High Order Blog

This post is a reaction to Donald Norman and Jakob Nielsen’s essay on gestural interfaces, which I found quite interesting. (Speaking of Donald Norman, if you haven’t read his book, Design of Everyday Things, I highly recommend checking it out.) I appreciate the points made in the article, and would like to echo the argument, but I’d also like to place a significant caveat on some of the conlcusions.

The essay begins with a description of the state of gestural interfaces. I couldn’t agree with this more:

Nielsen put it this way: “The first crop of iPad apps revived memories of Web designs from 1993, when Mosaic first introduced the image map that made it possible for any part of any picture to become a UI element. As a result, graphic designers went wild: anything they could draw could be a UI, whether it made sense or not. It’s the same with iPad apps: anything you can show and touch can be a UI on this device. There are no standards and no expectations.”

Word. As a developer who considers himself a relatively thoughtful interaction designer (albeit imperfect), it’s nice to hear usability experts call out these developers more concerned with graphics. I’ll go so far as to estimate that the vast majority of iPhone applications are poorly designed and amateurish. I find very few applications on the app store acceptable. (I have 42 apps installed, and many of those need to be removed.)

The essay goes on to discuss the lack of standards. On this point, again, I couldn’t agree more that the divergence in design is frustrating and to the detriment of usability. In the case of the iPhone, I blame developers for this trend. Apple has, for the record, outlined UI design guidelines, and I find that built-in iPhone apps are relatively consistent, which should serve as a guide for the rest of us.

I can see an argument for making apps stylish and fun, but doesn’t Apple do that without deviating from their core, familiar interactions?

The essay attributes gestural usability problems to a few reasons:

The lack of established guidelines for gestural control

The misguided insistence by companies (e.g., Apple and Google) to ignore established conventions and establish ill-conceived new ones.

The developer community’s apparent ignorance of the long history and many findings of HCI research which results in their feeling of empowerment to unleash untested and unproven creative efforts upon the unwitting public.

Furthermore, the essay notes the fundamental principles of interaction design, which are: visibility, feedback, consistency, non-destructive operations, discoverability, scalability and reliability. The claim is made that “All these are rapidly disappearing from the toolkit of designers, aided, we must emphasize, by the weird design guidelines issued by Apple, Google, and Microsoft.”.

I’m not too familiar with the latest from Google and Microsoft, but this seems a little harsh in the case of Apple. I would argue that you can find examples of each of those principles thoughtfully considered in iOS. I’m sure there are exceptions, too, but given the ambition of what Apple has accomplished with gestural interfaces, it seems to me like they adequately considered these principles.

The essay continues:

We urgently need to return to our basics, developing usability guidelines for these systems that are based upon solid principles of interaction design, not on the whims of the company human interface guidelines and arbitrary ideas of developers.

Can someone confirm that Apple employs interaction design experts? I can’t imagine that their human interface guidelines are the collective whims of ignorant developers.

Sure, let’s develop some guidelines and improve gestural interfaces, but this is the caveat I’d like to add: I encourage Apple to keep doing what it’s doing. Once you consider the iPhone and iPad as engineering problems, I think Apple’s effort in usability is commendable. By ‘engineering problem’ I don’t mean to dismiss arguments regarding usability, but rather indicate that execution is hard and all products are imperfect.

A willingness to take risks and make mistakes is a critical part of innovation. Pre-release usability testing is important, but there’s always a tradeoff. More time perfecting the product increases development costs, which could increase the final price of the product. It also means the product is released later, and in the meantime, we wouldn’t even have an option of using gestural interfaces. The bottom line is that Apple is a company and not a standards or research body; usability is but one of many things they have to consider.

I also tend to believe that, all things equal, the more people involved in a project, the more difficult it becomes to be innovative. I bring this up because you could argue that Apple needs to employ more usability experts relative to engineers. While that might help devise better usability guidelines in theory, I am skeptical of its true value. More people means more communication overhead and politics, which can slow development iterations and dull thinking.

I look forward to the advances in gestural interfaces, but more so to the messy part done by Apple than the cleanup accomplished through research.

The following was a draft for our website’s front page, but I thought I’d tuck it here instead. It’s just a little about our philosophy:

At High Order Bit, our business philosophy is simple: Our success relies on our passion and our sense of accountability. Our business must be about something beyond profits, and we’ve chosen to make it about our passion for technology and an embrace of individuality and creativity.

We value a focus on people, the ability to experiment (and fail fast) and supporting instead of fighting natural forces. We don’t dismiss all traditional business wisdom, but we believe these fundamental ingredients are essential before any of it matters.

Our theory is that profits will trend with the internal health of our company.

That’s my advice if  you’re thinking about starting  your own company.  Now, granted, I’m still waiting on Delaware to confirm that I, in fact, have (part of) a company, but the past few months have been pretty educational.  Let me walk you through those months:

Summer 2008, sometime

I hate my job more every day.  The pay is fine. I’m respected by my peers.  The company seems to mean well and try hard to make me happy.  But those elements can’t overcome my discontent stemming from corporate lethargy and an avoidance of risk (and a challenge).

August 2008

I read a sufficient number of Paul Graham essays to convince myself to quit my job and work for myself.  I was going to escape from the zoo, dammit!  But what would I do?

October 2008

I was a free man.

But wait!  I felt like I skipped a step.  Oh, yeah — that part about identifying my usefulness to society and how I’m going to survive.  No worries…  I have three and a half years’ worth of savings!

November 2008

Doctor Yi: It sounds like you aren’t treating your stomach very well.  Describe your daily routine for me.

Me: Well, I wake up around noon and make a pot of coffee.  I usually skip breakfast because I’m too consumed with ESPN and my RSS feeds.  Eventually I’ll get hungry and stop by Subway or Taco Bell.  By the time my girlfriend gets home from work, I’m dying to get out of the apartment so we usually go out to eat.  There are a lot of great Mexican restaurants in the neighborhood…  Then we’ll top off dinner with some hot chocolate or ice cream.  …there have also been a lot of birthday celebrations/an election party/after work events to attend, at which I’ll enjoy my favorite craft beers.  …couldn’t we have done this over the phone?

December 2008

I made the move to Boulder.  I was pretty sure I’d forgotten how to code, my attempts to “work” were futile and I started to notice my bank account’s rapid decay.  At least I moved to decaf and got outside more.

January 2009

Locked in a small basement room for a day, I had no choice but attempt productivity.  The first day of work was awkward — we bought office equipment, set up phone lines, incorporated our company, etc., but I still didn’t know what the company did.  I didn’t know whether to check all or none of the boxes on the various forms that insist we must have a purpose.  I checked “other”.  I started to question my idea of a bottom-up company and anxiety set in.  Thankfully there was something calming about working through some of the logistics.

By the end of the first week of locking myself in an office, I got that feeling of a voracious, free-ranging predator (yes, I’m continuing with the metaphor).  Ideas were flowing better than ever and my confidence sky-rocketed.  Every idea seemed so doable.  And now, just a couple weeks later, I’m considering what to start building tomorrow, which is vastly different from considering what I might build someday.  No more excuses.  I have regained the comfort from knowing that 5 years from now, at the very least, I’ll be able to say “I tried”.

Now, I’ve heard stories of people starting companies – and even selling those companies – in their spare time.  If that sounds like it could be you, by all means, keep the payckeck.  But if you’re like me, you need to find that small basement room with a locking door.  Skip over as much of mid-October through December as possible.  January is why you should leave your job.