You might think it’s just a font, but it’s not really. It’s a statement of who you are, what you mean, and why you’re doing something.

Pretentious?

Perhaps - but it’s still true. There’s an underlying meaning and message in the shape of the type face you’re using. Serif fonts can be serious, with plenty of gravitas just like The Times used to have, while sans serif are direct, quick to deliver a message. Bold fonts emphasise, while italics rush you along. Then there are the many millions of speciality fonts, which give your message a spin that only they can. And then, of course, there’s Comic Sans - but there’s always a runt of the litter (or in this case, a runt of the letter).

It’s a matter of semiotics. There’s meaning to the symbols we use, meaning that we all interpret in slightly different ways. Some if it comes from the way those symbols are used in a cultural context, while other comes from the very shape grammar of the symbol - angular shapes are disturbing, while smooth lines are pleasing. We can go on: circles encompass, arrows point, while lines join things together. The meanings in symbols touch users and viewers in visceral ways, and a poor choice can be the difference between a customer saved and a customer lost.

Last week there was a disturbance in the force, as if a million designers had suddenly cried out in shock and anger. Ikea had changed the font used in its catalogue. It wasn’t a big change,  a switch from Futura to Verdana. Both were similar sans serif fonts, though with one big difference: Futura had been designed as a modernist font, with distinct political intentions - while Verdana, well it had been designed by Microsoft to look good on screen and on print. To most of us it wasn’t much of a change - and one we barely noticed. Even so, there’s a change. Ikea’s edginess has become replaced with a comfortable, everyday look. It’s part of the background now,no longer out on the cutting edge. What’s more, it’s also cheap.

That’s the sort of message we need to consider in the fonts we use on our web sites and in our applications. Design is important in conveying the message behind a brand - just look at how the fonts BP uses have evolved over the years to carry the company’s corporate message. It’s a subtle process, but one that works well, and one that can increase user engagement with applications and services as well as with online properties. Yes, it’s easy to use one of the default fonts in Windows or OS X - but is that the message you really want to give?

One thing that’s changing are the limitations of screen fonts. Complex ligatures and the like just don’t work well when you’re laying out a page on screen. Computing the positions of letters is hard enough, let alone trying to deal with flying lines and curves.

If you’re running Windows 7 (and Office 2010), why not  play with Gabriola. It’s a new font with a difference - now you’re able to use those complex design type effects no matter what you’re doing. It’s the first font with the hints needed to build on new screen layout features that come with the latest version of ClearType. It’s an impressive feat - and something we hope that other fonts will support soon.

After all, good design really does matter.

–Simon

We’ve been helping a friend get to grips with mobile browsing on his aging BlackBerry. It’s one that’s old enough that it doesn’t get the new browser that arrived with the Bold, so he’d been using Opera Mini to at least get something that approached a decent browsing experience. Even so he was hitting what I think of as the mobile browsing wall: the mobile web is not the web we get on our desktops.

Our friend uses a lot of online forums, and Opera Mini was starting to show its limitations. Most of the social aspects of the sites were lost as he was redirected to mobile versions of the sites - with drastically cut down user interfaces. The in-cloud reformatting the Opera Mini was doing wasn’t helping, either…

Opera recently sent us a whole pile of statistics about how people are using their Mini browser. The numbers make interesting reading, with impressive numbers of people using the service to view huge numbers of web pages. But if I was running Opera I would be getting very worried about my mobile business indeed…

“Nokia phones continue to be the handsets of preference for Opera Mini users, with Sony Ericsson claiming second place. BlackBerry and Samsung phones are the preference in the United States.”

Nokia is in the process of rolling out a WebKit-based browser, which should bring iPhone class browsing to much of its Symbian platform. Sony Ericsson is enroute to Android, and while its Java-based feature phone platform works well for Opera, new Java-based platforms like Bolt are rolling out that give users access to a much more powerful in-cloud browser, with support for Flash and for Silverlight. BlackBerry will get a significant browser upgrade in the autumn with the release of BlackBerry OS 5.0, and our Windows Mobile in-cloud browser of choice SkyFire is currently testing its own BlackBerry version. Samsung’s own browser is also in the middle of upgrading.

