Ux

While working on a project with Richard Amos about a year ago we were pondering the static linear nature of breadcrumbs and wondering why they should always be so. The breadcrumb serves two purposes; firstly it gives users a sense of where they are in a site’s structure, helping them to never feel lost or disoriented. Which leads to the second purpose, to always provide them with a path home. The first of these is done entirely visually, you don’t need to click on the breadcrumb or interact with it in any way in order to help orient yourself.

Here’s an interesting article from Michael Gartenberg about the future of Nokia. He touches on some of the things that I talked about in a previous post but completely misses out the experience of using a modern Nokia phone which I still believe is their biggest failing. There’s no point in producing great hardware if the actual experience of using that hardware is poor due to creaky operating systems. Just look at HTC’s Windows Mobile phones.

AdMob have announced their Mobile Metrics report [PDF] for 2009 and it makes for some pretty interesting reading. The unstoppable rise of the iPhone OS is to be expected, but it’s nice to see this graph showing change over the last 6 months shows the 3 innovative operating systems all on the rise and everyone else in decline. Image credit to AdMob of course A couple of points worth noting… the fact that Windows Mobile’s share has now reached a level with Palm’s webOS and given their current trajectories is actually probably already behind.

With every release the iTunes UI seems to get worse. This morning I attempted the seemingly simple task of copying a video from my Mac to my iPhone. Firstly, I need to drag the video to iTunes which then creates a duplicate copy of the video on my hard drive for no apparent reason. The video then shows up in iTunes, so I attempt to click and drag it to my iPhone.

Testing out Linkup.com’s new service I got a slightly unexpected error message; “We couldn’t understand the location london that you provided.” While I don’t mind that it didn’t understand the word London, it is a shame that it doesn’t offer the user any options that may make their search work. Here it should be trying to help the user, rather than simply telling them that it doesn’t understand. “Did you mean…” followed by a list of linked words similar to the search term helps to catch misspellings.