One part of the conference that is particularly interesting to me is the MIX UX track that runs alongside of more technical subjects. Jensen Harris will be talking about the design process of Office 2007's Ribbon interface. Kim Lenox and Dan Harrelson from Adaptive Path will be taking care of an entire day in the UX track talking about the process of building great user experiences.

Perhaps more importantly is the presence of the IE team. With the recent, heated debates regarding IE8's versioning switch it will be interesting to see if their radical decision allowed the team to forget about legacy and really move towards a standards compliant browser. Jeremy Keith and Peter-Paul Koch already announced they will be heading down to the conference to slap some sense talk to the team about the versioning switch and their motivation. Also expected is the release of the first IE8 beta.

We will be in Las Vegas from the 4th (leaving Schiphol in the afternoon) until the 8th (leaving Las Vegas in the morning) and staying in the Treasure Island hotel -- right across the Venetian. As always, if you're planning to attend MIX08 and would like to grab a drink or eight (it's Vegas, come on), send me an e-mail or message me on Twitter.

Along with long time friend and fellow student Ron Kok, I'll attend the pre- and after-party and of course the conference itself. The pre-party starts at 8PM on Thursday night and is hosted by the people from Media Temple at Heist. Following the conference itself on Friday is the after-party hosted by Yahoo! and BBC in the Audio Brighton. Inevitably, we're there.

We'll be around from September 6th in the afternoon until September 8th in the evening (no BarCamp for us). If you are around as well, send me a direct message on Twitter. The other option is to walk around the streets of Brighton proclaiming me as your one and only God. Whichever works for you :-)

Last Friday, June 29th, I graduated with as a Bachelor in Communication & Multimedia Design. That day was the conclusion of a four month internship I did at Funda, where I designed, developed and tested a new online concept, but also the conclusion of a four year study at The Hague University.

Throughout those four years I took on many projects and met many people -- I wanted to record this milestone and take the time to thank a couple of people.

As mentioned, in early February 2007 I started a four month project at the leading Dutch real estate listing site Funda. Thanks go to Thijs Vieleers for the opportunity and freedom. I had an absolutely brilliant time working with the people there and working on a really fun project. Despite their recent bumps I am confident that Funda has an extremely bright future ahead of themselves.

A year before, in February 2006, I completed a five month internship at Leiden based internet company Media Design. Many thanks go out to Faruk Ates for bringing me in and giving me a chance to work at a great place during my first ever internship.

Finally, the guys from #xhtml.nl: Tim Hofman (Media Design), Hayo Bethlehem, Sjors Rijsdam and Jochem Meyers. However, everything would have been a lot less fun and a lot harder if it wasn't for two fellow students I spend the last two year working with: Ron Kok and Tjeerd in 't Veen. One of the few students who can balance fun with hard work and share the same kind of perfectionism in all the work they do.

What does the future have in store for me? Some will pursue a masters degree, most will take on full-time employment. Right now it looks like I will start work around September or October. I have not decided on the exact course of my future just yet, but when I do, it won't take another half year for me to post it here (hopefully).

PS: This was a quick update. I am not planning on making two posts in the same week a habit. ;-)

I was especially interested in the iPhone's virtual keyboard. Due to a lack of tactile feedback on a touch-screen it is necessary for them to create an interface that does a better job than a regular keyboard, if they wish the user to accept that one problem. Having seen the demonstration videos of iPhone’s keyboard, I instantly noticed some problems. Instead of waiting for people's experiences, I wanted to throw this out in the wild and see if other people have different ideas.

Inherent Problems

Touch-screens are old and even multi-touch screens date back from 1982. In the eighties people have conducted usability studies and designed many of the interaction models we see in the iPhone today. There are several problems with touch-screens and none of them have been solved yet:

• Finger-operated touch-screens are excellent in the speed department, but slow in accuracy with which an user can operate it (Albert, 1982). This is especially a problem with smaller screens where interface elements are relatively small.
• Stylus-operated touch-screens are comparable to operating the interface with a mouse in terms of speed and accuracy (Mack & Lang, 1989).
• Lack of tactile feedback requires the interface to rely on other means, such as visual or auditive feedback. Especially visual feedback can prove to be a problem on smaller screens where hands or fingers may block a clear view to the operated interface element.
• "Gorilla arm"-syndrome was observed mostly with larger touch-screens where movements cause strain on the arm and shoulder after a long period of time.

Only the first and third apply to the iPhone. These are the two problems Apple needed to attack in their interface and it shows in some of the features of the virtual keyboard. I consider accuracy in one of the most important aspects in interface design. Accuracy defines the difference between hit and miss -- between getting it right or wrong.

Apple implemented two types of solutions to attack this problem: suggestions and expandable touch areas in the keyboard. I couldn't help but notice something seemed wrong in both solutions.

