Yarone Goren - Tinkering in the lab...

Wednesday, April 11, 2012

Excel "Comment" Bubbles Need to be Improved

It's about time that Microsoft improve the "Comments" functionality in Excel:

Wow. Just plain ugly. Shooting from the hip:

That shadow technique (angled lines) is a bit...dated.
Square corners? Rounded would be much better, especially given the grid-like nature of Excel. Rounded corners would create a nice contrast to the rest of the display.
8 ways to tug / pull / stretch? Totally unnecessary. Why should this be resizable to begin with?
Default size: about four rows of text high. Doesn't automatically resize.

Monday, February 20, 2012

Stop Using Lorem Ipsum!

I think I've discovered a handy way of summing-up how I think about designing user interfaces: No Lorem Ipsum!

A Symptom of a Bigger Problem: Lazy Product Design
Lorem Ipsum isn't always bad. It's often useful in "marketing pages" - places where you want to indicate there will be a few paragraphs of text here, a sentence or two there, etc. But when designing interfaces? No way. Use Real Data. Text that represents, you know, what the user might actually see.

Designing and building great software is hard. You've got to put yourself in the shoes of the end user, try to understand their needs and motivations, and try to create a tool that's really useful (and hopefully fun and interesting too). You've got to sweat the small stuff. Every screen. Every permutation of every screen. Every label, every text box, every error message. It's the accumulation of thousands of design decisions that makes something great.

Using "Lorem Ipsum" or "Menu Item 1" or "Product 1" (or whatever) makes it harder to design great software. What happens when "Product 1" becomes "How to Be Funny: The One and Only Practical Guide for Every Occasion, Situation, and Disaster (no kidding)"? Find out early so you can design accordingly.

Tuesday, July 19, 2011

"The problem is we don't understand the problem"

Aza Raskin, the talented user interface designer (and son of the original designer for Macintosh, Jef Raskin), shares a really insightful short story that suggests how we should go about tackling "deeply difficult challenges."

Aza goes on to talk about a man named Paul MacCready who sought out to build the first human-powered airplane. From the article:

The problem was the problem. Paul realized that what needed to be solved was not, in fact, human powered flight. That was a red-herring. The problem was the process itself, and along with it the blind pursuit of a goal without a deeper understanding how to tackle deeply difficult challenges. He came up with a new problem that he set out to solve: how can you build a plane that could be rebuilt in hours not months. And he did. He built a plane with Mylar, aluminum tubing, and wire.

I think this perspective is useful when thinking about technology-based solutions to K-12 education. Modern instructional formats (like Academy123 and Khan Academy) afford scale, "failing quicker", and iterating toward success.

Imagine "a process of ongoing improvement":

100,000 mini-videos, 2-3 minutes in length, in one subject (say, algebra). For each specific topic (say, simple factoring), videos are recorded in dozens of different ways (teacher A, B, C. Easy, Medium, Hard. Instructional method X, Y, Z).
Each student is prescribed a customized path through those videos. The prescription changes on-the-fly. Some students, for example might respond better to a male teacher, a female teacher, a young teacher (peer), and older teacher, etc.
Hundreds of videos are re-done each week, based on student results, attention data, and other analytics. The content gets better over time.

Click here to Play

Scaling teachers using technology

Issac Asimov, the famous Science Fiction writer, wrote an amusing short story (below) that describes a highly individualized and customized learning environment, while at the same time, reminds us how our existing education system is so outdated and inneficient (textbooks that students don't read, 35 kids in a class, students grouped by age and not by ability, etc.).

Has technology advanced enough such that we can approximate, with sufficient "fidelity", a real flesh-and-blood teacher?

Isaac Asimov - The Fun They Had -

Friday, June 10, 2011

Use These Mockups: Lots of Design Patterns in Balsamiq Mockups (BMML) format

For those of you that use Balsamiq Mockups, here are a bunch of templates I created that you might find handy.
Download them all in one ZIP file (90KB).

I find myself re-using many of these elements when I design applications (especially the boring/tedious/must-have features, like Forgot Password, Sign In, 404 page). Enjoy!

The following mockups are included in the ZIP file:

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