turntable / as the table turns

Loving the highly iPhone friendly mobile version of the NZ Herald. It’s an especially good experience over GPRS.

Not loving the new Delicious design. Way too much visual noise. What used to take a few key clicks (tagging new bookmarks) now takes a few additional clumsy key clicks and mouse clicks.

I’m putting together some hands-on workshops, focused on improving online experiences. I’ve created a new site for this little project - please head over to Skyrize.com for all the details.

The first one is Rapid Prototyping in Flash (no experience with Flash necessary). We’ll also be covering many aspects of interaction design. It’s happening on 31 July from 7-9pm. The workshop is for designers, developers, project managers, biz dev and marketing people.

It should be a lot of fun. Be sure to register early, because registration is limited to 10 people, so everyone has quality hands-on time.

It’s always made me crazy that phone experiences aren’t better integrated with the desktop. On the desktop you have the space to manipulate large data sets and UI elements very easily and quickly.

There have been feeble, wretched attempts made by Nokia and Sony. I’m disappointed with the integration Apple has offered so far with the iPhone via iTunes. It’s extremely limited and frustrating. The new Mobile Me interface seems promising, but I’m not holding my breath that it’s what I want.

In the video below, Google demos the type of customisation that I’m looking for. At about 3:30 they show how you to customise the phone experience through a desktop interface. Just drag-and-drop content and UI widgets to your phone. Finally somebody has done it right!

Watch this video of the physics game software Phun (then go download Phun and have a blast playing with it!!).

Also, check out this video showing Crayon Physics.

And Crayon Physics for the iPhone.

You can install Crayon Physics for iPhone by adding http://iphone.r4m0n.net/repos as a source to Installer.app.

Finally, have a look at Moovl. It’s in Java, which I refuse to install, but the intro video provides a good overview of the concept.

Doesn’t it inspire you to dream up cool possibilities for games and learning tools?! Have you seen other games or apps that you find completely fun and inspiring?

My beloved K750 has crapped out on me. It’s not beloved anymore.

To replace it, I almost bought the N95. Then I played around with it. It has a killer feature set, but it’s extremely expensive and it has the absolute worst hardware and software design. It’s pitiful. For half the price I got the iPhone. Thank god for that.

The iPhone is almost certainly, as my friend Wayne put it, the best 1.0 product ever. I’m really dying to know how they pulled it off. How did they manage to design such a refined user experience in a 1.0 - without news of the phone’s details leaking?

I say that even though my version of the iPhone lacks the ability to make or receive phone calls, text messages, or email/web on-the-go via GPRS!! I can NOT wait until they work out the crack.

So what’s to love?

• The drop dead beautiful UI design and hardware. That’s obvious just looking at screenshots, but using it is far more impressive.
• The touch keyboard works extremely well. I often use one hand to type and I’m definitely much faster typing on it than a standard mobile keypad. Admittedly, I was never one of those hyper-thumb freaks.
• The speed of the interface. It’s incredibly responsive and smooth. Just like Macs, putting it to sleep and waking it up is instantaneous.
• The photo quality is very good. I thought the K750 took decent shots, but the iPhoto pix are significantly better (however, I do have some gripes about the camera).
• The apps (calendar, maps, notepad) are stunning. Purely from a UI design perspective it’s beautiful. The interactions are very quick and very smooth, with nicely anticipated shortcuts and navigational details.

Gripes?

• I can’t transfer songs from different machines. WTF?! That’s absolutely fucked. That is just stupid, lame and IMO really cripples the device.
• Camera controls. The thing I used most on my K750 was the camera and the MP3 player. Same goes for the iPhone. The K750 definitely had better hardware controls for both. The iPhone is sorely lacking a hardware camera shutter button. The touch screen shutter is awful. It’s the one time I desperately need tactile feedback and precision. The touch screen sensitivity doesn’t always work and that is maddening when you’re trying to capture a split second moment. It also could really use auto-focus and a macro. Plus, they need to move the lens - my finger always shows up in photos!
• Audio playback controls. The volume buttons are great, but I also need controls for play/stop and next/previous without using the screen. I know the Apple headset has those controls on the mic clip, but I don’t use Apple’s headphones and that controller isn’t so elegant anyway. My K750 would do next/previous by holding down the volume up/down. I wish the iPhone did the same. For play/stop it should use the camera shutter button I want added. Finally, scrolling through long audio files like This American Life episodes is hellish with the scrubber. Here’s a great suggestion from Chris Fahy: an on screen jog dial for scrubbing audio.

