Design on yozy//NET

Why Does Eventail Have So Many Settings?

Fri, 20 Apr 2018 20:00:00 +0200

In general, I do dislike applications which have many settings. It might be a little bit surprising that Eventail falls into this category. If you look at the whole un-cropped UI it might be a perfect fit for the sword-like iPhone 20.

In design, I try to abide to this rule:

“If you want to add an option, you need to decide on the default value. Once you have chosen the default, keep it and remove the option.”

With Eventail, I have broken this rule in two ways: On top of having many options, Eventail’s defaults are not even what I would recommend people to use.¹

The perfect app

The ultimate goal of Eventail is to be a perfect calendar widget for the masses. As I have argued in my article about e-mail clients: everybody’s definition of perfect is different. As such, I have defined two ground rules about the widget which will stay unbroken.

The app uses iOS calendar API, I will not be making any custom clients to manage CalDav or Exchange servers.
The app stays a simple and nice to look at widget. There are already a lot of great calendaring apps.

The first rule dictates limits on the features I can implement. For example there is no way I could handle Exchange categories or Google custom event colors in the current iOS (11.3).

The second rule might look at odds with many settings, but it is the widget itself that must stay simple. My stats show that most people who download Eventail launch the application once or twice. This is either because the app is crap, or because they set it up the first time they launch it and stash it in a dump folder. I choose to believe in the second case since this is how I intended people to use the app.

The complexity of settings dissipates after you have customized the widget to suit your needs. Tap and a detailed view opens, tap again and you are back. Two states is all there is. This is why the widget has (unlike other apps) a prominent preview of how will it look on top.

Behind the scenes—options that got axed

Although this means that Eventail will grow in complexity, it will not have all of them, the features.

In the 2.2 version, I have added a thin left border on the events in the default theme. Initially, this was a separate theme because I did not want to get e-mails from people unhappy with the change. In the end I have decided to risk the hit. The new theme is more iOS-like and it makes the choice of the theme simple–just decide whether titles or calendars are more important.

New icons for events were initially optional, there was a fallback to spheres for everything. Again, other applications use spheres all the time, but I wanted the invitations to be distinct. There may be more icons coming for other things. For example would it not be great to see a group of two people when there are just two people in the event?

I have opted for the switch options to be all in the positive tone: “display this,” “enable that”. For the sake of consistency and discoverability, they are all turned on by default. I would recommend to hide the empty days though. ↩︎

10 Laws of UX, digested

Fri, 19 Jan 2018 15:43:59 +0100

After reading the article on 10 Laws of UX and the associated comments on Hacker News, I have decided to try a shot at reformatting the page to a more legible format. In the form of a blog post—because I do not think that every idea on the internet needs its own domain.

I provide my own interpretation of the laws in the titles, they are not in the original article.

1. If a function needs to be accessed often and/or quickly, make the button big

The time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and size of the target.

– Paul Fitts

Fitt’s Law on Wikipedia

2. Only provide choices when a good default does not exist

The time it takes to make a decision increases with the number and complexity of choices.

– William Edmund Hick and Ray Hyman

Hick’s Law on Wikipedia

3. Respect the platform’s conventions and interface guidelines

Users spend most of their time on other sites. This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know.

– Jakob Nielsen

Jakob’s Law on Nielsen Norman Group

4. Do not stuff too much detail into a small space

Law of Prägnanz:

People will perceive and interpret ambiguous or complex images as the simplest form possible, because it is the interpretation that requires the least cognitive effort of us.

The Laws of Figure/Ground, Prägnanz, Closure, and Common Fate on Interaction Design

5. Put actions that do similar things together

Law of Proximity:

Objects that are near, or proximate to each other, tend to be grouped together.

N.B.: The recent missile alert fiasco is a good example of why this is important

6. Reduce the number of things your users have to remember

The average person can only keep 7 (plus or minus 2) items in their working memory.

– George Miller

Miller’s Law on Wikipedia

7. Make tasks short, simple and with set deadlines

Any task will inflate until all of the available time is spent.

– Cyril Northcote Parkinson

Parkinson’s Law on Wikipedia

8. Put the important things at the beginning or at the end

Users have a propensity to best remember the first and last items in a series.

Serial Position Effect on Wikipedia

9. Removing features from your product may result in users not being able to achieve some goals

Tesler’s Law, also known as The Law of Conservation of Complexity, states that for any system there is a certain amount of complexity which cannot be reduced.

Larry Tesler’s Law of Conservation of Complexity on Wikipedia

10. Make the most important thing stand out

The Von Restorff effect, also known as The Isolation Effect, predicts that when multiple similar objects are present, the one that differs from the rest is most likely to be remembered.

