Category Archives: Design

Retro Friday: The Sounds of Technology

In this era of web and app development, we pay lots of attention to how things look, how things feel — but not much, these days, to how things sound. Yet there are so many iconic sounds of technology that just don’t exist anymore, or are dying fast.

One of the most popular, of course, is/was “You’ve Got Mail” from AOL — so popular that it spawned a romantic comedy with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan! Throughout the 1990s, though, sounds were a key part of many software releases.

Think, for instance, about the lowly startup sound. Many combinations of Mac hardware and operating system gave different startup sounds (and different crash sounds, too — although the screeching tires were heart-stopping enough). It was followed so closely as to have a web collection! Windows iterations matured similarly, from the clunky Windows 3.1 sound to the zen Windows 95 startup and beyond. Again, there’s a web collection to allow you stroll memory lane.

But even the hardware had sounds of its own, even if it was merely a byproduct of how it worked. I still think fondly of the sounds of the old Epson FX-80 dot matrix printer — a printer that was so popular that you can STILL purchase ribbons online. Hearing the sound of the print head sweeping across the page and then loudly depositing dots of ink before doing it all again just signified that you were DOING something, you were creating something. Far more satisfying than the quiet fan and rollers of a laser printer today. (Although you’ll notice I’m saying nothing about relative quality of output.)

Why don’t we consider sounds as key interface features much anymore? Perhaps it’s because technology is used so much more in a crowd these days; it can be a little too disruptive if buttons click or startup comes with a chime.

But listening to the Museum of Endangered Sounds and other old sound repositories, I can’t help feeling like we’ve lost a little something along the way.

Interface Lessons Everywhere

I was out at a restaurant a while back, and it had pretty interesting decor – a hip, modernist kind of thing. Pretty to look at.

At one point, I needed to use the restroom, so I went and did that. When it came time to wash my hands, though, I was stumped. I mean, I think of myself as a reasonably intelligent guy, but I could not figure out how to turn the water on. There was a lever. I tried lifting – no dice. I tried pushing – nope. Side-to-side? Sorry.

After what seemed like an eternity, I discovered that it was a twisting motion – something not hinted at anywhere.

It reminded me of user interface design — it was Don Norman who popularized the idea of affordances and constraint, and this was a prime example. Of it done badly, that is.

But those kinds of lessons really are everywhere. When you rent a car and have to figure out how to open the trunk from the driver’s seat. Or you go to a restaurant (can you tell I like to eat out?) and open the menu. What’s obvious? What’s not?

It is, perhaps, the curse of a designer that everywhere you turn, you notice design — good and bad. But it’s also a benefit for everyone, and we encourage our clients, when thinking about design ideas, to do the same. Look around you every day and think about what you like and what you don’t.

Context matters also, of course. The design for a menu at a pub will look quite different than one for an upscale French restaurant, for instance. So the next time you’re walking, biking or riding down a neighborhood street, look at the retail storefronts. How are they representing themselves? Are they using design and “interface” to their advantage?

Because the lessons are everywhere.

Retro Tech: Early Software Creator Culture

Today, I write in appreciation of Bill Budge. Budge got his start writing games for the (then-new) Apple ][. But almost right away, that wasn't enough for him. And that's where things got interesting.

After some initial forays into writing games, he got more interested in one of the key underlying parts of the games themselves -- namely, the graphics routines. The Apple ][ was a pretty revolutionary computer of its time, after all, but the limitations of its graphics processing were huge. So how could you get around them and make things that looked good – and, important for games, rendered quickly?

After working on that for a while, Budge developed another game, and this one (unlike his earlier products) would be a classic: Raster Blaster. This was not just a pinball game – it was a pinball simulation. Budge had found a way to take the amazing work he had done on getting fast, high-resolution graphics out of the Apple ][ and give it the best proof-of-concept ever.

It was no wonder that Raster Blaster became among the best-selling games of 1981. But Budge didn’t even stop there. And even though I loved Raster Blaster when it came out, and played it a LOT, it’s this next step that put him in the innovator’s pantheon.

The next year, he released a Pinball Construction Set. For the masses of Apple ][ users who didn’t know how to program (or couldn’t program advanced high-res games, at least), it was a revelation.

You fired up this program, and you could make your own game! You just dragged and dropped (a new construct at the time) components onto a pinball board, adjust physics parameters if you wanted, and go. You could tweak all kinds of things along the way, and when you got a game put together that you liked, you could save it independently to a disk and share it with friends.

Pinball Construction Set was the first (as far as I can tell) “builder” kind of game/app. All of the Sim games and other simulations that came later — they have Bill Budge to thank. (In fact, Will Wright, creator of many of those great simulations, has cited Pinball Construction Set as an inspiration!)

So it seems only right on this Retro Friday to offer our thanks to Mr. Budge as well. Not only for helping us misspend much time in our youth, but for sparking a bit of the creator culture and vibe that has become a cornerstone of development today. It all started with some bumpers and flippers.

Speeds ‘n Feeds

In technology, we’ve always gotten excited about so-called “speeds ‘n feeds.” The stats, the specs, the numbers that indicate performance. There’s a whole benchmarking industry for computers, for instance, that allow you to run the same test suite on your computer and check it against other models. In theory, that will give you an objective sense about how much faster/better one is than the other.

Except that when things are generally fast enough, or sharp enough, or have enough capacity, the speeds ‘n feeds don’t matter so much anymore. For the majority of the population that uses their computer to access the web and do office productivity stuff, the difference between a 2.7GhZ and a 3.0GhZ processor isn’t going to matter. Neither is 6GB of RAM vs. 8GB.

(A quick side trip – part of my mind still reels when typing those numbers; I remember when it was $100+ per MB of hard disk storage, and if you had 64K of RAM, you were rockin’ the best machine around. 8GB of RAM? 4TB of HD space? Amazing.)

So when the numbers stop mattering so much, what’s left? Experience and, to a lesser degree, features.

I was thinking about this yesterday, when the new iPhones were announced. As has been pointed out elsewhere, the new iPhone 5C is essentially a buffed-up plastic version of the iPhone 5. The iPhone 5S is a faster version (and 64-bit, which is actually a pretty big deal), with enhancements made to the camera and a new fingerprint sensor.

Now I’m an iPhone user, and we develop apps for the iPhone and other devices all the time. But I found myself stifling a bit of a yawn at times. Other than the 32-to-64-bit move, the hardware was an incremental step forward, but other than for fanboys and those at the end of their contract who need a new phone, it’s not going to move the needle much.

No, the ‘killer app’ of the presentation was the first part, where a slideshow-based demo of iOS 7 was done. Now this just might sell more phones. Parallax views, new sharing technologies, redesigned interface, easier access to more frequently-used things, intuitive use of calendar and mapping — this spells the foundation of a new experience altogether.

I think, at least in the phone world, we’ve entered the zone that PCs entered about a decade ago: speeds ‘n feeds aren’t so important anymore. How will the new thing (phone/PC/whatever) make me feel differently? Work differently? Live differently?

Should make for an interesting run for device makers everywhere.