Froyo also boasts Flash 10.1 support and a revamped Android Marketplace that will allow users to send apps to a phone directly over the air. In addition, Froyo has a new wizard that helps you refine your interface design in terms of home screens, widgets and shortcuts. The latest iteration also allows you to tether your phone, effectively turning into a modem for your other computers.  All these new features and more open new avenues for interface designers and developers to make more innovative and user friendly tools and solutions for mobile devices. And considering the fact that Android is making its way on to tablets, ginormous HD TVs, automobile dashboards, microwaves and more, the future does look bright for the OS.

Among the new announcements at the recently concluded Google’s I/O Developers conference was the next iteration of the Android OS, namely 2.2 (codenamed Froyo). Android has grown in leaps and bounds since its inception with a new market survey showing Android powered phones overtaking Apple in the US, the world’s biggest smartphone market. According to Google, the latest version of Android will be up to five times faster at running apps and three times faster at browsing due to the use of just-in-time Java compilers and the same V8 JavaScript engine as Chrome.

Froyo’s browser includes more HTML5 features, such as allowing the browser to access hardware features such as the accelerometer (to rotate the screen automatically), the microphone and the camera which can all now be accessed by web apps. What this means for interface design, interaction design and web development is that voice recognition comes to the fore as an extra input and control device. Google’s voice recognition and translation services are examples of how users may potentially use their voice to perform web searches, control their android phones or even change the channel on the, also newly announced, Google TV.

In order to successfully market a product it must be usable, and to be usable it must be easy to understand. In a nutshell, this platitude is why usability and simplicity are often synonymous in the world of interface design. Usability is the driving force behind any really successful interface design. So how can you integrate usability and simplicity into your interface design? Let’s take a look at the strategies Google and Apple use to optimize their interface designs.

The facade of simplicity: Interface design as key to Google’s popularity
If only interface design were a simple task. It is not. You as a designer must employ great skill and imagination to create the illusion of simplicity for your users, no matter how complicated the technology or semantics behind the application may be. For example, the Google search engine is efficient and very user-friendly. Simply type in a word or phrase and Google takes you to all of the relevant links and categories you need to obtain the information you seek. Not only is Google easy to use, it is also easy to view. Take a look at the start page interface design. There is nothing more simple than the Google graphic hovering over the search engine field. One text input field, one button – there can hardly be any misunderstanding about how to use this application. Google masterfully presents a facade of simplicity for its users. Behind the scenes, things are quite different. The Google search engine must within a fraction of a second solve a million variable equation to rank 8 billion web pages by importance to suit your search needs. This means that Google is in truth quite complex at the technical level, but at the user interface level it is effortlessly accessible. So this suggests that simplicity in relation to interface design does not necessarily apply to its creation (although you can make your design process easier by prototyping, for example if you use wireframing software). Simplicity and usability are important for users, and the better the illusion of simplicity, the more successful the product can be.

The new Hotmail also integrates MS’s new Office Web Apps allowing you to view and edit Word, or PowerPoint or other files within Hotmail’s new interface design. Documents retain their formatting and are updated on SkyDrive. These documents can be accessed through any web browser and users can easily invite others to collaborate on them. YouTube videos and the like sent to you via email can also be viewed within Hotmail as can Flickr photo albums. And users can even manage social network invitations. Emails can also be arranged by threaded conversations. In addition to enterprise class SmartScan spam filtering, the new interface design update and increased functionality has made Hotmail a truly attractive proposition for today’s emailers, me included.

In order to bring back some funk to it’s Hotmail brand and to compete better with the likes of Gmail, Microsoft has spruced up the interface design of and added new features to their webmail service. Over time the nature of the content of inboxes has morphed from a majority of mails coming from people you knew. Today’s inbox includes a lot of spam (which now makes up 90% of webmail traffic), mail from other services such as social networks, newsletters and other types of mail such as sending yourself a document which you want to be able to access later away from your computer. The new Hotmail  segregates the different types of email to let you know exactly which types of mails you have received allowing to directly go to the desired type (such as mails with photos attached to them for example) from the revamped homepage.

A great new feature is the sweep function which allows you to move all mails from one or more contacts into a desired folder (such as the trash folder) with a couple clicks. Furthermore this feature can be made to work automatically. In effect MS is trying to make Hotmail the service of choice to centralize your emailing as POP mail such as Gmail and Yahoo Mail Plus can be forwarded and automatically swept into their own folders. Photos are automatically previewed and can be viewed as a slideshow all without leaving Hotmail.  Those sending photos can have their photos made into an online album on MS’s new free cloud-hosting service, SkyDrive, for all users to see, comment, tag friends or add photos regardless of email service used.

