I'm really digging on the "Party Shuffle" feature in the new iTunes.

11:05:44 AM  #  

Marginal Revolution has an interesting discussion about how to design the economically optimal fuel gauge on a car to take advantage of perception biases among customers.  Just a tip for all you folks in User Interface land.  You might want to consider these arguments when putting together UIs.  I know some applications tend to hang on complex operations and save the window redrawing until the operation is complete.  So you stare at a half drawn window for a few seconds.

This frustrates customers because it illustrates to them one of two things:

1. Their computer is too slow to run your application, or...
2. Your application is a bulky piece of junk.

Regardless of how fast the operation actually performs, staring at a window struggling to redraw itself causes the client to experience frustration.  Simply drawing the window objects in first and storing the data in memory until the operations are finished and then redrawing the window with the data populated might solve this.  A better solution is the oft-used performance meter window ("This operation may take a while...please be patient" with a status indicator below it).

Not that this is stuff you guys don't already know.  I just think that programmers tend to forget how important perception is.  Reality often takes a backseat.

10:35:38 AM  #