From one thing to the next

We enjoyed the article Mission Transition, in which Mark Cossey explores and illustrates the role of transitions in user experience design. One example shows iOS transitions in slow motion revealing subtle choices that are simple but not obvious.

In the pre-web early 90s we were very focused on creating short simple transitions that helped users move from one state to the next, maybe even with a smile. We had a VHS tape of SIGCHI demos exploring the role of animation in user interface.

From that tape we pieced together the following truthy guideline:  "It takes the brain about a second to move from one state to the next. Any animation that takes about a second and helps the user understand the relationship between the new state and the previous state creates greater user confidence and satisfaction. Any animation that takes much longer is wasting the user's time."

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The web shifted the focus of interactive media design away from niceties like animated transitions to clearly designed pages and navigation schemes. The browser handled transitions completely. Initial interaction with hypertext was snappy but once you clicked the web browser would serve up a big blank page and a wait, sometimes long enough to forget what the previous page looked like.

For a while nifty transitions got a bad name because people mostly only saw them in Flash apps that boasted little else.

Modern web and mobile apps, along with speedy processors, have put transitions back into designer hands. It's great to see designers thinking about them in detail. 

We do keep in mind that transitions that are nice on a small screen can be unsettling on a large screen. It took me a while to get used to some of the full screen transitions in OS X Lion. As it turns out I was not the only one to experience motion sickness with the new UI.

Productivity and the 40-hour work week

Great article in Salon (via boingboing) about the damage done to productivity when teams are over-worked and over-tired. Many of the studies cited apply specifically to knowledge workers.

The Business Roundtable study found that after just eight 60-hour weeks, the fall-off in productivity is so marked that the average team would have actually gotten just as much done and been better off if they’d just stuck to a 40-hour week all along. And at 70- or 80-hour weeks, the fall-off happens even faster: at 80 hours, the break-even point is reached in just three weeks.

... The other thing about knowledge workers is that they’re exquisitely sensitive to even minor sleep loss. Research by the US military has shown that losing just one hour of sleep per night for a week will cause a level of cognitive degradation equivalent to a .10 blood alcohol level. Worse: most people who’ve fallen into this state typically have no idea of just how impaired they are. It’s only when you look at the dramatically lower quality of their output that it shows up.

Bring back the 40-hour work week