As the saying goes ‘if it ain’t broke don’t try to fix it’. When Microsoft released Office 2007 to succeed Office 2003, users were treated to a revolution in the popular office productivity suite’s interface design as some of the core handling patterns learned by using previous iterations of the Office no longer applied. The menu buttons and toolbars on the interface design of Office 2007 were a radical and unexpected departure. MS implemented its new Fluent User Interface design ‘Ribbon’ to replace the previous system of layered menus, toolbars, and task panes with a new system “optimized for efficiency and discoverability”. In many ways Office 2007 in comparison to its previous iteration was like Vista to Windows XP. Some users that had gained mastery of XP found themselves unable to do things on Vista they could easily do on XP. Even power users were stumped by Office 2007’s learning (or should I say re-learning) curve leading many to simply stick to their guns much in the same way many never felt compelled to upgrade to Vista. Some who upgraded to the 2007 iteration even used add-ons that simulated the classical menu user interface design.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg ended his silence about the recent privacy controversies in a letter to tech blogger Robert Scoble and via an op-ed piece in the Wall Street journal. Zuckerberg acknowledged that Facebook security features were too convoluted and stated that “in the coming weeks, [Facebook] will add privacy controls that are much simpler to use”.  In addition, Zuckerberg promises that Facebook users will be given a much easier method for opting out of all third party services.

Zuckerberg’s response was prompted by a tidal wave of fury about Facebook’s lack of easy-to-understand and easy-to-use privacy options in its interface design from users across the globe.  An initial security glitch, in which some users were able to view the private chats or messages of their friends, created a snowball effect among users as they also began to complain that Facebook’s interface design was a conveyor of confusing privacy policies and made their private data to easily available to third parties.  One of the main problems with Facebook’s interface design, according to many users, is that there are too many settings and the settings are anything but usable or clear in terms of allowing users to make their desired selections.

According to Webmonkey early builds of the new Firefox show that the latest iteration has picked up more than a trick or two from Google Chrome’s interface design. An example of this is through a new add-on manager that appears as an inline page rather than opening in a new panel or window. And just like with Chrome’s interface design tabs can be made to appear above the address bar. The similarities, however, end in aesthetics as Firefox 4.0 offers many unique technological selling points differentiating it from both Chrome and even earlier iterations of Firefox! With Microsoft already pulling out all the stops with the latest iteration of Internet Explorer, the announced IE 9, it will be interesting to watch how the next Chrome, Safari and Opera shape up in what continues to be a highly competitive, cutthroat market. The bigger winner here, of course, are the consumers.

Firefox has long been a big draw in the crowded web browser market even landing in the Guinness Book of World Records when iteration 3.0 became the most downloaded software in a 24 hour period after being downloaded over 8 million times in that period. Iteration 4.0 is slated to be released in November 2010 and it promises speed and a revamped interface design. According to the lead Firefox developer, Mike Beltzner, “Something UI designers have known for a long time is that the simpler an interface looks, the faster it will seem. The less the user has to take in with their eye, the quicker they can process it and the quicker the entire application will seem. So we’re actually looking at making our interface faster by changing the way it looks.”

Advances in speed are to be brought about by more than just offering a cleaner interface design with less clutter and GUI controls for the user to cope with. Navigation will also be improved via a “switch to tab” tool designed to better manage tabs by facilitating jumps between them and reducing their overall number. This in effect is done by adding further functionality to the Home button, allowing it to double as a kind of tab repository. Firefox 4.0 also embraces the powerful emergent HTML5 standard allowing for Geo-location and reducing the need for plug-in-based rich internet applications. This latest iteration will also support multi-touch technology, extentions that can install without the need to restart, and easier layout and styling with CSS3.

Facebook and its dreaded partner sites

Facebook’s partner sites Yelp, Pandora, and Microsoft Docs all have access to your personal information unless you visit each site individually and opt out of information sharing. You can also by proxy share your friends’ information if they have not opted out on these websites.  So how do you opt out?  Well, Facebook makes that process very difficult according to the EFF.  The directions that Facebook provides users on its site about how to opt out of “intrawebsite” information sharing are vague and difficult to understand.  Facebook’s interface design is breaking one of the most important website usability rules: make everything easy and clear to your users!

The implication of Facebook’s interface design decisions

What is most troubling about Facebook’s interface design is that it could be a systemic problem plaguing thousands of websites and users. It begs the question: what exactly are the intentions of web designers and how safe is it to trust in the intuitiveness of any interface design?  This is a heated topic that will probably continue to keep internet users on their toes.  For now, it is important to remember that if you are creating a website, the interface design should be simple and usable!  Who knows what the ramifications of Facebook’s latest design changes will be.  Probably nothing.  They seem to own the internet already.