USE DESIGN blog

You would think that in our time of all-connectedness, Web 2.0 services, mobile integration, online editing and so on and so forth, the internet would have gotten more sensible about its error messages. Such simple things, really, from the usability point of view. But no. Here is my latest experience:

The title already sets the mood: YOU, the user, have done something very wrong.
The first sentence still sounds human. Tech talk for sure, but clear enough, unless your are a surfing grandma with no idea who this server might be and what this person was trying to serve you. Look what you’ve done, says the first sentence, but still with a contained emotion. ‘Additionally’, says the second sentence (or: to make your offense even worse), somebody - who? - has encountered an Error 404, which was at the same time Not Found - a Not-Found but still encountered Error? pure metaphysics - while trying to do what exactly? ‘Use’ (sounds chilling) an ErrorDocument (note the mystic joining of names) to ‘handle’ the request - or whatever it was you asked that poor server to serve you.
And I am not even speaking of visual design, in our Flex-and-Flash times. I guess we will have to wait for Web 3.0 to have comprehensive Error Messages, and not quotes from Lord of the Rings.

Did you notice how the names of the Web 2.0 services often sound like baby talk?

We use most of the above services in our leisure time, so this title humor is a way to attract a large and very diverse audience. It is also a trend, because it is ‘cool’, like it was ‘cool’ some decades ago to call everything electronic ‘thing-o-matic’.
I recently have worked with Wufoo (another baby name, or rather a dog sound), an online service for creation and management of electronic forms. (The last, I admit, sounds much more boring than woof-woof.) I was surprised to see the following examples of humor in their pages. I refer to the sub-titles.

What would happen if Microsoft Word welcomed you in the morning with the words ‘New Document. To boldly go where no one has gone before’. Or your Excel menu bar started with ‘File. To be or not to be’. Would you be amused? Would you take such a desktop software seriously? So what exactly is going on? The fact that a tool is on the Internet, makes us perceive it differently and the toolmakers get away with things we probably would not be amused by on the desktop. The online tools usually come for free or for a small fee, so we easily accept this bit of developer humor. But would you buy an expensive expert software for your PC if it was called Pic-a-boo, especially without the addition of ‘Pro’ or ‘Maker’?

‘He had found a Nutri-Matic machine which had provided him with a plastic cup filled with a liquid that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

A gadget ceases to be one when its absence has a negative effect on your social and/or professional life. I was one of the last people to buy a mobile phone and that was only after I have started taking long distance trains. Long distance trains tend to be late. The person waiting for me at the other end wanted to know.

I know a woman who does not want to own a mobile due to presumed health dangers. She is very difficult to get in touch with and people in her social circle complain about her all the time. She misses appointments or appears to ones that have been canceled. ‘We wrote you an email, just as you asked’, people would tell her, or: ‘We called you at home and told your mother.’ Thinking by themselves: just buy the damn mobile and be like everybody else! Me too, I was displeased with her once. For not having a mobile.

I must be the only person in the Whole Wired World not to be on Facebook. Despite a ton of invitations systematically thrown away. Why? For once, I don’t like its boys-dormitory-kind of communication style with all the poking and the partying. I have a very large and very dispersed circle of friends and yet I am not a smalltalk kind of person. If I need to talk to somebody, I will write him or her an email. I don’t feel like gathering hundreds of friends, who are already my real friends, in their digital form once again. I don’t feel like having a stream of their smallest daily news flooding my Inbox: who has befriended whom, who had dinner where, whose pictures are on show. I have to defend my choice not to join all the time. I am a very social person: I tend to respond to every message I get as soon as I can. Continuing to be a social person on FB would mean another full-time job.

Lately a close friend published some pictures on FB, which I would like to see you and which, of course, I cannot. Because I am not on FB. Is it slowly starting to affect my social life? Will I, as with the mobile, become one of the last to succumb to the new gadget? Are people starting to complain about ME? Am I missing ‘it’?

Whatever ‘it’ may be?

Après avoir dévoilé leur premier clavier contextuel, il y a quelques temps, le studio Artlebedev nous propose une nouvelle version tactile cette fois-ci.

Pour rappel, le principe de ces claviers est de s’adapter aux applications ou aux langues que l’on utilise. Ainsi plus besoin de connaitre ses raccourcis clavier photoshop par coeur (par exemple la touche “V” pour sélectionner l’outil de “déplacement”), puisque l’icone de l’outil s’affiche directement sur la touche du clavier à la place du “V”.

Le fait que cette nouvelle version soit tactile offre un plus grand potentiel dans la métamorphose du clavier en fonction des contextes d’usages. Le concept est plutôt intéressant et a déjà été explorer sous des angles différents par des grands de l’informatique tel que Apple (Multitouch Keyboard Apple’s Wide Trackpad).

Bien entendu, il faut voir ce que çà donne à l’usage, car le besoin de sentir la touche qui s’enfonce sous son doigt reste prédominant chez la plupart des personnes.

