Girl, Interrupted

The coolest T-shirt that I saw at the conference, which he said he bought from Qwertee.

Day 2 of the Playgrounds conference, I was on shift, but still got to hear some pretty good discussions, and I plan to watch some of the talks on skilled.io later. One of the talks I did get to hear was from Adam Bell who works at Facebook. He spoke about interruptability. It seems that in earlier versions of iOS, when you clicked on something, like opening a photo, the phone would drop all inputs until the photo finished loading. So even if you changed your mind, or wanted to do something else, you had to wait for the animation of the photo loading to finish first.

Obviously, that's pretty annoying from a user experience perspective. especially when some animations feel long and pointless. It reminds me a lot of DVD menus, and how some of them can be stupidly long. Sure, it's nice to look at the first time you open it, but when you have a 30 second menu animation between each navigation option, it can be frustrating pretty quickly if you want to do something as simple as turning on the subtitles.

I mostly do back-end stuff, but I imagine animations started out as something used to hide the fact that there was processing going on in the background. I remember from our UI class, back in old versions of word processors, when you saved a doc, you could tell the computer was doing something, because there would be the loud chugging sound which came from the computer writing the data to disk. So once you hit save, you got audio feedback that your click went through. But once hard drives started becoming faster and quieter, you lost that source of feedback. So people were clicking save, and not knowing whether anything was happening or not. I can't remember if it was a spinning icon, or something saying "Saving..." but it was introduced to indicate that something was happening to the user and that they didn't need to keep hitting the save button.

Now that computers are pretty fast, I think some of those things aren't needed anymore, but if nothing happened on the screen to indicate that the save had happened, the user would still be left wondering if their document had been saved or not. But if I click on a photo, I can see that it's loaded because, well, it's on my screen. I don't need some flashy sliding animation. I don't need the background to be blurred out. I just want to see the photo.

I don't know, I guess I just prefer more spartan designs, when it comes to UI.

Oops, I just went on a huge tangent. Anyway, Adam talked about interruptability, which is where you interrupt current processing to listen to a different input. So in the example he demoed, there's an app that takes photos, and you can swipe away the last photo taken in order to delete it. After swiping, there's an animation showing the photo flying away, but while that animation is happening, you can't take another photo or do anything else. In order to provide a better interface, what you should allow is for the user to do other things while the photo is being deleted.

I did end up meeting some new people at the conference, including someone who works for MrFodder's rival company! One thing I forgot to mention in my last post on the conference, rather than having a Q&A at the end of the talk, the speaker would move to another room, while the next speaker came on. Anyone who wanted to have a more intimate discussion with the speaker would be able to, while it would also allow the conference to fit in more talks during the day. Also, the organiser said that some people are too shy to ask a question in front of a large crowd, so having a discussion in a smaller room also meant people who wouldn't normally have spoken up would have the chance to.

However, one downside to this structure is that it forces you to choose between having the opportunity to speak to the speaker after their talk, or listen to the next talk. Unfortunately, it did mean that some speakers didn't have many people to talk to after their talk, because the speaker after them happened to have an interesting talk. But being in the room, listening to the discussions going on, I found that people were more engaged, and some of the questions that came out were quite fascinating. One of the speakers was from Uber, and while he did say a few times, "I'm not allowed to talk about that without clearing it with legal", I think he felt a bit more comfortable talking, and wasn't censoring himself as much - though it did seem like a lot of people who came to talk to him already knew him, so maybe that's why.

I have to say, the meme-level of some of the speakers was quite high. The international speakers had a bit of a running gag between them to put in a slide that was upside down (because they're down under), there were all these references to reddit in-jokes, gaming in-jokes, once again, I have to say, it felt very welcoming to find other people who are just like me. I mean, just look at today's photo - how many people would be so willing to let you take a photo of their shirt like that?