Category: Good design

Instances of good design

Cappuccino for two

One of the small pleasures of life is sharing a fine Cappuccino on a weekend morning at home. The only difficulty is, you need a way to produce one, and we don’t have a professional machine at home like they have in a proper coffee shop. We do have the means to make strong espresso – one half of the Cappuccino story – but what of the milk? We had a battery-operated propeller thingy that was supposed to beat milk into a froth, but it left much to be desired.

Enter Tupperware. This innovative manufacturer of kitchen plasticware came up with a gizmo for making foamed milk – the “Magic milk cappuccino maker” – that shines in its ingenious simplicity. It consists of a small plastic jug with a lid that allows through a round metal mesh – a strainer – on a rod. Here’s how this works:

First you fill the bottom third of the jug with milk, put on the lid and microwave for 2 minutes to get the milk hot.

Tupperware Magic Milk Cappuccino Maker

Next you put in the strainer, close the lid, and pump the rod up and down rapidly a few times. The mesh moves through the milk and foams it up in no time – very effectively.

Tupperware Magic Milk Cappuccino Maker

Meanwhile you produce the espresso in your Brikka, put it in the cups and shovel in foam and hot milk from the Tupperware jug. The entire process takes under 5 minutes, most of it waiting for the machinetta to boil. And here we are:

Homemade Cappuccino

Lovely, lovely Cappuccinos… none of the artwork a barista may make in the foam, but just as pleasant to consume.

Snagit 9 vs. FastStone 6: Simpler is better!

I needed a screen grabber, and based on recommendations from a friend downloaded the trial version of Snagit 9. I was impressed and disappointed.Impressed, because this is one potent package. It can do everything you may ever want to do about image grabbing. I particularly liked the “Scrolling window” option, for capturing a web page longer than one screenful. BUT… this program has an extremely complex and ornate user interface, giving you access to countless possibilities; and these are presented in the most colorful UI I’ve seen since my kids graduated from Fisher-Price. Take a look :

Snagit 9 User Interface

Compare this to Photoshop: powerful and feature rich, but its UI is simple, with minimalist icons in monochrome…

FastStone user interfaceI found this so distracting that I went and downloaded another shareware product, FastStone Capture (Ver. 6). Check the utterly simple UI to the right:

Note that 99% of the time, these few icons (including “Scrolling window”) cover all you need; the rest is accessible but unobtrusive in a drop down menu at the right, where it can’t distract you. Click a button on this tiny floating toolbar and the capture begins. The same icons exist in the Snagit window, but actually, once you click one there you then need to click the big red round button – which may make you feel powerful, but is a redundant action. Of course it’s a single extra click, but it’s also double the number of clicks required  in FastStone.

Interestingly, the development team at Snagit have a blog where they share their thoughts (commendable!) and there I read that “… we felt that the interface shouldn’t be competing for attention, but should fade away and allow people to focus on their content”. Sorry… good thought, but I can’t endorse the execution on it. Nothing about the baroque UI they built brings the word “Fade” to mind. Just compare it to the tiny toolbar of the FastStone tool.

Simpler is better, nowhere more so than in tools you use daily.

The other side of those Road Reflectors

We all know the raised reflector buttons on the lane divider lines of a freeway. They have white or yellow retroreflectors embedded in their edges, so that at night they shine right back at you in the light of your car’s headlamps. Safety and beauty in the same simple device.

But what many may not realize is that they have another design feature, also safety related, and far more ingenious. At least in some freeways – California’s, for sure – the buttons’ other edge – the one facing away from oncoming traffic – has red reflectors in it. Why put reflectors on the side you never shine a light on, the side you can’t even see?

Precisely because of the one circumstance when one would be seeing it: when they drive on the freeway in the wrong direction, having entered via the off ramp instead of the on ramp by some colossal mistake – think DUI, for instance. Now you have a drunken driver going in the wrong direction at night; traffic is sparse, but any moment disaster may strike unless this fool notices his mistake. And now those reflectors return the investment – for this driver will see long lines of red lights shining ahead to infinity; so unusual as to immediately alert him that something is wrong.

And if, like me, you never did that, you can still see the effect if you drive facing straight into the sun when it is low in the sky; you can then see the red reflectors, shining back the in the sunlight, in your rear view mirror!

Elegant design in the back of a Remote Control

Sometimes one runs into elegant design in humble places…

I was sitting in a meeting and fiddling idly with the remote control of the NEC LCD projector. After toying with the laser for a while, I pushed out the battery cover on the back. As expected, it unlatched and slid open, like these things always do. But there was a twist…

NEC LCD Projector remote control The cover slid off, but stayed connected to the unit by a thin rubber ribbon. We’ve seen so many R/C units missing their cover – well, not this one! The only extra part required was the rubber ribbon, which clips into a slot on the R/C itself. Simple, elegant, professionally designed. Good job!You can see in the photos how this works:NEC LCD Projector remote control

NEC LCD Projector remote control

NEC LCD Projector remote controlNEC LCD Projector remote control

Square is beautiful!…

Sometimes you find elegant design in the places you least expect it.

