In all other respects, it is pretty much a piece of crap: low cooking power, an annoying beep marking that it has finished its job, and I would bet it has a radiation leak. The colour I could do without, it is not white but one feels it should be (and so it is just dirty.) But when it comes to its design — the looks — there is another story to tell. Even if it is neither particularly attractive, revolutionary or avant-garde insofar as its lines and curves flow.

My microwave only has one button to open the door, and one dial to set the time, and because of this I love it. No “Start” button, no useless keypad or electronic display. A microwave does not need all of that bullshit. The features have been added by manufacturers to somehow make their wares seem better than the rest, while in effect it was just feature creep detracting from the real purpose that a microwave serves. To heat things up. And for that, ideally, you would only need one button; alas, having a button and a dial is something I can live with. In this case, the dial is both input and output, as it winds down to show the time left. It is an effective way of representing the only piece of information one really wants to know when they are using the microwave: How much till the chow is ready? And this dial does everything that a keypad could, only far more elegantly because of its simplicity.

It is easy for designers of interfaces or of software to get sidetracked. It happens, lots of times because of upper echelons, sometimes because we forget we are not the typical user. So we have feature bloat, design that needs a user manual to operate, software that has a lot of features and all broken, keypads on microwaves. In all these ways, we show how much we forget our purpose and our goals.

When you design an application to be cross-platform, or if you have decided to take an existing application to other platforms, your first step should be to translate that application to the new platform. In moving from a desktop application to a mobile one, the changes are quite radical and somewhat obvious. Moving from the desktop to the web, while tricky, is still understood as a big change so people tackle the problem accordingly, (generally) paying attention to details. Moving from one desktop platform to another is, unfortunately, a place where many mistakes are made, because sometimes software-makers forget that platforms are different.

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A few things I came across today, during the daily grind:

• Trying to sign up for meetup.com is not as easy as I would like, especially since they do not allow valid e-mail addresses.

  

• Trying to save the previous screenshot, using an invalid filename on Windows (due to the ‘?’ character) gives an error.

  

  Well, in my case it simply refused to save, with absolutely no indication as to why.

I hope none of these things are done on purpose (although the e-mail address bit happens in many places) but please, if the work you do is in anyway tangent to similar system, make sure the people in charge of testing the logic and the usability understand what the problems are. Someone said that “usability is predictability”, that if the user knows what’s going to happen after they click a button, your system is usable¹.

P.S. Yes, in Gmail you are free to use user+tag@gmail.com where user@gmail.com would be your normal e-mail address. The +tag is useful to filter easily on incoming mail, and potentially a giveaway in case some service decides to sell your e-mail address to spammers (although I suppose spammers are at least sophisticated enough to remove whatever is between + and @, but who knows?)

1. Caveat: this is about application design, where action should equal reaction and the interface should always provide some feedback. Games thrive on unpredictability, as do other systems [↩]

As more and more applications go cross-platform, users are sometimes presented with software that they can tell was simply “dressed-up” on/for their platform of choice, not actually thought out with it in mind all the way. Does your application follow the platform or does it follow itself?
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I love Julius Eckert’s creations. Especially his Quicksilver plugins — I would not use QS without BezelHUD (above)¹. Recently, Silverflow went in public beta. I gave it a quick spin before taking the screenshot and hitting return.
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1. Exaggeration [↩]

My recent affair with usability brought me to analyze a somewhat subtle aspect of software, especially the user interface design aspect.
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I have recently discovered a passion for design — especially the kind that can be done in software — and so I have been paying a bit more attention to various concepts and ideas pertaining to the field. Today I was called into a meeting to discuss the changes required to make a particular user dialog more… user-friendly. A great time to put theory to practice¹.
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1. I am a software developer by function and workplace designation [↩]