Rob Adams's User Eccentric

Firefox 3 Makes the Web Safer

I recently accessed my Paypal account to fork over some money to a friend for buying me a few bottles of wine. I had also recently upgraded to Firefox 3, without spending any significant amount of time looking over the new feature list, as usual. I was pleasantly surprised when the following object suddenly decorated my address bar (which I have circled in red):

Snackr Sinks Its Teeth Into Google Reader

As a side project, I've been helping NJ out with his Snackr AIR application. Way back when he first started building Snackr, he sent me a build and I started using it. It was exactly what I needed to get back into reading my RSS feeds again, but I still liked to read some feeds (like my friends' blogs and others that I always wanted to be up-to-date with) in a regular feed reader client. It annoyed me that I had to maintain two clients, add new feeds to both, mark items read in both, etc. Then I thought "Hey, Google Reader has an API. Maybe we could use it to automatically keep the two clients in sync!" I badgered NJ to implement this feature but he doesn't use a normal feed reader so it wasn't the first thing on his priority list. Then I thought "Wait a minute, I know how to code! And I've always wanted to learn a little more Flex..." So I sat down to do it myself.

Now it's four months later and I finally have something to show for it. NJ released a new test build, 0.38 TEST, which includes my Google Reader integration feature. After backing up your Snackr database and your Google Reader feed list, download the test build and let me know what you think.

Snackr: Don't Read Blogs, Snack On Them!

My coworker and friend NJ has created a new way to read and digest your RSS-syndicated news feeds in the form of a ticker-like desktop application built in Flex and AIR called Snackr. I've been using it to help him test it out for a month or two now and I have to say it's really cool. Prior to Snackr, I read a handful of the feeds I've added to my reader application (mostly those written by my friends or coworkers) and mostly ignored everything else. I just never wanted to spend the time to slog through that huge backlog of news in one sitting, and since I only opened my feed reader once a day at best, I didn't have very many sittings. But now that new feed items scroll by the bottom or side of my desktop, I can constantly glance over at the headlines and see if anything interests me. Plus it gives me something to do during a boring meeting or to kill time between tasks (although I'll warn you - it doesn't do much to improve your productivity!)

A Pattern Library for Information Design

I'm not usually one to recycle links, but this pattern library for information design was too good to pass up. Christian Behrens catalogs around 55 different ways to display information that helps application designers and others go beyond blasé bar and pie charts when a different visualization would be more appropriate. As I covered in the FIG section on Information Design, it's important to spend time getting content displays right by thinking of them as information design problems. This website helps us get better at that by giving us some concrete new tools and techniques to play around with. I'll definitely be keeping it around to refer to later.

Found via Ethan Eismann.

Thermo: The Board Game

As many of you may know, I’m currently hard at work on Thermo (demo video), our next generation RIA design tool, along with the rest of the design team. I wanted to share one of the research techniques we’ve used that’s proven to be quite effective.

Excellent Example of Eliminating Work

Yesterday's xkcd demonstrates a FIG best practice in action:

Although one might quibble with it's means, the Wifi autoconfig program depicted here does an excellent job of following the FIG best practice "Use the impeccable memory and powerful processing abilities of computers to eliminate work for your users." More systems should attempt to follow this autoconfig program's good example.

FIG Evaluation - The New Dilbert.com

(Disclaimer - as always, the opinions expressed below are my own and are not necessarily shared by my employer.)

Dilbert.com recently relaunched with a new site design that uses primarily Flash. Good technology choice. Unfortunately, it seems to have gone downhill from there.

The new design has received quite a bit of negative user feedback, and much of this is quite justifiable. The new Dilbert may use Flash, but it uses it in many of the wrong ways.

enabled=”false” Considered Harmful

Oftentimes when designing applications, certain functionality needs to be present in some situations but not in others. The traditional way of dealing with this on the desktop is to enable the controls that provide access to that functionality when it is available and to disable them when it is not. For example, consider the following application snippet where the “Merge” function only applies when the user has selected two records.

