I’ve recently been involved with an iPhone project where we are doing a few custom UI controls, and it’s definitely proved a learning experience about the difference between designing for a computer screen and designing for the iPhone screen (either the current one or the upcoming iPhone 4 Retina Display screen).

One thing I’ve learned has to do with the characteristics of the iPhone screen, and how that influences User Interface Design choices. Over the years, I’ve become used to the what it takes to show a change on a computer monitor, which is to say, the degree to much you need to change the colour, shape, or scale so that it’s obvious, even if the user looks away for a second before the change occurs and then looks back.  This might apply to an object in its selected and unselected states, or the addition of something new on the screen, or perhaps the enabling or disabling of a button or other element.  At first, I thought this was due to the dots (or in this case, pixels) per inch of the iPhone versus computer monitors. Monitors are usually somewhere between 72 PPI (Pixels Per Inch) and perhaps 200 PPI on the best equipment. The IBM T220/T221 LCD monitors marketed from 2001–2005 were 204 PPI, and they probably set the standard for a while. These days, a 20-inch (50.8 cm) screen with a 1680x1050 resolution has a 99.06 PPI, and a garden variety Macbook (not the higher end Macbook Pros) has 113 PPI (Wikipedia has an article on how this is calculated).

However, the iPhone PPI is listed at 163 PPI, which although it’s on the high side, is certainly not significantly higher than a typical computer these days. The difference, then, must be the size of the screen. In the case of any iPhone screen 2G, 3G, 3Gs and 4G, it’s a 3.5 inch screen (compare that to the aforementioned 20-inch, and now we’re talking different.)

It might be obvious, but what I’ve noticed is that the amount of change you have to make in order to be noticeable is far more on the iPhone’s screen. The contrast must be greater, scaling or moving an object between one state and another has to be larger (or farther), and as a corollary to this rule of thumb,  it’s easy to miss subtle changes.  Several times during development of the app we’re working on, I had to report to the graphic designer that I was working with, that a selection style wasn’t distinct enough, or that a small detail of a button, such as a downward pointing arrow, had to be rendered with higher contrast (the UI had a lot of grey objects, and some of them had white or darker grey overlays).

I think the easy way to think about this is the analogy of greasepaint. What’s greasepaint? It’s the traditional makeup that actors wore (and has now been superseded by more modern stage makeup) that helps to compensate for both the washing out of facial features by the bright theatre lights, as well as help audience members to make out their faces, even though the actors were farther away (and hence, smaller in the eyes of theatregoers — perhaps the equivalent of being 4 or 5 centimeters tall depending on how far away from the stage they were sitting). I remember going backstage to a dressing room after the Play or Opera was over, and was always struck by how odd the performers looked before removing all of that extreme makeup, which brought out cheekbones or encircled their eyes (like a Raccoon, I though!).

So User Interface Designers working on iPhone apps, remember, the computer screen is the dressing room, and the iPhone screen is the stage. Don’t forget the greasepaint!

Though the drawing doesn’t show it, Englebart’s mouse, which was one small part of Engelbart’s a larger project, aimed at ‘augmenting human intellect’ had 1 button. The drawing mainly shows how the block uses multiple rollers, which sense which way the mouse is being moved in terms of X and Y coordinates.

When Apple shipped the first Lisa computer (and of course, the first Mac) , the commandment that ‘Thy mouse shall have but  1 button’ was spoken to the masses. On the other side, the X-Window System, and the IBM PC mouse had multiple buttons (2 or 3). The two to three camps dug in for years, each claiming the ergonomic, moral or practical high ground over the others. The antipathy between the 1 or many buttons groups continues to to this day, even if this division is no longer the case. Many people believe that Apple has stayed true to their gospel and only makes or supports a 1 button mouse, but the unforutnately named ‘Mighty Mouse’, which shipped in 2005, supports multiple buttons virtually rather than physically (you click on one side or other other to simulate one or the other button), and also has a roller ball and 2 physical side buttons, providing no fewer than 5 buttons. The proliferation of mouse buttons, sometimes 2, sometimes 3, sometimes 5 or more, depends on the system and software one encounters. Some trackball devices have had 5 buttons that effectively provide even more control messages by allowing a different kind of click from different combinations of those buttons. Apple’s latest mouse (the even more unfortunately named ‘Magic Mouse’ — what group is coming up with these names?) even goes farther, making the entire mouse surface another control surface in and of itself, like the trackpad on a laptop. This, to me, is akin to attaching a steering wheel to the top of a gearshift, or some other bizarre composite, but I’ll have to withhold judgement until I try one, even though it sounds like the Industrial Design equivalent of a Turducken.

The point is, complex gestural movements, involving more than a simple click (or double click) on a pointing device have pretty much been adopted by all computer makers, with at least an accepted level of complexity, although for the most part, a user can work up to that complexity, by moving from simple gestures to more complex ones over time, hence the idea of a short cut to a function instead of making  that function only executable from a complex gesture.

As a friend of my parents puts it, ‘Anything worth doing is worth overdoing’. I shouldn’t be surprised by what I thought was certainly a post on The Onion, but no, it was serious, and it was the Open Office Consortium who was proposing this mouse:

The Open Office Mouse. Really. No, really.

Holy Roller, Batman! This thing is certainly the other end of the spectrum from the mice we’ve seen up until this point, at least for the general public. (More complicated mice like this one have shown up on engineering stations, imaging systems, and countless other vertical application machinery).

