There’s no doubt that smartphones, particularly the iPhone, have contributed to a phenomenal boom in the mobile web. Before Mobile Safari the Internet was a painful place to get around. However, I would argue that the primary reason mobile browsing suddenly exploded was due to the introduction of unlimited (fair use) data tariffs.

Not having control of your monthly bill adds stress to your mobile experience. Without being able to accurately gauge how much your internet traffic is costing you, you reduce your traffic or stop it completely. Users aren’t able to calculate how much a page “weighs”. It was already difficult when using WAP-enabled phones when pages were text-only, but now that Mobile Safari offers you the whole of the web (Flash excluded obviously) page weights and data transfer becomes impossible to calculate on the fly.

I remember trying to access some of Orange’s WAP sites when I first got a capable phone. It was a nerve-wracking experience, with the over-riding thought being to close the connection as soon as possible. Try and find what you need and close the connection. It’s no surprise that I rarely looked to my phone for the Internet. Yes it was slow and hard to get around but it felt like money was, figuratively, trickling through my fingers!

With the introduction of the unlimited tariffs, suddenly I could browse for pleasure. I could idly play with the Google Map app and watch my progress on the train; skim through the headlines, reading any or all of what caught my interest; play games that connected to transfer progress and save positions – and all safe in the knowledge that it wasn’t costing me any extra. Without this piece of mind I know my web use wouldn’t have been so great.

So now we face a reduction in our use on O2s new iPhone 4 tariffs and all this is due to end. Already I’ve been semi-seriously auditing my data use. Which games connect and what do they transfer? How big is the average YouTube video? How big are the data files in Maps? Not only are these tedious things to consider; users shouldn’t have to!

O2 contends that the introduction of the limited tariffs will improve the majority’s mobile experience and I’d certainly be all for that. But that just doesn’t fit with their assertion that 97% of customers won’t notice any effect.

What I think O2 are more nervous about is the rise in popularity of mobile music streaming services like Spotify and surely more recently the launch of the iPad. With increasing numbers of people and increasing mobile usage, O2 are legitimately concerned about the effect on their network. “Total mobile data consumption on our network is doubling every four months,” a spokeswoman for O2 said. “And the number of iPhone users on O2 has grown in a year from 1m to 2m.”

However, punishing the majority in order to catch the few just doesn’t seem fair. Just look at the uproar tax on alcohol had when responsible drinking campaigns suggested we should all bear the cost of the binge-drinking few. And anyway, surely O2’s “fair use” policy should catch this 3% of heavy users out?

O2 describes their data flow as a “permanently-on tap”. But surely the answer isn’t drought?

As noted previously, one of the exciting things about working in a technology-related industry such as web design, is the continual technological progress that keeps the dedicated designer or developer on their toes. Learning something new is always fun, but learning something new that makes your life easier is liberating.

CSS3 certainly falls into this second category. The prospect of ridding the world of tiny rounded-corner masks, pointless div’s and slivers of gradient-filled images for tiling, leaves me feeling happier, cleaner and smoother-of-face (no worry-lines). This of course assumes you’ve schooled your clients successfully in the benefits of graceful degradation of features; older versions of Internet Explorer of course don’t support the new developments.

So I thought I’d share a button I created on a recent project. There are lots of CSS3 button tutorials around the place, so I’m not going to bore you with excessive detail. My humble addition simply adds a subtle interaction to the button via the :active and :focus pseudo-classes.

So to turn a simple link into a half-decent buttony-button:

a.button {
    padding: 3px 6px;
    border: 3px solid #df4e4e;
    background-color: #a91c1c;
    color: #fff;
    font-weight: bold;
    text-decoration: none;
    text-align:center;
    font-size:0.8em;

    /* the exciting CSS3 stuff - the rounded corners */
    -moz-border-radius:4px;/* FF1+ */
    -webkit-border-radius:4px; /* Saf3+, Chrome */
    border-radius:4px; /* Opera 10.5, IE 9.0 */

    /* the exciting CSS3 stuff - the shadows */
    -moz-box-shadow: 1px 1px 2px #333; /* FF3.5+ */
    -webkit-box-shadow:1px 1px 2px #333; /* Saf3.0+, Chrome */
    box-shadow: 1px 1px 2px #333; /* Opera 10.5, IE 9.0 */
    }

And then the pseudo-classes to provide the affordance of a button (i.e. make the button move slightly as a button would when pressed in real life):

a.button:active,
a.button:focus {
    -moz-box-shadow:none;
    -webkit-box-shadow:none;
    box-shadow:none;
    position:relative;
    top:1px;
    left:1px;
    }

Easy!

click me! click me! click me!

