Facebook came on a little strong with all the changes to its interface, which left users feeling ike the abuela (grandmother) in the video above…minus the laughing. I think they also imagine the dog with Mark Zuckerberg’s face, screaming “GILF! GILF! GILF!“

This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

One of the tricky things about helping developers build for a platform that has yet to be released is that it’s a tabula rasa. There’s no history, which is both blessing and curse: we developers get to make that history, but at the same time, we’re working in the dark. There are no examples to emulate and no best practices to follow – it’s just us and whatever user interface guidelines there happen to be (which, in the case of Windows Phone 7, is the Windows Phone UI Design and Interaction Guide).

That’s why I’m glad that Microsoft is building WP7 apps like USGA Shot Tracker, a gorgeous golf scorekeeping app that practically announces to developers: “This is how you do it. This is how you write a usable, beautiful, truly Windows Phone 7 app.” Here’s a video of USGA Shot Tracker in action:

Give the app a look, and also make sure you check out the article on Long Zheng’s blog, istartedsomething, which includes images of USGA Shot Tracker’s screens.

Keep an eye on this blog, because I’m a couple of days away from starting an ongoing series on well-designed WP7 apps and how you implement them. I’ll take a closer look at USGA Shot Tracker and other apps, going through them with a fine-toothed comb in attempt to learn as much as possible from them, and share that knowledge with you.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

I think that we – and by we, I mean we developers and developer evangelist types at Microsoft – get touch and tablets, or slates, or pads, or whatever you’d like to call them, better than the Ars Technica article Ballmer (and Microsoft) still doesn’t get the iPad (written by Peter Bright and posted in the One Microsoft Way section) implies. I believe that over the next few months, you’ll see some interesting touch-related stuff coming from Microsoft, and that we have a responsibility to help developers understand the differences between mouse/keyboard computing and touch computing.

In anticipation of this, I’ve been make my move towards touch- (and other sensor-based) computing over the past little while, by migrating to the following devices:

• My current “main” laptop, a Dell Latitude XT2 convertible laptop/tablet computer, with a touch-sensitive screen that can responds to 5 touch points as well as a stylus
• A Wacom Bamboo Touch tablet for graphics work
• A Samsung “Taylor” Windows Phone 7 preview unit for early-bird WP7 developers
• The newest tool in my kit, a Nikon Coolpix S70 touchscreen camera – a good number of its features are accessed by touchscreen controls on its 3.5” OLED display. I had the option of going with a Coolpix S8000, which has a better lens, but I’m really trying to immerse myself in the world of touch-based computing and gadgetry.
• and some touch devices created by the Esteemed Competition, which I use for competitive research:
  • Apple iPad (the 16GB wifi-only model)
  • Apple iPhone 3GS (16GB model)
  • Sony Xperia X10 Android phone

The idea behind this purposeful move towards touch-equipped devices is to truly understand touch-based interfaces, which UI elements work and which ones don’t, and then to pass the lessons learned to my audience – developers and designers, whether you build for the Microsoft platform or the platforms of the Esteemed Competition.

My own move towards touch-based devices is a microcosmic example of the larger changes taking place at The Empire. The move to touch interfaces is taking place on Microsoft computing platforms of all sizes:

As the Ars Technica article points out, one of the signs that we do get touch is the new interface design of Windows Phone 7. The design philosophy is build around touch (and other sensors), and the WP7 “design bible”, the Windows Phone User Interface Design and Interaction Guide [12 MB PDF], explains this philosophy beyond the mere technical details. Here’s the introduction to its section WP7’s touch interface (any emphasis in the quote below is mine):

Touch input is a core experience of Windows Phone 7 and has inherent differences from traditional keyboard and mouse input systems. Designed for natural and intuitive user interaction, touch input in Windows Phone 7 enables users to interact with application content such as a photo or a web page. Touch input enables simple and consistent user touch gestures that imitate real life behavior, such as panning on a photo to move it. Single-touch gestures make interaction easier with one hand, but multi-touch gestures are also available to provide more advanced gesture functionality.

Application developers should strive to create unique and exciting experiences that encourage the discovery of content through the use of touch gestures. Users should enjoy the experience of navigating through the steps of a task as well as the completion of the task itself. Touch gestures should provide a delightful, more colorful, intuitive experience within applications

Touch delights the senses as the user gets to see the interaction match the performance. The touch UI should always have aware and responsive performance, just like how real world objects respond to touch immediately, and applications on Windows Phone 7 should as well, by performing the action in real time and by providing immediate feedback that an event or process is occurring. Users should not have to wait as it breaks their immersion, flow, and concentration, especially as their gestures transition from one to the other. For example, a pan may turn into a flick or a tap can become a double tap, and the user should not be aware that the UI is switching gesture support.

There’s a great amount of understanding behind the nuances of touch-based interfaces in the Windows Phone User Interface Design and Interaction Guide, and over the next few months, we’ll be covering them in great detail in this blog.

When the Surface, a.k.a. the “Big-Ass Table”, came out, a number of people asked why such a big, expensive thing was built and what practical purpose such a beast would serve.

For starters, there are a number of customers who use it, from casinos in Vegas to bible study classes in megacurches to places closer to home (by which I mean Canada), from the company that did the security for President Obama’s visit to Ottawa to super-sexy Toronto design firm Teehan+Lax to Ontario College of Art and Design to Infusion, who’ve built applications such as Noront Resources’s GSI Surface tool to the security app Falcon Eye.

