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'm only 35) they got less but I don'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'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't do two-thumb-typing, or take sharp pictures, having to steady it against/in my hand I press the power button by accident, it just sucks. Many things take longer and it's not cool to be confronted with every few minutes.<p>Three-finger touch gestures are going to be awful for who who can't reliably bring three fingers down on the touchpad at the same time or can'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's the intent and incur latency--at which point you'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's "design" skills, but I'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/interaction design skills ... I can't even judge because he doesn't display them?<p>All he writes about, even on the "Design Process" 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's the stories? Videos? Theory?<p>How do children ages 9-11 work with that (long) menu list that supposedly "is easily scannable"? (answer: they don'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/especially if that language is your mother tongue. What happened to "easily scannable"?<p>Now switch the interface to a script you can'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 "HODOR", which hooks into the OS and changes <i>all the words</i> everywhere to read "HODOR". It's hilarious. To switch back you need to start Xposed, browse two levels of menus and reboot your phone. There's only two points where I need to <i>guess</i> (memorize), which I think is not bad for Cyanogenmod's UX design. This is what the final reboot dialog looks like: <a href="http://i.imgur.com/Yjf4Gc0.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/Yjf4Gc0.jpg</a> (asking whether I want regular or soft reboot, recovery or download and to OK/Cancel).<p>On the Design Process page he says "during the creation of Neo, I put a big focus on research", 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'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's just my impression from reading these few pages. But that'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're interactive), doing tasks, taking notes and/or video, and documenting especially the failures and the changes they provoked. That means either he hasn'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't test on other people, I'd expect the "Design Process" page to at least talk about, his design process. It's just screenshots of early iterations. "Early on I identified the three most important topics as navigation, file management and input"--cool, how did you do that? Intuition is not a process! In particular it'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).