Word Suggestions

A keyboard, especially on a mobile device, is usually strongly connected to an intelligent text recognition system. Systems such as T9 provide suggestions based on the user's current input and behavior in the past. A user can choose to accept or ignore the suggestion.

The iPhone implements a similar system and likely only supports an English dictionary right now. In the demonstration video they show the user entering the word 'ouzza' and suggest the word 'pizza'. The suggestion itself can be perfectly correct and there is indeed not a word such as 'ouzza'. However, that is not the point I am going to make. The interface dictates that the spacebar is used to accept the suggestion. The question I ask is: what if I want to insert a space, but not accept the suggestion?

This scenario is not uncommon. Such dictionaries are based on plain English, but we all know users have their own dictionary as well. Besides the textspeak, it is not uncommon for people to use words specific to an industry, sport or whatever. Sometimes, we add such words in the dictionary, so they will appear as suggestions the next time. The convention across mobile devices seems to be that a separate interface element can be used to accept the suggestion -- in the case of the iPhone I would have thought it to be more logical to actually select the suggestion (although this isn't perfect either). This keeps the behavior of the spacebar singular and clear and does not require an extra character to accept an already written word.

Expanding Touch Areas

Another seemingly clever feature in the virtual keyboard seems to be the expandable touch area. This means that the area with which a certain key on the keyboard can be pressed expands, when surrounding keys would not form a word with the current input. In the video the user writes the word 'tim' and because there are no correct words to be formed with a following 'w' or 'r', the touch area of the 'e' is expanded.

In theory, this is awesome. Some people immediately said it was a perfect application of Fitts' Law. I disagree. This has nothing to do with Fitts' Law and I think that in its current implementation it will provide more frustration than an advantage in the speed/accuracy department.

Fitts' Law states that the time it takes to interact with an interface element is defined by the distance to and the size of the element. Looking at this feature in the demonstration video, it seems as if the expanded touch area is not visually communicated. How can the user possibly know when this occurs? The user will still want to focus on the normal touch area, because that is what is communicated. There is no visual difference in the size of the target, thus no dynamic application of Fitts' Law.

Now, the first thing you might say is that is excellent for error handling. This transparent expanded touch area allows for the right input in cases where accuracy was low, usually in the first days of using the virtual keyboard. I could agree, but this is mostly irrelevant. Exactly because the expanded area is not visually communicated and the algorithm is complicated, the user cannot predict nor rely on its behavior. If this is not possible, how is he supposed to use this behavior to his advantage?

Finally, I must briefly mention another edge scenario. What if I do want to enter a 'w' or 'r'? The video does not make this clear and suggests that the touch area mostly covers these keys.

Share Your Experiences

I have to admit this was a bit of a rant. I can't imagine Apple did not foresee these problems. So, I am looking forward to be proven wrong and hearing about your experiences with the aforementioned functionality in particular.

Judging by the video, Apple did succeed in improving a regular keyboard experience. One of the strengths of touch-screens is that it allows for contextual interfaces and Apple uses this by providing variations of the keyboard depending on the task you are trying to complete.

As for the iPhone itself, I would love to have my hands on one just for the interface alone. Unfortunately, I couldn't see myself actually using one.

As a casual gamer and news-addict I found myself visiting a dozen of gaming related sites almost every day and skim through the headlines looking for something interesting. Adding these sites' feeds to my reader would only annoy me. So, last november I started designing and building this little project. I spend the last month putting finishing touches on the design and code and talking with sites to offer platform-seperate feeds. Now it's available for everyone to use.

Design

On the design side of the project I had to make a choice between going for a river- or site-centred layout. As someone putting great value to the source of the news I opted for the latter. Especially with Gametrailers offering extensive data in their feeds, I was able to offer more than just headlines for the video portion. Everything else is the result of the desire to minimize noise, but still make it easy to skim through the headlines. As such, previously visited links are clearly denoted.

Magpie

A great thank you goes out to Magpie (an Atom and RSS parser in PHP). I use a dev build of Magpie 0.8 and it made the development a whole lot easier.

Future Plans

The plan is to keep on improving it and adding new features throughout the next month. Search, proper article previews and perhaps adding a PC channel, are ideas I will consider implementing. One site I particularly would like to add is the excellent Gamevideos, but their feed is very simplistic of nature.

I would appreciate any feedback you have, either by commenting here or e-mailing me.

Note: Gametrailers' Wii feed is now functioning. Also fixed some bugs where identical links or videos for multiple platforms would only display in one.

digg: You're free to digg.

For the past month, along with fellow student Ron Kok, we've been taking part in a project designed by ourselves for our Communication & Multimedia Design major. Inspired by a previous project we're researching the different interface problems when introducing new, dynamic interaction in a website -- specifically, an online booking system for a resort. The results will be implemented in our own version of such a system aiming to introduce a better user experience without sacrificing accessibility.

