Re: Launch image to increase feeling of responsiveness (a la iPhone)
On Mon, Mar 10, 2008 at 2:57 PM, Kalle Vahlman [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Heh, well if you don't care about marketing your product/program/platform to its users, you definitely shouldn't follow Apple. Please don't put words in my mouth. How exactly does putting an engineering-centric view first equate to not caring about marketing? It clearly does not. I would just rather application developers give the users a better experience my actual performance gains rather than blatant psychological manipulation. _Actual_ performance. _Perceived_ performance will be improved, which is what matters to anyone not thinking how the poor CPU is doing hard work. What cannot be seen by users, does not exist to the users. Actually ... I took a good look at the startup times of all the apps that I have installed on my tablet (which is a good chunk of what is available since I like checking out what is out there). The vast majority of them show a loading banner immediately and a barebones UI is less than 3 seconds. The only two that took an easily measurable time to start without showing *anything* (including a banner) was Erminig and Gnumeric and they both started up in about 6 seconds. So it appears that some people's perception of startup slowness problems do not match reality. This is with the N810 running OS2008. The N800 running OS2008 will be similar. Running OS2007 on either the 770 or N800 is the only problem area ... and there already is a solution for the N800. So this discussion should probably be narrowed down to how can you make the 770 look like it is starting up faster. Something I can see Nokia having zero interest in. I suppose many of the open source projects around do just that. They construct beautifully engineered but unimaginably crappy UI's. You are displaying a pile of hyperbole here and slipping into the tired falsehood that well engineered things look ugly. Don't forget that UI design is as much an engineering principle as it is an aesthetic one. While I agree that Apple does a great job at UI innovation, the rest of the world in not a UI cestpit. There are examples of crummy UI, sure. But maemo is not one of them. It could be better but it is pretty good by any absolute standard. If it was so easy to cut startup time to 3s, people probably would have done it already. Since it hasn't happened, setting up smoke and mirrors to entertain the user while loading would make *users* happier (note: not the people who watch the CPU meter or even know what the heck CPU is). Well, I have news for you ... that 3s standard for showing a basic UI has already been met (with the N800 and N810 running OS2008 at least). So all your smoke and mirrors will likely impact the user perception negatively since you'd be hard pressed to get a full screen fake UI image up in significantly less time than that. /Mike ___ maemo-developers mailing list maemo-developers@maemo.org https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-developers
Re: Launch image to increase feeling of responsiveness (a la iPhone)
I do agree with Michael Wiktowy. I did the check too and my applications show a barebone of their UI in less than 3s. Indeed, I have never noticed and slowness in applications startup since I've switched to OS2008. I am not an UI expert (even tho I would like to be), but, from an user point of view, I cannot say that the startup times in OS2008 are slow. In fact they're not even so slow to require cheating in order to appear faster. -- anidel ___ maemo-developers mailing list maemo-developers@maemo.org https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-developers
Re: Launch image to increase feeling of responsiveness (a la iPhone)
Michael Wiktowy wrote: Well, I have news for you ... that 3s standard for showing a basic UI has already been met (with the N800 and N810 running OS2008 at least). Actually OS2007 is faster here with my N800 in this regard. When launched repeatedly, both Application Manager and File Mananger show something below 0.5 seconds and look complete in =1 second (except scanning cards and directories in FM). Startup of other apps is slower though. In OS2008 File manager is below 1 sec too, AM is slow like others. So all your smoke and mirrors will likely impact the user perception negatively Well, while the fake UI is non-functional it may still help you to do the thing faster. Imagine Calculator application. It takes time before one thinks about what to type and finds specific number button, but until you see the layout, you can only wait. With correct screenshot your mind can start thinking about what buttons to press in which order earlier. True that at the time you manage to hit first button with stylus, it must already be functional or at least buffer the events or you are confused. So IMO it is not just smoke and mirrors. With banner your mind is occupied with watching spinning circle and you don't/can't think about what exact actions you are going to do next. But still, focusing on improving actual startup speed is of course much better than doing such dirty tricks :-) Frantisek ___ maemo-developers mailing list maemo-developers@maemo.org https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-developers
Re: Launch image to increase feeling of responsiveness (a la iPhone)