And until I commit all the new CSS to memory, CSS3please makes it easy.

But because I can’t add plugins to the Beta version of Mac/Chrome yet, if I want to bookmark a link in Del.icio.us I have to copy and paste the link into Firefox to use the quick-add button.

Too many services? Information overload? Or should I just be content to wait for Google to sort out Chrome, Mozilla to fix Firefox or The Guardian to fix www.guardian.co.uk/ ? It’s not as if I’ve paid for any of the services mentioned.

UPDATE: To add insult to injury Firefox just crashed on me again – fortunately just after I clicked save. Phew!

Interestingly, I’m getting visited by something at one specific IP address again and again but apparently using different browsers and operating systems. One quick IP look-up later and it seems Adobe are hitting me about ten times a day, every day. Either someone there loves trees too or else some sort of bot is coming back again and again.

Adobe don’t have a search engine (as far as I know) so why are they bothering? Have I managed to offend them, or has a page of my site somehow got saved in their browser lab? Enquiring minds want to know! Anyone got any ideas?

I’ve also been catching up with all the new developments in browser font display that have been taking place recently. And what a lot of fun it is – easy too! If you are viewing this page in the latest version of any fairly modern browser (Firefox 3.5, Safari 4, Opera 10 etc.) you should be reading these words set in the excellent Graublau Sans by fonts.info. I’m not 100% sold on it for this blog yet but time will tell.
I’ve implemented this font change with the css declaration @font-face. For me, this seems to be the simplest, most standards-compliant way forward. Whilst there are other exciting projects in progress (Typekit and FontDeck to name but two), they aren’t free. So now, as well as the standard “img” and “css” folders at root, I now also have a brand new “font” folder! Joy! Simple things please simple minds I guess…?

Unfortunately @font-face does sometimes result in a not-so-nice “flash of unstyled text” (fout) but for personal sites I can live with this. Whether clients will be able to, well that’s a different matter…

For references and thanks:

• http://www.font-face.com/
• http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/06/beautiful-fonts-with-font-face/
• fonts.info for creating the excellent Graublau Sans Pro that you may now be reading.

Nielsen initially launched his ‘discount’ ideas on the world twenty years ago this month. So what’s changed in all that time?

It might be hard to appreciate today, but these ideas were heresy 20 years ago… it has come a long way since I launched it to a lecture room of maybe 100 or so people. On balance, I’m happy that I started this campaign and will continue the fight for simpler usability, more broadly applied. Discount Usability: 20 Years, Jakob Nielsen

Hear, hear!

Read more: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/discount-usability.html

As a kid, I remember being amazed at the way they grow; by adding rings of tissue and expanding year on year. Even more exciting, you can also tell good years from bad by studying the thickness of each band. I’m sure none of this comes as news to you Dear Reader.

So you can imagine how much I like the idea of mischer’traxler’s idea of taking this “recording quality” of a tree,  and using it to inform the design of products. Take a look at the infosthetics link below and tell me you don’t like it as well!

“The work consists of a solar-powered apparatus that pulls threads through a coloring device, a glue basin, and then finally winds them around a mould. The physical height of the resulting object depends on the number of sun hours of the day, as the machine starts at sunrise and stops at sunset. At any time of the day, the thickness of the thread layer and the color is depending on the amount of sun-energy: more sun results in thicker layers and a paler color.” Via infosthetics.com

Visit the artist’s website: mischertraxler.com

The conference ran over three information-filled days. Day One was lecture day, with inspirational talks from the likes of Peter Merholz, Luke Wroblewski, Dan Saffer, Jared Spool, Jeffrey Veen and most excitingly Don ‘The Don’ Norman.

Days Two and Three went into much greater detail, with interactive workshops covering all aspects of user experience practice; from sketching lessons to learning how organisations can make better decisions through design. In fact there were too many fantastic workshops to get around all of them and there were no “fillers”.

