The use of QR Codes has increased recently as a simply way to transfer data from a computer to a phone. In the United States, Android phones have lead the charge. Many developers have used them as a way to link customers to their apps in the Android Market.
While this experience has worked great for the user that visits a site by computer, it fails when visiting a site by phone. You can’t point your phone’s camera at your phone’s screen. That’s why I propose a new standard for using QR Codes on websites.
When posting a QR Code on your site, always:
Make your QR Code at least 100×100 pixels for easy scanning.
Put the link in the alt and title parameters of the QR Code image
Encase your QR Code image in a link tag that has the same link as your code.
By doing this, you will ensure that you are maximizing a person’s ability to make use of your QR Code. Those users that are visiting your website via their phone’s browser, will be able to click on the code with the same result as if they scanned it. Users that visit your site via browser, can still scan the code, and will be able to see what the QR Code is providing by hovering their mouse over the image.
A very thought provoking image appeared on Astronomy Picture Of The Day yesterday. The boys at NSF ran the sun’s light through a spectrum to see what visible light the sun produces. As you can see from the image, there are swatches of color our sun doesn’t make.
This understanding might have a practical application in the Usability space. We as humans have evolved over the years to see color. But, humans may have difficulty discerning certain colors due to their rarity in nature. This may be something to take into account when trying to decide on the use and application of certain colors in the products we create.
Becoming better at Interaction Design requires constant practice. You can’t become an expert at a field without 10 years of experience, at least according to Malcolm Gladwell. If that theory holds true, there aren’t many experts in the field out there since it’s only been around for about 20 years, and only gained real attention in the last five.
I myself still feel quite the novice to Interaction Design. My background is in Computer Science. While this has helped bridge the gap between design process and development process in a corporate environment, it hasn’t helped much with cognitive psychology or design research. For that, I ravenously devour books on the subject, and make it a point to design every day.
Designing every day doesn’t require a lot of time. In most cases, it’s just a few seconds. My popular tapestry is the office kitchen, since it’s in a constant state of disarray, and problems surface easily. Take for instance the milk for coffee.
Here we see the creamer cartons as someone placed them into the refrigerator. Which of these is the open one? It can be hard to tell. They’re all facing the same way, some are in front, others are in back, colors differ. In a few seconds, I can redesign this space to make it clear as to which of these cartons is the open one to be used.
If you truly love Interaction Design and it’s something you want to be, seek out small design projects throughout your day. Constantly analyse the world around you. Look for areas of difficulty or confusion no matter how small and trivial. Seek to make a space more functional when you leave, than it was when you entered it. Practice makes perfect.
My Nexus One Car Dock came in last week, and I’ve forced myself to use it over the last few days. Unfortunately, the experience surrounding the dock isn’t good.
What I expected from the car dock:
To hold and charge my phone
To make and receive phone calls
To act as a navigation device
To play music on my car stereo
To Hold And Charge My Phone
More often then not, your phone is an after thought to driving. Your phone lives in your pocket or purse, and there it remains until it is required. Mounting your phone to the dock often happens after you’re already driving, and you suddenly need directions, or want to listen to music, or make a call. The ability to easily mount the phone to the dock is essential. Google simply was unable to get it right. The main problem is with the clip system that holds the phone in the dock.
When you try and put the phone into the dock, the clip gets caught on the seam between the battery cover and the phone casing. The first few days of use, no amount of reasonable pressure could be applied to clip the phone in using one hand. Mounting the phone was a two hand job. It took me a few days to figure out out how to hold the phone to the mount, while simultaneously pushing on the clip.
Two handed mounting of a phone to a car dock is simply unacceptable (you’re driving remember). The ability to mount the phone with one hand is a learned process. This issue detracts from the initial experience with the dock, making it feel clumsy.
To Make And Receive Phone Calls
Sending and receiving calls while driving is risky business. Distracted driving accidents are on the rise, and many states are passing laws for banning hand held cell phone calls. In order for this car dock to succeed, it should make the process of making and receiving call easier. Again, I simply didn’t experience it.
Mainly, the speakers on the car dock are simply not able to produce audio loud enough to hear. I talked with my mom for over an hour while on the road last Friday. Over that time, I continuously fidgeted with the sound volume and positioning of the dock, but could never achieve the voice clarity I expected. The voice seemed to fade in and out of clarity, and couldn’t compete with the road noise. This problem is due to how volume works when mounted on the dock.
