Sony Reader

This weekend I got to play with a Sony Reader at Borders. Most reviewers will complain about the price. This seems to be a market where we will need the blades to help pay for the razor. But this is the first version so maybe this one is all about early adopters.

I loved the screen resolution! Wow. The demo book was a comic with pretty small lettering!

I do wish that the background was even a little more white. This will probably come if this technology is allowed to advance.

My complaints really, as usual, will have more to do with the UI. Let me make a list;

1. Why the bevels? Like the Microsoft with the Zune (see my previous post), Sony is adding gratuitous frames. Ironically, books, which is what we are trying to ape, or improve upon here, do a wonderful job of not adding frames to content. The edge of the page is all you need.
2. Next and previous page buttons seem to have been designed by the same people who do stove top ranges and frequently place controls so as not to map to the job they are going to do. Why not have the buttons on either side of the device which would reinforce the direction they will take you. This would also nicely handle texts that read left to right.
3. The text zoom button is a little spot on the side, which steps through three sizes in rotation. I guess you can figure this out once you use it. But why not do this across the top with a ramp design over it. Or even better use a wheel for this (like setting volume on a walkman). You don't need to support all intermediate sizes to use a wheel to control it. Something that offer a satisfying click could do.
4. One of the two big controllers is merely redundant with the next and previous buttons (see #2) and doesn't do a much better job. Though at least the go next button is to the right of the go previous button. But not strictly to the right. Designers sometimes go out of their way to make things weird.
5. The mark button. Did their user testing tell them to put such a small button right there? Shouldn't this be a bigger target? The choice of what parts of the interface to have at the top level is always an interesting one. A case can be made that every function should be at or near the surface. But is mark as important as find?
   
6. The page number "x of y" is in reverse video at the bottom of the screen. Page numbers are an interesting kind of meta information. Everyone who reads has learned about footers and headers. Putting reference to the content on the same part of the system that tells me about the battery life feels like a category mistake. Why not leave it as black on white? It calls too much attention to itself this way. Alternatively let me have the screen real estate back for my text and make it easy to invoke this information when I use the book mark feature or as I turn pages. Or show it in the upper left or lower right.
7. A row of numbered keys. Now, what I think a good UI designer would like is a series of touch sensitive buttons on either side of the screen. Do some user testing to make sure they are wide enough so that people don't miss or that people with big hands can unambiguously click one at a time. Now with these buttons in place you could imagine all kinds of control (including next and previous pages and menu manipulation). The bank ATM and store debit card checkout people seem to have done some good work in this area. In this device we don't have that. Instead we have one of those strange vertical to horizontal mappings that are tied to each other via an abstract correspondence, 1 goes with 1, 2 with 2, and so forth. This means scanning back and forth. Why not just put the buttons where you want to click?!
8. The menu pad. Too bad Apple has the iPod scroll wheel locked up. You can see how that could help here. The four direction arrows plus the enter button will remind people of a DVD handheld controller and so all the things that people complain about there should be the starting point here. In future people will come up with touch sensitive screens but really with this kind of device you want people's fingerprints off the screen. So I would encourage Sony to reinvestigate the possibilities of the edges of the device.
9. The missing lid. You can buy a book like jacket in red, green or leather. Every user will want one if they have to throw this in their back pack. So why not add some control elements to this jacket? When the price comes down maybe we will have an ePaper book that opens at a spine (like a book) with content on both pages, ... hmmm....
   

I am very happy to see ePaper make its appearance in a real device with great resolution and fabulous battery life. The business guys will find a price point and a model. The risk here is that like cell phones this device will never be allowed to mature as a book reader before people find they want to add an MP3 player, a camera, a phone, wireless and internet connectivity, and and and... already the main competition may come from the tablet PCs. (It is weird that a device like this doesn't sport a calculator and a handsome(!) clock, you know it has the capability on the inside.)

The Sony Reader does allow you to read your own PDFs, text and Word docs. And this could lead to a time when we "print to ePaper" and take that with us on the commuter rail or plane. But laptops can and will step into that area too.

A final reason to rejoice is that you can read this in bright light and it turns on quickly and has great battery life. This should all put some creative pressure on laptop designers.

I love to read, and imagine a time when I could sit in a quiet (or not so quiet) place with whole book shelves squeezed into and gorgeously rendered in a magic book in my lap.

Boxes inside boxes

I don't have much to say about Zune but I did notice that, like so many products from Microsoft, it has too many edges. Apple seems to get the idea that a rectangular device has a box around it by virtue of its existence. Then the iPod has another box around the screen and then, that is it.


The Zune on the other hand has line after line after bevel after line and the screen... This is compounded by rings around additional control elements, a gratuitous tongue of edging that I guess associated the wheel with the content, but then (inadvertently?) leaves the other controls out.

This is a superficial complaint, but it may be a symptom. When I look at the number of horizontal lines in Word or Outlook between the edge of the laptop and my information, it is impressive. I count 8 until I get to the list of emails and 11 until I get to content. And that doesn't include lines that take up a couple of pixels for shading or some other artistic flourish.




MS Word does support a full screen view which when combined with zoom to text width (why isn't that one easy command key) makes for a pretty nice experience. All of that UI junk is out of the way.

Apple manages to both love the UI elements to death - all that chrome and 3-D AND to use as little as possible. Maybe the same way that information designers ask themselves what the information to ink ratio is UI designers could have a similar question about number of horizontal and vertical lines. (blocks of color make lines for free AND text that is left or right aligned also creates boxes that people "see."

