is a blog about design, technology and culture written by Khoi Vinh, and has been more or less continuously published since December 2000 in New York City. Khoi is currently Principal Designer at Adobe. Previously, Khoi was co-founder and CEO of Mixel (acquired in 2013), Design Director of The New York Times Online, and co-founder of the design studio Behavior, LLC. He is the author of “How They Got There: Interviews with Digital Designers About Their Careers”and “Ordering Disorder: Grid Principles for Web Design,” and was named one of Fast Company’s “fifty most influential designers in America.” Khoi lives in Crown Heights, Brooklyn with his wife and three children.
I got a kick out of this recent example of why it’s impossible to make every user happy. It concerns the most recent update of Agile Bits’ superb password password manager 1Password, which added a new view to see the contents of all of your vaults at once when accessing 1Password from within a browser. (Vaults are essentially groups of passwords, logins and other secure credentials; you might have one for work, another for home, another for a side project, etc.)
This is a fine idea, but when I upgraded, I was surprised to find that the new “All Vaults” view is the default view. Even when I selected a specific vault as my preferred view, the next time I launch 1Password from my browser it would revert to the “All Vaults” view. I found this very irritating. This change struck me as wrongheaded—it flies right in the face of how I use vaults, as I prefer to keep each group of passwords segregated from the others. I could only imagine that it would rankle every other 1Password user, as well.
However, when I went looking for a solution for this on the forums, I came across this response to another user from a member of the Agile Bits team:
It’s funny, in the previous implementation of multiple vaults, we heard from a lot of users who wanted to be able to see all of their items all at once, no matter which vault they lived in. We thought that ‘All Vaults’ was going to be an amazing solution for our users who relied on multiple vaults. It’s been really interesting reading all the feedback from users now and learning more about the various use cases that don’t quite fit into the ‘All Vaults’ mould.
It hadn’t even occurred to me that the way I use 1Password might be completely at odds with the way someone else might use 1Password, but of course this is exactly the case. It was a modest revelation to me; I went from being irate at Agile Bits to being immediately more sympathetic to their challenges.
Luckily, there’s at least one relatively straightforward answer here: always default to the user’s most recently selected vault view—whether it was a specific one, or it was “All Vaults.”
More to the point though, this modest bit of feature friction made me realize that, though I’ve always tended to think of 1Password as relatively simple, it’s become substantially more complex over the years. At this stage, having gone through at least six major revisions, the utility must accommodate many different usage styles—people who want strict separation among their vaults, people who want to see across all their vaults, and more. As with any software, as the number of use cases grows, it becomes harder and harder to reconcile them with a single coherent interface. That’s the unfortunate truth of creating great experiences; not all of your users are going to be happy all of the time.
Some smart user experience thinking in Neo, a project from Lennart Ziburski, a twenty-one year old design student in Berlin, that re-imagines OS X in a new, simpler way. Ziburski argues that while mobile has evolved dramatically over its short lifespan, the desktop is still rooted in concepts like folders, windows and the mouse that are remnants from another age.
What struck me about the project is that in many ways iOS for iPad already accomplishes many of these goals (or will hopefully do so soon), and that by drastically simplifying the desktop experience, Ziburski’s concept may actually be robbing that platform of its usefulness. One of Neo’s most dramatic aspects is changing the desktop’s overlapping windowing model to an “app panels” model where windows sit flush next to one another, with no overlap.
Ziburski and I had a friendly debate over this in an email exchange. He wrote:
Focusing on full-height panels allows Neo to use an interface that lets you switch extremely quickly between apps by just scrolling, while still giving you spatial awareness of where your apps are. My guess is that most productivity users probably want two to four apps on the screen at the same time, and full-height panels work best for that.
I argued that his app panels may undermine what power users value most from the desktop: the precision and flexibility that comes with being able to arrange windows exactly as you like them. It’s true that for many users this flexibility is unnecessary and even hampers productivity; for those users, I think that iOS, or some future version of it, makes the most sense.
At any rate, Ziburski makes a very compelling presentation of his ideas over at desktopneo.com.
A huge gift to the product design world from Australian app developer Bjango. Founder Marc Edwards and his team have produced this shockingly detailed and well-documented set of app icon templates for Photoshop, Illustrator, Sketch, and Affinity Designer.
The templates cover Android, iOS, OS X, Apple TV (tvOS), Apple Watch (watchOS), Windows, Windows Phone and web favicons. Where possible, they’re set up to automate exporting final production assets.
The cherry on top is that the whole kit is free and open source, released under the BSD license. You can find out more and download it at bjango.com.
