Commuting

In the last 4 weeks, I've commuted more than I have in the last 17 years. I'm starting to get used to the routine; the 30 minute drive each day isn't too bad, but it is an hour out of my day that I can't get back. I know that people commute everyday, but it is new to me.

My commute is against traffic which lets me get to work easily; no matter how fast I go, it takes me just about 30 minutes. On the way home, I pay for using the carpool lane (FasTrak) and while the cost varies depending on a number of factors, it is absolutely worth it for my sanity to not to have to sit in traffic. Like my drive to work, my drive home is about 30 minutes no matter what.

At some point I hope to work from home a few days a week. This will allow me to recover an hour each day I work from home and I think will help me more productive.

I wonder what would happen if people that could work remotely did so a few times a week. The office interaction is good, but I believe there can be a balance that affords people some of the benefits I've taken for granted most of my career.

My New Adventure

When I was laid off, people kept telling me that there was nothing to worry about and take some time for myself. For the first few weeks, I tried to heed the advice and took it easy while at the same time leisurely looking for a job. I treated the first month as the sabbatical that I didn't have the opportunity to enjoy and managed to make it through my inbox, my todo list, and ran out of things to do around the house.

After about a month, I started to get antsy as I'd never been away from a job for that long in my 20+ year career. I applied for a few jobs, but didn't hear back on most of them. This had me quite nervous even though I knew I didn't have to get a job for awhile. Would I be able to find a job? Would I have to take the first job offered to me even if it wasn't the job i wanted? Would I have the motivation to start working again?

This period of unemployment also had me thinking about what happens for older workers; all of their experience comes at a higher price tag and many companies aren't willing to pay for it. I don't consider myself an older worker (however, the federal laws about employment consider older workers over 40, I believe), but when I started talking to people and explained that I have 20 years in mobile app development, I started to date myself.

My job search, luckily, only took about 6 weeks from the time I was laid off (actually it was a total of about 10 weeks as I started even before I was told I was being laid off). I saw a job posting for a mobile architect and decided to apply even though the job description was vague. After talking with the recruiter, I felt like the job was perfect for me based on my experience. My interviews went well and the rest is history!

User Experience vs User Interface Design

Once upon a time, I claimed that I could do UI design of applications. This was back in the Newton and Palm OS days where the apps didn't do a whole lot and the developer guides had pretty clear guidelines that everyone followed. For Palm OS, it even had the number of pixels from the edges for buttons which made it quite easy to know exactly where to place objects.

Moving forward 20 years, it is clear to me that I can follow guidelines, but I need help designing an interface. This is where I've learned a ton working with professionals that do design. So far I'm being vague about what I mean by design, because I think that there is a clear misunderstanding of what is mobile design (or application design in general).

There are 2 main areas that I see referenced in mobile design. They are User Interface (UI) and User Experience (UX). While they sound very similar and some people treat them the same, they are very, very different. I've had the opportunity to work with a very talented individual that makes both look easy and has taught me the differences.

In general terms (at least to me), user experience is how the user navigates through an app, uses the features, and generally interacts with it. User interface is about drawing the pretty pictures, identifying the typefaces for styling, and picking the colors. In working with a designer on our team, I saw how he meticulously mapped out how everything would work in the application by putting together flowcharts of what every button would do, how you got back somewhere, what was the recovery for every error, how it interacted with hardware, what to do while the user was waiting for a network operation to finish, etc. The actual user interface was secondary to the user experience; for the most part we used standard controls, a standard color palette, etc. This type of design really impressed me as our designer identified so many things that are easy to ignore when simply writing an app. (How many apps just display "Error" with a number with no way to recover from it?)

On the flip side, I worked on a project where the designers were user interface designers trying to do both UX and UI design. Their UX design made the app hard to use, didn't consider different screen sizes, didn't consider navigation, didn't consider how to display data that wasn't in their sample, and was really about how pretty they could make it look. This frustrated me to no end as they wanted all kinds of custom interactions that would require end user training and were hard to use. In addition, they didn't consider dynamic typefaces which I feel are important in consumer apps as people like me increase the type sizes to make the text easier to read. I pushed back on some of it and made the app work the best I could. I'm definitely not any type of designer, but having been in this business long enough, I know what doesn't work!

As a user of apps, I find that a good user experience is paramount for me wanting to keep using an app. However, without an appealing visual appearance, I probably won't enjoy looking at an app. Keeping these ideas in mind makes killer apps. I feel quite lucky to have worked with a designer that has taught me so much about design; I think that seeing how he did the design and how he considered all the interactions will be a huge benefit to me in the future when I work on new apps.

Non Standard iOS Navigation

In my years of being an iOS developer and user, I've seen a lot of apps that try to come up with their own ways of doing navigation that don't follow Apple's Human Interface Guidelines. Over this time, Apple has changed their guidelines, but usually don't adopt some of the concepts that apps have inflicted on us.

I do most of my news reading on my iPad (and sometimes on my iPhone), so I've taken a look at the different news apps. Some people pan Apple's News, however it is one of the easiest to use, has consistent navigation, and has a number of hidden features that make it convenient to use. For example, you can scroll up and down using the arrow keys on an iPad Pro keyboard, scroll page by page using option and the arrow keys and navigate back from an article using command and the left arrow key.

Using News, I'm able to take care of my tech, national and world news craving. So that leaves local news. The local news apps seem to shun standard navigation. One app uses an X in the upper which seems more cutesy than useful. If you're browsing away with an iPad on a stand, you get used to swiping to the right to go back or at worst, tapping the back arrow.

This is pretty annoying; using the same app on the iPhone is worse because it prevents one handed news browsing. You have to reach up and hit the X button. The X for close is very much a desktop metaphor.

If we take a look at another news app, they at least kept the back button in the upper left, but because they want to show other articles, you can't swipe right to go back.

I keep asking myself if the designers and developers use these apps or have done user studies (it's hard for me to use a lot of apps I've worked on because they don't apply to me, especially enterprise apps). Just watching a user use the app gives huge insight into what can be improved. One of the best experiences I had in the last year was watching someone use one of my apps; this was an enterprise app and thing that I thought were obvious weren't obvious to the user.

By sticking to standard design paradigms as well as the Apple Human Interface Guidelines reduces user frustration, decreases training time (especially in enterprise apps) and increase the time that people use the apps.