As you can see, pictures hit the 1000-word mark at just under 1 megapixel. It looks like a standard 16×16 pixel toolbar icon weighs in at an auspicious 42 words. (No data yet on how much badging is required at that size to achieve the full 42-word potential, though).

This comes at a terrific time. Products like the iPhone are popularizing usable, delightful experiences, and for many the takeaway message is make it spartan. Some point to the Google home page as the perfect user experience because it contains so little. But good design isn’t about simplicity (in the English sense); it’s about context. Fogg’s simplicity framework builds a new concept of simplicity that incorporates context and perception.

Simplicity is the “minimally satisfying solution at the lowest cost.”

It is a function of the user’s scarcest resource at the moment and thus depends on the person and the context. It involves the following factors:

• Time: How long will it take?
• Money: What will it cost?
• Physical Effort: How much must I expend?
• Brain Cycles: How much must I think?
• Social Deviance: How weird will it make me look?
• Novelty: How different is it from what I’m used to?

It may not be intended as a complete design framework, but it is surprisingly comprehensive. Some of my favorite principles fit right in (consistency with expectations, the least effective difference, and a clear visual hierarchy, for instance). It does not, however, include the traditional definition of simplicity anywhere. In other words, while a spartan UI will often be the outcome of applying this framework, it won’t be when the context demands otherwise.

Fogg’s framework does omit delight as a factor. A delightful experience can predispose the user to accepting greater complexity, increasing simplicity through aesthetics. That may mean it belongs in the framework; but it may also belong outside it as a modifier.

Will this framework revolutionize user experience design? Probably not. But it can help designers explain the complexities of simplicity to others, and gives us tool for framing our own decisions and trade-offs.

UIE’s Joshua Porter has a worthwhile article on simplicity, with a discussion of its relationship to purchasing decisions and links to additional opinion.

“After the tone, please record your message. When you have finished recording, you may hang up or press pound for more options. [inexplicably long pause] To leave a callback number, press 5.”

I have never dared to press 5.
It’s possible that someone did research and found a real need for these Instructions, but I’d be surprised. It seems more likely that someone stuck them in because she could - perhaps Shirley herself, though I suspect she’s innocent. I’m not averse to providing options, but when they serve only a fraction of telephone users (as I suspect they do) they should be provided in a manner that doesn’t get in everyone else’s way. (The need for them is what we often call an edge case. It’s easy but dangerous to get caught up in edge cases, because the last thing you want to do is design for them at the expense of the core use cases.)
Some carriers (Sprint, AT&T/Cingular, and possibly T-Mobile) allow you to bypass Shirley by pressing 1; Sprint goes so far as to tell you about it. In the past my outgoing message has begun, “Press 1 to skip to the beep.” Instructions for the Instructions.
The iPhone has already been lauded for bringing Apple simplicity to the mobile phone market, but I think of my outgoing voicemail message as AT&T’s territory. To my surprise and delight, here’s what happens after the outgoing message when you call an iPhone user:

[beep]

Thanks, Apple.

Looking out a week it’s Boston, the Gunks, Long Island, Boston again…then Oregon the week after. Let’s hope I don’t come down with something.

The observant surfer will note that I’ve posted new photos, most notably those from my dad’s visit.

Despite the rumors, hunting for an apartment in San Francisco isn’t really that different from hunting for an apartment elsewhere, with a few twists. It’s handy to have a copy of your credit report on hand, and applications are universally non-binding so it’s often in your interests to fill one out if you have even a vague interest - particularly if your time is tight.

I spent my first two days (January 31 and Feb 1) climbing up and down the hills, visiting apartments from Craigslist and calling numbers on For Rent signs. The third day my legs hurt. There is perhaps no more efficient way to see a city than to hunt for apartments in it on a schedule…but it’s not necessarily the most enjoyable form of tourism.

By Saturday afternoon, I was nearly assured of an apartment. Due to various procedural hurdles I didn’t actually move in until late in my second week (last Thursday), but I’m more or less settled now. Here’s the inside of my apartment:

As you can see, I’ve actually put clothes away and stuff. Here’s the view out the window:

And, if you lean out a bit:

Here’s the street in front of my building:

And now the best part. Behind my building is a 24-hour Safeway (which is nice in and of itself). Behind the Safeway is this:

‘Course there’s also this:

In the midst of all this I picked up my muddy, muddy car and gave it a bath. There is something surreal about flying across the country to have your car waiting for you…a strange mix of the familiar and unfamiliar.

Over the weekend my Mom was in town:

And then it was time to start work:

(Yahoo!, not Lockheed Martin.)

The job’s great so far, but I’ll save details for another post. In the meantime, you can take a look at the product I’m working on (Yahoo! Messenger for Vista); but bear in mind that nothing you see is my work just yet. Stay tuned for that…

And just for Lapidus:

Today we’re excited to announce one major improvement and one new feature.Support for international characters is now much much better, from accent marks to non-English alphabets. You should be able to throw just about any language at Zirrus successfully.

We’ve had a lot of requests for RSS feeds and public tasks, and we’ve added both as one feature. In the lower left corner you’ll now see an RSS feed button (along with an Add to My Yahoo! button for Yahoo! users) that always provides an RSS newsfeed for the current view (list + tag).

These feeds are public: they don’t require login, but they do include authentication that’s unique to the view. That means you can share your tasks for one tag without making all your tags public. It also means you can share tags on a person-by-person basis. We think this new functionality is pretty powerful, and we’re curious to hear how you use it. We’re also hoping to put up some more specific documentation for technical types.