Playpen

Is it just me or does anyone else find LinkedIn’s new design tweaks weird on the perspective front?

This rounded-corner box has a couple of random shadows at the bottom. The impression is that the bottom corners are lifting up, but the box remains square and the top has no shadows. Logically, that can only mean that the background curves away from the box, except it has no gradient or shadows either.

It really niggles me for some reason and does my eyes in like some crazy M. C. Escher picture. Or am I being too anal?

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ATMs in Germany are lame, I have to say. They’re slow and clunky and appear to be designed by software engineers rather than UI designers.

So I wish interaction designer, Holger Struppek, Design Director of Hot Studio, was working here. He has written a explanatory piece for Physical Interface about the re-design of Wells Fargo’s ATM machines by Pentagram (where he was at the time of the design).

It’s quite a nice example of a classic interface design process for an interface that has a lot of pressures on it: multiple locations, different hardware, security issues, time pressures, accessibility, broad audience.

The jury in the comments seems to still be out about how successful it is – I find the grid of buttons a bit visually cramped – but it’s much better than the previous version. However, this part of the article about the colour-scheme favourites during user testing caught my eye:

Blue seemed to be a color that was genuinely pleasant to look at, and even though it was “off-brand”, everyone could live with it. It provided great contrast to the red Return Card button and the yellow alert boxes. During user testing, we presented participants with our color choices and got the same results: “It’s calming”, “I like the blue sky”, … and so we went with it.

Surprisingly, Wells Fargo recently switched the UI to the current tan color scheme. I don’t know what prompted that decision, but it does bring it back in line with their brand.

Surprisingly? Not really. Some brand managers will always want their brand colours to be in your face however ugly they are. Note to brand managers/marketers: If your brand colours are important enough to throw user testing out the window and infiltrate the UI, remember to choose some decent colours for your brand in the first place.

Maybe ATMs should look like this:

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Almost anything involving computers falls over once in a while, but it’s how you handle it that makes all the difference.

I spotted this in Newcastle airport the other day. I see a crappy broken Windows system almost every time I travel. I imagine travellers going through Heathrow’s Terminal 5 saw quite a few too.

Now, not only could someone have done a better job of handling the error on the application coding side, it’s also such shitty branding for Microsoft. Every time I see one of these I think: “Microsoft products can’t run enterprise systems without falling over - I wouldn’t let them near any project of mine.”

Given the massive wads of cash companies spend on those inane glossy business-management-enterprise-big-dick-corporation ads you always see in airports, this would seem to unravel the band promise it all pretty quickly. With all the new tech, it’s only going to get worse.

(Sorry about the crappy picture – I wasn’t too sure about taking photos in the airport. You know, just in case I got shot by the British Police or something).

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Alexander Stojanovic makes an interesting comparison between the Nintendo DS and the OLPC. Having bought both for his five year-old daughter at Christmas he has been able to compare:

The Nintendo DS (NDS) is the clear winner as an interactive device and learning platform. It truly is a paradigm shift for UI/UX. Our daughter was able to figure out how to configure two DSs for PictoChat (via WiFi) and now constantly wants to “IM” pictures and text with me. It’s an eye-openning experience.

The OLPC is the utter disappointment though. Everything about it is sluggish, unresponsive, cryptic and just sub-optimal.

Like Alexander and as someone who works in both interaction design and educational futures I really want the OLPC project to be a great idea, but I’m pretty worried it isn’t.

The first objection is that really the world would be a much better place if every child had enough to eat, was healthy and happy quite apart from having a laptop.

The second is the potential environmental hazards of sending out so many laptops perhaps not all that environmentally friendly.

Finally, everything is in the execution. Nicholas Negroponte is keen to stress that the OLPC project is “an education project, not a laptop project” and that is, of course, highly laudable, but I’m worried that in the quest to make them so cheap, the user-experience might have been lost in the process.

Alexander Stojanovic’s post seems to be confirming these fears for me:

The OLPC delivers a very - how shall I put this - “academic” idea of what people (children) will want and like. The NDS was clearly tested and usability done on each aspect. The OLPC looks like all the decisions were hardcoded early on by a brain trust of “experts” without any thought of the actual experience of using, maintaining or enhancing the device.

Having created several interactive projects whose primary audience is children, I have experienced first-hand the need to test ideas on children. Looking through the “lens of the learner” is one of the first tenets of teaching and learning.

Engaging people is one of the first tenets of interaction design. Without that the rest doesn’t even get seen. Whilst I congratulate the OLPC team on their achievement I really hope they don’t forget those two principles.

[tags]OLPC, UI, Nintendo[/tags]

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