Warning: you are about to read a bit of a ramble…

Slashdot has a discussion about an interview of several folks from the kde usability and gnome usability projects.

While all of this was not very interesting in and of itself it did lead me to spend some time thinking about file system metadata (see question six in the interview). Most of the projects that I have seen trying to do interesting things with file system metadata have had horrible user-interfaces. The two applications that I currently use that make excellent use of metadata are Microsoft’s Outlook and Real’s RealOne Player.

• both make adding information trivial
• both allow quick browsing based on the metadata
• both make it easy to change and create metadata (RealOne via CDDB and Outlook via drag and drop)
• both allow easy scanning and previewing of files
• both maintain their own metadata databases (although RealOne does write metadata into mp3 files)

I would like to see both of these merge some of the concepts from the flamenco project into their browsing interfaces.

I am pretty well organized on my computer… I like to keep everything in nice little hierarchies. But I often get into trouble when when my hierarchies don’t fit anymore (if I start working on three significant — worthy of nodes — subprojects). It is always a chore to decide the best way to classify things. Of course, this is likely more of a problem for me because I am lazy and a perfectionist.

Both of the above are applications designed for a specific tasks. They are able to more easily add interesting features (and in fact have to add features to survive). But I have never used an OS with extensive metadata facilities built into the file system (or somewhere near the file system level). I have seen a few projects to add such features but they are always scary because the limit data portability.

The gnome usability page led me to the list of references which reminded me of the humane interface project. The concepts sounded nice in the book but sound less appealing when I consider actually using the software.

I took my almost-three year old to the public library tonite. He wanted to play with the computers and chose to play a Magic School Bus game. The game was designed with older kids in mind so he did not fully understand what he was doing.

At one point he became frustrated during the process of designing a character and asked me, "dad, where is the back button". I explained to him that there wasn’t one… he said "oh ok" with a sad look in his eye and kept playing.

A lot of can be learned from that simple story:

• the back button is an easy to grasp concept
• the ability to undo or back-up should be pervasive
• children can learn how to use computers at a very young age
• don’t use frames without paying attention to details
• the little things matter
• in certain situations content trumps usability

Thanks to andersja I just found this interesting piece of software. It looks like Uzilla solves some of the problems that I brought up in a meeting yesterday. We were discussing how to easily run and evaluate a large scale usability test of a web-based product.

I could not figure out how to email a bookmark group using Mozilla.

I was at home doing some research this morning and collected a bunch of tabs that I wanted to have at work for later… I ended up having to copy and paste each of the URL’s. Every piece of data that I see in a ny program I see should be easily serialized and deserialized via email.

An interesting set of guidelines on Secure Interaction Design.

This has inspired me to start writing up some usability principles to post on my website… I am not really an expert but it will help me formalize my thoughts.

Who ever added the Exit menu item to mozilla is mean… I always use it thinking it will just close the current window… instead it closes all of my mozilla windows… not good.

David Ward: Dasher: Intro

• GNOME Human Interface Guidelines (1.0)
• Aqua Human Interface Guidelines
• Official Guidelines for User Interface Developers and Designers (Microsoft)