Equally important are lessons to be learned about input from touch and other sensors from a “concept” machine like the Surface, whose built-in camera systems allow for way more touch points than a resistive or capacitive touch screen will allow, as well as the ability to “see” objects on the tabletop. By being empirical and building such a computer, developing software for it and watching people interact with it, we learn more about touch and sensor-based computing way more than we could from mere theorizing.

I think Des Traynor captured our intent quite nicely in his article about Surface and other Microsoft efforts in the field of user interface:

When the Surface was released two years ago it was chastised by the public. The joke at the time was: “Apple and Microsoft both invest in multi-touch technology, Apple release the iPhone, Microsoft release a $15,000 coffee table!”.

But Surface wasn’t about “re-inventing the coffee table”, so much as it was prototyping a vision of the future of computing. There will come a time when “gathering around a laptop” will seem as ridiculous as connecting an ethernet cable; a time when everyone gathers around a multi-user computer to have a meeting or debate a design. With something like surface, Microsoft are preparing for that day.

A lot of the knowledge from Surface applications have been injected into Windows 7 in the form of the Windows 7 Touch Pack. This pack gives Windows 7 a touch-based API and a set of apps originally designed for the Surface, so that they can run on touch-enabled computers, such as HP’s TouchSmart series, touch-enabled laptops like my own Dell Latitude XT2 as well as any computer connected to one of the new touch-enabled monitors (our manager John Oxley has one in his office).

The Ars Technica article goes on and on about Windows 7’s standard interface controls being too tiny for touch, but a quick look at the Touch Pack apps reveals that they don’t use the standard controls; rather, they use controls better-suited to touch. Here’s a screenshot of Surface Collage, the photo-collage application, running on my XT2:

No standard Windows controls here! You manipulate the photos directly using gestures, and the strip along the bottom is a photo list, which you also manipulate through gestures. The closest thing to a standard Windows control is the “close” button near the upper-right hand corner of the screen, which is larger than the typical “close” button – small enough to be out of the way, yet large enough to click with a finger.

Here’s another app from the Touch Pack, Surface Globe, also running on my XT2:

Once again, no standard Windows 7 controls here, but a map that you directly manipulate, augmented by finger-friendly controls.

The Touch Pack apps all follow this philosophy: when going touch, eschew the standard Windows 7 UI controls in favour of touch-friendly ones, and then back to bog-standard Windows 7 when exiting them. These apps show not just that we understand that touch computing is a different beast from mouse-and-keyboard computing, but that we also understand where they intersect.

We’re working on what I like to call “the touch continuum”, which spans pocket devices such as the Zune HD and Windows Phone, to portable computing with netbooks, laptops and soon, tablets, to desktop and tabletop and wall-sized units. And yes, we get that new types of user input call for new user interfaces and give rise to new usage patterns. We’re aware of the challenges of touch (and other sensor) input and over the next little while, you’ll see our answers to those challenges. And better still, we’ll share what we’ve learned in order to make you better developers and designers of software that use these new interfaces.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

What you see above is a slide from Jason Putorti’s slide deck titled 10 Things CEOs Need to Know About Design. Don’t let the title throw you off: everything in the presentation is even more important for developers because we actually make the things our customers use.

If you decide to commit only one of these ten things to memory, commit this one: Design is more than pretty pictures. It’s about combining different aspects of intelligence – rationality, creativity and empathy – to meet your users’ needs and drive business success. It’s about crafting the user experience, which is how the thing you’re designing works in the real world and how your users feel about it.

I’ve included the slide deck below…enjoy!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Just as i18n is shorthand for “internationalization” – it’s made by taking the first and last letters of the word and replacing the 18 letters in between with the number 18 – a11y is shorthand for “accessibility”. That’s why the accessibility unconference taking place at 7:00 p.m. tomorrow, June 8th, at the University of Guelph is called A11yCamp.

Here’s what A11yCamp’s site has to say about the event:

A11yCamp is a participant-driven event about IT accessibility, modeled after the unconference format of BarCamp.  Whether you are an expert or just getting your feet wet in the IT accessibility space, come join us!  With the schedule determined on the spot, A11yCamp Guelph will be a dynamic event with presentations, demos and interaction by and among participants.

Come out to the first A11yCamp at the Aiming for Accessibility conference at the University of Guelph (about an hour west of Toronto) to share and learn about IT accessibility in an open environment.  Also, there will probably be pizza.  And maybe t-shirts.  We hope.  Register Now!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Last night at a gathering of Toronto digital marketing and social media types held by TheBizMedia – I’m not sure I qualified for an invite, but hey, free beer! – Scott Stratten, president of UnMarketing, gave a very entertaining, funny and insightful presentation in which he talked about the lessons he learned as an online marketer.

I shot a five-minute video snippet of his presentation, where he talked about:

• First name and email address are often enough. When you need users to sign up for things like contests or surveys, do you really need to take up their valuable time by collecting information that you probably don’t need? (I know that at Microsoft, we ask for great gobs of information when you sign up for even the simplest of things. I do try to get them to tone it down.)
• How to get people to take your surveys. Telling them that “your answers will help us” isn’t going to get them to take your surveys. Scott found that what works for him is offering a chance at a prize – even a $50 Amazon certificate – boosts the number of people who take survey by orders of magnitude.
• Auto-DM replies on Twitter. Don’t. Just don’t.

