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I can hear people saying ‘NO’, and ‘HELL NO’ for the second question. Hey I totally agree with the first, but when it comes to ENSO, well I could argue otherwise!

First of all, for those who are not familiar with ENSO, it’s a software by Humanized that currently encompasses a program launcher and universal spellchecker/dictionary. Actually each one of those is sold separately. I gave quite a detailed overview of ENSO in a previous post, so read that if you want to find out what’s quite different and interesting about this software. But if you want to know whether the software is really worth buying, then read on.

Click here to continue reading →

Well we all know that this statement is kinda false, at least the first part. Ask any web designer and they’ll complain for an hour or so about IE’s intimidating lack of full support for web standards, even with version 7. But for some reason IE does like site creators better than users when it comes to one thing, and it’s making us jealous!

Alright, I’ll admit it, I could be little biased here seeing how I’m a die hard fan of the Firefox browser. But like most of you, I have used IE a lot in the past and still do occasionally. In writing this though, I’m trying to be reasonable and really come up with a reason why on earth would IE persistently put site creators’ wishes ahead of its users with respect to font size!

In the old days, prior to insert your favorite non-IE browser here (see, unbiased), regular desktop users had little choice regarding their web browsing experience. We grew up with a not-so-gold spoon in our mouths called Internet Explorer. We learned to take what it gave us thinking that this was a “good enough” choice for us. That’s ok, because through that, we learned that there is a tremendous opportunity for making our lives in cyberspace a little easier.

But we were often confused, nevertheless, by the very nature of IE, especially when we wanted to make the font size a little bigger to make stuff easier to read. Call it a double standard or anything else, but we always wondered why IE was willing to increase the font size of some sites while ignoring our wishes for some other sites. We were never really sure what was the reason behind this, but we often thought it does so to preserve layout of the site, preventing it from looking horribly ugly on larger font sizes. That’s fine, we thought, site creators deserve to have their design kept intact. After all, they did spend long time crafting it.

Wrong!

Sorry, did I startle you? Didn’t mean to, but since when do users make compromises that support bad usability decisions implemented in a software. Whatever happened to putting users first, which was supposed to be a cornerstone for modern human-computer interaction designs. We could argue that IE does put users first, with “users” referring to site creators. But this argument is not valid because IE’s main audience are the people who are using it to surf the net, duh!

Here’s a little secret for ya: The reason why IE was willing to enlarge the font size of some sites and not some others is the following:

What is happening in many cases is there is coding that is setting an absolute pixel size for the text. This can happen in several ways. In our case, and many other the websites, the problem starts with our template design and CSS file.

A CSS file is a great convenience. It allows a website to have common definitions that drive the look and feel of each web page. This saves webmasters from adding extra code to every page. Moreover, if we wanted to make a global change, we edit the CSS file and not every web page. In our case, that would be hundreds of pages.

In our CSS file, we have the following line:

font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;

The font-size part is the root of the problem. That line tells the browser to set the font size to 12 pixels. The problem is Internet Explorer doesn’t resize pixels. One way for me to solve this problem is to use ems rather than pixels. Em is another typography measurement, but it is relative and scales as the user elects to change their font size.

Yep, you heard right, the problem started from the site creators themselves, choosing to specify (often on purpose) the size of the font in fixed-form pixel format. While that is an obvious design mistake, IE’s response, as opposed to other browsers, was simply: “hey, those people seem really serious about how exactly big they want the font to be, I guess I gotta stick to that” Well, here is a little tip you should stick right up your … : how about disabling the menu all together in such cases, this way we (the users) won’t be frustrated, busting our brains out trying to figure out why this thing isn’t working!

As if this wasn’t enough, here are 2 more observations, from software usability point of view:

1. Have you noticed how the Text Size menu is safely tucked away inside the View menu? This way, we can successfully hide user interface complexity from novice users, helping them wear out their vision faster on freakishly small font-sizes site creators like to choose to support their high-heeled web design fashion! Better yet, they will most likely choose to print out the content they’re trying to read which, as we all know, is very environment-friendly.
2. I personally would like to meet the person who came up with the following scale (Smallest, Smaller, Medium, Larger, Largest) to help us “humanize” the choice of our font size and ask him: “Exactly how big is Larger?” And “is Largest the largest possible font size in the whole wide world, including all the continents, the oceans and the mountains?” I’d like to think there was a room for one more choice: Larger than Life!Speaking for me, I would rather have the following images” ((”Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/cibergaita/54692929/“))” to choose from:

   

   At least this way I can relate: the bigger the smile, the happier my eyes will be!

