Yesterday I had the pleasure of spending time in several bookshops, just browsing. One of the stores I visited was Kinokuniya, in George St. It’s a great store (if at times a little over-priced), with a huge range of books. But because the shop is so large, they try and help shoppers with a touch-screen kiosk that searches for your book, and prints out a map of where the book is located (if it’s in stock).

As you can see, it’s a very simple interface. In fact, this is the second screen. The first screen lets you choose what items you want to search on, author name, book title, etc. And the results are very accurate. But this screen in particular, while it may look simple enough, it’s perhaps a little too simple. Why?

QWERTY
Yes, Qwerty layouts might not be as optimised for performance as Dvorak’s, but it’s what we know.

Image courtesy of Wikipedia

I put it to you, that when presented with a keyboard-esque layout for entering text, our brains, which are now so used to the standard qwerty layout, have great difficulty swapping to the unrelated visual order of the Kinokuniya interface. Sure, it’s simple, but it’s been overly simplified.

Did I miss something?
Funny enough the thing I missed - which you might have on first glance as well - is the button “PC Keyboard mode”. Sorry, but im not using this kiosk to set my personalised options - there is no ubicomp going on here, I just want to search for a book. So as far as im concerned, my brain is like “this button doesnt even exist”. Especially when im standing on an angle to the screen, AND my focus is on the keyboard, and not in the bottom right corner.

While the time difference between using Qwerty or not wouldn’t be measured even in minutes, it just bugs me they dont use Qwerty by default, AND that I have to choose to use it. I dont want to have to learn another layout. Ive already got to deal with mobile phones, pda, dvd’s, security locks… my brain just wants to enjoy the browsing experience. I want to find a book.

iPhone
Interestingly, I initially had the same reaction (but for different reasons) to the use of the Qwerty layout on the iPhone.

Image courtesy of Wikipedia

After using Nokia mobile devices for such a long time, with their predictive text and limited 12 button interface, I thought that using the qwerty layout for sms was too complicated, and perhaps it is (I haven’t had a chance to really play with the SMS capabilities of the iPhone - not having one of my own!!), but at least Apple didn’t attempt to come up with a new layout.

Conclusion
The Kinokuniya kiosk may be helpful, but from an interface design point of view, I find it ignores the user and their use-case. It is (for want of a better term) undesigned. And although undesign can be found everywhere and is a legitimate approach to interface design, ignore the user at your own peril!

Over at my work blog, we have just uploaded a post about how we created a Flash Text Cloud for one of our recent clients.

Bottom line, if you are in need of a faux tag cloud made in Flash, there is both a download and example for you to enjoy. And if you’re interested in tossing up how to go about creating your own tag (or text) cloud, we’ve also outlined the reasons we used Flash and not CSS.

So, at work we are currently doing some testing out of the Facebook API, and short of coming up with the next best idea on the web, I decided to re purpose a version of Solitaire I made a few years back in Flash.

So here is is for everyone to enjoy :

If you haven’t had a chance yet, go check out the redesign of ABC news. It is a shiny example of what can be achieved when you embrace some of the cool new HTML/CSS/Javascript techniques, while maintaining accessibility and increasing useability.

Even better, it doesn’t have banner ads.. (yet). Oh but it’s pretty!! Homepaged already.

EDIT - Also noticed that ABC news has it’s own twitter feed : http://twitter.com/abcnews/, and that RSS feeds from the site are totally customisable (if you like), based on your keywords.

SMH.com.au has started showing the entire print version of their daily newspaper online : SMH News Paper Direct.

^{Screenshot taken from smh.newspaperdirect.com}

Im not sure what I think of this idea yet - mainly I think it’s a waste of time, but there are parts that could be good from an accessibility point of view. Like the ability to hear an audio transcript of a story… but surely screen readers et al can do this for the existing website?

It was also pointed out to me that producing this type of online version is reasonably easy for them to do - in that they would have the paper in roughly this format already… but does easy make it useful? Not sure about that…

EDIT : ive had a little bit more of a play with it.. and there are a few cool things it can do - like translating content to various languages, skipping through content in a “webby” kind of way… but again, surely this is all done with the existing site? I guess the only thing I really like about it is that there are no banner ads!! Anyway…