On Saturday I got a shout from upstairs asking my if I could sort out there problem. They had decided to book a holiday with Thomas Cook on their online site. After submitting their personal details (+ bank details), the site came into some difficulties. Everything had been entered, my mum had clicked on the submit button and they were presented with the screen below.

My dad mentioned this screen has been on for 10 minutes, although we still think its processing because it is still asking us to wait and the icon is still moving. It was obvious at first glance that the page wasn’t doing anything, the ‘please wait’ meant absolutely nothing and the icon twirling was just a gif image to imply the system was processing their details. You can see that Firefox had done loading and the page had just become static. Both parents were frightened to touch anything, because the believed the system was still ‘doing something’. The system became caught up on something and couldn’t progress, but gave no ‘get out clause’ in case of such an event. Even a simple message below stating if the system hangs for more than 5 minutes (?) you should contact our customer services on blah blah blah. Now if I wasn’t at home, I still believe my parents would have sat for a good few hours watching the gif image twirl about the screen, wondering what to do if this screen wasn’t to proceed. Even after explaining what was going on, they still had difficulties understanding what was happening and remember I would class them as ‘competent’ surfers. More meaningful methods of showing the state of a system should be applied instead of ‘pseudo trickery’, that will certainly stumble the majority of users.

I haven’t got a problem with it if a system works 100% of the time, but which system could guarantee that?   

-Kyle

Check it out if you hadn’t already;

Maybe I’m a little undereducated in what Aza is saying above. He specifically states the interface does not allow multi-touch based interaction, but utilises a form of single touch interaction. The problem is that he then goes on to use gesture based scrolling (in moving up and down - Aza calls it ‘Kinetic Scrolling’) . Now as I believe it, single input touch screens do not allow gesture based interactions (i.e. the typical touch screen devices you see dotted around city centres). Therefore, the device must be using Frustrated Total Internal Reflection, which allows gesture support and multi touch interaction. Meaning, why have the technology there and not use it ? - I’m wondering does Apple own the patents ? - I don’t know, its something I would have to look at (I’m fairly sure they don’t, just look at Surface). In terms of accessibility, zooming in and out of web pages works amazingly well from multi-touch interaction, it makes sense to use the technology available, doesn’t it?

From the video I got the impression it was something they went against in terms of design decisions but the problem I have is WHY?  

I suggest before you leave, have a shot of the interface in action.

-Kyle 

I would like one, although I dislike the fact you have to use their paper, although for £75 I don’t think it is that bad.

-Kyle

Official Site

P.S Watch out for the Piano function.

I just browsed the list of seminars and some of the topics look rather interesting. Below, is a selection of the videos I’ll be watching first.

• Sketching and Experience Design, Bill Buxton, Microsoft Research, Spring 2007 (I like Bill Buxton, I keep meaning to get his book.)
• Designing Interactions, Bill Moggride, IDEO, Winter 2007
• Innovation on User Research Methods During the Development of Windows Vista, Gayna Williams, Microsoft, Fall 2006

I’ve just finished watching ‘The Design of Implicit Interactions, Wendy Ju, Stanford, Spring 2007′ - Although, nothing major or new was discussed it was still nice to watch the presentation.

You can point your browser to this link to get to the class listings within iTunes.

-Kyle