Want magazine published an interview with Luke Wroblewski (Chief Design Architect at Yahoo!). Luke talks about the User Experience and how it came to be, how Interaction Design has progressed through time and its current state, and web forms – how websites aim to gradually engage the user.

The editing of the video is disruptive and annoying, but the interview is interesting.

Minput is a sensing and input method that enables intuitive and accurate interaction on very small devices ones too small for practical touch screen use and with limited space to accommodate physical buttons.

It has two, inexpensive and high-precision optical sensors (like those found in optical mice) to the underside of the device. This allows the entire device to be used as an input mechanism, instead of the screen, avoiding occlusion by fingers. In addition to x/y translation, it also captures twisting motion, enabling many interesting interaction opportunities typically found in larger and far more complex systems.

YouTube video player - new UI

It seems that after the new video and profile pages that YouTube rolled out over the past few months, it was time to bring the flash player up to speed with the rest of the site’s interface (note: the new UI is not available in all videos yet).

As you can see, the controls have been re-arranged and they have a updated look and feel. In comparison, these are the old vs new designs:

YouTube video player - old vs new design

As a first impression, I like the improved aesthetics of the player and the less cluttered interface. The right-hand side of the old player was starting to look like a full loaded toolbar from Word (just to watch a video!).

The most obvious change is the progress bar, which has been moved above the other buttons and changes in size as you interact with the video. In its normal state it takes only a few pixels, but when you move your mouse cursor on top of the video player, it expands (having a minor transparency) and lets you interact with it. The rest of the buttons become ‘active’ as well, by a small change in color tone.

In regards to the new progress bar, although they moved it in order to free space for the other buttons, there is a small delay now before you can use it (move the cursor over the player > wait for the bar to appear > locate the progress indicator > click). So, this might have a negative usability effect when you just want to skim through a video quickly.

YouTube video player - new progress bar

Another interesting change is the volume control, which now expands horizontally as your mouse cursor hovers the button and doesn’t float over the video (how many times I had to click the volume button after I had adjusted the volume, just for the indicator to go away and let me watch the video). I still find the size of the volume bar small. They could increase its width and let us have a finer control over the volume.

YouTube video player - new volume control

YouTube found a simple way to reduce the clutter in the right-hand side of the player, by separating the buttons into two groups:

• buttons that appear in every video (player size, full screen)
• buttons that appear only under specific conditions (captions, subtitles, quality)

and giving them a distinct design:

YouTube video player - new misc buttons

Overall, the new UI design is less cluttered, straightforward to use and looks sleek (while providing the same functionality). I’m sure we are going to see further updates as the YouTube team starts getting feedback from the users. Well done YouTube!

“I was so hoping for something more.”, “Great just what the world needs, another freaking ….“, “I still can’t believe this! All this hype for something so ridiculous! … I want something new! I want them to think differently!“, “it wont sell, and be killed off in a short time…and it’s not really functional“, “Break-thru digital device? The Reality Distortion Field™ is starting to warp Steve’s mind if he thinks for one second that this thing is gonna take off.”, “I have a *** and a *** already, and besides that now that I don’t have a *** job anymore I need that $ to pay car payments and rent.”, “The reason why everyone is disappointed is because we had our hopes up for this incredible device that would do everything you could possibly use the word digital in and most of the things you can’t do.“

Why so much negativity? Is the product really that bad?

A case of Déjà vu

It is a bit ironic that the above comments (posted here) do not refer to the new iPad, but to the iPod mp3 player, which was launched at 2004 and since then over 250 million units have been sold. In fact, iPods have won several awards ranging from engineering excellence, to most innovative audio product, to fourth best computer product of 2006. Furthermore, iPods often receive favorable reviews; scoring on looks, clean design, and ease of use.

Similarly, when the -- now successful -- iPhone was released, people criticised Apple for releasing a phone with such limited features (no camera at first, no copy & paste for text and no multitasking, among other complaints).

A month ago Apple announced the iPad, “The best way to experience the web, email photos and video. Hands down” as they like to call it. But is it really the best experience, and for whom?

I will not go over the pros and cons of the iPad, there are tons of preview articles already. What I find interesting is the obvious pattern on user perception and acceptance every time Apple releases a new product.

Apple product releases - user acceptance pattern

People get hyped, excited, disappointed and critical of every new product, which ends-up being a success, nevertheless. Advanced / Power users are the main source of negative comments.

Embrace your weakness

The defining characteristic of Apple’s products is simplicity. While many people criticise what the iPad does not do, Apple embraces the very same characteristic: simplicity and usability.

Users criticise what the product does not do (lack of features) <> Apple embraces simplicity (easy to use).

With the explosion of media consumption over the internet and the increasing number of new internet users, the iPad couldn’t have come at a better time. There is a huge market with people that want to consume digital content and they are either not familiar with the technology or  just do not care about the technicalities.

‘What is a browser?’

Sometimes during the design process of a product/website, we tend to make a mistake: assumptions and over-simplifications about the users (“they will be able to figure this out”, “they will like all these extra features”, etc). It’s interesting and frightening how disconnected designers can become with their target audience. Two recent events came to my mind when I was trying to figure out Apple’s goal with the iPad. When Google released its browser, Google Chrome, they did a survey in New York, asking people ‘what is a browser?’. Watch the results:

Along the same lines, in early February, ReadWriteWeb published an article titled “Facebook Wants to Be Your One True Login“. Now, ReadWriteWeb is a popular website focusing on web trends and technologies and when this article was published it managed to get a very high ranking in Google search results for the term ‘facebook login’. This lead to hundreds of people that used Google to access Facebook ending up in ReadWriteWeb, complaining because they couldn’t log in to their Facebook page and see their friends. They actually thought that ReadWriteWeb was Facebook with a new design.

iPad’s focus on goals

Unfortunately, people unfamiliar with technology exist even in developed countries and although I do not believe that designers should over-simplify their applications just for inexperienced users, there are always creative ways to develop interactions and environments that are easy and fun to use.

It’s clear that Apple it trying to tap into this market of people that do not care about platforms, plugins and updates, but are only interested in achieving their goals. This is where the iPad excels and I believe that it sets the bar on creative Human-Computer Interaction and Usability design, providing a welcoming, captivating and fun User Experience. The challenge for Apple will be the inducement of advanced and power users in adopting the iPad (or simply ignore them?).

[UPDATE]

Here’s a nice example of a 2.5 year old girl using the iPad instinctively:

Skinput is a technology that appropriates the human body for acoustic transmission, allowing the skin to be used as a finger input surface. In particular, it resolves the location of finger taps on the arm and hand by analysing mechanical vibrations that propagate through the body.

Although the underlying technology is different, Skinput looks alot like the SixthSense device that Pranav Mistry showcased at TED:

In a video about new ways to design natural user interfaces, Bill Buxton, principal researcher for Microsoft Research, explains how engineers can use a combination of interactive gestures and communication methods to enable a society of appliances to assist users of technology.

“It’s not about speech, it’s not about gesture, it’s not even about the phone, and it’s not about human-to-human communication”, Buxton says. “How these things work together in a natural and seamless way that reduces complexity for the users—that’s what we’re about. Getting these things right opens up another dimension in how we have technology integrated into our lives.”

This is a concept video of Gesture Cube, a joint development by Ident, Lunar and Zinosign. Gesture Cube uses 3D spatial movement tracking and responds to your commands as you move your hands around it.