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Dan Russell has an excellent post on one of my favorite blogs, Creating Passionate Users, about using intuition to create, well, intuitive interfaces.The following is a great excerpt:

Great user interfaces might spring from an intuitive understanding, but they’re crafted by hard work; honed by carefully removing everything that doesn’t add to the tool’s value, deleting anything that gets in the way, or whatever it is that causes confusion.

Creating Passionate Users: Intuition

He makes a good claim that the most intuitive interface disappears while the user concentrates on using the tool you have provided. I really like this mentality, in web apps.

There is a fallback though, if your interface ‘disappears’, because often times your interface, be it the left or right side, holds your application together giving it meaning and value.

I think intuitiveness starts at design patterns and ends with usability. By using standard design principles you are gauranteed a majority of users will be able to ‘use’ your application. For instance, people are very familiar to a toolbar running across the top of a window, a hierarchical navigational pane on the left, and main content in the center-right.

The drawback of design standards is a lack of innovation, especially in a relatively young industry like web / application design. At functioning form there has been somewhat of a debate on design patterns because it does limit innovation, because who says your new design will not be the next standard? To this I say use innovation in a way to add to the experience.

Try sitting a potential user down in front of a screen with your interface on display. Provide no keyboard or mouse. And ask them if it looks familiar. Ask them if they understand what is layed out in front of them. Then give them a keyboard/mouse and see if they do what you expected them to. Chances are if they ‘know’ the layout than they will ‘know’ how to use it. That’s intuitive, and that’s usability.

I agree with Dan - don’t rely on your own intuition. Let the users decide. And yes, remove anything that does not create value because all it creates is confusion.

FYI — This is my first post using the new Flock release.

technorati tags:web+design, user+interface, design+standards

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We apologize for the speed of our server / connection speed. I host all of our stuff and a combination of increased traffic and Qwest’s inadequate service (much more in ‘a conversation with qwest’ in a later post), plus moving all the servers has resulted in this. We hope to have a hosted solution in place by the end of the week and data migrated over the weekend. I imagine most of our readers are probably seeing this via RSS in which case our connection problems do not matter.

But as we have gotten busier, the time for me to manage our network infrastructure has become less. So, we are outsourcing hosting on our more trafficked sites. If you know of a good (cheap) host for Wordpress leave us a note as we are in the comparative shopping phase. We would also like to select a host that will scale with our company as we grow — hopefully into hosting our web services and future developments.

Again, sorry for the slowness. We hope to be back with regular enthrawling and thought provoking material very soon.

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As a recent entrant to the 9Rules community, I couldn’t agree more with a statement made by them on a recent blog post.

9rules Members don’t blog because it’s their job, they do it for the passion.

Yes, I like to write. TJ and I make $0.00 from this blog. We run no advertisements on the blog or in our RSS feed. To us, it’s not about that. That’s why our blog’s mission statement is the following:

getanewbrowser.com was started to ‘analyze the web.’ We aren’t here to regurgitate news and reviews, but to provide insightful meaning to what is currently happening in the world of technology.

This is much like the series of posts Christian Montoya has run on Z-Listers. Through that post we had a conversation of why we are doing what we do on our blogs. We want to add value to our community and inspire thoughtful discussions. That’s what this is all about.

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Since late February 2006, Microsoft has been running the Windows Live Expo classfieds service. I’ve been genuinely impressed with Microsoft Live and like the fact that Microsoft is joining the race in creating innovative, and most importantly open web services.

At the start of 2006 Microsoft decided to get big on being small by spending $120,000,000 on an advertising / rebranding campaign. You can read my thoughts on this in a post I wrote the day of press release. Essentially what Microsoft wants to do is become smaller in the eyes of consumers in order to bring the company closer to the people. We’ve seen this in Microsoft’s commercial campaigns where it claims ‘the people’ are what make Microsoft and its products valuable.

My point is that Microsoft needs to put their money to work and actually practice what they preach.

While working on a product that you may or may not see (still determining its viability) I was interested in working with Live Expo, among other classifieds sites. The following is a conversation I had with the Microsoft Live Expo team:

Read the rest of this entry »

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I would like to hear a clear definition of a Web OS. Wikipedia lists a lot of technical jargon and research theory as a definition. If you look further down, you will see … “More generally, WebOS has been taken to refer to a software platform that interacts with the user through a web browser and does not depend on any particular local operating system.” Sounds like a browser to me.

There is a laundry list of sites coming out claiming to be a Web OS and to me it’s a portal with mashed up web services. Sure, it looks like a desktop with a ’start’ menu, icons, drag n drop windows — but those features do not make it an operating system. It makes it a dynamic web page.

I heard all kinds of good things about YouOS so I decided to give it a try, even though they blatantly state on their website that they are “(Still wayyyy alpha.)“. Frankly, I was not impressed. I see no more value in a web application like this than I do a Yahoo or Google portal. Although YouOS says that the definition of a Web OS is evolving, their short and sweet answer to my question above is:

“YouOS is a web operating system that lets you run diverse applications within a web browser. Small applications like sticky notes or clocks. Large applications like word processing, mp3 players, and instant messaging. Even better, it’s very easy to tweak an existing application or write your own.”

You can read their manifesto here.

Now don’t get me wrong - I think the technology behind these are awesome and the companies producing these are pioneers in an infant niche. But I honestly do not see the necessity of creating such a platform. To me, a portal is a portal is a portal. But, we will wait and see. These are definitely far before their time.

Find out more:

Web OS Market Review | Richard MacManus
Rethinking the Web OS from a user’s point of view | Jeremy Zawodny
WebOS | Wikipedia
web os | google blog search
What is a web os? | google search

tags: Web OS, Web, internet

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