The foundations of the Opera Mini business model are crumbling. What was a story of broken browsers and unsatisfying online experiences is changing into one where high end devices like the iPhone are changing the way users think about mobile browsing - and mobile device manufacturers are having to follow. Opera needs to make a jump that takes its desktop rendering engine into the cloud, rather than the current service.

It’ll be interesting to see if Opera Mini can evolve to deal with the demands of its users.

Oh, and our friend?

He’s now using the beta of Bolt and finding the mobile web a much more desktop-like place.

And do you even want them to? Yes, Microsoft is planning to offer Windows 7 with IE built in in Europe so users don’t have to jump through hoops to get a browser (and avoiding millions of CDs that go straight into landfill after one installation is a good thing).  It keeps the EU happy by popping up a ‘ballot screen’ that lets you pick from a list of browsers - here’s the sample screen Microsoft is showing off.

Incidentally, Opera - who started this whole debacle by complaining to the EU - still isn’t happy. Microsoft says the ballot screen will “in a horizontal line and in an unbiased way display icons of and basic identifying information on the Web browsers.” Opera says that’s still biased, because the IE logo is just so recognisable. Newsflash: the reason Opera isn’t the most popular browser isn’t the logo (and making it harder for people who want IE because they’re comfortable with it to find it isn’t the best way to grow your market share).

And “Yes,” confirms a Microsoft spokesperson, “the proposals will also cover boxed copies of Windows sold in Europe”. Does that mean that we don’t have to have an ‘upgrade’ version of Windows that only does a clean install? After all, the reason for the E version is to offer a browser choice to people who have previously had a built-in IE; surely the upgrade install process could offer the same ballot screen and not force you to vape your system in the name of choice? (At least if you’ve got Vista; XP users are stuck with a clean install because it’s too different). Ah, says the spokesperson. “Everything’s just at proposal stage, so specifics of how the upgrade process would work would just be speculation right now.”

And actually, with the relatively low numbers of people who have Vista compared to Windows XP, the current plan of E versions Windows 7 that mean you can buy the full version of Windows for the cost of an upgrade may be a better bargain.  Yes, you lose the convenience of an in-place upgrade but a clean install will often give you better performance - and with a full version there are no restrictions on installing on another machine and you don’t have to faff around providing proof that you have a previous version of Windows first. That’s probably worth the time it takes to back up your settings and re-install your apps.

-Mary

We recently met up with Jon Lilly, Mozilla’s CEO. During our conversation he talked about the philosophical difference between Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox. Chrome, he suggested was “A window into the web”, marked by its lack of toolbars and its integration of Google’s web services.

This morning we woke up to the news that Chrome the browser is also the front end to Chrome the OS, a thin Linux kernel with a browser intended for netbooks. It’s not Android, but it shares some key concepts - and will run on Intel and ARM processors. There’s still a lot missing from what Google’s said, and much remains to be revealed when Chrome OS finally arrives on hardware - but part of me is wondering if Google has fallen into what I think of as “The Gilder Trap”.

George Gilder was sort of famous in the early days of the Internet. He wrote a couple of popular economics textbooks, and one of his suggestions was that wired and wireless would swap places. Data would flow through the airwaves, into pocket devices and all manner of mobile computing hardware. After all, in the air bandwidth was essentially free. Sadly he missed a trick or two. Bandwidth may be free, but the hardware needed to support it certainly wasn’t - and the back haul from base stations to the wider network needs to be hefty. Copper and fibre still remain the most bandwidth efficient way of delivering that last mile, and wireless data is really only just starting to get significant traction - and is already starting to creak at the seams, especially in busy city centres, as well as in the country. Even so, people still believe his 1990s words…

You may think the 50:1 contention ratio for your home DSL connection is high, but that’s nothing compared to the connectivity at a central London cellular base station. Your 3G data card may well be connected at 3 or even 7Mbps, but there’s often not more than a 1Mbps SDSL connection from the base station to the net - and you’re sharing that with everyone else. Trying to get email over a 3G dongle can be trial, especially at peak hours.

Now imagine having to do that with a million other people using Chrome OS-powered netbooks.

