Desktop Neo – rethinking the desktop interface for productivity
Am I the only one who has trouble with touch interfaces in general? Ever since my burnout I developed tremors in my fingers (I&#x27;m only 35) they got less but I don&#x27;t expect them to ever completely disappear.<p>When I got my first smartphone, a Galaxy S4, which is nearly all-touchscreen to the edges and only 8mm thick, I found them absolute <i>hell</i> to use. Despite that I love the elegance of <i>idea</i> of touch-interfaces. If it&#x27;s on, I must hold it by the 8mm sides to not press all sorts of things, which is very hard to keep steady. Meaning I can&#x27;t do two-thumb-typing, or take sharp pictures, having to steady it against&#x2F;in my hand I press the power button by accident, it just sucks. Many things take longer and it&#x27;s not cool to be confronted with every few minutes.<p>Three-finger touch gestures are going to be awful for who who can&#x27;t reliably bring three fingers down on the touchpad at the same time or can&#x27;t quite rest their hand ready for that. Either the OS will occasionally register a bunch of one- and two-finger events before all three hit, or the OS will have to wait and analyse what&#x27;s the intent and incur latency--at which point you&#x27;re no longer doing <i>anyone</i> a favour, not the young dexterous power users, nor the twitchy and the elderly.<p>A lot of people ITT praise this guy&#x27;s &quot;design&quot; skills, but I&#x27;m not entirely clear what particular field of design? His graphics design skills are pretty okay (not my taste but it looks good), but his user interface&#x2F;interaction design skills ... I can&#x27;t even judge because he doesn&#x27;t display them?<p>All he writes about, even on the &quot;Design Process&quot; page is basically graphics design, mockups and daydreaming. This is what people in the industry call, <i>a cute hobby</i>. Where are the user tests? Where&#x27;s the stories? Videos? Theory?<p>How do children ages 9-11 work with that (long) menu list that supposedly &quot;is easily scannable&quot;? (answer: they don&#x27;t)<p>How do the elderly feel about three-finger touch gestures? (probably not very sexy)<p>What about when the menu list is translated to other languages? Doubt that even crossed his mind. But try it out, an exercise: An application with big menus that you are very familiar with (for me GIMP, but otherwise perhaps LibreOffice, or whatever). Switch the interface from English to a second language you speak well, even&#x2F;especially if that language is your mother tongue. What happened to &quot;easily scannable&quot;?<p>Now switch the interface to a script you can&#x27;t even read, Persian or Cyrillic. If you can still somewhat blindly perform some tasks and relatively easily find your way to switch back, the interface is doing pretty good. I have a fun Xposed plugin for Cyanogenmod called &quot;HODOR&quot;, which hooks into the OS and changes <i>all the words</i> everywhere to read &quot;HODOR&quot;. It&#x27;s hilarious. To switch back you need to start Xposed, browse two levels of menus and reboot your phone. There&#x27;s only two points where I need to <i>guess</i> (memorize), which I think is not bad for Cyanogenmod&#x27;s UX design. This is what the final reboot dialog looks like: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;Yjf4Gc0.jpg" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;Yjf4Gc0.jpg</a> (asking whether I want regular or soft reboot, recovery or download and to OK&#x2F;Cancel).<p>On the Design Process page he says &quot;during the creation of Neo, I put a big focus on research&quot;, but then all he shows is more daydreaming and mockups. Where <i>is</i> the research?<p>This is a neat portfolio for a graphics designer but as far as user interaction design goes, all I see is someone that doesn&#x27;t take the field seriously.<p>Something that is slightly worrying in the general case (also for graphics designers), all the descriptions I see him <i>telling</i> how it should be from his point of view, nothing about other users, nothing about users that are not like him. I admit that&#x27;s just my impression from reading these few pages. But that&#x27;s exactly what a portfolio should provide.<p>No stories about him sitting down with at least 20 random (not self-selected) people interacting with his mockups (assuming they&#x27;re interactive), doing tasks, taking notes and&#x2F;or video, and documenting especially the failures and the changes they provoked. That means either he hasn&#x27;t done actual research, or he deems it not important enough to write about on his portfolio (very unlikel,y given the troves of information it provides if you actually do it).<p>Even if he didn&#x27;t test on other people, I&#x27;d expect the &quot;Design Process&quot; page to at least talk about, his design process. It&#x27;s just screenshots of early iterations. &quot;Early on I identified the three most important topics as navigation, file management and input&quot;--cool, how did you do that? Intuition is not a process! In particular it&#x27;s not a skill that someone at the start of their career can plausibly demonstrate (either you can clearly explain steps how you got there or you have a long history of intuitively being right about such things).