If you look carefully (click on the photo to see it a bit larger), you’ll see that it has no fewer than 16 buttons and a roller that are visible. The description actually boasts that it has “18 programmable mouse buttons with double-click functionality” and “Three different button modes: Key, Keypress, and Macro”.  They even show a comparison chart comparing it to other mice on the market.

While I won’t comment on the oddness of an open software consortium designing hardware (or rather, having a designer design some for them), I have to admit that this initial paragraph, on the page ‘About the OpenOfficeMouse, caught my attention:

The OpenOfficeMouse was designed with the goal of being the best and most useful mouse the digital world has seen to date. Initially inspired by the keyboards on the Treo smartphones, it was designed by a game designer who was annoyed with the paltry number of buttons available on high-end gaming mice. Because gaming mice have historically been designed primarily for FPS¹ games, not MMO² and RTS³ games, they do not possess sufficient buttons for the dozens of commands, actions and spells that are required in games that make heavy use of icon bars and pull-down menus. After discovering that the available World of Warcraft mice were nothing more than regular two-button mice decorated with orcs, dwarves, and Night elves, the idea of the WarMouse was born. After much experimentation, it was determined that 16 buttons divided into two 8-button halves were the maximum number of buttons that could be efficiently used by feel alone. However, in the process of design and development, it quickly became apparent that many non-gaming applications would also benefit from having dozens of commands accessible directly from the mouse, especially applications with nested pull-down menus and hotkey combinations. OpenOffice.org was selected as the ideal application suite around which to design this application mouse because the usage tracking feature of OpenOffice.org 3.1 permitted the assignment of application commands to mouse buttons based on the data gathered from more than 600 million actual mouse and keystroke commands enacted by users. The OpenOfficeMouse team are advocates of Free and Open Source Software, which is why we are members of the OpenOffice.org community and have created custom profiles for other OSS applications such as Mozilla Firefox, Mozilla Thunderbird, The Battle for Wesnoth, D-Fend Reloaded, and The Gnu Image Manipulation Program.

So what we have here is a design for a gaming mouse, now re-purposed for general purpose applications (like browsing the web, email, and the Open/MS Office suite of word processing, spreadsheets and presentations).

Maybe it’s because I don’t do much gaming (and by ‘don’t do much’,  I mean hardly at all),  maybe it’s because I come from the ‘make it for a klutz’ school of UI design because I’m not very coordinated, but I think that this approach to User Interface or Industrial Design will never have much of a following. It wasn’t lost on me that I had to look up some of those acronyms to provide the footnotes here. Sure, there will always be some small group of people who want more and more direct power over their work from their hardware, and they often buy the most baroque control devices. For me, however, the whole idea of taking a piece of gaming hardware and repurposing it to work on everyday tasks is about as appealing as using a flight simulator to do your banking. Sure, you might get more fine maneuverability during a funds transfer (if you could master the controls), but it hardly seems worth the effort. Maybe that’s the key here: Having a competitive advantage from  your hardware and your skill with it during a game is far more important and more likely to have you make that effort than being a whiz at moving from cell to cell in your spreadsheet or even triggering one of the 100 or so macros you’ve created for your word processing tasks.

So to the OpenOfficeMouse folks, I say, good luck, but forget about selling one of those mice to me. Now, we start seeing the ‘direct to brain’ controllers, where I don’t have involve my arms and fingers at all with typing and gesturing on the screen but just think where I want to the cursor to go, I’ll be more interested. That would be the 0 button mouse, which I think I’m going to have to address in some future post.

¹first-person shooter
²massively multiplayer online
³real-time strategy

I particularly liked the monstrously bad user interface and industrial design, and how it mimics old ‘rotary’ phones.

Here’s the first one:

The Developer Conference has a very full schedule of sessions, split into 3 tracks. They are all categorized, numbered, and described in detail on the Apple WWDC Web site. While most attendees will want to go to a lot of these 150+ sessions, that’s clearly not possible, and not every session will appeal to every attendee . In fact, the schedule has been in place for nearly a month. What’s been added is the following: You can now create a personalized schedule of sessions and labs that will find its way to your hands, where you’ll need it during the conference. Using the online Conference Schedule, you click a session or lab you’re interested in, then click on the Select button in its information pop-up. (you can also add sessions and labs from an alternate Sessions and Lab page, where sessions are grouped by track rather than by the schedule):

After you’ve selected all of the sessions that you want, like this one:

…you click a link, which downloads a URL to iCal, which then subscribes to that calendar:

Then, when you then sync that calendar with your iPod or iPhone, you now have your personalized Conference schedule for each day on your iPhone:

The other web software that impressed me is the always-handy Internet Movie Database (IMDB). Whenever I’m stuck with that Now what other movie was that actor in?’ question or several like it, IMDB has been a godsend. While several sites are rolling out iPhone versions of the interface, IMDB does a spectacularly good job of it. The clear and sensible breakdown of an actor’s bio or film’s information lets you do that wonderful ‘swivel search’, where you can hop from actor to movie to cast to another actor to movie to director, etc. It keeps perfect track of your breadcrumb trail, and the performance, as well as excellent use of the ‘slide left’ animation for drilling down make it a real winner as an iPhone web app. I hope some of my other favourite sites roll out iPhone versions (Digg, Slashdot, Fark, BoingBoing and a bunch of other wonderful time-wasters, I hope you’re listening!)