A Next Page button can make Kindle Paperwhite 10x more fun

Kindle Paperwhite is small: it has a 6-inch screen while Nexus 7 has a 7-inch screen and iPad Mini has a 7.9-inch screen. The Kindle is lighter too: it weighs 206 grams while Nexus 7 and iPad Mini weigh 290 grams and 331 grams respectively.

Despite being small and light, the Kindle is hard to use single-handedly. I can hold the reader by wrapping my hand around its back, but then I can’t use any of my fingers to turn pages. (It’s also a bit uncomfortable to hold it that way, actually.)

I can hold it on just one side, but turning pages will still be impossible with one hand. Turning pages will require me to move my thumb onto the screen.

Adding a hardware Next Page button right where my thumb is will make it easy to use the Kindle with just one hand. Why didn’t you think of that, +Amazon.com?

Slow = bad

Having to wait for machines repeatedly is one of the most demoralising things you can experience when trying to get something done.

Is screen the only advantage tablets have?

Quite often, I find myself wanting to read on my Nexus 7 than on my laptops.  Checking my Google Reader, reading any article that’d take more than a couple of minutes, reading Kindle books... I prefer the tablet for all these.  This is not surprising because the Nexus 7 has a 216-dpi screen while my laptop has an incomparable 96-dpi screen.

When it comes to doing some real work... work that involves multitasking and/or precision, touch devices are very inadequate.  Think of writing code, for instance.  I’d have 6+ browser tabs open with various manuals, one terminal for building and running the code, one or two more terminals for other random stuff, one editor/IDE window (usually GVim; occasionally Eclipse), and a few more browser tabs that are pure distraction (Gmail, Google+, etc.)  A touchscreen device without overlapping windows just won’t work for this use case.

Android’s multitasking UI would improve over time, but I doubt if it can catch up with current desktop OSes in the next two years.  On the other hand, it’s likely that before the end of 2013 there will be enough high-res monitors and laptops in the market.  When that happens, I may use the laptop a lot more frequently than the tablets.

While tablets may replace laptops for quite a few people going forward, I don’t see myself giving up the functionality I get from desktop OSes.

Why I think new Android menus are broken

Up until Android 2.3, Android devices required a hardware “menu button”.  Pressing the menu button was the standard way of accessing the functions provided by apps.  Quite a few people  complained that this model is broken because sometimes users wouldn’t think that they can press the menu button to find actions they can perform.  Google “fixed” this problem in Android 3.0.

In Android 3.0, menu button became obsolete, and Google asked developers to use other on-screen UI elements to provide access to app features.  But the issue now is that actions are in two different menus.  Take Google Maps, for instance. If you want to check into a place, that option is available from the drop-down on the top-left:

But let’s say you want to change the Google account used for Latitude.  For that, you’d need to choose Settings from the bottom-right menu:

Similarly, Google+ app has its options split across two different menus.  Some options on the left:

And some on the right:

I know this is not plain madness, and there are reasons behind this UI change.  There are recommendations in Android Developer (or Design) Guide to help developers decide which options belong in the top-left menu and which options on the other one (called Action Bar).  But the issue is, any large app like Google Maps or Gmail or Google+ is going to have a large number of possible operations, and only when you know a good amount of it you can correctly guess which menu has the option you are looking for.  Expecting a common user to guess that correctly is unfair.

After having used my Android 4.0 phone for about 6 months, I’m giving a Thumbs Down to the new menus.

Android’s “sticky row” of icons

Have you seen Android home screen?  Android’s home screen has a number of “pages”, usually 5 or 7.  You can keep different icons and widgets on each page.  There’s also a “sticky row” at the bottom; icons in that row are present in all pages of the home screen.  In this screenshot, Phone, People, Messaging, and Browser are all sticky, so they are present on all pages of the home screen.

Sticky row sure sounds useful in theory—because “important” apps can be accessed from all pages of the home screen, but I have never found it useful myself.  Once I am familiar with the icon layout, I hardly ever look for an icon in the home screen—I simply navigate to it instead.

Let’s say I am on 2nd page of the home screen of my phone and I want to open the browser.  Although the browser icon is present on the second page as well, I’d swipe over to the center page (which is the “main” page where I am mostly on) and then launch the browser from there¹.  My brain has associated the main page with browser so it’s faster to launch it from there vs. looking for it on the 2nd page.

I believe this how it is for many people: this is why programs in Start menu are easier to find when they are in alphabetic order, but the icons on the desktop when in a familiar order.  Only this spatial familiarity makes us walk towards the kitchen without thinking when we are thirsty.  Walking to the kitchen first and then figuring out what we want from there is more efficient than doing it the other way around.

