My other entries have been about physical things and today I’ll talk about a design transformation that can be applied to software.

The Magic Ink paper says that there are three types of software:

1. Information software (that facilitate learning in the broad sense)
2. Manipulation software (that allows users to create things)
3. Communication software

And argues that that designers should approach the design of information software as a graphic design problem. In other words: make Tufte-y graphics for information software. It’s ironic that for a paper arguing that graphic design should play a bigger role that the paper is very long and wordy. I recommend skimming the paper while paying the most attention to the images that show before and after redesigns.

As an aside, I think Tufte overdoes information density. He’s a big proponent of cramming as much information into available space. While sometimes the result can be both beautiful and extremely informative, sometimes the designs he espouses take too long to comprehend on first encounter. Often you just want a little data and you want it quickly. About halfway down the page there’s a redesign of the Southwest Airlines online booking website. It took me maybe 5-10 seconds to understand the redesign of the flight selection page. In addition the author’s redesign recommends a map to allow users to select their departure and destination cities over an alphabetical list. Given what I’ve heard about many Americans’ ignorance of geography, I’m not sure this would be an accessible design for all. So consider your users and the context in which they’re going to use your product!

So…what software or website that shows information in textual form could be transformed to be more graphical?

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Categories: Design transformations

I’m going to take a temporary break from writing about design transformations to writing about designs that I like, dislike, or find strange. This entry is about the latter.

This is a picture of the washing machine in my apartment in Bangalore. As you can see, it has “fuzzy logic” control. I seem to remember that fuzzy logic was a buzzword, what 8 years ago? Since no one who’s going to buy this washing machine actually knows what fuzzy logic means it’s purely a marketing term. I wasn’t sure of the meaning myself. My guess before looking it up on wikipedia was that it had something to do with machine learning or heuristics. Well, surprisingly enough the wikipedia article has a whole section of the application of fuzzy logic to washing machines, and I was partially right. It seems that fuzzy logic is a set of heuristics that map from non-discrete sensor data to actions. I think in the US we’d call this “Auto”.

The Water Level button cycles between High, Medium, Low, and Extra Low (what’s the difference between Low and Extra Low?) and the course button lets you select between Fuzzy, Speedy, Rinse, and Spin. I can just think of the user thinking “Hmm, I don’t need my clothes washed speedily (will that compromise on quality?) so I’ll just have them washed fuzzily. But will this cause more lint?”

Another weird thing is that the pressing the Water Level button cycles upwards among the water level options while the Course button cycles the other way.

Lastly, this washing machine has a Power button which is separate from the Start button. Mechanical washing machines never had the need for this. Is it to save electricity?

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Categories: Bad design

This design transformation takes something complex, something with a lot of precision parameters that need to be adjusted and makes it into a simple design with imprecise controls that is more fun to use.

Let’s start with view cameras.

These things offer the utmost in photographer flexibility. Besides being able to adjust the aperture and shutter speed, the photographer can move the film around with respect to the lens, focusing and distorting the photo in ways not possible with normal cameras. Doing this is very intuitive: photographers simply move the “film” around and can see immediately the effect of the movements in the huge viewfinder.

Although view cameras are intuitive, they are heavy, bulky, and expensive. Along comes the 35mm camera. Due to its design, you can’t move the film around, so they created movable lenses (tilt-shift lenses) instead. These are commonly used to make big things look miniature (see an example).

Because these 35 mm cameras have a much smaller viewfinder (making is harder to judge focus) and are designed to be handheld, they had to add fiddly little knobs to these tilt-shift lenses be able to adjust each degree of movement freedom precisely and independently. This is far less intuitive than moving the film plane around wholesale as with view cameras but has the same end result.

To tilt-shift lenses, we’re going to apply the transformation and the result is…LensBabies!

Basically, these are lenses that you can move around wholesale just like in view cameras in the package the size of a tilt-shift lens. But of course, something had to be compromised and that was precision. Since your hand is holding the flexible lens and you’re looking through a small viewfinder, it’s much harder to get what you want in focus. But that doesn’t really matter, because the LensBaby is made to create wildly distorted images:

Skating Kids

©
Sergio Bertolini

Lensbabies are fun, quick, and intuitive to use. It’s a quick and dirty tilt-shift lens. (Or so I hear, I’ve never used one. Actually I’ve never used a view camera or a tilt-shift lens either). But I think I’ve still been educational in this blog entry…

So…what complex and precise things can you make quick and dirty, but fun and intuitive?

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Categories: Design transformations