Sure, many of them will be hooked up to “free” WiFi connections, but don’t expect them to remain free for long when the costs of running the services increase with a sudden massive leap in demand. Cloud services are bandwidth hungry, pushing expensive UI functionality down to local devices. Google’s Chrome OS’s reliance on Google’s online services (even with Gears’ offline web functionality) will fundamentally change the economics of offering wireless services - and not in a good way for the network operators.

Gilder, like many of the proponents of free services, was right to say that the digital world makes many things essentially free to the end user. However, again like many of today’s freevangelists, he was wrong to ignore the costs of infrastructure. Yes, 0.01p is almost zero, but when a hundred million people are using that low cost service, that fraction of a penny quickly adds up into sizable amounts of pounds.

That’s why there’s minimal cellular data service in huge parts of the world, and why travelling on the Tube cuts you off. It’s just too expensive.

We won’t be “always connected” as much as we want to be - especially in the current economic climate. Capital and operating expenses are being slashed across the board, and even giants like Vodafone are looking to buy other networks just to get access to their base stations. Rolling out the network needed for Chrome OS to be everything that Google wants will take time, and will also take truckloads of money.

Always on and always connected are wonderful ideals - but that’s all they are. It took me a long time to realise this, even as I spent years consulting on massive wireless Internet projects. Chrome OS needs free wireless bandwidth, and that’s not something that’s going to happen for a long time - and a massive spike in demand is something that could push it even further away.

I’d like to be wrong. I like Chrome the browser, I like the Chrome OS concept - and I’m especially fond of many of the HTML 5 features that Google is building into its latest applications and services. The web needs an upgrade, and Google is driving that upgrade.

The web isn’t the only thing that needs an upgrade - wireless data networks (as much as Telstra and the like talk about HSPA+ deployments) need a massive amount of work. However I’ve come to know the restrictions of the mobile networks, and the economic realities facing their operators. Without substantial infusions of cash, that upgrade is a long long way off.

It’s a problem that affects us all - not just Google and Chrome OS. We’re being sold a hyper-connected online world where everything’s available 24 hours a day, wherever we are - what we used to call “Martini computing”: any time, any place. What we’re actually getting is wireless networks like AT&T and O2 which are struggling to cope with the minimal demands of iPhone users. How are they going to cope with bandwidth hungry Chrome OS users running their entire lives through online services?

Google could just have fallen into an old, old hype trap.

Google is a company that’s built itself on a basis of abundance - cheap CPU, cheap memory, cheap disk. Mobile operators manage a world of scarcity, and work hard to make sure that things remain scarce and expensive. They’re two diametrically opposed views - and Chrome OS is where they’re going to collide.

The real war isn’t Google vs Microsoft. It’s going to be Google vs the mobile operators. I’m just not sure that Google is going to win.

–Simon

The ’screaming deals’ Microsoft is claiming for Windows 7 are causing a certain amount of screaming - from people upset that they don’t get a pre-order upgrade price for Ultimate. That’s probably because Microsoft thinks of Ultimate as a ‘niche’ version; I’m not sure that disk encryption should still be thought of as niche, but if they did include it in all versions, that would be something else the EU would suggest might be an abuse of the dominant position of Windows, the way it’s complained about the inclusion of Internet Explorer.

Microsoft’s response to the EU is to take IE 8 out of Windows 7 in Europe. That means ‘upgrade’ versions for end users are clean install versions at upgrade price (with limits on not moving them onto a new machine).  The complaints for this will be aimed at the EU and Microsoft, with a few brickbats for Opera for causing all this trouble in the first place. The end result will be (we predict) a lot of people buying Windows 7 online from the US to save the trouble of re-installing all their apps, and a lot of small businesses deciding that as you can buy the Enterprise version of Windows 7 through Software Assurance for as few as five users, it’s time to switch to volume licensing - because SA versions of Windows 7 will allow in-place upgrades, on the grounds that when you have SA, you build an image with the components you want and if you don’t want IE you don’t put it in, so it was never forced on you and you don’t have to be given the choice. Microsoft is happy to use consumers for a game of brinkmanship with the EU over browser choice; businesses who mandate IE for internal use because they don’t want to rebuild line of business apps are too important to them for that.

What about the battle that really matters - what browser goes on new PCs? That’s up to the OEMs and they don’t care as much about choice as they do about cold hard cash, which is bad news for Opera again. Why so?