Most people won’t look so deep into this, and they don’t have to; it’s the job of UX/interaction designers to evaluate these ideas.  Which means, even if the Android team knows by now that the sticky row is useless, they cannot take it away lest upsetting users who think it’s a useful feature.  If I were to control whether the bottom row of my Android is sticky or not, I’d make it non-sticky².

Notes:
1. If memory serves right, Android 2.0 (Eclair) was the first version of Android to have a sticky row.  I have been using Android from version 1.5 (Cupcake).  I got the sticky row feature when I upgraded to a Nexus One a year later.  I don’t know how much of an influence this has over my usage patterns.  Also, I am still using Android 2.3 (Gingerbread), so I cannot customise the icons in the sticky row.  My usage pattern may change when I upgrade to Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich).

2. I know Android is open source, so I can control if the bottom row on my phone is sticky or not.  But this annoyance is not reason enough for me to hack the home screen app.  Not yet.

Web layout: how not to do it

We didn't have stupid issues like this when we used tables for layout.

I'm learning UX

One of the qualities of good user experience (UX) is that people don't notice good UX.  They'd find the product good, but if you ask them why they like a product, they can't tell you.  Because they don't know.  They don't know because they don't care.  Most people don't care how a product works[*], but they care about what they can do with it.

I wrote a simple program that lets my friend Nags post pictures to her photo blog.  Yesterday I made two tiny little changes to the UI.  She probably noticed one of them, but I doubt if she would care enough.  (Now that I have talked about it, she might go looking for it and she'll find it.)  When I make such changes I deliberately don't tell her about it: she doesn't have to know.  People notice it immediately when the experience gets slightly worse, but when it gets better, even if they notice, they soon forget about it.

I wrote the first version of this program about 5 months ago.  She has posted probably around 130 pictures to her blog using the program.  If the program saved her 2 minutes for each post, it's a saving of 2 hours over 5 months.  That number doesn't look great[**], but not everything is quantifiable.  I don't know about her, but I get demotivated easily with repeated manual work.  If I had a similar blog, I would have soon stopped posting without a helper tool.  I'm sure my program makes her photo blogging experience a bit more pleasant, and that's a lot more valuable.

PS: I started writing this post with the intention of writing about what I have learned about UX, but apparently I have failed in that.  Maybe it would take some time before I can think clearly about them.

* Unless it annoys them.  I had an iPod for a long time.  If I want music, I'd press the play button; I didn't have to think about what all it did internally.  We had a Creative player that would eat up all its battery in 3 hours because it would keep the screen on when it's playing.  My brother found a workaround to turn the screen off, and thus improve battery life.  The Creative player forced him to think/care about how it functions.
** I spent maybe around 20 hours on getting the program to the state it is now.  Spending 20 hours to save 2 hours is not the wisest thing to do, obviously.

Why state the obvious?

What do you think of these two projectors, especially the "Yellow" and "Red" words on them?  Lame?  That's what I thought first as well.

But this is a good design because people with difficulty in seeing colours can also use these devices.  Can you spot such good design in any of the software you use everyday?

Recycle bin

I, for one, think that Windows operating system's Recycle Bin is badly designed.  Systems like KDE copied the idea without improving and it bothers me every time I delete a file.  Here is the list of changes I would make to make it a little more user-friendly:

• There will be no Shift+Delete shortcut to bypass recycle bin.  After a while, bypassing recycle bin is in your muscle memory and you start Shift+Deleting all your files.  Until you lose a file or two.  In my design, you have to open recycle bin and delete your file from there to permanently delete it.
• There will be, however, an option to disable recycle bin for all deletes.  (All versions of Windows already have this option.)  By default recycle bin is enabled and a user can disable it if they want.
• The user would be prompted only when a file is permanently deleted.  It can happen for two reasons: the user has disabled recycle bin and they are deleting a file.  Or the user is deleting a file from the recycle bin itself.  If you are moving a file to recycle bin, you are not asked to confirm your action.  (Windows already provides an option to undo file deletions if recycle bin was used for the deletion.)
• Recycle bin would be maintenance free.  A file in recycle bin will automatically be permanently deleted after it has been there for a certain amount of time.  I often end up with my recycle bin occupying GBs of space, which is ridiculous.

Although I can't remember the last time I used recycle bin!  When the world is moving to the clouds, who wants to manage files manually? ;-)

Vista's awesome Program Compatibility Assistant

I have a Windoze machine at my workplace.  It's running Vista, which brings wow experience to your computers.  Today I upgraded my VLC player to the latest version and when I open VLC, Windoze decided to save me from falling off earth into nowhere:

Windoze expects me to decide and tell if the installation went fine before even opening the app.  Before going mad, I saw the help link in the bottom that read "What settings are applied?"  Ah good, now it's gonna show me the settings used by the new app and I can tell if it's correct or not.  So I click on the link and this is all I see:

Oh well.  Using Windoze is like being handicapped.  You just get used to it over time.  If you manage to successfully move away from it, you pray you never have to go back again. 