S’il est bien un débat qui agite à longueur de temps les designers, c’est bien celui de la place de ce métier, de cette discipline dans le champ de bataille de l’économie. Telle la question de l’inné ou de l’acquis, chaque designer se pose régulièrement la question de savoir si son travail est ou non intéressant pour la société.

Le questionnement est utile car le design est à juste titre une activité qui se doit d’avoir du sens pour autrui comme pour son propre créateur, mais face à un monde changeant et en plein bouleversement, a-t-il encore une place ?

2 articles, issus de personnalités importantes du design en France viennent s’opposer sur la scène de ce grand débat.

L’un “Entrepreneurs, il est temps de redécouvrir le design !” tente de redéfinir ce métier au delà de ce que les médias veulent bien nous en faire voir. Pour Alain Cadix et l’International Council of Societies of Industrial Design, de design (industriel/produit) doit être “le principal levier d’humanisation innovante des technologies”. Autant dire notre avenir, rien moins…

L’autre “Le design est passé de mode” y voit déjà sa fin car submergé par le marketing, le design ne serait plus qu’un faire valoir, un joli packaging pour un monde manufacturé. Alain Boutigny se désole de voir le designer comme un simple ouvrier qui n’aurait vraisemblablement que la révolution prolétaire comme seule issue…

J’ai personnellement une plus grande attirance pour l’argumentation du premier, car au delà d’une orientation plus optimiste, je crois qu’elle correspond plus à la direction que prend la société toute entière, et par conséquent nos métiers : se consacrer à l’homme, être “user oriented/centric”.

Si je mettais ma modestie de côté, j’irais presque à dire que Didier Lombard abonde dans mon sens dans son dernier livre “Le village numérique mondial : La deuxième vie des réseaux” (éditions Odile Jacob) où tout son argumentaire sur sa vision de l’avenir porte sur l’attention à porter aux utilisateurs, plus qu’aux technologies :

“L’appropriation par les utilisateurs de ces technologies (l’apparition du numérique, la constitution de l’Internet et l’émergence de la téléphonie mobile), aidée par les mouvements de convergence, de simplification et même de design, est alors parvenue à un point où les réseaux physiques se sont effacés - en apparence seulement - au profit des réseaux humains. De l’espace des technologies, les utilisateurs se sont véritablement transportés dans l’espace des usages, dont ils jouissent chaque jour un peu plus et imaginent avec empressement l’avenir.”

A chacun d’entre nous “designers” d’apporter sa pierre à l’édifice, de construire et croire en son propre paradigme d’un design pour demain, que nous ébauchons dès aujourd’hui…

A couple of days ago, while walking through Montmartre, I was thinking: wouldn’t be nice to take pictures of all the places we think are beautiful and put them on one big map, recreating the whole Earth by our photographs… well, it is already done. When you think you have an original idea, it turns out that you just have ’sniffed’ it in the air.
Do you know Panoramio? It looks like Flickr, but its main function is to show you this big Earth map with all the photos put on it by the users. It is impressively fast and impressively complete, especially when it comes to popular places like Montmartre. What possible use could we make of it? Well, you could plan your holiday trip, but it might take some surprise element out of it or raise unrealistic expectations. You could take a nostalgic after-tour. What else? Nothing really.
Since the invention of the digital camera we have been documenting our world in an endless stream of images. Somebody thought of connecting them to places and Google came with a map. Like so many new web ’services’, in which we connect things to one another (friends to pictures, pictures to friends, messages to places etc.) Panoramio is wonderfully useless. It is delightful. You can talk a walk on Montmartre during your lunch break or instead have a look at the sea beaches of, say, Sicily. Or at how your place of birth, left a long time ago, looks nowadays.
Something at once touching and purposeless is art.

Les modes d’emploi Ikea, il parait que c’est toujours très bien fait… Enfin surement pas pour tout le monde apparemment (me voila rassurer) , voici un détournement plutôt sympathique en 15 étapes.

via MikeSacks

A while ago I wrote a post on different search engines and different ways to represent search results, different being non-Google. Here is another fine example, using the currently-very-in-vogue Coverflow visualisation: Searchme. You can browse through the visuals of the websites without clicking on them and returning to the results list: at least one click less per result and a much better overview!

The speed and fluency of the images are quite impressive. Besides, the search key word is indicated on each page.

Si comme certain à l’agence, vous ne pouvez pas attendre le 11 Juillet, voici de quoi patienter un peu!!!

Pour peu que vous fassiez attention au papier et à la colle que vous utilisez, il sera encore plus “green attitude” que le vrai

via Bigchief

An example of a beautifully done website with an environmental cause and a poetic design: Ecotonoha by NEC. Open the page and watch the lovely tree grow leaves from the messages left that day by previous visitors. Explore the tree by zooming in and browsing the brunches, watching the elegant animation, then attach your own leaf by adding whatever message you feel like. Don’t forget to visit the archive and enjoy the subtleties of its visual design.
Depending on the number of messages left on the tree, NEC will plant a matching number of tree seeds - more details here.