The Web and Beyond will cover many topics I am really interested in, especially with the way the internet has developed in the past year. Having only been a month at work, the project is already showing how challenging it is to keep the accessibility up to par while still introducing that amazing interaction you had envisioned. Furthermore, our user research makes us question some very simple and well established design patterns in the online booking world. Hopefully the conference will give us new ideas on how to solve some of these problems. If not, the list of confirmed speakers is more than enough already.

• Jared Spool, User Interface Engineering
• Jesse James Garret, Adaptive Path
• Bill Scott, Yahoo!
• and many more...

If you're planning to attend The Web and Beyond on the 8th of June, let me know and I'll make sure we run into each other for a quick drink.

DOM scripting and the AJAX methodology allows us to create interactive solutions for more complicated concepts, without sacrificing accessibility and usability too much. Others are still exploring the world of CSS and semantics in an effort to create better solutions that work for more people.

When building interfaces, we have the technology and increasing support to do the wildest things. It's tempting to think of solutions that implement spiffy interactivity or effects or reduce the flow to a single page.

2006 is promising to be an exciting time, if we're lead to believe the Web 2.0 movement. Ultimately, technology exists to increase usability: increase effectiveness, efficiency and the user experience. No matter how high the "I am going to wet my pants"-factor is, it is pointless if it doesn't allow your visitor to get more done in less time in a more enjoyable manner. So, while others are going to focus on prototyping cutting-edge solutions, my advice to you is to remember the cause: usability.

See you in 2006.

Flock: A Social Browser

They describe their intentions as:

"We started Flock to build tools that empower people and smooth out some of the more hairy parts of living and working online. As it is, we live and breathe this stuff everyday and wanted better tools to do the things that we love doing online."

Having read about 13 things you can do and the fact that it tries to address my complaints about online bookmark integration, I decided to give it a spin. Right from the start you notice a very, very sexy theme. Everything else seems rather familiar. Only after investigation you'll find some very interesting features, such as the favorites system, blogging tools supporting common blogging software and a very conveniently extended search box. Flock is based on Mozilla Firefox, meaning it's only a matter of time before all your extensions are compatible.

All in all, Flock is looking to become very interesting. If you 'live and breath' online, you'll definitely want to give it a shot and keep an eye on it.

Related Links

• Flock, official website
• Screenshots: 01, Flickr

PS: Yes, I don't write a lot. I've been busy. Consider this a drive-by-entry.

What did I pick? The Creative Zen Sleek 20GB.

UPDATE: I have made the drivers I talk about available below.

Creative Zen Sleek: An Introduction

Like most modern players, Creative's new multiformat HD MP3 player has 20GB of storage joy, advertised 18 hours of battery life and a touchpad for quick menu navigation, along with a blue backlight, FM tuner, voice/radio recording, equalizer, some PDA-functionality and a USB2.0 connection, supporting MP3, WAV, WMA and WMA with DRM 9 and 10. Oh, it's selling for a nice 250-260 euro.

Nothing special, right? Right.

Build Quality

Build quality is important. We're dealing with a hard disk here, so we don't want it to fall apart after some days of using it. So, I was happy to see that the Sleek feels and looks very good. It comes in a brushed aluminum casing combined with white and large, grey buttons. The aluminum makes the player feel very robust and perfectly capable of surviving some accidents.

The plastic area covering the 2 inch LCD screen looks a bit cheap, but that's primarily caused by the thick protection layer on top of it. It's not something that is bothering me though, because all in all it looks very nice.

The Interface

The buttons and the touchpad are the player's main interface and do the job very well. People have complained about the high sensitivity of the touchpad, but this setting is customizable and should offer the right setting for everyone. One way or another, the touchpad does require a couple of minutes of getting used to, but after that I was flying through the menu's.

As a laptop user, I am quite comfortable with the way touchpads work -- for example, tapping the touchpad enters the currently selected item. The button in the lower left corner allows you to go back one step in your history (not up one level in the menu hierarchy) and by holding it you'll go to the root level right away. Finally, on top of the Sleek is a hold button to disable the buttons and touchpad.

Browsing your music library is the same as most players. You can view it by album, artist, genre, load a playlist or bookmark. If you're one of those indecisive people you can let the Sleek's DJ choose for you, or play music using selections such as "Most Popular", "Rarely Heard" or "Album of the Day".

A very nice feature is the ability to completely customize the main menu by adding, removing and reordering the items on the screen. The default items are no reason to use this feature right away though, but it's nice to see that I can.

It works quick, easy and without any problems.