PS: FWIW, A quick Google search seems to suggest that not a lot of people like this feature:

Captchas should go away, seriously

Facebook very often reminds me of Mordac.  What am I supposed to tell those stupid servers to prove that I am human? :-/

A 2-line user's manual

Enough has been discussed about user interfaces for decades!  Even now, machines (or rather, the people who make those machines, programmers like me) haven't learned to say only what is required to be said.

This UI has four buttons and a tiny "user manual" besides the buttons.  The manual only describes two buttons -- OK and Next buttons.  God knows what Exit and Ignore buttons do.  I have used this UI maybe 50 times in the past one year, and I still cannot figure out what Next and OK buttons do without reading the "manual"!

If I were designing this UI, I would simply list all the available trays with the corresponding paper type/size and let the user pick one.  If that design is not possible for some reason I would only have two choices: one that says "Use paper from this tray" and another that says "Find another tray".

Disabling NetworkManager balloons

One of the reasons I hate Windows for is the frequent useless info balloons it shows.  Some people seem to like such balloons, including those who maintain NetworkManager applet.  Recently, we started using NetworkManager to manage the wireless network adapter, and I hated the frequent balloons that said "you are connected to so-and-so network".  Turns out that disabling those notifications is not very obvious (at least with version 0.7.0.99).  Here's what you do to get rid of those annoying balloons:

• Enter gconf-editor in command line to open GConf editor.
• Navigate to /apps/nm-appletr in the editor.
• Add a new key of Boolean type with the name disable-connected-notifications and the value True.

From next time, you won't see those annoying balloons when NetworkManager connects to a new network.

Compiz, don't steal my KDE shortcut keys!

The super-cool animations and glossy looks of Compiz does sure make it more fun to use my computer.  But I had my own set of complaints about it.  Until now.

I run KDE and despise Gnome for its too simplistic UI.  When I start Compiz it replaces the window title bar with its own version.  I customize my title bar in KDE by adding an "always on top" button to it.  It can be quite handy at times.  Compiz by default removes all my customizations to the title bar.  The solution is to use KDE-specific extensions for Compiz and use KDE-Compiz's window decorator instead of the stock one.  These commands do it:

sudo apt-get install compiz-kde
kde-window-decorator --replace &

I love Katapult.  Katapult is activated by default using Alt+Space global shortcut key.  Compiz binds the same shortcut key to window menu.  This can be changed in CompizConfig Settings Manager (invoked by ccsm command).  This configuration is under General Options > Key bindings > Window Menu.  I changed the shortcut key to Alt+F3, which is the default in KDE.

Another thing I learned today is how to configure Katapult.  Pressing Ctrl+C when Katapult is waiting for your input shows you configuration menu.  You can change the shortcut key that invokes Katapult, add a system tray icon for Katapult, etc.  Did I tell you I love KDE for its practically endless ways of customization? :)

Black background for text?

I know how much you love that black background of your blog. I accept, that background colour makes your blog look cool. But you know what? It's very hard to read white text on a black background. Especially when the text is in 8 point sans-serif font. If you wish to do me (and all the people like me who are almost always on computers) a favour, please:

• Don't use black as the background colour (some dark shade of gray is ok I guess). Switching between other apps that use white as background colour and your blog is a very bad exercise for the eyes.
• Don't use colours for emphasize -- use bold, italics etc. (Reason: when the post is read from an RSS reader like Google Reader, all we can see is yellow (or that other bright colour you used for highlighting) text on a white background. Obviously, yellow text on white background is not readable.)
• Don't assume your blog is readable in its current design. Different devices/computers render things differently. Shown below is a typical BlogSpot blog on my GNU/Linux machine. I think it looks much better on a Windows machine.
• Don't assume everyone can read it if you are able to read it. There are people with all kinds of inabilities. You never know how your readers feel. (I asked my optician, "I can read all the letters that you showed while testing. But I can't read text from that poster out there. Maybe I should try a different lens?" He answered me with a smile, "Human eyes cannot easily read white text on a black background. This is normal, you're fine with this lens.") Just think about it -- almost ALL the software that you use has dark text on a light background. This cannot be a coincidence.

Have a wonderful 2008 you all! PS: I am not complaining here. I am just requesting people to make their blogs/web sites a bit more easier on my eyes.