Novelty and Innovation

By Matt in Design, Commentary, Usability

Simply new and different do not innovation make. In fact, the difference is pretty substantial. According to the OED:

innovative: featuring new methods; advanced and original.
novel: new or unusual in an interesting way.

I was spurred to write this commentary after seeing a Tumbl’d photo of a creative bathroom arrangement by serial entrepreneur and innovator Jakob Lodwick. Here’s the photo, for reference:

While I find the arrangement of the toilet paper dispenser interesting, and love that there are people like Jakob out there willing to publish this sort of thing when they discover it, I take issue with it being called “innovation.” The bathroom does feature “new methods” (or at least one), and, hey, it’s plenty original, but does it fulfill the third requirement? Is it sufficiently advanced?

I call foul. It’s interesting that the toilet paper dispenser is screwed into the chair, but at the same time it’s a waste of a chair, arguably one of the most functionally perfect inventions in human history. There would perhaps be merit to this if it were posited as an art piece with some message behind the configuration, but that doesn’t seem to be the case here. I think it would make much more sense to put the basket on the floor, keep the roll in its usual place — at arm’s length on the wall — and then have an extra chair to use. From a functional design standpoint, it seems more like a misstep than innovation to me. As it stands, the chair is impaired for other uses and the toilet paper dispenser can now be accidentally removed from the bathroom.

I don’t mean in any way to single out Jakob or indict his creativity. In fact, I’m not so certain the post wasn’t entirely tongue-in-cheek. Rather, his photo-and-single-big-word post prompted me to write something I’d been meaning to articulate for a while. I think in the slightly feverish atmosphere surrounding the software and web development community nowadays, there is a tendency to get a little too excited about things before they’ve either been properly examined or vetted by history.

Novelty is a good thing, and I’d hate to live in a world without it. In fact, a lot of innovation — I’d even wager the vast majority of innovation — comes from experimenting with novel ideas. But novelty is not innovation on its own, no more than simply experimenting with food, machinery, or art (regardless of your credentials) is innovative on its own. The same goes for software. It’s the reason things that momentarily enthrall us eventually fade: many of them are just novel. The things that stick, on the other hand — the wheel, the chair, rock music, Craigslist, the MP3, and the Post-It (literally) — those are innovative.

Quick Update

By Cody in Commentary, Successes, Business, Applications

Sakuzaku’s Getting Press

Sakuzaku has been busy the last few weeks negotiating some new projects and putting the finishing touches on a few that are nearing launch. We’ve also been making some press. We’ve been featured on 37signals’ Signal vs. Noise blog, as well as had one of our posts ripped off wholesale by the global usability consulting firm Etre.

• Sakuzaku on Signal vs. Noise
• Etre’s plagiarized version of our post
• Chris Messina found Addressful!

(Etre’s post now has less plagiarized content than originally and properly attributes us, following a call to their office in London.)

Twhither

We’re currently waiting on the Twitter folks to add Twhither to their whitelist. Now that the SXSW hubbub has died down, we’re expecting a launch any day now.

Jobs

We’re still on the lookout for a software engineer and graphic designer. Head on over to our Jobs page for more details.

Concerning the Mutilation of Typography

By Cody in Constructive Criticism, Design, Commentary

Say, just as a hypothetical situation, that you’re writing a book on phonological analysis. Since the entire book deals with the investigation of representations of human articulatory gestures, a good design tip might be to set the book in a type that actually includes the entire inventory of necessary IPA glyphs. It’s not like such fonts don’t exist — Adobe alone, in fact, has two: ITC Stone Phonetic Standard (in both a serif and sans-serif) and Times Phonetic Standard.

I really can’t deconstruct this design tip into constituent axioms any further than by simply stating it as I have done. It seems self-evident — like that stuff in the Preamble of the Constitution.

But, apparently, it’s not, because someone decided to set the entirety of just such a book with two completely different typefaces — mixing them not only within the same line, but within the same words.

