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 ipad

Yet with the “iPad isn’t for making content” crowd, you wonder what they define as content. Twitter, apparently isn’t. Neither is writing, data-crunching, or presentations (the actions offered by the three apps Apple created itself for the iPad — all, it’s worth noting, content-creation apps). Music, out. Drawing, out. Blogging, the very format that these critiques have taken? Out. The iPad lacks a camera, yet there are photo editors for it, none of which apparently create content either. I would expect video editors to emerge shortly (probably from Apple to start), audio editing is already on the iPhone, so it’s sure to make the move (and already runs, just tiny). Is that content? Probably not. I could continue, but at some point I’m just duplicating the App Store catalog.

— Daniel Sinker, “Creation Myths: What the Argument That the iPad’s Not for Creating Content Really Tells Us”

This is why the umbrella “content” term is bad. Sure, you won’t be writing a novel on the iPad (well, probably not but who knows) but you can certainly create other forms of content.

Let’s not throw the bath-water out with the baby.

Where once it was possible, even natural, for design to happen concurrently with editorial creation, now it simply cannot keep up. The pace is too rapid.

Khoi Vinh, “Jobs Saves?”
I think Apple’s interfaces get out of the users way and teach them that their applications are for content creation and manipulation, and not as is the case here, about interface interaction. — Michael Heilmann on NoScope Rightly so, this is a classic case of abstract vs. direct manipulation. The iPad pages app lets you directly manipulate the content in a much more natural way. Word forces you, still, to decipher icons whose meaning may be decades outdated. Icon for the Save button is still a floppy disk, despite the fact that Apple hasn’t sold a machine with a floppy drive for a decade. —John Gruber, “Leaked Screenshots of Microsoft Office for Mac 2011”

I think Apple’s interfaces get out of the users way and teach them that their applications are for content creation and manipulation, and not as is the case here, about interface interaction.

— Michael Heilmann on NoScope

Rightly so, this is a classic case of abstract vs. direct manipulation. The iPad pages app lets you directly manipulate the content in a much more natural way. Word forces you, still, to decipher icons whose meaning may be decades outdated.

Icon for the Save button is still a floppy disk, despite the fact that Apple hasn’t sold a machine with a floppy drive for a decade.

—John Gruber, “Leaked Screenshots of Microsoft Office for Mac 2011”

Spatiality and NUI

I’ve written before about the differences between direct and abstract interfaces and how these differences can confuse users who aren’t used to abstracting their understanding of reality. The iPad, albeit wonderful at many things, fail to understand a concept very similar to this:

Let’s say you want to open the App Store on your iPad, and you know that you’ve put this icon at the bottom right of your apps. Turning the iPad rewraps the positions of your icons. The App Store now suddenly jumps to the middle of the second row:

While Lukas Mathis provides a few different alternate behaviors, I agree with this one most:

Another solution would be to simply keep the applications positioned as they are, and only turn the actual icons and labels.

I believe this solution is strongest because, as Lukas describes:

While the App Store is now no longer at the bottom right, it’s still in the same position. What has changed is the user’s perspective, not the arrangement of the icons. Humans are dealing with changing perspectives all the time and should still be able to identify individual applications based on their position.

One of our abilities that can be taken advantage of here is the same ability that allows us all to sit around different sides of a Monopoly game-board but still have the same understand of the game. How confusing would Monopoly be if after every person’s turn the game board reoriented itself to the current player?

But I’m telling you, the multitouch screen/software makes it very, very different from a laptop, and the screen size makes it very, very different from an iPhone. It’s something entirely new. So yes, if it appeals to you, you’d have to buy it in addition to your laptop or iPhone.

David Pogue, “Apple iPad FAQs”

Natural UI in use today.

I’ve been blowing a lot of smoke about this Natural User Interface (NUI) idea lately but that’s because I think it’s very important to the development of UI that is useable to anybody and, at the same time, a joy to use.

This is evident in two approaches to device design, Android/Windows Phone 7 Series Devices and the iPhone/iPad.

Hardware buttons are required for these devices (Android has 4 and Windows Phone 7 Series has 3) which is the equivalent of the mouse and keyboard on a personal computer (abstract interaction.) The iPhone doesn’t, instead it provides a viewport on which is displayed all the UI that you interact with using some form of direct manipulation.

To be clear, the iPhone isn’t a complete NUI experience. The iPad isn’t either, it still requires abstract concepts like clicking but the iPad is a much more complete NUI than the iPhone and the iPhone much more complete than most other devices.

On the iPad you open an album using the pinch gesture which “throws” the photos onto the screen. This gesture mimics the spreading out of the photos and the gesture’s result is what is expected when we spread out physical photos. On the iPhone the idea of photo albums is still very abstract, a collection of files in “folders” displayed as a list.

On the iPhone, a strike-through gesture (known as “swipe to delete”) is used to delete items from a list. This action mimics the crossing out of an item from a physical list and the result is a request for confirmation of deletion. Other devices require you to use arrow keys (or touch) to select an item, then use other buttons (be they hardware or virtual) to display a menu from which we select the “delete” command.

The contrast between these simple, natural, gestures and the abstract actions required when using hardware to abstract interaction (be they a “Menu” button on a phone or a mouse pointer on a personal computer) show the extent to which Natural User Interface improves user experience and reduces the need to learn how to abstract reality into computer concepts which means we can easily pick up these devices and already know how to use them.

Natural User Interface seems to be a technology that both Microsoft and Apple are heavily investing in. Microsoft Research has done a lot of public work in this arena and in terms of consumer products coming out we’re seeing Project Natal from Microsoft and the iPhone/iPad from Apple. The future of User Interaction Design is an exciting one!

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.

I think we need to change our expectations of a book. We now publish experiences (or apps, if you will) instead of books. Why have a textbook when you can have an app provides the same information through a better experience?

What happens with novels though? And other text-reliant experiences where the value is in the form just as much as the content.

Of the books we do print — the books we make — they need rigor. They need to be books where the object is embraced as a canvas by designer, publisher and writer. This is the only way these books as physical objects will carry any meaning moving forward.

via Craig Mod, “Books in the Age of the iPad”

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