My assumption is that Palm (PALM) would try to take market share by coming in significantly lower than the $200 or so Apple wants for its iPhone. But when I ran that theory by Palm CEO Ed Colligan, he looked at me liked I’d peed on his rug. “Why would we do that when we have a significantly better product,” he asked, then walked away.

– Peter Kafka, Media Memo, allthingsD.com

I’d say it’s a little early for Ed and crew to be counting their hatched iPhone killers. These are, of course, the same people who tried to foist the Foleo onto an unsuspecting public (and showed the wisdom to cancel it a few months later when no one appeared interested in being foisted upon). Video and music capabilities or corporate email support also weren’t disclosed, leaving the iPhone and Blackberry with at least two potential raison d’êtres (worth noting that the screenshots of the Launcher show “Music” and “Videos” apps). At least we can watch pretty videos of touch screens and gestural input until we know more about what’s in or out and how many precious golden angels will need to be sacrificed:

I’m curious about the gesture area below the screen. The device is fairly small as it is and it looks like they’ve dedicated the bottom strip to being for gestures when it could have been available for more screen real estate. I do like the way it lights up when you touch it, but would it have been more useful if the whole screen was for gestures and display? Guess we’ll find out.

I spent a little while going through the gallery of screenshots on the graphic-heavy but info-light (and slightly odd) Pre website. I can’t give you a link to it directly due to the way it was built, so go to the main Pre page, scroll down past the fold where it doesn’t look like there will be anything, then click on “See gallery” in the Connected calendars and contacts section to get started. You can then keep clicking the faint and hard to see right arrow at the extreme right edge of the page to move to the next set of screenshots. (Also weird? Scroll your browser window up or down after you open the gallery).

A few things I like the look of:

Palm Pre Calendar

I like the crunched up free time indicator that lets the calendar show more info on the screen while still giving you an at-a-glance call on whether you have time to hit Starbucks.

Palm Pre Card View

Being able to ‘background’ an application and do other things while it keeps running is one of the things sorely missing from the iPhone. The Pre has a notion of ‘cards’ which contain running apps and supports a few different gestural mechanisms to get into ‘card view’ where you can swipe left/right to move through the deck. You obviously can’t see it here, but the cards are live views in to the app and will continue to show animation or (presumably) playing video when you move into card view. It’s a clever way to support multitasking with minimal input and maintains that at-a-glance intuitive understanding that’s so key in mobile devices.

Palm Pre Integrated Calendars and Email

These are the best screenshots I could find to illustrate the “web” in “Palm WebOS”. Everything the device does is about connectivity, shown here in the form of Google and Palm calendars (top) and Gmail and regular mail (bottom) automatically integrated into a single view.

As with all things of this nature, I’ll only know how well it works when I’ve had a chance to play with it. The devil is in the details of the interactions, not in the pretty icons and design (nice as it may be). I’m going to try to get one in for Mr. Mobile, so stay tuned for a more in-depth look.

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Chris -

Great post (as always!). Made me think of two things:

1. The importance of metrics. Disney knows everything about their visitors because they’re a highly data-driven organization who measure every detail of your visit and feed it into an analysis machine that continuously improves the park experience. Gardening a community is the same: your garden is only as rich as your data. Go beyond the numbers built-into Wordpress (or your blogging platform of choice) and spend some time getting to know Google Analytics. I’d be curious, for example, to see if the low comment posts have a high enough time-on-page and low enough bounce rate to show that people are reading rather than leaving.
2. I’m commenting from my phone so can’t really look it up, but I’m reminded of a story Daniel Burka told during a presentation at mesh last year (slides from Iteration & You). I’m pretty it was about a new building at MIT, and specifically about the paths leading to it across the surrounding lawns. Rather than laying them out in arbitrary or aesthetic lines, they put down no paths and simply surrounded the building in grass. We’ve all encountered ad hoc paths: a deep, dirt groove through the greenery where the wisdom of crowds says it wants to walk. They waited for some time to pass and then used those ad-hoc paths as their guide for where to put the real ones. The first lesson here is simple: your community will find their own way through your site and will usually blaze the same trails over and over whether you want them to or not. Do you have grass in place to measure it? The second is equally simple but a little more bitter: students at MIT have to go into that building so their need overcomes the “path of most resistance” to create the “path of least resistance”. No one has to read your writing and so their determination to undertake grassroots trail blazing will be considerably reduced. That means you, as Community Gardner, have to step up your observation and measurement from passively watching grass get trampled to actively monitoring and responding.

