Natalia Fisher

interaction design I like: grooveshark

I discovered Grooveshark this summer when I started trying out different subscription/cloud-based music services after getting sick of syncing up music from my hard drive with my phone. I also tried out MOG and Rdio.

From the beginning, I have been very impressed by Grooveshark. They have made it an extremely intuitive “app-like” web application that can be used just as easily to listen customized recommended music (think Pandora/Last.fm Radio apps), genre-based streaming music, a single song, your own playlists, or your friend’s playlists. Not only have I started using their website and mobile app almost exclusively to listen to music, but I’ve noticed that an increasingly number of my less nerdy roommates and friends have been using it. There are definitely issues to be ironed out: allowing users to upload their own music even if Grooveshark doesn’t have an agreement with that artists’ label yet is sketchy; the search functionality often feels buggy, the “community” feed functionality is very basic right now, the horizontally scrolling playlist is sometimes difficult to interact with and “My Music” is not available in the mobile app even if you are a VIP. But none of these issues have been enough to stop me using. It is just so easy, seamless and effortless!

The one thing that I would personally like to see is taking the shared playlists a step further: if my friends are currently online listening to music, it would cool to be able to tune into their queue and listen to the same music simultaneously. Maybe you could also opt to share the permission to control the queue, both people could contribute songs. I think this could have the potential to be more fun than asynchronously listening or editing a shared playlist; it is also a nice way to unobtrusively spend time or feel close to someone without being physically in the same place and able to listen to music together.

locked door signalling

My former roommate works at the 9th/Market Starbucks in San Francisco:

It has one single-user bathroom that is locked by default. In order to use it, you have to ask a barista for the code and then punch it in on a numeric keypad on the door. Once you enter the bathroom, the other side of the door features this widget:

In its default unlocked state, the knob with the word “PRIVACY” is oriented vertically; you have the turn it and line the word up with the two horizontally oriented arrows in order to lock it.

The first time I used this bathroom, I didn’t notice the lock and it didn’t occur to me to look for it. I am used to two types of single-user public restroom door mechanisms:

• A door that locks automatically which requires a key for entry. You take the key inside the bathroom with you so that no one else can open the door while you are in there.
• A door that is unlocked by default, which you lock from the inside.

This Starbucks bathroom is a strange combination of the two: it locks automatically and requires a “key” for entry, but since the key is a numeric code rather than physical key anyone else code potentially also unlock the door at any time. Thus, an additional internal lock is necessary. The problem is that because you have to unlock the door from the outside and it locks automatically, it doesn’t feel like you need to take the additional step of locking it from the inside. I happened to see the lock when I turned around to hang my bag, but I easily could have missed it completely. I asked my roommate if people walk in on each other and he said “Yeah, that’s why we tell everyone to knock first!”

That got me thinking about what could be done to indicate to customers that they should use the internal lock once they have entered the bathroom. Inspired by all the time I have recently spent on airplanes, the first solution that popped into my mind is to have the internal privacy lock also serve as a switch for the main lights (with only dim safety lights on by default). Once the customer has entered and shut the door, the dim lighting should be a cue for the customer to look for a switch, which will lead them to find the lock.

Either that, or I guess you could just put a huge sign above the toilet that says “Remember to lock the door!” Less elegant, but possibly more effective in the end. :)

emotional design & document editing processes

This week we covered emotional design in my human behavior course. Our design exercise was to create versions of Google Docs for documents with faraway faraway deadlines versus documents with looming deadlines, focusing especially on the visceral (initial visual appearance) and behavioral (look and feel).

The exercise made me think of two of my favorite non-traditional word processors which are designed to help you write through encouraging distinct emotional states:

OmmWriter, which feels like a more beautiful, zen-like extension of distraction free full-screen editors such as WriteRoom and Writer.

Write or Die, which takes a completely different approach!

For our exercise, my group ended up an editor with three stages: 1. A free-form space (similar to what OneNote offers) where you can start typing anywhere in the editing space and can drag around blocks of text and making simple drawings. This would be for the initial brainstorming stage of a document, when the deadline is faraway. 2. A lined note paper view with minimal formatting options (and maybe even a cheesy handwriting or typewriter font). This is the stage for more formal outlining or a rough draft. 3. A print view with complete formatting options, that more or less resembles how Google Docs already appears by default - your writing appears on a white page with 1 inch margins, more or less how it will look in its final form.

Kevin also brought up the question of how one might redesign presentation software in a similar way. This was really interesting to me because while I have a somewhat established process for writing essays (that is largely reflected in the 3 stages we came up with above), I don’t have much experience creating presentations and have no idea where to start. If I just open up Powerpoint, I’m greeted with this screen:

Which suggests the way to start is to jump in and create my first slide, and then my second slide, and then my third slide, etc. until I’m done. Is that really how we should be creating presentations? Does any experienced presenter go about it that way? My guess is, probably not. I would guess that more often they start with some kind of script or outline for what they want to cover, and then later on determine exactly what content should actually go on individual slides. Why don’t we have software that encourages this process?

update: nightly build panorama

Update to my previous post: Just downloaded the nightly build, where Panorama is looking much more polished. Hooray!

• You can create tab groups from the Panorama view by dragging a thumbnail outside of its group box. As far as I can tell, you still can’t add new (previously un-opened) tabs to a group while remaining in the Panorama view.

• It appears that the Windows 7 Aero Peek quirk whereby individual tabs are being treated as separate windows still remains. If anything, I would have expected each tab group to be treated as a separate window. I don’t know if this is a problem with Windows or with Firefox.

• In the Panorama view, App tabs are now represented in every group as a favicons, which is a big improvement! The redundancy is a little bit strange - I think expected to instead have all the App tabs grouped in one place, separately from the other tab groups. But the current design does allow you, to decide whether you want to pull up a particular App tab within the context of one Tab group rather than the other.

• The highlighting around the current/last tab open is now a blue-ish glow rather than a drop shadow, which is a bit less subtle than the drop shadow, but I’m still finding it difficult to pick out when scanning through a number of thumbnails.

• Spotlight-like feature doesn’t appear to work for App tabs. Also, it would be really really awesome if it could search the text within the tabs in addition to the title.