It's been a while since I've visited ThinkingWithType. If you're at all interested in graphic design I highly recommend it. In going through the site I once again came across this gem.

Beautifully said. Beautifully executed.

UX Design: Outline versus Solid Shapes

I read an interesting article regarding that the brain takes more time to process an outline than a "filled-in" icon.

Your brain traces the shapes on the first row an average of twice as much. Your eye scans the outside shape and then scans the inner line to determine if there is value in the “hollow” section.

Icons without this empty core are processed as definite and only the outer lines are processed. Depending on the outline of the shape, this happens pretty fast. No matter the shape, though, the hollow icons take more time to process.

While I agree with this completely within the context of the article - designing mobile apps - where people are often scanning your app while moving, or being in a crowded environment where they will devote even less of their attention then they do while sitting at their desk, I fear that Aubrey Johnson may be taking the point a little too far. He writes:

Choosing to use hollow icons for the sake of lightness / very-modern aesthetic is not the issue, it’s that to sacrifice the usefulness of what an icon does (aide in reading speed) for aesthetic feeling is really bad. Don’t follow bad design decisions to appease a platform.

Design above it.

Yes people will scan the solid shape faster than the outline, and if they are hurried and distracted will more likely miss or have to concentrate more on the app to perceive the icon, but this ought not be taken as a hard and fast reason to not use outlined icons - even in mobile apps. At issue: (from an IA perspective) is "how are people using the apps?" and from a UX perspective it would be: "does the [less readable] iconography increase the users enjoyment/experience more than the lack of usability detract from the experience?"

Combining the two questions would be: are there user personas which are negatively impacted to the point (from the reduced scannability) that they will either not be able to use the app or would reject it? IF that happens then absolutely one must "sacrifice" the hollow icons and follow the author's advice: "Design above it."

Sublime Text 2 Won't Save

I was using Sublime Text2 and all of a sudden it wouldn't save a file. I kept getting a permissioning error: "Can't save file 'x'. It took a little while, and a little aggravation, to figure out what happened. Windows 8 just went through another of it's forced upgrades and the admin rights for Sublime Text to write to the C:\inetpub folder was revoked.

The solution is to right click on the application and give yourself admin rights.

Problem solved.

Back to work.

Windows 8 Mouse is Freezing - Solution

My wife got a new laptop with Windows 8. She hates it by the way, and what little I've seen of Windows 8 I can see why. The UI is not intuitive, especially for someone with years of Windows experience going from DOS to Windows 95 to XP.

Be that as it may be her mouse/slidepad kept freezing. She solved the problem, up-to-now, by rebooting her computer. Last night it froze and rebooting wouldn't start it. Of course I was dragged in to solve it. The long-and-short of it is:

PRESSING F5

SOLVES IT!

So much frustration for nothing.

Google has a problem with Brooklyn

I made a search for several addresses in Brooklyn and the search results kept displaying NYC instead of Brooklyn. What's going on Google. This is the first time I've seen something like this!

Closure versus Closure

I'm working to improve my javascript skills and am struggling to absorb, to grok, closures. I find that in addition to the issues in getting past the basic definition of a closure: that it is "code that remembers the outer environment from where it came while still being usable to where it has been brought." that I have overloaded the term.. Closure is also a graphic design term and I realize that somewhere, whenever I hear the word closure I keep thinking about "completing" code; or completing a partially worked out idea.

Wow. Talk about overloading and conflating terms. For the programmers out their who are not familiar with it closure is one of the components of Gestalt Theory which describes how the mind organizes visual data. Apparently while psychologists have rejected Gestalt Theory as it does not accurately reflect human cognition - graphic designers and HCI folks have adopted it as useful in understanding how it is that humans interact with their products / applications. For instance: "why is it that human beings don't always see something right in front of their face?" Or "why are somethings found and other things ignored?"

We, as UX professionals, have to understand this when thinking about how the user is going through the application. In addition to all the other burdens faced by the user we have to take into account the fact that the user's cognitive ability will be altered/enhanced/impaired by what it is he is focused on at the time he is using the app.

A closure, in design terms, is the ability, the tendency of the mind to fill in the gaps with expected information.
The importance of this is that we must take into consideration what it is that the user is expecting which in turn comes from what it is that the user is looking to do.

Design Fail

I needed to contact EZ-Pass regarding a question I had with their service. Typical with many government sites EZ-Pass is a horror but I couldn't resist posting this epic fail.

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