A few months after Apple's App Store's huge success, Google has decided (or planned long ago) to open their Android Market for their mobile platform Android. The site did indeed excites for a while. As a developer, I can't help thinking about the possibility of developing for Android, now that all the essential resources are ready, an SDK, a real phone and the place to sell applications.
Microsoft has been lagging behind on this matter, which they are not ashamed of. However, they definately would like to take a bite from this giant pie. Rumor has been out saying that there will be some sort of Zune based phone, or Windows Mobile based Zune to be unveiled in the near future; and of couse the App Store concept will be copied (re-innovated, in MS term) too! As Microsoft has their fame of naming their product very creatively, I hereby predit that the name is possibly "Zune Phone Application Shopping Mall", beating Apple and Google at least by the length of store name.
13 October 2008
User Interface Design
One has to admit the feature set of MS Office is the richest among all competitors in this area. Outlook I would say is the mother ship of all email clients. With that said, a rich feature set does not necessarily imply a good user interface. With outlook, it seems that its feature set has bloat the UI so badly that 90% of the features are out of reach for mortal beings.
The Oh-so-customizable email client gives you such a great amount of freedom for customization, that the options spread into dozens of menu items, 6 major tab in the option dialog, a few sections in each tab, and a few buttons/controls in each section, some of which lead all the way to a forth dialog. Experiments show that it takes 10 clicks at minimum and a lot of eye balls to be able to change the alert message duration (See screen shot below.) 6 clicks are to bring you up to the final config dialog, FOUR clicks on the 'OK' buttons to bring you back to main windows.
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