You’ll probably want to turn up the volume on the video. Scott was speaking without a microphone, and as good a videocamera as the Flip Mino HD is, I would’ve had to get obnoxiously close to the stage to get better sound.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Me and Bill Buxton at the MIX10 Attendee Party last Tuesday night.

There’s one reason I’m particularly excited about Windows Phone 7 Series. The radically reworked look and feel is the surest sign that the company is really beginning to understand design and is willing to start from scratch (a risky and pricey proposition) to get it right. It would appear from Microsoft’s Principal Researcher Bill Buxton’s interview in The Register that I’m not the only one who thinks this:

"We kinda changed the water that we drink, in the sense that all through the design community within the company we talk, and we have a common goal in terms of trying to bring a certain change of sensibility," he said.

"For me it’s not even about the phone, but what’s interesting is that it’s the first product in the company with critical mass that’s embraced this … it will have an impact on other parts of the company."

If (or better still, when) you start building Windows Phone applications – or hey, any kind of application — I hope that you’ll follow the spirit of “Metro” (the codename for the design philosophy behind Windows Phone 7) and keep it in mind. Yes, it’s absolutely important to know the Silverlight and XNA APIs as well as how to read the touch sensors, GPS, accelerometers and so on, but it’s just as important to design your applications around the people who’ll use them. That means understanding your users, how they’ll use what you’re making, knowing how to give them what they need as quickly and unobtrusively as possible and delighting them. Yes, “a pretty interface” is included in all that – and there’s research to suggest that beautiful interfaces work better –but looks are merely part of the design equation.

Some Design Sessions from MIX10

Want some interesting lunchtime viewing on design? Look no farther than these two videos.

The first is Bill Buxton’s MIX10 session, simply titled An Hour with Bill Buxton, a conversation about design:

Don’t have Silverlight? Get it here or download the video in
WMV, WMV (High) or MP4 format.

If you haven’t the time to watch the video of Buxton’s presentation, check out this hit list of metaphors complied by Sharon Chan at Microsoft Pri0.

If you’re planning on getting into Windows Phone 7 design, you’re going to want to learn the “design language” – not a programming language, but the guiding principles and philosophies behind the new user experience – behind it. Here’s the MIX10 presentation on that topic, Designing Windows Phone 7 Series with Albert Shum, Michael Smuga and Chad Roberts:

Don’t have Silverlight? Get it here or download the video in
WMV, WMV (High) or MP4 format.

A World Without Design

Here’s a little something extra for those of you who like to think about design and user experience:

I whipped up this graphic, modelling it after a poster I remember seeing many years ago. I can’t remember what it was for – a museum, art gallery or exhibit, perhaps? – but I remember thinking that it was right on the money. If you remember the original poster and what it was for, please let me know, either via email or the comments!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Don’t have Silverlight? Get it here or download the video in
MP4, WMA, WMV, WMV (High) or Zune format.

Welcome to another installment of Counting Down to Seven, a series of articles about mobile app development that I’m writing as we count down the days to MIX10, when we reveal more about the up-and-coming Windows Phone 7 Series.

We’re a week away from the start of the MIX10 conference! I like to refer to this as Microsoft’s most “right-brained” gathering, as its target audience and topic isn’t just developers and writing software, but designers, design and user experience.

With designers and design in mind, it’s only fitting that I show you a video featuring Nic Fillingham interviewing a couple of Microsoft User Experience gurus who also hail from Canada:

• Bill Buxton: He’s a Principal Researcher for Microsoft Research, and before that, he was Chief Scientist at Alias Wavefront and a professor at University of Toronto. And I’m pleased to report that he got his bachelor’s degree – in music – from my alma mater, Crazy Go Nuts University (which some of you may know as Queen’s University). He was the guy who thought of applying Fitts’ Law to human-computer interaction, did some pioneering work with multi-touch interfaces and invented the pie menu (which means that we owe weapon selection in Saints Row 2 and the full combat/spellcasting system in Dragon Age: Origins to him).
• Albert Shum: He’s the Director of Mobile Experience Design for Windows Phone 7. Albert’s from Winnipeg, studied engineering and architecture at University of Waterloo and went on to do design work at Nike before joining Microsoft. You can watch a video showing him talking about the new Windows Phone 7 experience and the thinking behind it in a previous article of mine, Albert Shum on Windows Phone 7.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Three Weeks to Go!

We’re three weeks away from the day when a lot more about Windows Phone 7 will be revealed. On Monday, May 15th, the MIX10 conference in Las Vegas is expected to open with a bang as developers and designers will learn about “WP7’s” programming and design models as well as the opportunities that Microsoft’s reworked-from-the-ground-up mobile phone OS will provide. As part of a team of evangelists who were picked to champion WP7, I’m looking forward to getting my feet wet developing for this new platform and sharing what I learn with all of you.

As good as the early indications are – the demos are impressive, and this is likely the first time that anything made by The Empire been described as “soulful” – WP7’s introduction won’t be without some significant challenges. As far as current-generation smartphones go, WP7 is a late entry into a fiercely competitive market featuring a rival who can boast about having an impressive 100,000 applications in its store. There’s the matter of the wait; the 7 Series phones won’t hit the market until later this year, and in the meantime, the Esteemed Competition will be releasing new models. There will also be the cries of “Too little, too late,” from the people who observed Microsoft squander an early lead with smartphones (I can understand the argument for “late”, but having seen some advance inside info on what these babies can do, “little” is not a valid argument).

