Design vs Art is following very close the developments on the electronic paper (epaper) industry. We think it is a great technology that is about to explode. Specially ebook readers could be the next big thing. Epaper is making the revolution that will change everything unstoppable. For that reason, the publishing industry needs a redesign.

After hearing about the Amazon-George Orwell incident (article on the New York Times), I decided to try to buy Orwell’s Animal Farm ebook in its original language and to write down on my Moleskine details about that experience. From the beginning the task was set to be difficult; I had an Amazon Kindle and I live in Germany, meaning that I can not buy ebooks at the Amazon/Kindle store.




The above described exercise took me to the following impressions:

Amazon would not sell me the ebook with a European credit card, so I went to Mobipocket.com and bought the digital version of Animal Farm. The Mobipocket software does not work on Apple Macs so I directly downloaded the book and send it to the Kindle using Calibre, an ebook management software. I tried to open the ebook and I got a disgusting message saying that the file was protected and could not be displayed in an unregistered device. Of course, I didn’t know that I could not register a Kindle on Mobipocket.

In case I was not clear enough, I would like to say again that I paid for the book I was trying to open. The whole user experience was totally frustrating.

You are not allowed to read this ebook on this unregistered device.

For copyright reasons you can not buy this ebook from your country.

Even worse, somebody could eventually decide which version of a book a whole nation should read. This is something that might be already happening somewhere in the world, but readers have the chance to travel, buy books somewhere else and smuggle them if necessary; something that is not going to be possible in a digital publishing industry controlled but old copyright laws.

You have to use our German store, buy the German version of this ebook.

Yes, the user experience of buying an ebook at Amazon and have it delivered to a Kindle is great. Everybody loves that. But I have also read comments on forums from panicking customers promising not to activate their Kindle wireless feature anymore, worrying that the ebooks they bought in the past could disappear. The user experience is broken, the system is not trusty anymore.

Delete that ebook from all the devices in this country.

I looked for the electronic version of Animal Farm on a torrent search engine. The book was there. I could have downloaded it for free in a few seconds. It could have been so easy…

I have to say this again: I tried to get a legal copy of the book. I actually paid for the book, but I was not allowed to read it on my device.

To download an ebook illegally is already easier than buying it.

Article by Alexis Brion.

There is a clear trend in product design, especially in electronics design: in the last years we have been observing the raise of products that offer, additionally to the physical thing, a bunch of extra services connected to the computer and internet ecosystem. In this article I give you a few examples on this design trend.

Kodak cameras are not silly apparatuses

The sudden appearance of digital cameras made Kodak lost big amounts of money, from one day to the other a network of services around the picture development business was gone. So Kodak started thinking outside the camera again but this time in the digital world: they developed Easyshare, a software bundled to cameras that makes photo printing, storing and sharing easy. Easyshare is actually not just another software, it is the revival of that old good Kodak service. I find important the fact that Kodak is now the number one digital camera brand. 

The Kindle should be the new iPod

Let’s say it, the first Amazon Kindle was, judged from the physical point of view, a poorly designed device. So why it was such a success? Amazon did to Sony what also Apple did to Sony; they practically stole the market through the offering of something that is more than just a device; Amazon and Apple designed whole service ecosystems around the Kindle and iPod. Of course, Apple designed beautiful iPods and Amazon had to redesigned the way the Kindle hardware looked in order to make it more appealing and usable, but the new concept here is that physical design, software interface and service design are all very important.

Nokia makes the best cell phones

Any doubt about the previous statement? Well, technically, it is true. I still remember using my Nokia smartphone and being able to connect everywhere and getting a fantastic speaking quality; physically, Nokia telephones are great. But Nokia was in the past not able to successfully design a proper ecosystem around those smartphones, I still remember how complicated loading music or installing applications on the phone was… Oh, and I won’t forget that time when I did an update of the phone’s OS and all my information was deleted.

Connecting to the environment could add glamor to a brand: Fiat

Fiat’s eco:Drive connects cars to computers offering customers the possibility of checking how they drive and offering customized advice on how to drive more efficiently to reduce emissions and save money. Plug the car to the computer to get extra services.

The connected patient

A highly probable success will be the connection of medical devices to systems outside the devices themselves. An example is the asthma inhaler designed by Cambridge Consultants that connects to an online personal health care application to send relevant health information to monitor progress and to make it available to the care specialist. A traditional "lonely" device like an inhaler is now connected to a bigger system to provide a better user experience.

