Jefferson Han is the NYU researcher whose research into multi-touch interfaces–and accompanying super-cool video–exploded onto the Web this time last year. He’s been on many folks’ brains since last week, when Apple demoed multi-touch features on the forthcoming iPhone. Now Fast Company has posted a feature on Jeff, along with an new video. The profile is just a tad breathless ("The scope of the projects he’s involved in is a testament to the sheer wattage of his brain" makes me think there’s a Trapper Keeper with "I [Heart] JH!!!" on it), but it’s fun to learn about a very bright dude with a huge passion for just getting it done. (Hey, how many 12-year-olds build a laser?)
Category Archives: User Interface
Lightroom Podcast #25: Mark Hamburg & Phil Clevenger
“We started from a supposition of content being king, and we wanted to move the interface out of the way of the content. And that was a real rallying point when we all found a model for the UI, where we could dedicate up to 95% of the screen to image content and have the UI politely get out of the way, or be invoked as needed.” So says Phil Clevenger,
user interface designer on Lightroom. George Jardine chatted recently with Phil & engineering manager Mark Hamburg:
Phil and Mark sit down with George to talk about Phil’s role on the team and the user interface that he’s designed for Lightroom. The conversation quickly begins to wander and turn (as these conversations frequently do take on a life of their own…) to some of the broader questions surrounding Lightroom, and ends up touching on the core story and original vision for the project. This podcast also includes a description by Mark of some of his original thinking behind Lightroom’s modular design.
The podcast is available as an MP3 file via George’s iDisk (under "1127 Podcast – Phil Clevenger and Mark Hamburg"). It’s also be available via the Lightroom podcasts RSS feed, and by searching for "Lightroom" in iTunes.
Lightroom Podcast #25: Mark Hamburg & Phil Clevenger
“We started from a supposition of content being king, and we wanted to move the interface out of the way of the content. And that was a real rallying point when we all found a model for the UI, where we could dedicate up to 95% of the screen to image content and have the UI politely get out of the way, or be invoked as needed.” So says Phil Clevenger,
user interface designer on Lightroom. George Jardine chatted recently with Phil & engineering manager Mark Hamburg:
Phil and Mark sit down with George to talk about Phil’s role on the team and the user interface that he’s designed for Lightroom. The conversation quickly begins to wander and turn (as these conversations frequently do take on a life of their own…) to some of the broader questions surrounding Lightroom, and ends up touching on the core story and original vision for the project. This podcast also includes a description by Mark of some of his original thinking behind Lightroom’s modular design.
The podcast is available as an MP3 file via George’s iDisk (under "1127 Podcast – Phil Clevenger and Mark Hamburg"). It’s also be available via the Lightroom podcasts RSS feed, and by searching for "Lightroom" in iTunes.
Photoshop & Macs: The new shuffleboard?
This week C|NET published findings from MetaFacts indicating that "nearly half of Mac owners are 55 and older–almost double the share for average home PC users." Apple disputes this claim, though I’d take it as a compliment that my tools can be used by a generation not raised by Grand Theft Auto.
As it happens, the registered base* of Photoshop customers has skewed older in recent years, due to the exploding popularity of digital photography. The same folks who in previous generations might’ve sprung for a home darkroom now tend to buy a really nice digital SLR, computer, and the best software to go with it. These trends prompted my colleague Ashley to quip, "Photoshop & Macs: The new shuffleboard?"
This demographic trend has some practical implications. Most obviously, we need to make a user interface that’s easy to navigate with older eyes. Given the 20- and 30-something demographics of many visual designers, this isn’t always easy to remember, but we’re working on it. The emergence of scalable, resolution-independent will be essential here, and in the meantime Photoshop CS2 added the ability to adjust the font size of the interface (a small thing, literally, but a step in the right direction).
*Note: This of course way undercounts all the five-finger-discounting little l33t-speak haxxor-kiddies. (“im in ur base, stealin ur ‘Shop…”)
Photoshop & Macs: The new shuffleboard?
This week C|NET published findings from MetaFacts indicating that "nearly half of Mac owners are 55 and older–almost double the share for average home PC users." Apple disputes this claim, though I’d take it as a compliment that my tools can be used by a generation not raised by Grand Theft Auto.
As it happens, the registered base* of Photoshop customers has skewed older in recent years, due to the exploding popularity of digital photography. The same folks who in previous generations might’ve sprung for a home darkroom now tend to buy a really nice digital SLR, computer, and the best software to go with it. These trends prompted my colleague Ashley to quip, "Photoshop & Macs: The new shuffleboard?"
This demographic trend has some practical implications. Most obviously, we need to make a user interface that’s easy to navigate with older eyes. Given the 20- and 30-something demographics of many visual designers, this isn’t always easy to remember, but we’re working on it. The emergence of scalable, resolution-independent will be essential here, and in the meantime Photoshop CS2 added the ability to adjust the font size of the interface (a small thing, literally, but a step in the right direction).