This is a terrific television commercial for Apple TV that takes the device’s rectangular hockey puck-like shape as a jumping off point for a series of playful animations. It ostensibly showcases the many apps that can run on the platform, but it focuses on the brand names that make the box come alive. Though it’s not perfect, I’m a fan of this most recent incarnation of the Apple TV, and I think this commercial does a solid job of communicating its value.
National Handwriting Day falls each year on January 23, the birthday (according to the Gregorian calendar) of [John Hancock,] the American Revolutionary leader and first signer of the U.S. Declaration of Independence. (While the U.S. government recognizes Hancock’s birthday as January 12, others recognize his birthday as January 23 based on our modern-day calendar.)
The Writing Instrument Manufacturers Association started this holiday in 1977 to acknowledge the history and influence of penmanship. Its reason for being grows more urgent each year as pens, pencils and paper lose ground to the QWERTY keyboard…
Research shows that teaching handwriting skills benefit cognitive development and motor skills, and can lead to improved writing skills and reading comprehension. In other words, children not only learn to read faster when they learn to write by hand first, but research suggests they are also better at generating ideas and retaining information than children who do not practice handwriting.
More than newspapers and the giftability of music and movies, what I miss most from the pre-digital world is the ability to write by hand. I’m sure I’m not alone in finding that any extended use of a pen is physically uncomfortable; I’ve entirely lost the stamina for it. And that’s not even to mention how bad my penmanship has become. I’d gladly pay for lessons to recover this skill.
It was only a few months ago when I realized that adult coloring books are a legitimate new category of publishing, and that sales exploded last year. Evidently this trend is not just about the further initialization of modern adult adulthood (at least, not entirely), as the books claim significant therapeutic benefits. It makes sense, then, that a multinational conglomerate like Ikea seems poised to bring us what I’ll call customer coloring books. They’ve released a virtual coloring book—five downloadable pages of benignly outlined drawings prominently featuring the company’s homewares, ostensibly aimed at those experiencing elevated levels of stress over their home decor challenges.
Grab them all for free at this Dropbox link, then go color the heck out of them and get shopping.
This is not new (in fact it’s almost exactly a year old) but independent foundry Fontfabric’s handsome Bebas Neue is an all-caps sans serif typeface that also happens to be free. It was originally based on an original, single-weight bold font by Ryoichi Tsunekawa, but a year ago the foundry released four additional weights: Thin, Light, Book, and Regular. While the character set is quite limited, the letterforms that are there are well drawn, and you can’t beat the price.
Before it gets too late in the year, here’s a quick roundup of all the films that I saw last year (or that were released last year; I snuck in a few viewings after Dec 31). First, my five favorite.
You could easily re-sort the top three any way you like and I wouldn’t disagree as I found it really difficult to choose the right ordering for them—even after watching each of them a second time.
Here are the movies I saw that I thought were worthwhile, and deserve attention from anyone who hasn’t seen them yet.
By the way, one of my new year’s resolutions is to track the movies I watch over at Letterboxd. If you’re at all interested, you can follow along there with my movie diary.
Interaction designer and author Dan Saffer is one of the smartest people I know working in technology. His résumé includes stints at Adaptive Path, Smart Design and Jawbone, among others, but I took notice when he recently joined Mayfield Robotics as vice-president of product. The early stage startup is focused on “making an adorable home robot”—a mission statement that manages to be both remarkably simple and impressively ambitious at once. Dan reached out to me recently for help hiring a Visual Product Designer for his small design team, a position that sounds easier to fill than it has been in practice. I invited him to talk about the open position here.
Your site says your want to “bring robot joy to people’s homes.” How?
Our goal as a company is to make awesome home robots. Robots you want to be around, who are fun, useful, and adorable. If you’ve ever seen R2-D2, Wall-e, or BB-8 and wondered when you could have one of your own, we’re trying to make that future happen.
Does the visual product designer you hire have to be handy with robotics?
No, although an interest in robots certainly helps, as will having some kind of background working with hardware. We have roboticists with Ph.D.s to handle all the hard robotics stuff. Our job is to advise them on what to make, help them make decisions that would affect the user experience of the product, and to fix what can’t be fixed in hardware with software and design. We’re designing the services and ecosystem around the robot.
How hard has it been to find this mix of visual design and hardware skills in a product designer?
