Inspired by Bicycling’s feature on Brews and Bikes, here’s five bike themed beer labels.

I’m starting the design of a new iPhone app. It’s intended to help users follow a live event, so the app will regularly be downloading data to refresh screens with the most current state. I’d like to avoid the use of a “refresh” button for numerous reasons that I’m not going to get into, mostly because it’s boring.

Taking away the users’ ability to manually force an update is tricky. We like to feel in control and it’s hard to trust that a piece of technology is working as it says it will without our intervention. For example, software designers have learned that although automatically saving a document (or progress in a web app) is a better overall experience, it also gives anxiety to users. Users feel that they know they won’t lose work after clicking on a button labeled “save”. Harvest, the time tracking tool used by Adaptive Path deals with this by including a prominent “save” button near the “last saved” message although clicking the button is not needed. Google Docs uses a different approach, labeling the button “saved” and making it non-functional…. the user goes to click save and see that it’s already taken care of. It appears that Google is attempting to train us to stop worrying about ever saving documents.

With these thoughts in my mind, I started designing a status indicator that will appease users’ innate desire for control. On a regular interval, probably every 10 seconds, the app will connect over the network and check for new data. If found, that data will be downloaded and the screen will refresh with the latest status from the live event. It is possible that multiple refresh cycles could pass with no new data, in which case the indicator will need to reflect an increased time since the last update.

Here is my current design for the indicator:

Likely this strip will go at the very top or the very bottom of the app.

There’s two sections, the last update time and a countdown to the next refresh. The last update time reflects the time since new data was found. It’s likely that several refresh cycles will pass without new data. As this occurs the last update time will increase by the 10 second interval length. Once new data is found, the last update time is reset to zero, represented by the friendly “just now” text.

The countdown bar is a simple visual element that over the 10 second interval animates to give the appearance of emptying. Once the 10 second time has lapsed, the countdown bar is replaced by text that reads “updating” along with an animated spinner. Once the refresh is complete, the bar resets to full.

Overall, I think that this design solution works. The biggest question I have is whether users will quickly understand that the last update time is not necessarily the same as the last refresh time.

I am living in the future. Andrew just sold me Girl Scout Cookies and he accepted a credit card payment with the Square app on his iPhone. It worked flawlessly was a joy to interact with. I do wish that the photo we took of the cookies appeared on the receipt.

How ‘cognitive fluency’ shapes what we believe, how we invest, and who will become a supermodel

Read the Boston Globe Article

Everything I read about the iPad (and believe me, I’ve read a lot) uses the near term to predict it’s failure or success. How many sales will Apple see in March? How many in April? Will Kindle outpace the iPad by Christmas? Everyone seems to be thinking about this year and maybe next year.

When I look at the iPad I don’t see the computer I’ll buy this year (though I might). I see the computer my kid(s) will take to college in 20 years. I see the video games we’ll play in 5 years. I see the magazines I’ll read when traveling on high speed rail from San Francisco to Los Angeles in 10 20 30 40 years.

Many call the iPad evolutionary, and indeed it is. It’s an iPhone with a bigger screen and faster CPU. Don’t believe me? Download the SDK.

What the iPad predicts for the future of computing however, is revolutionary indeed.