There have been high profile attempts at designing new, complete, usable components to solve specific problems such as interactive assistants and horribly bloated CD lists.  But in recent memory, all pale in comparison to the Ribbon that Microsoft introduced in Office 2007.  The Ribbon is what replaced the toolbar system used in previous versions of Microsoft Office.

The ribbon effectively solves the problem of displaying the functionality of a very complex and feature-rich piece of software like Word or PowerPoint much more effectively than toolbars, tabs, and other competing concepts.   In combination with gallery views of icons, and organising things in use-driven groups, the solution is elegant and ages well.  It’s unfortunate (read: fucking brutal) that Microsoft is patenting this idea in the current climate of software openness and growth, but I digress.

Jensen Harris did a presentation at MIX ’08 about the history of Office and how the ribbon was developed.  A must watch for any employed interface designer:  the ideas about religious tenets, building lots of high-fidelity prototypes,  evaluation over a number of months, and constraining ideas to make reasonable decisions are worth discussing.

YouTube video below, but the complete presentation is available from Microsoft.

There is a digital divide in the world, as there are 5 billion people that have never used the Internet.  Bringing them on board ought to be a priority for agencies involved with human development.  This doesn’t necessarily mean that everyone needs access to a traditional computer. In much of the developed world, even in places where there is no running water, there are cell phones.  Cell phone networks cover 80% of the world’s population. I can attest to this fact in my travels to India. In the middle of the foothills of the Himalaya’s there was limited running water, sporadic electricity, no sewage, but every family has a Nokia with SMS and a web (WAP?) browser.

The idea that services (education, banking, emergency services, and the like) can be delivered via mobile platforms is the cause d’etre of this W3C working group.  From their website:

Mobile Web for Social Development (MW4D)

The MW4D Interest Group explores how to use the potential of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) on Mobile phones as a solution to bridge the Digital Divide and provide minimal services (health, education, governance, business,…) to rural communities and under-privileged populations of Developing Countries.

Amazing ideas, definitely worth checking out.  As with any good idea, there are a variety of challenges, from availability of information, software development, and information literacy of the population.

Though it’s a solution that will gain traction in the future.  From a developers perspective, if I have use cases that involve use by emerging internet populations, I better be thinking about mobile browsers and serious localisation. The BBC speaker at the same conference mentioned that 20% of hits to the BBC website from Africa already come from cellular phones.

First, every semester I hope/pray to get a Graduate Teaching Assistant job, which luckily gets easier and easier as I accumulate “seniority points.”

Second, no funding means no specified project, which means freedom to choose any research topic I please, as long as my (very lenient/forgiving) advisor is OK with it. Well, it’s been about eight months since I’ve come back from India all ready to start researching, and only two days ago did I actually settle on a topic.

Eight months is a long time to pay tuition, and follow dead ends with literature reviews. Also, those months are expensive if you waste your time on partying, girls, video games, Union involvement, student government, keggers, new housemates, motorcycles, trips to Mississippi, Vancouver, Ottawa, and so on. Well .. maybe it wasn’t a complete waste, per se :)

Finally, I’ve settled on a topic that I’m truly interested in.

Usability and Image Search

The topic: usability of image retrieval interfaces for systems based on image content, rather than user-provided textual meta-data.

What does this mean? Image searching (like Google Image, or Flickr search) is actually really, really complicated stuff. The systems on the back-end of the process use a variety of properties of an image to catalogue it in their vast library: the file name, it’s dimensions, data size, human contributed tags and categories, and a whole slew of other things. That specific information is called the metadata. Most of major (Yahoo, Google, MSN, etc.) image search engines also scour the web-page content that surrounds an image to get more metadata that can be searched.

Human contributed metadata is particularly meaningful: tags, categories, and file names point to the content of the image, not just its properties. The problem with human contributed metadata is that it’s:

• very incomplete
• very subjective, thus possibly inaccurate
• very time consuming if you do want to make it accurate or complete
• there are no standard descriptive elements in markup languages like XHTML or HTML for people to tag their images on the web

If you have a photo of a man riding a bicycle in Greece, unless you’ve tagged that picture with “man”, “bicycle”, “greece” (in four or five of the most common languages in the world), the likelihood of that image being catalogued so it can be found by an interested party is quite low.

