SQLBits

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 06:10:38 GMT

I will be attending SQLBits on September 13th this year and have had a paper accepted!

I will be presenting in the BI track on the subject "Does your cube support your users reporting needs?". The agenda for the event looks great and I am looking forward to meeting a few folk that I have corresponded with in the past.

For more details check http://www.sqlbits.com/default.aspx

A bit more on UI design

Mon, 07 Jul 2008 18:18:38 GMT

I have just watched a presentation by Jensen Harris of the Microsoft Office team on the development of the "ribbon" menu system. Every web designer should be forced to watch this presentation at least once a day until they have got it

"The Story of the Ribbon"

Has the web destroyed UI design?

Sun, 06 Jul 2008 09:54:03 GMT

Earlier this week I downloaded and installed the latest Silverlight and Expression tools to start some research for a new project. My intention is to determine whether it is possible to create a rich web client version of the Intelligencia MDX query builder that can be distributed via the web. I suspect that this will be a reasonably long process given that this is entirely new technology to me.

My observation in this blog entry however is not about my project but on the user interface for Expression and how this ties in with the influence the web has had on user interface design.

I understand Microsoft's decision to separate design from implementation. In larger development shops this is a logical and useful step toward building applications with a better user experience. For smaller organisations the designer and developer are likely to be the same person - i.e. me. Now maybe I am a bit old fashioned (and maybe my eyesight ain't what it used to be) but based on my very brief first introduction to Expression I really don't like the user interface. Gray on Black may look "modern" but it provides poor contrast for actually seeing what you are doing. It also seems that Microsoft have abandoned many long standing "fat client" UI givens, for example the right mouse click to obtain context menu's. In fact, even though I have a good idea of what I want to achieve I have had to refer to the documentation in order to carry out some very simple and basic "getting started" design tasks such as applying a background color to an object. Clearly the designer for the Expression tool comes from a very different background to me.

A long time ago - remember when Windows 98 came out - Microsoft published a guide to user interface design for Windows applications. The guide was highly proscriptive about how a UI should look and work right down to the greyness of the window and the exact fonts which should be used for labels and captions. The thrust of this guide was to encourage developers to build applications with a consistent look and feel. The reason for this was to make life easy for users. Application menus were proscibed to contain a File, Edit, View, Tools and Options menu (unless the application simply did not fit these terms). This meant that irrespective of which application you were using you stood a reasonable chance of finding the functionality you wanted by looking for it in the same place as the last app you used. By-and Large this worked where software companies bothered to read and apply the guide.

As the web has blossomed the influence of "design" has become a bigger and bigger factor in product development. The design of your web page says a lot about the character of your organisation and the role of graphic designers has taken on a great deal of importance in the projection of corporate identity. Recently however I have noticed an unwelcome (at least to me) shift in the software industry. We seem to have moved to a point where design has become more important than functionality. As part of my Sliverlight research I visited as many sites as I could find which use the technology and I have to say that I was somewhat stunned by how bad they were. Not, I have to say that the technology itself is bad because it most certainly is not (and I have to say that sites built on flash technology are equally bad), but the designers seem to have become so overwhelmed with the ability to spin, fade and animate that they have lost sight of the whole issue that a user has to be able to understand how to navigate the site. Here are a few of my gripes:

Performance still matters. When I am browsing the web my attention span for a page to load is about 5 seconds. If your site does not provide me with some useful information in that time I am likely to be gone! Many rich client web apps try to load massive amounts of data for the home page in order to provide the biggest design impact as the first thing the user sees. This means that you cannot get to any other information until the mindless "loading" animation has completed.
Put the most important/commonly used options at the top/left of the screen and make it look like a menu. Many sites now open with a completely graphic display or video in which there is no obvious means of navigating the sites information. Frequently you are forced to watch a lengthy animation before the navigation becomes available.
If you want someone to click on something make it look like a button. I don't want to have to move my mouse pointer all over the screen to see what "lights up" when the pointer moves over. On of the worst examples of this is the log on Windows live in which an area of the screen only displays your email address until you move the mouse over it at which point a "Sign in" button appears. This is the most important part of the process and it is actually hidden by default!

The bigger problem is that this approach to design led applications s now bleeding through into fat client apps. More and more I am opening tools to be presented with something that looks very nice but in reality is worse to use than the equivalent product from around 1980.

Am I just sad and old or has the software industry lost the plot when it comes to usability?

Survey: Software Usability Is More Important Than Features

Thu, 06 Mar 2008 09:55:15 GMT

I couldn't agree more.....

http://www.informationweek.com/shared/printableArticle.jhtml?articleID=206901900

Andrew Wiles Olap Warehousing Blog: Misc

SQLBits

A bit more on UI design

Has the web destroyed UI design?

Survey: Software Usability Is More Important Than Features