John Gruber invites public ridicule to the UI design of this file renaming application. And yes, it certainly looks terrible, like a stereotypical case study in haphazard, bloated, bad UI design.

But is the UI design really that bad? I’m not so sure.

As someone who has had to do all manner of complex and esoteric batch file renaming over my career, this tool looks pretty darn powerful to me. I’ve had to do some absurdly massive batch file renaming (hundreds or even thousands of files) about twenty times in my life, and every single time it’s been a unique and bizarre challenge.

This is one of those tools where, at a fundamental level, more features is better than less. Fewer features make this tool less likely to serve its core function: saving your ass during a freak once-in-a-lifetime file renaming emergency. Even the wacky features like renumbering the files using roman numerals doesn’t seem absurd to me. This tool is intended for people without ninja-like mastery of the black art of regex construction (and, for that matter, for office production workers who may not know how to program anything at all, for example a photo editor).

So if it’s not the number of features that’s bad, let’s focus on the UI itself. The signature quality of this design is that every single feature is shown on one page. There are no layers of dialog boxes, no multistep wizards. The fields are numbered, too, which seems to suggest the order the transformations are processed. The entire transformation is right there for the user to see, no surprises. What’s more, showing all the possible transformations on this one screen educates the user on what the application can actually do: No poking around through menus and manuals to find out what this app is capable of. It’s all right there.

My only substantive critique, in fact, would be aesthetic: the grid of the page and the layout of the form elements could be more pleasing and better organized from an information design perspective.

Is that the nut of Gruber’s critique? Or is he being a little hasty in his judgement here?

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If you’re in NYC this Thursday, you should come to see From Sketching to Experience, the first of Liz Danzico’s Dot Dot Dot series of small, informal (and free) lectures. These lectures are the ramp-up to SVA’s new MFA in Interaction Design program. I’ll be one of the speakers this Thursday, and am also going to be on the SVA faculty as well when the program starts in 2009.

This lecture should be fun — four speakers from different backgrounds in a short-and-sweet presentation format. Please join us!

From the official site:

Crossword constructors sketch in pencil before ever laying a grid down, filmmakers rely on storyboards before ever picking up a camera, and cartoonists go pane by pane before designing a strip. Before interaction designers go high fidelity, sketches provide the method by which they communicate process, flow, layout — and importantly, story. Learn from four practitioners of divergent backgrounds how they practice sketching to get to their final product.

Speakers
Join us for the first lecture to hear from:

• Tom Bodkin, design director, New York Times
• Jake Barton, founder and principal, Local Projects
• Andrew Sloat, graphic designer and videomaker
• Christopher Fahey, founding partner, Behavior; forthcoming faculty, MFA Interaction Design

Details
Thursday, November 13
6-8PM (RSVP)
White Rabbit
145 E Houston Street (View Map)
New York

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This is a website Behavior made for the Smithsonian’s American Museum of National History during the 2004 Presidential election campaign. It is the web companion for Vote: The Machinery of Democracy, an exhibition of artifacts from America’s long and colorful history of voting technologies.

It was a fascinating physical exhibition. And I’m still proud of our interactive exhibition, too (both the Flash and HTML versions). It’s just as relevant today as it was four years ago in our first post-chad Presidential election (although the interactive map is a little out of date by now — to see a more up-to-date but less-detailed view of how voting technologies are distributed today, use the SciFi Channel’s new map from their surprisingly-good coverage of this topic).

As tomorrow’s historic election approaches, and many Americans will find this year’s voting user experience to be different than what they might be used to, I think it’s helpful to reflect upon the long and complex political and technological paths that got us here. For some colorful tales from yesteryear, see this New Yorker article from just last week. And it’s probably a good idea to learn where we are today: this New York Times article from January 2008 is a great place to start.

The Politics of User Experience

I just want to add one more thing, speaking as a user experience design professional:

It is a profound embarrassment to our profession that touch-screen voting exists at all in our country. It is an inferior system in every thinkable way, including — right up there with reliability, security, and cost — pure empirical usability. User experience experts should be up in arms over the very existence of these machines. Except perhaps for assisting with certain special needs voters, there is no excuse for a state government to have purchased these machines except for either old-fashioned corruption or a sad, abject gullibility for slick marketing presentations by election machine company salespeople. We Americans who call ourselves usability advocates should make it a goal to rid the USA of these machines by the 2012 elections. Who’s with me?

