STUCK ON AMBER

Upside Down Design

Rio Karma MP3 player (2004). 

This was before touch screens, when we had to rely on hard keys provided somewhere around the screen. The huge majority of hand held devices come with the controls at the bottom, below the display.

The Karma did the opposite, and that was daring. It was surprisingly comfortable, as the thumb would effortlessly meet the wheel and buttons located at the top, making the player very natural to use. But not everyone liked how it looked.

An example of product that didn't sell as much as it deserved, just because we're usually not ready to buy things that look too unusual, even if they're a delight to use. To be fair, the Karma was probably not ideal for lefthanders!

The Weakest Link Principle

The weakest link principle is a way to protect critical elements of a system, by exposing parts that are here to receive the potential damage. An example is car bumpers.

I have a nice pair of earphones that I use a lot. Since my music player is always in the front pocket of my blue jeans, the other day the cable finally broke at the jack level, due to excessive and hard to avoid friction on the pocket border. Upset, I grumbled and packed everything. Could my pricey earphones be dead just because of a damaged connector?  

At the end of the day I remembered the cable was in fact in two parts. The main part of the cable, welded to the expensive earphones, was actually intact! All I needed to do was to replace the lower part (the weakest link), which cost me about 1 euro.

How To Make a CCTV Tower With Just Three Cubes

In my previous post I show pictures of Beijing's new CCTV headquarters. Here's a simple way to understand the mad shape of it.

1. Clean the floor!

 
2. Drop a big cube (for a 1:1 model, about 230m high)

3. Add two smaller cubes

4. Force the blue cube into an angle of the big one

 
5. Delete the blue cube and the intersected part

 
6. Turn around, and put the red cube at an opposite angle

 
7. Remove the red cube and the intersected part

 
8. Oops, a bit of red remaining inside. Almost done!

 
9. Better now. See yourself through?

Your CCTV tower is ready! Well, the real one is a bit more stylish, cubes are more distorted, but the idea is the same. If you try to describe it as an addition of things (a L-shaped base, two legs, and an a L-shaped overhang but reversed...), that's difficult. But if you see it as a subtraction, it's pretty simple: remove two basic volumes from a third one, and the building is what remains. 

I suppose the stunning elegance of the CCTV tower is partly due to this great use of negative space. What is NOT there gives more strength to what is there. I already noticed that a logo could be greatly enhanced by adding empty areas and that music was more beautiful with silences, but I never really realised this could work in architecture too.

Irresistible Details

  

Example of details that make a UI more compelling than another!

Page corners that really follow your finger. Bookshelves that flip to the bookstore side. The flip effect is common on iPhone, usually to reveal a settings screen; except that here, the view is THICK as real wooden shelves. Useless? I would have agreed, not long ago. But I must admit this is cool. Details like that give more presence to the application, and help you immerse in it. Simple feeling to get closer, to control better, that something's alive in there. And what's more, the pleasure of surprise.

So consider bringing a bit of the physical world to your interfaces, and keep some surprises for your users. Discovering cool yet unexpected things is always rewarding. However there are 2 things you don't want to compromise:

Workflow and concentration

You don't want to distract your user's attention to the extent that they lose focus on their task. In the iBooks example above, the page animation as well as the bookshelves effect do not hurt; this happens in less than a second and doesn't make the application harder to use.

Performance

Ensure it does not eat your whole budget in development. Ensure that it runs smooth and does not kill the device's battery.