Conclusion

At Design vs Art we believe that in the future devices will be even more connected, not only to the Internet but they should also start talking among them. In order to offer a better user experience and a better service, devices should start connecting and talking to the bigger system they belong to.

I got excited when I received an email from Nokia announcing the new Nokia Music Store. OK, I didn’t get excited at all, Nokia has been sending me promises of good service for a long time. Without success.

I have been an unhappy Nokia E61 user for a year or so (they are still selling that model). The interface is horrible and the whole telephone is very slow. I managed to load music into my phone only once, I never did it again. OK, OK, Nokia is the number one phone maker but that might be because they are making a good business in the third world selling cheap phones.

The new Music Store

Designing with standards and for everybody should be something that customers and designers themselves should fight for. When I tried to see the new Nokia Music Store a beautiful "Unsupported Browser" message was displayed. GREAT. The only system combination that works with it is the Windows-Internet Explorer one.    

My point

This is not what customers want, specially here in Europe where Firefox has a 30% market share, in some EU countries with market share higher then 40% (as reported by Ars Technica in January 2008). In a perfect world we would design for standard browsers, but the world is not perfect. Making a service available for different browsers is something that it’s going to affect the usability of it.

We are not talking about a startup, we are talking a huge company. So why not spending some more money to make products available for all?

Why a merge between Microsoft and Yahoo! could be bad for the designer community? We know how bad Internet Explorer is and we also know that Microsoft does not want to adopt many standards. Even worse, its tactics to promote IE are a little bit obscure.

Bad Company + Bad Company = Really Bad Company

Yesterday I was checking the MSN Game Zone, a MSN section that has some free online games. I was shocked when I read that MSN Games can only be played if the user has Internet Explorer. Then I thought, maybe this is not fine and maybe a merge of Microsoft and Yahoo! is not a good idea.

What if Microsoft makes most of Yahoo! services IE-only compatible? Then, a software that does not respect standards will become more and more popular. This means more headaches for web designers and that websites will start having more bugs, with a decrease in quality, usability and user experience. 

I happened to try MyBlogLog, a site bought some time ago by Yahoo!. MyBlogLog is a social community for bloggers and blog readers, they are the ones making one of those widgets that tells you who was reading your blog.

The good thing: in the last weeks MyBlogLog was having problems with the login but this was recently fixed. In my opinion is very cool to be able to login with the Yahoo! ID, after all, we are already using that to login into many services (as Yahoo! becomes bigger and buys more and more companies).

The bad thing: in my opinion MyBlogLog has a few design and usability problems to resolve. For example completing my profile was quite hard task with a not very good looking form:

I have noticed in many parts of the site that they use some terminology that not everybody understands. That would be not that bad is they would include some kind of online help, but they don’t. Is opt-in and opt-out clear to everybody?

They also try to explain the users things that they probably don’t want to know about, using maybe too technical terminology:

“To opt-out of data collection from MyBlogLog, click on the button below. Please note that when you do so, our system will set the following cookie: “mbl_sid=Nxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx” in your browser. The capital letter N simply means “do not collect my data”.”

Another thing you should keep in mind when designing your site is to try to explain what the different sections are for. In this example, I clicked on My Account > Services, but MyBlogLog does not explain why they want my other services’ accounts or in which way filling this information will be beneficial to me.

In general, I like MyBlogLog, they have a cool service and I added their widget to my blog. On the other side, I think they could improve their service from the interface and usability point of view.

Disclaimer: with this kind of article I want to point out some usability and interface problems some sites could have. Please do not take this as an attack, take it as a free advice.

Have you ever been interested in your family tree? I have been using Geni, a free family tree builder that rocks, a “tool for understanding and staying in touch with your family”.

This family tree builder has a nice and clean design, it is easy to add relatives to your tree with all the personal information, including an email address that is going to be used to invite that person to your tree. Then, together, all the relatives can continue building that tree.

The tree itself has a nice design and easy to use navigation tools. The rest of the site is mostly navigated through tabs.

Geni also displays relatives sorted by location on a Google Map.