2008/3/11, Michael Wiktowy [EMAIL PROTECTED]: On Mon, Mar 10, 2008 at 2:57 PM, Kalle Vahlman [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Heh, well if you don't care about marketing your product/program/platform to its users, you definitely shouldn't follow Apple. Please don't put words in my mouth. How exactly does putting an engineering-centric view first equate to not caring about marketing? It clearly does not. You specifically excluded the marketing (ie. looking good to users) POV in the part you didn't quote. I would just rather application developers give the users a better experience my actual performance gains rather than blatant psychological manipulation. If the performance is good enough, naturally there is no need for psychological manipulation. I would assume that people already take this into account when designing their application and make it show the UI and allow user to start using it even if it's not completely ready. I'm sorry if you mistook me for suggesting *replacing* good engineering for smoke and mirrors. I'm just saying that smoke and mirrors can be useful in the cases where startup is long and it can't be cut down to meet user expectations. [snip] So it appears that some people's perception of startup slowness problems do not match reality. Andrew seemed to count 4-5 seconds (dunno if he used a stopwatch though). So this discussion should probably be narrowed down to how can you make the 770 look like it is starting up faster. Something I can see Nokia having zero interest in. Huh, I was rather discussing how to increase the perceived responsivness of launching programs than solving someones problem with 770's or even N8x0. I suppose many of the open source projects around do just that. They construct beautifully engineered but unimaginably crappy UI's. You are displaying a pile of hyperbole here and slipping into the tired falsehood that well engineered things look ugly. No, I meant that most projects put engineering first but forget to deliver the rest. And I have seen many many projects that probably are well engineered but the UI sucks. Badly. Don't forget that UI design is as much an engineering principle as it is an aesthetic one. Yes, and putting up smoke and mirrors to achieve pleasant UI can also be well engineered. While I agree that Apple does a great job at UI innovation, the rest of the world in not a UI cestpit. There are examples of crummy UI, sure. But maemo is not one of them. It could be better but it is pretty good by any absolute standard. I suppose it's a matter of taste too... But note that a big part of the UI in maemo is in fact NOT open source, so it's pretty much excluded from the above comment. Not that I've commented on the quality of maemo UI anyway in this thread. If it was so easy to cut startup time to 3s, people probably would have done it already. Since it hasn't happened, setting up smoke and mirrors to entertain the user while loading would make *users* happier (note: not the people who watch the CPU meter or even know what the heck CPU is). Well, I have news for you ... that 3s standard for showing a basic UI has already been met (with the N800 and N810 running OS2008 at least). It's not really news, and I certainly didn't claim otherwise at any point. So all your smoke and mirrors will likely impact the user perception negatively since you'd be hard pressed to get a full screen fake UI image up in significantly less time than that. If the startup is fast enough, there is no need to do it. I think that's pretty obvious. And the distinction should be made on the application level. For example, if the suggested image would be embedded inside the .desktop, fast-starting things should just omit it and nothing is lost. Applications that are known to take too long to load (for a good reason preferrably) can include the image and gain the psychological advantage over making the user disappointed by a long and dull period of waiting. But as said, I don't think the image approach will work for maemo since the theme changes make it very tricky. -- Kalle Vahlman, [EMAIL PROTECTED] Powered by http://movial.fi Interesting stuff at http://syslog.movial.fi ___ maemo-developers mailing list maemo-developers@maemo.org https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-developers
Re: Launch image to increase feeling of responsiveness (a la iPhone)
On Mon, Mar 10, 2008 at 6:57 PM, Kalle Vahlman [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: To be clear, I'm not an Apple fanboy. I do not like their restrictive way of doing things. But I do acknowledge their expertise in the HCI field, and I think I understand how they manage to produce the compelling products that make people shell out whatever money Apple feels like asking for them. Agreed: they iPhone isn't the device for me. But as you say, they've got an awful lot of investment in good UI, which is well-tested in usability labs etc. Very few open source projects get proper usability testing and - having been through it - it's remarkably effective at pointing out flaws that you know your app had, but had justified to yourself. They get away with the empty application scheme simply because they control every aspect of the application theme and (I suppose) there is no way of changing it... Theming is the one thing which kills the static image idea. There are a number of alternatives: 1) In the theme metadata, mark them as accepting the static images or not. Only display the static image if the theme author declares their theme similar enough. 2) Take a screenshot at application start-up/shutdown take a screenshot and reuse it next time. 3) Have a Glade XML file specified in the .desktop file which will be loaded, instantiated and displayed by Hildon Desktop whilst the app loads. Some mechanism should then be determined to pass that instantiated window to the app once it is ready. Personally, I quite like the idea of (3), but the implementation could be tricky. There's also the question then of using Glade for the basic window - which projects may not want to do. However, this could be considered the logical extension of maemo-launcher. The Glade approach addresses the concerns of it being smoke and mirrors only; and solves the problems with theming and disk space (a Glade XML file is smaller and compresses better than a PNG file). Thoughts? Cheers, Andrew -- Andrew Flegg -- mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] | http://www.bleb.org/ ___ maemo-developers mailing list maemo-developers@maemo.org https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-developers