All the IPA symbols that don’t exist in the book’s predominant face are set in a totally different face. The offending characters jump off the page at you in a jarring and discomforting way, because they have a variable stroke width while the dominant typeface has a uniform one, serifs where the principal face has none, a humanist axis in contrast to the other’s rationalist one, and even an x-height inconsistent with that of the main face. Bringhurst is turning over in his grave (and he’s not even dead). The guilty party here is whoever designed Introducing Phonology by David Odden. (Just in case you had any doubt, Tschichold’s golden canon of page construction unfortunately was lost on him, too.)

This example is a good cautionary tale for many things. One, perhaps, is the importance of not coming up to your own solutions to problems that are already solved. Not only does the designer’s solution look awful, but it certainly wasn’t an expedient one. A quick Google search for an IPA typeface would have taken far less time than manually setting each IPA character in a different face. (Unless, of course, the designer did something even more cringe-inducing, like editing the font the book uses to include the glyphs of the secondary IPA font.)

Another is that a designer should really always start designing with the constraints of the particular problem in mind. A textbook on linguistics requires IPA symbols; therefore, the choice of typefaces—ceteris paribus—is constrained from the beginning to those which meet that requirement. Rather than pick a typeface on some other basis, without regard for the salient constraint, and then coming up with a hack to sidestep the inevitable problem, it would have been by far preferable to choose a face first that works best for the context of the design application in which it will be used.

Usability on Facebook: The People Take Charge

By Matt in Information Design, User Science, Design, Commentary, Usability

Something is happening on Facebook, but it’s not the sort of thing you’re going to read about on Techmeme. It has to do with usability; specifically, the readability of a collection of comma-separated interests in a person’s profile. Apparently some people think the lists are too close together, and because Facebook doesn’t allow the sort of customization that MySpace does, the users are bending what they can’t break.

For those unaware, one of the default applications that comes “installed” on all Facebook profiles is the “Information” application, which allows the user to list their points of contact as well as their interests, favorite books, movies, and music, and a few other mundane details. Here’s what mine looks like, for reference.

But recently, on a few of my friends’ profiles, I started to notice something different. Here, a friend has separated her massive list of interests with a single dash.

For some, a single dash isn’t enough:

So: users obviously think their interests are hard to read when smushed so close together, right? Or is it just a trend they’re following?

People gussy up their MySpace profiles for a plethora of reasons, none of which we would assume is very practical. I’m sure they’d do the same on Facebook if profiles there were customizable, but it’s interesting to see that this change is one that has to do with usability. The choice and arrangement of applications on one’s profile are one of the most customizable aspects of Facebook, but also prone to increasingly random placement as their number rises on a given profile page. Unlike the placement of applications, this dashes alteration is deliberate. Or is it? I decided to find out. I asked the two friends behind the profiles above about their choice:

Hi! I’m writing up a post for the Sakuzaku blog about something I noticed on your and a few other Facebook profiles. You separate your interests, music, TV shows, etc. with little dashes, like this: [Here I provided an example.]

I find it really interesting that you and a bunch of other people are doing this, and I wanted to ask whether you began doing it yourself or you noticed it somewhere else first? Do you remember where you first saw it, and when? Why, in your own words, do you separate them that way?

I had my replies in only a few hours. C— wrote:

Hiya! Well, actually, I was editing my profile one day and saw that it was a mite long-winded… I wanted to make it look less cluttered and easier to read. A couple of years ago, I had an even longer list of quotations, because Facebook didn’t have as much of a character limit. So, I used a separator at that point too, but it was a long row of stars (the Shift-8 kind). However, with the new character limits, I couldn’t do that anymore. Plus, the areas besides my quote wall were looking kind of cluttered too. So, the dash just seemed like the best solution. It was the first thing I came up with, after I realized I couldn’t do the stars anymore.