Von Restorff Effect on Wikipedia

Alternatively: If you want to stand out from competition, find a feature which is always the same and make it different.

Bonus law

Do not put a leading zero on numbers that do not have to be aligned.

Redesigns for the worse

Sun, 14 Apr 2013 23:03:55 +0000

With the iPhone 5S release approaching feature wish lists and redesigns of iOS7 are legion on the Interwebz. Undoubtedly many people find that iOS in its current state lacks features, looks old and boring, and more generally “has to catch up with the competition”.

Usually the argument goes in the lines of “the home screen is just a list of icons” or “Apple must put widgets on the screen” or even “iPhone should centered around people, not apps”. Many proposed changes poke around the lock screen, many of them add a lot of eye candy, most of them are just wishful thinking.

It seems that lot of designers want to be part of the apple experience, want to show their skill by “improving” the user experience of an applauded product. The problem is that they base their designs on opinions of a minority (albeit very vocal) of geeks and tech enthusiasts. They criticize Apple’s design decisions without looking at the reason behind them.

Let us look at some examples and see what’s wrong with them:

Case: the iOS7 redesign video

A few days ago Federico Bianco has published a video of his ideas of how iOS 7 should look like. General reception, if we take comments on forums such as Mac Rumors, was positive. But it these comments were several very good remarks.

Lock screen

The first thing that comes in mind after seeing all of those lock screen features is security. Judging from several security holes that have surfaced in the past months it is apparent that the less features the lock screen has, the better. In its current state it can display time, notifications (that you have chosen to appear there), let you call emergency numbers and take a picture. For any other action you need to type in your passcode. Now, of course not all people use the passcode protection but most people do and it is a good practice that should not be discouraged.

After the redesign one can reply to texts, call arbitrary numbers, switch off wifi and my personal favorite: put the phone into airplane mode. What a joy when some random bloke can cut your phone off as a prank whenever you leave your phone out of sight for a minute. Apple has put a lot of effort so that without passcode people can not access even your photos and this dude lets everybody happily use your call minutes.

Widgets

The widgets Mr. Bianco proposes are a nice touch, in theory the allow you to peek at some of the information the application provides and in some cases take some rudimentary action. In practice the implementation is quite poor.

One very important thing to consider when using the double tap/click is the action that happens when the user is too slow. For example if we consider the selection on iOS then if the double tap is too slow one would move the cursor with the first tap and open the selection menu with the second. Once there one can select the word with a single additional tap.

In the case of double tap opening widgets, a wrong gesture would open the app. No big problem as you can get the information from inside the app as well as from the widget, as long as it does not take too long to open which would be a major frustration. Instead of earning half a second you would lose two.

The one thing I do not get with all these on-screen widgets is their utility. Why would I throw out place for apps to put some random information instead? What is the point of putting them on the main screen when in order to access it you need to close your current app?

Apple does already have a perfect place for widgets, the only missing thing is opening the API. You have guessed it: the notification center. The NC is the best place to put all kinds of widgets for several reasons:

It is already there
It is accessible from everywhere
People are already familiar with it
Jailbreak community has already shown that it works

If Apple would open the API then a lot of people would be happy.

Settings drawer

Another active corner = another hidden feature. There is clearly a huge demand for quicker access to settings. However I would see this more either as a widget (made by Apple, there is not much hope that apps will ever get access to phone settings) or inside the app switcher alongside music controls.

Mission control

Task switching was remade by a great ton of designers such as here in this video. Some of them are already available for the jailbreak community, like the much appraised Auxo.

The common point of all of this switchers are snapshots or live previews of the applications. In the case of Auxo they are completely useless as they are hardly twice as big as the app icon. The icon itself is shrunk. It is beyond me how somebody thinks this is a good idea. A snapshot preview consumes considerably more memory than an icon and it is much harder to quickly recognize.

As for live previews, they bring up the problem of real multitasking. Although background running apps could, in theory, provide a live preview, for most of them that would be impossible. Simply because the background process is not the same and the renderer for the application does not run and should not run because of performance issues.

The shelf

This is the best idea in the video in my opinion. The major issue I have with it is the fact that it sits on your dashboard as a folder. The news stand like shelf can only show 3 files on the iPhone at the same time, which is really not enough if you consider the quantity of the files that would end up there.

I really like the idea of system-wide file repository, as long as it is organized by type and searchable and not in a folder-like structure.

Case closed

Well, my rant is finished. It was largely based on comments and articles I read previously such as the piece on Unsolicited redesigns. Of course redesigning something is a boatload of fun, however it would be nice if people first asked themselves “why” has the original author done it one way or another before trying to improve on it.