Transferring Music

Easily one of the most important aspects of a player is the usability of transferring music to the player. As with many manufacturers, Creative also tries to make you believe you actually need the software they ship the Sleek with. Having never owned a MP3 player before, it must be said that I felt very uncomfortable with not knowing what is needed and what isn't. Marketing, I guess?

The Sleek ships with two software packages: Zen Media Explorer and Creative MediaSource. The former is basically an Explorer shell extension putting functionality -- think of things like viewing your music and data, or syncing the calendar, tasks and contacts with Outlook -- of the Sleek at an easily accessible place. Creative MediaSource is similar to Windows Media Player 10 by offering playback and libraries, but focusing on organizing and transferring your music instead. Unless you intend to use the basic PDA-functionality that's available in the Sleek, you can safely refrain from installing both packages. I know I will stick to WMP10.

What you do need are drivers. Yes, unfortunately one downside of the Sleek so far. The current firmware 1.00.05 does not make it instantly recognizable as removable storage. Of course, this does not mean it won't ever be with future firmware versions, as some other Creative models have received this welcome functionality in firmware upgrades.

17:11 GMT: Apparentely I was half mistaken in the previous paragraph. It is possible to connect the Creative Zen Sleek as a removable storage device, but it will only affect the data partition. Your music won't be visible and transfering music to it still requires the drivers.

Anyone that has just purchased or is planning to purchase a Creative Zen Sleek and now wonders about the installation of the drivers -- you can find them on the CD at \Drivers\<language>\Drv_Jb3.exe. Launch the executable and you're done. After installation a separate removable storage like drive will appear on your system through which you can use the Sleek as with any removable storage.

Sound Quality (and earbuds)

Creative's players have always been one of the best players on the market in terms of sound quality. The Sleek is no exception and I am very satisfied with the sound. I listen to a lot of hardstyle and techno, so good bass is important to me.

It must be said that you are going to need to use good headphones or earbuds with it. The ones that come with the Sleek are .. crap. They seem to have adopted the ergonomic properties of a cactus. I haven't even bothered to check their sound quality, but I've read that it's not the best either. Before purchase I had already decided to use my 13 euro Sony earbuds, which are brilliant.

Battery Life & Recharging

The Sleek is advertised to last 18 hours on a single battery charge, of course, highly depending on your usage. Considering these are just first impressions and the fact I haven't even gone through one battery charge yet, I can't say too much about it. What I can say is that by applying some maths, it does seem as if that claim isn't just marketing talk. On another note, recharging only takes two hours.

Other Functionality

I briefly mentioned PDA-functionality, such as a calendar, tasks and contacts -- all syncable with Outlook. You can't add, edit or remove of any these from the player itself, thankfully. Whether it uses an open format and can be synced with software like iCal or others is something I don't know and honestly don't care about. Viva la paper agenda's!

The Creative Zen Sleek also sports voice and radio recording and the ability to bookmark a location in a song (or Podcast), of which the latter might come in handy for some people.

No Colorscreen?

No, the Creative Zen Sleek does not have a colorscreen. Do I really care? No. Why not? Well, the primary use of a MP3 player is listening to the sound it produces. Occassionally one might use the screen to look at the interface trying to perform a certain task, but a (lack of) colorscreen won't affect your ability to accomplish it. It only makes you giggle like a little schoolgirl anyway. ;-)

Why not an iPod?

Perhaps one of the most common questions people have thrown in my general direction this month is: why not get an iPod? Well, as much as I like Apple's design, I am simply not that impressed with the iPod. It's a good player like most other modern players, but I won't jump right on it due to its sexy, white looks and the cute little, shiny Apple on the back.

The Creative Zen Sleek is smaller, lighter, has longer battery life, larger screen and comes with more features that appeal to me than an iPod. It's just a matter of elimination.

Conclusion

Teh sleek (did I just say that?)! No, really. It's a wonderful player doing everything I expected in a very, very good way. It even surprised me with some features, such as menu customization and bookmarks. That's said by someone who's not easily satisfied and aims for perfection.

Retailing for about 250 euro in Dutch stores I feel it's quite a good price/quality ratio. With the likelihood of the price dropping significantly in a couple of months for the holiday season, it only makes it nicer.

The decision to buy the Sleek was much easier than actually getting my hands on one, because the player has not officially made it to the shelves in The Netherlands yet -- has been available in the UK for a while now and only recently in the USA. You should be able to find some units in some online retailers by now.

Creative Zen Sleek Drivers for firmware 1.00.05

• ZIP file including: Drv_Jb3.exe, DRV_JB.exe, DRV_NM2.exe (2.4 MB)

Creative Zen Sleek Menu Diagram

• Diagram of most menu's and options

Related Information

• Creative Zen Sleek Official Specifications
• Creative Zen Sleek Photos (3) at Flickr