There are two things that are controlling volume; there’s the phone volume, and the device volume. The phone volume decides how loud it’s going to push out the sound to the device. The device volume is how loud your device is going to interpret the sound it’s being pushed. So, if you’re call volume (or navigation voice) isn’t set to max before mounting the phone, the dock won’t play louder, even if you turn your device to max. You have to unmount the phone from the dock in order to increase volume, since the dock obscures the Nexus One’s volume rocker, then remount the phone.
The docks speakers themselves, are simply inadequate. Because they face away from the driver, the sound has to reflect off your windshield and come back to you. Even at full power volume, on the phone and dock, I simply couldn’t clearly hear my calls over the sound of the road. What Google could have done is make the dock speakers full volume, left the Nexus One volume rocker open, and provided a stereo jack to send sound to your car’s speakers.
One last peeve is the “slide to answer” feature of the Nexus One. While the phone is docked, it becomes difficult to accurately slide your thumb vertically across the screen. My right hand thumb keeps wanting to go up, and to the right. This continuously makes me drop the button. I find myself watching the device, instead of the road, so that I accurately complete this gesture. A large and in charge dedicated answer button on the dock would have been a welcome addition.
To Act As A Navigation Device
One of the popular features of the Nexus One is it’s out-of-the-box ability to be used as a turn-by-turn navigation device. Google marketed the dock as a way to enhance this feature, and it’s clear that they felt this was the dock’s main purpose (however short sighted). I’m sorry to say that the dock does nothing to enhance this experience.
To start, the dock does not allow the holder to be infinitely rotated to the left or right. The cords running up through the inside of the mount, delivering power from the base, would eventually break if they allowed a full 360 degree turn. This creates an portrait/landscape issue when the phone is mounted on your dashboard. Right rotation is prevented by the stopper. So, rather than a simply 90 degree turn to the right, a full 270 degree turn to the left is required. Flipping between landscape and portrait views is cumbersome, and unforgiving. A different positioning of the stopper would have solved this.
Second, navigating to places with the dock is actually harder to do while docked. One of the great features of the Nexus One Navigator was the ability to create destination shortcuts on my home screen. All I had to do is tap the icon, and up launches the navigator and routes me to where I want to go. The dock buries my shortcuts behind another layer, the car dock home screen. Some customization, like favorites, to the car dock home screen is need.
Last, like the in call volume issues I described earlier, Google’s navigator suffers from the same volume issues as in call volume while docked. It still stands that obstructing the volume rocker, and not providing a stereo connection was a mistake.
To Play Music Over My Car Stereo
I commute a distance from home to work, my ability to play music, podcasts, and audiobooks while I drive is important to me. It’s clear that playing music while the phone is docked was never thought of by Google as a use case. Shocking!
What I expected was for the dock to have a 3.5 stereo jack, and to pass music audio to it via the Bluetooth Advanced Audio Device Protocol (A2DP). A reasonable expectation since that’s how they did it with the Desktop Dock. They don’t. If fact, it almost appears like they made no effort at all to think about the audio experience of the Nexus One while docked.
What you have to do instead, is insert your car’s auxiliary audio cable into the 3.5 stereo jack on the Nexus One phone itself. While this will send music to your car’s stereo, you can’t control the volume, since the volume rocker is covered up (as I stated earlier). Also, since the sound is coming in as analog, instead of digitally via Bluetooth, you get a whine and ticking noise from your car’s alternator as it charges your phone. Had they provided the stereo jack on the dock itself, it’s conceivable they could have added in some hardware to properly dampen the feedback, and provided a superior sound.
Last, there is no shortcut in the Car Dock Home Screen to the audio player. A media button would have been nice. Sometime to easily bring you to the music player, or Listen, or Pandora.
In Conclusion
Google’s Nexus One Car Dock only provided me with a kludgy and frustrating experience. Other than it’s ability to hold the device in a visible position, it doesn’t offer a single enhancement to the phone, and only serves to hinder it’s use. Even a few hours of use case testing would have discovered most of these issues. Chalk it up to more Developer Underpants from Google.