Unfortunately, disabling controls without explanation is often a pathway to confusing your users. The problem is that disabling a control does not, by itself, provide the user with any indication of why the control is disabled. It may seem obvious to us, the system’s designers/developers, but to a new user experimenting with the application’s functions the reason the control is disabled may be quite opaque, especially if the function is far away from the means of enabling it (e.g., with application menu items). Time and again in user testing, I’ve watched participants fumble when a function they were expecting to be able to perform is inexplicably disabled.

I'm at Interaction 08

I'm currently in Savannah, Georgia for Interaction 08. So far it is shaping up to be a really cool conference. If you see me around be sure to say hi.

NJ and Steven are here as well. If you ask nicely we would love to show you the Thermo demo and get your thoughts on what we should be doing with the product!

Help Us Help Users Learn Thermo!

Are you a writer with strong design skills or a designer with strong writing skills? Would you like to work on the Thermo team? If so, I think I might have a proposition for you.

We're looking for someone who can help us create learning material to help designers get up to speed on Thermo, a new tool that will allow designers to create the next generation of rich application UIs. You'll work closely with myself, Ethan, NJ, Mark, and Steven to design and develop the way people will learn this exciting new tool. Not sure if that's an incentive or a threat, but there you go :).

If you're interested, check out the job description and email Randy Nielsen if you think its a good fit. Don't write me about it - I'll just have to forward it to him and I can't guarantee I'll do so in a timely fashion :).

Get Your Design Out of My Content

On Monday, I attended a course taught by Edward Tufte on Presenting Data and Information. I've flirted with Tufte's ideas before, and Tufte fans may recognize some of them from Designing for Flex part 5 - Designing content displays. This is the first time I've heard a summary of Tufte's work from the man himself, however, so I uncovered some ideas that build on Part 5 and offer some additional guidance.

FIG Update - Parts 7 and 8 are now live!

As many of you may have noticed, Designing for Flex - Part 7: Making your application fast went live before the holiday break. Just yesterday, Designing for Flex - Part 8: Making your application safe went live, thus completing the Designing for Flex article series! It's been a long trip (I started work on the series text itself in July) but it's finally over.

However, this doesn't mean we're done with the Flex Interface Guide or our efforts to provide you with guidelines, components, and other useful material to help you create the great experiences we all dream about. We're currently working on adding more sample components and we still have a placeholder for an official set of interface guidelines, as you may have noticed. In the meantime, it would be great to hear your feedback on what we've already published (Is it useful? Is it correct?) as well as hear what else we could be doing to help you more.

Feel free to get in touch with me directly or post to the Flex Interface Guide forum.

FIG Update - Parts 5 and 6 are now live!

Hey everyone, just a quick update on the Flex Interface Guide (FIG) project in case you hadn't already noticed. Part 5, Designing Content Displays, went live two weeks ago and Part 6, Guiding with Motion, went live today. These two chapters discuss two aspects of Flex application design that I think are of particular interest to many designers and developers since they discuss topics that are somewhat unique to Flex and Flash. Check them out, and as always, please do send me any feedback you may have.

I actually just sent the final edit of Part 7 along to the Dev Center folks, so that article should show up in a couple of weeks. Part 8 should follow shortly after the holiday break. Once I've got those off my plate, I'm hoping to pick up the slack on this little blog project you're reading right now...

RIA Accessibility and the Law

I found an interesting news article on the IxDA list today concerning an accessibility lawsuit brought against Target by the National Federation of the Blind. One of the findings of the federal district court was that "web sites such as Target.com are required by California law to be accessible".

Now, ever since the early days of the Americans with Disabilities Act, government websites have had to adhere to minimum accessibility requirements defined by the section 508 guidelines. In general this is a good thing - government websites should be accessible to all citizens regardless of their physical capabilities. However, privately owned websites were not, to my knowledge, generally considered to be under the same constraints. Following the section 508 guidelines was generally considered a best practice, but it was up to each private company or individual to determine how closely they needed to adhere to the guidelines for their business goals.

MAX BOF on the FIG

This may be a little late in coming, but I wanted to let everyone know I'm giving a Birds-of-a-Feather (BOF) session at MAX 2007 on the FIG tonight at 7:30 pm CT in room 178A. If you're at MAX right now, swing on by! I'll show off the stuff we've made, sneak some of the stuff we haven't published yet, and I hope to hear from all of you to see what you'd like us to do with the FIG in the future.

NJ will be there as well.