Very challenging, because it’s not only an interest in robots; the person should have skills that span from print to mobile to web as well. We really need a generalist who’s comfortable in several mediums. And we’re looking for someone with a real sensibility and style they could bring to the table. Since it’s, well, robots, there’s an opportunity to do some things differently. For example, the mobile apps that help control and manage the robot could be more game-like than, say, a more functional app. (Although not too game-like, as you know there is valuable information in there.)
How about the rest of the team, what are their backgrounds and do they have similarly eclectic skillsets, or are there specialists as well?
We’re a startup, so the team is small and scrappy and we all do a bit of everything. There’s myself; Ellen Francik, our UX Lead; and Tisho Georgiev, who is a product designer and engineer.
Like all teams, we each have our strengths, but because we’re a startup, we all wear a lot of hats. Our team is responsible for not only design, but also product management, marketing, and brand. All three of us move between those disciplines to come up with how the robot works and to solve the issues that arise with the hardware.
There’s also deeply puzzling, although philosophical puzzles we as a team have to solve, my current favorite being: If a robot falls and there’s no one around to hear it, should it make a sound? We spend a lot of time thinking about things like that, because it has real implications for how people think about the robot.
What does the next year or so look like for this group—and the visual product designer you hope to hire, specifically?
It’s an intense and busy year ahead of us as we prepare to introduce and launch the robot. The first thing we’re finishing up is product definition: what does the robot do and how does it do it, and the visual designer is definitely part of that discussion. Parts of the robot need to be visually designed, so they will help determine that, as well as designing the accompanying apps (iOS and Android), the getting started (print) manual, and new web site announcing the robot.
There’s whole new brand to help define and work with there. Our corporate web site will need adjusting as well as we get ready to take pre-orders. The fall has us preparing marketing materials while we do in-home user trials (and, yes, the visual designer will be involved in user research as well). There will be movies to make and demos to prep and posters/stickers/brochures etc. to design. It’s a lot of work across multiple platforms/mediums, but it’ll be fun and exciting.
For the right person, it’s a terrific opportunity to help create a new brand for a new product in a new category, all while having a significant impact on the overall product design. It’s perfect if you’re a visual designer who has great visual design skills, but also a generalist at heart—and you love robots!
If you’re interested in this opportunity, read more at Authentic Jobs.
This is the latest in my occasional series spotlighting interesting job openings for designers. See previous entries here.
Recently I realized that some people are under the impression that these spotlights are sponsored content—that the companies I’m highlighting are paying for the interviews to be published. That’s not the case. While I do draw exclusively from Authentic Jobs (I’m a member and get proceeds from that site’s performance), I don’t get any direct income from the interviews. Additionally, I choose the subject of each interview independently.
Last week Apple announced several marquee features in its forthcoming iOS 9.3 update. Two of them I would classify under the heading Close But No Cigar, at least insofar as they match up to wish list items I’ve had for some time.
The first is Night Shift, which uses your device’s clock and location data to automatically shift the color of its display towards the warmer end of the light spectrum at night, much like the popular desktop utility f.lux. The goal is to ease users’ transitions into their sleep cycles by limiting evening exposure to blue light from the cooler end of the spectrum.
I have no quarrel with this feature, but if Apple is so concerned about sleep, I still wish they would implement a global “night mode” feature throughout iOS. I wrote about this idea in this 2013 blog post:
Apple should offer an API that lets developers specify a night mode interface for their apps, and that mode should be available from a system-wide switch. So instead of turning iBooks or Kindle to night mode individually, one flip of that switch would turn the whole device to night mode. In the beginning, of course, not every app will support this, but if Apple provides dim-light versions of the home screen, Mail, Messages, iTunes, Settings and other essential apps, that in itself would be a huge boon.
I still believe this would be not just a big benefit for users, but also a meaningful point of differentiation from other mobile operating systems. Few things seem more integrally mobile to me than software that responds to its environments; acknowledging the stark difference between day and night seems like an important one to get right.
Apple also announced that this next software update will finally allow for multiple user accounts on iPad, something that that platform has sorely needed practically since its introduction. Much, much more than mobile phones or even laptops, iPads are shared between family members, and being able to allow individual access to specific apps and settings would make these devices significantly more valuable to customers.
Alas, iOS 9.3’s “Shared iPad” implementation is restricted only to education environments for now. It appears to be part of a more extensive solution for schools that includes a new Apple app for teachers, an Apple School Manager portal, and even a new class of Apple ID that can be created and assigned by the schools themselves.
All in all that’s a huge win for students, teachers and administrators, and I suppose it’s a hypothetical win for consumer users too, as it demonstrates that multiple accounts on iPad is possible. Hopefully something like it will come to general audiences before too long.
