DevCon Banner: http://www.filemaker.com/developers/devcon
I will be presenting two topics at this years developers conference.
Performance Tuning Your FileMaker Solution
Power Tools to Make Development with FileMaker Pro Easier and Faster
Let me know if your coming, maybe we can meet for lunch one day.
Before the Philly FileMaker user group meeting, Jason did a short 5 minute interview to act as a short trailer before the live streaming of the meeting to the internet.
Thanks for the great meeting Jason!
There is a short drop out of the video around 3:50 and it lasts about 15 seconds.
The Philly Filemaker group meeting was a lot of fun. They stream their meetings live via uStream. You can read more about the meeting at the Philly FMP web site.There were some audio issues so you might want to skip forward to about 5 minutes in.
Tim will be speaking at the NJ FileMaker user group on Sept 30th. If your in the area come see him.
Tim will be speaking at the Philly Filemaker user group on Sept 22nd. If your in the area come see him.
Last month while I was attending the 2009 FileMaker Developers Conference in San Francisco I was briefly interviewed by Jason Murdok of IT Solutions. The Interview was for the Philly Filemaker user group. Jason video blogged as much of the conference as he could for the group members who could not attend the event.
I will be leading a session of the Philly Developers group later this month. stay tuned for more info.
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One of the hardest parts of user interface design is trying to think about data in new ways. Most people want to apply methods they are familiar with to systems as they develop. This is good as familiarity helps with ease of use. But it also limits the system, it prevents you from thinking about new ways that might be better for a given situation. It is easy to keep applying the same method over and over again. How do we get our selves to think of new ways to do things and not be stuck with the old way of doing things? Take Apple's iPhoto for example, up until last week all photo organization programs organized photos by Date, albums and tags. Now we see the power of organizing data by a new domain, People. Apple has added face recognition to iPhoto so now it automatically slices and dices the data by people! A dramatic change to the way we search and organize our information.
I have always been intrigued by clocks that use new interfaces designs. I don’t mean clocks with pictures of birds instead of numbers but rather new ways to tell time. New domains outside the idea of acircle cut up into 12 slices with hands that turn clockwise.
For example, this is the clock I have on my office wall…
backwordsclock
Its hands actually turn counter clock wise and it is numbered back words. Is it a better way to tell time? No I don’t think so, butit reminds me that the way I was trained to do something is not the only way todo it.
Its About Clock
I love this clock. It shows that some times you don’t need all the data that is available to make a decision. How often you really need to know the time down to the second? Some times less is more.
BianaryClock
Another clock I have in my office is this binary clock from Think Geek. I actually have two of these, the first one, in red basically just replaces the individual digits ofthe current time with binary digits in a vertical format.
I replaced it with a “more” binary version that uses just two binary numbers one for hours and one for minutes to tell time. Granted thisis not all that different from the clocks that use birds or cats instead of numbers, but it does make you think in binary instead of base ten as we are taught in school.
24Clock
This military clock is neat because its hour hand makes one revolution in a 24 hour period. A standard clocks hour hand makes two revolutions in a day. This eliminates all the extra info about am/pm…
TixClock
This “Tix Clock” lights up random blocks in each digits area to represent the time. This picture shows the time as 12:34, it does not show anything relating to AM/PM.
Triangle Clock
This clock uses two rotating triangles to show the time, one for hours and one for minutes.
Meter Clock
This Clock is based on three panel meters, one for hours, one for minutes and one for seconds.
Traffic Light
This is not a clock, but i think it is a great example of thinking about the domain of the data in new better ways. This is a stop light. The hand moves around in a circle like a clock showing the signal color as it goes. The great part about this is that it lets you know instantly how long each color is going to last. have you ever sat at a red light wondering how long you will be there?
One thing I want to make clear. Not all of these clocks represent good design. What they do do is show that there is always another way to think about data. Clocks have been around for a long time. Have we found the best User interface to represent time?
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I am looking forward to reading this book about writing code others can understand.Its called Clean Code. From SlashDotCory Foy writes: "As developers, system admins, and a variety of other roles in IT, we have to dealwith code on a daily basis. Sometimes it's just one-off scripts we never haveto see again. Sometimes we stare at something that, for the life of us, wecan't understand how it came out of a human mind (or, as the book puts it, hasa high WTF/minute count). But there is a time when you find code that is a joyto use, to read and to understand. Clean Code sets out to help developers write that third kind of code through a series of essay-type chapters on a variety of topics. But does it really help?"http://books.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/09/23/2243216
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What you call a feature might be a bug from the users point of view.
FeatureBug
If a feature is not easy to understand and self documenting, then it is easy for a user to misinterpret it as a bug. Pay close attention to icon selection, button labels and tool tips. The placement of the a button or feature is also very critical as it helps the user understand the context of the function.
It is very easy to get caught up in the mechanics of how a feature will work and lose sight of the path or work flow the user needs to travel. The journey for the user is as important as the end results. If a report is hard to generate or takes too many clicks to make, a users will forget the path and get lost each time they try to use it. Worse yet, many features get lost. Users may only need to run a report once a year, and with high turn-over rates at businesses these days it is easy for a company to forget a report even exists in the system. I have been called by clients to make reports, only to find that I had made the report years before, but both the client and I had forgotten that we did it. I did not leave a good UI for the feature, or place it in the correct location, so it was lost. Be sure to leave signs and bread crumbs for the users.
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Over the last decade of my career as a software developer/designer, I have been fascinated by how small but subtle changes to a user interface can make a system very successful or a complete failure. What can be very frustrating for a developer is the single vision of a user; if they see something they don’t understand, it will be all they can see. They will completely miss the big picture - not see the forest for the trees. Sometimes all it takes to get a system back on track once a user has locked onto an issue is a minor change such as renaming a field, or changing an icon, other times you may need to change the path a user goes down to perform a task. I hope to use this space to explore my experiences with users and systems while allowing you to learn and grow with me. Learning to think like your user is a very important skill to User interface design. It is harder to do than you would think. Once you have been exposed to the back end data structures it is difficult to step back and view the system as a user. Recently I was presented with the following dialog box. It did more to confuse me than to help me. How could the system have been changed to make this more understandable for the user? 
Time Machine Error Dialog: Time Machine error dialog that confuses more than it helps