We stayed in the Dan Carmel in Haifa, and the small supplies in the bathroom came in color-coordinated little boxes: shower cap, cotton pads, the usual stuff. Still, they failed to go all the way: they had tall bottles for the shampoo and a round box for the shoeshine sponge:

Hotel Dan Supplies

Which reminded me of a much better attempt at such standardized packaging that I saw in the Hotel Silken in Zaragoza, Spain:

Hotel Silken Supplies

They had ALL the supplies fit in square packages, made of either cardboard Square Eggs at the Silken Hotel in Zaragozaor plastic, and these all fit like a puzzle into a rectangular cardboard tray. Even the shampoo bottles were square and fit the scheme perfectly. It was a delightful design, injecting elegance into this utterly mundane collection of supplies, so I share it here.

These guys had such a thing going for the rectangular form factor, that even the sunny-side-up eggs they served for breakfast were square!

Can you guess what this device does?

They say that form follows function. So – take a look at the form of this strange device, which stands about a meter tall. Can you guess its function?

Smell Display Device at teh Potsdam Biosphere

No, it isn’t a trashcan with dreadlocks.

I saw this thing in the Biosphere at Potsdam. This pleasant museum is smaller and less ambitious (should I say, less pretentious?) than the one in Arizona, and serves very well to exhibit different ecosystems to the visiting public.

The item you see here is a display device for displaying smells. You sniff the end of a tube to get a whiff of the plant shown on the round image below it.

Did you guess?…

One hand!

Here is an absolutely trivial product feature that turns out to be very nice. This is the latch release for the more recent IBM (now Lenovo) Thinkpad notebook computers.

I’ve been through more models of Thinkpad than I remember, and until the T4x series they all had two latch releases on the front edge of the lid. Then came the T40, and it only had one, on the right, which actuates both latches through an inner linkage. When I first saw this I was disdainful: who cares, after all? But when I started to use a T41, I realized how useful this feature is. These days we mobile users run around the workplace from meeting to meeting with our notebook; and until someone comes out with the secondary displays we’ve seen on futuristic promotional videos (but never in reality), we often have to open the notebook to check details of our coming meeting while walking towards an elevator… and with the single-latch arrangement, you can hold the machine in your left hand while opening its screen with the right.

Like I said, a trivial detail, but it really is useful. A nice piece of design from IBM!

Tools 4: The right tool for the job

A major cause of accidents and frustration is trying to use the wrong tool for the job.

Professionals usually know, and have available, the right tool. Amateurs and beginners may be blissfully unaware of it. When I was just starting into homebrew electronics in my teens, I actually used to drill holes in metal with a hammer and nail! I soon discovered the hand drill, but for the larger holes required for mounting tube sockets, panel meters, and such I had to drill a circle of small holes, then use a file to painstakingly smooth out the jagged contour this left. This is definitely the wrong tool…

I became aware of the right tools after maybe a year of slaving over those holes. First came a chassis hole punch, where you’d drill a hole as thick as your finger, and use it for the screw that connects the punch’s two parts across the metal; tighten the screw and the punch eats the metal like butter. Making the finger-thick hole was still a matter of drilling and filing, until I discovered the Reamer, a sharp tool that widens the initial hole in seconds.

Chassis punch set

Lastly, I found the de-burrer – a tool for removing the sharp metal burrs that might remain around your hole. My trusty metal files got a well deserved rest, and I could focus my time on designing better electronic circuits… and enjoying their realization in hardware much more.

Reamer and deburrer

Whatever work you do, if it’s hard and frustrating, if you’re not enjoying it, you may be using the wrong tool for the job.

The importance of Exuberance in User Experience

Photoshop rules, and gets more powerful and more useful with every new release… but it will never recreate the joy of using Deluxe Paint.

Now, Electronic Arts’ Deluxe Paint was a raster graphics paint program released for the Commodore Amiga in 1985,King Tut, the iconic image of DeluxePaint which fast became the standard on that venerable 16-bit platform. It would typically handle 32-color images at up to 640×400 resolution. Sure, you could do things in it that no other personal computer could do at the time – like the King Tut image that became the hallmark of this program – yet in today’s terms it was utterly weak and primitive. So what’s the big deal?

The big deal, IMHO, was the Exuberant feel of its usage, the kind of joy one might feel when grounding the gas pedal in a powerful sports car… In DPaint you could mark a rectangle anywhere on your image, cut it (with one click) to become a brush, then drag and spray it across the screen in wide sweeps to create swatches of colorful shapes, in real time, under your immediate command. The village below was created in seconds from the single house at top left… And then you could set the program for mirror or tile modes that would reflect this action in a kaleidoscopic riot of visual joy. You could create colorful abstract images fast – click! click! click!…

Brush effects in Deluxe Paint

You may still say, what’s the big deal? You can do all that in Photoshop! Well, yes and no. You can achieve the same results (and lots more that was unthinkable in 1985) but you do this by going through a long sequence of steps, as if you’re performing delicate brain surgery. I mean, in DPaint you drew a circle by clicking a button and drawing the circle with one mouse motion. In Photoshop, the instructions for drawing a circle have 7 steps, and step 5 says “In the Stroke dialog box, type a value for Width, and then click the color swatch to display the Adobe Color Picker“. This certainly works, but it does not bring the words joy, or Real time, or Immediate to mind…

The same difference can be seen in comparing an iPhone to a Nokia. The iPhone’s UI is definitely exuberant; the joy of dragging stuff around with your finger and having it respond is very real. On a Nokia, you have to cope with all those teeny buttons… it works, but it just isn’t fun!

Hear that, designers? We need more products with an Exuberant user experience!

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