Erik Gibb
user experience

The good:

1. It’s a pretty box, with delightfully clear LEDs - simple red lights for recording: two of them means both receivers are firing.
2. The swivel search is awesome. I’m a huge fan of imdb when it comes to checking out actors/resses and “what else have I seen them in.” This is essentially that, linked to a record button. Very fun and useful.
3. I already talked about the setup process, but it’s worth mentioning again that it sucks way less than the original Tivos.
4. I like the “Music Photos & More” in principal, but in practice…

The bad, #1: Music Photos & More has a couple of issues.

1. It’s not caching the fact that a network connection exists, so it has to look around every single time you hit the menu.
2. Total lack of organization. There’s a bunch of stuff in there that could do with a good cleaning up.
3. Yahoo! Photos is showing up in there, when the service doesn’t exist. It’s essentially a placeholder for “we’re looking for something new.”
4. Managing any sort of internet addresses still depends on the horrifying Tivo text input, which hasn’t been touched since the first version. Trying to enter a podcast is far far more trouble than it’s worth.

The bad, #2: Slow menus This was a known issue going in, so not much to say here. It’s a little unnerving that the menus are remarkably slower than my Sony series 1 dvr, however. Everyone keeps saying/hoping that this will improve with software updates. I sure hope so.

The ugly, #1: The peanut remote sucks I’ve used them before at friend/relative’s houses, and didn’t like them. Now that I have spent more than 5 minutes with it, I can clearly articulate why. It’s not laid out well, period. I’ve done a rough diagram that demonstrates the overall layout problems with the newer peanut remotes. In short, the finger/hand span required to perform pretty basic Tivo navigation on the new remote is much larger than the old one. Even excluding the clear button (which less shortcut-savvy folks probably don’t know about), the new span is significantly larger. Including it for my purposes, it’s clearly twice as large as the old.

(This peanut remote is for a DirecTV, but the basic layout of all the keys that matter are identical to mine.)

1. Primary navigation on old remote was relatively standard 5-way cellphone setup: up/down/left/right on a circle around the central select button. New remote: 4 buttons in a circle with the select button below, requiring an awkward thumb bend for an insanely common operation.
2. Now playing list button on old remote was a dedicated button, allowing you to keep your hand in one location to return to primary nav buttons. You could also use the tivo-double tap, and still the hand/remote relative alignment didn’t require a change. New remote: No dedicated list button. You must use Tivo-double tap, or drill through menus. A comfortable Tivo-double tap on the wasp-waist form factor of the new remote means that you’re forced to hold more of the upper half in your hand which causes the whole thing to feel unbalanced. Getting back down to the primary nav with the select button in comfortable reach requires shifting the remote back down to the waist. Another insanely common operation that is not optimized in this form factor.
3. The clear button is impossible to get to with one hand. The new remote has been optimized with the number pad at the bottom. Sometimes I use the number pad, but not that often. I’m sure a number-pad junkie hates this, but that doesn’t bug me. What does is that the clear button is still pinned under the number pad, pushing it to the very bottom of the remote. I can no longer conveniently use the clear button to delete shows or cancel actions without using my other hand. Similar to using the Tivo-double tap gesture above, getting to the clear button requires that you shimmy the remote up in your hand until the widest part of the bottom is in your palm in order to use this button. At this point it’s nearly impossible to keep a grasp on the remote at all, forcing you to use 2 hands. That sucks.

To Tivo’s credit, the layout of play/pause/fwd/rev/slow cluster is better.

The ugly, #2: The box is not registering fwd/rev buttons quickly enough, causing a lot of error Slow response to fwd^3 (super fast forward). There’s a lot of hesitation with Tivo picking up the 1-2-3 forward, which was only ever a problem on the Sony if some major activity was taking place, but on the new one it’s always a problem. Because the ba-doop BA-DOOP BA-DOOP audio feedback is such a strong indicator of what’s going on I assume that if I only hear 2 ba-badoops, I need to hit the button a 3rd time. Gotcha though, that previously entered 3rd ba-doop was still in progress, so when you hit it again, it registers 4x, so it cycles back to the 1st level of fwd. LAME. LAME LAME LAME.

Continue reading “New Tivo HD: Love/Hate” »

Yahoo’s experimental thingies site is offline during a redesign. The page letting you know it’s down is pretty funny:

Like flickr, it’s not taken too seriously.

Continue reading “Next.yahoo.com - a sense of humor” »

When Lialina writes about what she calls the “Starry Night Background,” a popular web design conceit of the mid-90s, it’s hard not to feel a tinge of nostalgia. I haven’t seen a web page use a tiled jpeg of outer space as its background image in years, and, seeing one again helped me remember how excited I was about the internet when I first started to use it, how limitless it seemed. Still, as captivating as it may be, Lialina reminds us that it is basically impossible to put type on such dense constellations, and points out that these backgrounds aren’t, in fact, really appropriate for anything. “Scientific texts, personal home pages, cinema programs, pathfinder image galleries, it’s always wrong.” As the web became more ’serious’ and ‘designed’, starry backgrounds began to disappear.