The Real Challenge

I think that the biggest challenge is going to be creating a new Windows Phone culture. I believe that one of the problems with the developer culture surrounding the old Windows Mobile was that they treated the mobile phone as simply a shrunken-down version of the desktop. As I’ve written before, the desktop is what made Microsoft a successful company, but it’s also turned into an albatross that has impeded forward movement. The company built their mobile OS in a specific way with a specific design philosophy for a specific audience: “suits”. The developers took their cues from those decisions and built applications to match. The end result wasn’t pretty in any way: business-wise, functionally or aesthetically.

We – that’s both Microsoft as well as the development community that we want to gather around Windows Phone 7 — need to create a culture that “gets” the smartphone and cares about software craftsmanship, both in the underlying programming as well as in the user experience. I want to see a development culture that encourages both technical and design chops, the way that the iPhone community does, as well as that the way web app developers like 37signals do. I want Windows Phone to set the standard for mobile applications.

To that end, I decided to write this series – Counting Down to Seven – as a way to get developers to start thinking about mobile applications. I’ve been looking at applications written for the Esteemed Competition’s phones, books and articles on mobile development for other platforms and ideas from the world of user interface and user experience design as well as from science fiction (a long-standing source of ideas for neat-o devices that fit in your pocket). My hope is to convince you not just to write apps for Windows Phone 7, but also to write apps that redefine mobile computing, do interesting and useful stuff and delight our users.

Take a Walk on the Phone Side

There’s a mobile app that was designed by Lou Reed. Yes, that Lou Reed – the guitarist, vocalist and songwriter for the Velvet Underground, then Mr. Walk on the Wild Side and more recently, Mr. Laurie Anderson.

The app is called Lou Zoom, and although he didn’t implement it (that job went to Ben Syverson), he came up with the idea and co-designed it. That’s the sort of excitement that I’d like to see behind Windows Phone 7: so full of possibilities that even people who’d never think of designing applications start doing just that.

The idea behind Lou Zoom is quite simple: it’s a contact manager app, like the Contacts app that comes with the iPhone. The difference is that it has a couple of tweaks, no doubt born out of frustration with the current app. I’ve listed the tweaks below:

Tweak #1: Easy-to-Read Contact List

In the standard Contacts app, the list of contacts is shown as a standard list, with all entries the same size. In Lou Zoom, the list of contacts has variable-sized names: each name in Helvetica Neue, with the font size increased so that it is fills the width of the screen. Here’s a screen shot taken from the Lou Zoom page:

This design might make the sort of designers who prize uniformity cringe, but think about this: phones have small screens and are often used in less-than-ideal reading conditions. If you’re going to remain under 30 forever, are guaranteed to always have 20/20 vision and vow to always remain stationary and alone in a well-lit room, you don’t need this feature. For the rest of us – including me, a guy in his early forties with standard issue Asian myopia, who finds himself squinting more and more at small type, who often uses his phone from places like dimly-lit cabs going over potholes at breakneck speeds or in crowded, dimly-lit conference spaces and having had a couple of caesars – this user interface tweak is very helpful indeed.

Tweak #2: Easy-to-Read Contact Pages

Just as the contacts are listed in nice big type, so is the info on each contact page:

As with the contact list, Lou Zoom goes for legibility and displays the information in large type. It goes one step further by displaying the text in high contrast. If the contact has multiple addresses, phone numbers or email address, a left or right swipe over the appropriate field will give you those alternates.

An Aside: Windows Phone 7’s People Profiles

The “Profile” page in Windows Phone 7’s “People” hub takes an approach that is stylistically similar to the way Lou Zoom displays contact info:

…but it takes a markedly different approach to which items are displayed prominently. Windows Phone 7’s design is centered around what you want to do rather than with just throwing information at you. For example, the actions “call mobile”, “text mobile” and “call home” are in large type, while the person’s mobile and home numbers are in smaller text. This is a good idea — after all, what you really want to do is reach someone, not look up their phone number. The “address book” paradigm is a holdover from the days when phones weren’t smart enough to dial themselves.

Tweak #3: Search on Any Part of the Name

The standard Contacts app has a simple search function. Type in j and it will immediately present you with a list of all names in your contacts beginning with “j” (ignoring case, of course). If you expand that j to become john, you’ll get a list of all the names in your contacts beginning with “john”. The Contacts app will apply the search term you provide only to the leftmost end of the names in your contacts:

Lou Zoom improves on search by letting you search on any part of the name. Typing in john gives you a list of all the names in your contacts containing “john” in any part of the name, such as “John Smith”, “Alice Johnson” or “Olivia Newton-John”.

The Lou Zoom site provides its own example:

Has Kate Bell recently become Kate Appleseed-Bell? Searching for "Bell" will still bring up her name in Lou Zoom. From there, her full info is just a tap away.

It’s also great for searching for people by nickname. For instance, typing in mclovin into Lou Zoom’s search will give you the name of your buddy, who’s listed in your contacts as Christopher “McLovin’” Fogell.

What Can You Tweak?

It’s time to take a page from Lou Reed’s book and find apps that could benefit from a little tweaking. Look around at mobile apps and if you find yourself and other people saying “if only it did this”. Those are opportunities! The best applications aren’t always brand-new paradigm-shattering ideas; sometimes they’re old ones with a couple of tweaks.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

A New Windows for the Phone

Ever since joining The Empire, I’ve been saying that Windows Mobile needs to go back to the drawing board. While there was good technology lying in its innards – mobile versions of the .NET framework, SQL Server and Office – treating the mobile form factor as “the desktop, but much, much smaller”, was the wrong approach. In the meantime, the Esteemed Competition were doing the right thing: designing their phones’ OS features and interface from the ground up rather than attempting to force-fit the desktop UI into a pocket UI.