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Last night was the second U.S. Presidential Debate. One of my favorite new election-based interactive user experiences (in addition to CNN’s approval graphs and CNN’s magic wall) is Twitter’s election.twitter.com. Here’s a sample of what you would have seen during last night’s debate:

TechCrunch reviewed this site last week. Here’s their review in its entirety:

It sounds like a decent idea on paper: take every tweet about the candidates and stream them on a single, constantly updated site. Unfortunately, while it may be fun to look at for a few minutes, election.twitter.com is far too noisy to be worthwhile. There are no cohesive threads of arguments, and every quote that raises an eyebrow gets repeated ad nauseum. Verdict: Vetoed.

I completely disagree with TC’s analysis. It seems focused on extracting actionable, accurate, or even just coherent information. They’re disappointed in the quality of individual posts and the lack of consistent dialogue. It’s just “noise” to them.

Interestingly, the critique is identical to the initial criticism many people have of Twitter, before they actually try it and, hopefully, “get it”. They say it’s “just noise.” They say “who cares about everyone’s mundane, idle thoughts?”

Similarly, the nature and mechanism of election.twitter.com’s social function is, like Twitter itself, ‘ambient‘: It’s about getting an informal, general sense of what’s happening, not about following specific threads and individual thoughts. Just like with ambient music, you’re not supposed to actually listen to it in an attempt to extract something specific (for example a catchy melody, or a telling quote).

The “hot topics” keywords at the top of the page, extracted from the totality of the current twitterstream, are also extremely revealing. If you only look at that part of the page you’re already getting a real feel for the memes currently in circulation. Bite-sized but potent.

Bottom line: the site is not about finding content with immediate, actionable value. It’s about visiting repeatedly, or watching it flow by in your peripheral vision, without paying close attention. The goal is to synchronize with a certain public pulse.

(This is, coincidentally, what the New York Times home page does for me, albeit at a slower pace. I want to see what everyone is seeing and talking about today, and I trust that the Times home page will show that in a single page view, even if I don’t actually click through to any articles. It’s not about diving deep — it’s just about the broad overview of the zeitgeist.)

This new Twitter feature — this “topic-focused channel”, or whatever they call it — is a great new idea that I’d love to see extended to other areas and topics. It’s ideal for live events like debates, election night, live TV, sporting events, etc. Also for conferences, or even for private groups (a much-requested feature Twitter hasn’t yet delivered on). The idea is that you are really paying attention to something else — Twitter is just the back channel, the pulse of the topic. I can’t wait to see future implementations of this simple but powerful view.

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When I was just 20 years old, I went on a student exchange program to Amsterdam to study sculpture at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie. Those six months I spent in Europe, impoverished and starry-eyed, shaped a lot of who I am, both personally and creatively.

I’m delighted to say that I will be back in Amsterdam this week, from Thursday to Monday, for the 2008 Euro IA Summit, presenting version 2.0 of The Seduction of the Interface on Friday morning. I look forward to meeting some of my European peers as well as walking (or biking) around my old stomping grounds again.

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Barack Obama’s speech was tremendous. He was strong, forceful, and honest while fighting tooth and nail for most of the fundamentally liberal ideals that I share — arguing them openly instead of filtering or even hiding them as most liberal Democratic candidates have in the past. And in the several places where he strayed from liberal orthodoxy, there were three or four times where I actually found myself changing my mind a little bit.

The most interesting example was his statement about the right to bear arms. He said:

The reality of gun ownership may be different for hunters in rural Ohio than for those plagued by gang-violence in Cleveland, but don’t tell me we can’t uphold the Second Amendment while keeping AK-47s out of the hands of criminals.

My reaction was, hey, you know, I think I now realize that I don’t give a fuck if people in the sticks shoot the hell out of each other — as long as I can be damn sure that handguns are 1000% illegal here in New York City, I’ll feel safe enough.

Obama let me imagine a future where the Second Amendment isn’t a national issue at all except to the extent that localities are permitted the right to choose their own paths.

The idea that an adult in Montana should be forbidden from carrying a gun in their pocket just so I can feel safe walking home in Red Hook, Brooklyn now seems like more than just idealism or even ideology — it now feels like a kind of petty pedantry.

This is, of course, something enshrined in the United States Constitution, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t find a middle ground where Brooklyn and Montana can still have different rules. The Second Amendment’s words are, in fact, ambiguous enough (notoriously so) for both approaches to be able to survive simultaneously in the same nation’s legal landscape.

“Foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds”… Flexibility is strength. Is it my deep concern for the safety of Montanans living in a gun-saturated state that made me so uncompromising about the 2nd Amendment? Or was it really just my own desire that I and my loved ones can feel safe in a crowded city with a history of staggering crime? I have no doubt it’s the latter.