Re: Launch image to increase feeling of responsiveness (a la iPhone)
Here's a thought that might be of some use. Users probably don't care too much if it takes a little longer for programs to terminate. So how about grabbing a screen-shot on exit and caching it for the next time the application starts, rather like caching web pages? Michael ___ maemo-developers mailing list maemo-developers@maemo.org https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-developers
Re: Launch image to increase feeling of responsiveness (a la iPhone)
Andrew Flegg wrote: Reading the recently released iPhone SDK's Human Interface Guidelines document[1], I came across an interesting idea: every application has a launch image configured which is immediately displayed on launch to improve the user experience. ... I think this is a concept which would work well in Hildon: a PNG image the size of an unmaximised window could be specified in the .desktop file, on selection of an application the Task Navigator would load and show that image immediately in a window titled the name of the application... Long ago, Jef Raskin's Canon Cat, a sort of word processing appliance, used this idea. The last thing the Cat did before shutting down was to take a full screenshot and write it to disk, along with all of the other dynamic state. The first thing it did on start-up was to display the screenshot, then it went about restoring the state and drawing the live interface under the screenshot. The Cat had a short boot time, so by the time the user had seen and understood the screen display and decided what to do next, the Cat was ready to accept user input. The system's load latency overlapped with the human's think time. ___ maemo-developers mailing list maemo-developers@maemo.org https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-developers
Re: Launch image to increase feeling of responsiveness (a la iPhone)
For notification of launch, there is already the tag/notification bubble that pops up in the corner. If you wanted to implement this, you'd probably either have to modify the launcher (dbus?) or each application. Ryan Andrew Flegg wrote: Hi, Reading the recently released iPhone SDK's Human Interface Guidelines document[1], I came across an interesting idea: every application has a launch image configured which is immediately displayed on launch to improve the user experience. The theory goes that because the user sees something which looks like the shell of the application whilst it loads, they feel the application is loading faster: To enhance the user's experience at application launch, you should provide a launch image. A launch image looks very similar to the first window your application displays. iPhone OS displays this image instantly when the user taps your application icon on the Home screen. As soon as it's ready for use, your application displays its first screen, replacing the launch image. I think this is a concept which would work well in Hildon: a PNG image the size of an unmaximised window could be specified in the .desktop file, on selection of an application the Task Navigator would load and show that image immediately in a window titled the name of the application, and the application loading infoprint would also be shown. As soon as the app loads and opens its first window, the other window is closed. For example, a mockup showing a suggested launch image for the File Manager can be seen at: http://www.bleb.org/software/maemo/file-manager-launch.png As the Apple guidelines point out, the real window which is shown may have localised labels etc., so there's no text shown. I've also greyed out the button bar to show the user that it's inactive. At the moment, starting apps like File Manager, Calculator, Connection Manager etc. take on the order of 4-5 seconds, if the user was shown something within 1 second, there are then two separate waits: 1) 1s to display the launch image 2) 3-4s for the real window to open and the app to become usable Usability studies have shown that two short waits are preferable to one long one, as long as there is a seeming progression from one state to the other. That's why we've got the launching infoprints already - but this simple idea might improve the feel of responsiveness that bit more. Thoughts welcome. Cheers, Andrew [1] Linked from: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/07/iphone-sdk-some-of-the-details-arent-great/ More directly, it's on page 94 at: http://www.docstoc.com/docs/418559/iPhones-Human-Interface-Guidelines -- Ryan Pavlik www.cleardefinition.com #282 + (442) - [X] A programmer started to cuss Because getting to sleep was a fuss As he lay there in bed Looping 'round in his head was: while(!asleep()) sheep++; ___ maemo-developers mailing list maemo-developers@maemo.org https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-developers
Re: Launch image to increase feeling of responsiveness (a la iPhone)