If you include those you may never need to actually draw a line on a UI.

Why are cell phone user interfaces so bad?

How hard can it be?
The phone worked so well for so long. But cell phones! Cramped, overloaded with features you can't use, no feedback, difficult to read... everyone has their own list. It shouldn't be like this, lots of money and talent go into the amazing form factors that cell phones have become.

Why don't we get these things right? Here is my plea to phone designers. Feel free to send me additional suggestions for making this ubiquitous technology great. Or better yet, send me the name of a phone that does all of these things.

Providing feedback

Push button phones (of the sitting on the desk/hanging on the wall variety) beeped a different sound with each number, loud enough so that you knew when you hit it.

The buttons on the old Hewlett Packard calculator made a satisfying click you could feel when you pressed it far enough to register your number. Why couldn't we augment this with a small light under the button or keypad that flashed when we pressed successfully.

With a clam shell phone, opening it tells the phone that I am ready to use it. Why not take advantage of that information and offer me something (the last number I called?, the phone book number list?...) If the phone is off and the power button is under the clam shell a simple click (not a press and hold) should turn it on. Or better yet if the phone is off and I open it, turn it on!

Screen use

Every pixel is sacred. Use them all and subordinate the screen completely to the current use. So make the number that you are dialing as big as will fit. When you dial/press keys, fill the screen with each digit and then revert to showing the current string of numbers. This way you get lots of clear (anti-aliased) feedback for each number as you dial/press.

When the phone is off dedicate the whole screen to the time (or alternate it with the date). If there is additional room, put something useful there (like the the cell phones number!). Who calls themselves? I have taken to printing out my number and taping it to the back of my phone. Remember when all phones had a little strip of paper under plastic that showed its number.

Once a call has connected show both the callers number and my own, so that I can easily respond to the question, "What's your number?"

When the phone "rings" in addition to vibrate, if the phone has a good display; flash the display. A smoothly oscillating glow would look cool.

The shortcut

The best UI idea, which you see everywhere once you know about it, is to offer to do what the user just did, again.* This works because people so often want to do what they just did. Getting the granularity of "what they just did" right is important. But the just called list offers a perfect example.

Voicemail should not be on my recent calls list. While voicemail is accomplished by making a call it doesn't really live cognitively in the same space as people-I-call, rather it's a function of the phone (the answering machine). This serves as good example of the importance of getting the cognitive map right.

I want to know who called me recently and who I called recently. These should be easily accessible, possibly driven with a scroll wheel (like the blackberry or the iPod).

The address book should have a dedicated button. And typing number keys to move through the list (2=ABC, 3=DEF, ...) should allow you not just to go to the first letter but subsequent letters when you type the numeric key again.

Voice recognition

Trigger this feature with a single button and give good feedback. A button on the side of the phone dedicated to this so that your finger rests on it when you hold the phone to your ear would be nice. Motorolla's phone before the Razr was pretty good and had a nice ability to take a read phone number and understand it without training. There is plenty of opportunity for good feedback in this feature (e.g. repeating the number quickly). For some reason the Razr went back to a previous much weaker incarnation of voice dialing.

Design

1. The mute button should be located near the mouth piece (obviously?!) and mute should be indicated clearly. Maybe a red light near the button that toggles the feature.
2. We might want to hold this phone, albeit temporarily, between the ear and shoulder.
   

   

   The phone should be rugged enough to drop to the floor, or be tossed into a back pack. I recently got the Speck case for the Treo and this really adds to the feeling that the phone can be treated with abandon. Plus it can sit on slightly angled surfaces (e.g. dashboard) without slipping to the ground.
   
3. A single button on the outside of the phone should be able to turn off the ringer (toggle ring and vibrate). This is the single best feature of the Treo.
   

The clock

The phone has a clock in it. Make it a great clock! I like hands on a clock-face, alternate with the date. And provide an easy way to set alarms. Have the phone call you when the alarm goes off. This could all be internal to the phone. Or you could set alarms on the web and have them call your phone when its time. Another opportunity for that oscillating glow.

Misc...

1. Encourage blue tooth headsets.
2. Let me use the camera, if I have to have one, while I am on the phone. Why can't I, while I am talking to someone say, "Hey look at this?"
3. Synch well with my computer. No one likes having to enter names on the phone, though when I have to, make it easy to enter a name for the call that I am on currently, or the one just made.
4. Make the ring loud enough.

*Even this idea can run up on the rocks as illustrated by the ill-fated adaptable menus in MS Office. Turns out that stability (especially for information that is hidden, like menus) trumps doing what you did last time. They have changed their mind for Office 12 (see The End of Personalized Menus.)

Display of Quantitative Information

I am interested in good information display and in why so many attempts at displaying quantitative data are not very good.

Why, for example, are the default graphics in Excel so bad. It isn't that hard to make them better. But that is a topic for another post. I wanted, for now, a place to collect good examples.

Good examples

Edward Tufte the author of Visual Display of Quatitative Information has a terrific web site.
Majority Watch nicely illustrates the political balance in the upcoming US elections (uses Flash).
A wonderful computer animation inside the cell. Not strictly quantitative data representation but compelling nonetheless.

Evolution: A User's Guide

I am working on a book project. You can see the drafts at Evolution: A User's Guide http://evousersguide.blogspot.com/.