Today at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Microsoft previewed the latest in a series of steps forward – consider Xbox to Xbox 360, Windows Vista to Windows 7, Live Search to Bing – there’s now Windows Phone 7 Series.

(The name’s a bit long. Whoever does the naming at Microsoft corporate HQ must get paid by the syllable.)

A Quick Look at Windows Phone’s Experience

A good starting point is this video, which covers Windows Phone’s features in three minutes, thirty seconds:

You can take an interactive tour of the UI at the Windows Phone 7 Series site:

A Closer Look at the Windows Phone Experience

Over at Channel 9, Laura Foy has posted her interview with Joe Belfiore, VP Windows Phone 7 Program Management, who gave her a walkthrough of the goodies in Windows Phone (the video is 22 minutes, 18 seconds):

Some quick notes from the video:

• There are three mandatory hardware buttons, which are context-sensitive:
  • Back
  • Windows (the “Start” button)
  • Search
• The screen is a capacitive touch-screen, capable of supporting multi-touch
• The Start menu is built up of tiles: little block representing the information and features that you care most about
  • You can add your own custom tiles; Joe shows a “me” tile linked to his Facebook profile
• A browser with:
  • Snappy performance
  • Support for multitouch actions such as pinch zoom, double-tap to zoom and finger drag
  • Very readable text, that to sub-pixel positioning in HTML
  • Phone number recognition in HTML documents; touch them to dial them
  • Street address recognition in HTML documents; touch them to get a map
  • Multiple tabs
• The “People Hub”
  • Aggregates Exchange, Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo! Mail and other mail contacts
  • Provides a live feed of your contacts
• Context-sensitive search:
  • Press the “Search” button while in the People Hub, and you search your people list
  • Press the “Search” button while in the Start menu, and it runs a web search
    • Based on your query, it knows whether to give you a web search result or a local search result
    • In the demo, Joe does a search for pizza and gets a map and results for pizzerias near him, and a quick pan over to adjacent pages yield directions and reviews
    • A tap on “nearby” yield the locations of useful things like parking, ATMs and so on near the selected pizzeria
    • In another demo search, Joe does a search for “Avatar” and it returns a list of nearby theatres and times for the movie Avatar; a quick pan to an adjacent page yields the results for local business and places with “Avatar” in the name
• Email:
  • Easy pivoting between unread, flagged and urgent emails
  • A caching system prevents you from seeing the dreaded “loading” screen
  • Press “Search” within email and you perform a search of your email messages, by subject, text and so on
• Rotation: you can operate the phone in “portrait” or “landscape” mode
• Calendar:
  • Support for both work and personal calendars
• ActiveSync works in the background and keeps the phone synced with email, contacts and calendar
• User-customizable UI colour schemes
• The “Pictures Hub”
  • Gallery: Lets you browse all the pictures on your phone
  • Mosaic: Recent and favourite pictures
  • What’s New: New photos from your social networks
  • Camera roll: A folder for photos taken with your phone
  • Support for photo albums from Facebook and Windows Live, which you browse as if they lived right on your phone
• Music and Video
  • History: Most recently played music and videos
  • New: New music and videos added since the last sync
  • Zune HD-style marketplace searching and support for Zune subscriptions with unlimited music plays
• The “Me” tile
  • Lets you update your status on places like Facebook
  • Nice little typing features like auto-spelling-correction and a special soft keyboard for emoticons
• The UI concept: Windows Phone is task-centric, not app-centric, with a hub associated with each: people, photos, media
• There’s also a games hub, which ties into Xbox Live
• Third-party applications and games? Wait…

Wait a Minute…What About Third-Party Apps and Games?

Can you wait a month?

Here’s the deal: the announcement at Mobile World Congress was about showing what Windows Phone can do. As for what’s possible on the developer front, it’ll all be announced at the MIX10 Conference, which takes place from March 15th through 17th in Las Vegas.

There will be a dozen sessions at MIX10 for Windows Phone, and they promise to be quite interesting. I’ll be at MIX10, and will blog what I learn from these sessions when they take place.

You can save $200 off the price of MIX10 registration if you register before February 21st, so if you want to get in on the ground floor with Windows Phone and save some money, register now!

What the Tech Press is Saying

Pretty good stuff, actually. Rather than bury you with links to a zillion blog entries filed from Mobile World Congress, I thought I’d pick two of the big tech blogs, Gizmodo and Engadget:

Here’s what Gizmodo has to say about the new Windows Phone:

It’s different. The face of Windows Phone 7 is not a rectangular grid of thumbnail-sized glossy-looking icons, arranged in a pattern of 4×4 or so, like basically every other phone. No, instead, an oversized set of bright, superflat squares fill the screen. The pop of the primary colors and exaggerated flatness produces a kind of cutting-edge crispness that feels both incredibly modern and playful. Text is big, and beautiful. The result is a feat no phone has performed before: Making the iPhone’s interface feel staid.

If you want to know what it feels like, the Zune HD provides a taste: Interface elements that run off the screen; beautiful, oversized text and graphics; flipping, panning, scrolling, zooming from screen to screen; broken hearts. Some people might think it’s gratuitous, but I think it feels natural and just…fun. There’s an incredible sense of joie de vivre that’s just not in any other phone. It makes you wish that this was aesthetic direction all of Microsoft was going in.

