Ludwig Wendzich

y'know that guy from nz

Who is this guy?

His name is Ludwig Wendzich and he doesn't usually speak in the third person. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand after emigrating from South Africa when he was seven years old.

He has a passion for art and design. He is currently a web designer stroke developer who has a particular interest in designing the user experience; mixing usability and accessibility with aesthetics to maximize efficiency and enjoyment.

Scrapbook

, Inspirational stuff I found online

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tagged as UI design

Grip Limited

Uses the same type of interfacing tool agnosticism I’m attempting with Weekly Retrospect.

 Complete UI fail in real life. So I’ve used these automattic checkouts before, I love them! (Though I wonder if the amount lost to theft is less than, equal to or greater than employing a checkout operator.) The problem I encountered today was that I used cash for the first time (I always use EFTPOS) but couldn’t figure out where $10 of my change was until a lady, seemingly employed to help people understand these machines, pointed out that the change in Note form come out below the scanner. Completely isolated from all the other interaction points regarding money is (the top right.) Arg, why?!

Complete UI fail in real life.

So I’ve used these automattic checkouts before, I love them! (Though I wonder if the amount lost to theft is less than, equal to or greater than employing a checkout operator.)

The problem I encountered today was that I used cash for the first time (I always use EFTPOS) but couldn’t figure out where $10 of my change was until a lady, seemingly employed to help people understand these machines, pointed out that the change in Note form come out below the scanner. Completely isolated from all the other interaction points regarding money is (the top right.)

Arg, why?!

That last point is the most important. Other than “looking different” the change doesn’t do anything helpful. It’s a huge usability loss for an awful lot of people.

— Scott Richie, “It’s time to fix window controls”

While design the UI for Weekly Retrospect I try to innovate but will only break convention when it serves a higher purpose than just being different.

The next time you’re constructing a user interface, you should absolutely follow Fitts’ law. It just makes sense. But don’t forget to follow the opposite of Fitts’ law, too — uncommon or dangerous UI items should be difficult to click on!

— Jeff Atwood, “The Opposite of Fitt’s Law”

It’s interesting that the examples he uses, I believe, are bad ones. I think the UI of GMail is worlds better than Wordpress, but that might be that the complete experience is so much better and not just about these specific examples.

52 Weeks of UX: 10 Principles of UX

3. Great User Experiences are Invisible: When people are having a great experience, they rarely notice the hard work that has been put into place to make it happen. This is as it should be…our job as UX professionals is to be so successful that nobody talks about us.

I completely disagree. A good user experience is noticeable and more importantly, memorable. That’s why I switched to Mac, that’s why I go to certain movie theatres even though there are closer ones, that’s why I always buy this one particular brand of car: that’s how you get loyalty.

Is the user always right?

Recent fuss has been made about the Bloomberg Terminal and how it’s users refuse to use anything other than the current, complex and terrible design.

Simplifying the interface of the terminal would not be accepted by most users because, as ethnographic studies show, they take pride on manipulating Bloomberg’s current complex interface. The pain inflicted by blatant UI flaws such as black background color and yellow and orange text is strangely transformed into the rewarding experience of feeling and looking like a hard-core professional.

The Bloomberg Terminal interface looks terrible, but it allows traders and other users to pretend you need to be experienced and knowledgeable to use it.

—Dominique Leca

According to Lucas Mathis, this type of reaction from users is acceptable:

If your users reject an improved user interface, you need to start out by figuring out exactly what motivates them to prefer the more complex solution.

But I’d like to question, is it really? Making jobs more difficult in order to protect the people in them — is that a good enough reason not to improve user interface, not to make things easier. Is it really about protecting jobs or a sense of self-worth or is there a way users can feel like they aren’t being treated as imbeciles and still make their lives easier and the work more productive.

My iPhone is not as complex as Android devices but I love it and as a geek, I’d hate to think that I’d ever give up control over my devices but I have, very much so. But Apple have figured out how to make me like it.

They didn’t listen to me, or the rest of their customers: they knew what was right for us (what we needed), and gave us that instead of what we thought we wanted.

Our goal isn’t to create new technologies. I mean, that’s what I do, but our goal is to create new experiences.

—Dr. Richard Marks on Episode 7 of The Engadget Show about developing the Playstation Move.

A continuance of the theme to develop for people and not technology/devices.

The Anatomy of Scrolling

Developing Weekly Retrospect’s UI has got me thinking about a lot of different interactions that I’ve never thought about before, specifically because of the difference between abstract manipulation of content (using a mouse) and direct manipulation of content (using your hand.)

I never quite understood why my grandparents said “Go up” when I used to scroll email or web pages for them (before she learnt how to use a mouse) when she actually wanted me to scroll down. Even my mother’s older sister would also use the terminology of “scrolling up” when she actually meant scrolling down.

