Mint Usability

A while ago I stumbled upon this article (Smashing magazine) about Mac OS X usability highlights, after reading it for a while I couldn’t take it anymore. It was a classic case of cherrypicking things to make A look better than B, and all this in the name of usability, my favourite issue. So, after a month (started the post then moved to another country, started a school etc. and now, finally, finished it), here we go; Debunking Mac OS X usability highs.

One of the problems with the article – alongside others, is that it gives very limited set of examples for given area and via that extremely filtered results makes the assumption that OS X does the whole thing better. Someone would say that the whole list is just cherrypicked to make the OS X look better than it really is. Like claiming that OS X is more intuitive than the rest of the competition because it is apparently easier to install software in it, which even isn’t the case.

Claim no. 1

“1. Consistency
The whole OS and almost every application looks and feels the same, as if a single team developed the whole thing, thanks to Apple HI Guidelines. Official guidelines for user interface design made it possible for users to actually use most Mac-applications in a very same way, creating a seamless and comfortable experience in the end. Users are able to anticipate how system behaves and what to expect from its applications. In fact, consistency dramatically improves learnability and usability of interacting with the system.”

Like the text says, almost every application. Then and there the very point is shot down and morphed to, “OS X is more consistent than Windows because parts of it’s software are consistent“. And still, I’m not convinced it’s more consistent UI than, say Microsoft Vista, as I have seen no evidence of such as i.e. iTunes changes it’s colours etc. Not to mention that every big HMI project/team project has some sort style guide, as it is one of the key parts of UI design, and I have absolutely no doubts that the Windows UI dev team has one.

Not to mention the writer hasn’t even bothered to look if Microsoft has published any comparable guidelines, whatsoever. He just makes assumptions that only Apple could have such things, and proceeds to make his claims. Quick Google and fourth hit revealed this: MSDN: Windows Vista User Experience Guidelines.

He is right on one thing though; consistency improves learnability and usability.

Continue reading “Top 10 Usability highs of the Mac OS – Debunked”

Youre probably smart enough to figure out what in my opinion is a great way for generating that magic buzz around your open source commitment. Yeap, I claim that it has something to do with user interfaces. (Well, isn’t that news)

Three years ago I happened to stumble upon interesting project called ReactOS; a “free version” of Microsoft Windows – open source (blackboxing Windows components) and able to run Windows applications out of the box. Sounds sweet BUT… There’s always a catch. The thing that struck my eyes was the user interface, not because it just was so sweet, far from it. It struck my eyes because it was far from attractive, which in my eyes, was doing good job of destroying the appeal of the whole software. Hence, I decided I wanted to pitch in.

Now, years later I stumbled upon the same project and I even found mockups I made for the project from my harddrive. This provoked some thougths.

Continue reading “How to generate free buzz for your open source project”

I originally started to write this article about six months ago, far beyond the blog ever even existed. Just knew I had to get things out from my head, to get them organized. Then I saw a video which bummed me, since it presented pretty much the same thing and I scrapped the whole article. However, later on I’ve realized that the execution in the video (sadly, I can’t seem to locate this) was a bit saggy and not even about the thing I was about to write. So, here we go; posture input and games.’

More after the jump

Continue reading “Posture guided gaming”

The statistics nowadays seems to tell us that the PC gamers are a dying breed. As the next generation consoles takes over, PC just whimpers and dies. Why? And is this the reality we, PC gamers, are facing?

Since this is an usability blog, rather than gaming one, at this point one should have creeping feeling that, in my mind, this has something to do with usability and user interfaces. Well, if you came to that conclusion, I salute thee, thus thy are correct.

Continue reading “The dying breed and how PC gaming needs to adapt”

I can almost see Apple enthusiasts rallying up with their pitchforks and torches, but let’s just continue bit further into this, before going all witch-hunt on me.

Well, ok. Multi-touch as a concept isn’t completely useless, I give you that. The simple idea of using multiple input points has so much potential but everyone has been just blindly following Jeff Han, whos initial concept was just that, a concept, not a polished product. The idea has depreciated so much that today, even though there are practically no products around, multi-touch is useless, just a buzzword to sell a product and nothing to do with usability. So far, I haven’t seen single useful commercial end user solution. Why has no-one stopped to rethink the whole idea?

Continue reading “Multi-touch is useless, dead”