Here are Engadget’s impressions, after having some hands-on time with Windows Phone:

The design and layout of 7 Series’ UI (internally called Metro) is really quite original, utilizing what one of the designers (Albert Shum, formerly of Nike) calls an "authentically digital" and "chromeless" experience. What does that mean? Well we can tell you what it doesn’t mean — no shaded icons, no faux 3D or drop shadows, no busy backgrounds (no backgrounds at all), and very little visual flair besides clean typography and transition animations. The whole look is strangely reminiscent of a terminal display (maybe Microsoft is recalling its DOS roots here) — almost Tron-like in its primary color simplicity. To us, it’s rather exciting. This OS looks nothing like anything else on the market, and we think that’s to its advantage. Admittedly, we could stand for a little more information available within single views, and we have yet to see how the phone will handle things like notifications, but the design of the interface is definitely in a class of its own.

(In another article, Engadget simply summed it up with “Microsoft is playing to win”.)

Watch this Space!

We’ll have more announcements about Windows Phone over the next few weeks, so keep an eye on this blog!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Two days remain for you to cast your vote for sessions at the MIX10 conference, which I wrote about in the previous article. A number of people who submitted proposals for sessions are wooing voters, and one of the best promotions is that of Jason Alderman, who put together this comic explaining why you should vote for his session, titled Guerilla User Research – Carrying Out Missions Behind Enemy Lines to Get the Insight You Need:

This lovely hand-drawn comic is a reminder for me to fire up the scanner I bought for Christmas and get back to something for which I was notorious during my days at Crazy Go Nuts University: cartooning.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

I’m going to be at Microsoft’s MIX10 conference, which takes place from Monday, March 15th through Wednesday, March 17th at the Mandalay Bay Hotel in Las Vegas, where I’ll be catching sessions and posting photos and reports. If you can spare a couple of days off work to attend Mix10, you should too – and soon, because the early bird discount is going to evaporate very soon!

What is MIX?

The email sigs for people involved with MIX claim that it’s a “designer/developer lovefest for the web”, and I think it’s a pretty one-line summary of the event. It’s a conference for people who develop and design for the web, with particular attention paid to user interface and experience. This will be the 5th MIX conference, the first one having been held in 2006.

What Sort of Sessions Will There Be at MIX10?

Here’s a selection of some of the sessions and workshops at MIX10:

• Boot camps on up-and coming frameworks, such as Silverlight 4 and ASP.NET MVC 2
• Molly Holzschlag’s all-day HTML5 workshop
• Sessions on user experience such as:
  • Design Fundamentals for Developers
  • The Art, Technology and Science of Reading
  • The Laws of User Experience
  • Running with Wireframes: Taking Information Architecture into Design
• Technology sessions such as
  • Building Cloud Services with Windows Azure Platform
  • Miguel de Icaza’s session on The Mono Project
  • Robots at MySpace: Massive Scaling a .NET Website with the Microsoft Robotics Studio
  • Touch in Public: Multi-Touch Interaction Design for Kiosks and Architectural Experiences

There are some other cool things happening at MIX10 that I can’t talk about until the conference. Be there, or if you can’t, watch this space!

You Get to Vote!

You can help choose some of the content for MIX10! We took a number of submissions for presentations in an open call for content, and now it’s time to vote for them. You can see all the submissions here, and voting ends on Friday, January 15th.

Early-Bird Discount

If you register for MIX10 by January 15th, you’ll save US$600 off the admission and pay only US$795 – and you’ll also get a free night at the conference hotel, Mandalay Bay! After the 15th, the price goes up to a full US$1395, so if you want to go, register now!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

If you’ve taken a psychology course or have leafed through a user experience book, you’ve probably come across a diagram of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs:

Dan Zambonini of the web development shop Box UK took some inspiration from it and wrote an article titled Web App Business Models: User Needs and What People Pay For. In it, he writes:

As customers, we have a finite number of needs that we’re willing to fulfill by parting with our hard-earned cash. If you’re planning a web application that can’t build a business model around one or more of these needs, you may face difficulties generating sustainable revenue.

He breaks down people’s needs into the following categories, with an explanation of each one:

• Time: Convenience, Efficiency, Immediacy
• Scarcity
• Comfort
• Esteem: Id, Desirability, Self-Image, Ego
• Belonging: Relationships, Sex, Affection
• Survival: Health, Safety, Wellbeing
• Financial Security: Wealth, Success, Career
• Entertainment: Emotion, Experiences
• Intellectual Stimulation: Creativity, Learning, Expression

He also looks at how much people are willing to have different needs fulfilled. For example, people are willing to pay geometrically increasing prices for increasing comfort. Consider the 15x price difference between “cattle class” and first-class tickets on an airplane (even though both depart and arrive at the same times), or the 27x price difference between a bargain-basement pillow and a down-filled one:

Entertainment, on the other hand, is a different beast. According to Zambonini, across the wide array of entertainment options from games for their mobile phones to vacations in the tropics, people are willing to pay the same rate: $5 an hour…

He categorized the top 100 U.S. sites by the needs he listed — here’s how they break down:

Naturally, such categorization is subjective and had to be drastically simplified, with each site being slotted into a single category. Sites about food were put into the “survival” category, even though a top 100 site on food would probably cover things like gourmet food and wine, which could arguably be put into the “entertainment”, “comfort” and even “esteem” categories.