Anyone that knows me, knows I’m a huge fan of icons. When used properly, they can add so much to a design. Over the last few weeks, my friend and fellow designer has linked me to a wealth of icon resources that I’d like to share:
For those of you that don’t already know, Apple Inc, release a new tablet computing product called the iPad. It’s hard to make judgment on a device when it’s on stage with Steve Jobs, and the whole energy of the release would make you want a pile of crap if it was sprinkled with gold.
So, I let it marinate a bit overnight, and have come to a conclusion.
What Apple Got Right
While I haven’t handled it yet, I feel fairly confident they got the form factor right. Everyone on the stage, and in the videos appeared to use it with ease, and handle it confidently. It certainly “looks” like the tablet computer we all dreamed existed.
The other aspect I think Apple got right, was the User Interface. Traditionally, as with Microsoft Tablets, software companies would just slap a few band-aids on a desktop platform OS and say “Done!” I like the fact that Apple is taking the path less traveled on this; requiring software companies to rewrite their applications to work differently with hand based interactions.
The polish. When the eBook application rotated like a giant bookshelf to reveal a bookstore on the back, I started feeling warm inside. Then, the purchased book floated up, the shelf rotated back, and the books all got out of the way to make room for the new book’s decent; I wanted the iPad to have my baby. Each animation is short enough to not steal from the action, and designed to provide some feedback as to what, or why something is happening. The polish that Apple applies to their applications is undeniably fantastic.
Lastly, the price. $499 for a base model surpassed all my expectations.
What They Got Wrong
There’s already plenty of posts out there that mention it’s lack of Adobe Flash support, multitasking, and camera. Although I agree with all of them, I don’t want to spend more time on that. Here’s a few more thing I feel are missing.
The first thing that came to my mind, was a lack of synergy between the iPad and the iPhone, or other mobile phone devices. The iPad is designed to be a light, and easily portable device. Whenever anyone travels, they all carry around their cell phone. I would have liked to see an iPhone pass pictures to the iPad. I would have liked to see an iPhone share it’s Internet service via Bluetooth DUN. I would have liked to see the contacts application in the iPad automatically dial a number on a paired iPhone. None of these were demonstrated, nor hinted to.
Using the tired iPhone desktop was a huge disappointment. Apple had an opportunity here, to truly rethink their traditional home screen. I would have liked to see something like Bumptop (see video below). Their lack of ingenuity and interaction with their home screen is in sharp contrast to the polish from the rest of their applications. Their focus on the singular application for everything, leaves me skeptical about the future of the iPad/iPhone platform.
Oh yeah, one last thing, the name iPad was a terrible choice.
Conclusion
Still, my opinion remains undecided. There are things to like, and things to hate about this device. Furthermore, it’s not even available to purchase yet, and I haven’t had my hands on one. It could very well be that many of the cons were simply not demoed due to lack of time or perspective. All will be revealed in upcoming months.
I was forwarded this article by a friend (Thanks Lauren), which is a very interesting read. You see the extension if icon detail being applied all over the place, especially in operating systems like Linux, where every distro release adds a new set of icons.
One of the main topics discussed at the IXDA Interaction09 conference was, how to change complicated stuff. Marc Rettig, lead an hour long session on the topic. He tried to establish how to make a change, the new normal. In summary, he basically made these two points:
“Work of change is social. Deliberatly plan to be social and nurture that.”
“Relationships are more important than the things themselves.”
Finding ways of creating those relationships is not easy work. Especially, when the change that you’re trying to make, is more difficult than the alternative. In the video above, the designers use fun in order to change people’s behavior. The fun of using the stairs, creates a relationship between the task and the individual, bridging the gap of difficulty.
When creating solutions for professional business clients, do not overlook the power of making things fun. While on the surface it may be viewed as childish, or unprofessional, making something a game may be able the achieve the result you’re after.
Apparently, it was interface day on the web last weekend. There were three large announcements of different gestural interface concepts this weekend. I have to say, I like Microsoft’s, “Computer, make me a sandwich” approach the best. Check them all out!
This site is Brenton Klik's blog about Interaction Design, and User Experience.
Brenton is an Interaction Designer for web, mobile, and desktop applications. He has worked for SAP America as a design consultant to develop a Content Management System for their marketing department. Prior to that, he consulted for Carrier Corporation to create web based training simulations for their products.