Note that she’d been doing it for years, and only recently switched from a row of asterisks to double-dashes because of a character limit.

Coincidentally, the other friend I asked had stopped “dashing” her profile by the time I got around to asking. K— replied:

I actually began doing that on my own when I saw that it was sort of hard to distinguish between what was in what section without a space in between just because of the amount of text I put in there. It doesn’t keep a space between sections if you press enter a few times, except for between the last section and about me. I’m really organized like that, so it was bothering me. I’m not really sure why I changed it back… I think it’s because I started deleting sections and just putting my music and my about me and then gradually added the others again over a short period of time.

Both mentioned, in their own words, that it was about usability: “I wanted to make it look less cluttered and easier to read.” “I saw that it was sort of hard to distinguish between what was in what section without a space in between just because of the amount of text I put in there.” Regardless of whether their desire to separate things visually is driven by a desire to draw more focused attention to their interests, the fact remains that they believe they’re correcting an error in Facebook’s design judgment. This is bolstered by the particularly interesting claim that they each made the decision independently. In a way, they were designing with their “users” in mind: the people consuming their profiles.

The central argument of the piece I published last year, in response to Clay Shirky’s article on A Brief Message about the iPod and MySpace, was that good design is not necessarily arrogance. But there was something else I hinted at: users care about usability, but don’t realize they do. Most people probably aren’t even familiar with the term on a daily basis, but they could probably give you examples of what it means in an applied sense, at least. Thus the popularity of the “beautiful and useful” iPod — it’s popular because it’s pretty and the easiest-to-use MP3 player on the market. They likely can’t tell you that it’s a masterpiece of usability engineering, but they can tell you that they like how it “just works.” Like the iPod, Facebook is a tool that is both usable and popular: A social network done right.

So what does it all mean? I think there are two important and intriguing things to take away from this.

The first is that once users are committed to something (or even, indeed, forced to use it for lack of alternatives), they will change what they think isn’t perfect, to the best of their ability, to adapt the thing to their own standards of usability. Ergo, iPod cases to prevent scratching, and dashes separating big lists of interests in Facebook. (If they can’t change it enough, of course, they’ll leave, if they can.) Secondly, trends in style (especially in technological contexts) inevitably include elements of usability — however unnoticeable they might be to the people participating in the trends.

Sometimes the most fascinating and telling elements of the user experience are found in the smallest of details. Do you agree? Have you seen anything else like this on the Web?

Two Leopard Bugs: Followup

By Matt in OS X, Design, Commentary

Just about two months ago I identified two visual bugs in Leopard that were annoying me: application switcher icons were darkening, and Mail wasn’t properly changing the font color of quoted text. I’ve come up with a reproducible case for the former and a workaround for the latter.

I haven’t the faintest idea why, but if your cursor is in motion over the application switcher while it’s appearing (we’re talking fractions of a second), the application icon over which your cursor was moving will be darkened. Here’s a video demonstrating the oddity. While I hesitate to call this a 100% reproducible case, I am able to trigger the bug on my machine reliably at any time. Reports from readers such as yourself are, of course, appreciated.

And for getting properly-colored indented quotes in Mail, you have two options. First, the workaround: cut the offending text and any leading or trailing whitespace and paste to an empty text document in your favorite editor, and then cut it from there and paste back into Mail. The text will have lost whatever it is that causes the color issue. This is, admittedly, ridiculous. Thankfully, your second option works just as well and is a lot easier: just ignore it. It may display incorrectly before being sent, but once sent, the quoted text in your delivered messages will not stay uncolored, so you don’t need to worry about your recipients seeing something unexpected.

Minor offenses though they may be, attempting to find the cause of bugs like these is a valuable exercise for the developing and curious alike. We’ve filed bug reports through Apple’s Radar Bug Report system for the switcher and Mail issues: #5671975 and #5671970 respectively. Though 10.5.1 brought no cure, we can always hope for a fix in future point releases.