On Sat, Mar 8, 2008 at 8:09 AM, Ryan Pavlik [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: For notification of launch, there is already the tag/notification bubble that pops up in the corner. If you wanted to implement this, you'd probably either have to modify the launcher (dbus?) or each application. Yes, I'd imagine this in addition to the bubble, to add an illusion of starting the app quicker. It'd have to be implemented at the dbus/Hildon Desktop/Task Navigator level - rather than each app - as the app in question is in the process of loading. If it could show itself, presumably it would! At the moment, much of the reaction[1] has been on the negative side of ambivalent - but I'm hoping to put together a mockup tomorrow demonstrating it in action (entirely faked). That should give us all an idea of how well it might work. Cheers, Andrew [1] http://www.maemopeople.org/index.php/jaffa/2008/03/08/improving_application_start_up_usability#comments -- Andrew Flegg -- mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] | http://www.bleb.org/ ___ maemo-developers mailing list maemo-developers@maemo.org https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-developers
Re: Launch image to increase feeling of responsiveness (a la iPhone)
On Sat, Mar 8, 2008 at 6:21 PM, Andrew Flegg [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Yes, I'd imagine this in addition to the bubble, to add an illusion of starting the app quicker. It'd have to be implemented at the dbus/Hildon Desktop/Task Navigator level - rather than each app - as the app in question is in the process of loading. If it could show itself, presumably it would! At the moment, much of the reaction[1] has been on the negative side of ambivalent - but I'm hoping to put together a mockup tomorrow demonstrating it in action (entirely faked). That should give us all an idea of how well it might work. It is an interesting idea but I can see how some might be ambivalent to Apple's implementation. Spending more resources (storage space for bogus images, non-zero CPU time and battery life) and *actually* slowing application launch just to give the *perception* of speed may not be the correct direction to head. There has to be a way to implement this at the toolkit rendering level to show the actual barebones window that will be filled with widgets and connected to the backing functions before the entire app is loaded completely. That way some actual work is performed that isn't wasted while all the non-visual background stuff is sorted out. A good example is how the Canola folks are handling things. They bring up a themed environment to give progress updates in. So this could conceivably be handled just by writing apps with this early-display concept in mind. It is along the same lines as the work going on in some Linux distros to get X windows up and display gdm early and let people log on while all the other services are coming up in the background. /Mike ___ maemo-developers mailing list maemo-developers@maemo.org https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-developers
Launch image to increase feeling of responsiveness (a la iPhone)
Hi, Reading the recently released iPhone SDK's Human Interface Guidelines document[1], I came across an interesting idea: every application has a launch image configured which is immediately displayed on launch to improve the user experience. The theory goes that because the user sees something which looks like the shell of the application whilst it loads, they feel the application is loading faster: To enhance the user's experience at application launch, you should provide a launch image. A launch image looks very similar to the first window your application displays. iPhone OS displays this image instantly when the user taps your application icon on the Home screen. As soon as it's ready for use, your application displays its first screen, replacing the launch image. I think this is a concept which would work well in Hildon: a PNG image the size of an unmaximised window could be specified in the .desktop file, on selection of an application the Task Navigator would load and show that image immediately in a window titled the name of the application, and the application loading infoprint would also be shown. As soon as the app loads and opens its first window, the other window is closed. For example, a mockup showing a suggested launch image for the File Manager can be seen at: http://www.bleb.org/software/maemo/file-manager-launch.png As the Apple guidelines point out, the real window which is shown may have localised labels etc., so there's no text shown. I've also greyed out the button bar to show the user that it's inactive. At the moment, starting apps like File Manager, Calculator, Connection Manager etc. take on the order of 4-5 seconds, if the user was shown something within 1 second, there are then two separate waits: 1) 1s to display the launch image 2) 3-4s for the real window to open and the app to become usable Usability studies have shown that two short waits are preferable to one long one, as long as there is a seeming progression from one state to the other. That's why we've got the launching infoprints already - but this simple idea might improve the feel of responsiveness that bit more. Thoughts welcome. Cheers, Andrew [1] Linked from: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/07/iphone-sdk-some-of-the-details-arent-great/ More directly, it's on page 94 at: http://www.docstoc.com/docs/418559/iPhones-Human-Interface-Guidelines -- Andrew Flegg -- mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] | http://www.bleb.org/ ___ maemo-developers mailing list maemo-developers@maemo.org https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-developers
