Category: standards     Posted by: cornelius     Discuss: 20 comments

My last blog article had some harsh words directed at those responsible for creating the new website of the Clerk of Privy Council. Public Service employees and people in the community rallied around the opinion that the public should leave the Government alone, irrespective of whether they produce quality or not (calling it 'experimentation'). I still absolutely disagree with that opinion. Everyone's work should be open to critical feedback, especially publicly funded projects. If you put something out there (be it a website, a social media profile, a poster, a photo, a sculpture, a painting etc.), you are opening yourself up for, among other things, criticism. You can choose to act on it, ignore it, or respond to it. But to say that it's ok to produce inferior material because those responsible are not interested in properly researching and creating their deliverables is a fallacy. Someone from within GoC told me offline that the Government can accept to be open, but cannot accept being wrong. When did GoC websites become exempt from being scrutinized?

Others have lamented I am in no position to question the quality of a website because design is subjective. I agree that design is subjective, and I would add that it is also personal. But regardless, we have had design contests since the beginning of time because quality and innovation are also obvious to the masses, and especially to those trained in creating or evaluating visual material. And because there is a huge number of GoC websites, those who have worked in visual communications, design or user experience for the government can pick and choose with relative ease the ones that stand out in quality as well as the ones who are not exactly up to par. So for today's post, I chose to agree to disagree with those who think we should tolerate mediocrity and create a Best and Worst list for GoC CLF-based public website designs.

Best and Worst lists are the bread and butter of many research bodies, including Forrester and Gartner. Bloggers all over the world publish Best and Worst lists every day. To choose these websites, I have reviewed the homepage of every site on the Departments and Agencies list available at www.gc.ca, and also looked at select microsites of some of those departmental homepages.

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Category: tools     Posted by: cornelius     Discuss: add comment

The first mistake made out there is assuming that wireframes are primarily a design deliverable rather than an information architecture (IA) deliverable. The right interpretation should be self-explanatory. I personally use wireframes to demonstrate information, task flow and page flow rather than branding or graphics design. However, the notion of a wireframe has been expanded lately to include everything from physical hand-drawn paper screen mockups to high-fidelity, fully branded screen designs. This being said, my personal preference is somewhere in the middle as I prefer to use specialized applications to create them as a basis of discussion of content and overall structure rather than visual display.

If anyone's ever looked at a typical wireframe (and i say 'typical' very loosely as everyone personalizes the way they create them), you will notice that it consists of a collection of boxes, controls and annotations that make up the skeleton of an application screen. Each box may be an image, a section, a cell or a placeholder for application content.

When presenting screen design in the form of wireframes, application controls are also included. For example, in the case of a wireframe created for a web application, representations corresponding to HTML form controls will be added to the screen design in order to make the wireframe appear as an early drawing of the final product.

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Category: research     Posted by: cornelius     Discuss: add comment

The guys at Elliptic Labs have finally managed to do what Zaphod Beeblebrox and Tom Cruise's character in Minority Report have attempted to do for a while: use a touchless, gesture-based, user interface that doesn't require sensors installed on the hand. According to the Elliptic Labs website, "the hardware is based on standard components only, similar to those in a mobile phone. The system can run on the CPU and power in most usual consumer electronic devices. It can be embedded into any electronic device, including hand held ones."

However, we've seen something similar to this before in the form of electrostatic UI's, which also happen to be touchless. However, Elliptic are the only ones that created sensor hardware that is based on standard components, and also used a form factor that is more portable and usable than our favourite Northwestern students.

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Category: research     Posted by: cornelius     Discuss: 1 comment

While innovation in the realm of portable (i.e. netbooks) and mobile user interfaces shifted towards speed, functionality and support for a variety of standards and hardware technologies, Intel's new version of its Linux-based netbook UI has truly taken a step forward in terms of usability and user experience.

What's different about Moblin 2.0 ? Well, it's a bit of a departure from the usual desktop paradigm as the UI is organized into elegant tabbed panels and application "zones" (think virtual desktops with improved UX). The home screen interface is also quite functional, showing the usual tasks list, calendar and application shortcuts, as wells as other integrated widgets (eg. Twitter). Quite a feast for the UX eyes.

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Category: user experience     Posted by: cornelius     Discuss: add comment

Looking at the recent evolution of user interfaces, there seems to be a consistent trend of making things smaller or bigger than the typical dimensions of desktop/laptop screens, while the usual (let's call it 'medium' for the sake of this argument) size seems to fall out of grace with computing platform manufacturers.

As examples, everyone is mesmerized by the iPhone and similar portable (and consequently small) media players. eBook readers, netbooks, portable gaming systems, portable medical systems, etc. seem to converge towards convenience and ease of use, which means a small physical size. But while making things more compact has been the typical direction of human technology for obvious reasons, making things larger is in a way a major change of direction, unless we take a closer look at the more recent mainstream advancements in UI paradigms. Touchscreens, multi-touch devices, electrostatic user interfaces, they all require a fairly realistic motion in terms of scale, so moving your fingers or limbs on or above a large surface but responding on a small screen is very counterintuitive. Even brain user interfaces (BUIs) require a large display to project the motion sensed by electrical sensors.

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