Well, OEMs have several browser choices. There’s the devil you know, the devil your customers know and the easy option - Internet Explorer and the Live Essentials (including the really rather good Windows Live Photo Gallery). Expect Dell and perhaps HP to offer this, along with a number of smaller ‘just hand me the CD’ OEMs.

There’s ‘we have a pot of cash and we’re going to use it’ Google; expect to see the Mountain View boys to pay to put their only-as-popular as Firefox 2 browser, Chrome onto the best selling version of Windows ever. There’s ‘would you like a nice deal bundling iTunes on your home PCs?’ Apple with Safari (currently neck and neck with Chrome). Firefox is free, which always appeals. And then there’s this little company in Norway that would like the OEMs to pay them money to put a copy of their Opera browser on new PCs. Sounds like Opera’s attempt to get more market share is going to backfire on them.

Taking a step back, do Europeans really need to have browser choice forced on them, at the expense of easy upgrades? Not according to the latest figures.

Source: StatCounter Global Stats - Browser Market Share - click through to see share by browser version

IE has more market share than Firefox in Europe - barely - if you group together all the versions of IE. IE 6 is slightly more popular than IE 8 (oddly - perhaps it’s all those IE 6 LOB apps). But the hand-down winner at nearly 36% is - Firefox. Perhaps Opera should complain to the EU about the Mozilla foundation?
-Mary

I’ll admit it; I actually like IE. I’ve used it as my main browser for years because I know it will be the same on every system (although I have to supplement it with the IE7Pro tools to be really happy). I distrust Chrome slightly because of the Chrome teams’ initially disappointing attitude to user privacy and security (especially with Gears and the Gears features Google wants to see in HTML5). I would use Firefox, but almost everything I like about it is down to Greasemonkey, which is a security threat waiting to happen (and he author is now on the Gears team) - although Weave might change my mind. Opera can try to include every standard going, but there are too many sites that complain that I’m not using a ’standard browser’ - and the special pleading from Opera (to the EU in particular) doesn’t win me over either. Personally speaking, the way I see it is that thanks to the EU, when I install Windows 7 I will have to take longer to do the installation because I’ll have to take the time to install a browser; gee, thanks.

Professionally speaking, should I be pleased that the European versions of Windows 7 will be browser free? Not if you know what you’re doing. Organisations who want to install Windows 7 without IE can do it by customising their setup image; they’ll be doing that anyway and they can choose the components that go in the image, including whether they want IE 8 or not.
Have all the court cases forced Microsoft to clean up its act? Maybe. It always amused me when Netscape revealed their distribution figures as part of the DoJ case against Microsoft. Despite charging ISPs anything up to $20 per users to distribute the Netscape Navigator browser, Netscape distributed it to half as many people again as were online at the time (or to everyone online 1.5 times). Which says to me the reason Netscape didn’t succeed wasn’t lack of access to the market - it was lack of being a better browser than IE.

The counter-argument was that even though they got a copy of Navigator, IE users wouldn’t bother to install it because they had a browser they thought was good enough. Leaving aside the implicit criticism of users in that view, maybe a majority of people do use IE because it’s there and we’ll now see the true popularity (or not) of IE, but I think we’ll mostly see a lot more support calls. Perhaps Microsoft could suggest that some of the fines the EU is doubtless totting up could be ear-marked to pay for free phone support for all those users who are having trouble getting a browser installed?
-Mary

It’s not often that you get a standing ovation at a technology conference. That’s what just happened at Google IO here in San Francisco, where a team from Google Australia just finished unveiling Wave.

Wave certainly appears to be an impressive piece of work. Developed by the team that created Google Maps, it’s a radical reworking of the many different tools we use for collaboration - mixing IM and email with document creation and editing. Unlike most online collaboration tools it’s a real time experience - and it all runs in the browser. Communication takes place in “waves”, conversations and information streams tied to groups of online IDs - so each participant can be verified. New arrivals can scrub back through the history of a wave to see just what was said and by who.

Anything you type is echoed in the browsers of all the people you’re working with, as soon as you press each key. There’s no waiting for someone to hit return, everything is there as soon as it’s typed, so you can start your reply at the same time as you’re waiting for the last word to come in. Edits are in real time too, and anyone can edit anyone else’s text.