He closes the article with a series of questions that you should ask about your application, such as “Does my app allow the user to do something more quickly?”, “Does my app allow the user to express their creativity?”, “Does my app provide entertainment for the user?” and so on. Your should be able to answer “yes” to at least one of these questions, and better still, you should be able to explain why.

Links

• Web App Business Models: User Needs and What People Pay For
• Better Than Free: In it, Kevin Kelly “discusses the concept of ‘Generatives’: non-copyable qualities that retain value in a digital age.”
• Wikipedia page for Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
• Follow Dan Zambonini on Twitter

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Good Luck, Qixing!

We may be losing a User Experience Evangelist, but I think we’ll get a great Windows 8 in return. Qixing Zheng, who’s been with Microsoft Canada’s Developer and Platform Evangelism team for the past three years, is leaving to join the Windows UX Team as a Program Manager. While I saw firsthand that she enjoyed her work as a UX Evangelist, talking to developers and designers about building usable, comprehensible and beautiful applications, joining the Windows UX Team is the opportunity of a lifetime. After all, how often are you given the chance to design something that will get used all the time by millions of people, all over the world, at work, play and in their day-to-day lives?

Qixing’s been the sole writer for the Canadian UX Connection blog during her tenure. She posted her farewell article, A New Year and a New Beginning, on January 1st, but don’t think that’s the last you’ve seen of her online. She promises that she’ll be blogging soon – she’ll let us know where, and I’ll let you know in turn. In the meantime, you can follow her on Twitter, where her handle is @hundredflavour.

What About User Experience?

While I’m glad that Qixing is going to be applying her skills and knowledge to Windows’ user interfaces, there remains the need for someone to help developers, designers and people who play both roles build useful, usable and beautiful interfaces, applications and experiences. This is becoming even more important as mainstream software development extends beyond the desktop OS to the web, mobile phones, tablets and even big-ass tables.

I’m planning to pick up some of the slack in the tech blogs where I write, Canadian Developer Connection and Global Nerdy. In addition to articles on programming, industry trends and reports from the field, I’ll also be posting articles about usability, user interface and user experience, as seen from the developer’s point of view. I’ve had some experience in this area, and where my skills and knowledge fall short, I can always call on my “friends in UI places” and bring their opinions and know-how to you.

Once again, congratulations Qixing, you’ve been a great teammate — and yes, we’ll keep evangelizing user experience!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

This article was originally published in Canadian Developer Connection.

Comments on “The Device/Desktop” Opportunity

The Device/Desktop Opportunity got a number of comments, both in the “Comments” section and sent directly to me via email. First, I’d like to say “please keep those comments coming!” One of my intentions was to start some discussion.

I got a number of comments whose essence was “Why don’t the users simply use a photo editing tool and bring their photos down to the right size and DPI themselves, then copy them to the device?” To a geek, this suggestion sounds very sensible; in fact, I did just that to confirm what I thought the application that came with the device did.

The problem is that most users don’t see it that way. A commenter named Joshua summed it up nicely when he wrote:

I think we geeks, being somewhat more familiar with the tools than the problems, find it relatively easy to tweak an existing tool to do the job, than to “suffer” with Yet Another Not-Quite-Adequate Problem-X-Solving Tool.

Conversely, non-geek users don’t want to have to be bothered with all that hoo-hah. They see the task as moving the pictures from their camera or computer to the device. Do they really have to learn about some other program and fiddle with their photos to do just that? Weren’t computers supposed to make their lives easier?

This isn’t laziness or pride in ignorance on the part of non-geeks. It’s just that they have different interests and priorities than we developers do. To put yourself in their shoes, think of how most of us would make spaghetti: probably with store-bought dried pasta, canned sauce and pre-grated cheese. Now imaging how chef Gordon Ramsay would scream at you in a stream of put-downs and curse words for doing so. In his mind, he’s justified; in your mind, he’s being an elitist jerk who just doesn’t get the fact that you just want some spaghetti.

In the same comment, Joshua also talked about an interesting idea: putting the necessary desktop/device interface software right on the device. He wrote that the Flip Mino camcorder (which looks like a pretty fun device; Toronto-based photoblogger Rannie “Photojunkie” Turingan seems to be getting a lot of mileage out of it) comes with the necessary software for Windows and Mac stored within it.

Should “Cheap” Sites Look Cheap?

Last week, while having a late-night post-party snack with a couple of Toronto-based tech entrepreneurs — Facebook Cookbook author Jay Goldman and CommandN co-host Will Pate – we got to talking about sites that were successful in spite of their “pretty crappy” visual design. The site that got the discussion rolling was the dating site and Canadian ASP.NET success story Plenty of Fish (for a good general intro, see this New York Times article). From there, a number of examples came up, including Craigslist and a popular IIS-based site that lets you search for and book cheap airfare and travel packages. These sites all do their jobs quite well, but if you showed them to a web designer, you’d see a conniption fit within seconds.

“Travel sites all search the same data,” said Jay, “and many of them are running on the same back-end. They just use different design templates. Maybe people think that [the cheap-looking but successful travel site] gives you cheaper deals because they look cheap.”

He may have a point. Part of Craiglist’s charm is its stripped-down, not-even-trying-to-look-good design. Does that design send users the same subtle message in the same way that the no-frills “anti-design” of “big box” discount stores sends to their customers? It may be something to think about if you’re building a customer-facing site for a business whose main selling point is low prices or saving its customers money.

