Firefox 4 Beta: Tabs on Top Are Better

With the release of Firefox Beta 4, Firefox joins Internet Explorer and Chrome in placing tabs at the top of the browser application window, above navigation controls, instead of between the navigation controls and the page content.  Application-level functions like settings are now collected into a “Firefox” menu at the top. Buttons that affect the current web page, like back and mark as a favorite, are now lower, closer to the web page. Alex Faaborg, a user experience designer at Mozilla, has posted a video to his blog that explains the new features and the design advantages, but central to the design changes are classic interface design principles: proximity, error prevention, simplicity, context and grouping.

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Apple’s FaceTime ads trigger emotions and wallets

I’d like to first say that I dislike Apple’s new ads that showcase their FaceTime feature. They feel cheap and are as painful to watch as a sitcom with poor acting. At the same time, I also think that they are brilliant.

FaceTime is one of Apple’s new features for iPhone 4 that supports video chatting with other iPhone 4 users (if you’re both using a Wi-Fi connection). The iPhone 4 has a new camera in the front so you can see who you are talking to (and they can see you). Get a tissue box ready and watch one of the ads:

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You 404′d it. Gnarly, dude.

That’s an error message I saw on coffecupnews.org recently, I’m not kidding. I love it!

It has several elements of a great website error message

• It does NOT blame the user
• It has a sense of humor
• It provides some suggestions for what to do next
• It wraps the error message in all of the standard parts of the website – logo, search box, links to the most popular articles, etc.

It could use a little improvement, but not much

• Explain what happened – most people don’t know what a 404 error message is, and “lost at sea” is a little vague, although most people will probably guess that the page doesn’t exist
• Point out in the text of the error message that the site has a search box, although again most people will probably find that on their own.

My favorite error message is still the one I saw on Sesame Street’s website [blog], although the iPhone lolcats app gets the most points for style [blog].

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Caps Lock key demoted

After years of suffering through accidental CAPITALIZATIONS and wondering why keyboard manufacturers give such prominence and high priority to the Caps Lock key, I decided to simply remove it. And wha-la, my life is all the better for it. The key functions remain in tact, as anyone who has accidentally popped a key will tell you, but now, the rubberized button takes up only about 3 mm of space in my life as opposed to about 2 cm. Granted it isn’t very attractive, but it is highly functional, as the risk accidentally tapping the bubble is significantly less than tapping the entire key. Customization rocks.

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Child uses an iPad for the first time

This video is a reminder that there’s so much we can learn from watching others. This 2.5 year-old discovers a common problem that adults encounter: if you hold the iPad with your thumb on the screen, then you can’t use another finger to select an application on the home screen. The problem is that many people will find it natural to hold the iPad this way and now need to change their behavior to accommodate the device.

I am not sure whether Apple knew about this issue beforehand or not, but it demonstrates the importance of testing before release. Here’s a great quote I saw this morning on Twitter:

“A usability test is going to happen before or after you launch. The question is whether you want to be there or not.” - tsharon

Source: YouTube via Laughing Squid

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The zombies think they have brains

I am hopelessly addicted to Plants vs Zombies for the iPhone. The plants are fun (pea shooters that shoot frozen peas), the zombies are silly (floating across my pool in a giant inflatable duck? Hah!), Crazy Dave is the best (rock and roll!), and the awards are even better (Don’t Pea in the Pool). It has a certain style about the humor which comes across in the game messages, the notes that the Zombies leave for you after you complete a series of levels, and the almanac that reminds you of the capabilities of your plants and the zombies you’re fighting against. But what really got me was the hilarious help message. The help message got me on several levels. First, it was seriously funny and totally in keeping with the humor of the game, like the error messages for LOLcats [blog] and Sesame Street [blog]. Second, it made sense to me that the zombies that populated the game were so confident of their success that they didn’t need to write any help for the application.

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Reading between the screens

I ran into the flight status screens below at an airport in New York City on my way home to North Carolina. My husband and I stared at these screens for several minutes, looking for our flight and trying not to panic that it had been canceled. Then an airport employee walked past and pointed out that they were not in service. How did both of us miss the NOT IN SERVICE sign taped prominently between the two screens? The sign was right in front of us, but it wasn’t near our place of focus, the actual TV screen, and the writing in pen was hard to see from a distance.

There are so many things that could have made this better: write with a marker, stick it to the middle of the screen, cover the screens with paper, perhaps even turn off the broken screens, if that’s not too much to ask? When something like this happens at home or in a small office everyone just knows to ignore it, but in a public setting a sign like that has to scream so that even idiots like me will notice it.

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Good design from limited functionality: corn husker

In the fall I took my nephew and niece to Ganyard Hill Farms to pick pumpkins, get lost in the corn maze, and go on a hayride. An unexpected bonus of the trip was the corn husker. I grew up in New York City and had never seen one before, and I thought it was the coolest device ever – just a few moving parts were enough to get the job done.

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Party Video Games: Design for New Users

Games are an interesting design challenge because if they’re too easy they’re no fun, and if they’re too hard they’re no fun, and “easy” and “hard” may be different for different people. Party games, or video games that you’d break out with a group of friends, are a special challenge because they need to be fun for the group, which may contain people with mixed skill levels or experience. Wii Sports is a great video game because the direct interaction style is fun. Want to swing the tennis racket? Just swing the controller! But it quickly became a party game, even for people that didn’t play video games. Why? Because it was intuitive, easy to learn. No need to memorize complex combinations of button presses used in many video games. Instead, people could pick up a controller and start playing immediately.

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Designing a better car seat

While on the phone with one of my friends who is expecting, I learned something that I found very interesting. It turns out that about 90% of car seats are improperly installed by new parents, even when they use the instructions! I was shocked and a little appalled. My first thought was, why is it so hard/confusing to use a car seat? This is a life-saving device and you would think that manufacturers would want to implement a fool proof way to secure the seat in the vehicle.

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