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Usability studies are experiencing a shift in geography. For some time now, there has been some consensus that a traditional, dedicated usability lab is an unnecessary expenditure for an individual organization. Of course, since we specialize in User Experience Design, including usability testing, it’s a moot point for us. But we’re not exempt from the cost factor, either.

The main driver for this movement is the availability of software such as Morae and Spectator. Even Mac users are getting into the game with a product called VisualMark. These products turn a couple of laptops into a portable usability lab at the fraction of the cost of a full, fixed installation.

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Color in context

Many moons have swung by since our last talk, grasshopper, and by now you have had those tattoos revised and replaced more times than Angelina Jolie. I can only hope you have been as politically corrupt and personally shocking, really, she is a role model to so many.

Today we will talk about color and perception, then later we will do the sacrifice part… Right, let’s start with Kasimir Malevich, who had strong opinions about color or the lack thereof and put his money, [or the people's money] where his brush was. Painted such fashion nuggets as "White on white" and "Black square". If you imagine what they look like in your mind, you will be darn close.

So what was on his mind? Why bother? There are a couple of reasons:

1] Cultural
He was a Supremacist in Russia in the early part of the last century and thought that painting couches and side-tables was hopelessly bourgeois.

2] Psychological
He wanted to defeat his own preconceptions and create something new; a kind of meta painting that was both free of objects and depicting pure emotion.

Well can color or it’s absence do that? What strange and magical powers does it have? Vassily Kandinsky, one of Kasimirs drinking buddies, associated some very specific things with color – he claimed that certain colors elicited thoughts/memories/feelings of particular sounds and feelings and made them into a handy grid.

Most people make some basic and reliable associations with colors; black associates with night, death and designers clothing. Red means fire engines and radio flyer wagons. These are cultural associations, that effect how we perceive and interpret our world. A blue light on your dashboard is understood as a fairly passive status light. A yellow light, blinking rapidly, means the engine is probably about to seize.

When we use these colors in an interface, all of those associations are carried along with it. A complicating factor is the cultural context it is being read in. Many cultures have very different tolerances and preferences for color that western europeans; any short description of these differences will be reductive, but think of these references: Jamaican villages houses, Bollywood movies, Japanese packaging… Would those local tastes effect the design of an interface for those groups? I look forward to your comments. Leave a donation for the gods by the planter.

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As far as I’m concerned, the main advantage of GWT is the ability to have Java developers write and debug code in, well, Java and their favorite IDE. For those Javascript coders whose blood boils at the mention of GWT, let me offer up a more comforting analogy: when you have lemons, make lemonade. I’ll leave aside for the moment the canard that Javascript is a “more powerful language” than Java — they are both Turing-complete. The notion that one is “more powerful” than the other depends on your perspective. Javascript is great for small libraries but really starts to break down once you build larger systems.

OK, back to allowing Java developers to develop and debug in Java. Right now if you want to use any of the nifty libraries, such as Scriptaculous, in your applications, you have to wrap them using the GWT native trick for including native Javascript (see here for a library that wraps the effects library). If you start experiencing problems with this library, or with its interaction with another library or some code you’ve written, your Java developers are screwed.

I don’t know if anyone recalls the drive for “Pure Java,” back when vendors were first exposing their libraries and drivers (e.g. JDBC) as native libraries. The idea was that these hurt portability and thus should be phased out as soon as possible. After all, what was the point of writing Java apps if there was no portability? I propose that we treat the non-GWT Javascript libraries the same way: as a quick way to integrate existing functionality but, for the long haul, something to be phased out because it conflicts with the major advantage of GWT.

I have started on my own modest offering: a rewrite of the Scriptaculous Effects library. I’ve finished with the effects queue portion and the base effects class. You can see an example of the Fade effect in action here. Note that this doesn’t work in IE6 yet, nor Safari, etc. I haven’t implemented all of the edge cases that Scriptaculous does. No sweat. That too will come, and the best part is that it can be debugged in Java. Once I get all of the code done, I’ll release it under the same license terms as Scriptaculous itself.

The code for the demo EntryPoint is below.

public class Scriptaculous implements EntryPoint {
private Image duke = new Image("images/duke_wave.png");
private Button fade = new Button("Fade");

public void onModuleLoad() {
VerticalPanel vpanel = new VerticalPanel();
VerticalPanel opanel = new VerticalPanel();
opanel.setHeight("150px");
opanel.add(duke);
vpanel.add(opanel);
vpanel.add(fade);

fade.addClickListener(new ClickListener() {
public void onClick(Widget sender) {
Effect effect = new Fade(duke.getElement());
effect.setDuration(2.0);
effect.setAfterFinish(new EffectEventHandler() {

public void handle(Element element) {
DOM.setStyleAttribute(element, "display", "");
DOM.setStyleAttribute(element, "opacity", "1.0");
}
});
effect.enQueue();
}
});

RootPanel.get().add(vpanel);
}
}

As these Ajax applications become larger, the need for a more structured approach such as those offered by GWT (or Tibco GI, in a different way) becomes more urgent. What other Javascript libraries should we convert to GWT?

Technorati : ajax, gwt, scriptaculous

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