Principles Not Included in Design Journal #1

Accessibility:
Remember the Milk has been designed for above average web usesr; tech-savy individuals who are comfortable with a range of cutting edge products. Thus, I would argue that RTM was not designed with accessibility in mind. It was designed to meet needs of a niche market, not “to be usable, without modification, by as many people as possible”.

Advance Organizer:
In the RTM application, all of the information it displays has been provided by the user. There is no new information for the users to learn and as such, the advance organizer principle does not apply.

Attractiveness Bias:
There are no people (just a cow) anywhere in the Remember the Milk application. As such the attractiveness bias principle does not apply.

Closure:
I could not find an obvious example of closure anywhere in the Remember the Milk application. It seems that the RTM designers were explicit in ensuring that the tool's features could easily be perceived as "multiple, individual elements".

Cognitive Dissonance:
RTM is, essentially, the digital equivalent of a pen and paper to do list. For this reason, there is limited need for users to "seek consistency among [their] attitudes, thoughts and beliefs" about their "to dos" - they just write them down and cross them off as they are completed. Thus, the principle of "cognitive dissonance" does not apply.

Common Fate:
Generally speaking, there is very limited "motion" in the Remember the Milk tool. Users can "move" tasks in the sense that they can individually move them up and down by changing their priority. but this provides limited, if any, for grouping by common fate. Thus, the principle would not apply.

Comparison

The screenshots above show the main portion of the Remember the Milk interface, one showing outstanding tasks for "Today" and another showing outstanding tasks"Tomorrow". Clicking on either Today, tomorrow or overdue reveals the tasks due on that particular day during that time frame.

This interface displays task data in a "single context" so that users can compare task data for each day and "notice the subtle differences and patterns in the data...".

Confirmation

The above screenshot shows an example of confirmation. When a user deletes a task, the bar shown below appears across the top of the screen until the user performs another function in the tool.



Though the bar is not the blatant example of confirmation typically seen in software - IE: "Are you sure you want to delete the task?" - I would argue that the bar represents a superior form of it.

Executing the confirmation in this manner requires less interaction from the user. It assumes that the user has performed the correct function and immediately allows the user to "unconfirm" the action if he or she has made the wrong choice.

Essentially, this feature of RTM assumes that users are smart - and they are - a factor often overlooked in typical software design.

Colour

In the above screen shot, you can see small, gray and coloured boxes to the right of the listed tasks. You'll notice that the top 3 tasks have different colours than the rest (red, navy blue, light blue).

In this case, the colour is used to "attract attention, group elements...[and] indicate meaning"as the coloured boxes indicate the priority of task it sits beside.

The RTM colour legend is as follows:

Priority 0 (No Priority) - Grey
Priority 1 - Red
Priority 2 - Navy Blue
Priority 3 - Light Blue

Archetypes & Baby-Face Bias:

The Remember the Milk logo is comprised of an image and text that both appear to be hand-drawn, almost as if they were created by a child. The logo uses the baby face bias (the cow head) combined with the hand-written text to appeal to the archetype of child made drawings.

In practice, these principles make users of Remember the Milk perceive the RTM brand as being honest and innocent. In turn, these perceptions would impact the way the users feel about the functions of tool the itself - IE: they might be forgiving about small application glitches and bugs.

Chunking

In the above screen shot, you can see that the tasks are grouped under categories according to their due dates. The categories in this example (Today, Tomorrow and Never) are separated by a small, faint gray line and the tasks themselves are indented under the category names .

The gray lines and bolded category names separate the information - the tasks due on a particular day - into chunks and make the information "easier to process and remember" for the user.

Alignment

The screen shot above shows the primary interface of the Remember the Milk application. You can see that the various types of information (individual tasks, tasks overview, inbox, key) are placed and aligned to different horizontal and vertical areas of the screen.

For example, the main task information is aligned along the left side of the screen whereas, the task overview information is aligned along the right side of the screen. These alignments separate the information and allow users to differentiate between the types of data communicated on the page.

Affordance & Classical Conditioning

As shown in the screen shot above the Remember the Milk iGoogle gadget displays tasks in a vertical list sorted by the completion date inputted by the user. Beside each of the tasks is a small arrow that when clicked, launches a drop down menu of options for that particular task.

These arrows afford clicking. The downward arrow informs the user that there is more information contained "underneath" or "below" it and as a result, he or she clicks it to access to the new information.

The arrows are also an example of classical conditioning. A drop down menu indicated by a downward arrow is very common in computer software and as such users " just know"
that it is necessary to click the arrow order to access the information it contains.

Aesthetic-Usability Effect

RTM is a good lookin’ web app! It has a clean, uncluttered interface, just the right amount of colour and a cute, ‘reminds me of when I was young’ type cow head logo in the upper-left corner of the main display. Though these features don’t directly impact the tool’s primary functions –it would work just fine without them – they make RTM look more appealing and easy to use.

For example, the first screenshot below shows the applications main interface in its original form. The second shows the same interface without the style-sheet enabled. Not surprisingly, the second, no style- sheet version of RTM looks unappealing, confusing and even difficult to use. This is a perfect example of the Aesthetic-Usability Effect.

First Screenshot (CSS Style-sheet Enabled):


Second Screenshot (CSS Style-sheet Disabled):

The 80/20 Rule

Remember the Milk has a number of very cool options, sleek web 2.0’ish features that go above and beyond your typical task manager. However, only a fraction of these features are available through the tool’s iGoogle gadget, the interface I use almost exclusively to access my RTM tasks.

This isn’t a problem though as the few features that are in the gadget happen to be the ones I use most. I don’t think this is a coincidence. The RTM iGoogle gadget is a classic example of the 80/20 rule at work. It allows access to the 20% of RTM’s features that will be accessed 80% of the time by users.

Off to the Races: Design Journal #1 Introduction

For Design Journal #1, I opted to review Remember the Milk, a web-based task management tool designed to help people get more organized. It offers a few key advantages over traditional computerized to-do lists, all of which revolve around the idea of being able to access your tasks from any digital device or application.

Having formerly been a compulsive Outlook user (and admittedly, somewhat of a nerd), I made the transition to Remember the Milk this fall with nervous hesitation. After all, the fate of my school projects, errands and general musings depended on it. To my surprise, the change came with relative ease; Remember the Milk is a simple but extremely well-designed and intuitive application. It works almost perfectly for me and I am uber-stoked to be moving away from software made by 'the soft' (Note: The software is still in beta so the almost is to be expected).

Over the next ten or so posts, I'll be reviewing what it is, specifically, that makes Remember the Milk such a great design. I'll also take a stab at addressing some of its shortcomings; features of the design that I suspect (read: hope) that the company will revise in future iterations of the software. Stay tuned.