   Would you like to know how other popular-by-choice browsers are doing this scale? Check out the following images” ((”Source: http://www.smackthemouse.com/ie7bzoom“))” and try to figure out which browser each image is captured from:

   

   

Alright, enough rambling. My true aim from this post was to present a case-in-point scenario for few software usability design guidelines which I’m going to summarize below:

1. Always put the needs of your users first and design according to their perceived and studied usage pattern.
2. Choices = headaches (I’m not too fond with the number of choices, especially the ones in the bottom of the second picture above)
3. Design for usability first, layout second (this goes out for all webmasters in the house)
4. Visual clues are just as important as the functionality itself.

I can’t believe what I saw. I just finished watching Steve Jobs’ keynote (1 GB download) where he introduced the iPhone along with Apple TV. I got two words for you and your team Mr. Steve: Thank You! Here’s why:

I really can’t remember the last time some new technology just ‘wowed’ me this much, not by a feature or two, but by the entire package as a whole. Apple took about two years in the development of iPhone, and boy were those two years worth the while!

Yes, they were!

You see, unlike other blogs, I’m not going to exhaust the list of all cool, amazing, incredible and sophisticated features of this new phone. All I want to talk about is one thing; one thing that kept striking me all throughout the keynote; one thing that I have always, always, wanted in a freakin’ smart phone: usability.

I believe this factor in mobile phones (and other electronic devices in general) has long been overlooked to the point that it comes last on the list of desired features. Piled-up features together with average or poor unit design all add up to increasing what Alan Cooper describes in his book, The Inmates are Running the Asylum, as: cognitive friction. Here’s a brief description of what this fancy term means:

It is the resistance encountered by a human intellect when it engages with a complex system of rules that change as the problem permutes.

In his weblog, John Wood rephrases this in an easier way:

.. when our tools manifest complex behaviour that does not fit our expectations

So what does this have to do with usability and the whole iPhone thing, you ask? Well, let me give you a neat little formula to make this clearer:

Less cognitive friction = more usability

In other words, the more you design your product to be intuitive, understandable, predictable and consistent, the less cognitive friction you inflict on your users which translates into a much improved usability. Usability is the key to simplicity, so in the end you have one awesome product that packs set of amazing features into a clean interface even a 5-year-old can operate. Oops, I just described the iPhone!

Steve repeated certain keywords fairly often in the keynote I couldn’t help but take note of them. For instance:

• "it’s simple"
• "it just works"
• "the way I want it"
• "how I want it"
• "when I want it"
• "it’s smart"

In my opinion, all those are just synonyms for usability. Without a single doubt, Apple has done an outstanding job in this area. It exceeded by far what the biggest mobile phone makers in the world have been doing for years. Hell, it set a new standard for user-mobile experience. No longer do you have to put up with a phone that gives you one fat button that is supposed to do different functions depending on the screen you’re in. Steve said it, for more than a decade, computers were designed to give us custom options (e.g., different buttons) for each context we’re in. Well, it took the genius of the innovative people at Apple to say: "hey let’s do that for the phone as well"! And so they designed a phone with no static hardware buttons but slew of context-driven soft buttons and finger gestures that are meaningful and easy to learn" (("There’s some debate going on why mechanical or hardware buttons are more useful than soft buttons"))".

I’m not trying to deny that iPhone has its own set of "alleged" flaws which are being debated. There’s no doubt that such new innovation will bring (in its first phase) its own set of problems. However, all I wanted to say in this post is that we all have something to learn from the amount of thought and hard work put into making this device as human-friendly and cognitively-frictionless as possible. Tech newbies and savvies alike will find it easy to learn and operate. Steve’s perfectionism shows all over the device!

So, thank you Steve, and thank you Apple, for raising the bar and setting a new standard for how mobile devices are ought to be in the 21st century. You’re the new leaders of the pack, so innovate on!