Wes Kroesbergen's Portfolio » Design

Why IT Pros Should Study Design and UX

Wes Kroesbergen — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 12:45:47 +0000

This may sound like a weird idea coming from someone who thinks with the right half of their brain, but I think technology professionals need to study design principles and user experience (UX). Far too often IT pros fail to grasp and/or appreciate how the technology on which they are working impacts the end user. This results in upset clients, clients who (rightly so) feel that the technician attempting to fix their issue or help them implement a new project does not understand their ‘problem’. In turn, the tech feels that the user is ignorant and doesn’t appreciate how complex the task they are doing really is. This communication barrier begins to circle, and eventually you are left with two groups of people who do not trust or understand each other, and yet are forced to interact. This does not build good client relations.

The reason I suggest that IT pros study design principles is so that they learn to appreciate the ‘user-level’ features for what they are, not dismissing them as merely useless pieces of eye-candy. When a tech can look at an object or interface, and not allow their ‘function over form’ mentality to get the better of them, they can better relate to how the user will experience the interface. When the tech appreciates on some level what the user appreciates, understanding between the two parties can grow.

Hand-in-hand with the previous point, IT pros should also study user interface experience. By beginning to understand how to implement or at least structure a good user experience, the eyes are opened to a new perspective on how the world functions. Studying and ingraining good UX principles in the core of the tech’s mentality will drastically shift how they approach their users, and how they approach the potential technologies to be implemented.

Now, you may ask why I’m suggesting the actual techs learn these things instead of just ensuring that the head folks know and understand these things. I’m a firm believer in the ancient Greek holistic approach to education. However, beyond that, I think that while the head of the body is responsible for the rest of a person’s functionality, when the whole body is trained and tuned to the same level, the performance level of the particular body jumps exponentially. Consequently, new and previously unattainable heights can be reached.

If you’re interested in some design oriented websites, check out these for examples (mostly centered around web design):

Smashing Magazine: http://www.smashingmagazine.com
Noupe: http://www.noupe.com
Net-Tuts: http://net.tutsplus.com

Apple iPad

Adobe Flash

Wes Kroesbergen — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 18:27:42 +0000

I thought I’d write another short post on my view of Adobe Flash, and why I think there is such a negative reaction to it. We went through a bit of a war over Adobe Flash when the iPhone was originally announced, and I think we’re going through one again, only this time the technology field has changed sufficiently to make an entirely new battle. When the iPhone was originally announced, and Flash support was discovered to be lacking, there was a great deal of outrage. At the time, it was a de facto standard. Since then, web developers have begun to code their websites more and more for non-Flash devices. Major sites like YouTube have developed HTML5 player alternatives for their videos. There is a lot more weight against Adobe to prove why Flash is necessary this time around.

What is Flash used for? In my experience, Flash is generally used for the following:

Ads
Games
Music Players
Movie Players
Photo Galleries

Lets look at each one of these categories in a bit more detail.

Ads: Those annoying, flashy (excuse the pun) banners you see on some of the riff-raff sites of the internet. The big, ugly, strong-coloured patches in the websites you visit… generally are Flash. Very few people appreciate Flash ads. As a matter of fact, they were one of the leading instigators in the ad-blocking plugin market.

Games: This I believe is the only category that truly justifies the ‘interactive’ benefit that Flash provides. There is nothing else that remotely comes close to the power of Flash interactivity for web interface games. However, I have a problem with the category. It is generally either children or reclusive adults that tend to play Flash games. The majority of the adult population use the web for information consumption. The majority of children/teenagers will use a dedicated gaming device. I also think that as the iTunes App Store market matures in the gaming category, the majority of users will find much more value in natively coded games.

Music Streaming Another category that Flash is very prevalent in usage. Sites like MySpace, Last.fm, and others tend to use a Flash player by default. The reason for this is that Flash tends to be a very quick, easy to implement solution for music playback and playlist generation. There is nothing else available right now that offers the webmaster anything nearly as easy to implement. Until HTML5 becomes a bit more prevalent, Flash will be used de facto for music playback in the browser. Fortunately for us iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad users, some of these sites have published API’s, and some have their own dedicated app in the iTunes App Store (e.g., Last.fm). Also, the majority of iPod Touch/iPhone/iPad users will have iTunes syncing their music to their device.

Movie Players I would argue that this category would come close to Music Streaming in prevalence of Flash implementation. Unfortunately for Adobe, HTML5 offers a native implementation for movie streaming, via the ‘video’ tag. As HTML5 browsers become more prevalent, and sites like YouTube switch to either a single HTML5 portal, or a dual HTML5/Flash service, Adobe will have a harder time justifying the need for Flash in the Movie Player category.

Photo Galleries As an amateur photographer, I’ve found that the many self-hosted photo gallery solutions for servers are Flash based. However, this is again generally due to laziness on the part of programmers, or because there are a lot of easy, of-the-shelf solutions for the photographers with little computer knowledge. There are many native web coded galleries that work just as well, and are not hard to implement. Unfortunately, the majority of photographers do not have much of a budget for displaying their photos on the web, and generally hire a low-cost (usually inexperienced) web developer to build a photo site for them. There’s no technical justification for using Flash to display a gallery of photos.