But why? Graphic designers relish the constraints and pre-existing rules that govern most off-line mediums. Typically, too, they share a deep engagement with vernacular typography, from painted signs to punk flyers. So why did we so willingly annihilate the clumsy, yet oddly charming (and pervasive) graphic language that came built-in to the early web? If anyone is equipped to solve the problem of how to effectively use a starry night background, it’s graphic designers. (Read More)

Continue reading “Design Observer: writings about design & culture” »

I love my iPhone. You’re experience designers rocked it out with an interface that is so utterly delightful I can overlook a dumbfounding amount of missing apps (iTunes purchases, ringtone management, profiles, bluetooth contact and data transfer, flipped keyboards everywhere, yadda yadda) and bad behavior (Crashing Safari, sporadic munging of all my photos and music into a huge bar of orange “other” data files that still take up space, but are inaccessible through the interface)

Except… PLEASE FIGURE OUT YOUR MULTIPLE COMPUTER STRATEGY.

I have a work computer and a home computer. I don’t steal my music, I paid for every bit of it. I bought a metric crapton of movies and tv shows from the iTunes store too. Then there’s podcasts. Lots and lots of podcasts, all of which are free. Why can’t I sync *my* media with multiple computers? Why can’t I manually drop a movie from one computer on my iPhone and back over to the other one? Why can’t I manage podcasts from any location?

Rickalus.

Continue reading “Dear Apple…” »

Has anyone noticed that the flick-scroll gesture for the iPhone is the opposite of the double finger flick-scroll on the macbook? The phone uses a more natural metaphor. I was a late adaptor of the double finger scroll on the macbook, and the iphone reversoswitcho is really messing with my muscle-memory.

Continue reading “Apple gesture dissonance” »

Of course there was the fun “alleged” consumer fraud they perpetrated by using a secret internal site to “prove” to customers that the “deals” found on the real web site were no longer valid. And then there’s this gem from the store locator:

Why on earth, or at least in the united states do you need a state in order to disambiguate the zip code?

Continue reading “BestBuy WorstExperience” »

I love me some Apple, but I have a problem with the way they implemented search in mail.app and iTunes. Let’s say I want to search for and subscribe to the podcast “Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!”. I open iTunes:

Next, I type in my query in the search box:

Oops. It’s searching in my music folder by default. No problem, I’ll just switch it over to iTunes store in the left bar:

Whathuh? Where did my query go? For absolutely no reason, imnsvho, the query is cemented to the context. I now have to retype my query and submit to get a result:

The same sort of silliness happens in Mail.app. If you do a search, you actually get a decent set of filtering options on the result set: [This folder you in which you started the search] • All folders • from • to • subject • etc. But say I started in my inbox and did a search for an item I sent… If I do the search then switch context to my sent folder to filter by [results in the sent folder only], my query field blanks out and I have to retype it.

Is this “feature” trying to solve separate problems—that the query input field and results aren’t perfectly co-located, and/or clearing the query is most obviously done by clicking the tiny x icon next to the input field? I suppose if people typed a search, then decided to go back to normal browse, either of these issues could fool a user into thinking they were seeing their entire blob of mail/tunes, “but for some reason stuff is missing.”

This could be solved by

1. Adding cues to make the distinction between “all my stuff” and “a subset of stuff based on your query, filter, or context”
2. Grouping the search query (and re-query) field with the results
3. Providing an easy mechanism to back out or re-do your search that doesn’t require a mouse gesture (yes, I know there’s a key command in there, but its fabulously undiscoverable)

I also know there are a thousand legitimate reasons why stuff like this doesn’t happen, so my hat’s off to the design and implementation teams for all the good stuff these products do have, and future luck in working out the kinks.

Continue reading “Search in Apple Mail and iTunes: Why oh why did my query go away when I switched context?” »

While it was hard to miss that Apple.com received a complete redesign with this week’s WWDC events, the finer points of the site’s new functionality are now coming into the, erm… spotlight. Eagle-eyed TUAW readers have been commenting and reporting on a number of interesting new enhancements to apple.com’s abilities, such as the horizontal sub-navigation that Gruber mentioned on some of the product sites (try apple.com/mac to get an idea).

A really cool new (and long overdue) feature to searching Apple’s site is more or less the web-based equivalent of the Spotlight interface. As you can see, the search box is pinned to the top right of ever page at apple.com now, and running a search produces near-instant results in a drop-down menu style interface. A ‘View all search results’ option at the bottom of that menu displays the page I snapped for this post, complete with a more robust and categorized list of search results that can be expanded and collapsed, helping you find just what you need far more quickly. The site even appears to be using cookies to store a recent list of your searches, keeping them always accessible at the far right of this search results page.

Altogether these are some very, very welcome new tools for searching Apple’s exponentially growing product, information and support material. It should be noted, however, that the last update Apple made to their discussion forum still holds true, and that includes its own powerful search tools; this spotlight UI seems to apply only to the rest of apple.com.

Via Tuaw

Continue reading “Apple.com adds federated search, recent searches, and ratings” »

A decent and fun what, why, and how of RSS

(Found on http://bokardo.com/)

Continue reading “RSS in Plain English” »

You spent a good deal of time working on the revamped UI for NNW 3.0. What was the toughest UI choice you had to make? The easiest?

They’re all tough decisions. The hardest thing may be nuking the stuff I think is cool but that nobody else likes. On the other hand, that may be the easiest thing, because the only person disappointed is me. (Read More)

Some user testing would help inform this, but he’s definitely in the right mindset

Continue reading “5 questions with Brent Simmons, creator of NetNewsWire” »