Software Hatred
Posted by Tyler | Filed under Links, On Software
Great insight from Jeff Atwood:
One of the (many) unfortunate side effects of choosing a career in software development is that, over time, you learn to hate software. I mean really hate it. With a passion. Take the angriest user you’ve ever met, multiply that by a thousand, and you still haven’t come close to how we programmers feel about software. Nobody hates software more than software developers.
This is so true it hurts. An additional side effect of being a Program Manager is that you become extremely critical of everything. Parking meters. Elevator buttons. Anything that isn’t as usable as it should be. Not that I could do any better at designing these things, necessarily, but they still anger me, and much more than they used to now that design is a part of my daily work life.
Another great quote from the article:
Hardware companies don’t generally do software well. Digital camera companies excel at building digital camera hardware. Software, if it exists at all, is an afterthought, a side effect, a checkbox on some marketing weasel’s clipboard.
This is true not only for consumer electronics like digital cameras, but also for other hardware that you might not think of as running “software.” Think of your microwave. The ice dispenser on your fridge. Your washing machine. Your car’s on-board computer. All of these are running software in some fashion most likely, and they all kind of suck.
Tags: design, jeff atwood, software
On Intelligent Interfaces
Posted by Tyler | Filed under Links, On Software
Mencius Moldbug on why Wolfram Alpha shouldn’t have a natural language-based interface:
You know that when you type “two cups of flour and two eggs” (which now works) you are looking for a Nutrition Facts label. It is only Stephen Wolfram’s giant electronic brain which has to run ten million lines of code to figure this out. Inside your own brain, it is written on glowing letters across your forehead.
Wolfram Alpha and hubristic user interfaces
Tags: design, google, wolfram alpha
Mark Pilgrim on Web Fonts
Posted by Tyler | Filed under Links
I love Mark Pilgrim.
Dynamic web fonts are coming. Actually they’re already here, but most of Our People haven’t noticed yet. But they will, and that’s going to be a huge boon to somebody. I see you’ve decided that it won’t be you. Well, have fun shuffling your little bits of metal around. The rest of us will be over here, using the only fonts we’re allowed to use: Everything But Yours.
Fuck the foundries [via dive into mark].
Tags: design, fonts, typography
Finding Meaning in UI
Posted by Tyler | Filed under Deep Thoughts, Links
Loren Brichter, the guy behind the fantastic Twitter application Tweetie, has a post over on his blog talking about how and why he chose to put specific items on the bottom bar of Tweetie’s UI. The post is a quick read, so go take a look; I’ll wait.
Welcome back. One of the things I found interesting about what he said was that he chose the items for the bottom bar based not on what was most common, or most popular, or most used, but rather another characteristic that they all share: they’re all personalized features about the user.
This isn’t really earth-shattering, but I found it interesting because in most cases, UI designers try to make sure the most commonly used things in the UI are surfaced. The problem with that approach, as Loren points out, is that you can’t always do that. Sure, Copy and Paste are super-common, and should get first-class treatment, but where do you go from there? At some point, you’re splitting hairs, and if you try to rationalize why one function is surfaced in a prime location and something else isn’t, how do you explain your choice? “Well the data we collected said 51% of people used A and 49% of people used B, so we went with A.” Unsatisfying, isn’t it? At least if you take Loren’s approach, your answer has a bit more meat to it.
Anyway, at the very least this should get us all thinking about our rationalizations for putting stuff in specific places in our UI. Maybe there are alternative methods for making these decisions that we haven’t considered yet…
Tags: design, technology, ui
Syfy?
Posted by Tyler | Filed under Links
The rename of the Sci Fi cannel to SyFy Syfy strikes me as completely stupid. Gargantuan stupidity. http://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/archives/weird_syence.php
Update: Turns out it’s Syfy; no capitalization of the “f".” This makes it even worse. Stunning.
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