I did a little more digging post-comment into the paths example and was reminded that they have a name by Daniel’s presentation: Desire Paths. What a poetic way to explain what people want! It was coined by Gaston Bachelard in his 1994 book The Poetics of Space:

A term in landscape architecture used to describe a path that isn’t designed but rather is worn casually away by people finding the shortest distance between two points.

This wouldn’t be the first time that the Human Computer Interaction field have borrowed from architecture (think of Pattern Languages, based on Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language). You can apply this to your own site by observing people using it (do they go straight for the posts? Do they have to follow a torturous route to get to a list of your tags?), by reading their comments and reactions (look for things like “I wish there was a way to…” or “I love your blog but…” or even “It sucks that there’s…”), and by asking them directly. Finding patterns in your data is a bit of a black art, but think about ways to codify a desire path in the information you get back from Analytics or your blogging platform. Look particularly for the entrance and exit patterns from pages (do people leave the site entirely or do they go to a specific page?) as an indication of ‘virtual’ desire paths.

How about this site? Are there paths I’m not providing that would improve your experience? Let me know!

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Take, for example, the Clean/Explicit toggle in the iTunes Music Store. I was browsing the listing for Talib Kweli’s The Beautiful Struggle album (), when I got confused about which version I was thinking of buying.

Clean version of The Beautiful Struggle on iTunes

Generally speaking, darker things are further away from you. To me, it looks like the Clean tab is behind the Explicit tab, especially since the Explicit tab is the same colour as the ‘grabber’ strip separating the description from the track listing (you can tell that you’re looking at the Clean tracks by the CLEAN label in the name column). Compare to the Explicit view:

Tallib Kweli explicit version on iTunes

It doesn’t help that the cursor changes to a pointer hand on both tabs, regardless of which one is in front. There’s a touch of the ‘ole cognitive dissonance between the Clean tab looking like it’s in front and the red EXPLICIT labels on each track (P.S.: how awesomesauce is an album that has an explicit warning on EVERY track?!).

We ran into this once at Radiant Core, doing the design for the Agoracom website. Our version isn’t up anymore (props to The Working Group on their beautifully executed redesign), but there used to be two big tabs at the top of the page labelled “For Investors” and “For Public Companies”. Through a bunch of trial and error, we finally settled on a system for drawing the tabs to make it clear which was in front. Here are a bunch of tips to help you out in your designs:

• Darker things look further away. Try making all of your tabs the same colour range, and have the front tab be a lighter shade.
• Add a strip to the bottom of the tabs. In the screenshots above, the grabber strip between the description and track listings looks like it’s almost part of the background tab. Use the reverse to your advantage and add a strip across the top of the content area, colour-matched to the front tab (e.g.: if the current tab is green, have a green strip a few pixels tall that runs across the top of the content area).
• Use reversed gradients. Instead of a solid colour for the tab backgrounds, try a light to dark gradient. Use a light to dark (top to bottom) gradient on the front tab, which will make it look like it’s leaning backward a little, and reverse it on the other tabs (or other tab if you only have two), to make it look like it’s tucked behind.
• Connect the current tab to the content area and cut off the others. A simple, one pixel black line running across the bottom of background tabs will cut them off and make it clear which tab is connected to the content.
• Turn off the clickability of the front tab. If you’re doing this in HTML and have styled the <a> tag in your tabs, don’t provide an href parameter for the current tab. If you’re doing this in a desktop app, make it not clickable. It’s almost always the case that you don’t want to have a link to wherever people currently are.

And, of course, if you’re making tabs in HTML, make sure you’re using the right semantic markup and build them on a list (unordered or data preferably). See HTML Dog’s CSS Tabs tutorial for more info.

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