(I know this issue is more complex than I make it seem — the lax legality of guns in one state may of course negatively affect crime in a neighboring state where they are contraband… and of course if I had a relative in Montana I would be less flippant about their safety.)

Fight for the Future

Obama also brought the campaign fight back up to a respectable level (if only for the next 24 hours until the Republican campaign starts slinging the mud again). He was harsh in his attacks on McCain, but he explicitly asked us to judge John McCain not based on the consistency or inconsistency of his ideas, nor on whether his policies are driven by sincere conviction or crass political expediency, but rather to debate him and judge him based on on what his policies actually are right now. To do any less would be undignified and cowardly.

(What’s more this argument undermines the misguided faith many independent voters seem to have that McCain is secretly less conservative than he says he is. The reality is that there is no secret maverick freethinking post-partisan John McCain hiding under his sleazy Bush-style right-wing campaign — the election is for the kooky throwback ultra-right-winger he says he is right now and that he says he will be as president.)

Obama threw down the gauntlet and made this campaign about what happens next, what happens tomorrow. The future.

After the first day’s speakers, Democratic talking heads Paul Begala and James Carville thought this convention desperately lacked a single, simple message. They compared it to the 2004 GOP convention where the formulation “Bush is Strong, Kerry is Weak” was the resounding theme. But in my mind, all throughout the convention a theme was emerging: “Obama is the Future, McCain is the past”.

So in the spirit of that future, I include above this iPhone screenshot in which an Obamabot summons me to help the campaign via a pre-speech SMS text message, and wherein I respond immediately after the real Obama’s closing words. And wouldn’t you know, the SMS conversation resembles a traditional call-and-response sermon, from the lectern to a rapt hall, where the speaker’s call to action is echoed by the audience uttering a single simple cheer in response: Yes We Can! VOL [NAME] [TOWN]!

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Running shoes must be usable, but it’s their seductive design that really sells the product.

I’ll be delivering a new presentation concept about “merchandising” at the O’Reilly Web 2.0 Expo in New York this September 18th (and again two weeks later in Amsterdam at Euro IA). Not about merchandising as in the design of retail environments (offline or online), but about merchandising as in how products themselves are designed to make people want to buy them.

Many UX designers see “merchandising” as another flavor of marketing, and therefore see it as something different from, or even opposed to, good UI design. It’s the evil part of the product design process that says we need to put 100 buttons on the remote control so that they can put 100 bullets on the box, which in turn will help the product sell from the shelves in the stores.

Mozilla Labs UI designer, and former Humanized ninja Jono DiCarlo writes about this phenomenon in his thought-provoking UI manifesto “These Things I Believe“:

6. Is UI design marketing?

User interface design is not marketing.

Software developers loathe marketing, so if they think that UI design is marketing, then they will loathe UI design.

The qualities of software that make for a good advertisement or computer-store demo are not the same qualities that make software usable and pleasant to work with long-term, day-in day-out. Often these qualities are opposites.

A shopper may choose the microwave with more buttons, because it seems “more powerful”. However, the shopper will soon find out that it does the same thing as any other microwave, you just have to spend longer figuring out which button to push.

It is easy to fool people into buying something that is against their own best interest.

Don’t do that.

I’m not sure I agree with this entirely. The user experience designer’s job is essentially no different than what the industrial/product designer’s job has been for a century: To design products that people want to use. A product that is empirically hard to use but that people perceive as easy or fun to use because of delightful UI characteristics can be successful. A product that makes a lot of noise, takes up a lot of space, is expensive to maintain, and has a complicated interface might be extremely desirable and satisfying to many people simply because it makes them feel powerful using it, despite the measurable waste associated with the design.

A designer who neglects marketing concerns and designs a product that the target audience sees as undesirable (because, for example, it lacks a sexy list of features or a glossy interface) is just as bad as a designer who neglects production concerns and creates something that is prohibitively expensive and time-consuming to build (to manufacture, program, whatever).

And unfortunately for us designers who favor elegance and simplicity, there is a large cohort of consumers and purchasers who feel a *lot* better about instead owning products that they are confident have the most buttons and bullet points, regardless of usability or even performance. You can probably throw many Windows Vista champions into this category.

If efficiency isn’t generally seen as important to a product’s users, then we designers who do think it’s important need to make our elegant and efficient products scream out to users “I am simple to use! And (in case you didn’t know) that’s a good thing! Don’t buy the competitor’s junk with all the bloated features — buy me instead and you’ll be happier!”