The New Look for Calculator in Windows 7

In the Coding Horror article If You Don’t Change the UI, Nobody Notices, Jeff Atwood makes an interesting point: if you want users to notice changes you’ve made to the functionality or back end of an application, they should be mirrored by appropriate corresponding changes to the front end or user interface. Along the way, he points to a Raymond Chen article I’d never seen before. As much as I view Raymond with the highest esteem – he’s probably forgotten more about coding that I’ll ever learn — at a certain point in his article, I did a facepalm. Can you guess when that point was?

This article originally appeared in Canadian Developer Connection.

Why isn’t Brookstone in Canada yet?

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Brookstone, a good way to describe it is “lifestyle gadget store”. A good portion of their catalog is devoted to “lifestyle electronics”: things like

• alarm clocks for travel that also play soothing noises to help you sleep,
• key fobs that emit a sound so all you have to do is press a button to find them,
• record players with USB output so you can digitize your vinyl album collection,

and an assortment of digital photo albums like the “My Life” digital photo album pictured here. It holds up to 4000 photos and sports a 3.5 inch screen with 320 by 240 pixel resolution and will fit into a purse or jacket pocket. Sure, you can show off photos using your mobile phone, PDA, netbook or laptop, but there’s a considerable market for simple, single-use devices like this.

Brookstone is a great store, and whenever I’m in the U.S. and in a mall or Logan Airport, I can’t resist taking a peek inside.

My mom is also a big fan of Brookstone stuff, so when I was down in the U.S. for American Thanksgiving, I made it a point to get her something from them for Christmas. She loves carrying printouts of photos of the grandkids, so I got her a “My Life” digital photo album. I figured I’d pre-load it with family photos before wrapping it up.

I told my mother-in-law about my purchase and she said “I have one of those. They’re really nice, but I can’t figure out how to use the software.”

So, being the good son-in-law that I am, I decided to take a look at the software, which is called Photo Resizer. It worked just fine; the problem is that its interface could use some tweaking.

Here’s the first thing you see when you run the program:

I’m no psychic, but I can say with near-100% certainty that you probably don’t store photos in your Windows/system32 directory. So I used the rather old-school directory navigator to get to my Pictures directory and then to where I’d stored my photos from PDC 2008:

From there, you check the boxes corresponding the photos you want to transfer.

Once you’ve done that, it’s time to select which album you want to move the photos to. The digital album contains 4 internal albums, so you can group your photos by criteria – perhaps album 1 will hold your vacation photos, album 2 will have family photos, and so on. There’s a physical button for each album, so switching between albums is pretty quick.

You select the album you want to move the photos to by clicking the Browse button (it’s in the Save Photos panel), which makes a modal directory selector window appear:

…at which point you’d select the directory corresponding to album you want to move your photos to. Fortunately for the user, the default directory in this directory selector is ALBUM1 in the volume named PHOTOALBUM rather than Windows/system32. I suppose if I really wanted to, I could use the app for more than just transferring photos to the album, but as a quick utility for downsizing photos to 320 by 240 and saving them in the directory of my choice.

Once that’s done, one step remains: clicking the Resize button, which is the one button in the entire interface that doesn’t look like a button.

If you’re a reader of this blog, you probably could take a look at the interface and immediately understand what the program does and know what to do to get the photos on your your drives and camera cards into your photo album. But I’m willing to bet that many people in the target market for the photo album would find Photo Resizer’s user interface confounding. My mother-in-law did, and she’s probably not the only one.

Now don’t get me wrong – I actually like the Brookstone “My Life” digital photo album. The device itself is easy to use, and I know a lot of people who’d love one of these, and I’m sure you do too. I just think that there’s an opportunity for developers of Windows desktop apps here, and probably with a lot of consumer goods that hook up to people’s PCs.

What would it take to build a user-friendlier version of Photo Resizer?

Fortunately, we’re in the USB age, which means that as far as your computer is concerned, many USB devices “look” just like hard drives. Such is the case with the “My Life” photo album, which looks like a drive with the volume name PHOTOALBUM containing four directories, ALBUM1 through ALBUM4. Reduced to its essence, Photo Resizer simply does the following:

• It asks the user to specify a set of photos
• For each photo in the set, it creates a version reduced to 320 by 240 pixels at 96 dpi
• It saves each of those reduced photos in a specified directory

On one level, it’s a reasonable hobby project. User interface and user experience gurus could have a field day dreaming up a revised user interface, and developers could use this as an opportunity to try developing an app using WPF.

On another level, it’s an opportunity. How many times have you used a very nice device that came with software for your computer that seemed like an afterthought? I can think of a number of devices that I own or have owned that fall into that category. Perhaps there’s a market for improved applications with beautiful, intuitive user interfaces for devices like the “My Life” photo album. Maybe they could be sold online for some small fee – I’m think 5 or 10 dollars. It could be a nice side business for a developer; at the very least, it’s another “feather in your cap” for your resume.

I told my mother-in-law that I’d write an easier-to-use app that she could use to transfer photos to her album. While I’m at it, I’ll post some articles covering what I did and maybe solicit your input. Once it’s done, I’ll post both the app and its code online for you to peruse.

Here’s the challenge for you: can you think of any opportunities to write improved applications for devices that hook up to computers? Can you write a better app for the “My Life” digital photo frame?

I would’ve thought that they ignore everything after the first page, but ReputationDefender says that according to a Cornell University Study [PDF], most Google users ignore everything after the first three results.

UX Rule #1 – All HTML Form Control Elements Require Labels, and this rule is illustrated by showing the differences between Facebook’s and GMail’s login forms.