INTERFACE DETOURS SOFTWARE

The obstacle for libraries seems to be the longstanding culture of overly complicated design for our resources, especially OPACs. Note in the picture here that we in libraries have an advantage over news sources and other dotcom sites - We don’t have the extra baggage of advertising - This in itself would seem to make mobile friendly design a Great Opportunity for Libraries. The AP News example he chooses for the picture especially catches my attention, as I’ve been watching news sites to see how they’re adjusting to the mobile upheaval - I think they carry lessons for libraries, as we go through the same thing. Although he’s not talking specifically about libraries, his ideas are certainly right on-target for us in libraries. Wroblewski’s ideas resonate with what I’ve been writing about simple mobile design for library sites. The link in the quote above goes to Wroblewski’s Aug 2009 article Mobile App User Experience, which has the image at left, a great “picture-is-worth-a-thousand-words” view of the words in the quote - Cut the crap and give the user the important part, what they’re looking for! Taken together, I think, the quote and the picture tell the story of what’s been happening in the world of interface design since the introduction of the iPhone –Though I’m sure this is something of an oversimplification, I think that the simple user interface that seemed so hard to attain on a large screen has now become easier with the forced constraint of the small screen. So when a team designs mobile first, the end result is an experience focused on the key tasks users want to accomplish without the extraneous detours and general interface debris that litter today’s desktop-accessed Web sites. There simply isn’t room in a 320 by 480 pixel screen for extraneous, unnecessary elements.

INTERFACE DETOURS SOFTWARE

Mobile forces you to focus – Mobile devices require software development teams to focus on only the most important data and actions in an application. So … Jump forward to an excerpt from Wroblewski’s Nov 2009 article Mobile First, in which he first proposed the idea that all web pages should be designed first for a small screen, before considering their appearance on a large screen:

What makes this especially interesting is that the iPhone, with its game-changing elegant mobile interface, exploded on the scene just a month after Wroblewski’s article, in Jan, 2007. Interestingly (in light of his recent articles discussed below), in the 2006 article he doesn’t mention MOBILE design.

Once the detour is rerouted, connect to a Detour End tool to unify the data processes into a single stream for further analysis or connect to an output tool.In December 2006, Luke Wroblewski blogged a good discussion about The Complexity of Simplicity in user-interface design.

That means in the GUI, the metainfo (fields, etc.) is not getting updated for downstream tools. It makes it very hard to configure the disabled side. The unselected side does not get evaluated or run at all.

Connect the outputs to both the continue process and bypass process.

Connect the tool leading into the process you wish to bypass to the input connection of a Detour tool.

By default, the bypass occurs from the left side of the tool. Select Detour to the Right to make sure the bypass is through the right side of the Detour tool. Make sure your analytic app or macro sets the direction either way and you don't rely on the state in the workflow.

When you add a Detour tool to a workflow, first determine the process to bypass, whether you would like to configure to the left or to the right, and check the box appropriately.

Interface detours