That last feature is ideal for document collaboration. The Wave user interface supports rich text and images, and there’s very little isolation between user edits. Two or more people can work on the same document just a few characters apart, with no locking at all. If you’ve grown used to the line or paragraph locking of most online collaboration tools you’ll find this an effective - and much faster - way of working. There’s even scope for inline commenting in documents, and as comments are associated with users, moving a document from one wave to another.

Google’s Wave implementation is only one possible Wave. Like Microsoft’s Live Mesh the real secret sauce is in the protocols. Anyone will be able to write a Wave server or a Wave client, and they’ll be able to federate with each other - so my Wave server will be able to work with yours in a (sorry, Ray) big mesh of Wave servers all over the world. The open Wave is an interesting place, and it’s one where there’s going to be a lot of innovation - even if it’s not just the Emacs client that Google demoed in the keynote.

As Google goes on to evangelise Wave with the rest of the industry (after several years of complete secrecy), it’s going to be interesting to see just how much uptake we see. It’d certainly be interesting to be a fly on the wall during the call Vic Gundotra says he’ll be making to Microsoft’s Ray Ozzie…

–Simon

Windows and IE get the features that people use; that’s good if you’re in the majority.

In early betas of Internet Explorer 8, when you typed a search into the address bar rather than the search box, the list of results you got was five URLs from your history and five URLs from your RSS feeds.  Less than 1% of the IE8 beta testers ever clicked on those RSS results and most people said what they wanted was URLs they’d typed in - so the shipping version of IE 8 doesn’t give you RSS results when you search in the address bar, just ten results from your history. ..

Well, actually, it does, but only if you dig into the options and turn RSS results back on. There’s some confusion in the IE team about this. Depending on who you ask you’ll be told it’s relegated to an option and off by default or it’s gone completely because having everything be an option increases complexity and the number of combinations you have to test. The ‘ordering pizza for 150 million people’ analogy that Dean Hachamovitch is applying to simplifying Internet Explorer and Steven Sinosfky is applying to simplifying Windows comes from a boss they once both reported to and it’s true that you can’t have all the features and only the features that suit everyone, and that if everything is an option there will be many users who never figure out the right options for them. (And that the more combinations you have to test, the longer it takes to ship.)

If RSS results from the address bar had gone away, that would be bad news for 1% of IE 8 users, which is quite a large number of people - except, of course, it’s not really 1% of everyone who uses IE. It’s 1% of everyone in the beta test group, Paul Cutsinger of the IE team told me, and “it would drop way down in the mainstream population”. Beta users are different; we’re actually prepared to use beta software for a start. “They’re early adopters, they tend to be power users, they tend to have more tolerance for problems that show up - but they also complain more!” Dev teams at Microsoft have to compare what they see from beta users with what they see in usability labs and in other tests. They have to filter out the biases from internal Microsoft users as well; nearly half of all Windows user have between six and nine windows open at once but most Microsoft employees have 20, 30 or 50 windows open at the same time.

Balancing that out is a difficult problem and I’m not sure Microsoft always gets it right. In the M3 and beta builds of Windows 7, Win+E opens the Explorer pointing at your document Libraries; in RC it will go back to opening My Computer, so that wherever you want to go is a click away. I should start by saying I’m a huge fan of libraries - I’ve been waiting for years for an easy way to search all my documents without having to remember which drive the one I want is most likely to be on. But most people who open Explorer are going to be looking for a document - at least most of the people who will use the final version of Windows 7. Beta users are implicitly more technical folk so a higher percentage of them will be going to a variety of places and so they want My Computer; but users will want documents more often than they’ll want multiple drives. Libraries are the way that we’re ‘intended’ to get at the majority of our files so having them as the default target of Ctrl-E made huge sense to me, both for immediate use and as the way going forward. If Libraries become as widely used as Microsoft must hope, not having them be what you see first every time will come to seem a confusing thing in a few years time.