Researchers since the mid-1990′s have spent a lot of time and energy in a field that hopes to automate more and more of that descriptive process, so that images can be searched on more than their properties. The field is called Content Based Image Retrieval (CBIR). Rather than relying on metadata to describe images, one can have a computer “see” the image and record information about it: colour, texture, salient regions, shapes, layout, etc. This is the content of the image. Cataloguing all of the useful content of a very large number of images accurately, completely, and in a way that can be easily searched, is the holy grail of this field. We are decades away from such a system, but major strides in that direction have already taken place.

Humans + CBIR

A smaller consideration of all of this is: how is a person supposed to search for something based on content? As in, I know a dog is fuzzy, I know that the computer can find fuzzy textures, but how do I describe to a search engine that I want to find all images of a brown, fuzzy dog? It sounds simple, should be simple, but is not simple in the current state-of-the-art.

Usability is a field that concerns itself with how things are used, especially interfaces of computer programs. I’m very interested in usability of these image search systems; image search systems that already exist, and proposed systems that will exist once we have the technology to automatically identify brown fuzzy dogs in your Flickr photos from the cottage.

So that’s where I’m at. I have a general idea of the area I’m interested in, so I’m in the process of reading some review papers about the state of CBIR. Hopefully, a literature review is coming next.

Patterns are often employed in object oriented software development and engineering, much more so than user interface design. I believe that by applying patterns at the user interface layout and design level, employing a “top-down” approach, we can avoid some situations where deep-system code decisions impede usability of the resulting user interface.

More information on Patterns, and specifically in the context of software, check out Brad Appleton’s Essential Concepts and Terminology.

Really Good Pattern Libaries

These are my picks for sites to explore if you wish to develop your UI pattern vocabulary.

• Jenifer Tidwell’s Designing Interfaces.
• Sari A. Laakso’s User Interface Design Patterns.
• Yahoo!’s Design Pattern Library. There’s a really neat paper (PDF) that details the development of the Yahoo collection.

Van Welie + v.d. Veer does a good job elaborating on why a collection of patterns isn’t as useful as a full pattern language dedicated to a specific domain in this paper (PDF).

Specific Pattern Languages For Specific Domains

The following table lists some good pattern resources, organized by what problem domain they address.

UI Patterns In Print

• Jenifer Tidwell’s Designing Interfaces (2005), published by O’Reilly.
• Jan Borchers’ A Pattern Approach to Interaction Design (2001).

… or check out Hillside.net’s guide on writing your own patterns.

Good Reading

There are several academic papers on the subject of user interface patterns and their application in designing user interfaces. A Google Scholar search for user interface patterns is a good place to start, but here are some that are worth noting.

• Pattern Languages in Interaction Design: Structure and Organization (PDF), van Welie et al., 2003.
• Patterns for HCI and Cognitive Dimensions: two halves of the same story? (PDF) Fincher et al, 2002.
• A Pattern-Supported Approach to the User Interface Design Process (PDF) Granlund, et al., 2001.
  Fitting patterns into your software design process.
• Perspectives on HCI Patterns: Concepts and Tools (PDF), Fincher, Finlay, Greene et al, Molina, 2003.
  The extended abstract from the CHI 2003 workshop on HCI Patterns.
• A cookbook for using the model-view controller user interface paradigm in Smalltalk-80 (portal.acm.org), Krasner et al, 1988. One of the first academic publishings use of patterns in UI design.

… also check out the HCI pattern papers at CHI 2003.

At the 2004 CHI workshop, a markup language for pattern languages (PLML) was established. I love stuff that’s written in XML.

Pattern Conference

User Interface patterns are most likely to be workshopped and discussed at the following conferences:

• PLoP – Pattern Language of Programs conference. In 2006, in conjunction with OOPSLA.
• CHI – State-of-the-art patterns workshops 1997-2004.

Acknowledgements

Much of this content from stemmed from Tom Erickson’s The Interaction Design Patterns Page, which a really excellent resource.