  

  It looks like Apple already has that in the works.

• The wifi reception is really weak. And it doesn’t always activate automatically.
• As I mentioned, the touch sensitivity is not always reliable, which can be pretty maddening sometimes.
• The predictive text is terrible and it always messes things up. I wish I could just turn it off.
• I constantly want to use the home button as a back button in the iPod
• Here’s an idea: Wifi syncing. Duh. I’m sure they must be working on this.

What I miss from my K750?

• The LED light. It was ostensibly the camera flash, but I used it mostly as a flashlight and reading light. It came in super handy on many occasions, especially camping.
• The radio. I expect a radio will be available on future iPhones. It’s really nice to listen to the radio sometimes.
• I won’t miss…the flimsy/broken connector jack, the flimsy/broken thumbstick, the flimsy/broken camera shutter button.

The iPhone is definitely giving me Apple love. I’m still not quite compelled to switch to a Mac. I’d really just love to use my iPhone as my primary OS. If I could connect my iPhone via wifi to a big screen and keyboard then BAM…I’ve got my pocket computer that has most my data in the cloud and acts as a Web OS client device.

This navigation system paints a virtual line over the road which appears on your car’s windscreen. It’s like living inside a Google Map! All the other nav systems seem to force you to think and can easily be misread. This seems so obvious, natural and unobtrusive.

(via del.icio.us/garrettdimon)

Hong Kong 3D pixel-art interactive map. Be sure to spend time exploring it and using the tools!

This SlideShare presentation by Peter Merholz of Adaptive Path is mandatory viewing for anyone interested in product design and marketing strategy.

My take aways:

• Why user experience is the differentiator
• Experience first, then features, then technology
• A real vision focuses on the user experience
• The value curve of the Wii vs. Xbox and PS3 proves: experience matters, technology doesn’t
• Leverage the system, place functionality where appropriate in the ecosystem
• Products are people – what kind of person is your product?

It’s been my mission with Xero to make the user experience a bit like a game. Money essentially is a game. It represents your score, your points and your power in the game of life. Yet, for most people managing money is a painful chore that is dreaded and avoided.

The latest update to Xero includes new functionality and design ideas that really begin to exhibit what I see as a game play experience. For instance, we’ve designed the bank reconciliation so that it’s fun to use, it’s an experience you actually enjoy and look forward to.

With the bank rec in Xero your job is to match transactions coming in from the bank with transactions you have recorded in Xero. Often Xero can predict the match for you, so with one click you can easily clear a row. You get a big green tick and away it fades, bringing up the next line - the next little piece of the puzzle - to be matched. It’s a bit like clearing rows in Tetris (as seen in the short video above).

Our new ‘fast code’ design lets you do it even quicker, by letting you create an instant match, on-the-fly. After that, Xero learns how you code your transactions so that the next time it already has the details filled in for you. Pretty soon all you do is: click, click, click down the page and you’ve cleared away a whole bunch of rows, knocking them off in rapid fire.

It gives you a real rush of instant gratification.

When you come across a transaction that reconciles to multiple items you go into “find and match” mode, tracking down the transactions that add up to the one bank statement line. It’s another type of simple puzzle that gives you an immediate sense of satisfaction when you find the exact match.

With Xero, we’re now getting into a phase of the product design and development where we can really start to optimise the work flow across the system to make the experience smarter, faster and genuinely fun.

I love seeing it all come together. It’s even better to see how much customers are loving it.

I’ve been loving Slideshare. It’s an extremely useful tool that makes it dead easy and actually fun to share presentations online. It’s bringing to the surface some outstanding expertise. I’ve collected quite few goodies in my Slideshare favorites. Below are some presentations that are particularly relevant to my most recent slides.

Agile Usability Testing