I like Geni but I have some negative critics. The site could have more integration with other services, for example, allowing me to link my flickr account to Geni. The site is only in English language, but, how many families now a days are based in only one country?

Another important thing is that Geni does not have an import/export feature right now, but they say that they are working on that, using GEDCOM files. Also, a mobile interface could have been nice.

At last but not least, I have seen that Geni has only ads provided by Google and most of them are from competitors. Someone in Geni should have a look on that.

What’s your home page? I was using iGoogle for a long time but I decided to try Netvibes, an Ajax based personalized start page.

The whole thing is Ajax and it works perfect. You can add as many modules including RSS/Atom feeds and other widgets, then you can sort them in personalized tabs, for example, I have a tab for “Web2.0″ feeds, another for Web2.0 feeds in German language and another more for the ones in Spanish. Changing tabs is fast as the news are loaded and reloaded only from time to time, and not every time you go to that tab.

My personal Netvibes home page

You can also choose among many third party “universes”, those are like Netvibes home pages designed and customized by other companies. Like this one made by The Financial Times:

I like so much to have a module with my Remember The Milk tasks, another with my Gmail and another one with a Google/Yahoo! search box. clicking on a small arrow that appears on the module title as you hover over, allows you to open and close that module, an important feature for privacy reasons too.

The whole design is very slick and adding modules is extremely easy. For example, to add a feed just paste the site address and Netvibes will list the available feeds for that site. It also has a very useful “In my page” search that searches only among your feeds. Fantastic.

They also have a reasonable amount of documentation on their Netvibes’ Developer Network home page. Their Universal Widget API (UWA) from Netvibes allows developers to build widgets that will work on every platform or blog system. Your personal Netvibes home page is also reachable through your mobile device at m.netvibes.com

Picture taken from the Netvibes blog

I really like the Netvibes User Interface and don’t have complaints so far

It is not new that Google bought Jaiku.com, a Finnish microblogging and mini messaging service. I could a have said “Jaiku is a quasi Twitter site”, but the problem is that in Europe nobody knows Twitter (kind of).

With Jaiku you can create an activity stream log with messages and pictures and post it directly to Jaiku. These streams can be shared through the web, instant messager, SMS and third-party applications. It seems that Jaiku is very strong in the mobile field, providing a “live phonebook” that displays the activity streams, locations of contacts (HOT) and availability. I wanted to sign up for an account and install the mobile version but it seems that they close the registration since Google acquisition. Sad.

But right now I am more interested in the Jaiku web design. Last weekend I was at the BarCamp Munich, there a discussion around Twitter was hold. My impression was that in Europe people don’t know what they can do with Twitter, and after the explanation a lot of scepticism was heard. It is true that this kind of service is limited in European countries by the price of SMSs, much more expensive than in the US. But another thing must be said, Twitter home page does not explain very well what that site is for. In this sense, Jaiku is clearly doing it much better:

Jaiku is placing the explanation in the home page, click on it and you are redirected to the welcome tour, which is clear enough. I have to confess that I have critics regarding the usability, I would change a few things here, for example they try to explain the service to newcomers with a phrase like “Post new Jaikus”. What the hell is a “Jaiku”? (OK, I can imagine what that is, but it might not be clear enough for many users).

From my point of view Google has made another good move as Jaiku seems to have a much more clear interface and, maybe, better chances to win European hearts. I would really like to test it!

It seems that lately internet telephone services have been out of the news, not many exciting new features, but recently I have learned about the new Jajah Buttons.

The configuration process could be a little bit confusing at the beginning with the system requiring a Screenname that can not be changed once you set it up (plus, FAQ section does not have a search feature!).

But the service seems to be interesting: it is a button you can paste in your blog, website, eBay auction and email signature. Then, when somebody sees that button and fills it with his or her telephone number Jajah connects that person with you. The owner of the button is the one paying for the phone call.

This could be a good idea for people interested in being contacted. It also allows you to change your phone number, block certain ones and reject calls.

eBay has recently deleted all listings containing the Jajah Button. The is that eBay owns Skype, a direct competitor. Too bad, eBay.

In my opinion, the button’s design is very smart, giving the possibility to choose different colors and sizes. At the beginning I thought that users would not click there, but Jajah guys were smart and placed an “information icon”, when clicked it tells you what is that Jajah Button about and makes clear that the call is free of charge.

This is the Jajah Button: