Come on Apple – write a program that can scroll a text list without hanging my machine. I have a modest sized music library and a fast new PC – why does moving the scroll bar freeze my whole system for 30 seconds? Why does iTunes take 2 minutes to boot? Why does it constantly nag me to install new versions, and make me reinstall quicktime each time?

Maybe by making the PC/iTunes experience so miserable, Apple is hoping to make people switch out of sheer frustration. iTunes is just a list of files and a play button – not sure why it needs to commandeer my whole system. Winamp had this stuff figured out years ago and did it in about 200k. Now if only I hadn’t bought that ipod….

I found this image while browsing the fantastic Ffffound. Anyone know where it came from?

Last week I started my new full-time position with Yahoo’s Entertainment division. I’ll be working with a crack team of designers and developers, prototyping new features and interfaces to showcase Yahoo’s entertainment content (movies, music, TV, celebrities, games). One of the great things about working at Yahoo is the huge traffic they enjoy, which guarantees plenty of eyeballs on your work. Also, there is a great vibe to the place – everyone seems very cool and psyched about working here.

This job has meant a move to Santa Monica, California. It’s a big change from my previous home in Cambridge, MA. So far it’s been 72° and blue skies every day. I’ll have to brush up on my surfing skills 🙂

As if that wasn’t enough change, I’ve also switched my work machine to a Mac. Wish me luck as I fumble around looking for the right-click button and trying to get the ‘End’ key to work.

This feature:

• made Google a world leader
• makes video games so enjoyable
• is why geeks prefer Notepad over MS Word
• makes using some web apps so frustrating

The feature is : instant response.

In the real world, you touch something and it moves. You don’t have to wait 3 seconds for the universe to calculate the object’s new position. Instant response is what the brain expects. Anytime an application make us wait, it kills the flow state and our enjoyment of the app.

Donkey Kong has it. Does your application?

Think about using a computer for 8 hours every day. Think how long you are just waiting.

• Waiting for webpages to load.
• Waiting for your machine to reboot (arrrrgh).
• Waiting for applications to load (e.g. Photoshop).
• Compile times.
• etc.

Take these times and multiply by the millions of times you experience them, and you have a lot of your life wasted. This is stealing your valuable time on this earth.

It’s not even useful waiting, because you don’t know when the wait will finish, so you don’t have time to focus on other activities. In the future all UIs will be instant response. Future People will be shocked and saddened to realize that we had to waste so much time looking at progress bars.

So my main piece of advice, from a lifetime of using and building computer apps is – make it faster.

• Make it smaller
• Make it lighter
• Sacrifice unnecessary functionality
• Preload when possible.

Give the user instance response. If you can’t do that, then at least give them instant feedback with some kind of front-end animation, and try to accurately indicate how long the user will be waiting.

Testing out my scanner with a snippet from David Boring that seemed quite apt…

This awesome video proves that:

a) Pac-man has the easiest to understand UI of any game.
b) Chimps are exactly like us. Check out the bit where his power-pill runs out by the ghost’s house and he panics – I’ve done this many times myself.
c) Chimp experimenters have run out of useful things to test.

Via kotaku.