Some interesting insight on the Apple design process outlined in a presentation at SXSW by Michael Lopp (by way of Apple Insider).
What is really interesting is this part of the process:
Paired Design Meetings
This was really interesting. Every week, the teams have two meetings. One in which to brainstorm, to forget about constraints and think freely. As Lopp put it: to “go crazy”. Then they also hold a production meeting, an entirely separate but equally regular meeting which is the other’s antithesis. Here, the designers and engineers are required to nail everything down, to work out how this crazy idea might actually work. This process and organization continues throughout the development of any app, though of course the balance shifts as the app progresses. But keeping an option for creative thought even at a late stage is really smart.
Where you open up people’s thinking (going crazy) and let their imaginations run wild, and then focus on what can actually be delivered. It is hard to see each process not feeding into the other.
Very interesting research from Microsoft on how users read search results (by way of Greg Linden):
Microsoft Researchers Nick Craswell, Onno Zoeter, Michael Taylor and Bill Ramsey wrote “An Experimental Comparison of Click Position-Bias Models” (PDF) for WSDM 2008. The work looks at models for how “the probability of click is influenced by … [the] position in the results page”.
The basic problem here is that just putting a search result high on the page tends to get it more clicks even if that search result is less relevant than ones below it. If you are trying to learn which results are relevant by looking at which ones get the most clicks, you need to model and then attempt to remove the position bias.
The authors conclude that a “cascade model” which assumes “that the user views search results from top to bottom, deciding whether to click each result before moving to the next” most closely fits searcher click behavior when they look at the top of the search results. However, their “baseline model” — which assumes “users look at all results and consider each on its merits, then decide which results to click” (that is, position does not matter) — seemed most accurate for items lower in the search results.
The authors say this suggests there may be “two modes of results viewing”, one where searchers click the first thing that looks relevant in the top results, but, if they fail to find anything good, they then shift to scanning all the results before clicking anything.
Joel Spolsky has an interesting take on AJAX and JavaScript in general, and draws some interesting comparisons with the early times of the PC industry.
The basic premise of the article is that we have seen it all before when it comes to AJAX applications, and I think this premise holds up pretty well.
The only quibble I have is that Lotus 1-2-3 lasted a very long time as a product, it did not have any serious challenges until Excel on Windows matured.
Google has created an iPhone specific search page, I came across this via TUAW.
I tried the search page and it works pretty well for a demo.
What bothered me was this comment in the TUAW post:
But the problem with this goes right back to what Scott was talking about the other day– we aren’t supposed to be getting half the web on the iPhone, we’re supposed to be getting the real web. In this case, there’s not much to complain about– this really is Google, minus the extra content and the ads. However, the links actually go to regular browser windows (not iPhone formatted sites), and if you hit “More Results” at the bottom of the page, it takes you to a normal, full-screen Google page anyway. So what’s the point? Yes, this is just a demo, but why bother making an iPhone specific page in the first place? iPhone users should be able to browse to the Google homepage like everyone else.
While Apple may have meant Safari on the iPhone to allow users to browse the normal web, the reality is that the normal web is designed for displays a lot larger than that on the iPhone, even though it is an exceptional display.
Frankly, when I bring up a complex web page, such as the NY Times front page, on my iPhone, it is nice that I can see the whole page but the text looks like fly poop to me (and I have good vision) and I need to zoom to read anything.
I think it makes much more sense to have web pages specifically designed for mobile devices, so they can be optimized for smaller screens and lower bandwidth (EDGE, ahem).
Functionally I think it is much nicer for the user to get a page which they can read without having to zoom right off the bat and just scroll to read more, than getting a page which needs to be zoomed to read anything at all.