I now see that they saw the content moving upwards so they thought it was “going up” when in fact I was moving the “viewport” down. The viewport is what we see at any point in time. When we read a book we move our viewport by looking over to the next page. When we read a newspaper we move the viewport around the the newspaper that we hold in front of us. Very seldom do we see the content moving around within our viewport (unless it is actually moving), instead it is our viewport that moves around the content. So when they see content moving up within their viewport they interpret this not as the viewport itself moving down the page but as the physically content moving upward.

I came across this issue when coding the Natural Human Interface interactions for Weekly Retrospect. Keyboard keys move the viewport around (like traditional scrollers) so a right arrow key will move the “viewport” to the right. To achieve the same effect with a Natural Human Interface we have to come up with an interaction (or gesture) whose effect in reality would mimic what is being shown on screen. As what is been shown on screen looks like content moving from the right of the viewport to the left of the viewport, an appropriate gesture is one which would physically move the content, like dragging from right to left.

So a motion which goes toward the left translates to a keyboard key that points to the right. This isn’t amazing or revolutionary, just something I thought was interesting. An understanding of abstract (Mouse and Keyboard) and direct (Natural Human Interfaces) manipulation and why they relate to each other the way they do.

This is also why I believe the iPad is going to be so revolutionary. My grandparents and aunt who never got the hang of abstract manipulation won’t need to because their interaction with the device will be direct (natural).

[Flash 10 is required to watch video]

Natural Human Interface, meet the web.

So I’ve posted about my experiments with UI lately, specifically trying to bridge the gap between point-n-click, touch-based and Natural Human Interface (ie. Gestures, at the moment with my hand in the air, a la Project Natal.) Here’s a demo video of Weekly Retrospect working with iPinchMe, a Mac app that interprets gestures out of video received from your iSight feed

I’d like to thank the developer of iPinchMe, Andreas Pfadler, for, firstly, developing this app, and secondly, helping me write the script to get it to work. After some clarification from Andreas, this is the script that you use:

on handle_event(event_msg, state)

	if event_msg is equal to "right" then
		tell application "System Events" to key code 124
	end if

	if event_msg is equal to "left" then
		tell application "System Events" to key code 123
	end if

	if event_msg is equal to "up" then
		tell application "System Events" to key code 126
	end if

	if event_msg is equal to "down" then
		tell application "System Events" to key code 125
	end if

	if event_msg is equal to "green" then
		tell application "System Events" to key code 36
	end if
	
	if event_msg is equal to "blue" then
		tell application "System Events" to key code 36
	end if


end handle_event

After you’ve initialised iPinchMe, make sure Safari is active so it is sending the commands to the right window.

Swipe to Interface

Bill Gates has been going blowing the horn of Natural Interfaces for a long time and for as long I thought it was along the lines of his tablet computing spiel, however both seem to be coming to fruition at the moment. Bill Gates’ longtime friend, Steve Jobs, looks like he will finally be able to make a success of the tablet form factor and Bill’s other Steve, Balmer, is leading his former company to delivering Project Natal this year, a project that will deliver on the promise of Natural Interfaces.

Both these products require a new way of thinking about interaction design. Both are much clumsier than the mouse or keyboard and so interaction needs to be simplified. Since the resolution of control has decreased dramatically in these form factors, the resolution of the objects that need to be controlled must be scaled up.

Soon websites will be available not only on your computer screen but also on your iPad, your iPhone and your television screen hooked up to Project Natal or similar. The old way of interaction with the web won’t work with Project Natal and although possible with the iPad/iPhone it definitely isn’t ideal. I wanted to design a UI that would work across all these different platforms, and work well.

I recently launched the Weekly Retrospect which was originally going to be my attempt at curating and designing an online exhibition of the things I found (and most probably posted to this website) that week. What I found instead was an opportunity to rethink the way users interact with websites.

This will be an ongoing experiment as I try to refine the interface for various modes of interaction. Currently the website works without Javascript (or CSS), using the keyboard or mouse. It works well on portrait and landscape screens (your laptop and iPad catered for.) The next step is getting this to work with some sort of Human Interface — translating the swipe of a hand into the next arrow on a keyboard.

I found iGesture (pictured above) but haven’t yet figured out how to get it to work. I will continue to try and work on this and see how I can develop this style of UI.

Currently navigating between items and issues is simple enough, navigation within an item (say playing the video or jumping between links in an article) is not quite yet possible but I hope to introduce this along the way — most probably making use of the Enter/Return key to play video/launch full-screen image/launch the permalink/reveal interface to jump between links in an article.

How do you think this system can improve? Can you help with the Natural Interface problem?

Thinking for a Living

I love the interaction model here, utilising different planes for different ways to organise content. Might want to use this for the “issues” design for my theory journal.

iPad Application Design: back to reality.

I thought the success of the computer was because it was abstracting reality which enabled it to speed up workflow. Apparently the future is skinning that abstraction so it simulates reality.

My grandmother will understand it much easier I agree.

Elsewhere

Where else am I online?

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Who I've met