Inference

• Direct messaging for Twitter
• Direct messages sent and received widgets
• Twitter Replies widget
• A more powerful User Info Card
• Add and remove friends, reply to and direct message through the User Card
• Widgets can now be popped out into a single column view
• Performance improvements for the User Profiles

For further information send me an email or contact me via Twitter.

Found this video about visualizing ten dimensions via @garrytan.

Imagining the Tenth Dimension

Its amazing how the higher dimensions are completely hidden from the lower ones and yet here we are talking about the tenth dimension. A few observed anomalies in our dimension and our curiosity leads us to find a way to explain them with the idea of higher dimensions. Its truly humbling when we realize our place not just in our universe but in one of the many possible timelines of all the possible universes.

• Improved profile pages
• Twitter profile information and RSS feed info are displayed in the profiles
• At reply from the profile pages
• Friends can be added and removed from their profile pages and from the Friends page
• Profiles for non-friends are displayed

For further information send me an email or contact me via Twitter.

A good post on the managing of UI complexity by @bwalkin. He highlights some issues with a complex interface and ways to deal with them as a designer.

A complex interface can reduce user effectiveness, increase the learning curve of the application, and cause users to feel intimidated and overwhelmed.

Managing UI Complexity

This got me thinking about the process we went through while working on ViewPoint. We understand the importance of the UI and work tirelessly to manage its complexity. Here are a couple of things that we do while working on our interfaces:

Organization

We have carefully organized our application into different sections to avoid the “one screen” application syndrome that most social media applications have. The distance, in clicks, to any action is directly proportional to its importance. And so, the most important actions are the closest and most easily accessible. Additionally, the most commonly used actions have shortcuts for them. A good example of a shortcut is the act of changing the Group membership of a friend. This can be done by navigating to the Dashboard, then selecting the required Groups page and changing the membership. But what we discovered was that this was a commonly used action and there should be a shortcut for it. So, we designed a way for users to easily do this without disrupting their usage on the homepage.

It is important to remember that creating too many shortcuts can dramatically decrease the value of them. We avoid this by reminding ourselves of what we are trying to achieve through our interface. We recognize that our users are primarily here to read and consume information and so we design accordingly. Not having a goal in mind can lead to a chaotic interface that reflects the lack of clarity of the designer behind it. When you come to the homepage, the focus is always on what you are trying to read.

The end result of the organization process is an interface that feels lighter and more purposeful. The user’s homepage has the sole purpose of helping users read their updates and that is exactly what it does.

Care

Most of the actions within our application are simple, intuitive and are a result of the continual testing and feedback cycle and the care we take while designing them. An example of this is the user card; this is displayed when you click on a user’s name in the homepage. When we were first working on the user’s homepage, we had it setup so that clicking on a user’s name would take you to their profile page. The problem with this was that you would have to return to your homepage and browse through the updates for the one you were reading. So we replaced the user card with a condensed version of the user profile. We looked at how the other services handled the “user card” concept and we found that their implementation was poor and unintuitive.

The first thing we needed to do was figure out the action the user wanted to do to activate the user card. Some services do it with a mouse over and others do it with a click. Our requirement was simple; instead of redirecting the user to the profile page, we wanted to display the card. So we went with a single click. The second issue we ran into was the placement of the card itself. We found that there were twelve different positions (three different positions in four different directions) that the card could be displayed in with respect to the action button and grid layout. Of all the options, we felt that some of the positions were more favorable than others. But the most important thing was that the card should never be displayed outside the view of the user. A card that is displayed which requires the user to scroll is not very useful as additional effort is required to view it.

We developed an algorithm that finds the optimal position to display the card. The twelve different positions are ordered in priority and we analyze each, to determine the best possible position to display it without going out of the view.

The next thing we needed to do was create an action to hide the card once it has been displayed. The card has a close button, but we wanted to make it feel more natural. So it was designed such that clicking anywhere beside the card would hide it. This solution seemed satisfactory for the problem we had set out to solve. We pushed this change to production and put it through our testing and feedback cycle. After using this solution, we found that clicking the close button or clicking away from the card was still an expensive action to hide it. We decided to make it so that the same action button that displays the card would also turn it off. The result of this process is that while you are reading a post and curious as to the user’s rank, you could simply click on his/her name to display the card. Then when you’re finished looking at the card, you could click again and continue reading your updates.

As a part of the aforementioned continual feedback testing cycle we are always looking to improve existing features and their respective interfaces. It is by no means perfect but we know that we are heading in the right direction. If at any point while using our application you feel that something is amiss or if you feel there is a better way to do something, please let us know. We take your suggestions seriously and are always looking for feedback.

Thanks to @mliao for reading over this post.