Over the next few years, as HTML5 capable browsers become more ubiquitous, and providers start providing dual-service HTML5/Flash streaming, the need for Flash Movie Players will become miniscule. Thanks to the iTunes App Store, the desire for Flash games is swiftly disappearing. As applications like Lightroom and Aperture continue integrating web-publishing, photographers using professional tools for their photos will have less and less need to hire a third-party, inexperience web developer for Photo Galleries. In the end, the only justification for a webmaster to use Adobe Flash is for publishing Ads, and using it as an easy-to-implement Music Streaming player.

Microsoft vs. iPad

Wes Kroesbergen — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 17:09:06 +0000

I’ve seen a number of folks excited about the possibility of getting Windows 7 on a tablet device, whether it be through Citrix on the iPad or natively on a PC tablet such as the ExoPC. I personally have no such desire. Windows 7 simply wasn’t designed for the sole purpose of touchscreen computing. The experience simply won’t be as good as the iPhone OS. Another issue with running Windows on a touchscreen tablet is that the majority of Microsoft technology developers have only ever programmed for a mouse/keyboard experience. This results in less than optimal touchscreen computing experience. The iPad has a huge advantage in that there are developers who have been programming solely for touchscreen devices for 3 years. The developers’ mentality has shifted already to a touchscreen environment, meaning better quality experiences. This is not to say that Windows developers can’t code for touch environments, but merely that there will be far fewer quality experiences on a Windows touchscreen device than on the iPad for the next little while.

Microsoft obviously is not going to take the iPad challenge lying down, and will be touting Windows 7 as a more complete experience (Flash anyone?) than the iPad OS. Unfortunately however, I don’t see Windows 7, good as it may be, to be a worthwhile competitor to the iPad, due to the reason outlined above. So what should Microsoft do?

I firmly believe that if Microsoft wants to take on the iPad, it needs to build a tablet from the ground up. They’ve got some great software and hardware engineers¹, and should leverage that talent to build a complete Microsoft tablet experience. Integrate it with Zune and Xbox. They’ve got the Zune app store and Xbox download on demand. Utilize the existing frameworks and build a custom, performance tuned device that can compete with the iPad. Microsoft has proven it has both the hardware and software talent… now they need to be combined.

Windows 7, Xbox 360, and the Courier are fine examples of what Microsoft can do when they put their minds to it. ↩

Response to John Nack & The Flash Blog

Wes Kroesbergen — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 15:11:29 +0000

I thought I’d write a quick post in response to the posts by John Nack, Product Manager at Adobe, and The Flash Blog regarding the lack of Flash on the iPad (and iPhone). You can find their respective posts here and here.

First, in response to John Nack, who makes the point that Flash has brought standardization to the web. Yes, while it did bring a standard to the web for a while, once Adobe purchased Macromedia, Flash itself started fragmenting into many different versions which supported different levels of features. This resulted in many users having to upgrade their Flash plugins depending on the site visited. How is this any better a ‘standard’ than HTML5? Might as well force the user to upgrade their browser to a standards-compliant version.
So, Flash provides ubiquitous browser video playback? Who cares? YouTube and Vimeo are switching to HTML5, Hulu is committed to providing iPad compliant service, and everyone else doesn’t care what they use to play video in their browser. As Internet Explorer 8 begins mass penetration (via Windows 7) and Internet Explorer 6 support is dropped (as Google announced yesterday), Flash will become less & less important. Lets be honest here. The only reason Flash is really needed is IE6′s existence. Everything else can and should be implemented via HTML5 and standards-compliant services such as OpenType.
John Nack concludes with a point that the Flash team will likely be using the GPU to bring fast performance to the desktop plugin. Who cares? The iPad and iPhone are mobile devices. Utilizing a separate GPU to do the processing is irrelevant on a mobile device that uses System-on-a-Chip design.
He also makes the point that the download size for QuickTime is twice that of Flash. Irrelevant. Most of the Flash-haters he is targeting with this post (and most Adobe CS users) are running a Mac, with native support. And most people with iTunes installed (read: everyone with an iPod/iPhone) have QuickTime installed as part of Apple Software Update. So no, ubiquity is not dependent on the download size of your plugin.

Second, in response to The Flash Blog. Have of the sites you illustrated have an iPhone compliant version (as pointed out by Mark Hughes here), and likely more will by the time iPad launches. Other sites have worthwhile iPhone app alternatives. Why should I use your plugin if the iPad supports native HTML5, and the majority of video media is capable of being delivered to me that way (YouTube, Vimeo, and Hulu?) I don’t want to play Flash web games, and with the iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad, most games that people will be playing will be native iPhone apps anyway. So there is no use for Flash for media playback or gaming on iPhone OS. What does Flash offer me then?
Your Flash plugin performance sucks. Small wonder Apple didn’t want didn’t want a battery pig like that on the iPhone and iPad.

Flash is dead. I hate the platform with a passion, and while I’d love to watch it die a long and slow death, the faster it goes the better. With Google’s latest announcement that they will stop supporting IE6, HTML5 ubiquity will hopefully begin. Flash is useless if my content is delivered to me through other streams, whether the iTunes store, HTML5, or a dedicated app. If I want an ‘interactive’ game, I’ll stick with a native iPhone or iPad application. There is nothing that Flash offers me, and no real way for it to ‘innovate’ against the march of technological progress. Welcome to the New World folks.