And that’s the other problem with relying on users voting with their mice, even if you manage to remove the bias of early adopters, technical experts and other oddities. If what you want to do isn’t already a feature, how can Microsoft see in the statistics that it’s what you want to do? And if there’s a visionary feature that may not become part of the way you work until you’ve used it for a while, should Microsoft give up on it because the usage isn’t there at first? At the MIX conference this week, Senior User Experience Designer Stephan Hoefnagels claimed that the taskbar in the 1985 release of Windows 1 predated the Apple Dock by 15 years. If you want to take credit for a feature, you have to have the courage of your convictions and make it prominent - not hide it away behind the old way of working, even if it doesn’t win a popularity contest on the first day.
-Mary

Good design isn’t just for those fancy marketing advertising sites. It’s an important part of how you relate to your users – and how they work with your applications and services. A SAP line of business service needs just as much design as an ecommerce web site. Internal users need to love the applications they use just as much as they love eBay or LiveJournal or IT Pro…

Here at MIX09 Microsoft is evangelising user experience to designers and developers from all over the world. Microsoft Research’s Bill Buxton has provided dynamic and entertaining keynotes, and his ideas are showing up in the next generation of design tools that previewed here in Las Vegas this week. But the most interesting and inspiring keynote wasn’t the Silverlight 3 extravaganza, or the unveiling of Internet Explorer 8. Instead it was one woman standing on stage talking about prescription medicines.

I was tempted to save this story for Ada Lovelace Day next week, but Deborah Adler’s work with redesigning the prescription label shows just how good design can make people’s lives easier (and even save them), while also changing the public’s perception of a business.

It all started when her grandmother accidentally took some of her grandfather’s medicine. It’s not difficult for that to happen, as the standard packaging for pharmacy medicines all look the same: little orange plastic jars with badly printed labels. Adler was working on her master’s design thesis at the time, and took on redesigning the packaging as a task.

She used information architecture principles to redesign the labels, and came up with a packaging design that made it easier to view important information. The result was a clearer, safer view that could be personalized to avoid confusion, and which prioritised key pieces of information – the drug, the dose, and when it should be taken.

Of course that was just a college project, but Adler believed in what she was doing and felt that things should go a lot further than just being shelved in a college library. She took her ideas to regulatory bodies and to many of the large US pharmacy chains.

She ended up working with Target, where her ideas were refined, using more user research and industrial design. The resulting Clear RX system had redesigned packaging, with Adler’s new clear labels, as well as a new set of documentation to go along with the pill bottles – and the bottle included a magnifying lens to make the text even clearer.

Clear RX has now won many awards, and has also changed the perception of Target’s pharmacy – significantly increasing its market share. A new user experience has ended up not only saving lives, but adding business value.

Adler’s rules for design are a good set of guidelines for anyone designing an application, or a service:
1.Having a love affair with the customer and digging into their needs

2.Solve those needs humanly and humanely

Having a love affair with your users may seem a little odd, but it’s all about making a connection to your users and understanding what they need and how they need it.

Simon
At MIX09 in Las Vegas

Tim Berners-Lee may not have been Sergeant Pepper, but his work at CERN has left the world with a vital and powerful communications tool.

CERN has chosen to mark today to commemorate the approval of the initial project that two years later became the public web. It’s been surprising to think just how quickly the Web became the stuff of everyday life, and the place (the cyberspace?) where millions of us work.

I’ve been using the web since a few days after the first public web server went live, with my first access through a university terminal and a little text browser. It was a year or so later that I sneaked into the old SCO offices in Watford on a Sunday afternoon to be shown the the glowing grey pixels of the first release of the Mosaic browser.

It was only a year or so later that Mary and I wrote a round up of all the web browsers then available. It’s hard to imagine in these days of IE, Mozilla, Chrome and Safari that there more than 20 different browsers - a pre-Cambrian explosion of the Web. Shortly after that I moved to Bath, to help found UK Online, one of the first web-based content services - a direct ancestor of the CMS systems that power IT Pro…

Time flies, and the Web has become all pervasive - on our phones, our TVs, even baked into the hardware in our homes. We work using web-based cloud services, and we shop and talk all across the Web.

So, in a flash of historical perspective, here is a picture of the first web server. It’s Tim Berners-Lee’s original NeXT Cube, now in a case in CERN’s small museum. And the sticker? “Do Not Power Down. This Is A Server.”

–Simon

(In Silicon Valley)