*Note: This of course way undercounts all the five-finger-discounting little l33t-speak haxxor-kiddies. (“im in ur base, stealin ur ‘Shop…”)
Photoshop shortcut o' the day
Heh–you know you’re working on a mature application when you start running out of keyboard shortcut combos. Earlier today we were discussing shortcuts that would work for something that’s in development. We settled on a four-key combo (one of those Shift-Opt-Cmd-Letter deals), which let to this exchange:
- Bryan O’Neil Hughes: "Ugh, it beats no shortcut at all…but it isn’t too far removed from just
banging one’s head against the keyboard." - Joe Ault: "BangHeadAgainstKeyboard is already taken, but I think
Ctrl-Shift-BangHeadAgainstKeyboard is available…"
We will henceforth work on a forehead-USB interface. 😉
Next-gen, multi-touch interfaces
NYU researcher Jefferson Han, creator of a much-blogged large format, multi-touch flat screen interface (see original demo), spoke at this year’s TED Conference in Monterey. In this brief but inspiring video, he talks about the technology’s potential to enable next-generation interfaces that disappear, doing “the right thing” with a minimum of effort. (It’s at times like this that I wish Adobe made hardware!) [Via Mattias Jonsson]
Incidentally, it appears they’re using this morphing technology, or something close to it–well worth a look in its own right. (The server MIME types seem wrong, so to view the very cool video, you may have to download it and change the extension to .MP4.)
[Update: For a non-traditional interface that truly sucks (literally), check out this video from the Yahoo! Design Expo.]
Bumpin' 3D desktop interface
BumpTop brings some fresh thinking to the 20+ year old metaphor of desktop organization. Check out this video to see how it combines 3D, physics, pie menus, and pen savvy to improve file handling.
Cool as it is, however, I was struck by what Merlin Mann has already written up: namely, that the future belongs to file management based on searching. It just isn’t possible for a traditional file system metaphor, no matter how slick, to keep pace with an explosion of data. We see this again and again:
- Google cruised past Yahoo (i.e. Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle) when categorization couldn’t scale.
- Smart folders (i.e. saved searches) in email take over when you can’t keep switching among your zillion mailboxes.
- Desktop-level searching like Spotlight, Google Desktop Search, and Vista’s built-in engine become essential when your number of files overwhelms your ability to categorize them meaningfully.
Maybe, then, the future belongs to slick, forward-thinking UIs that rest atop great search plumbing. This, I think, is where Adobe could make a difference. Why not enable developers to create powerful, lightweight interfaces as they do in Flash (e.g. Felix Turner’s Flickr Related Tag Browser) and use those on the desktop in tools like Bridge? Flickr has thrived by becoming skinnable in interesting ways. There’s no reason that local file management should be less innovative.
For more info on BumpTop, see also the personal site of researcher Bill Buxton. [Thanks to Joel Bryant of Wacom for the link.]
Get lean. Stay hungry.
Ouch:
“The old Jetta was trim and compact, with chunky good proportions. The new one — 5.7 inches longer — is so big and amorphous they should have called it Jetta the Hutt. Every manufacturer engages in this incremental generation-to-generation size creep, and if it keeps up, eventually Shriners will drive 1996 Buick Roadmasters and we’ll laugh at their comical little cars from the observation decks of our Subaru Imprezas. Somebody, stop the madness.”
— The NY Times auto section*
The same could be said about a lot of modern software, of course, and a decent backlash is underway. Throw a dead cat & you’ll hit some manifesto or other talking about how features don’t matter, shouldn’t be added, etc.**
Why is that? A few things come to mind:
- Packing in tons of features makes software take forever to load, and/or makes it run slowly and consume tons of resources. Therefore everyone is penalized by stuff they’ll never use.
- The existence of unused features makes it harder to get at the small percentage you actually care about. Locating the right command is like finding a needle in a stack of needles.
- Being presented with a wall of options (especially if the previous set wasn’t well understood) makes people feel inadequate. The percentage anyone comprehends grows smaller as the app grows more vast.
- New features give the impression of a neverending, ever longer learning curve. Rather than make things simpler, they risk adding confusion and redundancy, fatiguing the people they’re supposed to help.
If this is all true, then aren’t the critics right? Yes–if it’s true. But what if it weren’t? What if:
- New software booted up faster than its predecessor on the same machine?
- It ran faster, felt smoother, and produced better results, without requiring any additional learning from users?
- The interface could grow simpler, more focused, more relevant to your needs (and your needs only)?
In short, if you could take away the pain that comes with a large and growing feature set, yet keep its benefits, would it cool the critics out? Would we then have permission (or blessings, even) to add whole new levels of power and capability?
As you might guess, we’re thinking about these issues all the time. In my view we need to define a fairly rigorous “Contract with the Customer” to ensure that before we move on to adding new layers of richness, we do the hard work of addressing the problems mentioned above.