One of the highlights for me however was hearing Don Norman speak on Day One. The author of seminal books such as The Design of Everyday Things, Things That Make us Smart and more recently The Design of Future Things, Don is well known to all user experience architects and designers alike. The fact that his comments were Twittered with the hashtag ‘#TheDon’ just goes to show the affection and regard in which he is held.

Often the contrarian (“When everyone is asking for something, I tend to take the opposite approach”), Norman has recently caused minor storms by arguing that simplicity is highly overrated and that complexity is good thing. At first this approach feels wrong: as usability people, we are often in the habit of trying to make online experiences as simple as possible. Surely complexity can only harm the experience and put customers off?

Norman offers a familiar example of simplicity: the Google search homepage – often quoted as the epitome of the simple. Without a doubt, Google is by far and away the most popular search engine. And yet Yahoo! have the most popular homepage and it’s packed with information. Yahoo! is optimised for exploration, with Google it takes a little more work. You might argue that these two homepages are different products but the sheer popularity of  Yahoo! goes some way to show that complex pages are popular.

Another example: the iPhone is often touted as simple and consumer-friendly. And yet with a new software update, Apple has added 100 extra new features. How is this level of complexity compatible with the idea of a simple product? One might argue it’s because users have learnt how to use the device and are now demanding more advanced tools (like Copy and Paste).

There appears to be a fundamental conflict here: when asked, people will demand simplicity (“Why is it so hard to use?”, “Why can’t products be simpler?” [1]) but when you watch these same people comparing products side-by-side, it is the number of features that sell a product. People want more features even when they realise this must complicate the product. People believe that as you add features you add capability, thereby making more feature-laden products more desirable. However, as user experience professionals, we believe adding more features decreases usability. Both positions, Norman argues, are wrong. “We must distinguish complexity from confusion, perplexity, and unintelligibility. The goal is complexity with order, lucidity and understandability.”

People prefer complex things. If it’s too simple, it gets boring. Once a user gains experience with a product, the user moves into a new role; that of the Intermediate and suddenly their perception of what is complex changes.

An aside – roughly speaking, there are three classes of user: the Beginner, the Intermediate and the Expert. If we plot the number of people against perceived skill level, like most population distributions we get the classic statistical bell curve, with most users situated in the middle of the curve at ‘Intermediate’. It stands to reason therefore, that these are the users we should spend the most amount of time designing for. And yet it’s often the Beginners and the Experts who get the most attention. The Product Manager demands the Beginner must be able to hit the ground running and yet the engineer or developer, if left to their own devices, designs for their own skill-level – that of the Expert.

So how does Norman suggest we solve the complexity problem? Unsurprisingly the first approach should be through well-researched design. By modularising actions we can contain the complexity and by teaching users as they go, we can help them manage complex interactions.

I’ll leave the last few words to The Don himself: “Why are things so complex? Because the world is complex. Our tools must reflect reality. Complexity can be good, leading to a rich, satisfying life, filled with rich, satisfying experiences.”

And again: “The mark of the great designer is the ability to provide what people need without excessive complexity, without feature bloat. Simplicity should never be the goal. Follow the famous Einstein quote: “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” Complex things will require complexity. It is the job of the designer to manage that complexity with skill and grace.”[2]

Thanks

To Luke W for his notes on the lecture that were far more comprehensive than my own.

And to the Twitterers who helped refresh my memory.

References:

1. http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/simplicity_is_highly.html
2. http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/why_is_37signals_so_1.html

It’s handy until you actually make use of it… and then you get the following message:

I’d like to draw your attention to the first line, which reads: “Please be reminded that enquiries submitted via the ‘Comment on this page’ form will be ignored.”

Hmmm… thanks…

Presumably “enquiries” are different to “comments” and the LSE gets lots of “enquiries” submitted via the “Comment on this page” form, but who’s to know? My comment was an enquiry (at least as far as I understand the word) so maybe I’ll be ignored too? I’ve gotten used to it over the years…

UPDATE: I wasn’t ignored at all. I got a lovely response an hour later. Maybe I’ll look for the “Comment on our ‘Comment on this page’ function”?

Dilbert on User Experience:

http://www.90percentofeverything.com/2009/05/26/dilbert-on-user-experience/

* The views expressed in this title are Mordac’s alone and do not represent my own…