#ux

Yopp — an easy way to send a file from phone to computer

Have you ever spent more than 1 second wondering:

"How do I get on my computer this photo I just made with my phone?"

or

"How do I get this PDF from my computer to my phone?"

Then you probably thought "Let's use Dropbox! ... oh no I'm not logged in on my phone, but what is my password again? Well, let's send the file to myself via email! Maybe I should just use a USB cable... but where is my USB cable again?"

Yopp is a solution for this problem, that you can easily install on your web server.

Thoughts about user experience & user interface design

This tool - Yopp - requires a total number of 7 actions to get the work done:

Open browser on phone [1 tap], Open Yopp page [1 tap if it's in the bookmarks], UPLOAD [1 tap], Choose file [1 action]

Open browser on computer [1 double click], Open Yopp page [1 click if in bookmarks], DOWNLOAD [1 click]

I'll be happy to switch to another tool if one requiring less actions exists.

I noticed that my likelihood/probability to use any tool (all other things being equal) is more or less proportional to P = 1 / a^2 (*) where a is the number of required actions/user inputs. If the number of required actions is doubled, the likelihood to use the tool is divided by 4.

Thus, even if it might sound obvious, one key element for a good user interface is to minimize the number of user actions to get a task done. If not, the user might unconsciously remember that the interface is unnecessarily complicated to use. He will then forget about the product, and look for another solution. (OK this is probably what will happen for you with Yopp if you don't have a web server already!)

As an example, I'm sure I'd use my city's bicycle sharing system Velo+ much more if I could take a bike by just swiping my card on the bike station's card reader (this is technically possible). Instead we have to: Tap on a screen (1), Choose "Subscribed user" (2), Swipe the card (3), Choose "Rent a bike" (4) (this one is particularly unuseful), Accept conditions already accepted many times before (5), etc. at the end it requires at least 12 actions! Any user who has done it at least once will process this data (required amount of inputs) and will probably make the choice of not using it for short distance trips.

It would be interesting to get more statistical data about the empirical result (*), this will be discussed in a future post.

See the BigPicture — a zooming user interface

This topic has been present in my thoughts for a long time, probably years:

“How to be able to think/write about lots of unrelated various topics, and still have a way to look at the big picture of what you’re doing?”

Here is my contribution about this:

1. bigpictu.re, a ready-to-use infinite notepad (infinite zooming and panning)
2. bigpicture.js, a JavaScript open-source library that you can use in various projects
3. A standalone version of 1. (so you can take notes offline) is also available here: bigpicture-editor
4. AReallyBigPage, an infinite collaborative notepad. It has been a real chaos once hundreds of people joined in. Probably internet’s deepest page ;)

Such an interface is called a Zooming User Interface (interesting reading: The humane interface by Jef Raskin, one of the creators of the Apple Macintosh), and strangely, ZUI has been very few used in modern interfaces.

As of 2017, nearly every software interface uses a 2D, or even a 1D navigation process: a web page only offers two scrolling directions: north and south. Even nowadays's apps famous for their "new kind of interface" still use a 1-axis navigation: "Swipe left or right".

Is there a future made of new interfaces?