipe Fortes, a Program Manager at Microsoft on Longhorn, is blogging the cool new features.

I agree 100% with Russell Beattie and his excellent post about the problems with the current trend of cell phone user interfaces.

Are cell phones too hard to use?  Hell yeah.  And with all the new features manufactures are adding, it's only going to get worse until they start re-thinking paradigms in how we interact with the software and information on our mobile devices.

The interface on the right looks cool, but looks can be deceiving.  Read his post to find out how intuitive it really is. 

I'm currently in Sunnyvale, California.  I'll be returning to the DC area in the morning.  I'm doing the sort of work that I enjoy the most: designing software.  

When designing I like to focus on our users and what their goals are.   

Finding the goals is easy: watch your users work and ask Why? 

• Why did you go to that screen? 
• Why did you click there? 
• Why did you open that file? 

Eventually you will narrow down some fundamental goals. 

For example, before I post this blog entry, I will:

1. Run a spell checker on the text
2. Check the links to make sure they are valid
3. Make sure the formatting is okay 

That's three different tasks, with three different purposes. 

Most software would then have these three features:

1. Spell Checker
2. Link Checker
3. Preview (to check the formatting)

However, if you asked me "Why I did each of those things", you'd hear the same answer three times: "I want an error-free blog post" (or, the ever-popular: "I don't want to look like an idiot," which isn't a goal on its own, but is important to keep in mind.) 

To solve my goal, those three features could be optimized down to a single click that did all three. 

Once your users' goals are discovered, it becomes much easier for you to design the user experience of your products.  And don't think this is just for software - this works for everything from advertising design to selecting locations for a popular coffee shop. 

Part of an email from a Papa John's employee:

I don't know how responsible he was for the new F****-UP computer system, which loses pizza orders and is otherwise incredibly stupid, like some screens saying "Press CONFIRM Key" when they use standard PC keyboards with no such key - while other screens say "Press F10 key" or whatever real key is necessary. The pizza order screen, the most used screen on the system, shows what several F keys do, but does NOT show what F key to go to the next screen. Go look, in any Papa John's. Remember lots of hs dropouts are working there all over the country. The computer system is losing orders and that contributes to the 6% drop.

Lesson: Test your software with your users.  It doesn't matter how smart, cleaver, or budget-minded you think you are, if you are not using real users, or personas based on real users, you are designing for a mythical user that does not exist.

I have tax information from my mutual fund and I don't know where to store it: Should I put it with the rest of my mutual fund information or with the rest of my tax information? In the real world it's hard to store one item in multiple places.

You might have the same issue with emails that you try to categorize using folders. What happens when an email relates to two projects? The same problem occurs with documents, bookmarks, music, and more. Because of the real-world metaphor that an object can only be in one place at a time, you're forced to store in one folder or make a duplicate of the item, which isn't ideal, especially for documents and music files.

Outlook 2003

Outlook 2003 has a great feature to help with this called Search Folders. A Search Folder is contains the results to any search you specify. I have a Search Folder for all unread email across all of my folders, another one for Flagged Items across all folders, and several others. The Search Folders act like real folders, so I can forward, delete, and move items as if items in the Search Folder are in a real folder. Unlike a typical search feature, the contents of Search Folders are updated as you receive or organize your email.

While not hard to set up, Search Folders are not perfect for every situation. I'm not going to set up a Search Folder for every possible category, mainly because it's still much easier to drag emails to appropriate folders or use the Rules Wizard.

More info: How to use Search Folders in Outlook 2003.

iTunes

iTunes has a similar feature called Smart Playlist, which is very well described on Apple's web site. With iTunes you can have Smart Playlist of music in your collection that you have never listened to and optionally have it update as you add more music.

Smart Playlist differs from Search Folders in that (as far as I know) you can't organize or delete the actual music files from the Smart Playlist view because you are looking at entries in a play list, not collection of files. In my opinion this isn't ideal because the user is still required to go back to the normal view organize and delete files. Apple may change this behavior.

More info: Smart Playlist video.

Windows Media Player

I use Windows Media Player for playing music. I've never bothered to create a playlist and instead I just rely on the folder organization on my hard drive. Windows Media Player has a built-in Smart Playlist-like feature which choices like "Fresh Tracks", "Tracks I listen to on Weekends", "Music I haven't heard recently", and several more.

Unlike iTunes you can't customize these searches, nor build a playlist out of a custom search. Windows XP can show metadata from music files such as Artist and Album name in the Windows Explorer (right click on the column name), but you still can't use Find in Windows to find music using the metadata.

More info: Unofficial Windows Media Player FAQ

Longhorn

Longhorn is Microsoft's code name for their next major revision to Windows, and is expected to be released in June 2061 (but could be as soon as 2005 if the European Union forces Microsoft remove a feature or two). Longhorn's file system is very different than the file systems we use today. Files are not stored in folders, but instead are assigned a folder or folders. (Basic techie details: the file system is implemented using a database; files and folders are stored as records; folder contents are the results of SQL queries).

So finally with Longhorn a file can easily live in multiple locations. Plus folders also work like Search Folders/Smart Playlist, showing the results of some complex query of metadata.

The technology for this feature is called WinFS, and Longhorn does not limit WinFS to the file system (so I'm not sure what the FS stands for). One example is that WinFS is used to organize your contacts in Longhorn, so if you have a contact that is both a friend and a co-worker, so put them in both places at the same time.

More info: Longhorn and WinFS video.

Conclusion?

Once Longhorn comes out and applications like Outlook, Windows Media Player, and maybe even iTunes start taking advantage of features like WinFS, I think we'll finally start to get away from the broken mental model that items on your computer must live in just one place. Until then, I'm still not sure how to best organize all my financial paperwork.