However, it gets a lot more useful when searching for stuff that is found in different sorts of categories. A good example of that would be Donald Duck. Below you’ll see that Amazon filters your query automatically into the different categories.

My only qualms with it is, is that it is not directly distinguishable from search results, apart from the fact that it was indented. Perhaps colour could take care of that.

Whilst browsing the web might be an extreme example of how this is done (wrong), even smaller changes in input or output can change the interaction methods. Example would be having an extra monitor. The fact that I have two impacts my usage pattern in the sense that I switch less between windows, do much more dragging of content between visible windows, or might have a harder time finding where my windows are hidden.

A more subtle example would be having a scroll wheel on a device that enables you to navigate very quickly through lists (A), vs having to press a button every time you want to go up or down in the list of items (B).

At first glance the implications of this are simply that you’d have to restrict yourself on Device B with the amount of menu’s you can bury in a menu. This however, affects the entire application. Not only do you need to restrict yourself to the amount of items in the list, you need to design the application in such a way that all the features are still accessible. When you can jump up and down in lists without problems, such as in A, you can afford to have a very flat menu structure, perhaps only 2 levels deep. On B, because you can’t fit so much in one screen, you’d need to design in such a way that you can still fit in all the functionality, whilst dealing with the restrictions. It requires a much deeper structure.

This illustrates that even the smallest change on seemingly similar devices require you to think twice about simply porting over your interface from one platform to the next. I don’t read my physical copy of The Economist in the same way as I do with the online version. Why should mobile application be any different?

PS: thanks to Barry for the tip about the lectures.

As opposed to showing you a list of dates and prices for departing and returning flights, they put the prices into a grid with the dates as X/Y values, making it a lot easier to find out what date is cheapest to fly. As an added touch, the cheapest day/flight combination was also highlighted. I wondered why I wasn’t encountering it more often. Recently I did go shopping for some airline tickets and much to my delight I saw Lufthansa’s design pattern implemented. I did a bit of research and found a few more airlines that were doing it. Below some of the results.

Lufthansa
The original (just to be clear: I am not sure whether Lufthansa used it first, I did however encounter it there for the first time). Lufthansa indicates your current date by highlighting them and adding an arrow. What I love most is the color indication given:

Finnair
Here is almost a direct copy, with the difference that the cheapest prices are sadly not highlighted:

KLM
The Dutch carrier implements the grid exactly the same, except for the dates, which are outlined as opposed to highlighted with colour:

I guess you can truly appreciate how nice this works if you see the alternative, which wasn’t hard to find.

Easy Jet
This represenation isn’t all that bad and the attempt is somewhat reminiscent, but it still doesn’t give me the nice oversight:

Olympic Airlines
Finally, if you look at Olympic’s offering you might start to wonder who thought that was a good idea, especially compared to the first three examples shown:

I wasn’t able to find any examples on US Airlines, so perhaps this is a European development. By all accounts though: I think it is a big improvement.

However, it raises some UI questions with me, some of which I already had a few weeks ago. The observations in that post was more a result of the way the applications that are being run inside the browser are being developed. Now however, this news from Google has added to my doubt whether the current incarnation of the browser is an appropriate one. The biggest question mark would be tabs. As great as they might seem, tabs have some inherent usability issues associated with them:

Cyrus: Ok, i seriously don’t get tabs on Windows. Hell, i don’t get tabs on OSX either. In the latter there’s a great system called Exposé for that, and in the former the task bar does the job just great. Once i start using tabs though things go all to hell. On OSX i can’t tell which FireFox/Safari window has the tab i want (since it’s too small), and similarly in windows i find myself scanning the taskbar for a site i was looking at, but i can’t find it because the task bar entry only lists the site that is the currently active tab. This makes it so difficult to actually find the site i want and it ends up being far slower than just having a window available for each site.

Now however, they are becoming a much more important navigational element. Whereas in it’s current inclination, tabs are used to navigate web pages and applications withinan application within an OS, they will eventually be used to navigate web pages and applications within an OS only (read: browser), the behaviour of which is similar to the taskbar found in Windows or Exposé in OSX. This shift in usage will most likely result in a much higher dependency on tabs and I somehow think that it is perhaps good idea to look at how this demand can be met.

equals

Somewhat ironic is also the way in which applications are accessed: on windows most people seem to click on a icon to launch them (this might vary: I am lost without being able to search for applications). In a browser this might not always be the case: the address bar functions as a sort of smart command line input that allows us to look for and launch online content.

By all accounts however, the current form of the browser will most likely need to be adapted to allow it to fit better into the usage patterns, but also the environment in which it is used.

I have added a link to the Spanish version on my own download section. For those of you who haven’t read it, feel free to take a look: Introduction to Good Usability (pdf).