That’s a designer being a marketer, or even a salesman. But in a good way.

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I am thoroughly enjoying the debut crop of iPhone Apps — a welcome improvement over the (mostly) second-rate half-baked apps available in the Jailbreak era.

Here are a few imaginary apps and functions I wish I could be using right now.

1. Batch Sync

Most New Yorkers with iPhones will recognize this scenario: You get on the subway and decide to catch some headlines on NetNewsWire, or maybe you want to catch up on the last hour or two of tweets on Twitteriffic. But when you open up each app, you find yourself looking at the same headlines you were looking at ten hours ago — the last time you launched the app. And now you’re underground and it’s too late to sync.In fact, many subway commuters have learned to practice a little ritual where, on their way to the train station, they launch each of these apps one by one just to sync the data so that when they go underground the data will be there ready for them.

“Batch Sync” is my solution. It’s simple an icon on the Home screen that, when clicked, launches each and every of the apps the user wants to synchronize with the cloud.

I realize that this app is probably impossible unless Apple does it themselves: Wisely, Apple does not permit any third-party iPhone apps to run in the background, a privilege reserved exclusively for a select number of Apple’s own apps (Mail, iPod, etc). But I can imagine a scenario in which Apple permits third-party apps to run in a limited way in the background, under specific user request and control: First, they can only sync in the background — no other functions besides syncing is permitted; and second, only if the user grants those apps specific permission to sync behind the scenes (or on demand) on a case-by-case basis.

This could most easily be done via a Preferences panel (a checkbox list, for example, listing all apps that offer the ability to sync automatically. UPDATE: Allegedly Apple is working on this, but no current apps seem to use it.

2. WiFi Switch

I turn my iPhone’s WiFi antenna on and off fairly frequently (to conserve battery life, for example), and it’s a pain to have to drill down into the System Preferences every time I want to do it.”WiFi Switch is a simple app that will provide Home-screen-level access to toggle WiFi on and off. That’s all it does — you click it and it turns WiFi on, click again and it turns it off. The icon could even change color to reflect the current state.

In fact, I sense some promise in the general idea of having a Home screen icon that simply switches some iPhone service on and off. There must be other uses for such a model.

3. A Decent To-Do List.

All of the current options really suck, IMHO. They’re either bloated GTD-crazed apps where it takes longer to write down and classify most tasks than it does to actually do them, or they are misbegotten piles of bad visual design, non-standard iPhone UI elements, and thoughtlessly inelegant user interaction design processes. More on this later.

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The NeXT Cube and the Apple Mac Cube. Are they iterations?

Discussing his upcoming biography of Steve Jobs, author Leander Kahney describes Apple’s prototyping process:

It’s a process where they discover the product through constantly creating new iterations. A lot of companies will do six or seven prototypes of a product because each one takes time and money. Apple will do a hundred — that’s how many they did of the MacBook. Steve Jobs doesn’t wake up one morning and there’s a vision of an iPhone floating in front of his face. He and his team discovered it through this exhaustive process of building prototype after prototype.

Clearly Jobs wants to see his team exploring hundreds of prototypes of his products before a final version is sent to manufacturing. But when asked in a video interview about his experience hiring the legendary graphic designer Paul Rand to design of the NeXT logo, Jobs said he admired the fact that Rand (perhaps arrogantly) proclaimed that Jobs would only get one logo for his engagement fee. Rand would not show Jobs a menu of variations to choose from, nor would he show a selection of rough drafts and allow Jobs to provide feedback so that Rand could go back to the drawing board to produce a final candidate. There would be no process at all, no open exploration — Rand would simply give Jobs the best logo he could provide, and then Jobs could take it or leave it.

Why would Jobs admire Rand’s process so much when he runs Apple’s design team in exactly the opposite fashion? Is it simply a matter of Jobs being a sucker for Rand’s monumental ego (and, of course, his stunning track record) while still being a absolute monarch with his own internal team?

This touches on a bigger issue in the design profession: When should a design process spend time on a broad exploration of many options, and when should a designer or design team focus on perfecting a single promising idea?

My inclination is almost always to explore as many options as possible, only settling on a final direction when practical constraints force me to get busy finishing the product.

Of course, this is just one school of design. Clearly many other designers prefer to finish their explorative thinking early and to then invest the bulk of their effort on perfecting the product. Still other designers are simply incapable of coming up with more than a small number of ideas — or they are temperamentally prone to become extremely emotionally attached to their earliest ideas.

In which contexts is a quality-based process actually preferable to a quantity-based process?

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