We need your permission to take Photoshop in new directions, to add features that will blow people’s heads clean off. And to earn that permission, we need to show that we’re nailing the fundamentals. It’s not going to be an overnight thing, but I think we’re on the right track.
J.
——
* VW can always take solace in having possibly the coolest parking structure ever. Oh, and once again, a fistful of great ads.
** To me, though, these critiques ring a little hollow–not unlike the great Onion article, “Report: 98 Percent Of U.S. Commuters Favor Public Transportation For Others.” That is, to some extent the critics are saying, Don’t add anything for anyone except me, that I personally don’t need right now.
Marching Ants, Hamm's Beer, & Photoshop
MacPaint changed my life, period. I’d fooled with the primitive tools on Apple ][‘s and a PCjr., but MacPaint was a whole new animal. At a friend’s birthday party in 1984, I laid eyes on their new Mac & dumped my usual “plays well with others” schtick like a hot rock. This machine was the stuff, and the other kids weren’t gonna get close until I’d rocked out with MacPaint’s cool features (drawing a prison just so I could paintbucket the walls with the brick pattern). I’ve been hooked ever since.
But who knew that the “marching ants” animation that denotes a selection in Photoshop and other applications comes from the Land of Sky-Blue Waters? According to Folklore.org, MacPaint author & Mac UI pioneer Bill Atkinson was inspired by a Hamm’s Beer sign. Groovy. [Via the PhotoshopNews history of the Photoshop toolbar]
On a related note, in covering Apple’s 30th anniversary, c|net shows an early ancestor to MacPaint. (Seems like rounded rectangles–always popular, overused in every era–have always been with us). And if you just can’t get enough of people waxing Apple’s car, check out frog design’s shout-out [update: link now MIA], as well as Engadget’s review of good, bad, and ugly Apple products from the last 30 years. (Hey, I kind of liked the Network Server! It had a certain ED-209 charm to it…) [Via]
Marching Ants, Hamm's Beer, & Photoshop
MacPaint changed my life, period. I’d fooled with the primitive tools on Apple ][‘s and a PCjr., but MacPaint was a whole new animal. At a friend’s birthday party in 1984, I laid eyes on their new Mac & dumped my usual “plays well with others” schtick like a hot rock. This machine was the stuff, and the other kids weren’t gonna get close until I’d rocked out with MacPaint’s cool features (drawing a prison just so I could paintbucket the walls with the brick pattern). I’ve been hooked ever since.
But who knew that the “marching ants” animation that denotes a selection in Photoshop and other applications comes from the Land of Sky-Blue Waters? According to Folklore.org, MacPaint author & Mac UI pioneer Bill Atkinson was inspired by a Hamm’s Beer sign. Groovy. [Via the PhotoshopNews history of the Photoshop toolbar]
On a related note, in covering Apple’s 30th anniversary, c|net shows an early ancestor to MacPaint. (Seems like rounded rectangles–always popular, overused in every era–have always been with us). And if you just can’t get enough of people waxing Apple’s car, check out frog design’s shout-out [update: link now MIA], as well as Engadget’s review of good, bad, and ugly Apple products from the last 30 years. (Hey, I kind of liked the Network Server! It had a certain ED-209 charm to it…) [Via]
Two-hand touch
While working as a designer, I found that the bigger my monitor, the more greasy-fingered art directors inevitably wanted to touch it, to show that they wanted something put *right there*. Soon, however, touching a monitor may be less a party foul & far more useful. Check out this video demonstrating research into two-handed touch screen interfaces. Pretty ridiculously cool, eh?
It reminds me a bit of the Tactiva device shown last year. Plenty of hurdles (size, cost, hands blocking artwork, parallax interfering with small adjustments, greasy fingers, etc.) would need to be jumped to make these approaches mainstream, but it’s gotta happen, right? Just yesterday a 3D artist was talking to us about wanting to paint with one hand while using the other to dial exposure & intensity up and down in high-dynamic range images. It’s just too natural not to happen. And the sooner these devices move towards ubiquity, the sooner we can start taking advantage of them in Photoshop and other tools (requiring plenty of UI re-thinking & engineering, but potentially very worthwhile).
[Thanks to Colin Smith for the link.]
[Update: Similar approaches are being taken to fields as diverse as jazz and warfare. Thanks to Tom Attix for the links.]
Burrowing through large sets of images
The Mini USA site features a clever, immersive Roof Studio that enables you to browse various roof designs and upload your own [link via Kaliber10000]. The zooming interface and ability to see items with matching metadata remind me of Airtight Interactive’s related tag browser for Flickr. Working on Adobe Bridge, I find these interfaces motivating. As image collections grow larger, we need to find more powerful ways to cruise through them (ways to form queries & visualize the results). As always, we’d like to hear your thoughts.